"Precocity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... behind which the musicians sang some ancient romance, without the guitar." [50] In fact, no further apparatus was employed than that demanded for the exhibition of mysteries, or the pastoral dialogues which succeeded them. The Spaniards, notwithstanding their precocity, compared with most of the nations of Europe, in dramatic art, were unaccountably tardy in all its histrionic accompaniments. The public remained content with such poor mummeries, as could be got up by strolling players and mountebanks. There was no fixed theatre in Madrid until the latter part ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... boy was able to enter Cambridge when only a little over twelve years of age. His father was for many years Lord Keeper of the Seals, and this brought Francis in contact with court life, where his precocity made him a favorite with the queen. He thus early acquired that taste for the court, by which he climbed to the height of his ambition only to fall therefrom in ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... cherished darling of it, in the person of a beloved, beautiful, intellectually promising, and only son. William Henry had not yet quite completed his third year, and yet such had been the impression created by his manly precocity, his decision of character, perpetual liveliness of temper and manners, and sweet and classic lineaments, and attachable traits, that he appeared to have lived a long time. The word time is, indeed, a relative term, and ever means much or little, as much or little has been enjoyed or suffered. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... before her hair was up she'd look a little faded, and there'd be moments of stress and strain when her naively insolent drawl would jar on the nerves, like the talk of a spoiled child too intent on holding the attention of a visitor averse to precocity. And her disdain of the practical would degenerate into untidiness, and her clinging-ivyness, if it clung too much, would probably remind a man in his reactionary moments of ennui that there are subtler pursuits than being a wall, even though it's ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... was left an orphan by the death of his mother. A wealthy Scotchman of Virginia, Mr. John Allan, adopted him and brought him up in luxury—a much spoiled child, everywhere petted for his beauty and precocity. ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... Clermont-Ferrand in 1623. His father, a president of the Court of Aids at Clermont, a man of intellect and character, guided his education in languages, natural science, and mathematics. The boy's precocity was extraordinary; at sixteen he had written a treatise on Conic Sections, which excited the astonishment of Descartes. But the intensity of study, preying upon a nervous constitution, consumed his health and strength; at an early age he suffered from temporary paralysis. When about twenty-three ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... him speak with all the deliberation of an older and experienced man, and to see him everlastingly charging his wooden pipe; but in the Province of Quebec the boys are looked upon as men when they undertake men's work, and as to their precocity in smoking there is always the excellent excuse that it afford some protection in summer against the attacking swarms of ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... argument by alluding to the early proofs of reason, as well as genius, in Cowley, Milton, and Pope, (Many other names might be added.) but only appeal to experience to decide whether young men, who are early introduced into company (and examples now abound) do not acquire the same precocity. So notorious is this fact, that the bare mentioning of it must bring before people, who at all mix in the world, the idea of a number of swaggering apes of men whose understandings are narrowed by being brought into the society of men when they ought to have been ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... the kindly mother, offering to bring her 'Gustus to join him in his play, that "if you bring your 'Gustus here I shall make a slit in him with my new knife, and let out his sawdust"—when, I repeat, we come in contact with such an obnoxious precocity as this, what word can describe him ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... his sawneyness, he is sure to be liked," as his eldest brother wrote in 1828. He suffered at this time from an internal weakness, which made games impossible. His passion, which he never lost, was for Greek, and especially for Homer. With a precocity which Mill or Macaulay might have envied, he had read both the Iliad and the Odyssey twice before he was eleven. The standard of accuracy at Buckfastleigh was not high, and Froude's scholarship was inexact. What he ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... and selfish gayeties. I compare their intellects to a rich tropical plant, which blossoms gorgeously and early, but rarely fruitens. The Southern women are, for the most part, a capable but undeveloped race of beings. With their precocity, like the exuberance of their vegetation, and with their quick, impassioned feelings, like their storm-freighted air, always bearing latent lightning in its bosom, they might become a something rich, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... another story of his infant precocity generally circulated, and generally believed, the truth of which I am to refute upon his own authority. It is told, that, when a child of three years old, he chanced to tread upon a duckling, the eleventh of a brood, and killed it; upon which, it is said, he ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... contempt, as evidence of the inferiority of the female understanding, that it arrives at maturity long before the male, and that women attain their full strength and growth at twenty, but men not until they are thirty. But this Mary emphatically denies. The seeming earlier precocity of girls she attributes to the fact that they are much sooner treated as women than boys are as men. Their more speedy physical development is assumed because with them the standard of beauty is fine features and complexion, whilst male beauty is allowed to have some connection ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... a loving husband, but he was an adoring father, and the extremest zeal and warmth of his adoration was given to his son Charles James. The child was from the first precocious, alert, and gifted beyond his years, and the father fostered and flattered the precocity with a kind of worship that proved, as it was bound to prove, disastrous. It seems to have been Henry Fox's deliberate belief that the best way to bring up a spirited, gifted, headstrong child was to gratify every wish, surrender to every whim, ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Our business as teachers is always so to stimulate, by proper exercise, the growing organs that they shall grow faster and further than they ever could without our aid. We are not to always hasten it. This is one thing we must bear in mind: precocity is the worst foe of a sound education. It is the boy and the girl who mature slowly but mature surely that in the end possess the earth. We must not hasten the process, but when we find the organ is ready to grow ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... Give it him; and dismiss him if he plays humdrum and doesn't earn it. Dismiss half a dozen, if necessary, till you get a fellow with a grain or two of genius for tuition. When the boy is seventeen, what with his Oriental precocity, and this system of education, he will know the world as well as a Saxon boy of twenty-one, and that is not saying much. Then, if his nature is still as wild, get him a large tract in Australia; cattle ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... Robert,—the second, and Philippa the Catanese, the third. Much has been said already of Joanna's love for study and of her unusual attainments, but a word or two more will be necessary to complete the picture. Her wonderful gifts and her evident delight in studious pursuits were no mere show of childish precocity which would disappear with her maturer growth, for they ever remained with her and made her one of the very exceptional women of her day and generation. Imagine her there in the court of her grandfather, where no woman before her had ever shown the least real and intelligent ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... 133} earliness &c adj.; morning &c 125. punctuality; promptitude &c (activity) 682; haste &c (velocity) 274; suddenness &c (instantaneity) 113. prematurity, precocity, precipitation, anticipation; a stitch in time. V. be early &c adj., be beforehand &c adv.; keep time, take time by the forelock, anticipate, forestall; have the start, gain the start; steal a march upon; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... amusingly. She had never attended school, but he had taught her systematically at home, and his interests were hers. The students attributed to her the most abstruse knowledge, and stories of her precocity were repeated proudly by the Lane folk. Many evenings spent with her grandfather at the observatory had not been wasted. She knew the paths of the stars as she knew the walks of the campus. Dr. Wandless, the president ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... case of other children, the individuality is very marked at an early age. As a rule, the child with the marked individuality is the one from whom the most may be expected later in life. Sometimes this very individuality is mistaken for precocity. This is particularly the case with musicians. In a few instances the individuality of the master has been developed late in life, as was the case of Richard Wagner, whose early individual tendencies were toward ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... precocity for science a very successful impetus and left me at his death fully in possession of the ideas and projects he cherished. Amongst these projects, one partially realized, was the acceleration of plant growth by means of electric light, ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... day beside that grave, the most brilliant by far was the third son, Joseph Addison Alexander. Dr. Charles Hodge said of him: "Taking him all in all, he was the most gifted man with whom I have ever been personally acquainted," In childhood, such was his precocity that he knew the Hebrew alphabet at six years of age (I am afraid that some ministers do not know it at sixty); and he could read Latin fluently when he was only eight! Of his wonderful feats of memory I could give many illustrations; ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... are alike; defeat alone displays an individual profile. And the case of Jules Laforgue wears this special aspect. Dying on the threshold of his twenty-seventh year, coming too old into a world too young, his precocity as poet and master of fantastic prose has yet not the complexion of a Chatterton or a Keats. In his literary remains, slender enough as to quantity, there is little to suggest a fuller development if he had lived. Like his protagonist Arthur Rimbaud—surely the most extraordinary poetic apparition ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... certain. It would be superfluous to quote any facts; for all experimenters, Koelreuter, Gaertner, Herbert, Sageret, Lecoq, and Naudin, have been struck with the wonderful vigour, height, size, tenacity of life, precocity, and hardiness of their hybrid productions. Gaertner[296] sums up his conviction on this head in the strongest terms. Koelreuter[297] gives numerous precise measurements of the weight and height of his hybrids in comparison with measurements ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... John "his first lesson on the flute, both sitting on the drawing-room floor, very deeply engaged." "I am sure," she says, "there is no other love, no other feeling, like a mother's towards her first boy when she loves his father;" and her pride in his looks, and precocity, and docility—"I never met with a child of his age so sensible to praise or blame"—found a justification in his passionate devotion to the man who was so dear ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... at a certain age, to put these children out to different trades and callings; and those who show precocity of talent are often received into the ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... impregnation. The case is much the same as regards children of the male sex. The fact that a boy is sexually precocious, will greatly facilitate his being led astray by grown females to whom his extreme youth acts as a stimulus. Moreover, his sexual precocity may deliver the boy to the embraces of homosexual men, an outcome which is rendered the more likely by the commonly undifferentiated character of the childish sexual impulse. There are certain homosexual adult males whose ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... now reaches the Anthophora's cells. Among these cells are some which contain larvae and which result from the labours of last May; others, though of the same date, are already occupied by the perfect insect. The precocity of metamorphosis varies from one larva to another; however, a few days' difference of age is enough to explain these inequalities of development. Other cells, as numerous as the first, contain a parasitical Hymenopteron, ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... gestures, words, mannerisms, habits, and oddities of human beings. If Hugh had been born in a household professionally artistic, and had been trained in art of any kind, I think he would very likely have become an accomplished artist or musician, and probably have shown great precocity. But he was never an artist in the sense that art was a torment to him, or that he made any sacrifice of other aims to it. It was always just a part of existence to him, and of the nature of an amusement, though in so far as it represented the need of ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of his biography. It was written shortly after his death, although not published for some time later; and nothing can be more lively, graphic, and yet dignified, than its portraiture of his youthful precocity, and, again, of the devotions and austerities of his later years. But it leaves many gaps unsupplied. Like other memoirs of the kind, it is written from a somewhat conventional point of view. No one, as M. Havet says, ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... of lyric poetry, James Macdonald was born in September 1807, in the parish of Fintry, and county of Stirling. His father was employed in the cotton factory of Culcruich. Of unwonted juvenile precocity, he attracted the attention of two paternal uncles, whose circumstances enabled them to provide him with a liberal education. Acquiring the rudiments of learning at Culcruich, he afterwards studied at the grammar school ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... panicle, and likewise hermaphrodite flowers.[572] Azara describes[573] a variety in Paraguay the grains of which are very tender, and he states that several varieties are fitted for being cooked in various ways. The varieties also differ greatly in precocity, and have different powers of resisting dryness and the action of violent wind.[574] Some of the foregoing differences would certainly be considered of specific value with plants in ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... the most promising young man who has appeared since - ahem - I appeared. He amazes me by his precocity and various endowment. But he alarms me by his copiousness and haste. He should shield his fire with both hands 'and draw up all his strength and sweetness in one ball.' ('Draw all his strength and all His sweetness up into one ball'? I cannot ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... teachers are in danger, of devoting such a disproportionate and unreasonable degree of attention to them as to encroach upon their duties to others. The school, the whole school, is your field, the elevation of the mass in knowledge and virtue, and no individual instance, either of dullness or precocity, should draw you away from ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... discipline than an ordinary boy would have used to escape it. Therefore this manly air and manner, which in most schoolboys would, of course, be intolerably ridiculous, seems in him the result of his natural precocity; and this precocity ought to be forgiven him, inasmuch as it comes ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... Mr. Southey's poems are not his triumphant taunts hurled against oppression, are not his glowing effusions to Liberty, but those in which, with a mild melancholy, he seems conscious of his own infirmities of temper, and to feel a wish to correct by thought and time the precocity and sharpness of his disposition. May the quaint but affecting aspiration expressed in one of these be fulfilled, that as he mellows into maturer age, all such asperities may wear off, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... reached us unexpectedly, through the government bag (Heaven knows how they came there), two of our many and long-looked-for letters, wherein was a circumstantial account of the whole conduct and behavior of our pets; with marvellous narrations of Charley's precocity at a Twelfth Night juvenile party at Macready's; and tremendous predictions of the governess, dimly suggesting his having got out of pot-hooks and hangers, and darkly insinuating the possibility of his writing us a letter before long; and many other workings of the same prophetic ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... respectable laboring people who turned her over, while she was still an infant, to a Mr. and Mrs. Prentice, instructors in physical culture in the public schools, first of St. Louis and later of St. Paul, Minnesota. As a child, and afterwards as a young girl, she exhibited great precocity and a considerable amount of real ability in drawing and in English composition, but her very cleverness and versatility were the means of her becoming much more sophisticated than most young women of her age, with the result ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... and the preliminary condition for thinking. One's own perceptions awaken one's own conceptions, and these awaken one's own thinking in later stages of development. Let us have no precocity, but natural, that is consecutive, development." ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... at Pampinara, and entered the count's service when he was five years old; his father was also a shepherd, who owned a small flock, and lived by the wool and the milk, which he sold at Rome. When quite a child, the little Vampa displayed a most extraordinary precocity. One day, when he was seven years old, he came to the curate of Palestrina, and asked to be taught to read; it was somewhat difficult, for he could not quit his flock; but the good curate went every day to say mass at a little hamlet ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and wife at a future, but an early day. To some persons all this may seem exceedingly improper, as well as extremely precocious; but the truth compels us to say, that its impropriety was by no means as obvious as its precocity. The latter it certainly was, though Mark had shot up early, and was a man at a time of life when lads, in less genial climates, scarcely get tails to their coats; but its impropriety must evidently be measured by the habits of the state of society ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... Scotland, where he had secured the chair of mathematics in Glasgow University. His early education he secured from his father, and this training, coupled with his natural brilliancy, enabled him to develop genuine precocity. At the age of eight he attended his father's university lectures as a visitor, and it is reported that on one occasion he answered his father's questions when all of the class had failed. At the age of ten he entered the university, together with his brother James, ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... poet, critic, student; Mr. Browning's opinion of his son's writings; the home in Camberwell; Robert Browning's childhood; concerning his optimism; his fondness for Carravaggio's "Andromeda and Perseus"; his poetic precocity; origin of "The Flight of the Duchess"; writes Byronic verse; is sent to school at Peckham; his holiday afternoons; sees London by night, from Herne Hill; the significance of the spectacle to ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... quick tide. The story of her life is the story of a mind, of a spirit, ever seeking, ever striving, and pressing onward and upward to new truth and light. Her works are the mirror of this progress. In reviewing them, the first point that strikes us is the precocity, or rather the spontaneity, of her poetic gift. She was a born singer; poetry was her natural language, and to write was less effort than to speak, for she was a shy, sensitive child, with strange reserves and reticences, not easily ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... manhood he said: "I do not remember when I could not read, so it must have been very early." He was one of those irrepressible little fellows, whose intuition and observation are better than school. He learned more out of school than he could or would have done in it. His precocity put him in advance of most boys at seven, even without schooling. It was not necessary for him to have school-teachers to testify that he possessed ten talents,—his parents knew that, and every one else who ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... see the wheels go round. My father was a young economics professor at Princeton. He brought me up on the system of answering every question I asked him to the best of his ability. My response to that gave him the idea of making an experiment in precocity. To aid in the massacre I had ear trouble—seven operations between the age of nine and twelve. Of course this kept me apart from other boys and made me ripe for forcing. Anyway, while my generation was laboring through Uncle Remus I was honestly ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... sternness of the man, observable in his speech, his countenance, and his puerile amusements; and BACON, DESCARTES, HOBBES, GRAY, and others, betrayed the same early appearance of their intellectual vigour and precocity of character. ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Majesty's immediate circle, which held itself as far as possible aloof from the court, and was disposed to be self-reliant for its amusements. Daniel had entered upon the vocation of courtier with flattering auspices. His precocity while at Oxford has found him a place in the "Bibliotheca Eruditorum Praecocium." Anthony Wood bears witness to his thorough accomplishments in all kinds, especially in history and poetry, specimens of which, the antiquary tells us, were still, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... like to see—and remembered one or two trifles she had mentioned which she wanted from town, and even laid in a stock of amusements for little Geoff,—boys' books, suited rather to his years than to his precocity. About the other and more serious part of his self-constituted mission Warrender, however, had done nothing. He had passed one of those "Scholastic Agencies," which it had been his (vague) intention to inquire at, had paused and passed it by. There ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... (1672,) he was twenty-two years of age, and had received an excellent education, and shown considerable military abilities. In consequence of his precocity of talent, his unquestioned patriotism, and the great services which his family had rendered to the state, he was appointed commander-in-chief of the forces of the republic, and was encouraged to aspire to the office of stadtholder, the highest ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... just these first instinctive impulses of the girl-child, combined with her imitativeness and wonderful precocity, which make her so fascinating. But do they think? They do, but this first early thinking does not make them self-conscious as does their later thinking, to the spoiling of their charm. The thinking indeed begins remarkably ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... Parris, was nine years of age. She seems to have performed a leading part in the first stages of the affair, and must have been a child of remarkable precocity. It is a noticeable fact, that her father early removed her from the scene. She was sent to the town, where she remained in the family of Stephen Sewall, until the proceedings at the village were brought to ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... little boys often figure thus in popular tales: readers of Rabelais will remember his story of the Fool and the Cook; and there is a familiar example of a boy's precocity in the story of the Stolen Purse—"Craft and Malice of Women," or the Seven Wazirs, vol. vi. of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... mathematics and astronomy extant. He directed the education of his son, who, like many another distinguished scholar in later life, seems to have exhibited very little talent in his early years. There is no rule in the matter. Precocity often disappoints. Genius is often dull in childhood, but there are exceptions that prove both rules. The basis of education in Spain at that time among the Jews was the Bible, the Talmud, mathematics, and ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... biographers to the contrary. If they are not, they are very apt to be little prigs like the second Pitt, full of "wise saws and modern instances." Webster was neither the one nor the other. He was simple, natural, affectionate, and free from pertness or precocity. At the same time there was an innate power which impressed all those who approached him without their knowing exactly why, and there was abundant evidence of uncommon talents. Webster's boyish days are pleasant to look upon, but they gain a peculiar lustre ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... as young Paynter, whose slenderness, however, is like steel. I well remember when Dr. McGee took him to North Carolina and made him over—a weak, irritable little precocity of twelve or so. He never ate or slept in a house for three years, and I think that the birds and trees of that period got into his opera and made it what it is, the musical event of a decade. He works best in Paris, and they will live there, after ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... as in the case of his mother's death, he mastered his sorrow by all the force of his Christian hope. No doubt he loved his son as much as he was proud of him. It will be remembered what words he used to speak of this youthful genius, whose precocity frightened him. Little by little his grief quietened down, and in its place came a mild resignation. Some years later he will write about Adeodatus: "Lord, early didst Thou cut off his life from this earth, but I remember him without a shadow of misgiving. My remembrance is not mixed ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... eminent Englishmen of all times, and chief formulator of the methods of modern science, was born in 1561 (three years before Shakspere), the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Queen Elizabeth and one of her most trusted earlier advisers. The boy's precocity led the queen to call him her 'little Lord Keeper.' At the age of twelve he, like Wyatt, was sent to Cambridge, where his chief impression was of disgust at the unfruitful scholastic application of Aristotle's ideas, still supreme in spite of a century of Renaissance enlightenment. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... while the left points him out,—and even his elder brother "Prosy" shows by his attitude the special notice to be taken of Hans,—it is clear that if this is a portrait-group either it was painted when the boys were actually older, or the younger had already given some astonishing proof of that precocity which his early works display; for in this group the younger boy cannot be more than eight ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... failure; but neither incident could have meant very much to Ibsen, who, if there ever was a poet who lived in the future, was waiting and watching for the development of his own genius. Slowly, without precocity, without even that joy in strength of maturity which comes to most great writers before the age of thirty, he toiled on in a sort of vacuum. His youth was one of unusual darkness, because he had not merely poverty, isolation, citizenship of a remote and imperfectly ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... a singular mixture of precocity and childishness. She is nine years old and so large that one would think her twelve. She plays dolls with passion, and she is as LITERARY as you or I, meanwhile learning her own language which she does not ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... still more vivacious negro. "The indigenous Mexican is grave, melancholic, silent, so long as he is not under the influence of intoxicating liquors. This gravity is peculiarly remarkable in Indian children, who at the age of four or five years display more intelligence and precocity than the children of whites. The Mexican loves to attach mystery even to his most trifling actions; the strongest passions do not display themselves in his countenance; the transition is frightful when it passes suddenly from a state of absolute ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... intellectual capacities were steadily, if not systematically, cultivated, sometimes at the expense of his bodily development. It was not unusual for a child of seven or eight to handle a difficult problem in the Talmud, a precocity characteristic to this day of the children hailing from Slavonic countries. Their 'illuyim (prodigies) might furnish ample material for more than one volume of ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... to have been a somewhat Dobbin-like individual, proved an affectionate husband and step-father. The little girl's prettiness and precocity appealed to him strongly. He could not do enough for her; and he spoiled her by refusing to check her wayward disposition and encouraging her mischievous pranks. It was not a good upbringing; and, as dress and "society" filled the thoughts of her mother, the "Miss Baba" was left very ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... and a stray dog had gathered about them. The dog, a puppy, barked at Clarissa and was promptly kicked for its precocity. The crowd laughed. This relaxed the ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... commit prescribed portions of the Word of God to memory; and the child soon became intensely interested in the study of the sacred oracles. The questions which he proposed to his father, as he repeated his appointed tasks, displayed singular precocity of intellect; and Leonides rejoiced exceedingly as he observed from time to time the growing indications of his extraordinary genius. But, before Origen reached maturity, his good parent fell a victim to the intolerance of the imperial ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... of mere decorum, for giving proper instruction in the facts of sex. Those who object to it (not counting coarse people who thoughtlessly seize every opportunity of affecting and parading a fictitious delicacy) are, in effect, advocating ignorance as a safeguard against precocity. If ignorance were practicable there would be something to be said for it up to the age at which ignorance is a danger instead of a safeguard. Even as it is, it seems undesirable that any special emphasis should ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... his own;" the prince replied, "But mine, if I have one, would govern your wife, and by that means would govern both you and me!" Henry, at this early age, excelled in a quickness of reply, combined with reflection, which marks the precocity of his intellect. His tutor having laid a wager with the prince that he could not refrain from standing with his back to the fire, and seeing him forget himself once or twice, standing in that posture, the tutor said, "Sir, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... avocations of the novel society. Thoranc was a connoisseur in art, and gave frequent commissions to the artists of the town; and Goethe, already interested in art through his father's collections, found his opportunity in these tastes of Thoranc, who was struck by the boy's precocity and even took hints ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... recite you many a story, tell of one sad heart on Mardi Gras years ago. It was a woman's, of course; for "Il est toujours les femmes qui sont malheureuses," says an old proverb, and perhaps it is right. This woman—a child, she would be called elsewhere, save in this land of tropical growth and precocity—lost her heart to one who never knew, a very common story, by the way, but one which would have been quite distasteful to the haughty judge, her father, had ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... begun to enjoy the maternal delight of human doll dressing, an extravagance in which she was lavishly encouraged by her husband. Babcock was glad of any excuse to spend money on his daughter, who seemed to him, from day to day, a greater marvel of precocity—such a child as became Selma's beauty and cleverness and ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... The astonishing precocity of the short horns, their remarkable aptitude to fatten, the perfection of their forms, and the fineness of their bony structure, give them an advantage over most other races when the object of breeding is for the shambles. No animal of any other breed can so rapidly ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... whose innocence he might still love his fellow man. On the third day of his acquaintance with Muche he brought an alphabet to the office, and the lad delighted him by the intelligence he manifested. He learned his letters with all the sharp precocity which marks the Parisian street arab, and derived great amusement from the woodcuts ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... Crenata seedlings have been grown since 1904, quite a number producing their first nuts the year succeeding germination. This unusual precocity is no indication of merit, as it tends to stunt the trees. The most promising individuals seldom bear until three or four years old by which time the trees have attained fair size. No high quality has yet been ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... Maupassant, have all been careful artists: they have not, like Thackeray, been slovenly in structure; they have not, like Scott, been regardless of style. The artistic instinct shows itself almost always at a very early age. If a man is destined to be an artist, he usually exhibits a surprising precocity of expression at a period when as yet he has very little to express. This is another reason why the short-story, as opposed to the novel, belongs to youth rather than to age. Though a young writer may be obliged ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... secluded home, and after him, his son; but the grandson, stirred by the blood of a Puritan mother, exchanged the North Sea shore for the banks of the Hudson, where his son breathed the air that made him a leading spirit in the war for American independence. Clinton's youth is one record of precocity. Before the war began he passed through a long, a varied, even a brilliant career, climbing to the highest position in the State before he had reached the age when most men begin to fill responsible places. At fifteen he manned an American privateer; at sixteen, as a lieutenant, he accompanied ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... The precocity of the Australian youth, to be properly understood and believed, can only be fully appreciated by being an eye-witness to some of these very extraordinary young creatures. I have seen a girl of ten years of age possess all the manner of an old lady of sixty: she would ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... who retain their boyish appearance as long as I have done; indeed, this is the curse of my life. Though I am approaching the age of thirty, I pass for twenty; and I have observed old gentlemen frown at my precocity when I said a good thing or helped myself to a second glass of wine. There was, therefore, nothing surprising in Scudamour's remark, that, when he had the pleasure of meeting Henry, Henry must have ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... in India how the tigers fought for their mates, and, with the precocity of the Anglo-Indian child, she recognised now the likeness between tigers and men—and boys. She was being fought for. These two lads, albeit they had neither of them seen their eleventh birthday, were using all their strength against each other, hammering each other's faces with their fists, ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... pea-blossom, that hidden in the center of it is a perfect miniature pea-pod, with the peas all in it,—as perfect a pea-pod as it will ever be, only it is as tiny as a chatelaine ornament. Maize and some other things show the same precocity. This confirmation of the theologic theory is startling, and sets me meditating upon the moral possibilities of my garden. I may find in it ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the orphan daughter of an artist. "She was small and slight in person, pale, sandy-haired, and with green eyes, habitually cast down, but very large, odd, and attractive when they looked up." Becky had the "dismal precocity of poverty," and, being engaged as governess in the family of Sir Pitt Crawley, bart., contrived to marry, clandestinely, his son, Captain Rawdon Crawley, and taught him how to live in splendor "upon nothing a year." Becky was an excellent singer and dancer, a capital talker ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... girl violinist. Two concerts, attended by an intelligent, nay, an exacting, audience delighted almost to tears—and yet not money enough in the house to pay expenses! Indifference to flaming advertisements of precocity is well; but it is not well, not worthy of the taste of Boston thus to neglect one of the finest manifestations of genius that ever seemed to come to us so straight from heaven. It was one of the most ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... author was an unknown youth, who had hardly reached his majority. Within a few months he was a celebrity. That so dignified and suggestive a performance should have come from so young a poet was considered a marvel of precocity by the literary world, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... he went to Mr. Clements, the builder at Norwich, and said, "Well, Clements, you have built a machine to surprise all the world, and I am come to surprise you by paying you for it." And to show his early quick perception, ready reply, wilfulness, and precocity, I must here relate two well-attested anecdotes: the first, when quite a child, and at his lessons in the nursery, on his mother's running up to dispel the noise and disturbance he was making, she exclaimed in anger, after in some measure correcting him, "Why, sir, if you go on in ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... puppy. Now it is very singular that she should have only taken two, the exact number she had been deprived of. Does this not prove to a certain extent the power of calculating numbers in animals? and does not the precocity of the two puppies brought up by the cat, infer there is some grounds for the supposition that with the milk is imbued much of the nature and disposition of the mother? A few experiments made on these points would be ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... published in the "County Gazette," and two poems of considerable length were published in book form, when the author was only fourteen. "Thanatopsis," perhaps the best known of all his poems, was written when he was but nineteen. But, notwithstanding his precocity, his powers continued to a remarkable age. His, excellent translations of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," together with some of his best poems, were accomplished after the poet, had passed the age of seventy. Mr. Bryant visited Europe several times; and, in 1849, he ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Montpellier in 1798, of a family of intense Roman Catholic piety. He showed at school a precocity which might bear comparison with Mill's. Expelled from school, cast off by his parents, dismissed by the elder Casimir Perier, whose secretary he had been, he eked out a living by tutoring in mathematics. Friends of his philosophy rallied to his support. He never occupied a post comparable with ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... pretty little pied d' terre in Paris, hard by Auteuil, in that dreamy little impasse, the Rue de Berlioz. Neither of these attendants were faint-hearted, for their young hearts had been attuned early to the wolfish precocity of the Parisian waif. And they had followed their resolute mistress in her weary quest of the ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... incessantly or rather at such times when his parents permitted, for they were simple folk who were rather alarmed at their boy's interests and zeal. No noticeable difference from other boys was noted aside from precocity in study, yet even at the age of ten life was running in two great currents for this boy. The one current was the outer world with its ever varied happenings, the other was the inner world of thoughts ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... he always used to spend his business vacations at her mother's home in Maine. He had possessed for her that almost hypnotic influence which young men sometimes exert upon little girls. It was a sort of phantom love affair, subjective and fanciful, a precocity of instinct, like that tender and maternal concern which some little girls feel for their dolls. Yet this childish infatuation is capable of all the depressions and exaltations of love itself, it has its bitter jealousies, cruel disappointments, its ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... India. And Lady Myrtle was nearly as great at castle-in-the-air building as Jacinth herself, and though too wise to discuss as yet with any one, especially with a girl who was really, notwithstanding her precocity, little more than a child, her still immatured intentions, Jacinth was far too acute, and Lady Myrtle too open and affectionate, for her young favourite not to be well aware how much her own future occupied and interested the old lady. Yet ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... child's beauty and precocity, and repeated her account of why she had two mammas. The red blood was dyeing my listener's face a deep crimson, but still I did not understand, and went ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... brother Anthony, of Trinity college Cambridge. At this seat of learning he remained three years, during which, besides exhibiting his powers of memory and application by great proficiency in the ordinary studies of the place, he evinced the extraordinary precocity of his penetrating and original intellect, by forming the first sketch of a new system of philosophy in opposition ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... questions and answers. He asked: "What is the shape of the world?" "Round," she replied. "Then why don't we fall off?" he asked, and she answered: "Because of the attraction of gravitation." "This is awful," he said, in horror at such precocity. ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... become Queen. He devoted his attention then primarily to gaining a predominant influence over the young King, with great success-the result, in no small measure, of his posing as a puritan; for the boy had all the uncompromising partisanship natural to the morbid precocity which his ill-health and Tudor cleverness combined to develop. If Edward had lived, no doubt the Tudor penetration would have unmasked Northumberland in due course; but this the Duke would hardly have anticipated in any case, and, as it was, he laid his plans on the hypothesis ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... who, under the Ruling of Beneficent Providence, was the Happy Preserver of a Beautiful and Precious Life of Virtuous Precocity, this Box is presented by the Father of Him whom He saved as a grateful acknowledgment ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... A curious instance of precocity is related in the Third Book of the "Masnavi" (see ante p. 365), of which Mr. E. H. Whinfield gives an outline in his admirable and most useful abridgment of that work: The boys wished to obtain a holiday, and the sharpest of them ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Bodmer soon afterwards published for the first time the Nibelungen Lied. Macpherson startled the literary world in 1762 by what professed to be an epic poem from the Gaelic. Chatterton's career (1752-1770) was a proof not only of unique poetical precocity, but of a singular facility in divining the tastes of the literary world at the time. Percy's Reliques appeared in 1765. Percy, I may note, had begun oddly enough by publishing a Chinese novel (1761), and a translation ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... Heinrich Heinecken,[2] who was born at Lubeck on February 6, 1721. There were marked points of difference between the development of Heinecken and that of Stott's child. Heinecken was physically feeble; at the age of three he was still being fed at the breast. The Stott precocity appeared to be physically strong; his body looked small and undeveloped, it is true, but this was partly an illusion produced by the abnormal size of the head. Again Heinecken learned to speak very early; at ten months old he was asking intelligent questions, at eighteen months he ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... one of the most cherished objects of the Utilitarian creed. Besides these there were the group of young men, who were soon to be known as the 'philosophical Radicals.' John Stuart Mill, upon whom the mantle of his father was to descend, was conspicuous by his extraordinary precocity, and having been carefully educated in the orthodox faith, was employed in 1825 upon editing Bentham's great work upon evidence. George Grote (1794-1871), the future historian, had been introduced to Mill by ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... chat chasse de race. The children of an excellent but unfortunate judge are said to have rushed one day into their mother's drawing-room exclaiming, "Dear Mamma, may we have jam for tea? One of Papa's judgments has been upheld in the Court of Appeal." An admirable story of commercial precocity reaches me from one of the many correspondents who have been good enough to write to me in connection with this book. It may be commended to the promoters of that class of company which is specially affected by the widow, the orphan, and the curate. Two small boys, walking ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... more conspicuous in the later stages. Jealousy is present from the first. It is more pronounced in the cases of love between children and adults of the opposite sex on account of the child's being less able to monopolize the attention of the adult and on account of the precocity of the child concerned in such cases. A fuller discussion of jealousy belongs in ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... rival of Mme. Adam, but whose activity occurred much earlier in the century, was Mme. Emile de Girardin,—Delphine Gay,—who ruled, at least for a short time, the social and literary world of Paris at her hotel in the Rue Chaillot. Her very early precocity, combined with her rare beauty, made her famous. In 1836, after having written a number of poems which showed a weak sentimentality and a quite mannered emotion, she founded the Courrier Francais, for which she wrote articles on the questions of the day—effusions ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... very fair intellectual capabilities, and a few evinced quite rare talents. Among these was her own little daughter, five years old, named Hattie, but familiarly called by the pet name of Daisy. She learned to read simple lessons fluently in a very short time. Others also exhibited a precocity which from day to day rewarded and stimulated the ardor of this ...
— Mary S. Peake - The Colored Teacher at Fortress Monroe • Lewis C. Lockwood
... and aptitudes of the young men of Great Britain. I do not accept the distinction. The powers and mental aptitudes of the Jews are exactly the same as ours, except that they come to full flower earlier. The precocity of this maturity is interpreted as a special genius for ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... uncomfortable, and occasionally acrimonious, succeeded at last in arranging for a resumption of litigation, but it was a fruitless victory. The Duke, with a touch of his earlier precocity, died of premature decay a fortnight before the date ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... English landscape painter of exceptional precocity, born near Nottingham; painted the "Ducal Palace" and "Grand Canal" at ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... is only a poetic plagiarism of the cruelty of Nimrod and Pharaoh; the star which guided the shepherds, a memory of the star promised in the prophecy of Balaam; Christ explaining the Bible when twelve years old, a gloss upon the precocity of Moses, Samuel, and Solomon; the increase of the loaves, a union of the manna in the wilderness and the twenty loaves with which Elisha fed the people; water changed into wine, a new version of the bitter waters made sweet; the cross, a reminder of the brazen ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... he was sent to a school at Twyford, where he is said to have got into trouble for writing a lampoon upon his master; he went for a short time to another in London, where he gave a more creditable if less characteristic proof of his poetical precocity. Like other lads of genius, he put together a kind of play—a combination, it seems, of the speeches in Ogilby's Iliad—and got it acted by his schoolfellows. These brief snatches of schooling, however, counted for little. Pope ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... derivation of our bodies from the bodies of apes is a conception too grossly materialistic for him. Our souls, however, he is quite willing to derive from the souls of lower animals. Obviously we have pre-existed; how are we to account for Mozart's precocity save by supposing his pre-existence? He brought with him the musical skill acquired in a previous life. In general, the souls of musical children come from nightingales, while the souls of great architects have ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... Shelley improved on Queen Mab, Robert Browning on Pauline, Byron on Hours of Idleness, he would to-day be without a peer. Mr Granville Barker is often cited as a classical modern example of precocity, but he was twenty-four when he wrote The Marrying of Anne Leete. Mr Henry James was twenty-eight before he had published a characteristic word. Mr Thomas Hardy at twenty-five had only printed a short story, and he was more than thirty when his first novel appeared. Mr Kipling ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... proofs of his wondrous precocity; the genuine sailor-poet, Falconer, had lately published The Shipwreck; Laurence Sterne had just collected the materials for his Sentimental Journey; Sir William Blackstone had published his celebrated Commentaries; Wesley and Whitefield had not yet ended their useful career; the star ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... up on a window-sill, with Smudge, our old black cat, in her arms, and was welcomed by both of them with much effusion. Jack was a tall, thin girl, all legs and arms, with a droll, freckled face and round blue eyes, with all the awkwardness of fourteen, and none of its precocity. Her real name was Jacqueline, but we had always called her Jack, for brevity, and because, with her cropped head and rough ways, she resembled a boy more than a girl; her hair was growing now, and hung about her neck in short ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... learn facts without the distraction of critical uncertainty. With this in mind, therefore, a few of his conclusions, picked mostly at random, may be quoted. An important factor in the production of delinquency he finds to lie in the premature appearance of adult sex development—a precocity which he regards as dangerous because it seems to be correlated with a stimulation of sex instinct before adult inhibitions appear. In girls (not in boys) he finds a distinct tendency to general physical over-development as compared with the norm of the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... during the summer of 1813, and West declared that if Morse were to live to his own age he would never make a better composition. The remark is equivocal, but was doubtless intended as a compliment to the precocity of the young painter. ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... previous meetings. You will recall that the off-type trees were rogued, leaving the parent trees of Nanking, Kuling and Meiling and others of good bearing habits. In 1951 four trees out of this lot, were outstanding in precocity. The earliest started dropping nuts the fifteenth of August and bore 7-1/4 pounds. The next matured September 5th and produced 8-1/2 pounds. The third tree is unusual. I noticed it the 4th of October. The ground was covered with nuts, but only an occasional bur. All of the burs were wide open and ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... first occasion on which we find the great man mentioned in history; "but," observes Mr. James, "the children of the Francs were trained in their very early years to robust and warlike exercises; and there is every reason to believe that great precocity, both of bodily and mental powers, fitted the prince for the office which was intrusted ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... teachers were all clergymen and the university curriculum in their days was regulated and limited by clerical ascendancy, and consisted of the Aristotelian and Butlerian philosophy, classics, and pure mathematics, without modern history or physical science. The remarkable precocity of Keble's intellect enabled him to graduate with the highest honours both in classics and mathematics at an age almost miraculously early even when allowance is made for the comparative youthfulness of students in general ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... to normal individuals, the abundance, variety, and precocity of wrinkles almost invariably manifested by criminals, cannot fail to strike the observer. The following are the most common: horizontal and vertical lines on the forehead, horizontal and circumflex ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... an instant only, has never been granted to men before the fortieth day from his birth, and then it is looked upon as a miracle of precocity. ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... The old pastor, Mr. Morell, stern man that he was, used to put his hand on her head, and call her his 'Goldilocks'; and he had once been heard to say, after leaving her, 'And a little child shall lead them.' Though somewhat lonely, there was neither priggishness nor precocity in her disposition; she was just herself—unspoiled from the hands of God and ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... application to studies in childhood and adolescence impaired his health, and is held responsible for his death at thirty-nine. Prodigious, though not incredible stories are preserved, especially of his precocity in mathematics. His mind was active rather than accumulative; he showed from his earliest years that disposition to find things out for himself, which has characterised the infancy of Clerk-Maxwell and ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... Macaulay was born October 25, 1800, the son of a wealthy merchant who was active in securing the abolition of the slave trade. His precocity is almost beyond belief. He read at three years of age, gave signs of his marvelous memory at four, and when only eight years old wrote a theological discourse. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at eighteen, but his aversion to mathematics cost him college honors. He showed at ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... race, and with the individual. As a round shot outstrips the rifled bolt on quitting the muzzle of the gun, so the lower race, in childhood, may outstrip the higher. But the higher eventually overtakes the lower, and surpasses it in range. As regards individuals, we do not always find the precocity of youth prolonged to mental power in maturity; while the dulness of boyhood is sometimes strikingly contrasted with the intellectual energy of after years. Newton, when a boy, was weakly, and he showed no particular aptitude ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... But Talent and Genius offer a special difficulty to education in the precocity which often accompanies them. But by precocity we do not mean that they early render themselves perceptible, since the early manifestation of gifts by talent and genius, through their intense confidence, is to be looked at as perfectly legitimate. ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... of Cromwell's death or in the boiler-shop, no stories of the youthful precocity of Eugene Field survive to entertain us or to suggest that he gave early indication of the possession either of unusual talent or of that unique personality that were to distinguish him from the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... him) unmeaning problems which philosophy starts, is vigorously delineated; [17] but some of his tableaux border on the ridiculous from their stilted concision and over-drawn sharpness of outline. The undeniable virtue of the poet irritates as much as it attracts, from its pert precocity and obtrusiveness. What he means for pathos mostly chills instead of warming: "Ut nemo in se curat descendere, nemo!" [18] The poet who penned this line must surely have been tiresome company. Persius is at his best when he forgets for a moment ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... my hempseed this year; my nuts blazed away together very comfortably to the end of their lives, and when mamma put hers in, which were meant for herself and papa, they blazed away in the like manner." Before he was ten he could write, with a really irritating precocity, that he had been "making some pictures from a book called 'Les Francais peints par eux-memes.' ... It is full of pictures of all classes, with a description of each in French. The pictures are a little caricatured, but not much." Doubtless ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my having forgiven him, thanked me and was about to depart in the same manner in which he came, when I intimated to him my willingness to extend a much greater kindness than my pardon. In short, his offence was punished only by sweet imprisonment in my arms; and delighted with his precocity, I blessed the lucky chance which had so unexpectedly furnished me with a youthful and handsome lover. Ere daylight he departed; and has since then frequently visited me, always gaining access to my chamber by means of the ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... small guests to the matinee. As the theaters were more limited in number then than now these comparative infants sooner or later saw practically everything that was on the boards—good, bad and indifferent; and they displayed a precocity of criticism ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... in the strictest propriety, welcomed as play-mates for her dears, whom she had kept away from the contaminating associations of the alleys, Belgian children from the toughest quarters of Antwerp, who had a precocity that led to baffling confusion in Mrs. Smith's mind between parental responsibility and patriotic duty. Smart society gave the run of its houses sometimes to gentry who were used to getting the run of that ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... was the son of a pious burgher of Linkoeping, and along with his two brothers had been educated from childhood for the Church. At the age of eighteen so marvellous was his precocity that he was made a canon both of Linkoeping and of Skara. Later, as was the practice with scholars of that period, he continued his studies at several of the leading universities in Europe. But in spite of a sojourn of some seventeen years ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... The precocity of some youths is surprising. One is disposed to say on occasion, "That boy of yours is a genius, and he is certain to do great things when he grows up;" but past experience has taught us that he invariably becomes quite an ordinary citizen. It is so often the case, on the contrary, that the ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... of life to its fullest and realize in himself all its manifold tendencies. Echoes only of the vaster, richer life of the remote past of the race they must remain, but just these are the murmurings of the only muse that can save from the omnipresent dangers of precocity. Thus we not only rescue from the danger of loss, but utilize for further psychic growth the results of the higher heredity, which are the most precious and potential things on earth. So, too, in our urbanized hothouse life, that tends to ripen everything before its time, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... retired from his place among the men, a step or two outside of the bar, and did not make a remark while his father remained. It was plain from this, that Mr. Slade was not only aware of Frank's dangerous precocity, but had already ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... "four-year-olds" where my father could hear me. To have simply skinned me alive and considered his duty at an end would have seemed to him criminal leniency toward one so sinning. He was a stern, unsmiling man, and hated all forms of precocity. If I had said some of the things I have referred to, and said them in his hearing, he would have destroyed me. He would, indeed. He would, provided the opportunity remained with him. But it would not, for I would ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... unhappy temperament to have been the result of a moral and physical idiosyncrasy,—she found it here to be the effect of a lifelong and hopeless passion for herself! The ingenious John Milton had given a poet's precocity to the youth whom she had only known as a suspicious, moody boy, had idealized him as a sensitive but songless Byron, had given him the added infirmity of pulmonary weakness, and a handkerchief that in moments of great excitement, ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... since refrained from saying I am confident that I've broken the back of one more legend, and saved Barbara from the fate of having to pass the rest of her childhood living up (or down) to a spurious halo of precocity. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... up was Samuel, afterwards Sir Samuel Bentham, born 11th January 1757. When eighty years old, Jeremy gave anecdotes of his infancy to his biographer, Bowring, who says that their accuracy was confirmed by contemporary documents, and proved his memory to be as wonderful as his precocity. Although the child was physically puny, his intellectual development was amazing. Before he was two he burst into tears at the sight of his mother's chagrin upon his refusal of some offered dainty. Before he was 'breeched,' an event which happened ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... thus spoken, the senior demons were amazed at his precocity, and performed a pradakshina, exclaiming, "Truly thou art a highly superior young devil!" They then departed to prepare the new infernal chamber, ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... their physical education to shew off their intellectual acquirements, the more injury you do their health and your own; and in the effort to do too much, you violate the laws of nature, defeat your own object, and make the school a hot-bed of precocity, instead of a rational infants' school for the training and educating infants. I have been blamed, by writers on the infant system, for that which I never did, and never recommended; I have been made answerable for the errors and mis-conceptions ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... deep blue eyes which seemed full of the humid fire of love. He had also a finely developed form, which his close-fitting garments set off to the best advantage, and, above all, what had the most charm for the eyes of his friends as they so heartily welcomed him to their house was the evident precocity of his organs of love, which in their quiescent state showed a most ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... good and ill results. He first played on February 24, 1818, a concerto by Gyrowetz and was so pleased with his new collar that he naively told his mother, "Everybody was looking at my collar." His musical precocity, not as marked as Mozart's, but phenomenal withal, brought him into intimacy with the Polish aristocracy and there his taste for fashionable society developed. The Czartoryskis, Radziwills, Skarbeks, Potockis, Lubeckis and the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... known as the "Cornish genius" when his first works, executed at the age of twenty, were exhibited in the Royal Academy, was a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was born at Truro in May, 1761, the son of a carpenter. His precocity attracted the notice of Dr. Wolcot ("Peter Pindar"), who introduced ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... royal youth, whose life, though short, had been so full of suffering, died at Versailles on the 4th of June, 1789, and, though only between seven and eight years of age at the time of his decease, he had given proofs of intellectual precocity, which would probably have made continued life, amidst the scenes of wretchedness, which succeeded, anything to him ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... nature has been in bestowing the gift of genius, the pursuit of art is nevertheless a long and continuous labour. Many artists have been precocious, but without diligence their precocity would have come to nothing. The anecdote related of West is well known. When only seven years old, struck with the beauty of the sleeping infant of his eldest sister whilst watching by its cradle, he ran to seek some paper and forthwith drew ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... in thirty-five stanzas, entitled "the Aeropteron; or, Steam Carriage." If his lines run not as glibly as a Liverpool prize engine, they will afford twenty minutes pleasant reading, and are an illustration of the high and low pressure precocity ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 479, March 5, 1831 • Various
... whole energies to poetry. His first poem, Festus (1839), is, for the daring of its theme and the imaginative power and moral altitude which it displays, one of the most notable of the century; as the work of one little past boyhood it is a prodigy of intellectual precocity. Along with its great qualities it has many faults in execution, and its final place in literature remains to be determined. It was pub. anonymously, and had great success, but has fallen into unmerited, but perhaps temporary, neglect. Among its ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... answer—seemed rather miffed, in fact. The child simply will not come, and that is point number one. Now, of course, Uncle Elbert realizes that he has not been what the world would call a good father. And he has figured it out that Mary, evidently a young precocity, has judged him, found him guilty, and sentenced him to banishment from her affections. That hurts, you know. Well, he is certain that if he could once see her and be thrown with her for a few days, she would find ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... his two cronies' attention to Andramark. If there was any precocity in the lad it would show of itself, and nothing would escape their black, jewel-like, inscrutable eyes. When Tassel Top fell into the river the aged pair laughed heartily, and when Andramark, without changing ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... If Abigail Hutchinson strikes us as representing, on the whole, rather a morbid type of human excellence, what are we to say to Phebe Bartlet, who had just passed her fourth birthday in April 1735? (iii. 70). This infant of more than Yankee precocity was converted by her brother, who had just gone through the same process at the age of eleven. She took to 'secret prayer,' five or six times a day, and would never suffer herself to be interrupted. Her experiences are given at great length, including a refusal to eat plums, 'because ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... yet nineteen when he commanded at Towton, at the head of almost fifty thousand men; and two months before he had gained the Battle of Mortimer's Cross, under circumstances that showed skillful generalship. No similar instance of precocity is to be found in the military history of mankind. His victories have been attributed to Warwick, but it is noticeable that he was as successful over Warwick as he had been over the Lancastrians, against whom Warwick originally fought. Barnet was, with fewer combatants, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... Smith was marked out from his comrades by nothing. The marvellous precocity of the boy did not astonish his preceptors. Books were not a passion for him from his youth, neither did any old man put his hand on Smith's head and say, mark his words, this boy would some day become a man. ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... lines farther down, the pseudo-Tacitus tells us that Crassus, in his nineteenth year, held a brief against Carbo; that Caesar did so in his twenty-first against Dolabella; and Pollio, in his twenty-second year, against Cato.[43] In this precocity Cicero did not imitate Crassus, or show an example to the Romans who followed him. He was twenty-six when he pleaded his first cause. Sulla had then succeeded in crushing the Marian faction, and the Sullan proscriptions had taken place, and ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... command of an abundance of general truths or commonplaces, and even at school boys were trained to commit them to memory, to expand them, and illustrate them from history.'[57] Finally they were taught to write verse. Such at least is a legitimate inference from the extraordinary precocity shown by many Roman authors.[58] This literary training contained much that was of great value, but it also had grave disadvantages. There seems in the first place to have been too much 'spoon-feeding', and too little genuine brain exercise for the ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... that was once turbid, heating, unwholesome in the current of sentiment which flows through this history of a guilty passion, "Death's immortalising winter" has chilled and purified. The book is now a harmless, and, it may be hoped, a not uninteresting, evidence of the precocity of its author's genius. As ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Hallo, Who's Your Lady Friend?"; "You're my Baby"; and the ungrammatical "Who Were You With Last Night?" Another great favourite is an involved composition which always appears to begin in the middle. It deals severely with the precocity of a youthful lover who has been detected wooing his lady in the Park. Each verse ends, ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... down, to while away an hour for him in a railway train! Thus I might begin this tale with a biography of Tonti—birthplace, parentage, genius probably inherited from his mother, remarkable instance of precocity, etc.—and a complete treatise on the system to which he bequeathed his name. The material is all beside me in a pigeon-hole, but I scorn to appear vainglorious. Tonti is dead, and I never saw anyone who even pretended to regret him; and, as for the tontine ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... wrapped in obscurity. It is certain that no glittering precocity brought disappointment to his maturer years, and he was already nineteen when he achieved his first imprisonment. Even then 'twas a sorry offence, which merited no more than a month, so that he returned to freedom and his fiddle with his character unbesmirched. Serious as ever in ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... care of the Rev. John Blanchard, who kept the best school in Nottingham, where he learnt writing, arithmetic, and French; and he continued there for several years. During that time two facts are related of him which prove the precocity of his talents. When about seven, he was accustomed to go secretly into his father's kitchen and teach the servant to read and write; and he composed a tale of a Swiss emigrant, which he gave her, being too diffident to show it to his mother. In his eleventh ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... exclaimed Duff Salter, pushing aside his gray apron of beard to see her more distinctly. "Did that brother who rushed in vicious precocity to maintain another and a wicked woman ever think of ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... consciousness of ancestry. They have a saying that every Rajput is a king's son, and every Rajputni worthy to be married to an emperor. It was in that atmosphere that Yasmini learned she must either use her wits or be outwitted, and women begin young to assert their genius in the East. But she outstripped precocity and, being Western too, rode rough-shod on convention when it suited her, reserving her concessions to it solely for occasions when those matched the hand she held. All her life she has had to play in a ruthless game, but the trump that she has learned to lead oftenest is unexpectedness. ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... the men were smoking, she inquired after Phoebe's boy. She declared she was "so fond of children" in a tone which compelled credence. She wished to know the colour of Victor's eyes and hair; she listened to Phoebe's marvellous stories of his precocity without the slightest sign ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb |
