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Unlettered   Listen
Unlettered

adjective
1.
Having little acquaintance with writing.  Synonym: analphabetic.
2.
Uneducated in general; lacking knowledge or sophistication.  Synonyms: ignorant, nescient, unlearned.  "Nescient of contemporary literature" , "An unlearned group incapable of understanding complex issues" , "Exhibiting contempt for his unlettered companions"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Unlettered" Quotes from Famous Books



... 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 ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... school. Like so many other New England boys, he learned what is essential for the carrying on of business in the chimney-corner, by the light of the fire. He possessed one beautiful accomplishment: he was a grand reader. Unlettered as he was, he greatly enjoyed the more lofty compositions of poets and orators; and his large, sonorous voice enabled him to read them with fine effect. His sons read in his manner, even to his rustic pronunciation of some words. ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... authenticity, though it must be remembered that Mr. Chisholm wrote only forty years after 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 well known to the whole community, having travelled much among them; had the reputation ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell

... poem of his son, Mr. Hosea Biglow. It was 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 ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... An unlettered girl, a peasant in France, saw an opportunity to save the glory of her country, and with a courage that baffles human understanding Joan of Arc ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given

... the causes that disposed many thousands of Protestant families from Ulster, and from the thickly populated districts of Switzerland and the Rhine country, to seek new homes in a land of better promise. To cross the ocean was no slight undertaking for unlettered and home-keeping people. But since the founding of Pennsylvania knowledge of America had spread among the peasants of Germany, and there was no lack of "Neulanders"—the emigrant agents of that day—who described the New World in glowing terms, and stood ready for a consideration to carry ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker

... valley marvellously, and when at last 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 ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... Tennessee, or came here to Illinois early in their youth; the strong, courtly, old-fashioned men, carrying with them the early traditions of the republic, in their way Lincolns—honest, truth telling, industrious, courageous Americans—plain and unlettered, many of them, but full of the sterling virtues. Yes, he would have written poems out of these people; and he would have done something more—he would have given us symbols, songs of eternal truth, of unutterable magic and profound meaning like "La Belle Dame sans Merci." I am sure ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters

... 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

... Nazareth, the Son of Joseph,' came thus because He was the poor man's Christ, because He was the ignorant man's Christ, because His word was not for any class, but as broad as the world. He came poor, obscure, unlettered, that all who, like Him, were poor and untouched by the finger of earthly culture, might in Him find their Brother, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... up my little table and began to show them how easy it was to guess which shell the little pea was under. The unlettered hinds gathered in a thick semicircle and began to nudge elbows and banter one another to bet. Then was when Rufe ought to have single-footed up and called the turn on the little joker for a few tens and fives to get them started. But, no Rufe. I'd seen him two or three times walking about and looking ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry

... nay," replied the man, in a tone of deep reverence, "he was Rabbie Burns. I dare na speak to him. If he had been any other mon I would have said 'good morrow to ye.'" Beautiful and eloquent tribute, paid by an unlettered peasant, not to rank or to wealth, but to a soul—a mighty soul though clad ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... splendid advocate, a 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 them, or to imagine that ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge

... 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

... station, water-carriers, labourers in the vineyards, 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various

... friend, is all that I know, and I believe that anything further is a delusion. Those who are called "men of the theater" (that is, in plain words, unlettered men who have not studied anywhere but on the stage) have decreed that a man knows the theater when he composes comedies according to the particular formula invented by M. Scribe. You might as well say that humanity ...
— How to Write a Play - Letters from Augier, Banville, Dennery, Dumas, Gondinet, - Labiche, Legouve, Pailleron, Sardou, Zola • Various

... of men understood. Jesus wiped out social differences and distinctions in the crowds that gently jostled each other in His presence. The aristocrat and the cultured, the student and the gentle folk, mingled freely with simple country folk, the unlettered, the humblest and lowliest, all drawn alike to Him, and all unconscious of differences when under the holy spell of His presence. The wealthy like Joseph of Arimathea, and the beggar like the man born blind, the pure in heart like ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon

... rabbit, the fox, etc., without any thought whatever of worshiping them. These American children had received the whole through dim traditional rhymes and stories and engaged in passing them on to others without any special thought. The uncivilized and the unlettered hand down everything by word of mouth. Religion, trades, superstition, medicine, sense, and nonsense all flow in the same stream and from this stream all is drunk down without question. If therefore the Negro's rhyme-clustering habit in America was the same as it had ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley

... said tauntingly. "Then must I tell thee a little story. I am an unlettered man, being but a poor fool, as thou knowest, but I try to do my duty, and every Sunday I go to church in Carlisle city with my betters. And at our church we have a right good preacher, though his sermons run ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson

... progress, disturbed the counterpoise between his mind and heart. The Idea that possessed his life had operated as a means of education; it had gone on cultivating his powers to the highest point of which they were susceptible; it had raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer to stand on a star-lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth, laden with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber after him. So much for the intellect! But where ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... 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

... mist. Not that life was to him aught but a tragedy at any time, on whichever road he took. What but a tragedy could it be to a man bred at Douay and reared on Greek, and now condemned to live in loneliness and squalor among unlettered, unwashed creatures; to one who, banned by the law, moved by night, and lurked in some hiding-place by day, and, waking or sleeping, was ever in contact with the lawless and the oppressed, the wretched and the starving—whose existence ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman

... Caucassian and Afro-American youth and maiden will strive to attain great heights. His first efforts to procure knowledge consisted of reciting A.B.S.s [TR: A.B.C.s?] from the McGuffy's [HW: ?] Blue backed speller with his unlettered sister for a teacher. In later years he attended a school conducted by the Freemen's Association. He bought a grammar from a white school boy and studied it at home. When sixteen years of age he was employed to teach negro children and grieves to recall ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves: Indiana Narratives • Works Projects Administration

... continued Eleanor, "that first sight of the great Earl. My brothers had teased me for going so far north, and told me the English were mere rude islanders—boorish, and unlettered; but, child as I was, scarce eleven years old, I could perceive the nobleness of the Earl. 'If all thy new subjects be like him,' said my brother to me, 'thou wilt reign over a race of kings.' And how good he was to me when I wept at leaving my home and friends! How he framed ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge

... for purity of life, for 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 ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... to the great world which he discusses so complacently and approvingly. The savant reposing in a palace-car, which is rushing through the midnight storm at a rate of fifty miles an hour, regards his situation with composure; but the unlettered engineer, whose eye is on the track,—who notes every slippery curve, swollen stream and overhanging bowlder,—who feels the motive power of that proud train swaying and plunging like a restless demon beneath his feet, is apt to ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... 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 ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... peasants of 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 ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot

... sometimes in an older way, some against most worthy things. But withal he managed to keep the main direction of truth, after his own young way of thinking and telling it. He had no such power to formulate his large conclusions as you or even I have; but whatever wrought to enlighten the unlettered, whatever cherished manhood's rights alike in lofty and lowly, whatever worked the betterment of the poor, whatever made man not too much and not too little his brother's keeper,—his keeper not by mastery, but by fraternal ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable

... alter her way of life, put on armor and become a captain in the wars, for she was chosen by the King of Heaven to save France from its enemies. And they called her "Daughter of God." But Jeanne was filled with fear and grave misgiving, for how was she, a poor, unlettered girl and the daughter of peasants, to lead armies and wield ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards

... were much occupied with Hungary, and he was content if Bohemia could be maintained in an outward appearance of peace. Then follows a description of their opinions. 'The Pope and all his officials they regard as Antichrist. They choose their own bishops, rude unlettered laymen, with wives and families. They salute one another as Brother and Sister; and recognize no authority but the Bible. Their priests celebrate mass without vestments, use leavened bread and only the Lord's Prayer. Transubstantiation ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen

... regions of the Aventine, riding slowly from one lonely church to another, and sometimes spending an hour in conversation with a solitary priest who, by living much alone and among inscriptions and old carvings, had gathered a little more learning than was common among the unlettered Romans. ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford

... was all very serious—strangely so, no doubt, for a little boy—but in truth reading of any sort would have served to make me an odd sheep among my comrades. I wonder still at the unlettered condition of the boys about me. John Johnson, though seven years my senior, was so ignorant as scarcely to be able to tell the difference between the Dutch and the Germans, and whence they respectively came. He told me once, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic

... brought about by the instrumentality of war. The first envoys from Tibet, or, as it was then called, Toufan or Toupo, are reported to have reached the Chinese capital in the year 634. At that time the people of Tibet were rude and unlettered, and their chiefs were little better than savages. Buddhism had not taken that firm hold on the popular mind which it at present possesses, and the power of the lamas had not arisen in what is now the most priest-ridden country in the world. A chief, named the Sanpou—which ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... culture of her own. You might almost say that from the time the Romans left Britain there was no channel through which ideas might flow in to her; and this idea, especially, was hardly in Europe to flow in. And yet this idea has curiously persisted in Wales, as a tradition among the unlettered, even to our own day. Dr. Evans-Wentz, of Berkeley, Oxford, and Rennes Universities, in this present twentieth century, found old people among the peasantry who knew something about it, had heard of it from their elders; there was nothing new or unfamiliar about it to them; ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... not heard of the early Christian martyrs? Is there a doubt that they, unlettered men, slaves, weak women, even children, did exhibit, under an infinite sense of duty, issuing in infinite self-sacrifice, a heroism such as the world had never seen before; did raise the ideal of human nobleness a whole ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... moreover, extended beyond the book-reading class, wide as that is in America. It was to be noted even in the untravelled and unlettered American, the man whose spiritual horizon is bounded by his Sunday newspaper, the man in the street and on the farm. The events of the past year had taught him—and he rubbed his eyes at the realisation—that England was not an "effete monarchy," ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... servants and slaves, who had been converted from paganism, and who did not possess even the rudiments of education. They had to be instructed in the rites and ceremonies of the Church, and in the practices and requirements of their new belief. Unlettered as they were themselves, they could scarcely undertake to educate their children. It is marvelous that under these conditions any attempt was made to do it; yet we find that great pains were taken even in the early centuries of the Christian era to perform this duty toward those ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley

... metaphor, nor has metaphor ardor enough to keep pace with passion."—Nothing can be less true. Metaphoric strength of expression will burst even from vulgar and illiterate minds when they are agitated. It is a natural effort of roused sensibility in every gradation, from unlettered simplicity to the highest refinement. Passion has no occasion to pause for metaphors, they rush upon the mind which it has heated. Similies, it is true, are not natural to strong emotion. They are the result of spirits that are calm, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward

... ever bring that back as it really was. None may hope to tell those who never heard him what it was like. No one, perhaps among the numberless thousands who did hear him, ever knew what the power was, by which this unlettered backwoodsman swayed multitudes at his will. Perhaps David afterward described it as nearly as any one could, when he said that the mere sound of Peter Cartwright's voice that night—when he could not hear the words—made him feel so sorry, so grieved, ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks

... description of him, it seems clear that he made no strong impression at Philadelphia, and found himself out of place in the national legislature. Who, then, would have dreamed that the accomplished Livingston should win his highest fame by preparing a state paper for this unlettered person's signature; that this rough backwoodsman should alone of all Americans surpass the polished Burr in the charm of his manners; that Duane's little son should one day be called by his father's unpromising ...
— Andrew Jackson • William Garrott Brown

... his readers, truth compels me to add, that every farthing of the money was duly invested with a single eye to the wishes of the dying Christian, who, under Providence, had been the means of bestowing so much gold on the poor and unlettered. As to the manner in which the charity was finally improved, I shall say nothing, since no inquiry on my part has ever enabled me to obtain such information as would justify my speaking ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... this is more important in criticizing what they wrote, these seamen were mostly simple, unlettered folk, to whom a country's wealth in natural products and their practical value made the strongest appeal, and whose admiration of bays, harbours, trees, fields of grain, etc., was measured by the same standard of utility. Even such unskilled ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... gentleman by grace of God, which placed him in a high-born position, can control numbers of other men placed beneath him. Every man takes his place to-day according to born position plus the test of his own experience. And just as an unlettered expert in business is only half authoritative to men of high cultivation, so also is the gentleman, no matter how much he knows of Latin, Greek, history, art and polish of manner, handicapped according to his ignorance on the subject of another's ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... 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 I inform my unacquainted feet In the blind mazes ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton

... altogether an unbeliever," he replied, "why should that give me any trouble? Have I not represented pagan divinities?—still, I don't believe in them." The life of this artist was one of consummate worldly success; the kings of Bavaria and Denmark were the personal friends of the unlettered son of the ship-carver, as were Horace Vernet, Walter Scott, Andersen, and Mendelssohn; his casket of decorations was the amusement of his lady visitors; and his invitations were so constant that he could not always remember the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various

... religious day, and then, by sheer dint of his sanctified and soaring imagination and his exquisite style, he stands forth the peer of the foremost men in the intellectual world. And thus it is that the great unlettered religious world possesses in John Bunyan all but all that the select and scholarly world possesses in Dante. Both Dante and Bunyan devoted their splendid gifts to the noblest of services—the service of spiritual, and especially of personal religion; but for one appreciative reader ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte

... themselves the whole history of Christ's kingdom in its inward principle. They unfold views of its steady progress from age to age, as a growth from an inward vital force, on which the most philosophical minds especially love to dwell; and yet they are perfectly intelligible to the most unlettered man. To teach by parables, without any false analogies, and in a way that interested and instructed alike the learned and the ignorant, this was a wonderful characteristic of our Lord's ministry. In this respect no one of his apostles, not even the bosom disciple, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... curiosities in the Tower Jewel-house generally fetched above the price fixed; the toys of art could please the unlettered minds that had no conception ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... poore, though not unlettered, Clerke, And these your subjects of St. Gyles his parishe, Who in this officious season would not sharke But thought to greet your highnesse with a morrice, Which since my riper judgement thought not fitt, They have layd down their ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... 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

... currency. This process of dialectal regeneration, as it is called, has been greatly aided in the past by men of letters, who have given a literary standing to the useful and picturesque vocabulary of their unlettered neighbours, and thus helped to reinforce with vivid terms our somewhat abstract and faded standard speech. We owe, for instance, words like lilt and outcome to Carlyle; croon, eerie, gloaming have become familiar to us from Burns's poems, and Sir Walter Scott ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English

... 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 the higher region of air approaches, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... 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 to his system, for the simple reason that their barbarism suggested no motive ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... lettered man is so because he is well natured, and just as the cause is more admirable than the effect, so is a good disposition, unlettered, more praiseworthy than a well lettered man ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci

... gave each other mutual encouragement: but with this exception, no one else knew anything of the girl's poetical essays, whose mild timidity made her often pass for a person of weak intellect. This soul must have been great and beautiful, for in all her unlettered strains there was not a word of murmuring respecting her hard lot: her note was sad, but gentle—desponding, but resigned; it was especially the language of deep tenderness—of mournful sympathy—of angelic charity for all poor creatures consigned, like her, to bear the double ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... of trumpet, much after the manner of modern strollers and showmen at fairs and street-corners. Indeed, long after playbills had become common, this musical advertisement was still requisite for the due information of the unlettered patrons of the stage. In certain towns the musicians were long looked upon as the indispensable heralds of the actors. Tate Wilkinson, writing in 1790, records that a custom obtained at Norwich, "and if abolished it has not been many years," of proclaiming in every street with drum and ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... of Rabindranath have been on my lips since early youth," I told my companion. "All Bengal, even the unlettered peasants, delights ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... painter to adorn his banqueting-room at Donnaz. The lords of Donnaz had never been noted for learning, and Odo's grandfather was fond of declaring that a nobleman need not be a scholar; but the great Marquess Gualberto, if himself unlettered, had been the patron of poets and painters and had kept learned clerks to write down the annals of his house on parchment painted by the monks. These annals were locked in the archives, under Don Gervaso's care; but Odo learned ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... "turf lies in many a mouldering heap," and the "rugged elms" are outside the inclosure, but their outstretched arms overspread many a "narrow cell and frail memorial," where the "rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep," and where also "their name and years are spelt by th' unlettered muse." A singular error in spelling the name of one of those humble persons, was however committed by the poet himself in his "Long Story," very pardonable in him, however, as the party was then alive; but that the error should have been perpetuated in ALL ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various

... 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 condition ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... 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 have had ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... mean to take away The Negro's vote for he's unlettered. 'Tis true he sits in darkness day And night, as formerly, when fettered; But pray observe—howe'er he vote To whatsoever party turning, He'll be with gentlemen of note And wealth and consequence and learning. With Hales and Morgans on each side, How could a fool through lack of ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce

... of Western Europe by their monkish occupiers, without being struck by the influence of terror which such events as eclipses of the Sun and Moon and such celestial visitors as Comets and Shooting Stars exercised far and wide. And this influence overspread, not only the unlettered lower orders, but many of those in far higher stations of life who, one might have hoped, would have been exempt from such feelings of mental distress as they often exhibited. Illustrations of this fact will be ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers

... 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 ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... himself? In his earlier wars against the foreign foes of his country, Monluc was indeed a model of military prowess; the civil wars added cruelty to his courage; after a fashion he was religious, and a short shrift and a cord were good enough for heretics and adversaries of his King. An unlettered soldier, Monluc, by virtue of his energy of character and directness of speech, became a most impressive and spirited narrator. His Memoirs close with a sigh for stern and inviolable solitude. Among the Pyrenean rocks he had formerly observed ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... are here given for each of the Latin terms caelo and terra. The same schoolmaster uses seven synonyms in describing the "fashion" of speech of the ignorant constable, —"undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or, rather unlettered, or, ratherest, unconfirmed, fashion." When we remember that it was really Shakespeare who wrote this, we know that he had been led to study variety of expression. His large vocabulary could not have been acquired by any one ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... 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

... Independent Malay State as naturally as did their prototypes in the countries of Europe during the Middle Ages. They learn by rote some old-world tale, which has been transmitted by word of mouth through countless generations, and they wander from village to village, singing it for pay to the unlettered people, to whom these songs and stories represent the only literature which comes within their experience. Such minstrels are greatly loved by the villagers, who hold them in high honour, giving them hearty welcome, and ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford

... answer, for unlettered as he was, and curtailed of that knowledge which should be, and is bestowed on all by every paternal government, the natural strength of his mind had enabled him to understand that a system, which on its face ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper

... timidity. There was needed some one who under all circumstances would be undaunted, and would not hesitate to tell the truth even to the king and queen, however unpleasant it might be. So this rough, fierce, unlettered man of few words was sent by God, armed ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord

... Leader; I have had Radicals and Tories, and patients who cared for neither party, but whose passion was cage-birds or boxing or amateur photography; I have had patients who were sulky and patients who were bright, patients who were unlettered and patients who were educated, patients who could hardly express themselves without the use of an ensanguined vocabulary and patients who were gently spoken and fastidious. Each of them was Tommy Atkins—the inanely smirking hero of the picture-paper and the ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir

... 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. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... works that he expected to meet with were the lying memoirs of some intriguing cardinal or the deluding apology of an exiled minister. To his surprise, he found that, without an exception, the collection consisted of poetry and romance. Somewhat surprised, Vivian looked with a curious eye on the unlettered backs of a row of mighty folios on a corner shelf. "These," he thought, "at least must be royal ordinances, and collected state papers." The sense of propriety struggled for a moment with the passion of curiosity; but nothing is more difficult for the man ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... time the daily paper on which I worked had been 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 ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley

... one hundred years have elapsed, my dear sirs, since Emperor Peter the Great launched decked barks on this river, and now thousands of steamships sail up and down the river. Who has built them? The Russian peasant, an utterly unlettered man! All these enormous steamers, barges—whose are they? Ours! Who has invented them? We! Everything here is ours, everything here is the fruit of our minds, of our Russian shrewdness, and our great love for action! Nobody has assisted us in anything! ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky

... familiar with it. There are "those rugged elms," and there is "that yew tree's shade." There are "the frail memorials," "with uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked;" there "the name, the years, spelt by the unlettered muse;" and the holy texts strewn round "that teach the rustic moralist to die." There is still "the ivy-mantled tower," tho the "moping owl" that evening did not "to the moon complain," partly because there was no moon to complain to, and possibly ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey

... services in a language which had for ages been unintelligible to the bulk of the laity, and was but partially intelligible to not a few of its ordinary priests. It had no catechisms or hymn books bringing down to the capacities of the unlettered the truths of religion, and freely circulated among them.[4] It did not, when the invention of printing put it in its power, make any effort to circulate among them the Holy Book, that they might read therein, in their own tongue, ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell

... politics of Italy and Greece. He widened the horizon of his contemporaries, bringing within their ken wonders and beauties hitherto unknown or unfamiliar, and in so doing he heightened and cultivated, he "touched with emotion," the unlettered and unimaginative many, that "reading public" which despised or eluded the refinements and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... 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 demanded by ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain

... any higher ambition to approve himself to judicious critics and posterity, and wanting in that love of art which longs for self-satisfaction in the perfection of its works, he had merely laboured to please the unlettered crowd; still this very object alone and the pursuit of theatrical effect, would have led him to bestow attention to the structure and adherence of his pieces. For does not the impression of a drama depend in an especial manner on the relation of the parts to each other? And, however beautiful ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... little town near here, but which I will not name, there recently occurred an incident which will furnish a short story. There lived there a good, simple, unlettered peasant, married to a nice, pleasant woman, and as long as he had plenty to eat and drink he cared for little else. He was accustomed to often go into the country to a house he had there, and stay, three, or four days—sometimes more, sometimes less, as suited ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various

... good deal of feeling, sir, for the unlettered and the vulgar. They have their station, but they have also—though doubtless in smaller capacity ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable

... 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 the receipt ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew

... writings were utterly false. They did not know the sciences they dealt with. The Jews, the Arabs, and the Greeks, who had good manuscripts, destroyed and corrupted them, rather than let them fall into the hands of unlettered and ignorant Christians.[2] Aristotle should be read in the original, he also says; it would be better if all translations were burnt. The criticism is acrid; but the men he contemns served scholarship well by quickening the interest in Greek books, and they succeeded ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage

... strange and almost unearthly ugliness of our diseased society. The costumes and customs of a hundred peasantries are there to prove that such ugliness does not necessarily follow from mere poverty, or mere democracy, or mere unlettered simplicity of mind. ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton

... between, and now, for the first time in her life, confidence in her own powers deserted her, and she was overcome by a strange new feeling of humility and doubt. Who and what was she, that such a man should stoop to accept her friendship; poor, unlettered girl that she was, while he was acknowledged as one of the leading intellects of the day? Yet deep in her heart the thought lingered that between this man and herself existed a certain affinity, which, given an opportunity, ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... the plain, Cared-for till cock-crow: Look out if yonder be not day again Rimming the rock-row! That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought, Rarer, intenser, Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought, Chafes in the censer. Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; Seek we sepulture On a tall mountain, citied to the top, Crowded with culture! All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels: Clouds overcome it; No, yonder sparkle is the citadel's Circling its summit. Thither our path lies; wind ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... all. It is thus that we may explain, in part, that penetrating apprehension of human life and character, and that power of touching sympathies common to all ages and nations, which surprises us so much in the unlettered authors of the old epic. Such periodical intercommunion of brethren habitually isolated from each other was the only means then open of procuring for the bard a diversified range of experience and a many-colored audience; and it was to a great degree the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... for example, Albert Pike, in his letter, "Touching Masonic Symbolism," speaks of the "poor, rude, unlettered, uncultivated working Stone-masons," who attended the Assemblies, he is obviously confounding Free-masons with the rough Stone-masons of the Guilds. Over against these words, read a brilliant article in the Contemporary Review, October, 1913, by L.M. Phillips, ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... Three 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 of that ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... met by you, whose day was thus occupied with continuous toil[198]. But in truth this will redound yet more to your glory, if amid so many and such severe labours you succeed in writing that which is worthy to be read. Besides, your work can without wounding their self-love instruct unlettered persons who are not prepared by any consciousness of eloquence for the service of the Republic[199]; and the experience which you have gained by being tossed to and fro on the waves of stormy altercation, they in their more tranquil lot may more fortunately ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... the humblest man in the world. He wore ragged clothing and lived in the filthiest tenement-house in New York. He was unlettered, had never opened a book, and seemed to know little of the ways of men. His hair and beard were long, and like golden silk; his eyes held the blue ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various

... with increasing fear. How little she knew the real man! Could it be possible that this lonely, unlettered boy of the streets of lower New York, starved and stunted in childhood, had within him the soul of a great poet? How else could she explain the sudden rapture over the threatening silences and shadows of these mountain gorges which had depressed her? And yet his ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon

... without them is the stanza as Pippa felt it. . . . In the same way, the opening rhapsody on dawn which precedes her invocation to the holiday is out of character—impossible to regard its lavish and gorgeous images as those (however sub-conscious) of an unlettered girl. ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... 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 ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... distant as the Gothic ages which succeeded them. We stand in the Forum, or on the height of the Capitol, and seem to see the Roman epoch close at hand. We forget that a chasm extends between it and ourselves, in which lie all those dark, rude, unlettered centuries, around the birth-time of Christianity, as well as the age of chivalry and romance, the feudal system, and the infancy of a better civilization than that of Rome. Or, if we remember these mediaeval times, they look further off than the ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Instead of regarding learning as an aid to faith, they regarded it as an hindrance and a snare. It led, they declared, to wordy battles, to quarrels, to splits, to uncertainties, to doubts, to corruptions. As long, they said, as the ministers of the Church of Christ were simple and unlettered men, so long was the Church a united body of believers; but as soon as the parsons began to be scholars, all sorts of evils arose. What good, they argued, had learning done in the past? It had caused the translation of the Bible into Latin, and had thus ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... study, and entirely unacquainted with the conduct of the present ministry, must know that we have hitherto acted upon different principles. We have always regarded letters as great obstructions to our scheme of subordination, and have, therefore, when we have heard of any man remarkably unlettered, carefully noted him down, as the most proper person for any employments of trust or honour, and considered him as a man, in whom we could safely repose our most ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... but significant. "The Princess married me. . . . Oh, well-a-day and lack-a-day, the whirligig of time and fortune, the topsyturviness of luck, the wooden shoe going up and the polished heel descending a French gunboat, a conquered island kingdom of Oceania, to-day ruled over by a peasant-born, unlettered, colonial gendarme, and ...
— The Red One • Jack London

... of the river, the flower of the Cote Dorion. Not alone because Charley had blasphemed against religion did they hate him at this moment, but because every heart was scorched with envy and jealousy—the black unreasoning jealousy which the unlettered, the dull, the crude, feels for the lettered, the able and the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... the miracle-working new breath of Liberty breathed upon them by the Revolution—eager young apprentices to the splendid trade of war, not old and broken men-at-arms, despairing survivors of an age-long accumulation of monotonous defeats; but Joan of Arc, a mere child in years, ignorant, unlettered, a poor village girl unknown and without influence, found a great nation lying in chains, helpless and hopeless under an alien domination, its treasury bankrupt, its soldiers disheartened and dispersed, all spirit torpid, all courage dead in the ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain

... than any of its predecessors, and that, indeed, she now regarded herself as practically cured. Explanations followed; inquiries were set on foot; the chemist's assistant sailed for South Africa; and "Edax Rerum" is now largely in demand among the unlettered heroes who bear the banner of the ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... jailer had been furnished with my name. You are right surely, touching the character of Aurelian. Though rude and unlettered, and severe almost to cruelty, there are generous sentiments within which shed a softening light, if inconstant, upon the darker traits. I would conceal nothing from you, Gracchus; as I would do nothing without your approbation. I know your indifference to life. I know ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware

... faculty of memory may be sharpened and developed by a class of men devoted to this culture in communities where such mechanical aids do not exist. It is known that long poems, stories, and historical narratives have been preserved by unlettered peoples much below the civilized condition of the Peruvians. Long poems, extending to three and four hundred lines, were retained by memory, and transmitted from generation to generation among the Sandwich Islanders. ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin

... are few more comfortless sights, than such a cemetery: it looks as if those by whom it is occupied regarded death as eternal sleep, and thought that the memory of man should terminate with the close of his life. However unlettered the muse, however hackneyed the rhyme, however misapplied the text, it is consolatory to see them employed. Man dwells with a melancholy satisfaction upon the tomb-stones of his relations and friends, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner

... 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 inhabitants, and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... my protest against the literary preciosity which derives the word from (un) chante and spells it 'chanty'—in other words, against the gratuitous assumption that unlettered British sailors derived one of the commonest words in their vocabulary from a foreign source. The result of this 'literary' spelling is that ninety-nine landsmen out of every hundred, instead of pronouncing the word 'shanty,' rhyming ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry

... authorize them to hurry through with their distasteful task. That the gloom of the hour and scene, and the utter forlornness of all the accompaniments of what was meant for Christian burial, had stamped themselves upon the mind and heart of the unlettered slave, was evident from the brief sentences he quavered out—joining his withered hands and raising his bleared ...
— At Last • Marion Harland

... 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 aristocrats. His family pride was beyond that ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... to be a school where great life lessons would be learned. Fresh from the University halls of Jena, he had met the students of Oxford on equal footing, quickly winning their respect and admiration, but these soldiers and sailors, restless, eager for excitement, rude and unlettered, were a new thing to him, a book written in a language to which he had no key. Later he would learn to find some point of contact with the unlearned as well as the learned, with the negro slave and the Yorkshire collier as well as the student of theology, but just now his impulse was to hold himself ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries

... terminations of the penman who is not certain about the spelling of his own name. The great collections of London contain many manuscripts of celebrated authors, ancient and modern, and some that are hard to decipher, but there is no chirography more hopelessly and irreclaimably unlettered and unscholarly than that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

... rights of Negroes, the peonage system, and the penal system. In 1905 twenty-nine men of the race launched what was known as the Niagara Movement. The aims of this organization were freedom of speech and criticism, an unlettered and unsubsidized press, manhood suffrage, the abolition of all caste distinctions based simply on race and color, the recognition of the principle of human brotherhood as a practical present creed, the recognition ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... difficult to obtain with proof plates; the Magniac copy was bought by Mr. Quaritch at Phillips's a few years since for upwards of L200, and sold by him, we believe, to Lord Carnarvon. Another copy, with the plates in unlettered proof state, is marked L250 in Pearson & Co.'s Catalogue, 1897-98. La Folle Journee, by Beaumarchais, with engravings of the same period and character, is also a charming production, and commands a ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... kept by a German or after the German fashion, is something that the sign doubtless means to tell us, but, owing to the absence of a hyphen ("German-Lace Store," or "German Lace-Store"), does not tell us. Nothing is more common than erroneous punctuation in signs, and gross mistakes by the unlettered in the wording of the ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)

... days gone by, on my journey back from Italy into England, in order not to waste all the time that must needs be spent on horseback in dull and unlettered gossiping, I preferred at times either to turn over in my mind some topic of our common studies or to give myself over to the pleasing recollection of the friends, as learned as they are beloved, whom I had left behind me in England. ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga

... These windows are modern, but combine softness with wonderful brilliancy of effect. Through the pillars and arches, I saw that the walls in that distant region of the edifice were almost wholly incrusted with marble, now grown yellow with time, no blank, unlettered slabs, but memorials of such men as their respective generations deemed wisest and bravest. Some of them were commemorated merely by inscriptions on mural tablets, others by sculptured bas-reliefs, others (once famous, but now forgotten generals ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... 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 ended, and Jesus returned to the Father, all the learning and the mighty genius ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... the scene in which he is placed, reflects upon the infinite wonders of creation, and meditates upon the equal wonders of his own mind, can be at a loss respecting the sources and causes of superstition. Let him transport himself back to the condition of a primitive and unlettered people, before whom the world appears in all its original and sublime mystery. Science has not lifted to their eyes the curtain behind which the secret operations of nature are carried on. They observe the ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... small curacy for life, and he takes his revenge by imprisoning the reader's imagination in luckless verse. Shut out from social converse, from learned colleges and halls, where he passed his youth, he has no cordial fellow-feeling with the unlettered manners of the Village or the Borough; and he describes his neighbours as more uncomfortable and discontented than himself. All this while he dedicates successive volumes to rising generations of noble patrons; and while he desolates a line of coast with sterile, blighting lines, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... unlettered Croats, seek information. The people of Vienna ask their confessors' permission to read instructive books. Various subscribers, having read the first volume of my work, brought it back, and re-demanded their money, because some monk ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck

... uncultivated, unversed, 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, unapprehended, unexplained, unascertained, uninvestigated^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... When I see a flight of birds overhead, performing their evolutions, or steering their course to some distant settlement, their signals and cries are as unintelligible to me as are the learned languages to an unlettered mechanic: I understand as little of their policy and laws as ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous

... 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

... picturesque effects should not be wasted on mere reality, but should be turned to real use upon the stage. So, too, it is difficult to take a roadside beggar seriously; he seems to ask, not for alms, but for a frame. Happy the unlettered and the inartistic, to whom even the picturesque person is a person, who can think of olive oil when he sees the olive-trees weaving their graceful patterns above the stone walls, and can watch the sun set in lurid splendour behind the purple ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... wealthy and aristocratic man. He owned many slaves, and was a cruel and exacting master. Young "Nat." was born of slave parents, and carried to his grave many of the superstitions and traits of his father and mother. The former was a preacher; the latter a "mother in Israel." Both were unlettered, but, nevertheless, very pious people. The mother began when Nat. was quite young to teach him that he was born, like Moses, to be the deliverer of his race. She would sing to him snatches of wild, rapturous songs, and repeat portions of prophecy she ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams

... imagination of the vulgar is not sufficiently cultivated to see, in the emblems which art typifies, those passions or sentiments which have moved generations with enthusiasm. A Gothic cathedral is infinitely more interesting to a man of sentiment or learning than to an unlettered boor. The ignorant cannot appreciate the historical fidelity and marvelous study of races which appear in such a statue as the African Sybil. We must comprehend the character of Moses before we can kindle ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... in manners holds her still, While comments of your praise richly compil'd, Reserve their character with golden quill, And precious phrase by all the Muses fil'd. I think good thoughts, whilst others write good words, And like unlettered clerk still cry 'Amen' To every hymn that able spirit affords, In polish'd form of well-refined pen. Hearing you praised, I say ''tis so, 'tis true,' And to the most of praise add something more; But that is in my thought, whose love to ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare

... 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

... of Goths were capable of preserving a faint tradition of their Scandinavian origin, we must not expect, from such unlettered barbarians, any distinct account of the time and circumstances of their emigration. To cross the Baltic was an easy and natural attempt. The inhabitants of Sweden were masters of a sufficient number of large vessels, with oars, [13] and the distance is little more than one hundred miles ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... the socket, and this produced the noise which had disquieted him. He writes in conclusion: "Thus many events which seem to defy all explanation have really come to pass by accident, or in the course of nature. Out of such manifestations as these the unlettered, the superstitious, the timorous, and the over-hasty make for themselves miracles."[274] Again, after telling a strange story of a boy who beheld the image of a thief in the neck of a phial, and of some incantations of Josephus Niger, he concludes: "Nevertheless ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... With 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. With cheers we now hail him, May success ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... would just as soon take it that way as the other, teaching as preaching. Is not the teaching of laymen as sectarian as the preaching of clergymen? What is the difference between unlettered laymen and lettered clergymen in this respect? Every one knows that laymen are as violent controversialists as clergymen, and the less informed the more violent. So this, while it is a little more ridiculous, is equally obnoxious. According to my experience, a layman ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... in the North American Review (vol. 96) from whom we have elsewhere quoted says of the Elegy: "It is upon this that Gray's fame as a poet must chiefly rest. By this he will be known forever alike to the lettered and the unlettered. Many, in future ages, who may never have heard of his classic Odes, his various learning, or his sparkling letters, will revere him only as the author of the Elegy. For this he will be enshrined through all time in the hearts of the myriads ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray

... of the elder period in praise of wine and love, which forcibly illustrates the contempt felt by the student class for the unlettered laity and boors, shall be inserted here. It seems ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various

... and which not to possess was to be ignorant; instead of considering that knowledge is infinite, and that the man most learned in human estimation is just as far from knowing anything as he ought to know it, as the unlettered peasant. Men are merely on a lower or higher stage of an eminence, whose summit is God's throne, infinitely above all; and there is just as much reason for the wisest as for the simplest man being discontented with his position, as respects the real quantity of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin

... disciplines the mind, And broadens thought, like contact with mankind. The college-prisoned greybeard, who has burned The midnight lamp, and book-bound knowledge learned, Till sciences or classics hold no lore He has not conned and studied, o'er and o'er, Is but a babe in wisdom, when compared With some unlettered wand'rer, who has shared The hospitalities of every land; Felt touch of brother in each proffered hand; Made man his study, and the world his college, And gained this grand epitome of knowledge: Each human being has a heart and soul, And self is but an atom of the whole. ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox



Words linked to "Unlettered" :   uneducated, illiterate



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