"Pedantic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in France, because he was an ardent Catholic at a time when Christianity had almost the charm of novelty. His religious outpourings combine the fervour of the Middle Ages with modern expansion, and he freed the Italian language from pedantic restrictions without impairing its dignity. It was once the fashion to inveigh against Manzoni for, as it was said, inculcating resignation; but he did nothing of the kind. As a young man he had sung of the Italians as 'Figli tutti d'un solo Riscatto,' and though he was not of those ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... always bound to the King by feelings of ardent loyalty, formed a military caste; the peasantry was industrious, thrifty and hard-working; the State officials were devoted to a spirit of discipline at once thorough and pedantic; the Prussian school-system was first in square-headed masters, who ruled with rods of iron. Thus, the Prussian National ideal was based on Discipline military in its severity, self-sacrifice and energy. "Throughout ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... That pedantic charge of inaccuracy, with which I have already dealt in another place, in connection with another and perhaps a greater man, is not applicable to Froude. He was hasty, and in his historical work the result certainly was that he put down things ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... conspirators, Guy Fawkes, who was busy with the last preparations for the execution of the plot. With a smiling countenance he confessed his purpose, which he seemed to regard as the fulfilment of a religious duty. The pedantic monarch thought himself in the presence of a fanatical ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... names exactly as they are written, with the exception of those with which we are so familiar in their Latin form as to render this practically impossible; as for instance in the case of Cyprus or Corinth, or of a name like Thucydides, where a return to the Greek k would be both pedantic and unmeaning. ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... ass! Had he learnt that speech by heart in advance, or was he by nature a pedantic idiot who expressed himself in this set and formal manner? How came so sweet a blossom to waste her perfumes on such a prig? And what a ridiculous ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... for the first count, to be publicly executed in Cannara, and to make compensation to the heirs of the murdered man, according to the valuation of the civil tribunals, and to pay the cost of the trial; and on the second count, the court" (with a pedantic mockery of mercy) "considers the first three months of the incarceration the prisoner has already undergone to be sufficient punishment, coupled with a fine of five scudi and the loss ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... said the count, "to those golden tablets which you hold in your hand? Give me leave to look at them. They might suit my pedantic way of life. But," added he, as he examined their delicate workmanship, "came you honestly by this toy, my lord? What fair frailty have you cheated of this knack, that never, I will be sworn, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... of course, nothing particularly original in Miss Stokes's book, nor can she be said to be a very attractive or pleasing writer, but it is unfair to look for originality in primers, and the charm of the illustrations fully atones for the somewhat heavy and pedantic character of the style. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... consequences of which are still felt by the State. Pontchartrain, Secretary of State for the Navy, was the plague of it, as of all those who were under his cruel dependence. He was a man who, with some-amount of ability, was disagreeable and pedantic to an excess; who loved evil for its own sake; who was jealous even of his father; who was a cruel tyrant towards his wife, a woman all docility and goodness; who was in one word a monster, whom ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... and tyrannical to deprive flowery of their perfumes, by banishing young girls from all but domestic cares. One can imagine in what manner a future queen, sustaining such a thesis, was likely to be welcomed in the most lettered and pedantic court in Europe. Between the literature of Rabelais and Marot verging on their decline, and that of Ronsard and Montaigne reaching their zenith, Mary became a queen of poetry, only too happy never to have to wear another crown than that which Ronsard, Dubellay, Maison-Fleur, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Lane, by the too strict an adherence to Oriental forms of expression, and somewhat pedantic rendering of the spelling of proper names, is found to be tedious to a very large number of readers attracted by the rich imagination, romance, and humour of ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 1 • Anon.
... geography and very little of political. With this state of things I at once grappled, and immediately "conditioned'' in these studies about nine tenths of the entering class. At first there were many protests; but I said to my ingenuous youths that no pedantic study was needed, that all I required was a preparation such as would enable any one of them to read intelligently his morning newspaper, and to this end I advised each one of them to accept his conditions, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Greek names. The rule which I have tried to follow has been this: when the word has been hopelessly Latinised, as 'Phoebus' has been, I have left it as it usually stands; but in other cases I have tried to keep the plain Greek spelling, except when it would have seemed pedantic, or when, as in the word 'Tiphus,' I should have given an altogether wrong notion of the sound of the word. It has been a choice of difficulties, which has been forced on me by our strange habit of introducing boys to the Greek myths, not in their ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... of treatment is essential to a theme. Indeed, I am sure that this peculiar office would regard it as fantastic for a poor devil of an artist to want to be faithful or sincere. The demand would appear pedantic and extravagant. ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... withholding the entreaties which her instincts urged but her wifely obedience restrained. Her influence as yet was that of a noble, fascinating woman, who softened the jars occasioned by the King's narrow and pedantic nature, and purified the Court from the grossness of the past. But in the dark days that were to come, her faith and enthusiasm breathed new force into a down-trodden people; and where all else was shattered, the King and ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... comedian, played the following trick upon Doctor Gower, who was then provost of his college, a man of considerable learning, but rather of a grave pedantic turn of mind. ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... in which he lived, and his own individuality. An axiom which I have heard confidently set forth, that a picture is worth nothing unless "he who runs may read," has inundated the world with frivolous and pedantic criticism. A picture or any other work of Art, is worth nothing except in so far as it has emanated from mind, and is addressed to mind. It should, indeed, be read like a book. Pictures, as it has been well said, are the books of the unlettered, ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... one of Juvenal's. According to the falsity of the proposition was the success. He was forced to crowd his verse with ill-sounding monosyllables (of which our barbarous language affords him a wild plenty), and by that means he arrived at his pedantic end, which was to make a literal translation. His verses have nothing of verse in them, but only the worst part of it—the rhyme; and that, into the bargain, is far from good. But, which is more intolerable, by cramming his ill-chosen and worse-sounding monosyllables ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... organisation, and it is this, and this alone, that has preserved our confidence. We believe that Buller gauged the capacity of one subordinate at Colenso, of another at Spion Kop, and that now he will do things himself, as he was meant to do. I know not why he has waited so long. Probably some pedantic principle of military etiquette: 'Commander-in-Chief should occupy a central position; turning movements should be directed by subordinates.' But the army believes that this is all over now, and that for the future Buller will trust no one but himself in great matters; and it is because they believe ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... The democratic politician remains exactly as Plato described him; the physician is still the credulous impostor and petulant scientific coxcomb whom Moliere ridiculed; the schoolmaster remains at best a pedantic child farmer and at worst a flagellomaniac; arbitrations are more dreaded by honest men than lawsuits; the philanthropist is still a parasite on misery as the doctor is on disease; the miracles of priestcraft are none ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... upon Lady Clementina, she resented it, thinking towards and speaking to him repellently. Something in her did not like him. She knew he did not approve of her, and she did not like being disapproved of. Neither did she approve of him. He was pedantic—and far too good for an honest and brave youth: not that she could say she had seen dishonesty or cowardice in him, or that she could have told which vice she would prefer to season his goodness withal, and bring him to the level of her ideal. And then, for all her ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... thought too pedantic on my part if I explain that the King Clodion referred to in Millaud's last verse was the legendary "Clodion the Hairy," a supposed fifth-century leader of the Franks, reputed to be a forerunner of the ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... his stiff, dry, pedantic, "highly classic" style, according to the interpretation of the phrase by the French in ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... used to write on to Messrs. Roe Lockwood & Son, New York, for my Spanish books, and I dare say that my letters were sufficiently pedantic, and filled with a simulated acquaintance with all Spanish literature. Heaven knows what they must have thought, if they thought anything, of their queer customer in that obscure little Ohio village; but he could not have been queerer to them than to his fellow-villagers, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... destroyed my hope, though it did not alter my purpose. I wanted a figurehead for my petition, and the figurehead I had chosen I could not get. I began to wonder and doubt. I next approached a very different man, the late Professor Churton Collins, a great friend of mine, who, in spite of an almost pedantic rigour of mind and character, had in him at bottom a curious spring of sympathy—a little pool of pure love for the poets and writers whom he admired. I got him to dinner and asked him to sign the petition; he refused, but on grounds other ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... of conjunctions which are met with almost exclusively in the written language, and which it would be pedantic to use in conversation. ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... make any use of the evidence against her and are prepared to take all the blame for the unhappy state of affairs between you! I write sarcastically. Why, it would be monstrous if you had any other intention! Oh, how I hate this pedantic roundabout way of writing! I feel inclined to tear up these sheets—I've torn up two already. Really, you've made it so difficult for me to treat you naturally. If I could talk to you, I'd make you understand in ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... necessity of frequent practice. Still it was from an imperfect recollection of what he had acquired during this pacific period, that he drew his sources of conversation when in company with women; in other words, his language became pedantic when it ceased ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... I should believe him,' replied the magistrate, 'for they are as stupid and pedantic in composition, as mischievous in their tenets. But can you suppose anything but value for the principles they maintain would induce a young man of his age to lug such trash about with him? Then, when news arrive of the approach of the rebels, he sets out in a sort of ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... off his cloak so as to be ready to beat his drum to good advantage, and another was testing his timbrel, and all were more and more buzzing out in talk, only here and there could one be found to defend even that curious person, whose proud and pedantic bearing so strongly contrasted with the modest appearance and kind affability of ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... one—how can he retain his own original opinion, which by the supposition is in polar opposition. But this argument rests on a false notion of the sense attached originally to the word convinced. That word was used in the sense of refuted; redargued, the alternative word, was felt to be pedantic. The case supposed was that of a man who is reduced to an absurdity; he cannot deny that, from his own view, an absurdity seems to follow; and, until he has shown that this absurdity is only apparent, he is bound to hold himself provisionally ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... British Plantations in America. The price was to be nine-pence Pennsylvania money, with considerable allowance to shopmen who should take quantities. The brevity of Franklin's advertisement is in strong contrast to the learned length of Webbe's pedantic prospectus. He claims that the idea of the magazine had long been in his mind, and that Webbe had stolen his plans. Before he had divulged the scheme to Webbe he had proceeded so far in the matter as to choose his writers and to ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... universal decay." [Footnote: An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World, consisting in an Examination and Censure of the common Errour, etc. (1627, 1630, 1635).] He and his pedantic book, which breathes the atmosphere of the sixteenth century, are completely forgotten; and though it ran to three editions, it can hardly have attracted the attention of many except theologians. The writer's object is to prove that the power and providence ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... excitement which stimulates the nerves instead of uplifting the spirit, is not necessary in the life of the artist. Of course one must often let oneself go, and I should be the last to defend a so-called moral discipline, or a pedantic rule of monastic severity. For a healthy, active person the joy of the daily struggle and of work performed with enthusiasm should be sufficient to beautify life, drive away fatigue and illuminate present and future. This condition ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
... were prolific or sterile, gentle or savage, obsequious or arrogant.[55] Their anger could therefore be soothed and their favor obtained through rites and offerings; even the adverse stars were not unrelenting and could be persuaded through sacrifices and supplications. The narrow and pedantic Firmicus Maternus strongly asserts the omnipotence of fate, but at the same time he invokes the gods and asks for their aid against the influence of the stars. As late as the fourth century the pagans of Rome who were about to marry, or to make a purchase, ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... waiting, the conversation was much more unrestrained, even on the Old Testament, than I would suffer at my own table in England, if a single footman was present. For literature, it is very amusing when one has nothing else to do. I think it rather pedantic in society; tiresome when displayed professedly; and, besides, in this country one is sure it is only the fashion of the day. Their taste in it is worst of all: could one believe that when they read our authors, Richardson and Mr. Hume should be their favourites? The latter ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... Randolph, Mary Beaton married Ogilvy of Boyne (really in love with Lady Bothwell), and not one of the four Maries was at Fotheringay. An artist ought to be allowed to follow legend, of its essence dramatic, or to manipulate history as he pleases. Our modern scrupulosity is pedantic. But Tennyson read a long list of books for his Queen Mary, though it does not appear that he made original researches in MSS. These labours occupied 1874 and 1875. Yet it would be foolish to criticise his Queen Mary as if we were criticising "exact ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... of the Arab horse is the vast plateau of Al-Najd: the Tahmah or lower maritime regions of Arabia, like Malabar, will not breed good beasts. The pure blood all descends from five collateral lines called Al-Khamsah (the Cinque). Literary and pedantic Arabs derive them from the mares of Mohammed, a native of the dry and rocky region, Al-Hijaz, whither horses are all imported. Others go back (with the Koran, chapt. xxviii.) to Solomon, possibly Salmn, a patriarch fourth in descent from Ishmael and some 600 years older than the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... almost every young man does at last make—the thrilling discovery that he is not Robinson Crusoe. Pippa Passes is the greatest poem ever written, with the exception of one or two by Walt Whitman, to express the sentiment of the pure love of humanity. The phrase has unfortunately a false and pedantic sound. The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love of humanity is the commonest and most ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... inquire what is the proper Hebrew pronunciation of the several letters, but rather what is the accented syllable in each word. To pronounce in a manner nearly approaching to the Hebrew might make the congregation stare, but would appear very pedantic to a learned ear. The safest mode is to examine the Greek of the Septuagint, or of the New Testament (if the reader does not understand Hebrew), and observe the place of the acute accent. On that place, if it be on the penultimate or antepenultimate, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... long—when Wales actually did follow, less formidably, of course, in the path of Ireland, beginning with the Church, going on to the Land, and not distantly threatening the State. As usual he goes to his books. He quotes Goethe—a great man of letters, but perhaps the most pedantic of great men of letters except Milton—to prove that "the English are pedants." He quotes Burke—the unregenerate Irish Whig Burke, not the prophet whose tongue the French Revolution had touched as it opened his eyes—to tell us what to do with Ireland. But the main ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... In vain Harry urged that he was outraging grammar. Mr. Waverton did not believe him, did not want to believe him—the same thing. Mr. Waverton was convinced that he had an insight into the soul of Horace which Harry's pedantic eyes could not share. He explained, as one explains to a dull child, the rare poetic beauty of the sentiment which he had produced. The hero whom Horace was celebrating, you know, was the man superior to the common herd. Now common men (as even Harry might be ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... not cherish pedantic and sectarian prejudices, this hypothesis is changed into assurance by modern discoveries; it is shown in the transformations and transitions of paleontological forms; in the embryogenic evolution of so many animals, man included, which, according to their various species, reveals ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... From Dr. Hawkesworth's pedantic volumes to Sir Walter Besant's delightful sketch, there are any number of versions of the story of Cook's life and work. Let us assume that everyone knows how James Cook, son of a superior farm labourer in Yorkshire, at thirteen years of age apprenticed to a fishing village shopkeeper, ...
— The Naval Pioneers of Australia • Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery
... not be studied with the same method and earnestness as it would be by men, what a peculiar advantage there is in any study for them, in which no proficiency whatever can be made without some use of most of the qualities we desire for them. Geometry, for instance, is such a study. It may appear pedantic, but I must confess that Euclid seems to me a book for the young of both sexes. The severe rules upon which the acquisition of the dead languages is built would of course be a great means for attaining the logical habits ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... little man, "Pedantic rot!—the tree's me, I repeat. Every tree has its gnome or elf; they used to call us dryads in old times; but nowadays people are getting so cock-sure of knowing everything, that they can't see what is going on right under their noses. Trees are ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... .026 of an inch of rain has done the damage; the soul yearns for something more startling than that The record of the pond, that there has been another 5 in., soothes us, where the record of the ordinary pedantic rain-gauge would leave us infuriated. It speaks much for my friend Aldenham's breadth of view that he understood this, and planned the ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... prescribes rules of behavior in respect to many things which are really indifferent; in regard to the cut of the clothes we wear, in regard to the accepted form of salutation, in regard to the language of polite speech, and much more of the same sort. Now, the ethically-minded man is not a pedantic micrologist who wastes his time on the minutiae of conduct. But where custom relates to things not indifferent, where a principle is involved, there is no detail of conduct so minute as not to challenge the most vigorous protest, the utmost assertion of independence. ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... Pedantic critics may find fault with my modest productions, and perhaps justly, in regard to grammatical construction, and mechanical arrangement, but I shall be satisfied, if the public discern a vein of true poetry glittering here and there through what I have ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... profound contempt of Allan Ramsay, who, from his thorough knowledge of the Scottish vernacular, was openly indignant at the reputation gained by Kelly's work, and made a collection himself, which was published at Edinburgh in 1763. In a sensible but pedantic preface, which he addressed to the "Tenantry of Scotland, Farmers of the Dales, and Storemasters of the Hills," he states his reasons for issuing a work on the subject, and strongly recommends the use of proverbs, particularly among the agricultural portion of the community. After alluding to the ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... one accuse the critic of irreverence, who doubts the wisdom of universities, and of pedantic scholars who burrow like moles in the mouldering remnants of antiquity, but see nothing of the glorious sky overhead. While I have no reverence for barren or wasted intellect, I have the profoundest respect for the fruitful intellect ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... announcement of the death of the king of France ends the embassy, and the lovers are put on a year's probation of constancy. In the subplot, or minor story, the play is notable for the burlesquing of two types of character—a pompous pedantic schoolmaster, and a braggart who always speaks in high-flown metaphor. These two, happily contrasted with a country curate, a court page, and a country clown with his lass, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... partisan, lending effectual aid to Socrates; there is Critias assuming the tone of impartiality; Callias, here as always inclining to the Sophists, but eager for any intellectual repast; Prodicus, who finds an opportunity for displaying his distinctions of language, which are valueless and pedantic, because they are not based on dialectic; Hippias, who has previously exhibited his superficial knowledge of natural philosophy, to which, as in both the Dialogues called by his name, he now adds the profession of an interpreter of the Poets. The two latter personages have been ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... her. This, in an age when the binding sacrament of matrimony is being held up to ridicule both in theory and in practice, is perhaps the only reasonable argument that can be utilized in its defence. It is surely not pedantic to hope that the purity of some women is still essential for the race, and it is surely not illogical to suppose that marriage is the means, in such cases as that of Sally Bishop, to this ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... of kings are thus laid down in the Rajtarangini. It is evident, as Professor H. H. Wilson says, that the royal status was by no means a sinecure. But the rules are evidently the closet work of some pedantic, dogmatic Brahman, teaching kingcraft to kings. He directs his instructions, not to subordinate judges, but to the Raja as the chief magistrate, and through him to all appointed for the administration ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... but clothing a hill, which overlooks a valley, or dell, or river, or the sea,—the trees rising one above another, as the spectators in an ancient theatre,—I know no other word in our language (bookish and pedantic terms out of the question), but hanging woods, the sylvae superimpendentes of Catullus; yet let some wit call out in a slang tone,—"the gallows!" and a peal of laughter would damn the play. Hence it is that so many dull pieces ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... of all this business was that a peace was made between us and the Council of the Abati. After their pompous, pedantic fashion they swore solemnly on the roll of the Law that they would aid us in every way to overcome the Fung, and even obey such military orders as we might give them, subject to the confirmation of these orders by a small ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... pronunciation, but this is not always a safe or even a possible guide. The vowels preceding or following the one on which the primary accent falls, sometimes called obscure vowels, are so slurringly pronounced that even a pedantic precision will hardly make it possible to indicate clearly which vowel is used. The writer remembers seeing an examination paper written by a fourth year medical student in which the word fever was spelled fevor. A moment's thought will show that so far as pronunciation ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton
... muscles or tendons,—suppuration and subsequently inflammation, first of the adjoining Parts and afterwards of the brain, took place, and the fine intelligent little creature was laid in a premature grave, because the ignorance of the people justified a pedantic hedge-schoolmaster in the exercise of irresponsible cruelty. Frayne was never prosecuted, neither was the classical despot, who by the way sits for the picture of the fellow in whose school, and at whose hands, the Poor Scholar receives the tyrannical ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... Norton to Clarissa.— Mr. Brand to be sent up to inquire after her way of life and health. His pedantic character. Believes they will withhold any favour till they hear his report. Doubts not that matters will soon ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... a very common epithet of contempt for pedantic and affected expressions. The following, from Churchyard's "Choice," sig. E e 1., sets it ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... isolated ungraded schools will be improved. Given an interested community, the modern teacher can vitalize every feature of the school, changing the formal curriculum into an interesting and liberalizing interpretation of country life and the pedantic drills and tasks of instruction into a skillful ministry to real ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... however, showed what the war-spirit can make of Shakespeare. It was interpreted in the pedantic historical vein, and was given as a bloody, brutal mediaeval piece without a thought or a smile or a tear. Richard was shown as a "Hun" of the worst kind. His murderous career was facilitated by his characterless victims. Anne was a "characteristic English hypocrite," pretending ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... put up with the vicar's antiquities, but not with the young vicar's pedantic Oxonianism. He does think so well of himself, and quite rules every ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... sudden innovations were not very scandalous, specially in the laws of any language or art, the use of Greek and Latin feet might be brought into our vulgar poesy, and with good grace enough." But it is evident on the whole, that he bore no good will to this pedantic novelty. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... conceded, and, if necessary, firmly maintained, that the profitable use of our Lord's parables does not depend on rare and difficult erudition. If a deficiency in this department infers the risk of baldness in the exposition, a redundance supplies a temptation to pedantic display. It is one thing to place some ancient eastern custom in such a position that a ray of light from its surface shall pleasantly illumine a feature of the parable that was lying in the shade, and all another thing to make the parable a convenience for the exhibition ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... the same happy taste that makes him correct the diction of Philistus, and abuse Plato and Aristotle. This sort of contention and rivalry with others in matter of style, to my mind, in any case, seems petty and pedantic, but when its objects are works of inimitable excellence, it is absolutely senseless. Such actions in Nicias's life as Thucydides and Philistus have related, since they cannot be passed by, illustrating ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... novelist's equipment he certainly possesses, namely, an insight into character and an ability to delineate it. This gift is seen especially in his sketch of Parson Wilbur, who edited the Biglow Papers with a delightfully pedantic introduction, glossary, and notes; in the prose essay On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, and in the uncompleted poem, Fitz Adam's Story. See also the sketch of Captain Underhill in the essay on New ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... grammar will suffice to show us, that it is much easier to acknowledge this principle, and to commend it in words, than to ascertain what it is, and abide by it in practice. Good use is that which is neither ancient nor recent, neither local nor foreign, neither vulgar nor pedantic; and it will be found that no few have in some way or other departed from it, even while they were pretending to record its dictates. But it is not to be concealed, that in every living language, it is a matter of much inherent difficulty, to reach the standard of propriety, where usage ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... your second letter which I found also on my return: I am very glad you like the plays {282} and am encouraged to hope that other persons who are not biassed by pedantic prejudices or spites might like them too. But I fully expect that (as I told you, I think) the London press, etc., will either sink them, or condemn them as on too free a principle: and all the more if they have not read the originals. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... and making a fortune." And thus teaching and composing (he is said to have composed much for the pianoforte, but he never published anything), he lived a long and useful life, dying in 1842 at the age of 86 (Karasowski says in 1840). The punctual and, no doubt, also somewhat pedantic music-master who acquired the esteem and goodwill of his patrons, the best families of Warsaw, and a fortune at the same time, is a pleasant figure to contemplate. The honest orderliness and dignified calmness of his life, as I read it, are quite refreshing ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... for the honor of God, that the contradictory creeds for which men have died are all true. Perhaps humor—your right Hegelian touchstone to which everything yields up its latent negation, passing on to its own contradiction—gives truer lights and shades than your pedantic Philistinism. Is Truth really in the cold white light, or in the shimmering interplay of the rainbow tints that fuse in it? Bah! Your Philistine critic will sum me up after I am dead in a phrase; or he will take my character to pieces and ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... hands, to my mind, should be neither high nor low, but should be in line with the forearm. One should continually strive for quietness. Nothing should be forced. Ease in playing is always admirable, and comes in time to all talented students who seek it. The Deppe method of hand position, while pedantic and unnecessarily long, is interesting ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... which just correspond with the beginning and end of this period of eclipse. One of them is called A Brief and Ingenious Discourse against the Work of Dante. It was written by Monsignor Alessandro Cariero, and published at Padua in 1582. The arguments are of the feeblest and most pedantic kind; but it marks a stage in taste. The recovery is indicated by a Defence of Dante Alighieri, a lecture given by Dr. Giuseppe Bianchini to the Florentine Academy in 1715, and published three ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... you shall have seen your country ruined. I shall not pretend to disturb your understandings, which are none of the strongest, with a hotchpotch of unintelligible terms, such as Aristotle's four principles of generation, unformed matter, privation, efficient, and final causes. Aristotle was a pedantic blockhead, and still more knave than fool. The same censure we may safely put on that wiseacre, Dioscorides, with his faculties of simples— his seminal, specific, and principal virtues; and that crazy commentator, Galen, with his four elements, elementary qualities, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... schoolmastering and verse-writing: the Latin paraphrase of the Psalms; another of the "Alcestis" of Euripides; an Epithalamium on the marriage of poor Mary Stuart, noble and sincere, however fantastic and pedantic, after the manner of the times; "Pomps," too, for her wedding, and for other public ceremonies, in which all the heathen gods and goddesses figure; epigrams, panegyrics, satires, much of which latter productions he would have consigned to the dust-heap in his old age, had not his too ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... all of us familiar with the process of 'whitewashing' historical characters. We are past being surprised at finding Tiberius portrayed as an austere and melancholy recluse, Henry VIII pictured as a pietistic sentimentalist with a pedantic respect for the letter of the law, and Napoleon depicted as a romantic idealist, seeking to impose the Social Contract on an immature, reluctant Europe. Though the 'whitewashing' method is probably not less paradoxical than the opposite system, it makes ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... ALDERSON who played very well as Herr Pappelmeister (Kapellmeister to a New York orchestra); and what I took to be the Yiddish of Miss INEZ BENSUSAN as the aunt of the hero, a pathetic figure of an old lady with firm views about the keeping of the Jewish Sabbath, and a pedantic habit of celebrating with a false nose and other marks of hilarity the anniversary of the escape of the Chosen People from a Persian pogram twenty-five ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... two letters which show the ludicrous side of the literary character of Cassiodorus. In justice to this honest, if somewhat pedantic, servant of Theodoric, I will close this sketch of his character with a state-paper of a better type, and one which incidentally throws some light on the social condition of ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... replied with increased contemptuous tartness. It is admitted that Camden was indiscreet in his manner of reply, and that some genuine holes had been pricked in his heraldry. But the Britannia lay high out of the reach of fatal pedantic attack, and this little cloud over the reputation of the book passed entirely away, and is remembered now only as a curiosity ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... decreasing vitality appeared to be the only symptom—a bodily weakness which left the mind unclouded. He was much interested himself in his own case, and made notes of his subjective sensations as an aid to diagnosis. Of his approaching end he spoke in his usual unemotional and somewhat pedantic fashion. "It is the assertion," he said, "of the liberty of the individual cell as opposed to the cell-commune. It is the dissolution of a co-operative society. The process is one of ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... responsibility of acting on it. Such a crisis is the severest test of character. To dare to disobey from a paramount sense of duty is a paradox that a little soul can hardly comprehend. Unfortunately, Blasco Nunez was a pedantic martinet, a man of narrow views, who could not feel himself authorized under any circumstances to swerve from the letter of the law. Puffed up by his brief authority, moreover, he considered opposition to the ordinances as treason to himself; and thus, identifying ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... one of his most delightful moods, says somewhere that the best characteristicon of a man is how he wears his hat. If he wears it perpendicular, he is honest, pedantic and boresome. If he wears it tipped slightly, he belongs to the best and most interesting people, is nimble-witted and pleasant. A deeply tipped hat indicates frivolity and obstinate imperious nature. A hat worn on the back of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... Scaliger in Gnomit. "To profess a disinclination for that knowledge which is beyond our reach, is pedantic ignorance." ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... through a fatality, he was ignorant of the German language. A trumpeter was then sent out to ask if there was not in the country a Catholic priest who was a German, or acquainted with the German tongue. Luckily one was found, and Madame de Maintenon, who is very, pedantic, even in the matter of toilet and ornaments, trembled with joy and thanked God for it. But what was her astonishment when they came to bring her the priest! He was in coloured clothes, a silk doublet, flowing peruke, and ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... by the law of self-preservation to put, not only his brothers, but all their sons, to death; so that there was, after every new succession, an entire clearance of all the male members of the imperial family. Aurangzeb said to his pedantic tutor, who wished to be raised to high station on his accession to the imperial throne, 'Should not you, instead of your flattery, have taught me something of that point so important to a king, which is, what are the reciprocal duties of ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... lady, to listen to the falsehoods of that reverend mummer, who is neither true priest nor true soldier. But I will fetch one who shall confront him either in casque or cowl." So saying, she went hastily out of the chapel, while the monk, after some pedantic circumlocution, acquainted the Lady Eveline with what he had overheard betwixt Jorworth and Wilkin; and proposed to her to draw together the few English who were in the castle, and take possession of the innermost square tower; a keep which, as usual in Gothic fortresses of the Norman ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... me, crushed beneath that weight of glory, Forget the Maker of that glory now? You'll not believe it. Neither would the Church, Had not his enemies poisoned all the springs And fountain-heads of truth. It is not Rome That summons him, but Magini, Sizy, Scheiner, Lorini, all the blind, pedantic crew That envy him his fame, and hate his works For dwarfing theirs. Must such things always be When truth is born? Only five nights ago we walked together, My father and I, here in the Convent garden; And, as the dusk ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... action. Anna at first has a life that rests on many supports, with her husband and her child and her social possessions; it is broadly based and its stability is assured, if she chooses to rely on it. But her husband is a dull and pedantic soul, and before long she chooses to exchange her assured life for another that rests on one support only, a romantic passion. Her life with Vronsky has no other security, and in process of time it fails. Its gradual failure is her story—the losing battle ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... defects of his temperament. Directly and indirectly, he himself took in hand his son's instruction, but without appreciation or consideration of the affinities of a mind with precociously developed instincts. The natural result of the father's pedantic solicitude was that his son came to see in him the schoolmaster rather than the parent. Knowledge in abundance was conveyed, but of the moulding influence of parental sympathy there was none. What dubious consequences followed from these relations ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... on which the hapless Francesca looked when she read the story of Lancelot that led to her own undoing. Some such fancies as these passed through the crannies of Stretton's mind while he seemed to be listening to Mr. Heron's mildly-pedantic allocutions, and absorbed in the consideration of mediaeval art. Mr. Heron was in raptures ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... :legalese: /n./ Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language description, product specification, or interface standard; text that seems designed to obfuscate and requires a {language lawyer} to {parse} it. Though hackers are not afraid of high information density and complexity ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... contribution to American history, Mr. Doyle, the English historian, says: "Gratitude is quickened when we compare the simple, vigorous, and picturesque chronicle set before us by Bradford, with the tedious and pedantic writings from which so much of the later history of New England has to be extracted.... His work is in the true sense scholarly. The language is like the language of Bunyan, that of a man who trained himself not merely to speak ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... {41} VI. (1422-1471). Chaucer's contemporary, John Gower, wrote his Vox Clamantis in Latin, his Speculum Meditantis (a lost poem), and a number of ballades in Parisian French, and his Confessio Amantis (1393) in English. The last named is a dreary, pedantic work, in some 15,000 smooth, monotonous, eight-syllabled couplets, in which Grande Amour instructs the lover how to get the love ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... although it was early honored as the gift of superior beings. The Chinese philosopher detected a grand world music in the harmonious order of the heavens and the earth, and wrote voluminous works on musical theory. When it came to putting this into practice tones were combined in a pedantic fashion. ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... its adventurous exploits and its arbitrary tendency, and her reception of the English Embassy was as much the result of personal predilection as of policy. Whitelocke amused her by his somewhat pedantic erudition, and flattered her vanity, but he seems scarcely to have divined the extraordinary variations of ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... that period for the task, by giving them leisure, if nothing else, to face questions with a lifelong earnestness impossible to the more social and practical Northern mind. Our duty is, instead of sneering at them as pedantic dreamers, to thank Heaven that men were found, just at the time when they were wanted, to do for us what we could never have done for ourselves; to leave to us, as a precious heirloom, bought most truly with the lifeblood of their race, ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... Flying Dutchman, with his crew of ghosts, so the bills received by Severne, as purchase-money for his ship, necessarily partook of that ship's aerial character. Indeed they existed, as the schoolmen used to say, in posse, but not in esse. To be less pedantic and more exact, they existed as slips of blank paper, with a Government stamp. To give them a mercantile character for a time—viz., until presented for payment—they must be drawn by an imaginary ship-owner or a visionary merchant, and indorsed ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... a strong sympathy for the writer of these notices. She showed an orderly, almost pedantic, character, mingled with generosity of heart. He turned leaf after leaf until he finally came to the words, written in intentionally heavy letters, "How ...
— The Case of The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... hand at an essay, but he found that the old easy style which had been his principal asset had deserted him. It was stiff and pedantic, and what was worse—bitter; and he tore it up savagely after he had read it through. He tried desperately to recover some of his old time optimism—and he failed. He told himself again and again that it was up to him to see big, to believe in the future, and ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... suggested above, the reason for its supreme beauty. Save for Mullgardt's court, it is the only building that seems to be based on the realization of a dream of a true artistic conception. With many other of the buildings one feels the process of their creation in the time-honored, pedantic way. They are paper-designed by the mechanical application of the "T" square and the triangle. They do not show the advantage of having been experienced ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... golden; had it not produced her? But other products,—iron, coal, wheat,—these were stuffs too base to fellow in the same mind with her. Had it principal industries, like any red, or green, or blue state on that pedantic map? I could no longer recall them. Formally confronted with this problem, I muttered shamefully again that day in the valley of Humiliation. There was, I knew, a picture at the top of the page in which strong, ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that on the nature and genesis of the Imagination or Plastic Power—On Pedantry and pedantic expressions— Advice to young authors respecting publication—Various anecdotes of the Author's literary life, and the progress of his opinions ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... had no reference,—far from it,—to women, to love, or to friends, things where the pedantic and ostentatious scepticism of literary men of the Larra type usually finds its fodder; his nihilism was much more the confusion and discomposure of one that explores a region well or badly, and finds no landmarks there, no paths, and returns with ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... was flecked with dashes of white. And it was ever observed that, should the soldiers be passing from Portsmouth, or should the clank of trumpet or the rattle of drum break upon his ear, he would arch his old neck, throw out his grey-streaked tail, and raise his stiff knees in a pompous and pedantic canter. The country folk would stop to watch these antics of the old horse, and then the chances are that one of them would tell the rest how that charger had borne one of their own village lads to the wars, and how, when the rider ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and to diversify the scenes, yet they are not in sufficient number to perplex the memory or to confuse the incidents. Their spirit is well kept up till the very last, and they relieve one another with so much art that the reader will not find himself wearied even with the pedantic jargon of the old Baron ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... 'em; Carry their weight; show fair, like Deeds enroll'd; Not Writs, that are first made and after filed. Thence first came up the title of Blank Verse;— You know, sir, what Blank signifies;—when the sense, First framed, is tied with adjectives like points, Hang 't, 'tis pedantic vulgar poetry. Let children, when they versify, stick here And there, these piddling words for want of ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... of what he said. If anyone thinks it pedantic, I can only say, he would not have thought so if he had heard it as it was uttered—in the homely forms and sounds of ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... Nature, not the Schools Distorted by pedantic rules, With patience wrought, such logic vain Had ne'er perverted thus thy brain: For Genius never gave delight By means of what offends the sight: Nor hadst thou deem'd, with folly mad, Thou could'st to Nature's beauties add, By taking ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... virtue, and everything is lawful. (And by the way, do you remember how your brother Mitya cried out: 'I will remember!') An attractive theory for scoundrels!—(I'm being abusive, that's stupid.) Not for scoundrels, but for pedantic poseurs, 'haunted by profound, unsolved doubts.' He's showing off, and what it all comes to is, 'on the one hand we cannot but admit' and 'on the other it must be confessed!' His whole theory is a fraud! Humanity will find in ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... seconds, and Goddard and most others adhere rather strictly to this rule. Kuhlmann, however, allows thirty seconds if there is no error and twenty seconds if one error is committed. We agree with Bobertag that owing to the nature of this test we should not be pedantic about the time. While a majority of children who are able to count backwards do the task in twenty seconds, there are some intelligent but deliberate subjects who require as much as thirty-five or forty seconds. If the counting is done with assurance ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... uncompromising, and the surface becomes a beautiful enamel, unyielding, definite in its lines, lacquer-like in its firmness of finish, while the Gothic forms, which had hitherto been so prevalent, were replaced by more or less pedantic adaptations from Roman bas-reliefs. This system of design was practised most determinedly in Padua itself, but it soon spread to Venice. Squarcione himself was employed there after 1440, and though Antonio da Murano clung ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... "passably literate," writes Chambre; at the best, according to Petrarch, "of ardent temperament, not ignorant of literature, with a natural curiosity for out-of-the- way lore": an antiquarian, not of the lovable kind, but unscrupulous, pedantic, and vain, indulging an inordinate taste for collecting and hoarding books, perhaps to satisfy a craving for shreds and patches of knowledge, but more likely to earn a reputation as a great clerk.[1] For De Bury was something of a humbug; ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... Colbert resumed his pedantic look. "My lord," interrupted he, "I think it would be quite as well to examine whether what the Theatin ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... apt times and circumstances should give it an opportunity to discharge its office.—Observe, I determine nothing upon this.—My way is ever to point out to the curious, different tracts of investigation, to come at the first springs of the events I tell;—not with a pedantic Fescue,—or in the decisive manner or Tacitus, who outwits himself and his reader;—but with the officious humility of a heart devoted to the assistance merely of the inquisitive;—to them I write,—and ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... temporary collapse of Mr. Semhians. Proceeding at once to the comments of these high-class missionaries on the really curious inquisitiveness of certain of the foreign passengers on board, he introduced to them the indisputably learned, the very argumentative, crashing, arrogant, pedantic, dogmatic, philological German gentleman, Dr. Gannius, reeking of the Teutonic Professor, as a library volume of its leather. With him is his fairhaired artless daughter Delphica. An interesting couple for the beguilement of a voyage: she so beautifully moderates his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Elizabeth, James of Scotland ascended the throne. His pedantic and eccentric character is well known. He had an early and decided inclination towards abstruse or mysterious speculations. Before he had reached his twentieth year, he undertook to accomplish what only the most sanguine and profound theologians have ever dared to attempt: ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... human endeavors, the lofty and serious place of which I have spoken above, to defend it from the petty point of view of those who, mistaking its dignity, and the pedantic attitude of those who, mistaking its peculiar character, regard it only as a trifling adornment and embellishment of life or else ask an immediate moral effect and teaching from it—this, as one cannot repeat too often, is deeply rooted in the German habit of thought and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... meteorological observation. Apart from his knack of looking and talking sentiment, he had no strongly-marked taste or hobby: danced respectably, but not often; knew enough about horses to pick out a good one when he wanted a mount for a riding-party; drank good wine habitually, without being pedantic about the different brands of it; and read enough of the current literature of the day to be able to keep up a conversation if he fell among a literary circle. He was not a marrying man, partly because his income, sufficient to provide him with all bachelor luxuries, was not large ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... people by any other name. One misnomer is as good as another; and to refer to old Greeks and Romans in a private letter as the old Hellenes from Hellas or Magna Graecia, and the Latins as from Latium, would have been, besides looking pedantic, just as incorrect as the use of the appellation noted, though it may have sounded, perchance, more "historical." The truth is that, like the ancestors of nearly all the Indo-Europeans (or shall we say Indo-Germanic Japhetidae?), the Greek and Roman sub-races mentioned have to ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... the description of my father impressed you favorably. I will not deny that I am heartily tired of the German bourgeois, these Lorenz Starks, or whatever they may be called, who, in humorous gloom, give free play to their pedantic temperament, and by standing dubiously in the way of their good-natured desires, destroy them, as well as the happiness of other people. In the two following volumes the figure of my father is completely ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... is to his credit that he frankly recognized that a language is a living thing, and that {209} life means growth and growth change. So far as it lay in the power of the French critics the new dignity that came to their language in the seventeenth century was made to involve a pedantic and sterile immobility. The meaning, the spelling, the arrangement, of words was to be regulated by immutable law, and all who disobeyed were to be punished as lawless and insolent rebels. Johnson knew better. Both his melancholy ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... you hear stories of police interference and petty tyranny, and it is mere luck if you do not innocently transgress some of their fussy pedantic regulations. In South Germany I once put a cream jug on my window-sill to keep a little milk cool for the afternoon. The jug was so small and the window so high that it can hardly have been visible from ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... trim, restored turrets of the famous chteau of Sillery, with its gateways, moats, and drawbridges, flanked by trees and floral parterres. It was here that the Marchale d'Estres carried on her successful business as a marchande de vins, and the pragmatic and pedantic Comtesse de Genlis, governess of the Orleans princes, spent, as she tells us, the happiest days of her life. The few thriving vineyards of Sillery cover a gentle eminence which rises out of the plain, and present on the one side an eastern and on the other a western aspect. ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... is only one kind of affection; it has characteristics that would destroy any other kind. Anyone who has known true comradeship in a club or in a regiment, knows that it is impersonal. There is a pedantic phrase used in debating clubs which is strictly true to the masculine emotion; they call it "speaking to the question." Women speak to each other; men speak to the subject they are speaking about. Many an honest ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... of the lyrics by any sort of recitative. The first Italian to write anything of this kind in a play seems to have been Cavaliere, but unfortunately his "Il Satiro" (1590) and "La Disperazione di Sileno" (1595) are known to us only through a comment of Doni, who censures them for pedantic affectations and artificialities of style, inimical to the truth of dramatic music. The dates of the production of these works show us that they were not as old as the movement toward real monodic song, and it is certain that in France, ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... hour came when I felt, not without relief, that I might well fling all my notes into the fire. The fire was a very big one, and was burning up bigger things than such pedantic quackeries. And, anyhow, the issue itself was being settled in a very different style. Scientific officialism and organisation in the State which had specialised in them, had gone to war with the older culture of Christendom. Either Prussianism would win and the protest would be hopeless, ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... advertisement, no flamboyant interviews. Even a complimentary luncheon at the Voyagers' Club was courteously declined. Indeed, it began to be felt that the self-effacement of the returned pressmen was being carried to a pedantic length. Foreman compositors, advertisement clerks, and other members of the non-editorial staff, who had, of course, taken no part in the great trek, found it as impossible to get into direct communication with the editor and his satellites now that they had returned as when they had been excusably ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... dealing with Greek and Latin mythology one might employ both Herakles and Hercules. Also many Indian names such as Ramayana, Krishna, nirvana have become Europeanized or at least are familiar to all Europeans interested in Indian literature. It seems pedantic to write them with their full and accurate complement of accents and dots and my general practice is to give such words in their accurate spelling (Ramayana, etc.) when they are first mentioned ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... touch more delicately and happily both the weakness and the strength of Germany; pedantic, simple, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... think this pedantic acquittance of an electioneering account is in the highest degree ridiculous, and that I cannot interfere in it. The legal expenses are you say paid; and if they were not, I should feel myself bound, as the head of the family, to ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... small town; where college professors and the lawyers of the Parliament House give the tone, and persons of leisure, attracted by educational advantages, make up much of the bulk of society. Not, therefore, an unlettered place, yet not pedantic, Edinburgh will compare favourably with much larger cities. A hard and disputatious element has been commented on by strangers: it would not touch Fleeming, who was himself regarded, even in this metropolis of disputation, as a thorny table-mate. To golf unhappily he did not take, and ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... guts!" Lester put in, trying to belong, and be light-minded, like he thought the others were, instead of a scared, pedantic kid. He slapped the blastoff drum under him, familiarly, as if to draw confidence from its ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... suffered from the rule Of sceptics, icily pedantic, Who blighted, ere I went to school, My dreams ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug. 22, 1917 • Various
... worked on the rotary principle. He became a champion of the wheel, and of the rotary principle. There was something of the fierceness of theological dispute in the controversies of these early days. The wheel, it was pointed out, is not in nature; it is a pedantic invention of man. Birds do not employ it to fly with, nor fish to swim with. The naturalist school of aeronauts declared against it. In 1892 M. A. le Compagnon made experiments, not very successfully, in Paris, with a captive dirigible balloon driven ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... ignorant of the actual office of this excellent minister, whom Julian afterwards created praefect of Gaul. Sallust was speedly recalled by the jealousy of the emperor; and we may still read a sensible but pedantic discourse, (p. 240-252,) in which Julian deplores the loss of so valuable a friend, to whom he acknowledges himself indebted for his reputation. See La Bleterie, Preface a la Vie de lovien, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... differentiation, or the law of the passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, or the dialectic of the concept of pure being, or the impulse towards life, or the vocation of spirit is what actually hatches them? Alas, these words are but pedantic and rhetorical cloaks for our ignorance, and to project them behind the facts and regard them as presiding from thence over the course of nature is a piece of the most deplorable scholasticism. If ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... closet naturalists, in following out their pedantic propensities, have created a genus expressly for this animal, there is nothing either in its appearance or habits to separate it from the badgers, the racoons, the coatimondis, and such other predatory creatures. ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... poor pun, and Plato, less justly, for mere figurative badinage. It would be an easy task to ransack contemporaries, even great contemporaries, for similar failings, for pomposity, for the florid, for sentences like processions of intoxicated torch-bearers, for pedantic display of cheap erudition, for misplaced flippancy, for nice derangement of epitaphs wherein no adjective is used which is appropriate. With a library of cultivated American novelists and uncultivated English romancers at hand, with our own voluminous essays, and the essays and histories and "art ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... Himself always appearing wrong, and speaking like one cracked, he never failed to set right all those who were guided by his advice; and, while his tongue ran riot as if he were drunk or mad, his conduct was governed by sound sense and prudence. If ever any thing hobby-horsical or pedantic crept into the conversation of Hodgkinson, it was his fondness ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... which has been sent to you, or who may be its author, I have heard nothing but through your letter. If the person you suspect, it may be known from the quaint, mystical, and hyperbolical ideas, involved in affected, newfangled, and pedantic terms, which stamp his writings. Whatever it be, I hope your quiet is not to be affected at this day by the rudeness or intemperance of scribblers; but that you may continue in tranquillity to live and to rejoice in the prosperity ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... not be negligent of this in his conversation; but be careful ever to select the best words, to avoid a slovenly style and drawling utterance, and to aim at neatness, force, and brevity. This may be done without formality, or stiffness, or pedantic affectation; and when settled into a habit ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... knew she had learned from books or from her companionship with Captain Dane that first summer after Clive had gone abroad. And there was nothing orthodox, nothing pedantic, nothing simulated or artificial in her likes or dislikes, her preferences ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... order, while war becomes the assassin seeking to overthrow those principles of constitutional liberty, both nations so wisely combined in their constitutions. Why tear down the noble edifice you cannot rebuild? why blight the cheering prospects of thousands to gratify the vain ambition of pedantic politicians? ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... cakes and Madeira, she told him about her month's visit to the Craigs'; about her life in the quaint and quiet city, the restful, old-fashioned charm of the cultivated circles on Columbia Heights and the Hill; the attractions of a limited society, a little dull, a little prim, pedantic, perhaps provincially simple, but a society caring for the best in art, in music, in literature, instinctively recognising the best although the best was nowhere ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... much in the manner in which they called wretches out of their prison to the guillotine. When these ambassadors of infamy appeared before them, the chief Director, in the name of the rest, treated each of them with a short, affected, pedantic, insolent, theatric laconium,—a sort of epigram of contempt. When they had thus insulted them in a style and language which never before was heard, and which no sovereign would for a moment endure from another, supposing any of them frantic enough to use it, to finish ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... done with the professors, and Ned asked the landlady to tell him what change had come over the mind of this somewhat pedantic young woman. And he was told that Ellen had abandoned her studies and professors for politics and politicians, and that these were a great trial to her father, into whose house no Nationalist member of Parliament had ever put his foot before. "Now the very men that ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... break the laws of any land for the sake of a great ideal. Goodness knows what stuff they talked together. Mary said she would blush to think of it till her dying day, and I gathered that on her side it was a mixture of Launcelot Wake at his most pedantic and schoolgirl silliness. ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... obliged to mention something which as an educationist I can by no means pass lightly by. We received instruction from two schoolmasters: one was pedantic and rigid; the other, more especially our class-teacher (conrector), was large-hearted and free. The first never had any influence over his class; the second could do whatever he pleased with us, and if he had but set his mind to it, or perhaps if he had been aware ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... nothing to be hot about," said the Colonel, naively; "but that is neither here nor there. You are ten times worse than he is. He is only a prating, pedantic puppy, but you are a muff, sir, a most unmitigated muff, to stand there mum-chance and let such an article as that carry ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade |
