"Pedant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... young man; he was not quite forty. He had led a varied and somewhat eccentric career. His father, a morose man, had a coldness for him. Young Stanhope, according to his own account, was an absolute pedant at the university. "When I talked my best I quoted Horace; when I aimed at being facetious I quoted Martial; and when I had a mind to be a fine gentleman I talked Ovid. I was convinced that none but the ancients had common-sense; that the classics contained ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... The name of a pedant is so formidable to young men when they first sally from their colleges, and is so liberally scattered by those who mean to boast their elegance of education, easiness of manners, and knowledge of the world, that it seems to require particular consideration; since, perhaps, if it were ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... pedant waste his oil, With the soldier all is sport; Let your blockheads make a coil In the cloister or the court; Let them fatten in their stall, We can ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... I passe to their signification, which in the same dialect may be call'd the soul of a word, as the sound is its body; to expresse it in other terms, then what seem to rellish the dry and unpleasant humour of the Pedant or Grammarian; I suppose that words being the expressions of our thoughts, and our thoughts the representations of objects, the different significations that are given to words, principally depend upon the various conceptions, that every Nation frames ...
— A Philosophicall Essay for the Reunion of the Languages - Or, The Art of Knowing All by the Mastery of One • Pierre Besnier
... so that when he had them, he enjoyed them without affectation, and when he had them not, he did not want them. No one could ever say of him that he was either a sophist or a [home-bred] flippant slave or a pedant; but every one acknowledged him to be a man ripe, perfect, above flattery, able to manage his own and other men's affairs. Besides this, he honored those who were true philosophers, and he did not reproach those who ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... friend Wickham, telling him if his eye should see anything of it through the newspapers, he would wonder how so much A B C knowledge could be tolerated here, but that I saw it was necessary to state it, and therefore he must not think me so much of a pedant as he might otherwise be disposed to do. Had the thing been suffered to pass unnoticed, I might have hoped at some time or other to gain some credit for a speech when I saw an occasion offered to make one; and I have vanity enough to believe that I could make a much better almost ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... sense, with a perfect accord of intelligence, good taste, and good manners. Later, when pretension crept into the inferior circles which took this one for a model, the term came to mean a sort of intellectual parvenue, half prude and half pedant, who affected learning, and paraded it ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... removed from the jurisdiction of Boyer, we were near enough (as I have said) to understand a little of his system. We occasionally heard sounds of the Ululantes, and caught glances of Tartarus. B. was a rabid pedant. His English style was crampt to barbarism. His Easter anthems (for his duty obliged him to those periodical flights) were grating as scrannel pipes.[4]—He would laugh, ay, and heartily, but then it must ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... best. The people do not interest me; I avoid them, and must appear in their eyes even more deluded than I am to come to this secluded spot at this unseasonable moment and be satisfied with my own society—no, not my own society, but that of these kind brotherly mountains. From a prosaic pedant I can almost feel myself becoming an ecstatical hermit, and my soul getting ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... in our temperate climate: whence it comes, that our english booke-knowledge in these cases is both disgraced and condemned, euery one fayling in his experiments, because he is guided by no home-bredde, but a stranger; as if to reade the english tongue there were none better then an Italian Pedant. This to auoide, I will neither begge ayde nor authoritie from strangers, but reuerence them as worthies and fathers of their ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... insincerity of patrons, by that bread which is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most toilsome of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick. Through all these things the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to eminence and command. It was natural that, in the exercise of his power, he should be "eo immitior, quia toleraverat," that, though his heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his demeanour in society should be harsh and despotic. For severe distress he had sympathy, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... though it may shock you to think so, these Stuart princes of yours are not wise men. Legitimate monarchs of England though they may be, they do not possess the qualities that endear kings to their people. From what I have heard, James was a heavy pedant, a rank coward, essentially not a man to be popular among a spirited people. Charles had a noble presence and many fine qualities. But, although his ideas of kingly power would have suited us well enough in France, his arbitrary measures alienated a large proportion ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... But if he had courage, he had not the initiative of a man of action. He invented none of the ideas or methods of the Revolution, not even the Reign of Terror, but he was very dexterous in accepting or appropriating what more audacious spirits than himself had devised and enforced. The pedant, cursed with the ambition to be a ruler of men, is a curious study. He would be glad not to go too far, and yet his chief dread is lest he be left behind. His consciousness of pure aims allows him to become an accomplice in the worst crimes. Suspecting ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... critics may praise their subtle and elegant brevity; yet Dr. Bentley (Dissertation upon Phalaris, p. 48) might justly, though quaintly observe, that "you feel, by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with some dreaming pedant, with his elbow ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... histories; of some of their doings, and of some of their contemplated doings. These kindergarten pictures I will endeavor to paint, not in that "over-the-head" verbosity or "under-the-feet" profundity and intricacy of the political economy pedant, which are as the canvases of the Whistler school to the masses; but rather will I use the brush of the artisan who in giving us our white fences, our gray cottages, and our green blinds sets off those ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... affectation of bombastic diction—it is lamentable to see a preelucidated theme rendered semidiaphonous, by the elimination of simple expression, to make room for the conglomeration of pondrous periods, and to exhibit the phonocamptic coxcombry of some pedant, who mistakes sentences for wagons, and words for ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... did I say? What honour to the other does this imply! When one might challenge the proudest pedant of them all, to say he has been disciplined into greater improvement, than she had made from the mere force of genius and application. But it is demonstrable to all who know how to make observations on their acquaintance of both sexes, arrogant as some are of their superficialities, that ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... two principal masters—it is they who spoil the taste of my food and mingle my drink with ashes. They are, in their way, well-meaning and conscientious men. But is it not possible to love discipline without being a pedant, and to be vigilant without being a sneak? I fear in the back of my heart that Kipling thinks that the trade of a schoolmaster is one which no generous or self-respecting man can adopt. And yet it is a useful and necessary ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... none. Little secret plans as to what they were to read about, and think about, and pray about on certain days of the week and at certain hours of the day and the night. You must not call the father an old pedant, for the fact is, it was the son who was the pedant if there was one in that happy house. The two intimate friends had a word between them they called agenda. And nobody but themselves knew where they had borrowed that uncouth word, what language it was, or what it meant. Only ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... eyes, shone with extraordinary fire, she grew red and pale by turns, and stirred convulsively in her chair. How admirable is the Italian organization, which can understand poetry without needing a pedant to ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... modesty. Men now, he says, cannot welcome a friend but straight they must be in hand with tobacco. He that refused a pipe in company was accounted peevish and unsociable. 'Yea,' says the royal coxcomb and pedant, 'the mistress cannot in a more mannerly kind entertain her servant than by giving him out of her fair hand a pipe of tobacco.' The royal reformer (not the most virtuous or cleanly of men) closes his denunciation with this tremendous ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... the hour of his triumph was at hand, he was too experienced and too Spanish to be precipitate. He may well have had an inkling that, if many were repelled by Luis de Leon's austerity and implacable righteousness, his own reputation as a pedant and reactionary did not mark him out for leadership. His lack of expository power may also have struck him as a disqualification.[42] Further, on tactical grounds, he may have argued that his notorious hostility to Luis de Leon made it advisable for him not to figure too prominently in ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... Lord Chief Baron Rochfort. George, his eldest son. Nim, his second son, John, so called from his love of hunting. Dan, Mr. Jackson, a parson. Gaulstown, the Baron's seat. Sheridan, a pedant and pedagogue. Delany, chaplain to Sir Constantine Phipps, when Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Dragon, the name of the boat on the canal. Dean Percival and his wife, friends of the Baron ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... society must ever be subjected." "To play the lion under such circumstances must," as the knowing Lockhart observes, "be difficult at the best; but a delicate business indeed, when the jackals are presumptuous. The pedant could not stomach the superior success of his friend, and yet—alas for poor human nature!—he certainly was one of the most enthusiastic of his admirers, and one of the most affectionate of all his intimates." It seems that the Duchess of Gordon had some hope that her friend, Mr. Addington, ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... dear Bessie, is naught but a miserable pedant, who loves nothing so well as hearing himself talk, and prating by the hour together on matters of law and religion, and on the divine right of kings. He is not the King such as England has been wont to know—a ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... a pretty touch of the pedant (who exists, says M. De Banville, in the heart of the poet) in ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... giving vent to them. This fact, so creditable to the candour of his nature, I learn from a loose sheet in his handwriting, containing the following corrections. In place of the passage beginning "Or if my Muse a pedant's portrait ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... sneered in a gentlemanly manner, employing polite phraseology; others coarsely caricatured it. Many were insulted by its incomprehensible erudition; a few growled at its shallowness. To-day there was a hint at plagiarism; to-morrow an outright, wholesale theft was asserted. Now she was a pedant; and then a sciolist. Reviews poured in upon her thick and fast; all found grievous faults, but no two reviewers settled on the same error. What one seemed disposed to consider almost laudable the other denounced violently. One eminently shrewd, lynx-eyed editor discovered that ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... of the use of a canon may be illustrated in many ways; for, like all notions which resume actual experiences, it will be found applicable in many spheres. Thus, on the subject of verse, the eternal quarrel between the poet and the pedant is, that for the first the rules of prosody and rhyme are only useful in so far as they make the licenses he takes appreciable at their just value; while for the pedant such licenses ever anew seem to imply ignorance of the rule or incapacity ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... was a pedant fool, Meting beauty by a rule: Pallas? Juno? Venus?—he Should have chosen all ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... emotion: the passion of the pedant). Caesar: once in ten generations of men, the ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... him, we apply to ourselves, because he applies it so himself as a means of general reasoning. He is a great moralizer; and what makes him worth attending to is, that he moralizes on his own feelings and experience. He is not a commonplace pedant. If Lear shows the greatest depth of passion, Hamlet is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, originality, and unstudied development of character. Shakespeare had more magnanimity than any other poet, and he has shown more of it in this play than in any other. There is no attempt to force an interest: ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... a favourite of King James the Fourth of Scotland and First of England, and an author of several poetical tragedies, wished {95} to follow the example of Sir Frederick Gorges, one of the promoters of the colonisation of New England. He had no difficulty in obtaining from James, as great a pedant as himself, a grant of Acadia, which he named Nova Scotia. When Charles the First became king, he renewed the patent, and also, at the persuasion of the ambitious poet, created an order of Nova Scotia baronets, who were obliged to assist in the settlement ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... illustrious chief. I refer to one only, which is of peculiar value, on account of the quarter whence it comes. It is that of the great German writer Niebuhr, whose accurate acquaintance with every important scene of modern as well as ancient history was unparalleled: and who was no mere pedant, but a man practically versed in active life, and had been personally acquainted with most of the leading men in the great events of the early part of this century. Niebuhr, in the passage which I allude to, [Roman History, vol. v. p. 17.] after ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... father would have thought it a crime to keep books from a boy on the plea that he might injure the bindings or lose the volumes or get harm from unlicensed reading. I did exactly what I liked in the library and browsed about with a splendid incoherence which would have shocked a pedant, but delighted a true man of letters. Now I would open the folio edition of Ben Jonson, now Congreve's plays and poems printed by Baskerville; now a volume of "Counsel's Brief delivered in the defence of Warren Hastings Esqre. at his impeachment," which we happened to possess; ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Chesterfield, then Lord Stanhope, was entered at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. It was one of the features of his character to fall at once into the tone of the society into which he happened to be thrown. One can hardly imagine his being 'an absolute pedant,' but such was, actually, his own account of himself:—'When I talked my best, I quoted Horace; when I aimed at being facetious, I quoted Martial; and when I had a mind to be a fine gentleman, I talked ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... caricature so flagrantly untrue. She knew Mark Pattison's quality, and could never have meant to draw the writer of some of the most fruitful and illuminating of English essays, and one of the most brilliant pieces of European biography, in the dreary and foolish pedant who overshadows Middlemarch. But the fact that Mark Pattison was an elderly scholar with a young wife, and that George Eliot knew him, led later on to a legend which was, I am sure, unwelcome to the writer of Middlemarch, while her supposed ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... made as good show of argument as he could, but was evidently no match for his antagonist. He was soon vanquished in the wordy warfare. Well he might be, for it appeared that the stranger was no less a personage than Peter Rythovius, a doctor of divinity, a distinguished pedant of Louvain, a relation of a bishop and himself a Church dignitary. This learned professor, quite at home in his subject, was easily triumphant, while the poor dissenter, more accustomed to elevate the hearts of his hearers than to perplex their heads, sank prostrate and breathless ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... than the king to meet opposition with violent measures, was imbued with whig theories. While George sought to rule by securing the support of parliament, Grenville tried to use that support to enable him to rule the king. He was a pedant, and lectured the king on his duty like a schoolmaster. Bute stood in his way as the king's ally and secret counsellor. His victory over him was partial and short-lived. While Bute was in the country the king corresponded with him, and he returned to London in the ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... and two or three others in the Play, I must confess I was moved with the utmost Indignation at the trivial, senseless, and unnatural Representation of the Chaplain. It is possible there may be a Pedant in Holy Orders, and we have seen one or two of them in the World; but such a Driveler as Sir Roger, so bereft of all manner of Pride, which is the Characteristick of a Pedant, is what one would not believe could come into the Head of the same Man who drew the rest of the Play. The Meeting between ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... its expression. He had just the temperament to take up with the mode of the Nineties that drove the Young Men to asserting themselves and upholding their doctrines in papers and magazines of their own. The pedant may trace the fashion back to the Hobby-horse of the Eighties, or, in a further access of pedantry to the Germ of the early Fifties. He may follow its growth as late as the Blast of yesterday and The Gypsy of to-day. But I do not have to go ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Albrechtsberger and Salieri were for a time his teachers, but Beethoven got on no better with them, and Albrechtsberger said, "Have nothing to do with him; he has learnt nothing, and will never do anything in decent style." Perhaps not in your pedant's ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... misunderstanding which attaches to most other poets. The opponents of Victor Hugo called him a mere windbag; the opponents of Shakespeare called him a buffoon. But the admirers of Hugo and Shakespeare at least knew better. Now the admirers and opponents of Browning alike make him out to be a pedant rather than a poet. The only difference between the Browningite and the anti-Browningite, is that the second says he was not a poet but a mere philosopher, and the first says he was a philosopher and not a mere poet. The admirer disparages poetry in order to ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... he, after a little pause. "I'm rather well acquainted with his method, and the fact that he's been given charge of the coroner's examination isn't a very hopeful sign. He's a sort of pedant, who has come to think that the mixture of medical learning and knowledge of police conventions which he possesses makes him a ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... of kings, greatest in valour, in virtue, in wisdom, with what indignation must thy soul, enthroned in heaven, have looked down on thy unworthy, thy degenerate daughter! With what shame must thou have seen her rambling about from court to court deprived of her royal dignity, debased into a pedant, a witling, a smatterer in sculpture and painting, reduced to beg or buy flattery from each needy rhetorician or hireling poet! I weep to think on this stain, this dishonourable stain, to thy illustrious blood! And yet, would to ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... our conventional Irishman in the pedant who, on going abroad, was asked by a friend to buy him two slave-boys of fifteen years each, and replied, "If I cannot find such a pair, I will bring you one of thirty years;" and in the fellow who was quarrelling with his father, and said to him, "Don't you know how much injury ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... the whole, as a 'dull prosaist,' and the patron of pedantry! Addison, the man of all that ever lived most hostile even to what was good in pedantry, to its tendencies towards the profound in erudition and the non- popular; Addison, the champion of all that is easy, natural, superficial, a pedant and a master of pedantry! Get down, Schlosser, this moment; or let ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... like Thales, who was so intent looking at the stars that he fell into a well, "was so eager to know what was going on in heaven that he could not see what was before his feet."[66] And consequently the poor pedant dined on the remnants left after his employer and her husband had cleared the board; and had rancid oil and sour wine given him, when they enjoyed the best. The slaves had snubbed him and made fun of him; the freedmen regarded him with absolute disdain; Valeria's regular visitors treated ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... his speech worked a pretty enough havoc with fine-spun rhetoric to raise the wig off a pedant's head, Jean and I thought we read some ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... to the civil arm to protect the victim, but, for reasons which seem good to him, turns tail, breaks his arranged part, and is very nearly accessory to a murder. At the other end of the story, carrying out his general character of prig-pedant, as selfish as self-righteous, he meets Valjean's rather foolish and fantastic self-sacrifice with illiberal suspicion, and practically kills the poor old creature by separating him from Cosette. When the eclaircissement ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... it? Will he go with it to that ancient and famous England that once was governed by statesmen—by Burleighs and by Walsinghams; by Bolingbrokes and by Walpoles; by a Chatham and a Canning—will he go to it with this fantastic scheming of some presumptuous pedant? I won't believe it. I have that confidence in the common sense, I will say the common spirit of our countrymen, that I believe they will not long endure this huckstering tyranny of the Treasury Bench—these political pedlars that bought ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... I am no pedant that I should cavil at Mr. JUSTIN HUNTLY MCCARTHY'S re-adjustment of history. It was all for our delight that Claude Duval, instead of perishing on the scaffold, should escape from prison, have his freedom confirmed by the KING'S pardon, confound everybody else's knavish tricks and marry ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... tangle?" Which it was, and no one could look upon it without keen delight, unless he were a horticultural pedant in whom the appreciation of nature had been killed by parterres. There was some principle of order, and even now, when the Pleasaunce is a wilderness, the traces can be found. A dwarf fruit tree stood at every corner, and between the trees a three-foot border of flowers kept ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... father" is certainly like a father; and although a man may be surly in his "countenance," I do not well see how he could be surly in his "gait;" besides, what had occurred to make the pedant surly? This appears to me the best reason for rejecting surly in favour of "surely;" but I have another, which can hardly be refused to an editor who professes to follow the old copies, where they are not contradicted. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... Commander-in-Chief had over-rated his ability; and I was therefore not surprised when he afterwards turned out to be the most complete example, amongst the many this War has afforded, of the Staff College "pedant," whose "superior education" had given him little idea of how to ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... say that dear Casey's estimate had the arid accuracy of the pedant, but she had a rich and helpful imagination. In rare moments of depression and unhappiness I have found that by reading one of her testimonials I can always recover my tone. And they were effective for their ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... noticed that these two forces of discrimination exist sometimes almost independently of each other, in rare and radiant instances confounded and blended in one immense and unique love. Who has not been, unless perhaps some dusty old pedant, thrilled and driven to pleasure by the action of a book that penetrates to and speaks to you of your most present and most intimate emotions. This is of course pure sensualism; but to take a less marked stage. Why should Marlowe enchant me? why should he delight and awake enthusiasm in ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... can no more be translated than a symphony for the strings can be adequately represented upon the organ. You may persuade yourself that you have got the substance; you have missed the perfection of the form. Yet who but a narrow pedant will insist that the study of any literature, ancient or modern, is valuable chiefly for familiarizing us with the language, not for enriching our minds with the subject matter? Do we desire to understand the past and so to be better able to estimate the importance ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... is he a clear thinker. He is also an original and independent thinker. He has not the professional taint of the German pedant. He has the German professor's minute knowledge of concrete facts, and his doctrinaire love of abstract principles, but he is not a mere scholar and teacher. He always remains the man of the world, and he brings to the consideration of historical problems the practical experience which he ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... against hexameter verse in English. The genius of the Northern languages refuses this old heroic measure, which the Latins borrowed from the Greeks, and all the scholarship and finish of Longfellow has not been able to establish it in English. Harvey was a pedant so thoroughly tinctured with classical learning, that he would trammel his own language by ancient rules, instead of letting it grow into the assertion ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... varying degrees of talent—with, in one or two cases, even a little genius—all these writers had broken themselves upon one fatal difficulty—that of anachronism: not in the petty sense of the pedant, but in the wide one of the critic. The present writer is not prepared, without reading A Peep at Our Ancestors again (which he distinctly declines to do), to say that there are, in that remarkable performance, any positive errors of historic ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... "the prettiest pedant in the world," was thus paid out for his intrigues against La Bruyere in the ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... leader in a barring out. (Johnson's Works, vii. 419.) Garrick entered the school about two years after Johnson left. According to Garrick's biographer, Tom Davies (p. 3), 'Hunter was an odd mixture of the pedant and the sportsman. Happy was the boy who could slily inform his offended master where a covey of partridges was to be found; this notice was a certain pledge of his pardon.' Lord Campbell in his Lives of the Chief Justices, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... two great men, whom history has not failed to distinguish—Archie Armstrong and George Buchanan—the wit and the scholar, which in him became the representatives of two much more useful and esteemed qualities—fool and pedant! ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... epilogues to Phaedra and to Lucius he is very happily facetious; but in the prologue before the queen, the pedant has found his way, with ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... like Spenser and Sidney, were for a time misled into the vain attempt to graft exotic forms upon the homely growths of native poetry, they soon saw their mistake and revolted in silence against the ridiculous pedant who preferred the limping hexameters of the Arcadia to Sidney's sonnets, and the spavined iambics of ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... wide hall could be heard in the stillness the old clock, that now lifted up its voice with unwonted emphasis, as if, unnoticed through the bustling week, Sunday was its vantage ground, to proclaim to mortals the swift flight of time. And if the old pedant performed the task with something of an ostentatious precision, it was because in that house nothing else put on official airs, and the clock felt the responsibility of doing it ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... service as "intendant." The serio-comic figure of this personage, so graphically drawn by George Sand herself in the memoirs of her early life, will never be forgotten by any reader of those reminiscences. Pedant, she says, was written in every line of his countenance and every movement that he made. He was possessed of some varied learning, much narrow prejudice, and a violent, crotchety temper, but had proved during the troubles of ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... men, in which," etc. But how does it define the "Invisible" one? And what does "faithful" mean? What if I thought Cromwell and Pierre Leroux infinitely more faithful men in their way, and better members of the "Invisible Church," than the torturer-pedant Laud, or the facing ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... be no less futile than presumptuous to lay down exact formulae as to what the artist ought and ought not to do. No modern critic is likely to waste his time in framing rules and canons, which can be so easily handled by the pedant and stand condemned by the first great man who defies them. Aristotle did it once and for all for the Greek drama, and when the perspective of life widened and new forms of literature grew up to compete with drama, his rules were destined either to shackle literature or to be thrown ruthlessly ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... us in the full career of our pleasures, and with importunate remorses comes to bridle our fleet desires. The horrid thing reserves for us most cruel and matchless rigours. It is like a troublesome pedant one is forced to hear, who always growls, but never touches us, and frequently like D———, and such like venerable impertinents, lose the time ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... when appealing to a German Brigadier-General on behalf of some homeless women and children, the Prussian martinet—half pedant and half poltroon—answered her with a quotation from Nietzsche to the effect that "Pity is a waste of feeling—a moral parasite injurious to the health." She early felt the cruel and iron will of the invader, but, nothing daunted, ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck
... of the British frigate, one of the boobies, pointing to Lord Charles, called to me, "Poll, who is that?" I answered, "Red tape and sealing-wax;" and raised a general shout at the expense of the little diplomatic pedant. An Irish midshipman present, a Mr. O'Gallagher, pointing to Mr. Henry, asked me, "Who is that, Poll?" "Good for nothing," I replied; and Mr. Henry flew at me in a rage, swore I had been taught to insult him, and that he would wring my neck off. This he would have ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... began to address him in Latin; but, turning quick towards him, he gaily said, "Monsieur, j'ai l'honneur de representer Ciceron, le grand Ciceron, pere de sa patrie! mais quoique j'ai cet honneur-la, je ne suit pas pedant!—mon dieu, Monsieur, je ne parle que le Francois dans la bonne compagnie!" And, politely ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... home at Down. New species of animals and plants were being described by naturalists at an alarming rate. The bulk of knowledge of specific characters and the necessity of specialisation bade fair to make every species-monger a dry and narrow pedant; and the pedants quarrelled about the characters and limits ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... in this "model of human life," to quote Fielding's own descriptive phrase of his book, those which tell us most of their author are that worthy, authoritative, humourous clergyman, Dr Harrison; the good Sergeant Atkinson; and that fiery pedant Colonel Bath, with his kind heart hidden under a ferocious passion for calling out every man whom he conceived to have slighted his honour. Dr Harrison does not win quite the same place in our hearts as the man whom Thackeray calls 'dear Parson Adams'; his cassock rustles a little too ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... sharers to the full in the struggles and vicissitudes of life. He can appreciate their enormous learning, their unwearied labour, their sense of honour in their profession; and the editor of texts, the collator of various readings and emendations, the annotator who to us perhaps seems but a learned pedant appears to him as a man of sound and philosophic thought, of enthusiasm for truth and light—perhaps of genius—a man, too, with human affections and interests, with a history not devoid of romance. There ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... avoiding contention, thou didst never answer this blustering Franck, but wentest quietly about thy quiet Lea, and left him his roaring Brora and windy Assynt. How could this noisy man know thee—and know thee he did, having argued with thee in Stafford—and not love Isaak Walton? A pedant angler, I call him, a plaguy angler, so let him huff away, and turn we to thee and to thy sweet charm in ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... literature. By the old ten-o'clock rule (I do not refer to Whistler's lecture), once observed in Board schools, no scripture could be taught after that hour. Once a teacher asked his class who was the wisest man. 'Solomon,' said a little boy. 'Right; go up top,' said the teacher. But there was a small pedant who, while never paying much attention to the lessons, and being usually at the bottom of the form in consequence, knew the regulations by heart. He interrupted with a shrill voice (for the clock had passed the hour), 'No, sir, please, sir; past ten o'clock, ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... history,—light on the waves over which they had gleamed,—all the ocean elsewhere dark! With him thought I; as my father spoke, his child believed. But what to the eyes of the world was this inheritor of a vaunted name?—a threadbare, slighted, rustic pedant; no station in the very province in which mouldered away the last lowly dwelling-place of his line,—by lineage high above most nobles, in position below most yeomen. He had learning; he had genius: but the studies ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... would you compare this meaningless stuff with Kent in F? Why, in Kent, the dominant sentiment of each composition is admirably preserved. His 'Magnificat' is lofty jubilation, with a free, onward rush. His 'Dimittis' is divine repose after life's fever. But this poor pedant's 'Magnificat' begins with a mere crash, and then falls into the pathetic—an excellent thing in its place, but not in a song of triumph. As to his 'Dimittis,' it simply defies the words. This is no Christian sunset. It is not good old Simeon gently declining to his ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... withal!" hint some calumniously. [Paulus Jovius, &c. See Pauli, iii. 70-73.] "Hector of Germany!" say others. He tried some small prefatory Siege or scalade of Pesth; could not do it; and came his ways home again, as the best course. Pedant Chroniclers give him the name HECTOR, "Joachim Hector,"—to match that of CICERO and that of ACHILLES. A man of solid structure, this our Hector, in body and mind: extensive cheeks, very large ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... at that day, even as before and since, a very intimate relation between good living and good reading. The practical person, the wary pedant, and the supercritical will scoff at this, ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... profligate atheism of the elder poet had estranged his friend, or at all events had kept him at a distance. But a feeling of common loyalty, and the anger which a true man of letters feels when a genuine poet is traduced by a pedant, led Nash to take up a very strong position as a defender of the reputation of Greene. Gabriel Harvey, although the friend of Spenser, is a personage who fills an odious place in the literary history of the ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... and left me particular orders to send him an express if the King died: but here's the Prince, dead and he said nothing about him." You would easily believe this story, if you knew what a mere law-pedant it is! ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... only desire to live by my Goods, and I hope you will be pleas'd to allow some difference between a neat fresh Piece, piping hot out of the Classicks, and old thread-bare worn-out Stuff that has past thro' ev'ry Pedant's Mouth...." ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... great credit also. Peter Petersen Syv (1631-1702) was a very able philologist, who was also a minor poet of ambition. In 1695 he reprinted and edited Vedel's text, adding 100 more kjaempeviser which had been unknown to Vedel. But his work was not so well done; Syv was something of a pedant, and unfortunately either too critical or not critical enough. He ventured to correct the irregularities of the ballads, and not seldom has spoiled them. He bore the proud title of Philologer Royal of Denmark, and he was above all things ...
— Grimhild's Vengeance - Three Ballads • Anonymous
... more aspiring, less sensuous art which belongs to Western civilisation may bear many a change and not die utterly; nay, may feed on its intellect alone for a season, and enduring the martyrdom of a grim time of ugliness, may live on, rebuking at once the narrow-minded pedant of science, and the luxurious tyrant of plutocracy, till change bring back the spring again, and it blossoms once more into pleasure. May it ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... salutations, languages, all which Wolfius behelde with great content upon the Venetian Rialto, as he describes diffusedly in his book the World's Epitome, which Sannazar so bepraiseth, e contra our Polydore can see nothing in it; they call me singular, a pedant, fantastic, words of reproach in this age, which is all too neoterick ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... wrote down those words. But in this question of fairy tales my immediate point is, not how near he was to hell, but how very far off he was from fairyland. That notion about the hero with a magic sword being the superman with a magic superiority is the caprice of a pedant; no child, boy, or man ever felt it in the story of Jack the Giant Killer. Obviously the moral is all the other way. Jack's fairy sword and invisible coat are clumsy expedients for enabling him to fight at all with something which is by nature stronger. They are a rough, ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... a mansion of the kind which Russia builds for her military settlers and for German colonists. A noticeable circumstance was the fact that the taste of the architect had differed from that of the proprietor—the former having manifestly been a pedant and desirous of symmetry, and the latter having wished only for comfort. Consequently he (the proprietor) had dispensed with all windows on one side of the mansion, and had caused to be inserted, in their place, only ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... perfection of draughtsmanship and chiaroscuro equally supreme, and that, consequently, there is not a single universally accepted work of his which is absolutely free from the reproaches of the academic pedant." Secondly, the surface of this portrait has lost its original glow through cleaning, and has suffered other damage, which actually debarred Crowe and Cavalcaselle (who saw the picture in 1877) from pronouncing definitely upon the authorship. ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... social initiation. It is a kind of hazing which we visit upon one another. But we do not isolate the comic personage as we do the solitary, tragic figure. The comic personage is usually a type; he is one of an absurd group; he is a miser, a pedant, a pretentious person, a doctor or a lawyer in whom the professional traits have become automatic so that he thinks more of his professional behavior than he does of human health and human justice. Of all these separatist tendencies, laughter is the great corrective. When the individual ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... not even the grace to be ashamed! Yet I am shamed, messire, that Osmund Heleigh should have become the book-muddled pedant you are. For ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... quarter a pedant, whose name was Boubekir Muezin, a vain, haughty, and envious person: he hated the rich, only because he was poor, his misery making him angry at his neighbour's prosperity. He heard talk of Zeyn Alasnam, and of the plenty his house afforded. This was ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... subdued and tamed in us that the memory of him in literature shall be left to perish; that what is lewd and ribald in the great poets shall be kept out of such editions as are meant for general reading, and that the pedant-pride which now perpetuates it as an essential part of those poets shall no longer have its way. At the end of the ends such things do defile, they do corrupt. We may palliate them or excuse them for this reason or that, but that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... pedagogue, perhaps something of a pedant, a hot partisan, a special pleader; but few lives can show a more dignified and noble end. If it was the truth he had written this old man cared for nothing else, not even for that fame which is the last infirmity of noble ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... and he had perceived the cynical indifference with which educated men often regarded it. Science and learning seemed to have made men only more selfish. Indeed, the ignorant peasant seemed to him humbler and more virtuous than the pompous pedant. In a passionate protest—his Discourse on Arts and Sciences (1749)—Rousseau denounced learning as the badge of selfishness and corruption, for it was used to gratify the pride and childish curiosity of the rich, rather than to right the wrongs ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... students more thoroughly at home, from no one did they receive more keen sympathy, more generous recognition, or more friendly help. He did not like a mere smattering of literary chatter; he did not like to be called a pedant; but he knew, if any man did, what literature was and what was knowledge. He was eager to welcome good work in every field, however far it might be from ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... qui sur l'Antique glose, Idolatrant le hom, sans connoitre la Chose, Vrai Peste des beaux Arts, sans Gout sans Equite, Quitez ce ton pedant, ce mepris affecte, Pour tout ce que le Tems n'a pas ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... calls another a Cartesian[17] but he who is one himself, a pedant but a pedant, a provincial but a provincial; and I would wager it was the printer who put it on the title of ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... little beggar!" said Daventry. "And we don't know so very much more about it all than he does. I expect he's a Muscovy duck, or drake, if you're a pedant about genders." ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... was reticent, and kept on with his work. In his cell at Santa Fosca, he quietly and steadily devoted himself to his cherished studies; but he continued to study more than books or inanimate nature. He was neither a bookworm nor a pedant. On his various missions he met and discoursed with churchmen and statesmen concerned in the greatest transactions of his time, notably at Mantua with Oliva, secretary of one of the greatest ecclesiastics at the Council of Trent; at Milan with Cardinal ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... either confines himself to two pamphlets, or, more probably, speaks of the three as written by only two authors. Leigh is, I presume, the contemptible pedant, and the Sir Fastidious Brisk of Oxford. The Cambridge author, who imitated his style, is the Fungoso of the Dedication:—"As for the errors they pretend to find in me, I could easily show them that the greatest part of them are beauties; and for the rest, I could recriminate upon the best ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... into her chamber to bring the hand-mirror, and when in an instant she returned and, at her bidding, he held the shining glass before her, she patted his cheeks with their thin, fair, pointed beard, and called him her faithful little Wolf, her clear, stupid pedant and Satan in person, who would fill ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... widespread love of gossip, the quick and ever-present tendency to disparage others, especially the fortunate and the successful, are manifestations of this type of superiority seeking. Half the humor of the world is the pleasure, produced by a technique, of feeling superior to the boor, the pedant, the fool, the new rich, the pompous, the over-dignified, etc. Half, more than half, of the conversation that goes on in boudoir, dining room, over the drinks and in the smoking room, is criticism, playful and otherwise, of others. There are ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... pedant, this is The patroness of heavenly harmony: Then give me leave to have prerogative; And when in music we have spent an hour, Your lecture shall have leisure ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... utter disappointment I found them wonderfully shrunk, and lessened almost out of my knowledge. I looked with contempt on the tribes painted on the church walls, which I once so much admired, and on the carved chimneypiece in the Squire's Hall. I found my old master to be a poor ignorant pedant; and, in short, the whole scene to be extremely changed for the worse. This I could not help mentioning, because though it be of no consequence in itself, yet it is certain, that most prejudices are contracted and retained by this narrow way of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... the good sense to choose an able master for his son—'a man of profound learning, possessed of both the ancient languages, whose method of teaching is the finest and most time-saving that has yet been tried; a gentleman withal, with nothing of the pedant in him.'[6] The boy was lucky also in the companion of his studies, a cousin, Cristoforo Tasso, who had come from Bergamo to profit ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... always this compartmentising of the facts of existence. Scratch the sentimentalism and aestheticism of a German, and you come upon a pedant. Wedekind has not altogether escaped this national peculiarity. But he writes for to-morrow, not yesterday; for youth, and not to destroy the cherished prejudices of the old. His admirers speak of him as a unicum, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... from his eccentric grandfather. He was practised daily in talking Latin, to which afterwards he added a competent study of the Greek; and finally he became unusually learned for his rank, but the most absolute and undistinguishing pedant that perhaps literature has to show. He sneers continually at the regular built academic pedant; but he himself, though no academic, was essentially the very impersonation of pedantry. No thought however beautiful, no image however magnificent, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... every point upon equal terms. And yet under all her learning and her firmness ran a sweet, womanly nature, peeping out in her talk, shining in her greenish eyes, showing itself in a thousand subtle ways which the dullest of men could read. And he, though a bit of a prig and a pedant, was by no means dull, and had honesty enough to confess when ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fade and fade, and vanish into nothingness. And when the real woman has shown him how utterly false and impossible this dream woman was—then, Mr. Peter Vibart, I hope she will laugh at you —as I do, and turn her back upon you—as I do, and leave you —for the very superior, very pedantic pedant that you are—and scorn you—as I do, most of all because you are merely a —creature!" With the word, she flung up her head and stamped her foot at me, and turning, swept out through the ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... being always devoted to music and dress. At this time her strongest ambition was to be every inch a woman. She gave up serious studies, to which she had applied herself, and cultivated even music as a mere accomplishment, fearful lest she should be considered a pedant or an artiste. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... mayn't agree With FECHNER'S pedant formulae, I don't complain of such disparity; Too flawless that perfection shows; For me a larger comfort flows From human failings (take your nose— I like its ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... to have become specially skilled in minor tactics, or in the daily routine of company or regimental service. He was, however, so profoundly devoted to the military profession in a larger way, that at times he gave to those less learned than himself the idea that he was a pedant in knowledge and a martinet on duty. With imperturbable self-possession, great lucidity of statement and a decidedly deliberate and austere manner, he was widely recognized as a masterful man, who won easily ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... conversation what the stone is to the pulp of the peach, what the cob is to the kernels on an ear of Indian corn. Once more: Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant, with all his knowledge and valuable qualities, and will "cavil on the ninth part of a hair," if it will give him a chance to show ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... matters the most trivial, and he turns into ridicule the most sacred subjects. In the midst of his own circle of fops and silly women, he utters his shallow conceits with all the pompous assurance of a pedant. ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... shall raise, And decent Truth be call'd, and loved as, modest Praise. "O happy child! the glorious day shall shine, When every ear shall to thy speech incline, Thy words alluring and thy voice divine: The sullen pedant and the sprightly wit, To hear thy soothing eloquence shall sit; And both, abjuring Flattery, will agree That Truth inspires, and they must honour thee. "Envy himself shall to thy accents bend, Force a faint smile, and sullenly attend, ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe
... said, "what a blessed thing to be in the open air again—to be quit of all their niggling and naggling, to be quit of that pompous old fool the Rector, and of that hypocrite Joliffe, and of that pedant of a doctor! Why does he want to waste money on cementing the vaults? It's only digging up pestilences; and they won't spend a farthing on the organ. Not a penny on the Father Smith, clear and sweet-voiced as a mountain brook. Oh," he cried, "it's too bad! The naturals are worn down to the quick, ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... pleasing or surprising, of diverting or informing, the reader. I have seen a play (if I mistake not it is one of Mrs. Behn's or of Mrs. Centlivre's) where this vice in a voyage-writer is finely ridiculed. An ignorant pedant, to whose government, for I know not what reason, the conduct of a young nobleman in his travels is committed, and who is sent abroad to show my lord the world, of which he knows nothing himself, before his departure from a town, calls for his Journal ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... so clearly! somber, jovial, a little absurd, with his head stuffed full of allegories and symbols, Gothic and rococo, choleric, obstinate, serene, with a passion for life, and a great longing for death ...—he saw him in his school, a genial pedant, surrounded by his pupils, dirty, coarse, vagabond, ragged, with hoarse voices, the ragamuffins with whom he squabbled, and sometimes fought like a navvy, one of whom once gave him a mighty thrashing ...—he saw him with his family, surrounded by his twenty-one ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... near the Doon; secondly, by John Murdoch, student of divinity, who undertook to teach arithmetic, grammar, French, and Latin, to the boys of Lochlea, and the sons of five neighboring farmers. Murdoch, who was an enthusiast in learning, much of a pedant, and such a judge of genius that he thought wit should always be laughing, and poetry wear an eternal smile, performed his task well: he found Robert to be quick in apprehension, and not afraid to study when ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... whom common sense had the upper hand felt sensible of the immense distance remaining to be filled up between a genius of the highest order and a learned pedant; and they became in a manner free-thinkers, rejected all belief in theory, and affirmed the conduct of War to be a natural function of man, which he performs more or less well according as he has brought with him into the world more or less talent in that ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... may venture to offer an advice, I should say employ the next two years in letting him see a little more of real life and acquire a due sense of its practical objects. Send him to a private tutor who is not a pedant, but a man of letters or a man of the world, and if in the metropolis so much the better. In a word, my young friend is unlike other people; and, with qualities that might do anything in life, I fear, unless you can get him to be like other people, ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of pedantry to be always wrong. Your true prig of a pedant goes immensely out of his way to be vastly more correct than other people, and succeeds in the end in being vastly more ungrammatical, or vastly more illogical, or both at ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... barber and a monkey; he has a rich wrought waistcoat to entertain his visitants in, with a cap almost suitable. His curtains and bedding are thought to be his own; his bathing-tub is not suspected. He loves to have a fencer, a pedant, and a musician seen ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... the stronger for the experience which he has gained. It is not uncustomary in those who have excelled in scholarship to despise those who have excelled merely in sympathetic understanding of the human race. But in the military services, though there are niches for the pedant, character is at all times at least as vital as intellect, and the main rewards go to him who can make other men feel ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... the host of enemies and the fame of the reformer of comedy, exclaimed, "Take courage, Moliere, this is true comedy." The learned Menage was the only member of the society who had the good sense to detect the drift; he perceived the snake in the grass. "We must now," said this sensible pedant (in a remote allusion to the fate of idolatry and the introduction of Christianity) to the poetical pedant, Chapelain, "follow the counsel which St. Remi gave to Clovis—we must burn all that we adored, and adore what we have burned." The success of the comedy was universal; the company ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... himself played probably the parts of Lisandre the dancer, Alcandre the duellist, or Alcippe the gambler, and perhaps all three, with some slight changes in the dress. He also acted Caritides the pedant, and Dorante the lover of the chase. In the inventory taken after Moliere's death we find: "A dress for the Marquis of the Facheux, consisting in a pair of breeches very large, and fastened below with ribbands, (rhingrave), made of common ...
— The Bores • Moliere
... off what he considers his own good qualities; a certain slow, methodical plodding and a good memory, which are natural gifts, but which he boasts of as if they were acquired virtues. He binds his music because he is a pedant and a prig, and can't help it; a bad fellow to get on with. Now, mein bester, ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... society and your friendship. I, too, am not wholly what I appear: the world may yet see that Halifax was not the only statesman whom the pursuits of literature had only formed the better for the labours of business. Meanwhile, let me pass for the pedant, and the bookworm: like a sturdier adventurer than myself, 'I bide my time.'—Pelham—this will be a busy session! shall ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... deeper knowledge, however, which is essential for culture; for culture is such an appropriation of knowledge that it becomes a part of ourselves. It is no longer something added by the memory; it is something possessed by the soul. A pedant is formed by his memory; a man of culture is formed by the habit of meditation, and by the constant use of the imagination. An alert and curious man goes through the world taking note of all that passes under his eyes, ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... that the greatness of Dickens comes in; it is just here that the difference lies between the pedant and the poet. Dickens enters the social and political war, and the first stroke he deals is not only significant but even startling. Fully to see this we must appreciate the national situation. It was an age of reform, and even of radical reform; the world was full ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... of his ancestor—the gray-haired farmer whom hatred and anger made an orator, who wielded in masterly style the plough as well as the sword, who with his narrow, but original and sound common sense ordinarily hit the nail on the head—was this young unimpassioned pedant from whose lips dropped scholastic wisdom and who was everywhere seen sitting book in hand, this philosopher who understood neither the art of war nor any other art whatever, this cloud-walker in the realm of abstract morals. Yet he attained to moral and thereby even to political importance. In an ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... very well what I was losing if I went away; but I could not control myself, and one day after a painful and revolting scene of which I was a witness, and which showed my friend in a most disadvantageous light, I quarrelled with him finally, went away, and threw up this newfangled pedant, made of a queer compound of our native flour kneaded up ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... the same obsequies—not the successful or the victorious alone! And she acted justly. For all these have done that which it was the duty of brave men to do; but their fortune has been that which Heaven assigned to each. {209} Accursed, poring pedant![n] if you, in your anxiety to deprive me of the honour and the kindness shown to me by my countrymen, recounted trophies and battles and deeds of long ago—and of which of them did this present trial demand ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... is very different from the simplicity of a machine. He who sees moral nature out and out and thoroughly knows how knowledge is acquired and character formed, is a pedant. The simplicity of nature is not that which may easily be read, but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made. We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that the perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth. The wild fertility ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... We had no disputes and wrangling about the nature and equality of the holy, blessed, and undivided Trinity, no niceties in doctrine, or schemes of church government; no sour or morale dissenters to impose more sublimated notions upon us; no pedant sophisters to confound us with unintelligible mysteries: but, instead of all this, we enjoyed the most certain guide to Heaven; that is, the word of God: besides which, we had the comfortable views of his Spirit leading us ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... man a prig at all? Was he a pedant? have those who have sedulously spread that report of him in the West told the truth about him? Or—hath a pleasant little lie ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... a pedant. I tried to ignore you, as pedants always do try to ignore any fact they cannot fit into their pet system. The basis of my pet system was celibacy. I don't mean the mere state of being a bachelor. I mean celibacy ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... his manner was everything that the most fastidious person could possibly desire. He was a gentleman, in the highest sense of that often misused term; and although his conversation subsequently, during dinner, evidenced that he was a most erudite and finished scholar, there was nothing of the pedant about him. Information exuded from him naturally and simply because he could not help it; it seemed impossible to broach a topic upon which his knowledge was not complete, and he was brilliant without the ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... (tapping her forehead), And Man, whose brain is to the elephant's As Woman's brain to Man's - (that's rule of three),— Conquers the foolish giant of the woods, As Woman, in her turn, shall conquer Man. In Mathematics, Woman leads the way; The narrow-minded pedant still believes That two and two make four! Why, we can prove, We women — household drudges as we are— That two and two make five — or three — or seven; Or five and twenty, if the case demands! Diplomacy? The wiliest diplomat Is absolutely helpless in our hands. He wheedles ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... neither a pedant nor yet a revolutionary: his theories were Utopian and he had an extraordinary ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... thoroughgoing pedant will drag his students through two weeks' lectures and a hundred pages of text at the beginning of the course in the effort to define sociology and chart all its affinities and relations with every other science. Twenty minutes at the first class ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... me—true enough to kill generally—and who the deuce can be at the bother of your pragmatical preparations! I am sure it might be said of you, as it was of James the First, of most pacific and pedantic memory, that you are 'Captain of arts and Clerk of arms'—at least you are a very pedant in gunnery." ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... proper business. Her unaffected politeness induced me to take a chair and recruit my strength with a glass of water and a crust of bread. We talked on Education, and particularly on that of females. She agreed that a female pedant is at best a ridiculous character, and that retired graces, personal accomplishments, and useful domestic acquirements, are best adapted to the destiny of woman. We approved of dancing, because it affords social recreation and wholesome exercise; and of music, for ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... filter for actual experiences. A man must have a rich and varied experience of men and women before he can use books to advantage. Life is varied, men and women many, while the individual life is short; wise men read books, therefore, to enrich their experience, not merely as the pedant does, to garner facts. "J'etudie les livres en attendant que J'etudie les hommes," writes Voltaire. "Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the heavy artillery of theology, and in a long series of elaborate propositions demonstrated that any other doctrine than that of the fixity and persistence of species is absolutely contrary to Scripture. The Abbe Desorges, a former Professor of Theology, stigmatized Darwin as a "pedant," and evolution as "gloomy". Monseigneur Segur, referring to Darwin and his followers, went into hysterics and shrieked: "These infamous doctrines have for their only support the most abject passions. Their father is pride, their mother impurity, their offspring revolutions. They ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... profession of pedantry, so, inversely, any profession of pedantry, by whatever signs expressed, would be symbolized reproachfully by the imputation of wearing cerulean socks. It classed a woman, in effect, as a scholastic pedant. Now, however, when the vast diffusion of literature as a sort of daily bread has made all ridicule of female literary culture not less ridiculous than would be the attempt to ridicule that same daily bread, the whole ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... is worthy of remark, that a thought which is often quoted from Francis Bacon, occurs in Bruno's Cena di Cenere, published in 1584; I mean the notion, that the later times are more aged than the earlier. In the course of the dialogue, the Pedant, who is one of the interlocutors, says, 'In antiquity is wisdom;' to which the philosophical character replies, 'If you knew what you were talking about, you would see that your principle leads to the opposite result of that which you wish to infer; I ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... close-running mate of Archbishop Laud, who hunted heretics and cropped the ears of a thousand Puritans. Noy is described for us as a law-pedant, finding legal precedent for anything that royalty wished to do. Noy devised the ship-money scheme, and then died before his law went into effect: killed by the hand of Providence, the Puritans said, who uttered prayers of thankfulness for his taking off, all of which was quite ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... Paulus and the last representative of the house, also used the anchor, the effect of which is to a great extent destroyed by the elaborate coat-of-arms granted to the family by the Emperor Maximilian. Aldus "the younger," was a precocious scholar, of the pedant type, and under him the traditions of the family rapidly fell. He married into the eminent Giunta family of printers, and died at the age of 49. The famous Mark of the anchor had been suggested by the reverse of the beautiful silver medal of Vespasian, aspecimen of which ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... become perhaps an owl-eyed pedant, to whom would be for ever dead the possibility of such enjoyment as I know in these final years. Who can say? Perhaps the sole condition of my progress to this state of mind and heart which make my happiness was that very stumbling and ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... answered Blazius, the pedant, "for though on the stage we may sit down to mock repasts—pasteboard fowls and wooden bottles—we are careful to provide ourselves with more substantial and savoury viands in real life. As quartermaster of the troupe I always have in reserve a Bayonne ham, a game pasty, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... Italian, or Florentine speech for that of a different origin, but which answers to his impressions, he would be falsifying the latter. He would become a vain listener to himself, instead of a speaker, a pedant in place of a serious man, a histrion instead of a sincere person. To write according to a theory is not really to write: at the most, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... it he describes the election and coronation of Alexander VI, and quotes portions of the declarations of loyalty which the Italian envoys addressed to the Pope. Court flattery could not be carried further than it was in this case by Hieronymus, an affected pedant, an empty-headed braggart, a fanatical papist. Alexander made him Bishop of Andria and Governor of the Romagna. In 1497 Hieronymus, then in Cesena, composed a dialogue on Savonarola and his "heresy concerning the power of the Pope." ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... Stanhope, was entered at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. It was one of the features of his character to fall at once into the tone of the society into which he happened to be thrown. One can hardly imagine his being 'an absolute pedant,' but such was, actually, his own account of himself:—'When I talked my best, I quoted Horace; when I aimed at being facetious, I quoted Martial; and when I had a mind to be a fine gentleman, I talked Ovid. I was convinced that none but the ancients had common sense; that the classics contained ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... "Pedant!" he cried, with quivering lips, "prate not to me of thy vain legends and gossip's tales! think not to snatch from me my possession in another, when thine own life is in my hands. Unhand the maiden! throw down thy sword! return home without further ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... more verbosity, and a strong extract of priggishness. Throw in a degree, and two speeches at the Union. Set him to simmer for two years in a popular constituency, and serve him up, a chattering pedant of ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various |
