"Unlettered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Twain received in England an appreciative reception of well-nigh national character. Whilst the literary and academic circles of America withheld their unstinted recognition of an author so primitive and unlettered, Great Britain received him with open arms. He was a welcome guest at the houses of the exclusive; the highest dignitaries of public life, the authoritative journals, the leaders of fashion, of thought, and ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... the epic poem is simply a narrative in verse. Historically it seems to have originated in the records of ancestral heroism, which passed from mouth to mouth in metre, as the natural form of oral communication in an unlettered age. In the Iliad and Odyssey we first find this outward form penetrated by a new spirit, which converts the narrative into the poem. There is no need to do violence to historical probability by supposing that Homer was a conscious artist, or that he imagined himself to be doing anything ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... Country Churchyard, by Thomas Gray, is so superior as a poem to Spoon River Anthology. The rich were buried in the church; the poor in the yard; we are therefore given the short and simple annals of the poor. The curious thing is that these humble, rustic, unlettered folk were presented to the world sympathetically by a man who was almost an intellectual snob. One of the most exact scholars of his day, one of the most fastidious of mortals, one of the shyest men that ever lived, a born mental aristocrat, his literary genius enabled him ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... Venture was tied up for the night near other rafts, and its crew exchanged visits with theirs. The regular river raftsmen were generally powerful young giants, rough and unlettered, but a good-natured, happy-go-lucky lot, full of tales of adventure in the woods or on the river, to which the boys listened with a never-failing delight. Nor were the raftmates at all behindhand in this interchange of good stories; for they could tell of life on the ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... for unlettered as he was, and curtailed of that knowledge which should be, and is bestowed on all by every paternal government, the natural strength of his mind had enabled him to understand that a system, which on its face professed to be founded on the superior ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... faculty for business—greedy, suspicious, and keen-eyed. He carried on his craft in disdain of theory. In course of time he had learned to estimate at a glance the cost of printing per page or per sheet in every kind of type. He proved to unlettered customers that large type costs more to move; or, if small type was under discussion, that it was more difficult to handle. The setting-up of the type was the one part of his craft of which he knew nothing; ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... doors and shattered beams, which were to be made strong and serviceable, or, sitting on a pile of lumber, watching the carpenter as he put in execution the plans which they had made. The children of the village were generally playing near by, in the sand, with blocks and chips,—growing up as unlettered and ignorant as their parents. Some of them were great boys and girls,—almost as tall as Noll himself,—and had never yet seen the inside of ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... 19th of January. His greatest friend, Robert, the Bishop of Hereford, a learned man, understanding all the science of the time, a judge, and a courtly Lorrainer, yet who loved to spend whole days with the unlettered Saxon, came to lay him in his grave. He received, as a gift from the convent, the lambskin cloak that Wulstan used to wear, in spite of the laughter of the gay prelates arrayed in costly furs, keeping his ground by saying, that "the furs of cunning animals did ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... mind; and which eradicate prejudices. Incidentally, I'll explain something of the structure of the world, of the properties of matter. And as far as Karl Marx is concerned, just remember, that great books are equally accessible to the understanding both of a scholar and an unlettered peasant, if only comprehensibly presented. And every ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... the deep, quiet voice, as some unlettered savage might hearken to the rhythmic music of Homer, soothed by the tones, yet incapable of comprehending their import; and as she looked up at the grave, kingly face, her eyes fell upon the broad band of crape that encircled ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... requested to contribute something in prose or verse. It is sometimes very hard to say no to the requests. If one is in the right mood when he or she writes an occasional poem, it seems as if nothing could have been easier. "Why, that piece run off jest like ile. I don't bullieve," the unlettered applicant says to himself, "I don't bullieve it took him ten minutes to write them verses." The good people have no suspicion of how much a single line, a single expression, may cost its author. The wits used to say that Ropers,—the poet once before referred to, old Samuel Ropers, author of the ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... carried off by the harsh climate (yet the climate of this place is preferred to that of Gafsa). The enclosure is filling up with drift-sand; the inscriptions on the tombs, often a mere charcoal scrawl of some unlettered friend or parent, is soon effaced ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... he said tauntingly. "Then must I tell thee a little story. I am an unlettered man, being but a poor fool, as thou knowest, but I try to do my duty, and every Sunday I go to church in Carlisle city with my betters. And at our church we have a right good preacher, though his sermons run through my poor brain as ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... for having—in his Lucrezia Borgia—struck a pose of scholarliness, for having pretended and maintained that his work was honest work founded upon the study of historical evidences. With that piece of charlatanism he deceived the great mass of the unlettered of France and of all Europe into believing that in his tragedy he presented the ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... chains it may be, but chains nevertheless, marches through the streets of Philadelphia to-day, an appendage of the chariot wheels which proclaim the coming of her king, her lord, her master, whether he be white or black, native or foreign-born, virtuous or vile, lettered or unlettered. As the state-house bell, with its inscription, "Proclaim liberty—throughout the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof," pealed forth its jubilant reiteration,—the daughters of Jefferson, of Hancock, of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... miracle-working new breath of Liberty breathed upon them by the Revolution—eager young apprentices to the splendid trade of war, not old and broken men-at-arms, despairing survivors of an age-long accumulation of monotonous defeats; but Joan of Arc, a mere child in years, ignorant, unlettered, a poor village girl unknown and without influence, found a great nation lying in chains, helpless and hopeless under an alien domination, its treasury bankrupt, its soldiers disheartened and dispersed, all spirit torpid, all courage dead in the hearts of the people through long ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... beyond the book-reading class, wide as that is in America. It was to be noted even in the untravelled and unlettered American, the man whose spiritual horizon is bounded by his Sunday newspaper, the man in the street and on the farm. The events of the past year had taught him—and he rubbed his eyes at the realisation—that England was not an "effete monarchy," evilly-disposed towards ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... antiquaries, really is, I suppose, a symptom of the strange and almost unearthly ugliness of our diseased society. The costumes and customs of a hundred peasantries are there to prove that such ugliness does not necessarily follow from mere poverty, or mere democracy, or mere unlettered simplicity ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... cock-crow: Look out if yonder be not day again Rimming the rock-row! That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought, Rarer, intenser, Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought, Chafes in the censer. Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; Seek we sepulture On a tall mountain, citied to the top, Crowded with culture! Air the peaks soar, but one the rest excels; Clouds overcome it; No! yonder sparkle is the citadel's Circling ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... man of the East," I found Pilate chuckling. "He is a thinker, this unlettered fisherman. I have sought more deeply into him. I have fresh report. He has no need of wonder-workings. He out-sophisticates the most sophistical of them. They have laid traps, and He has laughed at their traps. Look you. Listen ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... Province of Quebec there is much uncertainty in the spelling and the use of names. A scattered people in a huge half-wild country, unlettered for the most part and with no one to turn to for counsel but the priests, is apt to pay attention only to the sound of names, caring nothing about their appearance when written or the sex to which they pertain. Pronunciation has naturally varied in one mouth or another, in this family ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... of the early Christian martyrs? Is there a doubt that they, unlettered men, slaves, weak women, even children, did exhibit, under an infinite sense of duty, issuing in infinite self-sacrifice, a heroism such as the world had never seen before; did raise the ideal of human nobleness a whole stage—rather say, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... be presented under any one paragraph is voluminous, it may be broken up into a number of subparagraphs. Except in paragraph 3, these subparagraphs are unlettered. ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... fearful against her that the court in Iowa refused her any support from the estate, and in her shame and confusion she went away to Texas and taught school for six months to earn money enough to make her defense; that there she met an unlettered and sensitive man, but at the same time one of the clearest-brained, most generous and noble-hearted men in the world, but in whom, from the fact he was so sensitive and generous, she could not confide, lest she might not be able to vindicate herself; ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... order, God sparing my life and memory. And they who light upon this book should bear in mind not only that I write for the clearing of our parish from ill fame and calumny, but also a thing which will, I trow, appear too often in it, to wit—that I am nothing more than a plain unlettered man, not read in foreign languages, as a gentleman might be, nor gifted with long words (even in mine own tongue), save what I may have won from the Bible or Master William Shakespeare, whom, in the face of common opinion, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... was regularly fortified by every precaution that the long experience of a vagabond could suggest, and he was permitted to pass forthwith. The poor Westphalian student presented an instrument fairly written out in scholastic Latin, and escaped further trouble by the vanity of the unlettered agent of the police, who hastily affirmed it was a pleasure to encounter documents so perfectly in form. But the Bernese was about to take his station by the side of the other two, appearing to ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... in its melody and rhythms, in its style and shape. There are times when it stands in relation to other music as some being half giant, half day-laborer, might stand in the company of scholars and poets and other highly educated and civilized men. The unlettered, the uncouth, the humble, the men unacquainted with eloquence are in this music in very body. It pierces directly from their throats. No film, no refinement on their speech, no art of music removes them ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... of any number of men who could philosophize for hours about the disgrace and humiliation of being jealous, but who, as soon as there was a justifiable cause for jealousy, became as unreasonable as a child and as jealous as any unlettered Sicilian ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... remember," continued Eleanor, "that first sight of the great Earl. My brothers had teased me for going so far north, and told me the English were mere rude islanders—boorish, and unlettered; but, child as I was, scarce eleven years old, I could perceive the nobleness of the Earl. 'If all thy new subjects be like him,' said my brother to me, 'thou wilt reign over a race of kings.' And how good he was to me when I wept at leaving my home ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... unlettered; you are confessedly a chevalier of industry; personally you are exceedingly distasteful to me. But it is useless to deny that you are the most extraordinary man I ever saw.... How soon can you take me to these ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... any higher ambition to approve himself to judicious critics and posterity, and wanting in that love of art which longs for self-satisfaction in the perfection of its works, he had merely laboured to please the unlettered crowd; still this very object alone and the pursuit of theatrical effect, would have led him to bestow attention to the structure and adherence of his pieces. For does not the impression of a drama depend in an especial ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... were full of prejudices, prepossessions, and foregone conclusions, all of which had the sanction of their culture. It was enough for them to know that Jesus came from Nazareth and was unlettered; this produced in them violent scorn and antipathy. They were still further offended because He used none of the shibboleths with which they were familiar. Nor could they conceive of any life as satisfactory but the kind of life they lived, ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... 15. Again: "The nations of unlettered men so adapted their language to philosophic truth, that all physical and intellectual research can find no essential rule to reject or change."—Ibid., p. 91. I have shown that "the nations of unlettered men" are among that portion of the earth's population, upon whose language the genius of grammar has never yet condescended to look down! That people who make no pretensions to learning, can furnish better models or instructions than "the most enlightened scholars," is ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... by such men as O'Brien and Healy, they see the incompetency which has reduced the party paper to so low an ebb, they see the misery and degradation which the Land League inflicted on the once thriving districts of Tipperary; they saw their neighbours, poor, unlettered men, dupes of unscrupulous lying eloquence, men whom it was murder to deceive—they saw these men sentenced to long terms of penal servitude, while the instigators of the crimes for which they had suffered, availing themselves of ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... schismatic; such as Nestorius or Marcian at one time, such as Arius or Pelagius at another. In his character of theologian, therefore, Mahomet was simply the most memorable of blunderers, supported in his blunders by the most unlettered of nations. In his other character of legislator, we have seen, that already the earliest stages of Mahometan experience exposed decisively his ruinous imbecility. Where a rude tribe offered no resistance to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... child of plain, poor, farmer folk, immemorially dwelling close to the soil; unlettered, unambitious, long-lived, abounding in children, without physical beauty, but marking the track of their generations by a path lustrous with right-doing. For more than a hundred years on this spot the land had lessened ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... straight-haired, pale-eyed and freckled, duly darned and catechised, marching into a New England schoolhouse, is an object often seen and soon forgotten; but I think I shall always remember with infinite tender conjecture, as the years roll by, this little unlettered Eros of the Adriatic strand. Yet all youthful things at Torcello were not cheerful, for the poor lad who brought us the key of the cathedral was shaking with an ague, and his melancholy presence seemed to point the moral of forsaken nave and choir. The church, admirably primitive and curious, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... exception, no one else knew anything of the girl's poetical essays, whose mild timidity made her often pass for a person of weak intellect. This soul must have been great and beautiful, for in all her unlettered strains there was not a word of murmuring respecting her hard lot: her note was sad, but gentle—desponding, but resigned; it was especially the language of deep tenderness—of mournful sympathy—of angelic charity for all poor creatures consigned, like her, to bear the double burden of poverty and ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... fact that even one of Shakespeare's plays must remain incomprehensible to a person knowing nothing either of Christian beliefs or of the beliefs which preceded them. The real mastery of any European tongue is impossible [4] without a knowledge of European religion. The language of even the unlettered is full of religious meaning: the proverbs and household-phrases of the poor, the songs of the street, the speech of the workshop,—all are infused with significations unimaginable by any one ignorant of the faith of the people. Nobody knows this better than a man who has passed ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... not a fancy sketch—it is not improbable: on the contrary, it is the obvious and hitherto certain consequence of bringing hastily together large bodies of civilized men with unlettered barbarians. ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... here to Illinois early in their youth; the strong, courtly, old-fashioned men, carrying with them the early traditions of the republic, in their way Lincolns—honest, truth telling, industrious, courageous Americans—plain and unlettered, many of them, but full of the sterling virtues. Yes, he would have written poems out of these people; and he would have done something more—he would have given us symbols, songs of eternal truth, of unutterable magic and profound meaning like "La Belle Dame sans Merci." I am sure ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... were only that—a simple, unlettered countryman, as I thought him—I should know how to win his confidence. But, do you know, sir, he is well educated and intelligent. Once he studied for the priesthood or ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... "age of man," or "course of man's life," and in the mind of the folk the life of the world and the life of man have run about the same course. By common consent the golden age of both was at the beginning, ab ovo. With Wordsworth, unlettered thousands have thought:— ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... from an obscure and humble position to an exalted pre-eminence, without peculiar fitness for the work on which his fame rests, and which probably no one else could have done so well. He may not be learned, or cultured; he may be even unlettered and rough; he may be stained by vulgar defects and vices which are fatal to all dignity of character; but there must be something about him which calls out the respect and admiration of those with whom he is surrounded, so as to give him a start, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... His pleasure in the gala affairs of the time was doubled by the presence of his wife, who one day arrived quite unexpectedly in the company of some Tennessee friends. Mrs. Jackson was a typical frontier planter's wife—kind-hearted, sincere, benevolent, thrifty, pious, but unlettered and wholly innocent of polished manners. In all her forty-eight years she had never seen a city more pretentious than Nashville. She was, moreover, stout and florid, and it may be supposed that in her rustic garb she was ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... and relative to us than to our forefathers. It cannot but startle us to find doubts that we hastily look upon as peculiarly "modern," set forth in their full strength and wrestled with and overthrown by an unlettered recluse of the fourteenth century. In some sense they are the doubts of all time, with perhaps just that peculiar complexion which they assume in the light of Christianity. Yet, owing to the modern spread of education, or rather to the indiscriminate divulgation of ideas, ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... studious, from the classic groves, Where calm-eyed Pallas with still footstep roves, And charge thee seek the turmoil of the state? What bade thee hear the voice and rise elate, Leave home and kindred and thy spicy loaves, To lead th' unlettered and despised droves To manhood's home ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... intellectual development, which, in its progress, disturbed the counterpoise between his mind and heart. The Idea that possessed his life had operated as a means of education; it had gone on cultivating his powers to the highest point of which they were susceptible; it had raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer to stand on a star-lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth, laden with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber after him. So much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That, indeed, had withered,—had contracted,—had hardened,—had perished! ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... shelf in my home along with Albrecht, McCarrison, and Howard. Price, a dentist with strong interests in prevention, wondered why his clientele, 1920s midwest bourgeoisie, had terrible teeth when prehistoric skulls of aged unlettered savages retained all their teeth in perfect condition. So he traveled to isolated parts of the Earth in the early 1930s seeking healthy humans. And he found them—belonging to every race and on every continent. And found out why they lived long, had virtually no degeneration of any kind including ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... same thing may also be illustrated by the influx into animals of every kind according to the form of each. That the influx is according to the form of every particular thing, may also be seen by the most unlettered person, if he attends to the various instruments of sound, as pipes, flutes, trumpets, horns, and organs which give forth a sound from being blown alike, or from a like influx of air, according to their ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... enthusiastic popular reception and left the same marked impression, especially upon his more critical and learned hearers. They found no little surprise in the fact that a Western politician, springing from the class of unlettered frontiersmen, could not only mold plain strong words into fresh and attractive phraseology, but maintain a clear, sustained, convincing argument, equal in force and style to the best examples in their ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... all subsequent editions, and as the book itself is extremely scarce, I conceive that a reprint of it in your pages may be acceptable to your Folk-lore readers. The "Rules" are interlarded with scraps of poetry, somewhat after the manner of old Tusser, and bear the unmistakeable impress of a "plain, unlettered Muse." The author concludes his work with a poetical address "to the antiquity and honour of shepheards." The title is rather a droll ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... throughout the kingdom the humble people were kneeling, praying their unlettered prayers for the beautiful young Queen, with the more faith that the Holy Mother would listen because one so great as the Archbishop of Nikosia ministered in person before their sacred image of San Nicolo. For had it not been the booty ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Carolina were to be a school where great life lessons would be learned. Fresh from the University halls of Jena, he had met the students of Oxford on equal footing, quickly winning their respect and admiration, but these soldiers and sailors, restless, eager for excitement, rude and unlettered, were a new thing to him, a book written in a language to which he had no key. Later he would learn to find some point of contact with the unlearned as well as the learned, with the negro slave and the Yorkshire collier as well as the student of theology, but just now his impulse was to hold himself ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... to him that the gratification of his wish might have involved war-paint and feathers, a semi-nude body, a wild unlettered life, and a predilection for raw meat and murder. No, rapid though thought is, it did not convey these ideas to his mind. His one desire— after the first unguarded "exclamation" and impulsive grasp of the hand, was to escape from his false position without ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... greater riches and a mordant, ever-smouldering disappointment at not having attained them, will replace the healthier impulses of adolescence. Books will have no savor for him; men of high attainments, unless their coffers brim with lucre, affect him no more than the company of the most unlettered oaf. He becomes, in other words, the typical Wall Street man, and he becomes this with a stolid indifference to all known ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... aborigines of this country, few names have excited a deeper interest, or have been more widely and familiarly known than that of RED JACKET. The occasion of this notoriety was the rare fact that, though a rude and unlettered son of the forest, he was distinguished for the arts and accomplishments of the orator. His life marks an era in the history of his nation and his name like that of Demosthenes, is ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... This way the noise was, if mine ear be true, My best guide now. Methought it was the sound Of riot and ill-managed merriment, 172 Such as the jocund flute or gamesome pipe Stirs up among the loose unlettered hinds, When, for their teeming flocks and granges full, In wanton dance they praise the bounteous Pan, And thank the gods amiss. I should be loth To meet the rudeness and swilled insolence Of such late wassailers; yet, oh! where else Shall I inform my unacquainted feet 180 In the blind ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... is necessary in the Church, not only for instruction of the ignorant—such as the simple, unlettered people and the children—but also for the purpose of awakening those who know very well what they are to believe and how they are to live, and admonishing them to be on their guard daily and not to become indolent, ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... the experience of the present. We are enabled, symbolically and imaginatively, to anticipate situations. In countless ways, language condenses meanings that record social outcomes and presage social outlooks. So significant is it of a liberal share in what is worth while in life that unlettered and ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... the Reverend Father Adone Doni, who at the time was, like myself, working in the old Academy degli Intronati. I had taken an instant liking for the Cordelier in question, a man who, grown grey in study, still preserved the cheerful, facile humour of a simple, unlettered countryman. He was very willing to converse; and I greatly relished his bland speech, his cultivated yet artless way of thought, his look of old Silenus purged at the baptismal font, the play of his passions at once keen and refined, the strange, alluring personality that informed the whole man. ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... the surest proof of the soul's immortality, and of the fundamental difference between man and the wisest brutes. To plant the trees that, after we are dead, shall shelter our children, is as natural as to love the shade of those our fathers planted. The rudest unlettered husbandman, painfully conscious of his own inferiority, the poorest widowed mother, giving her life-blood to those who pay only for the work of her needle, will toil and stint themselves to educate their child, that he may take a higher station in the world ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... banqueting-room at Donnaz. The lords of Donnaz had never been noted for learning, and Odo's grandfather was fond of declaring that a nobleman need not be a scholar; but the great Marquess Gualberto, if himself unlettered, had been the patron of poets and painters and had kept learned clerks to write down the annals of his house on parchment painted by the monks. These annals were locked in the archives, under Don Gervaso's care; ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Nuithones, Sigulones, and others? What population amongst those with which they came in contact could have recorded their alliances, their victories, or their defeats? Not the Frisians, who were unlettered as long as they were Pagan, and Pagan until the tenth century. Not the Slavonians, whose spiritual and intellectual darkness was equal. Not the Romans, for reasons already given. There only remained the Gauls and Britons. But, unfortunately, in the ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... truth and wisdom, was a God of peace and love; And as God upon Mount Sinai, stooping from his heavenly throne, Gave the law unto his people, deeply graven into stone, "Gitche Manitou, the Mighty," in compassion for the race Of unlettered, untaught heathen who knew not his god-like face Save they saw it in the tempest or the lightning's livid glare, Or in some familiar emblem they could see, or feel, or wear, Taught them peace and love to kindred, through an emblem ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... German fashion, is something that the sign doubtless means to tell us, but, owing to the absence of a hyphen ("German-Lace Store," or "German Lace-Store"), does not tell us. Nothing is more common than erroneous punctuation in signs, and gross mistakes by the unlettered in the wording of the simplest ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... Opportunities were few and far between, and now, for the first time in her life, confidence in her own powers deserted her, and she was overcome by a strange new feeling of humility and doubt. Who and what was she, that such a man should stoop to accept her friendship; poor, unlettered girl that she was, while he was acknowledged as one of the leading intellects of the day? Yet deep in her heart the thought lingered that between this man and herself existed a certain affinity, which, given an opportunity, might bridge over greater ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... pleasant to say more of Julian, but perhaps her own words have sufficed to show that here we are dealing with one of the great mystics of the world. Childlike and yet rashly bold, deeply spiritual, yet intensely human, "a simple creature, unlettered," yet presenting solutions of problems which have racked humanity, she inherits the true paradoxical nature of the mystic, to which is added a beauty and delicacy of thought and expression ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... reference to the holy office of the Inquisition. This caused exceeding disturbance and scandal in this city, because the bishop was not content with saying what he did in reply to my petition; but to every person who entered his house he said that I had been guilty of a heresy, and unlettered persons who heard this gave it credit. Moreover, as there is here a commissary of the Inquisition, he called together many friars and certified this proposition, separating it from the petition and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... the charm of a monstrously overgrown elf. His shyly wandering gaze behind thick spectacle panes, his incessant devotion to cigarettes and domestic lager, his whimsical talk on topics that confound the unlettered—these are amiable trifles that endear him to those ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... examine the abuses of the Court of Faculties, of the simoniacal contracts, of the dilapidations and dishersion of the churches; that they may find the true value of the benefices, and who takes the profits and to whose uses; to deprive these serving men and unlettered kern that are now incumbents, and to place some of the poor scholars of the College who are learned and zealous Protestants; to bring others out of that part of Scotland that borders on the North of Ireland, who can preach the Irish tongue, and to transplant ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... fraud. The father had distinguished himself in repelling the Indians in their various forays upon the frontiers, and was a representative man. With strong will and distinguished courage, he, without much talent, was conspicuous among a people who were, like himself, rude, unlettered, but daring, and ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... again thus loudly spoke (Thinking again it might be tried): "'Twas but a lapsus linguae," cried. My lord, who long had quiet sat, Now clearly saw what he was at. In wrath this warning now he gave— "When next thou triest, unlettered knave, To give, as thine, another's wit, Mind well thou knowest what's meant by it; Nor let a lapsus linguae slip From out thy pert assuming lip, Till well thou knowest thy stolen song, Nor think a leg of lamb a tongue," He said—and quickly from the floor ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... the world, people living under similar conditions to the Southerners are exceedingly musical, and we owe the great majority of the sweetest compositions which delight the ear and subdue the senses to unlettered song-makers of the Swiss mountains, the Tyrolese valleys, the Bavarian Highlands, and the minstrels of Scotland, ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... word, for speech to them was grievous, With bovine eyes they supplicated me; "We wot not what ye will, but prithee leave us, Unlettered folk are we." ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... march, as recorded by Captain John Tipton, is exceedingly interesting. The militiamen of southern Indiana and Kentucky assembled from the frontier settlements, were men of simple habits, rough, unlettered, hard to teach the intricacies of military evolutions, but as General John C. Black has stated, they were also "insensible to fatigue, watchful as a catamount, resolute as men, heroic as martyrs." Some of their favorite sports were wrestling, shooting at a mark, and horse-racing. ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... in the second book of his Dialogues, ascribes to him miraculous prophecies and healings, and even a raising of the dead.[8] With reference to his want of secular culture and his spiritual knowledge, he calls him a learned ignorant and an unlettered sage.[9] At all events he possessed the genius of a lawgiver, and holds the first place among the founders of monastic orders, though his person and life are much less interesting than those of a Bernard of Clairvaux, a Francis of Assisi, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... . . Oh, well-a-day and lack-a-day, the whirligig of time and fortune, the topsyturviness of luck, the wooden shoe going up and the polished heel descending a French gunboat, a conquered island kingdom of Oceania, to-day ruled over by a peasant-born, unlettered, colonial gendarme, and . ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... for his purpose of running in the vessel; and he was preparing to give her a good berth on the beach, when he saw a gang of ferocious-looking fellows coming down to the point for which he was making. Poor Nicolou was a perfectly unlettered and untutored genius, and for that reason, perhaps, a keen listener to tales of terror. His mind had been impressed with some horrible legend of cannibalism, and he now did not doubt for a moment that the men awaiting him on the beach were the monsters at whom ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... with advantage be given a larger currency. This process of dialectal regeneration, as it is called, has been greatly aided in the past by men of letters, who have given a literary standing to the useful and picturesque vocabulary of their unlettered neighbours, and thus helped to reinforce with vivid terms our somewhat abstract and faded standard speech. We owe, for instance, words like lilt and outcome to Carlyle; croon, eerie, gloaming have become familiar to us from Burns's ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... the Kentucky. No more was heard of him or his companions, and it is still the belief of the family that the latter murdered him. He was survived by his wife and a daughter, and left a large landed estate. Harrod, although unlettered, was a man of fine presence and many sterling qualities, and made a strong impress on his generation. He is still remembered in Kentucky as one of the worthiest pioneers of ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... arms, who valued their friends not for their strength but for their obedience, sent them word that the senate did not wish them to help the Athenians, and that the Roman people would take care of their own allies. The Alexandrians looked upon the proud but unlettered Romans only as friends, as allies, who asked for no pay, who took no reward, who fought only for ambition and for the glory ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... prevalence of debasing forms of superstition among the people, it is not inappropriate to consider the condition of that class of the population which is wont to exert the most potent influence in forming the moral sentiments and moulding the character of the unlettered masses. We have already touched upon the external relations of the clergy to the king and to the Pope; let us now look more narrowly into ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... Federal Constitution. Neither threats, fire, rope, nor bullet has been powerful enough to swerve him from pursuing the course made mandatory by his self interests. He may have pursued this course by the intricate process of reasoning employed by educated men, or of intuition employed by the unlettered. The fact remains that his attitude has been one of sympathy and helpfulness towards those who were unmistakably sympathetic and friendly towards him and as unmistakably antagonistic and troublesome to those ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... deliverance than intellect which innovates," is a phrase ascribed to a Mohammedan saint, and do not modern theologians report with enthusiasm, the unlettered condition ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... happy, he who, when the world Is nodding to its ruin, knows the spot Where he himself shall, though in ruin, lie! No trumpet call shall break his sleep again: But in his humble home with faithful spouse And sons unlettered Fortune leaves him free From rage of party; for if life he owes To Caesar, Magnus sometime was his lord. Thus happy they alone live on apart, Nor hope nor dread the event ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... themselves the whole history of Christ's kingdom in its inward principle. They unfold views of its steady progress from age to age, as a growth from an inward vital force, on which the most philosophical minds especially love to dwell; and yet they are perfectly intelligible to the most unlettered man. To teach by parables, without any false analogies, and in a way that interested and instructed alike the learned and the ignorant, this was a wonderful characteristic of our Lord's ministry. In this respect no one of his apostles, not even the bosom disciple, attempted to imitate ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... aged widow,—as devout and sensible as she is unlettered,—I yesterday learned a death-bed mystery which appeared new to me, and which (if not more commonly known than I take it to be) you may perhaps think worthy of a place in "NOTES AND QUERIES," to serve as a minor satellite to some more luminous ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... own soul. And so too does it correspond with what he sees in others. Often and often the unlearned and untrained by sheer goodness of life attain to wonderful perception of spiritual truth, and the holiness of the unlettered peasant reveals to his conscience the law of right conduct in circumstances which perplex the disciplined and well informed. As the human race has learnt the highest spiritual truth by direct communication from God, so too on communion with God far more than on ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... way through the mist. Not that life was to him aught but a tragedy at any time, on whichever road he took. What but a tragedy could it be to a man bred at Douay and reared on Greek, and now condemned to live in loneliness and squalor among unlettered, unwashed creatures; to one who, banned by the law, moved by night, and lurked in some hiding-place by day, and, waking or sleeping, was ever in contact with the lawless and the oppressed, the wretched and the starving—whose existence was spent in shriving, christening, burying among the ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... boy's correction, "studying" for "reading," was impertinent, but probably sound. To be equally sound, we must reckon among his educational facilities the abundant stories which came his way in a community which, however unlettered, was certainly not dull-spirited; the occasional newspaper; the rare lectures or political meetings; the much more frequent religious meetings, with preachers who taught a grim doctrine, but who preached with vigour and sometimes ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... by the simplest of the unlettered age for whom it was intended. It was remembered by them... For almost five centuries it was appealed to as the decisive authority on behalf of the people... To have produced it, to have preserved it, to have matured ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... cut-throats and robbers of Christians, slow-bellied monks, who have made escape from their cloisters, simoniacal and perjured shavelings, busy Sir John lack-Latins, thrasonical and unlettered chemists, shifting and outcast pettifoggers, light-headed and trivial druggers and apothecaries, sun-shunning night-birds and corner-creepers, dull-pated and base mechanics, stage-players, jugglers, peddlers, prittle-prattling barbers, filthy graziers, ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... western empires afforded protection to the church!" Why, the empire, in both its wings, was the deadly enemy of the church, as we have already seen! (ch. xi. 7.) Alas! what absurdities result from political bias! The unlettered Christian will readily perceive under the emblem in the text, a plain allusion to the gracious interposition of the church's Redeemer in the days of old. "Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... enough, taking her for a mile or two in his low basket-carriage either before or after his day's business in the shop. It was not exactly like being with her only other friend, Mr. Audley; but he was a thoroughly kind, polite, and by no means unlettered old man; and Geraldine enjoyed and was grateful, while the children were his darlings, and were encouraged to take all manner ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... my extremities, being giddy, and doubtful what to do, at least it was put into my labouring thoughts, to make happy use of this paper; and to blear their unlettered eyes, I told them there was a Device for a Mask drawn int', and that (but for their interception,) I was going to a Gentleman to receive my reward for't: they, greedy at this word, and hoping to ...
— The Puritain Widow • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... for letters nor cultivated the society of students, are amongst the judges whose names most Englishmen would gladly erase from the history of their country. Jeffreys and Macclesfield represent the unlettered Chancellors; More and Bacon the lettered. Fortescue's 'De Laudibus' is a book for every reader. To Chancellor Warham, Erasmus—a scholar not given to distribute praise carelessly—dedicated his 'St. Jerom,' with cordial eulogy. Wolsey was a patron ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... looked to the preacher for the ceremony that was to authorize them to hurry through with their distasteful task. That the gloom of the hour and scene, and the utter forlornness of all the accompaniments of what was meant for Christian burial, had stamped themselves upon the mind and heart of the unlettered slave, was evident from the brief sentences he quavered out—joining his withered hands and raising his bleared eyes ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... refute the common misconception that it is only the educated and Christian Indian who has contributed to the progress of his people and to the common good of both races. There are many men wholly unlettered, and some of whom have not proclaimed themselves followers of Christ, who have yet exerted great influence on the side of civilization. Almost every tribe has a hero of this type who arose at a critical juncture to ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... and their consequences, might well puzzle a wiser head than that of the many-named but unlettered Nimbus. ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... that he was as kind as ever after the disclosure. She did not know that before his eyes he beheld as it were a galley, in which he, the fastidious urban, was chained to work for the remainder of his life, with her, the unlettered ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... scholar, teacher, saint, Whose creed, some hinted, showed a speck of taint; He broached his own opinion, which is not Lightly to be forgiven or forgot; Some riddle's point,—I scarce remember now,— Homoi-, perhaps, where they said homo-ou. (If the unlettered greatly wish to know Where lies the difference betwixt oi and o, Those of the curious who have time may search Among the stale conundrums of their church.) Beneath his roof his peaceful life I shared, And for his modes of faith ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... course, accepted humbly by the unlettered Teutons; and did its work well, for centuries to come. It is said—I trust not truly—to be still enrolled among the decrees of the Canon law, though reprobated by all enlightened Roman Catholics. Be that as it may, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley |
