"Didactic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the episode caused a little naive vexation in Davies. I relate it as a good instance of one of his minor peculiarities. He was utterly without that didactic pedantry which yachting has a fatal tendency to engender In men who profess it. He had tossed me the chart without a thought that I was an ignoramus, to whom it would be Greek, and who would provide him with an admirable subject to drill and lecture, just as his neglect ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... light female touch, which revolts at figures and documents, is well suited to that work, if work it can be called. The male traveller, we know, does much of his research when he gets home, keeping up, however, with a view to that end, a solemnly didactic frame of mind all the time he is abroad. He is thus apt to give us less of what he sees than of what he thinks—an error into which a woman is less prone to fall. She is less critical, less ashamed of being startled and pleased, and more frank and naive in her confession of it. She resembles ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... farmer-clothes;' which he will wear always; careless of short-cloaks and costumes. The name Gerard, or 'Pere Gerard, Father Gerard,' as they please to call him, will fly far; borne about in endless banter; in Royalist satires, in Republican didactic Almanacks. (Actes des Apotres (by Peltier and others); Almanach du Pere Gerard (by Collot d'Herbois) &c. &c.) As for the man Gerard, being asked once, what he did, after trial of it, candidly think of this Parlementary work,—"I think," answered he, "that there are a good many scoundrels ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... of feature or pitch of voice, at once didactic and yet not uncomrade-like, must be counted a very important fact, especially in connection with the period when that voice was first heard. It must be remembered that Shaw emerged as a wit in a sort of secondary age of wits; one of those stale interludes ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the Recluse was written, but is yet unpublished; the Third Division was never even begun, and "the materials," we are told, "of which it would have been formed have been incorporated, for the most part, in the author's other publications." Nor need this change of plan be regretted: didactic poems admit easily of mutilation; and all that can be called plot in this series of works is contained in the Prelude, in which we see Wordsworth arriving at those convictions which in the Excursion he pauses ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... a right mind knows not this, and who with a wrong one will heed it? The only point is that the commonest truisms come upon utterance sometimes, and take didactic form too late; even as we shout to our comrade prone, and beginning to rub his poor nose, "Look out!" And this is what everybody did with one accord, when he was down upon his luck—which is far more momentous than his nose to any man—in the case ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... and, worst of all, kidnaps young people as pupils and persuades them that his limitations are rules, his observances dexterities, his timidities good taste, and his emptinesses purities. And when he declares that art should not be didactic, all the people who have nothing to teach and all the people who don't want to learn agree with ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... moral was it. She had her doubts about it from the beginning, for her lively fancy and girlish romance felt as ill at ease in the new style as she would have done masquerading in the stiff and cumbrous costume of the last century. She sent this didactic gem to several markets, but it found no purchaser, and she was inclined to agree with Mr. Dashwood ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... mural problems, the periodicals record, of course, the events and the interests of the little college world. Through the "Free Press" columns of these papers, the didactic, critical, and combative impulses, always so strong in the undergraduate temperament, find a safe vent. Mentor and agitator alike are welcomed in the "Free Press", and many college reforms have been inaugurated, and many college grievances—real and imagined—have ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... man in London had the right to be bumptious and didactic, Henry had. And yet he remained simple, unaffected, and fundamentally kind. But he was very serious. His mother and aunt strained every nerve, in their idolatrous treatment of him, to turn him into a conceited and unbearable jackanapes—and their failure to do so ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... character? "C'est l'imagination," said Napoleon, "qui domine le monde." The drama has one immense advantage over the pulpit or the professor's chair: it fascinates while it instructs—it allures while it elevates. It thus extends its influence over a wide and important circle, upon whom didactic precepts will never have any influence. Without doubt, the strong and deep foundations of public morality must be laid in religious and moral instruction; if they are wanting, the social edifice, how fair soever to appearance, is built on a bed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... once historian, translator and poet. Of his many works the most important are his chronicles of the four kings of Castile during whose reigns he lived; they give a generally accurate account of scenes and events, most of which he had witnessed; he also wrote a long satirical and didactic poem, interesting as a picture of his personal experiences and of contemporary morality. The first part of his chronicle, covering only the reign of Peter the Cruel, was printed at Seville in 1495; the first complete edition was printed in 1779-1780 in the collection ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... a, with pairs of rhymes. Chaucer, Denham, Dryden, Waller, Pope, Goldsmith, Cowper, Byron, Moore, Shelley, &c. This is the common metre for narrative, didactic, and descriptive poetry. ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... people," etc., etc. The speakers who made use of this colloquial phraseology concerning the inhabitants of a distant continent, in the freedom of extemporaneous debate, were not framing their ideas with the exactitude of a didactic treatise, and could little have foreseen the extraordinary use to be made of their expressions nearly a century afterward, in sustaining a theory contradictory to history as well as to common sense. It is as if the familiar expressions ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... tale. Ravensnest, with no lack of scenic embellishments, introduces to us three of the author's happiest characters—always excepting Leatherstocking and Long Tom—namely, the two Littlepages, 'Captain Hugh' and his 'Uncle Ro,' and Mistress Opportunity Newcome. The didactic asperities in which he indulged naturally marred the fortune of a book whose readers, whatever they might be, were pretty safely 'booked' for a scolding. Otherwise, it gleamed with scintillations, neither faint nor few, of the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... I have never found any poet excepting King David whom I liked because he taught me anything. Didactic "poetry" wearies me, probably because it is not poetry at all. When people praise Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," because it is dogmatic, I am surprised—for if I found anything dogmatic in it, it would lose all its splendour for me. The Apocalypse and "The Hound ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... herself to blame if she didn't enjoy it; she was bent on going," said Johanna, in the mildly didactic manner she invariably used towards her sister. "But I think she is ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... raisins, and bumpers of sweet wine. But mark the difference between him and the pig. Instead of greasy letters and old cards, which are used for the learned pig, before the little human animal are cast the finest morsels from our first authors, selections from our poets, didactic, pathetic, and sublime—every ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... is even more remarkable in the poems than in the romance. No volume of poems ever published in the country was so popular. Severe critics indeed, while acknowledging its melody and charm, thought it too morally didactic, the work of a student too fondly enamoured of foreign literatures. But while they conceded taste and facility, two of the poems at least—the "Psalm of Life" and the "Footsteps of Angels"—penetrated the common ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... days of this rhetorical—or satirical, didactic—or perfunctory, treatment of classical themes were doomed. It is the glory of Romanticism to have opened 'magic casements' not only on 'the foam of perilous seas' in the West, ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... illustration of the poem depends, as essentially as the plot of the Iliad on the anger of Achilles." [Footnote: Mure's "Language and Literature of Ancient Greece," vol. ii., p.384.] The whole work has been well characterized by another writer as "the most ancient specimen of didactic poetry, consisting of ethical, political, and minute economical precepts. It is in a homely and unimaginative style, but is impressed throughout with a lofty and solemn feeling, founded on the idea that the gods have ordained justice among men, have ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... respect. Surely it is a most potent egg, a gallinaceous Swift. After all, anything but pointless and childless, since it has this strange quality of being offensive and engendering thought. Food for the mind if not food for the body—didactic if not delightful—a bit of modern literature, earnest and fundamentally real. I must try and understand you, Ibsen Ovarum. Possibly it is a profound parable I have stumbled upon. Though I scarcely reckoned on a parable with my bread and butter. Frankly, ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... of Arnold's mind must be recognized in order to understand alike his attitude of superiority, his stiffly didactic method, and his success in attracting converts in whom the seed proved barren. The first impression that his entire work makes is one of limitation; so strict is this limitation, and it profits him so much, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... earnestness and completeness; and I revert to it, in conclusion, as their paramount failing, and one fatal in many ways to the interests of art. Our landscapes are all descriptive, not reflective, agreeable and conversational, but not impressive nor didactic. They ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... certain of our own novelists, who had at one time a fair degree of transient popularity. A lack of skill in the creation or accurate delineation of individual character, which, instead of representing men and women, are didactic exhibitions of the author himself, projected into various personages, and all bearing an unmistakable family resemblance—this it is that is at the bottom of the sudden decadence into which the writings of one or two of our more prolific romancers have fallen, past all redemption; and this is the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... Metamorphoses, follows Hesiod exactly as to nomenclature and very closely as to substance. He makes the degeneracy continuous, however, by omitting the heroic race or age, which, as Grote points out, was probably introduced by Hesiod, not as part of his didactic plan, but from a desire to conciliate popular feeling by including in his poem the chief myths that were already current among the Greeks. Varro recognized three ages: (1) from the beginning of mankind to the Deluge, a quite indefinite period; (2) ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... about 1450 by Steinhoewel, a physician of Ulm, was translated into French, and became the chief source of later collections, thus appearing in the remote ancestry of the work of La Fontaine. The aesthetic value of the mediaeval fables, including those of Marie de France, is small; the didactic intention was strong, the literary art ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... in the course of an existence, the rest of the sojourn upon earth being devoted to a sublimation of our thought. But always wise, sensible, sagacious, rational; always in wig and spectacles; always algebraic and mathematical; doctrinal and didactic; ever to sit like FRANKLIN'S portrait, with the index fixed upon 'causality;' one might as well be a petrified 'professor,' or a WILLIAM PENN bronzed upon a pedestal. There is nothing so good, either ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... full meridian of the eighteenth century, wrote poems upon the subject of Nature; but it would be foolish to suppose that Wordsworth and Coleridge merely carried on a fashion which Thomson had begun. Nature, with them, was something more than a peg for descriptive and didactic verse; it was the manifestation of the vast and mysterious forces of the world. The publication of The Ancient Mariner is a landmark in the history of letters, not because of its descriptions of natural objects, but because it swept into the ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... George Eliot's moralising is constantly suffused by the broad light of a highly poetic imagination, and this was in no degree among Miss Martineau's gifts. Still there is something above the flat touch of the common didactic in such a page as that in which (chapter xix.) she describes the case of 'the unamiable—the only order of evil ones who suffer hell without seeing and knowing that it is hell: nay, they are under a heavier curse than even this, they inflict torments second only to their own, with an unconsciousness ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... talent was dramatic, not didactic, or epic, or pastoral. Pope was not so deep in the drama as in other matters, and Cibber was one of its luminaries; he wrote some of the best comedies of his day. He also succeeded where Dryden, for lack of true dramatic taste, failed. ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... drew nearer she was whimsically struck by a kind of family likeness between Miss Van Osburgh and Percy Gryce. There was no resemblance of feature. Gryce was handsome in a didactic way—he looked like a clever pupil's drawing from a plaster-cast—while Gwen's countenance had no more modelling than a face painted on a toy balloon. But the deeper affinity was unmistakable: the two had ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... her forte is a certain crisp and lively condensation of persons and qualities which carry a large amount of information under a captivating cloak of vivacious and confidential talk with her audience, rather than didactic statement. ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... well-written, but very didactic 'Old Play'," as Adolphus calls it. (Letters to Heber, ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... belongs to the second group of Bjoernson's novels, of which the first group is represented by early peasant tales like "Arne." In this later category the stories are of a more or less didactic nature. Although "In God's Way" lacks something of the freshness and beauty that distinguished "Arne," it is, nevertheless a powerful and vivid picture of Norwegian religious life; and it is, of all Bjoernson's books, the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... duties of a governor. The King, the Queen, and a privy councillor, Antonio de Fonseca, were the persons present; and, as I imagine, the latter addressed Ovando on the part of their Highnesses. As it is not often that we have an opportunity of hearing a didactic lecture on the modes and duties of government given in the presence of a great master of that art, and probably looked over, if not prepared, by him, we must enter the royal cabinet, and hear some part of ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... a higher plane than I'm moving on now. There's nothing higher for a girl than to marry a—a person she likes," said poor Isabel, wandering into the didactic. ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... instead of dialectic skill, his force lay in vituperation, sarcasm, and repartee. 'To Sokrates,' says Epiktetus, 'Zeus assigned the cross-examining function; to Diogenes, the magisterial and chastising function; to Zeno (the Stoic), the didactic ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... if he had finished the portrait of Misery on his stick. Misery had now become a figure of Piety, and Choulette recognized the Virgin in it. He had even composed a quatrain which he was to write on it in spiral form—a didactic and moral quatrain. He would cease to write, except in the style of the commandments of God rendered into French verses. The four lines expressed simplicity and goodness. He consented ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... presents the real character and workaday opinions and beliefs of a writer. The teacher generally speaks from a height transcending his ordinary levels of thought and action. In Florio's Second Fruites his intention is didactic only in relation to imparting a colloquial knowledge of Italian. In this endeavour he arranges a series of twelve conversations on matters of everyday life between imaginary characters, who are, presumably, of about the same social quality as his usual pupils—the younger gentry of the time. In ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... Junius Brutus is said to have had paternal affections withal. Friedrich Wilhelm, alone against the whispers of his own heart and the voices of all men, yields at last in this cause. To Seckendorf, who has chalked out a milder didactic plan of treatment, still rigorous enough, [His Letter to the King, 1st November, 1730 (in Forster, i. 375, 376).] he at last admits that such plan is perhaps good; that the Kaiser's Letter has turned ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... I did not catch them, nor, I'm afraid, did Nina,' said Dick. 'Look there! I'll be shot if she's not giving your friend the major a lesson! When she performs in that way with her hands, you may swear she is didactic.' ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... judgment on Philo. "No Jewish writer has contributed so much as Philo to the breaking up of particularism, and the dissolution of Judaism. The history of his people, though he believed in it literally, was in its main points a didactic allegoric poem for enabling him to inculcate the doctrine that man attains the vision of God by mortification of the flesh. The law was regarded by him as the best guide to this, but it had lost its exclusive value, as it was admitted to be possible ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... linger, of course, over other verse-writers of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for instance, are not without grace and womanly sweetness, in spite of their didactic themes and portentous length. But this lady, born in England, the daughter of Governor Dudley and later the wife of Governor Bradstreet, chose to imitate the more fantastic of the moralizing poets of England and France. There is little in her hundreds of pages which seems today the inevitable ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... highest interpretation,—or, at least, from sustaining it, without sharp falsetto effort, throughout the entire passage of a play. In a few impersonations, where Kemble, with all his mannerisms and defective elocution, and Macready, notwithstanding his uninspired, didactic nature, were most at their ease and successful, this actor would be somewhat put to his mettle,—a fact of which he is probably himself no ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... "your opinion will be very valuable. The question is this: Monsieur the Principal thinks that my thesis ought to be dogmatic and didactic." ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... sat down and had a tumbler or two of punch. Mr. Campbell left him, but Sir Walter thought he would dip into the manuscript before going to bed. He opened it, read, and read again—charmed with the classical grace, purity, and stateliness of that finest of all our modern didactic poems. Next morning Mr. Campbell again called, when to his inexpressible surprise, his friend on returning the manuscript to its owner, said he should guard well against piracy, for that he himself could repeat the poem from beginning to end! The poet dared him to the task, when Sir Walter Scott ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... II.; Cha-abas, Louis XIV., &c. In "Oceana," Parthenia is Queen Elizabeth; Morpheus, James I.; in Ingelow's work, Bentivolio represents "Good will," and Urania "Heavenly light." "Oceana" and "Bentivolio" are didactic treatises rather than romances; the first is a political treatise, and the second a religious treatise, an enormous morality in prose. "The Pilgrim's Progress" must be placed among religious literature properly so-called, as being its master-work ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... gloire in everything; and we should not deign to notice it, if it had occurred in a work of small pretensions; but M. Curmer's book professes to be a complete exposition of the scientific principles of cookery, and holds a high rank in the didactic literature of France. We half suspect that M. Curmer obtained his knowledge of English beef in the same way as did the poor Frenchman, whom the late Mr. Mathews, the comedian, so humorously described. Mr. Lewis, in his "Physiology ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... of the moral sentiments in the human heart, in early life,—and every thing in fact which relates to the formation of character,—is determined in a far greater degree by sympathy, and by the influence of example, than by formal precepts and didactic instruction. If a boy hears his father speaking kindly to a robin in the spring,—welcoming its coming and offering it food,—there arises at once in his own mind, a feeling of kindness toward the ...
— Stuyvesant - A Franconia Story • Jacob Abbott
... makes the book interesting—far more interesting than any story could do; but it is what the writer himself says that attracts far more than what he puts into the mouths of his characters. G. H. Lewes is, to my perception, decidedly the most original character in the book. . . . The didactic passages seem to me the best—far the best—in the work; very acute, very profound, are some of the views there given, and very clearly they are offered to the reader. He is a just thinker; he is ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... deceptions or even in practical jokes. The objection, however, is not only false, but very much the reverse of the facts. The fairy-tales are at root not only moral in the sense of being innocent, but moral in the sense of being didactic, moral in the sense of being moralising. It is all very well to talk of the freedom of fairyland, but there was precious little freedom in fairyland by the best official accounts. Mr. W.B. Yeats and other sensitive modern ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... its charm. His wisdom is deeper than it seems, so simple, practical, and direct as it is in its application; and his moral teaching more spiritual and penetrating than is apparent on a superficial study. He does not fall into the common error of didactic writers, of laying upon life more than it will bear; but he insists that it shall at least bear the fruits of integrity, truth, honour, justice, self-denial, and brotherly charity. Over and above the mere literary ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... of arms in clusters on the lofty roof, marble warriors and their wives without noses occupying a large proportion of the area, and the twelve apostles, with their heads very much on one side, holding didactic ribbons, painted in fresco on the walls. Here, in an absence of mind to which he was prone, Mr. Gilfil would sometimes forget to take off his spurs before putting on his surplice, and only become aware of the omission ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... from other passages in his letters, Clarendon's first intentions are clear. The History was to be a repository of authentic information on 'this most lovely Rebellion', constructed with the specifically didactic purpose of showing the King and his advisers what lessons were to be learned from their errors; they would be 'the wiser for knowing the most secret truths'. At first he looked on his work as containing the materials of a 'perfect story', but as he proceeded his ambitions grew. He had begun ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... Cymbeline the mountainous forest and the cave appear in their aspect of obstruction to life's opportunities. These only seem tolerable in comparison with the vicissitudes of fortune in the artificial court life. In As You Like It the forest of Arden is didactic in its lessons. It does not bring peace, ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... in Hamlet, borrows from Lyly's Euphues Polonius's advice to Laertes; but, however he may have regarded the moral sentiment of that didactic romance, he had no respect for the affectations of its prose style, which he ridiculed in a familiar passage in I Henry IV, II. iv. 445: 'For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... and so we find Mr Pasquin reappearing under the guise, or in the company, of the Champion and Censor of Great Britain, otherwise one Captain Hercules Vinegar, a truculent avenger of wrong and exponent of virtue, in whose fictitious name a political, literary, and didactic newspaper entered the field of party politics on November 15, 1739. The paper, under the title of the Champion, was issued three times a week, and consisted of one leading article, an anti-Ministerial summary of news, and literary notices of new books. The first number announced ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... didactic and at the same time demonstrative of affection is difficult, even with mothers towards their children, though with them the assumption of authority creates no sense of injury. Emily specially desired to point out to the erring one ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... sort of happiness which is enjoyed by the nation of uneventful annals. There is little to be told of him in the way of literary performance; little record remains, unfortunately, of the discursively didactic talk in which, during these years, his intellectual activity found its busiest exercise; of incident in the ordinary sense of the word there is almost none. An account of these closing days of his ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... fall into two groups according as they are didactic (technical or gnomic) or genealogical: the first group centres round the "Works and Days", the second round ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... works of art little can be said; their influence is profound and silent, like the influence of nature; they mould by contact; we drink them up like water, and are bettered, yet know not how. It is in books more specifically didactic that we can follow out the effect, and distinguish and weigh and compare. A book which has been very influential upon me fell early into my hands, and so may stand first, though I think its influence was only sensible later ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of works of imagination practically closed. He wrote several novels afterward, but not one of them did anything to advance his reputation. Some of them tended to lower it. This was not due to failure of power, but to its misdirection. The didactic element in his nature had now gained complete mastery over the artistic. The interest, such as it is, which belongs to his later stories, is rarely a literary interest. Not one of them has the slightest pretension to be termed a work of art. There are, at times, passages in them ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... as old as Homer. Its laureate is Montesquieu. The more northerly you go, he said, the sterner the man grows. You must scorch a Muscovite to make him feel. Gray was a convert. One of the prose hints for his noble fragment of a didactic poem runs thus: "It is the proper work of education and government united, to redress the faults that arise from the soil and air." Berkeley entertained the same feeling. Writing to Pope from Leghorn, and alluding to some half-formed design ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... than even those of the poems of Chaucer. The older fashions of instructing the people were still in vogue in the early part of Edward's reign. Richard Rolle, the hermit of Hampole, whose Prick of Conscience and vernacular paraphrases of the Bible illustrate the older didactic literature, was carried off in his Yorkshire cell in the year of the Black Death. The cycles of miracle plays, which edified and amused the townsfolk of Chester and York, crystallised into a permanent shape early in this reign, and were set forth with ever-increasing elaborateness by ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... Pero LOPEZ DE AYALA (1332-1407), wise statesman, brilliant historian and trenchant page xiv satirist, wrote religious songs in the same style and still more intricate in versification. They are included in the didactic poem usually called ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... old days he would have laughed at her for pretending to know, and turned it off with a kiss. Now what she said set him on edge. The talk he had been living amongst had spoilt him for silly criticisms. Moreover, for the first time he detected in her a slight tone of the 'schoolmarm'—didactic and self-satisfied, without knowledge. The measure Madame de Pastourelles had dealt out to him, he in some sort avenged ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... literary mind. They are all splendid titles for a real book of legendary experience. The poet will be first to feel the accuracy of lyrical emotion in these titles. The paintings lead one away entirely into the land of legend, into the iridescent splendor of reflection. They take one out of a world of didactic monotone, as to their artistic significance. They are essentially pictures created ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... be said that, in making primary the universal contents and spiritual significance of type and plot, I have made literature didactic, as if the word should stop my mouth? If it is meant by this that I maintain that literature conveys truth, it may readily be admitted, since only thus can it interest the mind which has its whole life in the pursuit ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... life and nature, the poet and the philosopher happily co-operate; truth is recommended by elegance, and elegance sustained by truth. In the structure and order of the poem, not only the greater parts are properly consecutive, but the didactic and illustrative paragraphs are so happily mingled, that labour is relieved by pleasure, and the attention is led on through a long succession of varied excellence to the original position, the fundamental principle of wisdom and ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... right hand whilst the left held a page ready to turn, he solaced himself, pending the appearance of the mid-day meal, with a few hundred lines of a favourite work—the didactic poems, I believe, of a certain Doctor Erasmus Darwin, on the ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... followers have honoured his memory by re-erecting in a new place the barriers which he laboured to cast down. But his wonderful songs survive, the spontaneous expressions of his vision and his love; and it is by these, not by the didactic teachings associated with his name, that he makes his immortal appeal to the heart. In these poems a wide range of mystical emotion is brought into play: from the loftiest abstractions, the most otherworldly passion for the Infinite, to the most ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... trace of the now old usurping deluge of Byronism; but it is truly a fact of the time,—less a characteristic than a portion of it. Every species of composition—the dramatic, the narrative, the lyric, the didactic, the descriptive—is imbued with this spirit; and the reader may calculate with almost equal certainty on becoming acquainted with the belief of a poet as of a theologian or a moralist. Of the evils resulting from the practice, the most annoying and the worst is that some of the ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... thought he had a mission. He was a professional poet. He had purposes and theories about poetry which he started out to enforce and illustrate. He is as didactic as Wordsworth, and is thinking of himself the whole time. He belonged, moreover, to that class of professionals who are always particularly self-centred, autocratic, vain, and florid,—the class of quacks. There are, ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... and duties as citizens from their orators, so they hung on the lips of the 'lofty, grave tragedians' for instruction touching their origin, duty, and destiny as mortal and immortal beings.... Greek tragedy is essentially didactic, ethical, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... buttoning his gaiters, all the processes of his simple little life, should be matters of the most enthralling interest, in which he is eager to take his part and increasingly capable of doing so. In the Montessori system there is provided an elaborate apparatus, the didactic material, designed to cultivate tactile sensation and the perception of sense stimuli. It will generally suffice to advise the mother to make use of the ordinary apparatus of the nursery. The imitativeness of ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... callant,' and never became a full-grown and brawny man. Wordsworth was equal to the epic of the age, but has only constructed the great porch leading up to the edifice, and one or two beautiful cottages lying around. Coleridge could have written a poem—whether didactic, or epic, or dramatic—equal in fire and force to the 'Iliad,' or the 'Hamlet,' or the 'De Rerum Natura,' and superior to any of the three in artistic finish and metaphysical truth and religious feeling—a work ranking immediately beside the 'Paradise ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... majesty, the canons of Mosaic and Apostolic Scripture. All that the young reader need know is, that when Jerome died at Bethlehem, this great deed was virtually accomplished: and the series of historic and didactic books which form our present Bible, (including the Apocrypha) were established in and above the nascent thought of the noblest races of men living on the terrestrial globe, as a direct message ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... sciences hypotheses that are not believed in, that are preserved for their didactic usefulness, because they furnish a simple and convenient method of explanation. Thus the "properties of matter" (heat, electricity, magnetism, etc.), regarded by physicists as distinct qualities even in the first half of the last century; the "two electric ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... the pale walls of her sitting-room, seeking counsel of ancestral daguerreotypes and didactic samplers; but they seemed to make utterance ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... spent its force. For the first time since Wyatt and Surrey, England deserted the great themes of literature, the heroic passions of Tamburlaine and Faustus, of Lear and Othello, for the trivial round of social portraiture and didactic discourse; for Essays on Satire and on Translated Verse, for the Tea-Table of the Spectator, for dreary exercises on the Pleasures of the Imagination and the Art of Preserving Health. A new era had opened. It was the day of ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... possible; it is even probable that, if my father had devoted himself to the art, he might have become the author of some elegant and popular didactic poem, on some ordinary subject, which his fancy would have adorned with grace and his sensibility invested with sentiment; some small volume which might have reposed with a classic title upon our library shelves, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... And all this didactic talk comes from looking at that old green cover of Poe. I am sure that if I had to name the few books which have really influenced my own life I should have to put this one second only to Macaulay's Essays. I read it young ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... work of the Church of Rome to teach the common people, and to train them to obedience. In its teaching it has made use of every means which could serve its purposes. Didactic teaching is not effective with tired and sleepy peasants. Sermons soothe, rather than instruct, after a week of hard labor in the fields. Hence comes the need of object-teaching, if teaching is to ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... casually, here and there, not so much for the purpose of specific biography, as to illustrate the incentives which shaped his thought and enriched his invention as a playwright. His purpose in writing these forewords is just a little didactic; he addresses the novice who may be befuddled after reading various "Techniques of the Drama," and who looks to the established and successful dramatist for the secrets of his workshop. These prefaces reveal Thomas as working more ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: In Mizzoura • Augustus Thomas
... was the Water Lily. Then Joe was on board, and the flag was because Nancy was in trouble. The reasoning was intuitive rather than didactic; but the conviction was so forcible that I instinctively rose to return to the hospital for the black bag that is my fidus Achates on ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... meantime Tegnr had given to his native land the solemn didactic poem "Svea". In stately Alexandrine verse he scathingly rebukes his countrymen for their foolish aping after foreign manners and depending on foreign goods to satisfy their desires. The people, says the poet, can become strong again only by a return to ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... effeminacy of the American press, and show up the sausage-venders and Cleons of the Republic in their true light? How long will the richest field of national folly in the world remain unreaped, save by the crotchety sickles of dull moralists and didactic pamphleteers? ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... politics were still more inane. It is a monument of presumptuous infatuation that any one should feel so strongly as he did that order could only be restored on condition of coming to terms with religious use and prejudice, and then that he should dream that his Supreme Being—a mere didactic phrase, the deity of a poet's georgic—should adequately replace that eternal marvel of construction, by means of which the great churchmen had wrought dogma and liturgy and priest and holy office ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... Habeas Corpus Act. True, early in the seventeenth century Military Statutes (Buke Hatto) were promulgated; but their thirteen short articles were taken up mostly with marriages, castles, leagues, etc., and didactic regulations were but meagerly touched upon. We cannot, therefore, point out any definite time and place and say, "Here is its fountain head." Only as it attains consciousness in the feudal age, its origin, ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... not sleep. My blood made a tumult through my body. Before dawn I had written two poems on national themes; didactic verses, each with a moral of democracy tagged to it, and much about the worth of simplicity in it, and the ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... element in the Form. When it was her turn to answer there would be an air of general expectancy in the room; the didactic language of the textbooks was often paraphrased by her lips into something of a more racy description, and even her mistakes were as delicious as her quaint methods of stating facts. Miss Farrar occasionally suspected her of intentionally giving wrong replies, for the sheer ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... indeed he had been a trifle didactic to her grievance. They laughed together, and then with a look at her in which observation seemed suddenly to ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Used to stand for a real object in didactic examples (especially database tutorials). Legend has it that the original widgets were holders for buggy whips. "But suppose the parts list for a widget has 52 entries...." 2. [poss. evoking 'window gadget'] A user interface object ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... house, her father and Mr Heddegan immediately at her back. Her mother had been so didactic that she had felt herself absolutely unable to broach the subjects in the centre of ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... technical skill was not wholly lost. The metrical treatises of Terentianus Maurus, a scholar of the later years of the second century, show that the science of metre was studied with great care, not only in its common forms, but in the less familiar lyric measures. The didactic poem on the art of medicine by Quintus Sammonicus Serenus, the son of an eminent bibliophile, and the friend of the Emperor Alexander Severus, though of little poetical merit, is written in graceful and fluent verse. If of little merit as poetry, it is of even less as science. Medicine had sunk ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... Miss Vance. "Poor Pauline! Her career was always a mystery to me. I was at school with her, and she was the most generous, lovable girl! Yet she came to a wretched end," turning to her flock, her tone growing didactic. "One is never safe, you see. One must ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... our intention that the poet shall versify scientific discoveries. The didactic poem is and will be, in its best form, always but a piece of mechanism, or wooden figure, which has not the true life. The sunlight of science must penetrate the poet; he must perceive truth and harmony in the ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... grace of Guillaume de Lorris, or the wicked wit of Jean de Meung, but full of learning and matter, and written by an author certainly not devoid of the art of telling stories. The mind of this author was thoroughly didactic in its bent; for the beauty of nature he has no real feeling, and though his poem, like so many of Chaucer's, begins in the month of May, he is (unnecessarily) careful to tell us that his object in going forth was not to "sing with the ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... far less attention. This volume is designed, therefore, to portray in some degree their influence in the struggle of the Colonies to attain their independence. The narration of events takes the form of a story—a slight thread of romance being employed, rather than didactic narrative, to more vividly picture the scenes and the parts performed by the actors in the great historic drama. It will not be difficult for the reader to discern between the facts of history and the imaginative ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... once for all, that this universe is moral, and say no more about that. Every man loves goodness, and the saint never exhorts to this love, but reinforces by addressing himself to it as matter of course. All power is a like repose on the basis of common desires and perceptions in the race. The didactic method is an insult alike to the pupil and the universe. Socrates is master and gentleman with his questions, suggestions, seeking in me and acting as midwife to my thought; but all illuminati and professors, all who talk down or cut our meat into morsels, will quickly be counted aunties ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... Friends" to be one the two best short stories of 1915, and others felt it to be the best story of the year. To "The Friends" have now been added in this volume two other stories of almost equal distinction,—"The Packet" and "'In the Way of Business.'" While Mr. Aumonier has a certain didactic intention in these stories, he has kept it entirely subordinate to the artistry of his exposition, and it is the few characters which he has added to English fiction that we remember after his somewhat obvious moral has been conveyed. His short stories have the same flavor of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... told, have their purpose, Mr Humphreys, and I suppose these blocks have had theirs as well as another. But what that purpose is or was [Mr Cooper assumed a didactic attitude here], I, for one, should be at a loss to point out to you, sir. All I know of them—and it's summed up in a very few words—is just this: that they're stated to have been removed by your late uncle, at a period ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... cameos, loosely strung upon a thread, a structure with countless beautiful parts, which do not however cohere into any symmetrical whole. The poems are cast in many forms; allegory, narrative, vision, didactic poetry, lyric poetry, all find a place. There is little history, but much legend, some fiction, and a good deal of mythology. The series was not designed as a whole. La Chanson des Aventuriers de la Mer was ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... in Ferishtah's Fancies. These interludes are love lyrics which follow the separate Fables and Fancies of the Persian Dervish Ferishtah, and state in terms of the affections the truth embodied in didactic or philosophical fashion in the fables. In the first fable, "The Eagle," the Dervish observes an eagle feeding some deserted ravens. His first inference is that men will be cared for as the ravens, without effort of their own; later he sees that men should ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... some curious observations I should like to make about the mental machinery, but I think we are getting rather didactic. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... associatioassociationistsnlsts. In order, however, to emphasize the importance of imagination, by which he largely means the imagistic liveliness of the poet's mind, he allows that the imagination is secondary only in didactic or ethical poetry. Such forms are perhaps best understood as hybrid, a kind of poetizing of philosophy, a sort of reasoning in verse, and therefore forms in which the imagination is not given full exercise. Given his premises it is not surprising ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... refused to try in spite of his wife's pleading. However, he consented to the employment of the bridge teacher for her and, thereafter, two hours of each alternate afternoon, Sundays excepted, were spent by Mrs. Dott and two other female students in company with a thin and didactic spinster who quoted Elwell and Foster and discoursed learnedly concerning the values of no-trump hands. The lessons were given at the Dott home and Mr. Hungerford was an interested spectator. Daniel, who was not interested, and ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... novel through several generations from Homer and Calliope. He then undertakes to characterise the most considerable writers in this line. He discusses with much learning, and all the logical subtlety so proper to the didactic muse, the pretensions of the Cyropedia of Xenophon; but at length rejects it as containing nothing but what was literally true, and therefore belonging to the class of history. He is very eloquent upon the Shepherd of Hermas, Theagenes and Chariclea, and ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... this production has been disposed of, in the few criticisms I have seen upon it. One critic declared that it was a good poem but no drama; another avers decidedly that it is a fine drama, but not a poem; while the "Nation" man thinks that it is neither a poem nor a drama, but a sort of didactic narrative intended to be in the first place British, and, in the second place, a warning against the advancing powers of the Catholic Church. There is but a solitary thread of judgment in common among ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... extending to more than 250 pages. In 1757, a greatly abridged form of this version was published by Madame de Beaumont, who was then living in England and who wrote many spirited tales designed for children. Her stories are full of the didactic element, and "Beauty and the Beast" is no exception to the rule. These "edifying commonplaces," however, are so sound and fit into the story so naturally that the reader does not suffer from their presence. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... general sense of helplessness in Holland, and a craving for any kind of companionship. Now I have got him, I feel rather more helpless than ever—a sort of composite of Sandford and Merton, with a didactic, but frequently incomprehensible Dutch Barlow. My Sandford half would like to exhibit an intelligent curiosity, but is generally suppressed by Merton, who has a morbid horror of useful information. Not that BOSCH is remarkably erudite, but nevertheless he contrives to reduce ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 18, 1892 • Various
... Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... stumbling-block to the Froebelian that Dr. Montessori, while advocating freedom in words, has really set strict limits to the natural activities of children by laying so much stress on her "didactic apparatus," the intention of which is formal training in sense-discrimination. This material, which is an adaptation and enlargement of that provided by Seguin for his mentally deficient children, is certainly open to the reproach of having been "devised by adults." ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... about only by the dramatic agencies of others, but also by our own reasonings and habits of thought. What I am now about to set down may be wearisome, but it is not episodical; and I promise that it shall be the last didactic conversation ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Gilby had explained other things to her, small practical things, such as some points in English grammar, some principles of taste in woman's dress, how to choose the wools for her knitting, how to make muffins for his tea. It was his kindly, conceited, didactic nature that made him instruct whenever he talked to her. Zilda learned it all, and learned also to admire and love the author of ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... pin, repented of and confessed that crime, and then became a good and great man, I was as familiar as if I myself had invented that ingenious and instructive tale; I could lisp the moral numbers of Watts and the didactic hymns of Wesley, and the annual reports of the American Tract Society had already revealed to me the sphere of usefulness in which my grandmother hoped I would ultimately figure with discretion and zeal. And yet my heart was free; wholly untouched of that gentle yet deathless passion which was ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... the intellectual movement in Greece is didactic rather than scientific, in the widest acceptation of the term. We have not yet here those strifes and debates which at the present time agitate and enliven the modern mind in Europe. We teach, and teach. This is our mission ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... West threw the poet upon the communion with the fields and woods, the days and nights, the changing seasons, in which another great nature poet of ours declares they "speak in various language." But nothing could be farther from the didactic mood in which "communion with the various forms" of nature casts the Puritanic soul of Bryant, than the mood in which this German-blooded, Kentucky-born poet, who keeps throughout his song the sense of a perpetual and inalienable youth, with a spirit as pagan as that which breathes ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... to blame."—Priestley cor. "I am not satisfied but that the integrity of our friends is more essential to our welfare than their knowledge of the world."—Id. "Indeed, there is in poetry nothing so entertaining or descriptive, but that an ingenious didactic writer may introduce it in some part of his work."—Blair cor. "Brasidas, being bit by a mouse he had catched, let it slip out of his fingers: 'No creature,' says he, 'is so contemptible but that it may provide ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... rhyme, even, that the young Charles should learn his lessons. He might get all manner of instruction in the truly noble art of the chase, not without a smack of ethics by the way, from the compendious didactic poem of Gace de la Bigne. Nay, and it was in rhyme that he should learn rhyming: in the verses of his father's Maitre d'Hotel, Eustache Deschamps, which treated of "l'art de dictier et de faire chancons, ballades, virelais et rondeaux," along with many other ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to Montesquieu what Homer has been to the didactic writers on epic poetry. As the latter have considered the work of the immortal bard as the perfect model from which the principles and rules of the epic art were to be drawn, and by which all similar works were to be judged, ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... those of Plato and Aristotle, or to those of any other authors who have written on the same subjects in any country. These works, the Ihya-ul-ulum, epitomized into the Kimia-i-Saadat, and the Akhlak-i-Nasiri, with the didactic poems of Sadi,[38] are the great 'Pierian spring' of moral instruction from which the Muhammadan delights to 'drink deep' from infancy to old age; and a better spring it would be difficult to find in the works ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... "Forgive his crimes," etc. This is quoted from Night Thoughts by the English didactic ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... charge Rueckert with never having produced "a whole," have certainly forgotten one of his works,—"The Wisdom of the Brahmin, a Didactic Poem, in Fragments." The title somewhat describes its character. The "fragments" are couplets, in iambic hexameter, each one generally complete in itself, yet grouped in sections by some connecting thought, after the manner of the stanzas of Tennyson's "In Memoriam." There ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... but they don't wear like the plain old beverages. I saw very plainly, that much more was to be gained, in the long run, by planting myself—not with a sudden and startling jump, but by a graceful, cautious pirouette—upon a basis of the Moral and the Didactic. I should thus reach a class of slow, but very tough stomachs, which would require ample time to assimilate the food I intended to offer. If this were somewhat crude, that would be no objection whatever: ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... to convince you of this I will now proceed to cure this gentleman of cataract" would have been, to a man of Jesus's intelligence, the proposition of an idiot. If it could be proved today that not one of the miracles of Jesus actually occurred, that proof would not invalidate a single one of his didactic utterances; and conversely, if it could be proved that not only did the miracles actually occur, but that he had wrought a thousand other miracles a thousand times more wonderful, not a jot of weight would be added to his doctrine. And ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... in a sufficiently didactic manner, was a hint that Miss Peyton did not neglect. She arose and retired, ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... not a series of nursery-rules for man—formal, didactic droppings of a pedant's tongue. Homiletics is the appeal of man to man, for the welfare of his soul, and the true progress of mankind. Exegesis is not a matter of Hebrew or Greek alone. It includes the spiritual interpretation of the great problems of the race. ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... book. [unnecessary teaching] preach to the wise, teach one's grandmother to suck eggs, teach granny to suck eggs; preach to the converted. Adj. teaching &c v.; taught &c v.; educational; scholastic, academic, doctrinal; disciplinal^; instructive, instructional, didactic; propaedeutic^, propaedeutical^. Phr. the schoolmaster abroad; a bovi majori disscit arare minor [Lat.]; adeo in teneris consuecere multum est [Lat.] [Vergil]; docendo discimus [Lat.]; quaenocent docent [Lat.]; qui docet discit [Lat.]; sermons in stones and good in everything ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... debate. Doubtless mine have the same forensic quality. Our letters have become rebuttals, pure and simple. This discovery gave my pen pause for a week. It occurred to me that Walt Whitman must have meant didactic letters too, when he said of the fretters of our little world, "They make me sick talking of their duty to God." Yet friend should speak to friend, should utter the word than which nothing is more sacred. "Let there be light, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... the didactic Tappington's method of inculcating a horror of slang in his sister's breast was open to some objection; but they were already on the steps of their house, and he was too much mortified at the reception of his last unhappy suggestion to make the confidential disclosure he had ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... furnishes one of the most memorable lessons in history. It was not lost on his contemporaries; and the marquis of Santillana has made use of it to point the moral of perhaps the most pleasing of his didactic compositions. [41] John did not long survive his favorite's death, which he was seen afterwards to lament even with tears. Indeed, during the whole of the trial he had exhibited the most pitiable agitation, having twice issued and recalled his orders ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... written The Editor with a "purpose," his vivid dramatic sense kept him from becoming merely didactic. The little tragedy that takes place amongst this homely group of people makes quite a moving play, thanks to the skill with which the types are depicted—the bourgeois father and mother, with their mixture of timidity and self-interest; the manly, straightforward young politician, resolute to ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... conception and treatment, but his hundred and thirteen types of fools possessed, nevertheless, universal interest. It was in reality sins and vices, however, rather than follies that came under his censure, and this didactic temper was reflected in Barclay. The book appeared in 1494 with woodcuts said to have been devised and perhaps partly executed by Brant himself. In these illustrations, which gave an impulse to the production of "enblems" ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... age naturally drifted into the didactic. They should have the credit of trying always to be useful. They go through so many pages, seeking to give the little people some notion of botany, of natural history, of other branches of human intelligence. There is no book cleverer in its way than Miss Hannah ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... presume is meant, that it is not susceptible of any other proof; for otherwise, there would be no fallacy. To deduce from a proposition propositions from which it would itself more naturally be deduced, is often an allowable deviation from the usual didactic order; or at most, what, by an adaptation of a phrase familiar to mathematicians, may be ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... avoid the question of didactic art in writing of these pictures, though such a wide question, debated for half a century, can receive no adequate treatment here. We must frankly allow that Watts was 'preaching sermons in paint', nor would he have repudiated the charge, however loud to-day are the protests ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... also well that Bill's momentary attitude of didactic propriety was not further excited by the subsequent conduct of his protege. For by this time Tom, half supporting the unstable Johnson, who developed a tendency to occasionally dash across the glaring road, but checked himself mid way each time, reached the corral which adjoined the ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... whereas the reactionary elements in Russia looked upon "Fathers and Children" as a glorification of Nihilism. Thus he satisfied nobody. He fell between two stools. This, perhaps, could only happen in Russia to this extent; and for that same reason as that which made Russian criticism didactic. The conflicting elements of Russian society were so terribly in earnest in fighting their cause, that anyone whom they did not regard as definitely for them was at once considered an enemy, and an impartial delineation of any character concerned in the political ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... all the discursive elements that come up in the legal discussions in the old Babylonian and Palestinian academies. These elements are occasionally biographical,—fragments of the lives of the great scholars, occasionally historical,—little bits of Israel's long tragedy, occasionally didactic,—facts, morals, life lessons taught by the way; occasionally anecdotic, stories told to relieve the monotony of discussion; not infrequently fanciful; bits of philosophy, old folk-lore, weird imaginings, quaint beliefs, superstitions and humor. They are presented haphazard, most irrelevantly ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... we have a record in the elegies of Theognis, in which the poet has embodied, for the benefit of Kurnus his friend, the ripe experience of an eventful life. The poems for the most part are didactic in character, consciously and deliberately aimed at the instruction and guidance of the man to whom they are addressed; but every now and again the passion breaks through which informs and inspires this virile intercourse, and in such a passage as the following ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... it has been criticised and estimated as a lyrical drama, a drama in the epic style, a lyric poem in the form of a play, a phantasy, an allegory, a philosophical poem, a suite of speeches or majestic soliloquies, and even a didactic poem. Such variety in the description of the poem is explained partly by its complex charm and many-sided interest, and partly by the desire to describe it from that point of view which should best reconcile its literary form with what we know of the genius and powers of its author. Those ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton |
