"Unlettered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reply. He and the other Democratic leaders thought the president uncouth, unlettered, and very weak. The phrase "please write me at least as long a letter as this" produced an impression upon the scholarly, cultured, cautious, and diplomatic Seymour which was most unfavorable to its author. Seymour acknowledged ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... thunder voice of Fate Should call thee, studious, from the classic groves, Where calm-eyed Pallas with still footstep roves, And charge thee seek the turmoil of the state? What bade thee hear the voice and rise elate, Leave home and kindred and thy spicy loaves, To lead th' unlettered and despised droves To manhood's home ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... common misconception that it is only the educated and Christian Indian who has contributed to the progress of his people and to the common good of both races. There are many men wholly unlettered, and some of whom have not proclaimed themselves followers of Christ, who have yet exerted great influence on the side of civilization. Almost every tribe has a hero of this type who arose at a critical ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... sophistry blended, Deep science in Chaos had slept; Its limits were fettered, Its voters unlettered, Its students in movements but crept. Till, despite of great foes, Great WALSH first arose, And with logical might did unravel Those mazes of knowledge, Ne'er known in a college, Though sought for with unceasing travail. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... see the incompetency which has reduced the party paper to so low an ebb, they see the misery and degradation which the Land League inflicted on the once thriving districts of Tipperary; they saw their neighbours, poor, unlettered men, dupes of unscrupulous lying eloquence, men whom it was murder to deceive—they saw these men sentenced to long terms of penal servitude, while the instigators of the crimes for which they had ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... the world with frivolous and pedantic criticism. A picture or any other work of Art, is worth nothing except in so far as it has emanated from mind, and is addressed to mind. It should, indeed, be read like a book. Pictures, as it has been well said, are the books of the unlettered, but then we must at least understand the language in which they are written. And further,—if, in the old times, it was a species of idolatry to regard these beautiful representations as endued with a specific sanctity ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... party, they were more protected than otherwise. Owen never was particularly thrifty; and as his means were small, was generally embarrassed, or rather somewhat pinched in circumstances. Notwithstanding this, however, he was as happy as a king; and according to his unlettered neighbors' artless praise, "there wasn't a readier hand, nor an opener heart in the wide world—that's iv he had id—but he hadn't an' more was the pity." His entire possessions consisted of the ground we have mentioned, most ...
— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... consciousness that the reason of it all was that we might profit by it. Those unpaid hands wrought that our hands might be free to do nothing; those empty cabins were bare, in order that our houses might be full of every soft luxury; those unlettered minds were kept unlettered that the rarest of intellectual wealth might be poured into our treasury. I knew it. For I had written to my father once to beg his leave to establish schools, where the people on the plantation might be taught to read and write. ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Hardening a people's heart to senseless stone, Thou knewest them, O Earth, that drank their tears, 40 O Heaven, that heard their inarticulate moan! They noted down their fetters, link by link; Coarse was the hand that scrawled, and red the ink; Rude was their score, as suits unlettered men, Notched with a headsman's axe upon a block: What marvel if, when came the avenging shock, 'Twas Ate, not Urania, held ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... these regions to gain a little money; or little children, carried off by the harsh climate (yet the climate of this place is preferred to that of Gafsa). The enclosure is filling up with drift-sand; the inscriptions on the tombs, often a mere charcoal scrawl of some unlettered friend or parent, is soon effaced by winds ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... would have ranked only as a Christian heresiarch or schismatic; such as Nestorius or Marcian at one time, such as Arius or Pelagius at another. In his character of theologian, therefore, Mahomet was simply the most memorable of blunderers, supported in his blunders by the most unlettered of nations. In his other character of legislator, we have seen, that already the earliest stages of Mahometan experience exposed decisively his ruinous imbecility. Where a rude tribe offered no resistance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... progress, advance—those things perhaps lay in the vague ambitions of twice two hundred men who now lay in camp at the border of our unknown empire. They were all Americans—second, third, fourth generation Americans. Wild, uncouth, rude, unlettered, many or most of them, none the less there stood among them now and again some tall flower of that culture for which they ever hungered; for which they fought; for which they now ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... Many of the tales in this volume, as in similar collections for other European countries, are what the folklorists call Drolls. They serve to justify the title of Merrie England, which used to be given to this country of ours, and indicate unsuspected capacity for fun and humour among the unlettered classes. The story of Tom Tit Tot, which opens our collection, is unequalled among all other folk-tales I am acquainted with, for its combined sense of humour ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... from a list before him. This done, he got him to fill out his report to the crown lands department, to write several letters to the firms he dealt with in Toronto, and one to his daughter, which was original in matter and expression. Archie recognized the shrewdness and ability of this unlettered man, who carried on with ease several lines of business in addition to his farm. After supper he made Archie sit beside him and asked if he would not give up his notion of taking up land and hire with him. Finding he was determined to have a home of his own, Magarth gave him much advice as ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... rhythms, in its style and shape. There are times when it stands in relation to other music as some being half giant, half day-laborer, might stand in the company of scholars and poets and other highly educated and civilized men. The unlettered, the uncouth, the humble, the men unacquainted with eloquence are in this music in very body. It pierces directly from their throats. No film, no refinement on their speech, no art of music removes them from us. As Moussorgsky originally wrote these scores, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... little of ancient statuary can still brighten to intelligent recognition of the huntress with her quiver and her little stag when they meet with them in picture gallery or in suburban garden. That unlettered sportsman in weather-worn pink, slowly riding over the fragrant dead leaves by the muddy roadside on this chill, grey morning, may never have heard of Artemis, but he is quite ready to make intelligent reference to Diana to the handsome young sportswoman whom he ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... elemental instinct, which in the miners, the "men," yet remained vigorous and unblunted, and by means of which they assessed Felice and her harmless blandishments at their true worth. For all Lockwood's culture, his own chuck-tenders, unlettered fellows, cumbersome, slow-witted, "knew women"—at least, women of their own world, like Felice—better than he. On the other hand, his intelligence was no such perfected instrument as Hicks's, as exact as logarithms, as penetrating as a scalpel, ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... world, people living under similar conditions to the Southerners are exceedingly musical, and we owe the great majority of the sweetest compositions which delight the ear and subdue the senses to unlettered song-makers of the Swiss mountains, the Tyrolese valleys, the Bavarian Highlands, and the minstrels ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... a city, may have many sins to answer for, but ingratitude is not one of them, or reverence for the great men she has produced, and as the years go by her greatest son Mark Twain, or S. L. Clemens as a few of the unlettered call him, grows in the estimation and regard of the residents of the town he made famous and the town that made him famous. His name is associated with every old building that is torn down to make way for the modern structures ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... receiving, among the general literary driftage of amateur essayists, poets and sketch-writers, some conceits in verse that struck the editorial head as decidedly novel; and, as they were evidently the production of an unlettered man, and an OLD man, and a farmer at that, they were usually spared the waste-basket, and preserved—not for publication, but to pass from hand to hand among the members of the staff as simply quaint and mirth-provoking specimens of the verdancy of both the venerable author and the Muse inspiring ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... of intellectual aristocrats. The Christian Church from the beginning included intellectual aristocrats side by side with the ignorant and unlettered. ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... by the simplest of the unlettered age for whom it was intended. It was remembered by them... For almost five centuries it was appealed to as the decisive authority on behalf of the people... To have produced it, to have preserved it, to have matured it, constitute the immortal claim of England on the esteem of mankind. ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... in reading them, the tenderness and humility of a nature redeemed from all pride of opinion and self-righteousness, sinking itself out of sight, and intent only upon rendering smaller the sum of human sorrow and sin by drawing men nearer to God, and to each other. The style is that of a man unlettered, but with natural refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart enters into his language. There is no attempt at fine writing, not a word or phrase for effect; it is the simple unadorned diction of one to whom the temptations ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... this country, few names have excited a deeper interest, or have been more widely and familiarly known than that of RED JACKET. The occasion of this notoriety was the rare fact that, though a rude and unlettered son of the forest, he was distinguished for the arts and accomplishments of the orator. His life marks an era in the history of his nation and his name like that of Demosthenes, is forever ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... and engaged in various menial occupations from which I was exempted, the knowledge that in something I was regarded as their superior, soon forced itself upon me; I felt a distaste for the society of little unlettered, and unmannered boors, and in silence and solitude made progress in studies, which, mere matters of amusement to me, would have been hailed by many youths as tasks more severe than daily ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... doubtless means to tell us, but, owing to the absence of a hyphen ("German-Lace Store," or "German Lace-Store"), does not tell us. Nothing is more common than erroneous punctuation in signs, and gross mistakes by the unlettered in the wording of ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... that always struggled for command; but he was deeply susceptible of kindness, and, if feared by those who opposed, loved by those who served him. About his character was that mixture of tenderness and fierceness which belonged, of old, to the descriptions of the warrior. Though so little unlettered, Life had taught him a certain poetry of sentiment and idea—More poetry, perhaps, in the silent thoughts that, in his happier moments, filled his solitude, than in half the pages that his brother had read and written by the dreaming lake. A certain ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have a compartment to ourselves, and to travel in a manner becoming our position. We are quite willing to be healed, but we would like to be healed with due deference. You are an educated man, a student; you do not like to take the same place as the most unlettered, and to feel that the common fact of sin puts you, in a very solemn respect, upon the level of these narrow foreheads and unlettered people. And so some of you turn away because Christianity, with such impartiality and persistency, insists ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... figure and dash it to pieces on the stone floor of the little church. But one must have lived awhile among simple-minded pious Catholics to know what this poor waxen image and the whole baby-house of bambinos mean for a humble, unlettered, unimaginative peasantry. He will find that the true office of this eidolon is to fix the mind of the worshipper, and that in virtue of the devotional thoughts it has called forth so often for so many years in the ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... group like this Sumner's great and eloquent speech on the Barbarism of Slavery, seemed almost cold and dead,—the mute appeals of these little ones in their mother's arms—the unlettered language of these young mothers, striving to save their offspring from the doom of Slavery—the resolute and manly bearing of these brothers expressed in words full of love of liberty, and of the determination to resist Slavery to the death, in defence of their wives and children—this ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... well he might, for poor Bligh was a man, who, out of his midshipman's pay, allowed his wife and children thirteen pounds a year. He wished to be made master's mate, that he might make the sum twenty pounds, and then he said they would be happy. He was a man about thirty-five years of age; an unlettered man, of strong natural powers, and of a heart, of which a purer, and a better, never lived. I could tell you anecdotes of him that would make your eyes overflow, like mine. Surely, Cottle, there will be no difficulty in sending his poor wife some little sum. Five guineas would be much to her. ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... order, God sparing my life and memory. And they who light upon this book should bear in mind not only that I write for the clearing of our parish from ill fame and calumny, but also a thing which will, I trow, appear too often in it, to wit—that I am nothing more than a plain unlettered man, not read in foreign languages, as a gentleman might be, nor gifted with long words (even in mine own tongue), save what I may have won from the Bible or Master William Shakespeare, whom, in the face of common opinion, I do value highly. In short, I am an ignoramus, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... sciences enrich the mind, gives an air of dignity to whatever we say, even in cases where that depth of knowledge is not required. Science adorns the speaker at all times, and, where it is least expected, confers a grace that charms every hearer; the man of erudition feels it, and the unlettered part of the audience acknowledge the effect without knowing the cause. A murmur of applause ensues; the speaker is allowed to have laid in a store of knowledge; he possesses all the powers of persuasion, and then ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... the strangers and invite them to take dinner in his booth, where Mrs. Hollis reveled in a riot of pastry. A little behind him strutted Mr. Moseley, sending search-lights of scrutiny over the crowd in order to discover the academy boys who might be wasting their time upon unlettered femininity. ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... body, and the Great Pagoda is his tail. In front is a grove of cedars. To one side is the hall where thousands of scholars go to worship at the Spring and Autumn Festivals—this for the gentry alone, not for the unlettered populace. There is a building used for the slaughter of animals, another containing a map of the city engraved in stone; a third with tablets and astronomical diagrams, and a fourth containing the Provincial Library. On each side of the large courts are ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... detached posts throughout the kingdom of Cabul; the dreadful catastrophe which ushered in the year 1842 is but too unanswerable a proof of the opinion I here express; and though innumerable instances of individual gallantry as well amongst the unlettered privates as the superior officers have thrown a halo round their bloody graves, the stern truth still forces itself upon us, that the temporary eclipse of British glory was not the consequences of events beyond the power of human wisdom to foresee or ward off, but the natural ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... certain parts of the Koran, he is reckoned sufficiently instructed; and with this slender stock of learning commences his career of life. Proud of his acquirements, he surveys with contempt the unlettered negro; and embraces every opportunity of displaying his superiority over such of his countrymen as are not distinguished by the ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... his magnificent plan, included several curious departments. Jealous of the literary glory of the Italians, whom he compares to the Greeks for accounting all nations barbarous and unlettered, he had composed four books "De Viris Illustribus", on English Authors, to force them to acknowledge the illustrious genius, and the great men of Britain. Three books "De Nobilitate Britannica" were to be "as an ornament ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... of his best affections, drawing him to her with a purifying charm, from the selfishness of the world, from poverty and neglect, from the low and base, nay, from his own frailty or vices:—for he cannot approach her with unhallowed thoughts, whom the unlettered and ignorant look up to with awe, as to one of a race above them; before whom the wisest and best bow down without abasement, and would bow in idolatry but for a higher reverence. No! there is no power ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... closer to deliverance than intellect which innovates," is a phrase ascribed to a Mohammedan saint, and do not modern theologians report with enthusiasm, the unlettered ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... course, accepted humbly by the unlettered Teutons; and did its work well, for centuries to come. It is said—I trust not truly—to be still enrolled among the decrees of the Canon law, though reprobated by all enlightened Roman Catholics. Be that as it may, on the strength of this document the Popes began ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... obscurity of the Nuithones, Sigulones, and others? What population amongst those with which they came in contact could have recorded their alliances, their victories, or their defeats? Not the Frisians, who were unlettered as long as they were Pagan, and Pagan until the tenth century. Not the Slavonians, whose spiritual and intellectual darkness was equal. Not the Romans, for reasons already given. There only remained the Gauls and Britons. But, unfortunately, in the eyes ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... heads that she directed the vengeance of the cruel Aurelian. The fame of Longinus,[70] who was included among the numerous and perhaps innocent victims of her fear, will survive that of the Queen who betrayed or the tyrant who condemned him. Genius and learning were incapable of moving a fierce unlettered soldier, but they had served to elevate and harmonize the soul of Longinus. Without uttering a complaint he calmly followed the executioner, pitying his unhappy mistress, and bestowing ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... by the complexities of the female mind, the mental processes of the unlettered male were quite familiar to him and he showed his comprehension by ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... masses, the songs sung in the intimacy of the Czar Boris's household, the chants of the monks, needed not to be strange to any student of folk-song, nor could their puissance be lost upon the musically unlettered. In the old Kolyada Song "Slava" [Footnote: Lovers of chamber music know this melody from its use in the allegretto in Beethoven's E minor Quartet dedicated to Count Rasoumowski, where it appears thus:—] with ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... passions may revel unfettered, And the heart never speak but in truth; And the intellect, wholly unlettered, Be bright ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... example, he saw faults in Mozart and Beethoven where there are only beauties, and beauties which even an ignorant listener—if he is naturally musical—will see without trouble. He did not understand the vast difference between the unlettered person who commits a solecism and Pascal, the inventor of a ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... way the noise was, if mine ear be true, My best guide now. Methought it was the sound Of riot and ill-managed merriment, Such as the jocund flute or gamesome pipe Stirs up among the loose unlettered hinds, When, for their teeming flocks and granges full, In wanton dance they praise the bounteous Pan, And thank the gods amiss. I should be loth To meet the rudeness and swilled insolence Of such late wassailers; yet, oh! where else Shall ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... "The nations of unlettered men so adapted their language to philosophic truth, that all physical and intellectual research can find no essential rule to reject or change."—Ibid., p. 91. I have shown that "the nations of unlettered men" are among that portion of the earth's population, upon whose language the genius of grammar has never yet condescended to look down! That people who make no pretensions to learning, can furnish better models or instructions than "the most enlightened scholars," is an ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... been growing before the World War. Slowly but remorselessly the skilled and intelligent, banding themselves, had threatened the coffers of the mighty, and slowly the mighty had disgorged. Even the common workers, the poor and unlettered, had again and again gripped the sills of the city walls and pulled themselves to their chins; but, alas! there were so many hands and so many mouths and the feet of the Disinherited kept coming across the wet paths of the sea to this ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... changed the whole course of their lives, and taught them things which He had taught to no one else, and given them a great and awful work to do—the work of changing the ways and thoughts and doings of the whole world. He had sent them out—eleven unlettered working men—to fight against the sin and the misery of the whole world. And He had given them open warning of what they were to expect; that by it they should win neither credit, nor riches, nor ease, ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... requisites, the moral courage (for moral courage, if not physical, must form part of an author's mind,) to publish the lucubration: but "I magnify mine office" above the unnumbered host of unwriting, uninformed, loose, unlettered gentry, who (as full of leisure as a cabbage, and as overflowing with redundant impudence as any Radical mob,) mainly tend to form by their masses the average penless animal-man, who could not hold a candle to any the most mediocre of the Marsyas-used authors of haply this week's journals. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... into the theory of M. le Comte de Monte-Cristo. However closely disguised, himself is always the heroic figure, and he is ever busy in arranging discovery and triumph. To his chance-mates he is but an eccentric person, an amateur tinker, a slack-baked gipsy, an unlettered hack; to his audience he is his own, strong, indifferent self: presently the rest will recognise him and he will be disdainfully content. And recognise him they do. He throws off his disguise; there is a gape, a stare, a general conviction that Lavengro is the greatest ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... of plain, poor, farmer folk, immemorially dwelling close to the soil; unlettered, unambitious, long-lived, abounding in children, without physical beauty, but marking the track of their generations by a path lustrous with right-doing. For more than a hundred years on this spot the land had lessened around them; but the soil had worked ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... whole defensive scheme of the Second Army collapsed, it is true that confusion and panic began to spread through the Second Army like fire through dry grass. But it is not within the power of common soldiers, and especially of simple unlettered peasantry, such as most of these soldiers were, to repair the blunders of bad Staff work, and to make for themselves, on the spur of the moment and in face of deadly peril, plans which trained brains should have elaborated long before, at leisure and in safe ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... to repose under in summer's burning heat, but is in itself a pretty ornament. The great fault of the Africans is want of forethought, or impatience of the future. Their maxim is, to enjoy the present, to take no thought for the morrow, but let the morrow provide for itself. Like all rude and unlettered people, the precepts of religion are interpreted in their strictest literality. To-day, I find more people in the streets, and the Ramadan is not so visible in their faces as I expected it would be. The fact is, the generality of the Saharan ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... Jews, the cut-throats and robbers of Christians, slow-bellied monks, who have made escape from their cloisters, simoniacal and perjured shavelings, busy Sir John lack-Latins, thrasonical and unlettered chemists, shifting and outcast pettifoggers, light-headed and trivial druggers and apothecaries, sun-shunning night-birds and corner-creepers, dull-pated and base mechanics, stage-players, jugglers, peddlers, prittle-prattling barbers, filthy graziers, curious bath-keepers, ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... of the church is a narrow opening, at which the priest is supposed to have sat and listened to the confession of the sinner on the outside of the building. The dead lie all around the church, under stones bearing the dates of several centuries. One epitaph, which the unlettered Muse must have dictated, is worth recording. After giving the chief slumberer's name the ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... be done? Opportunities were few and far between, and now, for the first time in her life, confidence in her own powers deserted her, and she was overcome by a strange new feeling of humility and doubt. Who and what was she, that such a man should stoop to accept her friendship; poor, unlettered girl that she was, while he was acknowledged as one of the leading intellects of the day? Yet deep in her heart the thought lingered that between this man and herself existed a certain affinity, which, ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... became evident at once that his nephew had slyly and forcibly put it into his head that amateur radio construction was largely newspaper bunk, without any real foundation of fact. Thad may have had some new scheme, but at any rate the unlettered old man would swallow pretty nearly everything Thad said, even though he often repudiated Thad's acts. Again Mr. Hooper, Bill and Gus got on the subject of radio and the old gentleman ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... Written in a Country Churchyard, by Thomas Gray, is so superior as a poem to Spoon River Anthology. The rich were buried in the church; the poor in the yard; we are therefore given the short and simple annals of the poor. The curious thing is that these humble, rustic, unlettered folk were presented to the world sympathetically by a man who was almost an intellectual snob. One of the most exact scholars of his day, one of the most fastidious of mortals, one of the shyest men that ever lived, a born mental aristocrat, his literary genius enabled him ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... of the world. The Chinese called the white man "a sky-breaker." The mediaeval spirit loved its part in life as a part, not a whole; its charter for it came from something else. There is a joke about a Benedictine monk who used the common grace of Benedictus benedicat, whereupon the unlettered Franciscan triumphantly retorted Franciscus Franciscat. It is something of a parable of mediaeval history; for if there were a verb Franciscare it would be an approximate description of what St. Francis afterwards ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... my pencil, and tearing a leaf from the memorandum-book, I stood ready to act as amanuensis. The intelligent though unlettered maiden, resting her forehead upon her hand—as if to aid in giving shape ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... the poor, and this cry against oppression, grew stronger and stronger till it culminated in "Bobby" Burns, who, more than any other writer in any language, is the poet of the unlettered human heart. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... ventured once or twice to remonstrate with the prosperous farmer upon the positive danger, with reference to his ambitious views, of not at least so far cultivating the intellect and taste of so attractive a maiden as his daughter, that sympathy on her part with the rude, unlettered clowns, with whom she necessarily came so much in contact, should be impossible. He laughed my hints to scorn. 'It is idleness—idleness alone,' he said, 'that puts love-fancies into girls' heads. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... Gai-Orlov left their fields unfilled, and cultivated nothing save hymns and prayers. They seemed to be uplifted as by some wave of dreamy, poetic madness. Even the unlettered imitated Grigorieff in composing psalms and hymns, some specimens of which are to be found in Father Arsenii's collection. They breathe ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... uninstructed, untaught, uninitiated, untutored, unschooled, misguided, unenlightened; Philistine; behind the age. shallow, superficial, green, rude, empty, half-learned, illiterate; unread, uninformed, uneducated, unlearned, unlettered, unbookish; empty- headed ,dizzy, wooly-headed; pedantic; in the dark; benighted, belated; blinded, blindfolded; hoodwinked; misinformed; au bout de son latin, at the end of his tether, at fault; at sea &c. (uncertain) 475; caught tripping. unknown, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the soul's immortality, and of the fundamental difference between man and the wisest brutes. To plant the trees that, after we are dead, shall shelter our children, is as natural as to love the shade of those our fathers planted. The rudest unlettered husbandman, painfully conscious of his own inferiority, the poorest widowed mother, giving her life-blood to those who pay only for the work of her needle, will toil and stint themselves to educate their child, that he may take ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... families of a few old pensioners. In these low- vaulted chambers, with their deep and narrow embrasures, once the scene of the rude alarum of war, often has he held a quiet religious service with the lowly and unlettered inmates, who knew little of the thrilling ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... certifying to our having been in his employ, but also to our not being highwaymen, kidnappers, nor yet runaway seamen. Even written in English, a paper like this would answer every purpose; for the unlettered natives, standing in great awe of the document, would not dare to molest us until acquainted with its purport. Then, if it came to the worst, we might repair to the nearest missionary, and have the ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... age, with the care of a widowed mother, and children still younger than himself, neither the circumstances of his family, of the country, or his peculiar condition, allowed him the chances of education. Almost as unlettered as James Harrod, he was a memorable example of a self-formed man. Great natural acuteness, and strong intellectual powers, were, however, adorned by a disposition of uncommon benevolence. Under the eye of an excellent father, he commenced ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... that was all music and melody. When Count Drentell carried her off in the face of a hundred admirers, he was considered lucky indeed. Dimitri never confessed, even to himself, that he regretted his hasty choice. Louise was as capricious as she was beautiful, as unlettered as she was charming, as superstitious as she was fascinating. All that she did was done on impulse. She loved her husband on impulse, she deserted her child for weeks at a time on impulse, she succored the poor or neglected them on impulse. ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... fill a long evening by dint of minute and realistic description of every stage of a journey, each camp made, every feature of a ceremony performed, and so on indefinitely. True, the attention of his unlettered listeners never flags; but our sophisticated youngsters would soon weary, we ...
— Wigwam Evenings - Sioux Folk Tales Retold • Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman
... parting at Jerseyville nearly two years ago—hence we fully realized that this farewell might be the last. Nor did this manner spring from indifference, or lack of sensibility; it was simply the way of the plain unlettered backwoods people of those days. Nearly thirty-five years later the "whirligig of time" evolved an incident which clearly brought home to me a vivid idea of what must have been my father's feelings on this occasion. The Spanish-American war began in the latter part of April, ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... feeling heart, a nice sense of honesty and honour, and was, notwithstanding his humble lineage, an educated and accomplished youth. His father, the gardener, was a man of ambitious spirit, though quite unlettered; and, having himself often experienced the disadvantage of this condition, he resolved that his ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... move slowly towards this extreme conclusion. If reason appears to-day to play but a feeble part in society, and exerts only a limited empire over the actions of men, it is because unlettered ignorance, social habits and the positive institutions of government stand in the way. Where the masses of mankind are sunk in brutal ignorance, one need not wonder that argument and persuasion have but a small influence with them. Truth ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... supposed that the English esquire of the seventeenth century did not materially differ from a rustic miller or alehouse keeper of our time. There are, however, some important parts of his character still to be noted, which will greatly modify this estimate. Unlettered as he was and unpolished, he was still in some most important points a gentleman. He was a member of a proud and powerful aristocracy, and was distinguished by many both of the good and of the bad qualities which belong to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to see their wives and children once more, after a long and painful service. Their companion, the hope and prop of his family, had sunk under the fatigue, and they had made a grave for him; but they were poor unlettered men, and unable to repeat the funeral service from the holy Koran-would his Highness but perform this last office for them, he would, no doubt, find his reward in this world and the next. The Mogul dismounted—the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... his hand, and smiled—it was Lael's work. "How she has improved!—and how rapidly!" he said aloud, ending a retrospect which began with the hour Uel consented to her becoming his daughter. She was unlettered then, but how helpful now. He felt an artist's pride in her growth in knowledge. There were tedious calculations which she took off his hands; his geometrical drawings of the planets in their Houses were frequently done in haste; she perfected ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... footsteps of Hume, he asked: "How far can human reason go? Where is its limit?" His Critique was the answer. He showed that, if the loose methods of thought were to be continued, philosophy, instead of being the hand-maid of religion, would be unworthy the attention of the most unlettered man. Hence he would recall reason from its lofty flights, and direct its attention solely to self-consciousness. Only by studying the powers of the mind as a datum, he held, can any positive results be gained. Using his own illustration of his work, he would do for philosophy what Copernicus ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... and one whose manners were to furnish a model for the Spanish court, had, of course, been trained to that demeanor which was regarded in Spain as the distinctive mark of high breeding. "All the nobles of this court," writes an Italian contemporary, "though amazingly ignorant and unlettered, maintain a certain haughty tranquillity of manner which they term sosiego." Foreigners found it difficult to define a quality which differed as much from the composure and self-possession everywhere ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... matter to be presented under any one paragraph is voluminous, it may be broken up into a number of subparagraphs. Except in paragraph 3, these subparagraphs are unlettered. ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... this wound was twice the subject for witty remarks by two young women, the daughters of a North Carolina patriot. Tarleton remarked to one of these sisters that he understood Colonel Washington was an unlettered fellow, hardly ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... Christianity its former position. The army next chose Valentinian I. (364-375), the son of a Pannonian warrior, who associated with him, as emperor in the East, his brother Valens (364-378). Valens ruled from Constantinople. Valentinian fixed his court at Milan, and sometimes at Treves. He was an unlettered soldier, but strict and energetic in the government of the state, as well as of the army. His time was mostly spent in conflict with the barbarians on the northern frontiers. He carried forward this contest with vigor on the Rhine ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... demanded that he allow no friendship to spring up between himself and this girl. If his sister's belief was really true, if Helen really was interested in him, it must be a romantic infatuation which, not encouraged, would wear itself out. What was he, to win the love of any girl? An unlettered borderman, who knew only the woods, whose life was hard and cruel, whose hands were red with Indian blood, whose vengeance had not spared men even of his own race. He could not believe she really loved him. Wildly impulsive as girls were at times, she had kissed him. She had been grateful, ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... an informed one, it is better to conceive the sky as a blue dome than a dark cavity, and the cloud as a golden throne than a sleety mist. I much question whether anyone who knows optics, however religious he may be, can feel in equal degree the pleasure and reverence an unlettered peasant may feel at the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... the time was, like myself, working in the old Academy degli Intronati. I had taken an instant liking for the Cordelier in question, a man who, grown grey in study, still preserved the cheerful, facile humour of a simple, unlettered countryman. He was very willing to converse; and I greatly relished his bland speech, his cultivated yet artless way of thought, his look of old Silenus purged at the baptismal font, the play of his ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... Forks of the Kentucky. No more was heard of him or his companions, and it is still the belief of the family that the latter murdered him. He was survived by his wife and a daughter, and left a large landed estate. Harrod, although unlettered, was a man of fine presence and many sterling qualities, and made a strong impress on his generation. He is still remembered in Kentucky as one of the worthiest pioneers ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... next. Books of religion, however, cannot be considered a fair test of the enduring and vivacious properties of human thought, because such books so seldom really touch upon their ostensible subject, and have, therefore, so little business to be written at all. So long as an unlettered soul can attain to saving grace there would seem to be no deadly error in holding theological libraries to be accumulations of, for ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... estate.' It has long been confessed in the courts, that the first decision, that a devise of lands to a person without words of inheritance, should carry an estate for life only, was an absurd decision, founded on feudal principles, after feudal ideas had long been lost by the unlettered writers of their own wills: and it has often been said, that were the matter to begin again, it should be decided that such a devise should carry a fee simple, as every body is sensible testators intend, by these expressions. The courts, therefore, circumscribe ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Look out if yonder be not day again Rimming the rock-row! That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought, Rarer, intenser, Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought, Chafes in the censer. Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; Seek we sepulture On a tall mountain, citied to the top, Crowded with culture! Air the peaks soar, but one the rest excels; Clouds overcome it; No! yonder sparkle is the citadel's Circling its ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... contrary to the commands of Al-Islam, Mohammed expressly said "The Astrologers are liars, by the Lord of the Ka'abah!"; and his saying is known to almost all Moslems, lettered or unlettered. Yet, the further we go East (Indiawards) the more we find these practices held in honour. Turning ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... thoroughly civilized or always civilized; the most refined, the most enlightened person has his moods, his moments of barbarism, in which the best, or even the second best, shall not please him. At these times the lettered and the unlettered are alike primitive and their gratifications are of the same simple sort; the highly cultivated person may then like melodrama, impossible fiction, and the trapeze as sincerely and thoroughly as a boy of thirteen or a barbarian ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... some unknown bird. The artist, however, had sufficiently provided against the consequences of so embarrassing a blunder, by considerately writing beneath the offspring of his pencil, "This is the sign of the Whip-Poor-Will;" a name, that the most unlettered traveller, in those regions, would be likely to know was vulgarly given to the Wish-Ton-Wish, ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... a purely imaginary tale. Suddenly Burns appeared: and the ideal seemed incarnated in the living present. The Scottish bard was introduced to the world by his first admirers as "a heaven-taught ploughman, of humble unlettered station," whose "simple strains, artless and unadorned, seem to flow without effort from the native feelings of the heart"; and as "a signal instance of true and uncultivated genius." The real Burns, though indeed ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... extremely scarce, I conceive that a reprint of it in your pages may be acceptable to your Folk-lore readers. The "Rules" are interlarded with scraps of poetry, somewhat after the manner of old Tusser, and bear the unmistakeable impress of a "plain, unlettered Muse." The author concludes his work with a poetical address "to the antiquity and honour of shepheards." The title is rather a droll one, and ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... life-facts which now in her hour of need stretched under her feet like a solid pathway across an oozing marsh. All those men and women whom she had seen in a thousand unpremeditated acts, those tired-faced, kind-eyed, unlettered fathers and mothers were not breathing poisoned air, were not harboring in their simple lives a ghastly devouring wild-beast. She recalled with a great indrawn breath all the farmer-neighbors, parents working together for the children, the people she knew so well from long ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... struggling for the preeminence. Many of the bigoted clergy were exasperated by the toleration which the empress enjoined, and they united with the disaffected lords in a conspiracy for a revolution. The clergy in the provinces had great influence over the unlettered boors, and the conspiracy soon assumed a very threatening aspect. The first rising of rebellion was by the wild population scattered along the banks of the Don. The rebellion was headed by an impostor, who declared that he was Peter III., and that, having ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... not feel it, arisen. The rich and noble, absorbed in debauchery or art, regarded the peasant as a different race—"the ox without horns" they called him—to be cudgeled while he was tame and hunted like a wolf when he ran wild. Artists and men of letters ignored the very existence of the unlettered, with the superb Horatian, "I hate the vulgar crowd and I keep them off," or, if they were aroused for a moment by the noise of civil war merely remarked, with Erasmus, that any tyranny was better than that of the mob. Churchmen like ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... that the court in Iowa refused her any support from the estate, and in her shame and confusion she went away to Texas and taught school for six months to earn money enough to make her defense; that there she met an unlettered and sensitive man, but at the same time one of the clearest-brained, most generous and noble-hearted men in the world, but in whom, from the fact he was so sensitive and generous, she could not confide, lest she might not ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... was proposed to the great Gustavus of Sweden to destroy the palace of the Dukes of Bavaria, that hero nobly refused; observing, "Let us not copy the example of our unlettered ancestors, who, by waging war against every production of genius, have rendered the name of GOTH universally proverbial of the rudest state ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... was to him aught but a tragedy at any time, on whichever road he took. What but a tragedy could it be to a man bred at Douay and reared on Greek, and now condemned to live in loneliness and squalor among unlettered, unwashed creatures; to one who, banned by the law, moved by night, and lurked in some hiding-place by day, and, waking or sleeping, was ever in contact with the lawless and the oppressed, the wretched and the starving—whose ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... it; the near kinship of terseness to obscurity; the laughable outcome of a mountain's labour; the warning to be chary of bringing gods upon the stage; the occasional nod of Homer;—are commonplace citations so crisp and so exhaustive in their Latin garb, that even the unlettered scientist imports them into his treatises, sometimes with ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... who consider that in all territorial questions, the ablest diplomatists of the United States are sent to negociate with the Indians, will readily appreciate the loss sustained by the latter in the death of their champion. * * * * Such a man was the unlettered savage, Tecumseh, and such a man have the Indians lost forever. He has left a son, who, when his father fell, was about seventeen years old, and fought by his side. The prince regent, in 1814, out of respect to the ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... country who cannot read and write. In Northern communities where the children grow up in Christian homes and are environed in cultured society, with the best of common schools, the church finds the material for its membership, so far forth, prepared to its hand, but among these millions of unlettered peoples the church, if it is to be pure and intelligent, must be the outgrowth of the Christian school; and the branches of the tree might as well be expected to grow up without the roots, as such churches without these schools. The work among them begins in the primary school, and follows ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... Inelegance. — N. inelegance; stiffness &c. adj.; "unlettered Muse" [Gray]; barbarism; slang &c. 563; solecism &c. 568; mannerism &c. (affectation) 855; euphuism[obs3]; fustian &c. 577; cacophony; words that break the teeth, words that dislocate the jaw; marinism[obs3]. V. be inelegant ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... Idea that possessed his life had operated as a means of education; it had gone on cultivating his powers to the highest point of which they were susceptible; it had raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer to stand on a star-lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth, laden with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber after him. So much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That, indeed, had withered,—had contracted,—had ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is again the key—it was to this I was indebted for ridding me of my fright, and once more giving me the advantage over my unlettered companion. In that book I remembered having read—of course in the same chapter that treated of the baobab—how a curious practice existed among some tribes of negroes, of hollowing out the great trunks of these trees into vaults or chambers, and there depositing ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... Unlettered? Yes; But the alumni of his schools, Triumphant over the handicap Of "previous condition," Are to be found the world over In every assemblage inspired By the ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... Fire and air, as not distinctly known by the unlettered, are not expressly named by Moses among the parts of the world, but reckoned with the intermediate part, or water, especially as regards the lowest part of the air; or with the heaven, to which ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... of the above remarks was made by a young fellow, answering to the name of John, who sits near me at table. A certain basket of peaches, a rare vegetable, little known to boarding-houses, was on its way to me via this unlettered Johannes. He appropriated the three that remained in the basket, remarking that there was just one apiece for him. I convinced him that his practical inference was hasty and illogical, but in the mean time he had ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the event, and forty more had elapsed at the time of Mr. Hira Lal's investigation. [383] Of the Chamar Reformer himself Mr. Chisholm writes: [384] "Ghasi Das, like the rest of his community, was unlettered. He was a man of unusually fair complexion and rather imposing appearance, sensitive, silent, given to seeing visions, and deeply resenting the harsh treatment of his brotherhood by the Hindus. He was ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... up for the night near other rafts, and its crew exchanged visits with theirs. The regular river raftsmen were generally powerful young giants, rough and unlettered, but a good-natured, happy-go-lucky lot, full of tales of adventure in the woods or on the river, to which the boys listened with a never-failing delight. Nor were the raftmates at all behindhand in this interchange of good ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... and how the provinces had been tunnelled and bridged and canalised and irrigated, during two thousand years, by those whose bones were dust under the Latin soil. He could not wholly cheat himself, as these unlettered men could do; he knew that if the commerce which has succeeded the Caesars as ruler of the world coveted the waters of Edera, the river was lost to the home of its birth and ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... Gorics' or 'Nains'). Other mythical personages are also credited with their erection, most frequently either the devil or Gargantua being held responsible for their miraculous creation. The phenomenon, well known to students of folk-lore, that an unlettered people speedily forgets the origin of monuments that its predecessors may have raised in times past is well exemplified in Brittany, whose peasant-folk are usually surprised, if not amused, at the question "Who built the dolmens?" Close familiarity ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... to and fro among the palms and poppies of Palestine, glorifying anew an accursed and degraded human nature, unlettered fishermen, who mended their nets and trimmed their sails along the blue waves of Galilee, were fit instruments, in his guiding hands, for the dissemination of his Gospel; but when the days of the Incarnation ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... how Hath—that interminable Hath!—would know it all better than she did, but long ago the land was overrun by a people from beyond the broad, blue waters outside; a people huge of person, hairy and savage, uncouth, unlettered, and poor An's voice trembled even to describe them; a people without mercy or compunction, dwellers in woods, eaters of flesh, who burnt, plundered, and destroyed all before them, and had toppled over this city along with many others in an ancient foray, the horrors of which, ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... young apprentices to the splendid trade of war, not old and broken men-at-arms, despairing survivors of an age-long accumulation of monotonous defeats; but Joan of Arc, a mere child in years, ignorant, unlettered, a poor village girl unknown and without influence, found a great nation lying in chains, helpless and hopeless under an alien domination, its treasury bankrupt, its soldiers disheartened and dispersed, ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... time when grievances were as real as plenty; when unutterable resentment must have been rankling in many minds; and when those traditions were growing which have coloured the whole texture of Irish thought, until, with the poor and unlettered, to be 'agin the government' is an inherited instinct, to be ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... found another surprise—my friend Mr. Carson of the Rockies. It seemed a little incongruous that the simple, unlettered Irishman should have found his way into the brilliant, many-countried company, where were men who made history and held the fate of nations in their hands and built or crumbled empires, and women to match, regally gowned, keen ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... my experience as an occasional lecturer during the past twelve years, I have been much impressed by the keen interest evinced, even by the most unlettered persons, when astronomical subjects are dealt with in plain untechnical language which they ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... churches throughout the kingdom the humble people were kneeling, praying their unlettered prayers for the beautiful young Queen, with the more faith that the Holy Mother would listen because one so great as the Archbishop of Nikosia ministered in person before their sacred image of San Nicolo. For had it not been the booty of a slaughtered Eastern city, ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... resort of the unlettered poor. The very threat of one to the Scotch peasant of a half-century ago was a sentence of death. Auld Jock blanched, and he shook so that he dropped his spoon. Mr. Traill hastened ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... scandal in this city, because the bishop was not content with saying what he did in reply to my petition; but to every person who entered his house he said that I had been guilty of a heresy, and unlettered persons who heard this gave it credit. Moreover, as there is here a commissary of the Inquisition, he called together many friars and certified this proposition, separating it from the petition and paying no attention to my purpose therein, or to the circumstances under ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... how he distinguished his "ragged veterans" in their tattered and unlettered bindings, answered, "How does a shepherd know his sheep?" It has been observed that, "Touch becomes infinitely more exquisite in men whose employment requires them to examine the polish of bodies than it is in others. In music only the simplest and ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... was small and except for his brilliant eyes, not especially good-looking. Moreover, he was often away on important business, and the Big Blue had nothing to do but stay around the loft and display his unlettered wings. ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Christ's kingdom in its inward principle. They unfold views of its steady progress from age to age, as a growth from an inward vital force, on which the most philosophical minds especially love to dwell; and yet they are perfectly intelligible to the most unlettered man. To teach by parables, without any false analogies, and in a way that interested and instructed alike the learned and the ignorant, this was a wonderful characteristic of our Lord's ministry. In ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... It was November (1790) before the result came into the hands of the public. It was a small octavo of three hundred and fifty-six pages, in contents rather less than twice the present volume, bound in an unlettered wrapper of gray paper, and sold for five shillings. In less than twelve months it reached its eleventh edition, and it has been computed that not many short of thirty thousand copies were sold within the next ...
— Burke • John Morley
... somehow or other grinding money out of everything by force of will, bending everything to his purpose by stubborn sinew, always truthful, straightforward, and genuine. Consider what immense labour this represent! I do not think many such men can be found, rude and unlettered, yet naturally gentleman-like, to work their way in the world without the aid of the Lombard Street financiers; in village life, remember, where all is stagnant and dull—no golden openings such as occur near great towns. ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... benevolence to the poor, for bold denunciation of the excesses of the great. He had not, like the Norman, the grand design of creating in the priesthood a college of learning, a school of arts; such notions were unfamiliar in homely, unlettered England. And Harold, though for his time and his land no mean scholar, would have recoiled from favouring a learning always made subservient to Rome; always at once haughty and scheming, and aspiring to complete domination over both the souls of men and the thrones of kings. ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... enormous factor his past and present have been and are, in the development and progress of our highest civilisation. Historically, we first meet him coming forth from the Arabian desert, a rude unlettered herdsman, in intelligence, cultivation, and morality far below the tribes among whom he is thrown. A terrible weapon arms him—a theism stern, hard, and pitiless, beyond, perhaps, all the world has ever seen. To the bravest and best of his race—a Moses and a Joshua, a Deborah and a Jephtha—this ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... among the students a healthy tone of scepticism in regard to certain forms of popular belief. Scientific education is rapidly destroying credulity in old superstitions yet current among the unlettered, and especially among the peasantry—as, for instance, faith in mamori and ofuda. The outward forms of Buddhism—its images, its relics, its commoner practices—affect the average student very little. He is not, as a foreigner ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... incomprehensible to a person knowing nothing either of Christian beliefs or of the beliefs which preceded them. The real mastery of any European tongue is impossible [4] without a knowledge of European religion. The language of even the unlettered is full of religious meaning: the proverbs and household-phrases of the poor, the songs of the street, the speech of the workshop,—all are infused with significations unimaginable by any one ignorant of the faith of the people. Nobody knows this better than a man who has passed many ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... he asserted, "I won't tarry no longer. Mebby I'll come back again." But before he had reached the threshold the operator and his companion stood looking on from the baggage room door. Even unlettered Machiavellis must have their flashes of inspiration, premonition, "hunch," or whatever you may choose to call it. Suddenly, into the telegrapher's consciousness flashed the suspicion that in the departure of this unknown observer lurked ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... my way When I am dead. A hunter's fate, a warrior's fame, A shade, a phantom, or a name, All life-long through my hands have sought, Unblest, unlettered, and untaught: Deny me not the boon I crave— A symbol-light upon my grave, When I ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... sight died out among them the race lived on. They had even time to adapt themselves to the blind control of fire, which they made carefully in stoves of stone. They were a simple strain of people at the first, unlettered, only slightly touched with the Spanish civilisation, but with something of a tradition of the arts of old Peru and of its lost philosophy. Generation followed generation. They forgot many things; they devised ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... reputation for being 'quiet,' and the sense conveyed by those who disliked the place was that of dullness and primness. This fortunate chance has protected the little town from the vulgarizing influences of the unlettered hordes let loose upon the coast in summer-time, and we find a sea-front without the flimsy meretricious buildings of the popular resorts. Instead of imitating Blackpool and Margate, this sensible place has retained a quiet and semi-rural front to ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... yet a kind of insinuation, as it were, in via, in way, of explication; facere, as it were, replication, or rather, ostentare, to show, as it were, his inclination,—after his undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather, unlettered, or ratherest, unconfirmed fashion,—to insert again my haud ...
— Love's Labour's Lost • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... spelt by the unlettered Muse, The place of fame and elegy supply; And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... debasing forms of superstition among the people, it is not inappropriate to consider the condition of that class of the population which is wont to exert the most potent influence in forming the moral sentiments and moulding the character of the unlettered masses. We have already touched upon the external relations of the clergy to the king and to the Pope; let us now look more narrowly into its ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... trained statesman and economist, a remarkable constitutional lawyer, and a man of immense dignity, not headstrong in temper and without peculiar force of will. Jackson, on the other hand, was a rude soldier, unlettered, intractable, arbitrary, with a violent temper and a most despotic will. Two men more utterly incompatible it would have been difficult to find, and nothing could have been more wildly fantastic than to suppose an alliance between ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... of Quebec there is much uncertainty in the spelling and the use of names. A scattered people in a huge half-wild country, unlettered for the most part and with no one to turn to for counsel but the priests, is apt to pay attention only to the sound of names, caring nothing about their appearance when written or the sex to which they pertain. Pronunciation has naturally varied in one mouth or another, in this family or that, ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... no new thing to seek to arrest the public attention with the vernacular applied to public affairs. Major Jack Downing and Sam Slick had been notable examples, and they had many imitators; but the reader who laughed over the racy narrative of the unlettered Ezekiel, and then took up Hosea's poem and caught the gust of Yankee wrath and humor blown fresh in his face, knew that he was in at the appearance of something new in American literature. The force which Lowell displayed in these satires made his book at once a powerful ally of an anti-slavery sentiment, ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... immortality; launching our thunders upon the bold, softening the hearts of the errant, mingling with our unbending creed the more pliable ethics of worldly graces, and, in a word, walking like Saint John on the savage border of civilization, to thrill the brutal and unlettered with the tidings of one just day to come—our itinerant lives drift on till the marble slab in the meeting-house wall writes the ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... to all this, his daily thoughts are engaged in the investigation of sickness in its many forms, and, frequently, his midnight oil expended, while he peruses the observations, and profits by the researches of others. Again, the advertising quack is frequently an unlettered, never a well-informed man, at least on medical topics: his education, his habits, his purposes, are all foreign to science; the first has not been devoted to the accomplishment of a particular duty; the second have not received that ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... higher ambition to approve himself to judicious critics and posterity, and wanting in that love of art which longs for self-satisfaction in the perfection of its works, he had merely laboured to please the unlettered crowd; still this very object alone and the pursuit of theatrical effect, would have led him to bestow attention to the structure and adherence of his pieces. For does not the impression of a drama depend ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... Master impressed upon his hearers the exact correspondence of the attitude of this unseen Power towards them with their own attitude towards it. Such teaching was not a narrow anthropomorphism but the adaptation to the intellectual capacity of the unlettered multitude of the very deepest truths of what we now call Mental Science. And the basis of it all is the cryptic personality of spirit hidden throughout the infinite of Nature under every form of manifestation. As unalloyed ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... by Liebig, the creator of the chemical theory of agriculture, often got on the wrong tack in their love of mere theories, unlettered agriculturists opened up new roads to prosperity. Market-gardeners of Paris, Troyes, Rouen, Scotch and English gardeners, Flemish and Lombardian farmers, peasants of Jersey, Guernsey, and farmers on the Scilly Isles have opened up such large horizons that the mind hesitates ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... unlettered as he was, and curtailed of that knowledge which should be, and is bestowed on all by every paternal government, the natural strength of his mind had enabled him to understand that a system, which on its face professed to be founded on the superior acquirements of a privileged ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... countries in which they were first promulgated, frequently delivered in parables, and in a language abounding in metaphors and loaded with figures. On points where the learned have, in purity of heart, been compelled to differ, the unlettered will necessarily be at variance. But, happily for us, my brethren, the fountain of divine love flows from a source too pure to admit of pollution in its course; it extends, to those who drink of its vivifying waters, the peace of the righteous, and life everlasting; it endures through all time, ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... easy thing to determine the laws or the practices of an unlettered people, who have abandoned the wild and primitive life to live under regulations prescribed by their conquerors, and who must depend upon tradition and recollection for the practices of the old life; but fortunately intelligent observers have from time to time, ...
— Sioux Indian Courts • Doane Robinson
... the labouring part of the public); and as a lettered education but too generally sets people above those servile offices by which the businesses of the world is carried on. Nor have I any doubt but there are, take the world through, twenty happy people among the unlettered, to one among those who ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... that views of this sort, extending over a hundred or a thousand other points, were so universally accepted in his time that to dispute them was to be ranked with the unlettered or the fantastic. I asked him if it were so in economics. He said: Yes, in England, where there was a similar dogma of Free ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... just entering public life as a means of winning glory for their youthful genius. The custom has long since become obsolete, but even if the practice were still common, it would not apply to Aemilianus. It would not have been becoming to him to make any display of his eloquence, for he is rude and unlettered; nor to show a passion for renown, since he is a mere barbarian bumpkin; nor thus to open his career as an advocate, for he is an old man on the brink of the grave. The only hypothesis creditable to him would be that he is perhaps giving an example ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... poetry. The Slav immigrants have the virtues and faults of their primitive world. They come to America to make money. The majority come with intent to earn money to take back home, rather than with expectation to settle here permanently. Unenterprising, unlettered, they are at the same time hardy, thrifty and shrewd, honest and pious. They are undoubtedly highly endowed with gifts of imagination and artistic expression for which in their American conditions they find little or ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... passed away. Civilization made gradual encroachments. Quite a little cluster of log huts was reared in the vicinity, where the inmates in case of necessity could flee to the fort for protection. Christopher, at fifteen years of age, was an unlettered boy, small in stature, but very fond of the solitude of the forest, and quite renowned as a marksman. He was amiable in disposition, gentle in his manners, and in all respects a good boy. He had a strong character. Whatever he undertook, ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... and bridgeless streams marooned the people of the Blue Ridge for centuries, shut them off from the outside world so that they lost step with the onward march of civilization. A forgotten people until yesterday, unlettered, content to wrest a meager living from the grudging soil, they built for themselves a nation within a nation. By their very isolation, they have preserved much of the best that is America. They have ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... own hackney-man; for he lets himself out to travel as well as his horses. He is the ordinary embassador between friend and friend, the father and the son, and brings rich presents to the one, but never returns any back again. He is no unlettered man, though in shew simple; for questionless, he has much in his budget, which he can utter too in fit time and place. He is [like] the vault[29] in Gloster church, that conveys whispers at a distance, for he takes the sound out of your mouth at York, and makes it be heard as far as London. He ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... for these metamorphoses, and their consequences, might well puzzle a wiser head than that of the many-named but unlettered Nimbus. ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... citizens. His pleasure in the gala affairs of the time was doubled by the presence of his wife, who one day arrived quite unexpectedly in the company of some Tennessee friends. Mrs. Jackson was a typical frontier planter's wife—kind-hearted, sincere, benevolent, thrifty, pious, but unlettered and wholly innocent of polished manners. In all her forty-eight years she had never seen a city more pretentious than Nashville. She was, moreover, stout and florid, and it may be supposed that in her rustic garb she was a somewhat conspicuous figure among the ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... were still in being. I can assure you that many a Don Luis yet, bitterly poor and bitterly proud, starves and shivers, and hugs up his bones in his capa between the Bidassoa and the Manzanares; many a wild-hearted, unlettered Manuela applies the inexorable law of the land to her own detriment, and, with a sob in the breath, sits down to her spinning again, her mouldy crust and cup of cold water, or worse fare than that. Joy is not for the poor, ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... like this," she explained, "you others, the English, had this town many years ago, and these unlettered ones, who read never the papers and know nothing, think you will take possession of the town once again." Needless to say in time this impression wore off and they ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... renown, Saw his unlettered sire Still by the old log fire, Saw the unpolished dame— And the ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... and his delight in watching the lights and shades of human character, took him into that wider circle where witty and notable men are always eagerly sought after to grace the feasts or enliven the heavy splendour of the rich and the unlettered. He was still young, and happy in the animal spirits which make the exhausting life of a luxurious capital endurable even in spite of its pleasures. What Victor ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin |
