"Penman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gratifies the impatience of the human disposition will be practised in the teeth of danger, and in defiance of admonition; and, in despite of the Cambrian antiquary, mail-coaches not only roll their thunders round the base of Penman-Maur and Cader-Idris, but ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... well for you but that of a merchant; and I see no means of your getting into this line without property and without credit, except by going into some established house as a clerk. You are a good penman, and ready accountant, I think you tell me; and I presume you have a sufficient knowledge of book-keeping. With sobriety, diligence, and honesty, you may do well in this way; and may look forward to being a partner, and in a lucrative situation, some years hence. ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... day the Archbishop was a skilful penman, which does not by any means convey the idea of covering sheet after sheet of paper with rapid writing. The strip of parchment was about fourteen inches by four. He laid it lengthwise before him, and the letters grew slowly on it, in ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... without a doubt," I replied. "I went to school with him, and he was a good penman, though that was about all ...
— Up the River - or, Yachting on the Mississippi • Oliver Optic
... with the sketches by Lalanne it has more richness of color, but there is the same fine restraint, the same nice regard for the instrument. The student will find it most profitable to study the work of this masterly penman. By way of warning, however, let me remind him here, that in studying the work of any accomplished draughtsman he is selecting a style for the study of principles, not that he may learn to mimic somebody, however excellent the ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... little wink As deep I go into the merit Of this and that distinguished spirit— 50 His cheeks' raised colour, soon to sink, As long I dwell on some stupendous And tremendous (Heaven defend us!) Monstr'-inform'-ingens-horrend-ous Demoniaco-seraphic Penman's latest piece of graphic. Nay, my very wrist grows warm With his dragging weight of arm. E'en so, swimmingly appears, Through one's after-supper musings, 60 Some lost lady of old years With her beauteous vain endeavour And goodness ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... the fancy confused, and the judgment inert, hath in all ages been noted, not only by the erudite of the earth, but even by many of the thick-witted Ofelli themselves; whether the rapid pace at which the fancy moveth in such exercitations, where the wish of the penman is to him like Prince Houssain's tapestry, in the Eastern fable, be the chief source of peril—or whether, without reference to this wearing speed of movement, and dwelling habitually in those realms of imagination, be as little suited ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... abandon, a desperate guidance, a thoughtless ratiocination, a mechanical swaying of rhetoric, are the grounds of dissertation. A pause for a few days, a visit to the country, anything that would seem designed to restore the mind to its normal state, destroys the faculty. The weary penman, who wishes his chaotic head could be relieved by being transformed even as by Puck, knows that very whirling chaos is the condition of his multitudinous periods. It seems as if some special sluices of the soul must be opened to force the pen. One man, on returning to his desk ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... Staples, "seems to have been a favorite illustration of the sacred penman. 'They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount upward as on the wings ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... contradiction between the I Q and the child's performances in and out of school. We cannot deny the existence of "feeble-minded geniuses," but after a good deal of search we have not found one. Occasionally, of course, one finds a feeble-minded person who is an expert penman, who draws skillfully, who plays a musical instrument tolerably well, or who handles number combinations with unusual rapidity; but these are not geniuses; they are not ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... was impressed by the character of the sentences he had given him for a copy. "It was considered at that time," said he, "that Abe was the best penman in the neighborhood. One day, while he was on a visit at my mother's, I asked him to write some copies for me. He very willingly consented. He wrote several of them, but one of them I have never forgotten, although a boy at ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... seconds were entered on the ledger. At last the gray penman has made his footing. The great page turns. I have ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... much, I am certainly fit for something. I have only a smattering of Latin and Greek, it is true, and a very slight knowledge of French, but, if I am to believe my teacher's reports, I am not a bad arithmetician, and I know a good deal of mathematics, besides being a pretty fair penman." ...
— Digging for Gold - Adventures in California • R.M. Ballantyne
... old and respected citizen of our place, who knew my father and my father's father, and me as an unlucky dog from my cradle, 'Tom, did ever any idea of getting a permanent and profitable position—say, as you are an excellent penman—as clerk in one of the departments at Harrisburg or ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... Hertfordshire. My father lived to see them both married; and enjoyed a firm health, until above eighty years of age. He was a handsome gentleman of great natural parts, a great accomptant, vast memory, an incomparable penman, of great integrity and service to his prince; had been a member of several Parliaments; a good husband and father, especially to me, who never can sufficiently praise God for him, nor acknowledge his ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... his unwilling hand to its accustomed work, his peculiar J being plainly written and followed by characters meant for the remaining letters of his first name. To earlier documents he was wont to affix a simple neat signature, and although not a clerkly penman like his friends John Tinker, Master Joseph Rowlandson and Ralph Houghton, his writing is superior to that of Major ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... evening I pored over the manuscript, on which she had bestowed great pains, and crossed all the t's without missing one. But it is never an easy task to decipher a woman's meaning, particularly when not addicted to penmanship; and although my excellent wife had attended a penman's instructions, and had acquired the reputation, in her native place, of being an accomplished clerk, still, since her marriage, she had applied her genius to the making of tarts and other confections, rather than to the parts of scholarship, and it was difficult for me ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... was a good penman, and the lines that he wrote On that sad occasion was too fine for me to quote,— For I was there and heard it, and I ever will recall It brought the happy tears to the eyes ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... (Vol. ix., p. 422.).—RUSTICUS is obliged to the Editor for so soon giving a reply to his Query; but seems convicted of being a bad penman, like many other rustics. For the strange word, respecting which he asked for information, having seen it used in a newspaper, was not lignites but liquites. RUSTICUS could have guessed that the ashes of lignites were but wood-ashes under a pedantic name; but a term which looks, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... were now spent in the society of John Wigham, whose father occupied the Glebe Farm at Benton, close at hand. John was a fair penman and a sound arithmetician, and Stephenson sought his society chiefly for the purpose of improving himself in writing and "figures." Under Andrew Robertson, he had never quite mastered the Rule of Three, and it was only when Wigham ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... hours a day was not enough," said Cassiodorus. "We should copy the great works of literature so that every monastery shall have a library as good as that which we have at Monte Cassino." He himself was an expert penman, and he set himself the task of teaching the monks how to write as well as how to read. "To write beautifully is a great joy ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... he reaches will always and inevitably misjudge him. Mais c'est mon homme, one may say, as La Fontaine said of Moliere. Of modern writers, putting Scott aside, he is to me the most friendly and sympathetic. Great genius as he was, he was also a penman, a journalist; and journalists and penmen will always look to him as their big brother, the man in their own line of whom they are proudest. As devout Catholics did not always worship the greatest saints, but the friendliest saints, their own, so we scribes burn our cheap incense to St. William ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang |
