"Smattering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and, with the exception of gin-and-water, everything. I know every language, both in the known and unknown worlds; I am profoundly ignorant of history, or indeed of any other useful science, but have a smattering of all. I am excellently qualified to judge and lash the vices of the age, having experienced, I may almost say, every one of them in my own person. The immortal and immoral Goethe, that celebrated sage of Germany, has made ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... and Italian, as well as English: a smattering of Spanish too; yet they said modestly, when we exclaimed at their accomplishments, that it was nothing; hardly anybody would learn Dutch, so the Dutch must learn the ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... through a town, or across a county, if his fame extends so far; a dull repetition of the same notion characterises all his works. He served his apprenticeship to old Plumbline, in Brick Lane; got up the Carpenter's Vade-Mecum by heart; had a little smattering of drawing from Daub the painter, and then set up in business for himself. As for Mr Triangle the architect, who built the grand town-hall here, the other-day, in the newest style of Egyptian architecture, and copied two mummies for door-posts, and who is now putting ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... When it came to assimilating Spanish, however, he did not appear to be so apt a pupil. He managed, after many trials, to acquire "buenos dias" and "buenos tardes," and "senorita" and "gracias," and a few other short terms. Dick was indeed eager to get a little smattering of Spanish, and perhaps he was not really quite so stupid as he pretended to be. It was delightful to be taught by a beautiful Spaniard who was so gracious and intense and magnetic of personality, and by a sweet American girl who moment by moment forgot her shyness. Gale ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... bright, ambitious boys An inkling of these pleasures, too— A little smattering of the joys Their dead and buried fathers knew; And let them sing—while glorying that Their sires so sang, long years ago— The songs "amo, amas, amat" And "Zoa ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... knew little of affairs of moment but by hearsay and by what he had learned in the cabal of "The Importants," of whose jargon he had retained some smattering, which, together with some expressions he had perfectly acquired from Madame de Vendome, formed a language that would have puzzled a Cato. His speech was short and stupidly dull, and the more so because he obscured it by affectation. ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... treated me with excellent remedies, which I accepted with security. Himself commented on the circumstance. "You see," says he, "you begin to know me better. A very little while ago, upon this lonely ship, where no one but myself has any smattering of science, you would have made sure I had designs upon your life. And, observe, it is since I found you had designs upon my own that I have shown you most respect. You will tell me if this speaks of a small mind." I found ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... don't see a ship when it's in spacedrive. It's out of normal space-time dimensions. We had a smattering of the theory at cadet school ... anyway, if one did flash into normal space-time—say, for instance, coming in for a landing—the probability of us being at the same place at the same time was almost nil. 'Two ships passing in the night' as the ...
— Homesick • Lyn Venable
... appeared to me were utterly unsaleable, and few people would have ventured upon an engagement with so disreputable a person. However, I liked his face; he could speak Turkish and Arabic fluently: Greek was his mother-tongue, and he had a smattering of French. I sent for the tailor, and had him measured for a suit of clothes to match those of Amarn—a tunic, waistcoat, knickerbockers, and gaiters of navy-blue serge. In a few days Georgi was transformed into a respectable-looking servant, ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... whole labor trouble, it seems to me, lies in this whistle trade. A smattering of education has made labor dissatisfied. The laboring people are trying to get out of their place, and as a result we have strikes and lawlessness and disrespect for courts, and men going around and making trouble in industry by 'doing ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... years,—not to load the memory of the student with a mass of undigested knowledge, but to force upon him so much that he has rejected all. It has been the error of distracting and enfeebling the mind by an unmeaning profusion of subjects; of implying that a smattering in a dozen branches of study is not shallowness, which it really is, but enlargement, which it is not; of considering an acquaintance with the learned names of things and persons, and the possession ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... people. All cannot be great linguists any more than all can be great inventors, and it were just as valuable and reasonable an expenditure of time to teach a child to be one as the other. Of what benefit is a smattering of foreign language, except to make people ridiculous? and that class is already sufficiently large; far better that they learned to speak and spell their mother tongue with a commendable degree of accuracy, ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... been holding forth, to the handful of men who had been dining with me, on Malay beliefs and superstitions, while they manfully stifled their yawns. When a man has a smattering knowledge of anything, which is not usually known to his neighbours, it is a temptation to lecture on the subject, and, looking back, I fear that I had been on the rostrum during the best part of that evening. I had told them of the Penangal, that horrible wraith of a woman who has ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... only of torturing for hidden treasure, or swilling southern wines; and they returned to Spain and to Germany, to persecutions of Moriscos and plundering of abbeys, as savage and as dull as they had arrived. A smattering of Italian literature, art, and manners was carried back to Spain and Germany by Spanish and German princes and governors, to be transmitted to a few courtiers and humanists; but the imagination of the lower classes of Spain and of Germany, absorbed in the Quixotic Catholicism ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... foreigners think they know it all when they have only a smattering of it," mused Blake. "Though Alcando isn't as bad that way as lots of others. Well, we've done our best with him. And how unjust all our suspicions were—Joe's and mine. I wonder what he really did think he was ...
— The Moving Picture Boys at Panama - Stirring Adventures Along the Great Canal • Victor Appleton
... his people should go on, and at once they left him with us, and Owen bade me do reverence to Aldhelm, the abbot of Malmesbury, before whom we stood. And after that they talked long in Welsh, and that I could not follow, though indeed I knew a fair smattering of it by this time, seeing that Owen would have me learn from him, and we had used it a good deal in these ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... the superior had a fresh attack of convulsions, and as all present knew that these attacks usually indicated that the performance was about to end, they withdrew, making very merry over a devil who knew neither Hebrew nor Gaelic, and whose smattering of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... for Oxford Local Examinations has been the first, as far as we know, to set a paper in domestic science to senior candidates. There has been a demand for it in the London Matriculation, but objection has been raised on the score of its being a smattering and a soft option. The Oxford Delegacy has introduced two new headings—Domestic Science and Hygiene—and sets two papers under each, without any practical work. The first paper is the same under both headings—Elementary Physics and ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... from that Lincolnshire town he had written to Temple on March 18:—'As to American affairs, I have really not studied the subject; it is too much for me perhaps, or I am too indolent or frivolous. From the smattering which newspapers have given me, I have been of different minds several times. That I am a Tory, a lover of power in monarchy, and a discourager of much liberty in the people, I avow; but it is not clear to me that our colonies are completely our subjects.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... was not only reading many books besides Thackeray's, but I was studying to get a smattering of several languages as well as I could, with or without help. I could now manage Spanish fairly well, and I was sending on to New York for authors in that tongue. I do not remember how I got the money to buy them; to be sure it was no great sum; but it ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... admiration for the moral and social idealism which is advocated. I agree that the atheological moral idea is superior to the mere performance of religious ceremonial. But I cannot admire the reasoning or the intelligence of those who use a smattering of science as evidence of the decay of religion. There is something almost comical in the solemnity with which they contrast the commonplaces of scientific observation with the vast mysteries of religion, to the detriment of the latter. "These marvellous researches of the human eye," writes ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... admirable scholar, but was always deeply interested in the progress of his students. But here lay the villainy. Almost {p.034} all my companions who had left the High School at the same time with myself had acquired a smattering of Greek before they came to College. I, alas, had none; and finding myself far inferior to all my fellow-students, I could hit upon no better mode of vindicating my equality than by professing my contempt for the language, and ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... now that my smattering of culture was neither deep nor broad. I acquired no definite knowledge of underlying principles, of general history, of economics, of languages, of mathematics, of physics or of chemistry. To biology and its allies I paid scarcely any attention at all, except to take a few snap courses. ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... round the town, explore its nooks and corners and make himself, for the time being, a part of his surroundings. A smattering of European languages aided him in this. He rubbed elbows with coatless workmen in French, Swiss, Spanish and Italian "pensions," sitting at long tables and breaking black bread into red wine. He drank black coffee and ate cloying sweetmeats in Greek or Turkish cafes; ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... a man can presume to write a book. He cannot produce a treatise on mathematics without knowing at least Euclid, nor a work on history without having read Hume, nor on political economy without having acquired a smattering of Adam Smith. But in regard to travels, no previous information is thought to be requisite. If the person who sets out on a tour has only money in his pocket, and health to get to his journey's end, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... says the man of millions, "It is this way——". As a connoisseur he seems to think that because he can pay for anything he fancies, he is accredited expert as well as potential owner. Topics he does not care for are "bosh," those which he has a smattering of, he simply appropriates; his prejudices are, in his opinion, expert criticism; his taste impeccable; his judgment infallible; and to him the world is a pleasance built for his sole pleasuring. But to the rest of us who also have to live in it with as ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... answers, but neither of us could understand a syllable. There were several of his priests and lawyers present (as I conjectured by their habits), who were commanded to address themselves to me; and I spoke to them in as many languages as I had the least smattering of, which were, High and Low Dutch, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and Lingua Franca;[15] but all ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... "have some little smattering of Italian, and I plume myself on singing some of Ariosto's stanzas; but tell me, senor—I do not say this to test your ability, but merely out of curiosity—have you ever met with the word ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... public school, Lord Plowden tells me," said the other, with interest. "And his people were booksellers—somewhere in London—so that he got a good smattering of literature and all that. He certainly has more right to set up as a gentleman than nine out of ten of the nouveaux riches one sees flaunting about nowadays. And he can talk very well indeed—in a direct, practical sort of way. I ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... is something unpleasant, and I suppose you have heard a smattering of it in your muddled way; but it is quite plain you don't in the least understand it, when you fancy I can do anything to serve anyone in the smallest degree connected with that disagreeable business—or that I am ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... wind, or what fell little short of a real gale, was not to be undertaken with twenty men, the extent of Daly's command; and he had recourse to the assistance of his enemies. A good natured, facetious Irishman, himself, with a smattering of French, he soon got forty or fifty of the prisoners in a sufficient humour to lend their aid, and the sail was set, though not without great risk of its splitting. From this moment, la Victoire ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... when Want tapped at my chamber door, I drew out the check that seemed most willing to come, and exchanged with Scrymgeour. In his detestation of argument Scrymgeour resembled myself, but otherwise we differed as much as men may differ who smoke the Arcadia. He read little, yet surprised us by a smattering of knowledge about all important books that had been out for a few months, until we discovered that he got his information from a friend in India. He had also, I remember, a romantic notion that Africa ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... I had picked up a good deal of pleasure and a good deal of knowledge. I had been to a German school and a German university, and spoke German as readily and perfectly as English; I was thoroughly at home in French; I had a smattering of Italian and enough Spanish to swear by. I was, I believe, a strong, though hardly fine swordsman and a good shot. I could ride anything that had a back to sit on; and my head was as cool a one as you could find, for ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... said, with some illiberality, of our brethren across the Tweed, that though "every man may have a mouthful, no one has a belly full;" but it still marks a degree of national refinement, that any attention whatever is bestowed upon such subjects. This smattering of knowledge, accompanied with the constant readiness to communicate it, is also agreeable to a stranger. Except in a few instances at Rouen, I never failed to find civility and attention among the French. To the ladies of ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... in physic and astrology; he had formerly been a merchant in Yarmouth, and Mayor of the town, but failing in estate, went into the Low-Countries, and at Franecker took the degree, of doctor in Physick; he had some little smattering in astrology; could resolve a question of theft, or love-question, something of sickness; a very grave person, laborious and honest, of tall stature and comely feature; he died of late years, almost in the very street near Tower-Hill: ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... not offer in sufficient number, the militia might be drafted to supply the deficiencies, but only to serve until December, and not to be marched out of the province. In this case, said he, before they have entered upon service, or got the least smattering of duty, they will claim a discharge; if they are pursuing an enemy who has committed the most unheard-of cruelties, he has only to step across the Potomac, and he is safe. Then as to the limits of service, they might just ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... her Heart would break, Oh! deliver me out of the Hands of this Barbarian: Save, Sir, O save my Life. Upon these her shocking Outcries, Zadig threw himself between the injur'd Lady and the inexorable Brute. And as he had some smattering of the Egyptian Tongue, he expostulated with him in his own Dialect, and said: Dear Sir, if you are endow'd with the least Spark of Humanity, let me conjure you to have some Pity and Remorse for so beautiful a Creature; have some Regard, Sir, to the Weakness of her Sex. How can you treat a ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... schoolfellow of his at Bideford, and son of a merchant in that town—one of those unlucky members who are "nobody's enemy but their own"—a handsome, idle, clever fellow, who used his scholarship, of which he had picked up some smattering, chiefly to justify his own escapades, and to string songs together. Having drunk all that he was worth at home, he had in a penitent fit forsworn liquor, and tormented Amyas into taking him to sea, where he afterwards made as good a sailor as any one else, but sorely scandalized ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... in the old happy-go-lucky fashion of schooling. Australian children have all now the chance of learning the three R's according to the latest and most approved fashion, and if their parents choose they can also get a smattering of history, geography, and one or two other ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... I," said Tom, in the same tone as before. "Just fancy a chap like you turned into an officer. You can jabber a few words of French, and may have picked up a smattering of navigation on board the Foxhound, though I've a notion you must pretty well have forgotten all you knew by this time, and you may be fond of books, but all that won't turn a fellow who has come out of the gutter, as one may say, into a gentleman, as I ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... the school. As the days shortened and the nights grew longer, the girl realized, with bitterness in her heart, that almost the only thing she had accomplished along educational lines was the imperfect smattering of the Indian tongue ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... people with their productions. Every man jack of them was trying to unload his stock-in-trade. The most thriving of them were naturally the nostrum-mongers, the philosophical lecturers who ladled out general ideas, leavened with a few facts, a scientific smattering, ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... and shorter hours. He meets the noted men and women of the city. Suddenly from the city editor's desk his ambition turns to Washington. He succeeds there. He now comes into the presence of distinguished ambassadors, ministers and diplomatists. He acquires a polish and a smattering of the languages. His work becomes a feature of his paper. The president chooses him for a friend; he comes and goes as he wills. Presently his eye furtively wanders to Europe. The highest ambition of a journalist, next to being a ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... but would never run counter to her dictates without ample reason for doing so: in such cases they would override her with due self-reliance, and the goddess seldom punished them; for they are brave, and Ydgrun is not. They had most of them a smattering of the hypothetical language, and some few more than this, but only a few. I do not think that this language has had much hand in making them what they are; but rather that the fact of their being generally possessed of its rudiments was one great reason for the reverence ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... from Mexico and the border campaigns found that their smattering of Spanish did not help them much. But still every one seemed to manage to get along all right. Our soldiers and the French soldiers in those early days couldn't understand each other's languages, but ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... Honor had another and a nobler ambition. She had acquired all the requisite knowledge to fit her for any station in life, from that of a nursery governess to that of the highest lady in the land. Her learning was not a smattering of this and that—a few words of German, a great deal too many of her own tongue, a well-studied enthusiasm for Tennyson and Longfellow, and may be now and then a word for the "Lake" school poets. Who has not met in their long or short run of experience with ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... goes, the teachers were generally of a very inferior order, and rarely possessed more than a smattering of the rudiments of grammar and arithmetic. As the Governor points out, they were poorly paid, and "boarded around" the neighbourhood. But it is not improbable that they generally received all their services were worth. In those ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... life." The other common charge of dilettanteism, brought by such opponents as Professor Huxley and Mr. Frederic Harrison, deserves hardly more consideration. Arnold has made it sufficiently clear that he does not mean by culture "a smattering of Greek and Latin," but a deepening and strengthening of our whole spiritual nature by all the means at our command. No other ideal of the century is so satisfactory as this of Arnold's. The ideal of social democracy, as commonly followed, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... differential calculus young Tudor knew nothing, and pretended to know nothing. He told the chief clerk that he was utterly ignorant of all such matters, that his only acquirements were a tolerably correct knowledge of English, French, and German, with a smattering of Latin and Greek, and such an intimacy with the ordinary rules of arithmetic and with the first books of Euclid, as he had been able to pick up while acting as a tutor, rather than a scholar, in ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... imposing, capable, but socially indifferent person who responded to the name of Adelbert P. Gibney. Mr. Gibney had spent part of an adventurous life in the United States Navy, where he had applied himself and acquired a fair smattering of navigation. Prior to entering the Navy he had been a foremast hand in clipper ships and had held a second mate's berth. Following his discharge from the Navy he had sailed coastwise on steam schooners, and after attending a navigation school for two months, had procured a license as ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... contrary, their acquaintance, if not select, is numerous. They are useful, good-looking, piquant, tasteful and vivacious. Many of them have more than one lover, and conduct their amours with singular finesse, generally escaping detection. They are rarely possessed of more than a smattering of education, because their ranks are recruited from a class where education is not in vogue. They are not, as a rule, disgusted with their mode of living—most of them consider it as a means to an end, and in no measure degrading or ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... secondary European monarchies. Voltaire, however, was not the man to turn up his nose at royalty, in whatever form it might present itself; and it was moreover clear that the young prince had picked up at least a smattering of French culture, that he was genuinely anxious to become acquainted with the tendencies of modern thought, and, above all, that his admiration for the author of the Henriade and Zaire ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... the doctor his experience with the people among whom his father worked in his East Side chapel had given him a smattering of many languages and he was able to make out from Mrs. Tsanoff, although her fright and fatigue had made her forget almost all the English she knew, what had terrified her companion. They had gone ...
— Ethel Morton at Rose House • Mabell S. C. Smith
... tried, found guilty, and fined fifty dollars or a month in jail. Many arguments arose between magistrate and constable, as the latter, having served in the United States, and there learned a smattering of Yankee law, was resolved to make his voice heard in the case. The inability of the prisoner to pay the fine of course made it necessary to fall back upon the alternative—thirty days in jail, which jail was a hundred and odd miles off. There was no conveyance ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... pierce below these externals is to come on a vacuity of any sterling quality, a deliquescence of the moral nature, a frivolity and inconsequence of purpose that mark the nearly perfect fruit of a decadent age. He has a worthless smattering of many subjects, but a grasp of none. 'I soon weary of a pursuit,' he said to me, laughing; it would almost appear as if he took a pride in his incapacity and lack of moral courage. The results of his dilettanteism ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the whole youth of the United States condemned to become proficient in French or Spanish or German. Say we take the easiest of them, Spanish: does anyone dream the thing possible? Only an infinitesimal fraction of our young people could attain even a smattering, and that at the cost of from two to three years' study; and even then it is quite unlikely that other nations would adopt the same language. But if they all did this impossible thing the Spanish speaking peoples would still have the pull on them ...
— Esperanto: Hearings before the Committee on Education • Richard Bartholdt and A. Christen
... sympathy with the trade school as it is commonly organized—the boys get only a smattering of knowledge and they do not learn how to use that knowledge. The trade school should not be a cross between a technical college and a school; it should be a means of teaching boys to be productive. If they are put ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... all the names, and soon became so deeply interested that her sadness departed, and the smile came back once more. For my own part, I was always rather quick at learning languages. I had a correct ear and a retentive memory; in my wanderings round the world I had picked up a smattering of many languages, such as French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, German, Hindoostanee, and a few others. The words which I learned from Almah had a remote resemblance to Arabic; and, in fact, my knowledge of Arabic was actually of some assistance, though how it was that ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... during the exercise time. Now the "highflyer" I have referred to did not belong to this class, but except in his principles and habits and tastes, his education was quite equal to theirs. He spoke German and French fluently, knew Latin and Greek, a smattering of Italian, and the higher branches of mathematics. What first surprised me about him was his pretended intimacy with some German merchants of the highest standing I knew in London, and with whom I had done business. To know such men ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... he never gave up his study of it. He was not satisfied, and no true missionary ever will be satisfied with such a smattering of knowledge as may enable him to proclaim a few Christian doctrines. Such superficiality was not his aim or end. And when he first acquired Chinese, it was more difficult to do so. There were no aids in the way of ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... of it!" interrupted Theos swiftly and with passion—"I am aware that so-called 'wise' men, rooted in narrow prejudice, with a smattering of even narrower logic, presume, out of their immeasurable littleness, to decry and make mock of the truly great, who, thanks to God's unpurchasable gift of inspiration, can do without the study of books or the teaching of pedants,—who flare through the world flame-winged ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of the Revolutionary War. We hung breathless on his account of the treason of Arnold and its detection and the class burst out into applause when he ended,—a thing the like of which never happened in any time in College. There was a little smattering of instruction in modern languages, but it was not of much value. We had a French professor named Viau whom the boys tormented unmercifully. He spoke English very imperfectly, and his ludicrous mistakes destroyed all his dignity and rendered it impossible to maintain any discipline in the ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... the hotel office that Monday evening: Jared Parker, the proprietor; Seth Wilber, town authority on all things past and present; and John Fletcher, known in Collingsville as "The Squire"—possibly because of his smattering of Blackstone; probably because of his silk hat and five-thousand-dollar bank account. Each of the three men eyed with unabashed curiosity the stranger in ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... was it a dream, remote, something to be gained to-morrow, but never to-day, like the mediaeval Christian's idea of heaven. His interest was in the search. For that one could see in him a real enthusiasm. He had his smattering of theory, his very real empirical knowledge, and his superstitions, like all prospectors. So long as he could keep in grub, own a little train of burros, and lead the life he loved, he ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... insatiable desire to acquire information of every kind, he had naturally, when at home, learned a little rough-and-tumble surgery, with a slight smattering of medicine. It was not much, but it proved to be useful as far as it went, and his "little knowledge" was not "dangerous," because he modestly refused to go a single step beyond it in the way of practice, unless, indeed, he was urgently pressed to do so by his patients. In virtue ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... pleasure. He had been transferred temporarily to Calcutta, where his Colonel, who had received secret information concerning him, had treated him like a gentleman, and had employed him as regimental interpreter, for he spoke French and German and a smattering of Indian tongues. During his lonely hours he had studied, for he knew that some day he would be called upon to administer a vast fortune.... He laid the pipe on the sill, rested his elbows beside it, and ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... the virtues and all the supposed gentlemanly vices, he might dissipate his energies in hunting, gambling, and cockfighting. He would almost certainly make the grand tour of Europe, and, if he had little Latin and less Greek, he was pretty certain to have some familiarity with Paris and a smattering of French. The eighteenth century was a period of magnificent living in England. The great landowner, then, as now, the magnate of his neighborhood, was likely to rear, if he did not inherit, one of those vast palaces ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... new establishment, or covered ourselves with dust and returned laden with Chinese gods and brass warming-pans from the dealers in antiquities. I found Pinkerton well up in the situation of these establishments as well as in the current prices, and with quite a smattering of critical judgment; it turned out he was investing capital in pictures and curiosities for the States, and the superficial thoroughness of the creature appeared in the fact, that although he would never be a connoisseur, he was already ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... get along with a surprisingly small vocabulary, and one also learns fast when he is surrounded by people who do not speak his own language. In six weeks Will had quite a smattering of the Sioux tongue. He still lived in the lodge of Inmutanka, who was invariably kind and helpful, and Will soon had a genuine liking for the good old doctor. It pleased him to wait upon Inmutanka as ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... to offer us? We are of a class who neither care to bind books nor draw patterns. We are your equals—if we were not distinctively modest, we might say something more than your equals—in acquirement and information. We have our smattering of physical-science humbug, as you have; we are read up in theological disputation, and are as ready as you to stand by Colenso against Moses; in modern languages we are more than your match. What have you ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... taught them, at the same time, that the only safe and sure way of rising is to fear God and keep his commandments; and so has really done more to civilize and refine them—to make them truly civilized men and gentlemen, and not vulgar savages—than if they had known a smattering of a dozen sciences. I say that the Bible is the book which civilizes and refines, and ennobles rich and poor, high and low, and has been doing so for fifteen hundred years; and that any man who ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... we noted the achievements of English scholarship and genius working under great disadvantages. Gray and Scott may have had a smattering of Icelandic, but Latin translations were necessary to reveal the meaning of what few Old Norse texts were available to them. This paucity of material, more than the ignorance of the language, was responsible for the slow progress in popularizing the remarkable literature ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... friend to guide him,—having saved up money enough to buy a grammar and dictionary,—he commenced the study of another; after mastering the chief difficulties of which he began still another; and so he had gone on through life, with the most determined perseverance, gaining even more than a smattering of the tongues not only of Europe but of the Eastern world, though he could make no practical use ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... happened just as they do now; the criticism is almost invariably the work of beginners. A youth who has acquired a smattering of learning, who has caught up the slang of the studios, and pretends to have a system or to defend a paradox, is chosen to write an account of the Salon. I was that youth, that novice. And after all, how become ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... only a smattering of the secret of certain success if you just skim over the chapters, and skip whatever requires you to think hard in order to comprehend it all. But if you dig into the meaning of each sentence for the full idea, you will enrich yourself with constantly increasing ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... past. Nothing better than the founding of a People's College could be thought of. Lamentable ignorance of the world and all therein was and yet is the direct curse of the land. The natives have had no opportunity of learning anything beyond the parrot-smattering of the Koran, the one book of Moslem schools. The rudimentary knowledge common to British schoolboys transcends all the learning of the wise in the Soudan. The people, Arabs and blacks, are docile and capable of readily learning everything taught in the ordinary scholastic curriculum at ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... not one in ten thousand has any practical knowledge of the subject. They may possess a smattering, and in the endeavor to make it show to advantage, they draw upon their imagination to supply the deficiency. On the other hand, I have been making this subject a constant study for the past twenty years, ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... off to practise medicine at Perugia. His son followed him, acquired the rudiments of knowledge in that town, and then proceeded to study philosophy alone at Rimini. There was no man-servant or academy in his case. He was far too plebeian and too free. The boy lodged with a merchant, and got some smattering of Thomas Aquinas and the Peripatetics into his small brain, while he contrived to form a friendship with an acting company. They were on the wing for Venice in a coasting boat, which would touch at Chiozza, where ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... translators responded to its stimulus with an enthusiasm denied to later times. It was work that appealed to persons of varying ranks and of varying degrees of learning. In the early part of the century, according to Nash, "every private scholar, William Turner and who not, began to vaunt their smattering of Latin in English impressions."[250] Thomas Nicholls, the goldsmith, translated Thucydides; Queen Elizabeth translated Boethius. The mention of women in this connection suggests how widely the impulse was ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... the Public School-girls, they return from their 'polishing schools'—these demoiselles—cursed with a superficial smattering of everything but what they ought to have learned—physical and moral wrecks, whom we physicians are expected to wind up in the morning for the husband-hunting excitements of the evening. And these creatures are intended for wives! But wives only, for it is fast going out of fashion to intend ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... a study of the classics may be better than that of modern foreign languages, is that in studying the latter the object is more often considered—by the student at least—to become able to read professional books in a modern language, or to get a smattering which will be of use in travel or in business; while in the study of the classics these objects are entirely absent, and the attention is more apt to be concentrated on studying delicate shades of meaning. ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... his emergencies, Goldsmith undertook to teach the English language. It is true he was ignorant of the Dutch, but he had a smattering of the French, picked up among the Irish priests at Ballymahon. He depicts his whimsical embarrassment in this respect, in his account in the Vicar of Wakefield of the philosophical vagabond who went to Holland to teach the natives English, ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... by way of salary, I soon found myself standing for introductory approval before Bishop Burgess at his hotel in Waterloo Place, a candidate for orders by Examination. The good Bishop being a Hebrew scholar was glad enough to hear that I (with however slight a smattering) had studied that primitive tongue under Pusey and Pauli,—and I began to hope before his awful presence. But, when he told me to read, and soon perceived my only half-cured infirmity, he faithfully enough assured me with sorrow that I could not be ordained unless I had my speech. So that ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Asiatic down because he thought the man was a fool, whereas he himself was ignorant of what was going on. The message the coolie was bringing was misunderstood by the conceited assistant, and as a result of having just this smattering of the vernacular, he ran his firm in for a loss ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... feet six) should be exceedingly rare, or that the human race is not of all possible heights from three inches to thirty feet? Can it be doubted that in this case, as in the last, the wrong answer would be given? He would defend himself, probably, if he had a smattering of science, by saying that experience teaches us that Nature works by 'invariable laws'; by which he would mean, usually unbroken customs; and that he has, therefore, a right to be astonished if they are broken. ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... while she is here," said Mrs. Hartrick. "Would you believe it, George?—that little girl of sixteen calmly informed me that her education was finished. At the same time, she said she knew no language but her own, and just a smattering of that dead tongue, Irish. She cannot play; in short, she has no accomplishments whatever, and yet her education is finished. I must say I do not understand your sister. I should have thought that she was a ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... able to wound and even to kill at the distance of a spear-cast, absolutely fascinated them. Nothing would satisfy them but that they must possess a revolver apiece, and the very next day they stole a brace, together with some fifty cartridges; and having watched us intently, and thus acquired a smattering of knowledge of how to use the weapons, took to the woods, where, later on, we heard them popping away in the most reckless fashion. That, of course, was an offence which it would never do to overlook; therefore we sallied forth, captured the culprits, took the revolvers and the half-dozen ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... otherwise. Few students confine themselves to their speciality. The majority of them dislike the laborious work of mastering dry details, and, with the presumption which is often found in conjunction with youth and a smattering of knowledge, they aspire to become social reformers and imagine themselves specially qualified for ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... had the first Bengal regiment—a new experiment, undertaken for political reasons. The Bengali is the Indian who most readily takes to European learning. Rabindranath Tagore is probably the most widely known member of the race. They go to Calcutta University and learn a smattering of English and absorb a certain amount of undigested general knowledge and theory. These partially educated Bengalis form the Babu class, and many are employed in the railways. They delight in complicated phraseology, ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... welcome accorded them their numbers soon increased. Among them there happened to be a boy, of some fifteen years of age, who showed himself more tractable than his fellows, and whom Father Junipero determined to use as an instrument for his purpose. When the lad had picked up a smattering of Spanish, the padre sent him to his people with the promise that if he were allowed to bring back one of the children, the youngster should not only by baptism be made a Christian, but should also (and here the good father descended to ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... agents of the world, and that the work of other powers in that direction only tends to the stagnation of Eastern peoples. One might affirm with more truth that our intercourse with the civilisation of the East tends to our own stagnation. We do impart to the natives, it is true, some smattering of the semi-barbaric, obsolete ways we possess ourselves, but standing aside and trying to look upon matters with the eye of a rational man, it is really difficult to say whether what we teach and how we teach it does really improve the Eastern people or not. Personally, with a long experience ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Magdeburg, asking him to give a concert there. He hesitated for a long while, and then agreed to accede to their wish. Outwardly it could not be called an unusually successful evening, but his auditors felt his power. People with the thinnest smattering of music forgot themselves and became infatuated with his arms and his eyes. An uncertain, undetermined happiness which he brought to the hearts of real musicians carried him further along on his career. For two ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... been melasses, as Webster and his provincials spell it,—or Molossa's, as dear old smattering, chattering, would-be-College-President, Cotton Mather, has it in the "Magnalia"? Ponder thereon, ye small antiquaries, who make barn-door-fowl flights of learning in "Notes and Queries"!—ye Historical Societies, in one of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... with them during the greater part of this day. The manners of this young man were reserved, but respectful. He was a great admirer of the English, and had obtained a smattering of their language. Although his appearance was extremely boyish, he had already three wives, and was the father of two children. His front teeth were filed to a point, after the manner of the Logos people; but, notwithstanding ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... across North America. She had no tried standard by which to measure life's values for she had lived her twenty-two years wholly shielded from the human maelstrom, fed, clothed, taught, an untried product of home and schools. Her head was full of university lore, things she had read, a smattering of the arts and philosophy, liberal portions of academic knowledge, all tagged and sorted like parcels on a shelf to be reached when called for. Buried under these externalities the ego of her lay unaroused, ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to be forearmed; and I seriously counsel you to try if you cannot find something new this summer along the coast to which you are going. There is no reason why you should not be so successful as a friend of mine who, with a very slight smattering of science, and very desultory research, obtained in one winter from the Torbay shores three entirely new species, beside several rare animals which had escaped all naturalists since the lynx-eye of Colonel Montagu ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... panegyric on the furniture in comparison with that of Mrs. Over-the-Road. She struck the lyre and awoke a louder and loftier strain on the splendour of its proportions and symmetry—"heaps of room here to swing a cat"—and her rapture and inspiration swelled as she turned herself to the smattering price charged for it. On this theme she chanted long and lovingly and a hundred coloured, senescent ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... their women shall be trained to the highest culture—shall be taught in the deepest wisdom—shall live for the broadest and grandest purposes. No; they think it is enough if their women can have a little smattering of knowledge so as to appear well in the drawing-room parlor. Wisdom is for men. Man alone may draw from the deep wells of knowledge. Why have civilized men closed all their colleges and universities against ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... because he is out of his groove. A smattering of law is not enough here. It wants a smattering ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... offered no indignities, such as would have been our fortune in olden days. But did you notice how that old warrior examined the knots himself? He seems to be a sort of head-man. I can remember a smattering of a few dialects, and I am sure I heard him say to the braves: 'Not too tight. Do not hurt the pale-faces, but keep ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... Fynes, aut finis.' He may have been told what it meant, but he certainly seemed to know. Of course, no real knowledge of Latin can be obtained without a University education"—and the Rector pulled up his tie and collar—"but still chemists and persons of that sort do manage to get a smattering of it." ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... into their sermons, and made his words the subject of their instruction; and Rashi was taught even to the children. The mass of readers assimilated the Halakic and Haggadic elements. Those who were not students, through Rashi got a smattering of a literature that would otherwise have been inaccessible to them; and the commentaries threw into circulation a large number of legends, which became the common property of the Jews. Rashi's expressions and phrases entered into current speech, especially those happy formulas which impress ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... tragedies, and who, by dint of carrying to and going for his manuscripts at the Odeon, ended by marrying the stagedoor-keeper's daughter. In the seventh grade Amedee groaned under the tyranny of M. Prudhommod, a man from the country, with a smattering of Latin and a terribly violent temper, throwing at the pupils the insults of a plowboy. Now he had entered the sixth grade, under M. Bance, an unfortunate fellow about twenty years old, ugly, lame, and foolishly timid, whom M. Batifol ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... centre of Borrow's Norwich life was William Taylor, concerning whom we have already written much. It was a Jew named Mousha, a quack it appears, who pretended to know German and Hebrew, and had but a smattering of either language, who first introduced Borrow to Taylor, and there is a fine dialogue between the two in Lavengro, of which this is ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... parentheses of talk. Under all the bluntness of the Bush young Osgood had a refinement which now found expression in an attempt to make himself agreeable—not a difficult task, since, thanks to his father's tastes and a year or two at college, he had a smattering of physical science. He soon won his way to the old man's heart, and to his laboratory, which had been developed through years of patience and ingenious toil ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... from Montreal. With these Indians he lived for several years, and having a natural taste for languages, acquired, during this time, a fair knowledge of the tongues of most of the Northern tribes, as well as a smattering of French. He also became well versed in woodcraft, and so thoroughly Indian in appearance and habit that when he was again captured by a marauding party of Maquas, or Mohawks, it was not detected that he was of white blood until he was stripped for ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... actors, a small selection of the more raffish members of The Retreat including Delavan Eyre; Ely Ives; an elderly Jewish lawyer of unsavory reputation, enormous income, and real and delicate scholarship; Herbert Cressey, a pair of the season's racing-kings, an eminent art connoisseur, and a smattering of men-about-town. Seated between the lawyer and one of the racing-men, Banneker, as the dinner progressed, found himself watching Delavan Eyre, opposite, who was drinking with sustained intensity, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams |
