"Anachronism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Clinch boldly. "They emigrated from Koln and Crefeld to Philadelphia, where there is a quarter named Crefeld." Mr. Clinch felt himself shaky as to his chronology, but wisely remembered that it was a chronology of the future to his hearers, and they could not detect an anachronism. With his eyes fixed upon those of the gentle Wilhelmina, Mr. Clinch now proceeded to describe his return to his fatherland, but his astonishment at finding the very face of the country changed, and a ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... World Court. With a strange feeling, the general noticed a solemn old man in black, staring bleakly out the window. He realized suddenly it was probably a judge, and that the golden coin in his pocket had turned this costly mechanism into an anachronism. Nobody used the World Court ...
— The Golden Judge • Nathaniel Gordon
... hand pointing dramatically at the heavens, the other extended holding a reversed sword. It shows sincerity and faithful work, and had it been placed within the rotunda, would no doubt have been impressive and majestic. Where it stands, it is a hopeless anachronism. ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... yet.' Paula seated herself on a stone bench, and Charlotte went on: 'Miss Power thought of making a Greek court of this. But she will not tell you so herself, because it seems such dreadful anachronism. ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... the British working man, expressing itself in the patronizing tone. The British working man, as Chesterton sees him, is a very different person from what he is. If the Middle Ages had been the peculiar period Chesterton appears to believe it was, then his working man would be merely a trifling anachronism of five centuries or so. But he is not even that. Five centuries would be but a trifle compared with the difference between him and his real self. Chesterton's attitude towards the working man must resemble that of a certain chivalrous ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... direction of forty of the most distinguished artist. Reynolds, who had been mainly instrumental in founding it, had been unanimously elected president, and had thereupon received the honor of knighthood. [Footnote: We must apologize for the anachronism we have permitted ourselves, in the course of this memoir, in speaking of Reynolds as Sir Joshua, when treating of circumstances which occurred prior to his being dubbed; but it is so customary to speak of him by that title that we found it difficult to dispense with it.] Johnson was so delighted ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... "that would be most ungrateful. I only expected a more characteristic example of sea cookery. After what Mr. Vane told us, a lunch like the one you provided, with glass and silver, struck me as rather an anachronism." ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... bearing, he might have been taken, but that such a costume would be anomalous, for a Quaker in black. He looked still more like (what he really was) a literary Modern Antique, a New-Old Author, a living anachronism, contemporary at once with Burton the Elder, and Colman the Younger. Meanwhile he advanced with rather a peculiar gait, his walk was plantigrade, and with a cheerful "How d'ye do," and one of the blandest, sweetest smiles that ever brightened a manly ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... office-holding politicians. But the introduction of the spoils system had a meaning superior to its results. It was, after all, an attempt to realize an ideal, and the ideal was based on a genuine experience. The "Virginian Oligarchy," although it was the work of Jefferson and his followers, was an anachronism in a state governed in the spirit of Jeffersonian Democratic principles. It was better for the Jacksonian Democrats to sacrifice what they believed to be an obnoxious precedent to their principles than to sacrifice their principles to mere precedent. If in so doing they ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... perhaps an anachronism. Even speaking of to-day in Tahiti, the phrase would have to be understood as referring mainly to mosquitoes, and these only in watered valleys with close woods, such as I suppose to form the surroundings of Rahero's homestead. Quarter of a mile away, where ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and he paid the penalty for them. He had faith in the Divine ordering of the affairs of this world; but he forgot that the processes by which evils like that of slavery are done away are thousand-year-long,—that, to be effectual, they must be slow,—that wrong is no remedy for wrong. He was an anachronism, and met the fate of all anachronisms that strive to stem and divert the present current by modes which the world has outgrown. But now that he and those dearest to him have so bitterly expiated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship. This Divine Being in some of his smaller and silkier incarnations takes, in the affection of Woman, the place to which there is no human male aspirant. The Dog is a survival—an anachronism. He toils not, neither does he spin, yet Solomon in all his glory never lay upon a door-mat all day long, sun-soaked and fly-fed and fat, while his master worked for the means wherewith to purchase the idle wag of the Solomonic tail, ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... I told him. "But look, Siddy, I was going to sayest that I do know the plays. Having Queen Elizabeth speak a prologue to Macbeth is as much an anachronism as if you put her on the gantry of the British moonship, busting a bottle of champagne ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... of the judge's robe puzzled him. A vestige, an anachronism, handed down from centuries before. White was the color ...
— Life Sentence • James McConnell
... part in the conversation, without the least respect to hist neighbour. The Baron of Bradwardine sang French CHANSONS-A-BOIRE, and spouted pieces of Latin; Killancureit talked, in a steady unalterable dull key, of top-dressing and bottom-dressing, [This has been censured as an anachronism; and it must be confessed that agriculture of this kind was unknown to the Scotch Sixty Years since.] and year-olds, and gimmers, and dinmonts, and stots, and runts, and kyloes, and a proposed turnpike-act; while Balmawhapple, in notes exalted above both, extolled his horse, his hawks, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... landscape, a faint light gleaming here and there from an opening in the rock huts, and with Arcturus and the Pleiades of Job in the sky, it has seemed almost sacrilege to mar the ancient environment by such an anachronism as a modern railway locomotive. Rather, in looking out over the picturesque mountains and valleys and sniffing the cool, dry air, you feel "the call of the wild" in your blood. Across long centuries the life of your far-gone nomadic ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... thing. It glared through the cloudless sky and glanced with blinding force off the road. Sir Thomas Boyd squinted at it through the rather incongruous sunglasses he was wearing, while Malone wondered idly if it was the sunglasses, or the rest of the world, that was an anachronism. But Sir Thomas kept his eyes grimly on the road as he gunned the powerful Lincoln toward the Yucca Flats Labs ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Italy's classical associations is indicated by his original purpose of extending his travels to Greece, an enterprise at that period requiring no little disdain of hardship and peril. But it would have been an anachronism if he could have contemplated the comprehensive and scientific scheme of self-culture by Italian influences of every kind which, a hundred and fifty years later, was conceived and executed by Goethe. At the time of Milton's visit Italian letters ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... a new glazed card was to be seen on most of the fashionable tables in New York. It was of the particular tint most in favour that season, whether bluish or pinkish we dare not affirm, for fear of committing a serious anachronism, which might at once destroy, with many persons, all claim to a knowledge of the arcana of fashionable life. Having no authorities at hand to consult, the point must be left to the greater research of the ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... been so rewarded. That was in his eighteenth year when he awoke to the glories of free thought, and knew himself a victim to the Moloch of the Sabbath, to which fathers sacrifice their children. The proprietor of the fancy goods was a Jew, and moreover closed on Saturdays. But for this anachronism of keeping Saturday holy when you had Sunday also to laze on, Daniel felt a hundred higher careers would have been open to him. Later, when free thought waned (it was after Daniel had met Bessie), although he never returned to ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... properly the nave, is of that massy unornamented style, in use before and at the conquest; from the circumstance of its being built with the materials of the neighbouring Roman work, it will perhaps be no anachronism to assign to it a date prior to that period. The tower is also Saxon; and the spire having been damaged by the wind is now ...
— A Walk through Leicester - being a Guide to Strangers • Susanna Watts
... not strange, then, that Marie Louise's people, who had made almost no impression on the life of the town, should have lapsed from its memory. But it was discouraging. Marie Louise felt as much of an anachronism as old Rip Van Winkle, though she looked no more like him than an exquisite, fashionable young woman could look like a gray-bearded sot who has slept in his clothes for ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... "the Duke of Reist is an honest man, but—he will forgive me—he is an anachronism. He should have lived two centuries ago—or, better still, he would have made an excellent crusader. The necessities of modern diplomacy are unknown to him. He has passed all his days in a semi-civilized country. He is not a fitting judge of the ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... were speaking—well, of foreign countries. Now, Paul Vanderhoffen has read that in one of these countries there was once a prince who very narrowly escaped figuring as a self-conscious absurdity, as an anachronism, as a life-long prisoner of etiquette. However, with the assistance of his cousin—who, incidentally, was also his heir—the prince most opportunely died. Oh, pedant that you are! in any event he was interred. And so, the prince was gathered to his fathers, and his cousin Augustus ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... stout old English oak, cunningly bolted together) was made during the former king's reign and was never used by Arthur at all. What are such crude exactitudes to us? As well object to the heavy plate-armour worn by the knights—everybody knows this to be an anachronism of nigh a thousand years. Romantic phantasy and scientific data are as far apart as the poles, and none but a fool would try to reconcile them. King Arthur feasted in the castle hall, says Malory, and so far as our book-hunter is concerned ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... the Commedia being purely imaginary, we need pay no attention to dates. For one thing, Dante is extremely careful, and with more success than any one without his marvellous "visualising" power could hope for, to avoid anything like an anachronism in the Commedia. If he allows no event, which, in the history of the world, was still future in 1300, to be referred to as past, why should he have allowed this in regard to events in the history of his ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... happy face and softened manner, who unites the charms of both epochs, retaining the ready responsiveness of youth while adding the wider sympathies of experience—with her there has never been any such struggle to make herself an anachronism. Consequently she remains beautiful to the last, far more beautiful than all the paste and washes in Madame Rachel's shop could make her. Sometimes, if rarely in these latter days, we meet her in society, where she ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... of highest personality from what the oriental, feudal, ecclesiastical worlds bequeath us, and which yet possess the imaginative and esthetic fields of the United States, pictorial and melodramatic, not without use as studies, but making sad work, and forming a strange anachronism upon the scenes and exigencies around us. Of course, the old undying elements remain. The task is, to successfully adjust them to new combinations, our own days. Nor is this so incredible. I can conceive a community, to-day and here, in which, on a sufficient scale, the perfect personalities, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... he rushes at conclusions too rapidly, he judges hastily; and with an imperfect knowledge of human nature, which is a mass of irregularities, he worries himself because he cannot bring a whole parish up to his level in a few weeks. That impetuosity shows itself everywhere. He is an anachronism, a being from another time and world, set down in sleepy Kilronan. For the first few weeks that he was here, whenever he slammed his hall door and strode down the village street with long, rapid, undulating steps, ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... Nectan. The church was dedicated to St. Brigid; and the Chronicon Pictorum (Innes' Inquiry, p. 778), in ascribing its foundation to Nectan I. (about A.D. 455) instead of Nectan II., commits a palpable anachronism, and very evident error, as St. Brigid did not die till a quarter of the next century had elapsed. (Annals of the Four Masters under the year 525; Colgan's Trias Thaumaturga, p. 619.) Again, according ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... half after the marriage of Ethelberta and the evening adventures which followed it, a man young in years, though considerably older in mood and expression, walked up to the 'Red Lion' Inn at Anglebury. The anachronism sat not unbecomingly upon him, and the voice was precisely that of the Christopher Julian of heretofore. His way of entering the inn and calling for a conveyance was more off-hand than formerly; he was much less afraid of the sound of his own voice now than when he ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... estimate of time.] Anachronism. — N. anachronism, metachronism, parachronism, prochronism; prolepsis, misdate; anticipation, antichronism. disregard of time, neglect of time, oblivion of time. intempestivity &c. 135[obs3]. V. misdate, antedate, postdate, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... exactly what I say. In the life you are living now I am an anachronism. I'm a survival. I'm out of date and in the way. You would be ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... was in her bath, the maid had committed an anachronism. Folly was not in her bath. She had been in her bath over an hour ago; now ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... royal children of France, and the country was to provide titles, dignities, and royal rent-rolls for them and their heirs forever. Do you wonder that there was a revolution a century later, and that the people, grown weary of the parasitic anachronism of royalty, should have risen to throw off the intolerable burden it ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... triple-headed and many-handed, sinister and splendid, seemed moving through the gloom on a throne of gold, uplifted by a phalanx of elephants. Fudo I saw, shrouded and shrined in fire, and Maya-Fujin, riding her celestial peacock; and strangely mingling with these Buddhist visions, as in the anachronism of a Limbo, armored effigies of Daimyo and images of the Chinese sages. There were huge forms of wrath, grasping thunderbolts, and rising to the roof: the Deva-kings, like impersonations of hurricane power; the ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... an anachronism. He might, if he chose, be one of the kings, the prophets, who lead the van in the fight for civilisation. But he will not; he despises his own powers, and one day he will start a revolution against himself. Mark my ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... hopelessly out of touch with his surroundings, an alien and a struggling figure. Nevertheless, he entertained the little party with many stories. He struggled all the time against that queer sensation of anachronism which now and ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... as Mr. Croker says), if he did not get a money bill passed by the next day. The bill, according to the story, was passed. Mr. P. Cunningham informed Mr. Croker that Johnson was here guilty of an anachronism, for that heads were first placed on Temple ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... Boeotian absurdity of our neighbours. What can, at first view, appear a grosser blunder than that of the Irishman who begged a friend to look over his library, to find for him the history of the world before the creation? Yet this anachronism of ideas is not unparalleled; it is matched, though on a more contracted scale, by an ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... broke drearily for our friends, the two pedestrians, at the 'Blue Goat.' A day of dull aspect and soft rain in midsummer has the added depression that it seems an anachronism. One is in a measure prepared for being weather-bound in winter. You accept imprisonment as the natural fortune of the season, or you brave the elements prepared to let them do their worst, while, if confined to house, you ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... space my flesh Was naked of me.] Quae corpus complexa animae tam fortis inane. Ovid. Met. l. xiii f. 2 Dante appears to have fallen into a strange anachronism. Virgil's death did not happen till long ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... a little out of order,' said Elizabeth; 'either she meant his grandson, or Sir Walter Scott made as great an anachronism as when he made that same Ulrica compare Rebecca's skin to paper. If she had said parchment, it would not have ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with Montaigne and yet delays his revenge in the spirit of the Christianised savage, who fears to send the praying murderer to heaven. There is no solution of these anomalies: the very state of Shakspere's consciousness, working in his subjective way on the old material, made inevitable a moral anachronism and contradiction, analogous in its kind to the narrative anachronisms of his historical plays. But none the less, this tragedy, the first of the great group which above all his other work make ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... make her let them go; The Providence that works in history, And seems to some folks such a mystery, Does not creep slowly on incog., But moves by jumps, a mighty frog; No more reject the Age's chrism, Your queues are an anachronism; No more the Future's promise mock, But lay your tails upon the block, Thankful that we the means have voted To have you ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... square, and until the Parque de Isabella was finished, it was the great centre of fashion, and the place of evening resort. At one corner of this Plaza is an insignificant chapel, built upon the spot where Columbus is said to have assisted at the first mass celebrated on the island; an anachronism easily exposed were it worth the while. The great discoverer never landed at Havana during his lifetime, though his body was brought hither for burial, centuries after his death. There is one fact relating to this site in the Plaza de Armas fully authenticated, ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... commentators have ignorantly supposed that the Irish author is guilty of a great anachronism in this passage; for having said that the contested succession occasioned long wars, he yet speaks of queen Grata at the conclusion of them, as still sitting in her mother's lap as a child. Now I can confute them from their own state of the question. Like a child does not import that she actually ...
— Hieroglyphic Tales • Horace Walpole
... heads together with a sharp blow. Bateman describes the death of one of the twins and its excision from the other, who died subsequently, evidently of septic infection. There is a possibility that this is merely a duplication of the account of the preceding case with a slight anachronism as to ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... at the naughty nineties, when everybody was very unhealthy and soulful and hinted darkly at tragedies; the period of the Yellow Book and Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Symons and Dowson, and the last end of Wilde. He undoubtedly had the charming and fluent manners of his time, anachronism though he was. And he talked a great deal, and very brilliantly, if a bit excitedly. He plunged now, in his charming, high, slightly too mannered voice, into a discussion with Marjorie on the absolute rottenness of the modern magazine, ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... and Tennyson, did not exist for Baudelaire; inspiration he denied; simplicity he scouted as an anachronism in a decadent period of perfected art, whose last word in poetry should be the apotheosis of the Artificial. "A little charlatanism is permitted even to genius," he wrote: "it is like fard on the cheeks of a naturally beautiful ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... drunken debauch, and the swift, powerful narrative of the battle and the rout of the Assyrians, are in the best Anglo-Saxon epic strain. The poem is distinctly Christian; for the Hebrew heroine, with a naive anachronism, prays thus: "God of Creation, Spirit of Consolation, Son of the Almighty, I pray for Thy mercy to me, greatly in need of it. Glory of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... communications with suspected persons, he was brought back to the Lagune and drowned. The minute particularities of Jaffier's depositions, and the motive which prompted him to offer them, (the latter, as we have already shown, resting on a gross anachronism,) are, we believe pure inventions by St. Real; and Otway has used a poet's license to palliate still farther deviations from authentic history. Under his hands, Pierre,—whom all accounts conspire in representing to us as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... in close proximity to railroad tracks, or upon the main thoroughfares of cities where stone or asphalt pavements resound to every hoof-fall, and where street cars go whirring and clanging by all night long, is something more than an anachronism; it is a fiendish disregard ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... flashes strongly; thus forming, together with it, the lion and eagle symbol, which is the type of Christ, throughout mediaeval work. In order to show the meaning of this symbol, and that Solomon is typically invested with the Christian royalty, one of the elders by a bold anachronism, holds a jewel in his hand in the shape of a cross, with which he (by accident of gesture) points to Solomon; his other hand is laid on ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... chair. "War has made mourning an anachronism in Europe. If it lasts long enough, it will do the same here and do the same with art. But you are very brave." He looked about. "I understood your father had ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... Autos self autograph, automatic, authentic *Barvs heavy baritone, barites *Biblos book Bible, bibliomania *Bios life biology, autobiography, amphibious *Cheir hand chiropody, chirurgical, surgeon *Chilioi a thousand kilogram, kilowatt *Chroma color chromo, achromatic Chronos time chronic, anachronism *Cosmos world, order cosmopolitan, microcosm *Crypto hide cryptogam, cryptology *Cyclos wheel, circle encyclopedia, cyclone *Deca ten decasyllable, decalogue *Demos people democracy, epidemic *Derma skin epidermis, taxidermist ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... receiving hearty good-will and not returning it in kind. There was nothing of a "we-forgive-you" in the bearing of his Northern acquaintances, nor was there any effusiveness in cordiality with an evident design of reassuring him. He was made to feel that he was guilty of an anachronism in brooding over the war, that it had been forgotten except as history, and that the present with its opportunities, and the future with its promise, were the themes of thought. The elements of life, energy, hopefulness with which he came in ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... metaphysic creed, can at least raise his voice in protest against its disguising itself in 'scientific' plumes. I think that all who have had the patience to follow me thus far will agree that the spencerian 'philosophy' of social and intellectual progress is an obsolete anachronism, reverting to a pre-darwinian type of thought, just as the spencerian philosophy of 'Force,' effacing all the previous distinctions between actual and potential energy, momentum, work, force, mass, etc., which physicists have with so much agony achieved, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... clothes question is exhausted, philosophically. I cannot but regret that the Poet of the Breakfast-Table, who appears to have an uncontrollable penchant for saying the things you would like to say yourself, has alluded to the anachronism of "Sir Coeur de Lion Plantagenet in the mutton-chop whiskers and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... expression. The name is Greek, but the nature and spirit are essentially Gothic. Nor does the abundance of classical allusion and imagery in the story call for any qualification here; because whatsoever is taken is thoroughly steeped in the efficacy of the taker. This sort of anachronism, common to all modern writers before and during the age of Shakespeare, seems to have arisen in part from a comparative dearth of classical learning, which left men to contemplate the heroes of antiquity under the forms into which their own mind and manners ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... perfect under the sun; but if there were, it would certainly be Paddy at an alibi. Some flaws, no doubt, occur; some slight inaccuracies may be noticed by a critical eye; an occasional anachronism stands out, and a mistake or so in geography; but let it be recollected that Paddy's alibi is but a human production; let us not judge him by harsher rules than those which we apply to Homer, ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... opposed the view, that every old belief, or institution, such as the throne or the Church, had served some need, and had a rational idea at the bottom of it, to which it might be again recalled, and made once more a benefit to society, instead of a curse and an anachronism. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... saw her not at all. For one thing, he climbed no more to the spring-sheltering altar rock among the cedars; and for another, among all the wild creatures of the mountain, your moonshiner is the shyest, being an anachronism in a world of progress. One bit of news, however, floated in on the gossip at Little Zoar. It related that Nan's mother was dead, and that the body had lain two days unburied while Tike was drowning his sorrow in a sea of ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... an anachronism: I have noted that the title was first assumed independently by Mohammed of Ghazni after it had been conferred by the Caliph upon his father the Amir Al- Umar (Mayor of the Palace), Sabuktagin ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... in the present instance, for the fellow had committed, the blunder of fixing upon the year 1802 as the period of this pretended business in England, that is to say, two years before my appointment as Minister-Plenipotentiary to the Hanse Towns. This anachronism was not the only one I discovered ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... new life, then better conduct. Men's way is, 'cultivate morality, seek after purity, try to be good.' And surely conscience and experience alike tell us that that is a hopeless effort. To begin with what should be second is an anachronism in morals, and will be sure to result in failure in practice. He is not a wise man that tries to build a house from the chimneys downwards. And to talk about making a man's doings good before you have secured a radical change in the doer, by the infusion into him of the very life ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Definitions upon or through this process. This, true enough as indicating what was latent in the Socratic method, and what was subsequently actually developed out of it by Aristotle himself, is nevertheless probably an anachronism if one seeks to represent it as consciously present in Socrates' mind. Socrates adopted the method unconsciously, just because he wanted to get at the people about him, and through them at what they thought. He was the pioneer of Induction rather than its inventor; he created, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... it seems that this very expression, god of the sky, god of the cloud, is so entire an anachronism that we could not even translate it into Vedic Sanskrit without committing a solecism. It is true, no doubt, we must use our modern ways of speaking when we wish to represent the thoughts of the ancient ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... pick-pocket, the forger, the sweater, the roue, every one of whom may plead that he is but carrying out the Divine ordinances; if Alexander Borgia's perjuries, poisonings and debaucheries "break not Heaven's design," but are "ordained of God for some purpose," morality itself becomes an exploded anachronism. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... States would have united to form a society that included in its objects any discussion of the moral duties arising from the institution of Slavery. Admitting the first part of their proposition, we deny the conclusion they seek to draw from it. They are guilty of a glaring anachronism in assuming the same opinions and prejudices to have existed in 1825 which are undoubtedly influential in 1858. The Anti-slavery agitation did not begin until 1831, and the debates in the Virginia Convention prove conclusively that six years after the foundation of the Tract Society, the leading ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... wherein the terrific and supernatural abounds; in all their romances accordingly this taste prevails strongly; nay, even in some of the romances, where the scene is laid in later times, there is some such anachronism as ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... with which the slave power threatened the Union. His fears, it is true, were aroused for the balance of power between the old States, rather than by any moral sensitiveness, which would, indeed, have been an anachronism at that time. But the Civil War ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... continued, "the Ministry of Defense, itself, is an anachronism, which no doubt accounts for the condition in which we now find it. The Empire has no external enemies whatever; all our defense problems are problems of internal security. Let us therefore turn the facilities over to the Ministry responsible for ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... into the hall, and Dartmouth left her there and went to the library. Sir Iltyd was sitting before a large table, reading by the light of a student's lamp, which looked like an anachronism in the lofty, ancient room. He closed his book as Dartmouth entered, and rising, waved his hand toward a chair on the other side ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Prometheus was bound, the scene doubtless represented a ravine between two precipices rent from each other, with a distant prospect of some of the places mentioned in the wanderings of Io. (See Schutz, ibid.) But as the whole mention of Scythia is an anachronism, the less said on this point the better. Compare, however, the following remarks of Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. ii. p. 140, "The legend of Prometheus, and the unbinding of the chains of the fire-bringing Titan on the Caucasus by Hercules in journeying eastward—the ascent ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... reconciled to some other faults which are rather due to expectations raised by his critics than to positive errors. No one, for example, would care to notice an anachronism, if Landor did not occasionally put in a claim for accuracy. I have no objection whatever to allow Hooker to console Bacon for his loss of the chancellorship, in calm disregard of the fact that Hooker died some twenty years before Bacon rose to that high office. The fault can be ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Austria-Hungary, obviously falling more and more to pieces, formed no point of attraction for Munich and Dresden, who, though not Prussian, yet were German to the very backbone. The vague and irresponsible plan of returning to the conditions of the period before 1866 was an anachronism. Thirdly and chiefly, all experiments were dangerous which might create the impression in the Entente that the Quadruple Alliance was about to be dissolved. In a policy of that nature executive ability was of supreme importance, and ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... anachronism as regards this stage of my career, I cannot resist a little episode which pleasantly illustrates moral courage, or chivalry at least, combined ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... less gruesome than his shop. The furniture looked as if its manufacture had been coeval with the time of the Meynells, and the ghastly glare of the gas seemed a kind of anachronism. After a few preliminary observations, which were not encouraged by Mr. Grewter's manner, I inquired whether he had ever heard the ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... trouble of which the tithes difficulty was only an incident. Already a party was forming itself in the House of Commons composed of intellectual and far-seeing men who recognized the fact that the Irish State Church was in its very principles an anomaly and an anachronism. On May 27, 1834, a debate on the whole question of the Irish State Church and its revenues was raised in the House of Commons by Mr. Henry Ward, one of the most advanced reformers and thoughtful politicians whom the new conditions ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... has commemorated it. He sat between Lavater and Basedow, and during the meal the former expounded the Revelation of St. John to a country pastor, and the latter exerted himself to prove to a stolid dancing-master that baptism was an anachronism. ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... of the 'Family Compact' school, which with changed conditions was fast becoming an anachronism. He was at the same time a ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... honestly—and is shortly going into Parliament. They say that he is sure to be a great man. To us—to Philip and me, he has been extremely kind. I only meant that he seems to be in place here—or anywhere, indeed, where the world is moving; while Mr. Arthur, in Canada, is a walking anachronism. He is out of perspective; ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... men as these I have sketched in Father Bruno. And if, possibly, the portrait is slightly over-charged for the date,—if he be represented as a shade more enlightened than at that time he could well be—I trust that the anachronism will be pardoned for the sake of those eternal verities which would ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... economy of words to a heat as voluble as his own. Often as the two moved briskly about, preparing a meal together, they shouted out from the dining-room to the kitchen a discussion on some unintelligible topic such as the "anachronism of the competitive system," so loudly voiced and so energetically pursued that when they came to sit down to table, they would be quite red-cheeked and stirred-up, and ate their dinners with as vigorous an appetite as though ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... of her rich petticoat, nor would her cheeks have tingled when the Queen of the East—by a bold adaptation—played the part of Lion in interrupting the interview of our old friends Pyramus and Thisbe, who, by an awful anachronism, were carried to Palmyra. It was no plagiarism from "Midsummer Night's Dream," only drawn from the common ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... genius, gives such play to the imagination that the mind loves to indulge in it. But the vision dissolves before historical truth; and Chamaeleon, and Hermesianax, who are the source of the supposition, are considered as having merely indulged in a poetical anachronism. ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... must not be taken as involving any anachronism. Pasquino is like Love, he is not Time's fool. Never having been born, he can never die, and never to die is to be immortal. Accordingly, whenever a comic servant is wanted, whether as a messenger from a castle which is being ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... want to do is to make a clean sweep of everything," he said. "Money is an anachronism, and in a perfectly ordered State would not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... large milliner's shop, and here we found a forewoman with eighteen assistants at work. Books of costumes are always at hand, so that a degree of historical accuracy is now attained in Opera costume, which materially assists the illusion; and no such anachronism is visible in Covent Garden as in a certain theatre across the Thames, where, instead of the Saracenic minarets of Cairo, this gorgeous Arab city is represented by pyramids, obelisks, and sphynxes. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... attributed to the Evangelist, but to another Luke, also called 'Saint,' and a Florentine by birth. This painter lived in the eleventh century—that is to say, about seven centuries after the image of Oropa had been known and venerated! This is indeed an anachronism. ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... Shaw, "is an anachronism of which we must get rid. Among people who are proof against the suggestions of romantic fiction there can no longer be any question of the fact that military service produces moral imbecility, ferocity, and cowardice.... For permanent work the soldier is worse than useless; such ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... the walls of the royal palace of Negaristan in the Persian capital. There may be seen the portraits of Sir Harford Jones and Sir John Malcolm, as well as of General Gardanne, grouped by a pardonable anachronism in the same picture. There is the king with his spider's waist and his lordly beard; and there are the princes and the ministers of whom we have been reading. The philanthropic efforts of the Englishmen to force upon the reluctant Persians ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... twenty years since Mr. Chamberlain, in a celebrated speech at Islington, made the following remarkable declaration:—"I say the time has come to reform altogether the absurd and irritating anachronism which is known as Dublin Castle, to sweep away altogether the alien boards of foreign officials and to substitute for them a genuine Irish administration for purely Irish business." Change of opinions, no one can refuse to admit, in a statesman any more than in other men, and as ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages. If the Canterbury Pilgrims, led by jolly Harry Bailey, their host, had burst out from the woods, on horseback, singing and jesting, I should not have considered their appearance an anachronism.... ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... matters, I could only come to the conclusion that they pointed in one direction, namely, toward the anachronism and absurdity of our whole theory of punishment by imprisonment. As I shall have plenty of cause to give full discussion to this subject later on, I will only touch it here; but the fact is that we imprison malefactors or law-breakers ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... acts, and a weakly romantic ending. The ghost of Eleuteria is less in place than the corresponding spirits of Realidad and Casandra, both because it is unnecessary for the solution of the plot, and because it is an anachronism in a play devoted to the eulogy of the modern and the practical. On the other side, it is clear to an impartial reader that Galds did not intend an attack on the clergy, much less an attack on religion. Mximo is careful to affirm his belief in God. And Pantoja is not the scheming ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... old man received them, and his benefits were placed at their service; the only return he demanded was an attendance at his religious services, and that the children should be sent to the classes which he held in the Mission House. It was a pastoral that held every element of beauty, but as an anachronism in the fierce setting north of "sixty" it was even ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... itself a most significant first step in the path of knowledge which his grandson has opened up for us, but to wish to revive it at the present day, as has actually been seriously attempted, shows a weakness of thought and a mental anachronism which ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... Castle to the "Bull" in the High Street is a transition which seems almost an anachronism. It is but to follow in the traces of the Pickwick Club. The covered gateway, the staircase almost wide enough for a coach and four, the ballroom on the first floor landing, with card-room adjoining, and the bedroom which Mr. Winkle occupied ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... had. But I have sufficiently proved, in the Course of my Notes, that such Anachronisms were the Effect of poetic Licence, rather than of Ignorance in our Poet. And if I may be permitted to ask a modest Question by the way, *Why may not I restore an Anachronism really made by our Author, as well as Mr. Pope take the Privilege to fix others upon him, which he never had it in his Head to make; as I may venture to affirm He had not, in the Instance of Sir Francis Drake, to which I have spoke ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... to the former volume are not represented in this one, either because they have published nothing which comes within its scope, or because they belong in fact to an earlier poetic generation, and their inclusion must be allowed to have been an anachronism. Two names ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... but the Bishop of Durham has found it in a rescript of the Emperors Marcus and Commodus (A. D. 177-80), and in an early treatise written by Galen, which carries it back within about half a century of Ignatius. Evidently it was then a familiar term. Another alleged anachronism is the use of the term 'Catholic Church.'[78] Cureton and others have urged, that a period of full fifty years must have intervened between the time when Ignatius wrote and the first trace we find of the term 'Catholic Church.' This, says Bishop Lightfoot, 'is founded on the confusion of two wholly ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... Old Testament history, all the kings were Charles I. and all the Queens Henrietta Maria. One and all wore early Stuart costumes. Even Pharaoh's daughter wore the handsome dress of the day, with Point lace falling collar and real pearls round her neck. It is a fashion to jeer at this anachronism; but may it not perhaps be that we take these pictures too literally, and deny the workers their feelings of passionate devotion to the lost cause. Doubtless they worked their loyalty to their beloved monarch into these pretty and pleasing fancies, just as it is said that the fashion of ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... gentlemen had Inverness capes over their sacks, fastened on the shoulders with Highland brooches. How came the Greeks, in the time of Euripides, to know about Inverness capes and Highland brooches? She, Keturah Vanhansen, had been so startled by what she feared might be a frightful anachronism that all her false hair had fallen off, and she had been left like one of her ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... sake of conciseness in a hurried situation I have made Cleopatra recommend rum. This, I am afraid, is an anachronism: the only real one in the play. To balance it, I give a couple of the remedies she actually believed in. They are quoted by Galen from Cleopatra's book ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... powdered hair usually mark the high tide of imaginative originality among this sort of people. So it was to be the inevitable Louis XVI fete—or as near to it as attenuated, artistic intelligence could manage, and they altered Duane's very clever and correct sketches to suit themselves, careless of anachronism, and sent the dainty water-colour drawings to town in order that those who sweat and sew in the perfumed ateliers of Fifth Avenue might use them ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... hundred foes that in affairs of the heart he was obliged to rely exclusively on moral worth and charm of manner. He belonged to the old school of fighters who looked the part, and in these days of pugilists who resemble matinee idols he had the appearance of an anachronism. He was a stocky man with a round, solid head, small eyes, an undershot jaw, and a nose which ill-treatment had reduced to a mere scenario. A narrow strip of forehead acted as a kind of buffer-state, separating his front hair from his eyebrows, and he bore beyond ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... these need the consideration which is made possible by the accumulated wisdom of centuries and the insight which eighteen hundred years' study of Christian principles have developed. But I shall never get over a sense of anachronism, of being out of time, in arguing at this late day a claim for so fundamental a thing as human freedom. I rub my eyes to make sure that I have not been in a Rip Van Winkle slumber for a few centuries, and am not coming before ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... those who are conversant with the Works of the Old Masters this piece of anachronism ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... been wrongly given by Dr. Grey to Lilburn, and whether Prynne is not rather the person described. Dr. Grey admits in his note that the application of the passage to Lilburn involves an anachronism, Lilburn having died in 1657, and this passage being a description ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... the subject. But at the present day, when comparative philology has made such strides, and when want of accurate scholarship is as little tolerated in strange and remote languages as in classical literature, the 'Romano Lavo-Lil' is, to speak mildly, an anachronism." ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... human species from the landsman, without laws and usages to protect him. This was a tradition which, for centuries, had been fostered in the naval service, and it survived among merchant sailors as an unhappy anachronism even into the twentieth century, when an American Congress was reluctant to bestow upon a seaman the decencies of existence enjoyed ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... mind was vigorous to a degree; a power that throws down the gauntlet, as it were, with a confidence that disdains any disguise or fear of criticism: a confidence the more manifest in the defects, particularly of grossness and anachronism, bringing them out strongly palpable and conspicuous by a more vivid colouring, more determined opposition of dark and light,—as if he should say, behold, I dare. And this power has the usual charm ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... Such are the misleading statements which disfigure the History of England in its most important chapter. They mislead by more than a simple error of fact: those, which I have noticed last, involve a moral anachronism; for they convey images of cruelty and barbarism such as could not co-exist with the national civilization at that time; and whosoever has not corrected this false picture by an acquaintance with the English literature of that age, must necessarily image to himself a state ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Can I offer you a cigar? I'm on my way to take a look at the fort. Seems like an anachronism, doesn't it, for us to keep an old-fashioned fort like this so near our own border in native territory. Care to come with me? Well, so long then—see you at the ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... powerful nation of Chancas, with their chief, Huancavilca, inhabited the great valley of Andahuaylas and were formidable rivals of the Incas. But they were subdued by Pachacuti long before Ollantay can have been born. An allowable dramatic anachronism. ...
— Apu Ollantay - A Drama of the Time of the Incas • Sir Clements R. Markham
... instincts common to civilised folk. Until Germany, 'deep patient Germany,' suddenly hoisted her colours as a champion of murder and rapine and barbarism, she the mother of art and literature and science, there was nothing in Europe that could compare with the anachronism of Turkey being there at all. Then, in August 1914, there was hoisted the German flag, superimposed with skulls and cross-bones, and all the insignia of piracy and highway robbery on land and on sea, and Germany showed herself ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... either an anachronism or a mere fabrication. Bonaparte was fourteen in the year 1783. He was then at Brienne, where certainly he did not go into company, and least of all the company ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... political framework of the colony, with its strict centralization, the paternal regulation of industry and commerce, the flood of missionary zeal which poured in upon it, the heroism and courage of its priests and voyageurs, the venality of its administrative officials, the anachronism of a feudal land-tenure, the bizarre externals of its social life, the versatility of its people—all these reflected the paternity of ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... way evil. There must be something wrong with any institution which does not appeal to many members of the highest types of womanhood. Perhaps in certain of its details this institution must be an anachronism, a survival from times to which it may have been well suited when the development of womanhood was habitually stunted, but inadequate to satisfy the demands of fully developed womanhood in our own days. Now from the ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... of an age,' remarked the Duke peevishly, 'when my birthdays have ceased to be a cause for congratulation. This review is an anachronism. In my father's time I rode at the head of the Guard, and led a charge on the day I was eighteen. Pish! I have grown wiser, and know how to enjoy life after a more rational fashion. To return to our ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... alleged author, nor contemporary with him, if words are used that only became current at a later date, or are used in a sense that they only later acquired, or if later writers are imitated, or if events are mentioned that happened later ('anachronism'). Books are sometimes forged outright, that is, are written by one man and deliberately fathered upon another; but sometimes books come to be ascribed to a well-known name, which were written by some one else without fraudulent intent, dramatically ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... purist might urge, neither of them had any right to be acquainted with paint, or skirts, or gold. But anachronisms like these are, after all, only a part of the great anachronism, or postulate rather, whereby Adam and Eve are made to speak the English tongue. In the Twelfth Book Michael is guilty of a graver lapse where he mentions baptism without explanation or apology. ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... he knew, with his wife's question, that it was too late. Her arms, sweet and strangling, were around him, for he had made all such choices back in that room in the Plaza the year before. This was an anachronism from ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... assigned to his electing faculty,) or else, if it really meant to revive the old duties of the censorship, and to assign the very same field for the exercise of those duties, it must be viewed as the very grossest practical anachronism that has ever been committed. We mean by an anachronism, in common usage, that sort of blunder when a man ascribes to one age the habits, customs, or generally the characteristics of another. This, however, may be a mere lapse of memory, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... the past is wise; solicitude concerning it is an anachronism. Suppose one has accepted a certain position and finds himself in doubt of his fitness for that position. Nothing can be more important than for him to decide upon his next line of conduct. Shall he resign or continue? Is he fit for the position, or, ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... precisely indicated. But the ecclesiastical features lend it a semblance of mediaevalism; and one is reminded, though but faintly, by the imprisonment of the offending sister in the sepulcher of the convent, of the scene in "Marmion" where Constance is immured in the vaults of Lindisfarne—a frank anachronism, of course, on Scott's part, since Lindisfarne had been in ruins centuries before the battle of Flodden. The motto from Horace on the title page of "The Monk" sums up its contents, and indeed the contents of most of its author's ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... newly recognized conditions. Though on the statute books there are found few examples of legislation directed to the deaf as if they were peculiarly in need of the state's attention, and though such are hardly more than reminders of the past legal attitude, they are mostly an anachronism to-day, and should in ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... system of serfdom. Representative government corresponds to capital-rule. Both, however, are class-rule. But in a society where the distinction between capitalist and labourer has disappeared, there is no need of such a government; it would be an anachronism, a nuisance."[66] If Social-Democrats were to tell him they know this at least as well as he does, Kropotkine would reply that possibly they do, but that then they will not draw a logical conclusion from these premises. He, Kropotkine, is your real logician. Since the political constitution ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... tiers of decks—the lowermost, or main, containing the engine-room and stowage place for cargo, as well as the men's quarters; the lower saloon, in which were the refreshment bars, and what could only appropriately be called the "dining hall," if such a term were not an anachronism on board ship; and, thirdly, the upper saloon, containing the principal cabins and state-rooms, in addition to the graceful promenading hurricane deck surmounting the whole—the steamer had the appearance of one of those bungalow-like pretended "houses" which children build up with a pack of cards. ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Yejiro found, by a person still yellow with the jaundice. He met the demand for boatmen with the counter demand for the passport, and when this was produced his official eye at once detected its anachronism. ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... the establishment decorated in imitation of a Louis XIII. hôtellerie. Oaken beams supported the low-studded ceilings: The plaster walls disappeared behind tapestries, armor, old faïence. Beer and other liquids were served in quaint porcelain or pewter mugs, and the waiters were dressed (merry anachronism) in the costume of members of the Institute (the Immortal Forty), who had so long led poetry in chains. The success of the “Black Cat” in her new quarters was immense, all Paris crowding through her modest doors. Salis had founded Montmartre!—the ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... consideration that barbarians are 'slaves by nature' and that it is for their own interest to be 'living tools'. This insistence upon the fundamental distinction between Greeks and barbarians must have seemed an anachronism to many of Aristotle's contemporaries and it had been expressly ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... that is why Queen Elizabeth was never married. Side-lights on Shakespeare's Sonnets were obviously cast. The young man whom Shakespeare admired so, and urged to marry, was—Darnley. This romance did not get the prize (the anachronism about Shakespeare is worthy of Scott), but I am conceited enough to think it ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... document, the stereotyped press-warrant of the century, here concisely summarised in its own phraseology, was not at all what it purported to be. It was in fact a warrant out of time, an official anachronism, a red-tape survival of that bygone period when pressing still meant "presting" and force went no further than a threat. For men were now no longer "prested." They were pressed, and that, too, in the most drastic sense of the term. ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... eighteenth-century manners, as he himself was an eighteenth-century personage (he died in 1799, in his seventy-eighth year); and that for the date in which the story is cast (1814) such manners are somewhat of an anachronism. During the generation contemporary with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars—or, to put it another way, the generation that elapsed between the days when Scott roamed the country as a High School ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... views on the importance of dietary and civic selfhelp while Bloom dissented tacitly from Stephen's views on the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature. Bloom assented covertly to Stephen's rectification of the anachronism involved in assigning the date of the conversion of the Irish nation to christianity from druidism by Patrick son of Calpornus, son of Potitus, son of Odyssus, sent by pope Celestine I in the year 432 in the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... and unchanged to all appearance from the days when the Crescent and the Cross battled for supremacy on those stony hills and in those savage gorges. Once again, I felt myself a crude anachronism, in my automobile, nor did the impression leave me when Toledo was hidden round a corner; nor when we flashed past ancient Eastern norias, slowly turned by sleepy horses or indignant donkeys; nor with glimpses ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... an anachronism. Such a man should have had no dealings with the nineteenth century: he belonged to the sixteenth, or perhaps the thirteenth, and in Italy not in England. It would, nevertheless, be wrong to say that ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... cried, "Remember this: you are making history; therefore, pray be accurate. I am not yet Emperor, and you are guilty of an anachronism of a most embarrassing sort. Some men make history in a warm room with pen and ink, aided by guide-books and collections of anecdotes. Leave anachronisms and inaccuracies to them. For ourselves, we must carve it out with our swords and cannon; we must rubricate our pages with our gore, and ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... feeling his hands quiver ever so slightly, groping for the right words. Societics was his faith, and his teacher, Abravanel, its only prophet. This man before him, carefully preserved by the age-retarding drugs, was unique in the galaxy. A living anachronism, a refugee from the history books. Abravanel had singlehandedly worked out the equations, spelled out his science of Societics. Then he had trained seven generations of students in its fundamentals. ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... parallel that Comte himself was the first to hit upon. It is no doubt the worst kind of cynicism to make a mock in a realistic vein of any personality that has set in motion the idealising thaumaturgy of the affections. Yet we cannot help feeling that it is a grotesque and unseemly anachronism to apply in grave prose, addressed to the whole world, those terms of saint and angel which are touching and in their place amid the trouble and passion of the great mystic poet. Only an energetic and beautiful imagination, together with a mastery of the rhythm and swell of impassioned ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... up my mind to cart the blessed stuff myself." . . . This was what he required a steamer for, and I knew he was just then negotiating enthusiastically with a Parsee firm for an old, brig-rigged, sea-anachronism of ninety horse-power. We had met and spoken together several times. He looked knowingly after Jim. "Takes it to heart?" he asked scornfully. "Very much," I said. "Then he's no good," he opined. "What's all the to-do about? A bit of ass's skin. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... of the times, customs, and thoughts in the midst of which it bloomed into beauty. In early Greek times an epic without its gods and demigods, without resounding battle-shout and din of mighty conflict, had been an anachronism for which there could have been offered no apology. The splendid era of Pericles demanded the tragedy, and such a tragedy as only Aeschylus and Sophocles could originate; while the foibles of an earlier era made the comedy imperative. On like principles, the ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... a mistake to make the Hebrew language do the work of one of our elaborated European languages, the products of thoughts and education and literary knowledge which the Hebrew knew nothing of. A Hebrew grammar constructed on the principle of a Greek or a Latin grammar is simply a huge anachronism. ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... improvement. It binds us to the letter of tradition, leads us to confound the accidental with the essential, and gives to certain notions and certain words a potency which must be described as an anachronism. We still use the language of the Revolutionary epoch, recognize no perils but those against which our ancestors had to guard, and put faith in the efficacy of methods that have no longer an object, and of phrases that have lost their original significance. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... three strong men against me. I want peace, but I am helpless without you three. For I am an anachronism. Not nature but human force, fighting against nature, keeps me on my throne. If you must have war, have it. But I tell you this: God has no part in it. Leave God out of ...
— Makers of Madness - A Play in One Act and Three Scenes • Hermann Hagedorn
... should desire to strike a point of contact with the German status quo, albeit in the only appropriate way, which is negatively, the result would ever remain an anachronism. Even the denial of our political present is already a dust-covered fact in the historical lumber room of modern nations. If I deny the powdered wig, I still have to deal with unpowdered wigs. If I deny ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... translation of the 'AEneid' to Lord Normanby, near the middle; when speaking of the anachronism that made ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... anything in The Idylls of the King. There are other elements; especially that sacred thing that can perhaps be called Anachronism. All that to us is Anachronism was to mediaevals merely Eternity. But the main excellence of the Mumming Play lies still, I think, in its uproarious secrecy. If we cannot hide our hearts in healthy darkness, at least we can hide our faces ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... complain that they sometimes come upon what they call "air holes." The atmosphere seems suddenly to give way under them. In Rome the element of Time on which the imagination has been flying seems to lose its usual density. We drop through a Time-hole, and find ourselves in an inglorious anachronism. ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... seemed to be by a sort of anachronism that I had ever mentioned contemporary Venetian Commerce; and I turned with exultation from the phantom transactions of the present to that solid and magnificent prosperity of the past, of which the long-enduring foundations ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... was as much of an anachronism as his scheme of Church reform. But no one ever climbed the rugged peaks of Mount Carmel with more heroic courage and patience. His life shows what tremendous moral force is generated by complete self-surrender to God. And happily neither his failure ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... disgust that somebody who has lost his arm, in despair cut off his other arm with an axe in order more easily to get assistance, and yet they do not ask "how.'' Or again when somebody is asked if he knows the romance "The Emperor Joseph and The Beautiful Railway-signal-man's Daughter,'' the anachronism of the title does not occur to him, and nobody thinks of the impossibilities of the vivid description of a man walking back and forth, with his hands behind his back, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... chiefly by Pitt, created a similar college at Haileybury, which continued till the open competitive system of 1854 swept that also away; and the Company itself soon followed, as the march of events had made it an anachronism. ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... the arena of Parliament. The appeal now is not so much to arms as to argument; and in this new sphere a minority, provided that it is well organised and persistent, may generally hope to attain its ends. Revolt, even if it take the form of a refusal to pay taxes, is therefore an anachronism under a democracy; unless, as in the case of the American Civil War, two great sections of the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... understand was a mind which refused to accept the inevitable conclusions to which its own processes pushed it. Verden University lacked the courage which comes from intellectual honesty. Wherefore its economics were devitalized and its theology an anachronism. ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... in fact, somewhat of an anachronism in a country whose inhabitants exhibit at least a trace of primitive and wholesome barbarity. One could have fancied him at home among men of leisure and cultivated tastes, but he seemed out of place in a log-built ranch in the ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... ammunition; but fixing their long knives in the muzzles of their guns, they thus successfully charged on and defeated the enemy. The legend is mentioned, as every one must listen to it from the local guides, though—between ourselves—it is a most gross anachronism. ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... has the diminutive 'Mariechen'. To this Dr. Ebers appends this note. "An ignorant critic took exception to the use of the diminutive form of names (as for instance 'Irenchen', little Irene) in 'The Sisters,' as an anachronism. It is nevertheless a fact that the Greeks settled in Egypt were so fond of using the diminutive form of woman's names that they preferred them, even in the tax-rolls. This form was ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Trial. He first fixed the opening of the story in 1817: but on coming to the compromising incident in Goswell Street, which occurred only a few weeks later, he changed the year to 1827. Then Jingle's anachronism of the French Revolution of July suggested that the new date would not do. So 1830 was next adopted. But this did not end the matter, for in the "errata" we are directed to change this date back again to 1827. And so it now stands. The ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... Cuthbert was an exploded superstition, an anachronism, part of a vanishing order of things, and that the ideal which was replacing him was a boiler-plated monster with clock-work heart and brain, named Efficiency. And that Cuthbert must go, along with his Jacobean manor and his family ghost, and the oaks in the park, and everything ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... more hopefully. 'But by that time,' I would say, 'you'll probably be married, and your wife mightn't quite—', whereat he would hotly repeat what he had said many times: that he would never marry. Marriage was an anti-social anachronism. I think its survival wasin some part due to the machinations of Capital. Anyway, it was doomed. Temporary civil contracts between men and women would be the rule 'ten, twelve years hence'; pending which time the lot of any man who ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... through Tennyson's Cup. There are those who compare Scott with Shakespeare in the gift of visualising and vitalising the past. We Englishmen may leave it to the Scotchman Carlyle to settle with that comparison. For my own part, as a student of antiquity, I would maintain that, despite all petty anachronism, Shakespeare in his Roman plays comes nearer to the essential truth than any merely professional student can ever come. What he gives us is not archaeology, not the exact Forum nor the precise etiquette of the toga, but the man, the Caesar, the ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker |
