"Erudition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... digesting and arranging the contents of the libraries. There were then no short cuts of learning, no comprehensive lexicons, no dictionaries of antiquities, no carefully prepared thesauri of mythology and history. Each student had to hold in his brain the whole mass of classical erudition. The text and the canon of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the tragedians had to be decided. Greek type had to be struck. Florence, Venice, Basel, and Paris groaned with printing-presses. The Aldi, the Stephani, and Froben toiled by night and day, employing scores ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... in a minute than others communicate in half a year; quotes Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, etc., with a formidable fluency; and drove me from one end of the room to the other with all the thunder of erudition. Syllables fell thicker than hail, and in an instant I found myself so weighed down and covered, that I prayed, for mercy's sake, to be introduced, by way of respite, to a Laplander whom he leads about as a curiosity; a poor, harmless, good sort of a soul, calm and indifferent, ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... allusions to slip through his hands unperceived; but, on the other hand, it ought to be frankly conceded, and, if necessary, firmly maintained, that the profitable use of our Lord's parables does not depend on rare and difficult erudition. If a deficiency in this department infers the risk of baldness in the exposition, a redundance supplies a temptation to pedantic display. It is one thing to place some ancient eastern custom in such a position that a ray of light from its surface shall pleasantly illumine a feature of the ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... recognisable by his long frock-coat of a metallic green and his large wide 'topper.' Most people in the neighbourhood knew this hat, which, set on the back of a grey curly head, distinguished, like a halo, the hierarch of erudition. It ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... the vivid young goddess of Liberty inquired, "Wouldn't you like to walk home with me, Comrade Higgins?" He stammered, "Yes"; and they went out, the young goddess plying him with questions about conditions in the jail, and displaying most convincing erudition on the subject of the economic aspects of criminology—at the same time seeming entirely oblivious to the hoverings of the other moths, and the disgust of the unemancipated ladies ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... and not rather the Production of one of those Grecian Sophisters, who have imposed upon the World several spurious Works of this Nature. I speak this by way of Precaution, because I know there are several Writers, of uncommon Erudition, who would not fail to expose my Ignorance, if they caught me tripping in a Matter of so ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... catechism and the offices of the Church, made up his whole stock of erudition. That he was devout as a monk of the middle ages, conforming daily and hourly to religious ceremonies, need scarcely be stated. It was not probable that the son of Philip II. would be a delinquent to church observances. He was not deficient ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sympathy he acknowledged for the creations of the other. Like the author of NORMA, he was full of melodic feeling, yet he was ambitions of attaining the harmonic depth of the learned old master; desiring to unite, in a great and elevated style, the dreamy vagueness of spontaneous emotion with the erudition ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... sciences. Its work in the department of paleontology is particularly noteworthy as it has extended the boundaries of knowledge through its many explorations in the western fossil fields. The success of the Museum is largely due to the energy and erudition of Dr. W. J. Holland, its amiable director. In the music-hall, a symphony orchestra is maintained, and free recitals are given on the great organ twice every week by a capable performer. When the orchestra began its work thirteen years ago, it is doubtful if there were ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... intendant—Master Jacques—who goes everywhere with Jane Zeld," answered the ever-present reporter, delighted to have an opportunity of displaying his erudition. "He is ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... Book de Consolatione. His Francogallia was his own Favourite; tho' blamed by several others, who were of the contrary Opinion: Yet even these who wrote against him do unanimously agree, that he had a World of Learning, and a profound Erudition. He had a thorough Knowledge of the Civil Law, which he managed with all the Eloquence imaginable; and was, without dispute, one of the ablest Civilians that France had ever produced: This is ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... thrown upon those times, in which an accurate chronological system can best repair what is deficient, and best elucidate what is obscure in the scanty authorities bequeathed to us, all the light of a profound and disciplined intellect, applying the acutest comprehension to the richest erudition, and arriving at its conclusions according to the true spirit of inductive reasoning, which proportions the completeness of the final discovery to the caution of the intermediate process. My obligations ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Sidonia and the Chosen Race. The Novels by Eminent Hands are all good: they are much more than parodies; they are real criticism, sound, wise, genial, and instructive. Nor are they in the least unfair. If the balderdash and cheap erudition of Bulwer and Disraeli are covered with inextinguishable mirth, no one is offended by the pleasant imitations of Lever, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... fishers to study carefully all the chapters on fishing for salmon, loch trout, sea trout, and yellow trout, whatever may be their experience or erudition. They will find general hints of immense use which they can apply to that local knowledge of their own river or 'water' which no books can teach, and which Mr Colquhoun himself would equally have ...
— Scotch Loch-Fishing • AKA Black Palmer, William Senior
... of the Howards, the Plantagenets, and the Montmorencis," says Prue, surprising me with her erudition. "Have you any remoter ancestry, Mr. Sculpin?" she asks Minim, who only smiles compassionately upon the dear woman, while ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... united, the high breeding of a nobleman, and the erudition of a man of (literary) consideration; you would have been worthy of becoming ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... were now firmly established in Peru and it came to pass that a certain Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, a Spanish officer of unusual erudition in maritime and other matters, having collected and translated many historical documents, or guipus,* relating to the Incas, became aware that one of them, their wisest and greatest monarch, named Tupac Yupanqui, had made an extensive voyage ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge
... Rohde was not misled into accepting such adulation of queens as evidence of adoration of women in general. In several pages of admirable erudition (63-69), which I commend to all students of the subject, he exposes the hollowness and artificiality of this so-called Alexandrian chivalry. Fashion ordained that poems should be addressed to women ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Caton, which book hath been translated into English by Master Benet Burgh, late Archdeacon of Cochester, and high canon of St. Stephen's at Westminster, which ful craftily hath made it in ballad royal for the erudition of my lord Bousher, son and heir at that time to my lord the Earl of Essex. And because of late came to my hand a book of the said Cato in French, which rehearseth many a fair learning and notable examples, I have translated it out of French into English, as all along hereafter shall appear, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... assisting in the education of Philip IV., but in reality to justify the assassination committed in France on the person of Henry III., and probably to prepare for that of his successor. Mariana sustains, with warmth, with eloquence, and with erudition, the dogma of regicide; determines the cases in which the commission of that crime is not only lawful but necessary and praiseworthy; lays down rules by which the deed should be executed, under certain and determinate ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... of Truth and Love. 88:27 It is due to inspiration rather than to erudition. It shows the possibilities derived from divine Mind, though it is said to be a gift whose endowment 88:30 is obtained from books or received from the impulsion of departed spirits. When eloquence ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... Claretie, que vous etiez le vrai createur de ce paladin, Lagardere, pair de d'Artagnan, pair de Cyrano, pair presque de Roland et d'Olivier. Et si je ne l'avais pas su, j'aurais pu l'apprendre dernierement en lisant ce livre aussi plein de charme que d'erudition, "Les Anciens Theatres de Paris" de M. Georges Cain. Mais je crois que cette verite est connue de peu de monde dans les pays ou se parle la langue anglaise, que quand on loue "Le Bossu" de Feval on doit aussi ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... recreation-time in the courts. In those very days he was writing great plays, and needed all the time he could get. The horse-holding legend ought to be strangled; it too formidably increases the historian's difficulty in accounting for the young Shakespeare's erudition—an erudition which he was acquiring, hunk by hunk and chunk by chunk, every day in those strenuous times, and emptying each day's catch ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Deans enquiry however demanded an amount of erudition that greatly fatigued the bishop. He had a very fair general knowledge of vestments, but he had never really cared for anything but the poetry of ornaments, and he had to work strenuously to master the legal side of ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... gradually pulled himself together, a comforting little sense of flattery came to soothe his bruises and to clear his eyes. Yes, she believed in him. This brilliant and learned young woman had impetuously placed her boundless stores of erudition at his disposal; she had loaded the work of twenty men on his shoulders and was confidently expecting him to carry off the whole vast undertaking with jaunty ease. He must not fail. Fortunately, she was willing to admit the co-operation of a few of ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... owe this account of Bloet's—which appears to me the only one trustworthy—to the courtesy and erudition of Professor Henry Morley, who finds it quoted from Bloet's 'Acroama,' in the 'Observationum Medicarum Rariorum, lib. vii.,' of John Theodore Schenk. Those who wish to know several curious passages of Vesalius' life, which I have not inserted in this article, would do well to consult one ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... being extracted and interpreted, sentences laboriously involved and difficult of analysis, prolix digressions full of mystic combinations of antiquated myths, and generally a store of cumbersome erudition of all sorts. Instruction needed exercises more and more difficult; these productions, in great part model efforts of schoolmasters, were excellently adapted to be lessons for model scholars. Thus the Alexandrian poems took a permanent place in Italian scholastic instruction, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... in your interesting little work, that the round towers so common in Scotland and Ireland, have afforded the antiquaries much room for the display of their erudition, in ascertaining the purposes for which these ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... is always, delightful. But the blundering bluster of Brougham, the solemn ineffectiveness of Horner (of whom I can never think without also thinking of Scott's delightful Shandean jest on him), the respectable erudition of the Scotch professors, cannot for one single moment be compared with the work which, in Jeffrey's own later days, in those of Macvey Napier, and in the earlier ones of Empson, was contributed by Hazlitt, by Carlyle, by Stephen, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... "he would do little or nothing besides heaping up notes"; "as for MSS. he would not trouble himself about any, but rest wholly upon what had been done to his hands by former editors." This habit of carping, this trick of collecting notes, this inability to put a work through, this dawdling erudition, this horror of manuscripts, every Oxford man knows them, and feels those temptations which seem to be in the air. Oxford is a discouraging place. College drudgery absorbs the hours of students in proportion to their conscientiousness. ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... do I tell them that their admirable John Milton, the only poet save Sternhold and Hopkins that my father deems not absolute pagan, knew, loved, and borrowed from Dante. All my books are turned over as ruthlessly as ever Don Quixote's by the curate and the barber, and whatever Mr. Horncastle's erudition cannot vouch for is summarily handed over to the kitchen wench to light the fires. The best of it is that they have left me my classics, as though old Terence and Lucan were lesser heathens than the great Florentine. However, I have bribed the young ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... neither my sister nor myself brought any out of it but a little of our native English. By "mathematics," reader, must be understood "cyphering." It was, in fact, a humble day-school, at which reading and writing were taught to us boys in the morning, and the same slender erudition was communicated to the girls, our sisters, etc., in the evening. Now Starkey presided, under Bird, over both establishments. In my time, Mr. Cook, now or lately a respectable singer and performer at Drury-Lane Theatre, and nephew ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... it learned to have called our dancing ground by the name of the first dancing grounds ever discovered and built by Daedalus, the famous artificer of Crete? However, we are obliged to give Miss Frean the credit for most of our erudition. ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... promise to a friend. Soon after my return from Europe, in November, I spent part of a day in New York discussing Bolshevism with two friends. One of these is a Russian Socialist, who has lived many years in America, a citizen of the United States, and a man whose erudition and fidelity to the working-class movement during many years have long commanded my admiration and reverence. The other friend is a native American, also a Socialist. A sincere Christian, he has identified his faith in the ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... Their passion is not so much to know life as to enjoy it; not to direct it, but to experience it; not even to make understanding of it an end, but only a means to interpreting it. They do not, as a rule, thirst for erudition, and they are indifferent to those manipulations of the externals of life which are dear to the lovers of executive power. They know less but they understand more than their scholastic brethren. As ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... attached so little value to knowledge in general, she contented herself with smiling at the "Socratic method," as she saw no reason for becoming seriously wrought up over it. According to her honest conviction there were other things in life of far greater importance than knowledge, to say nothing of erudition, and these other things were: a good appearance and good manners. That her children should all present a good appearance was with her an article of faith, so to speak, and she considered it a natural consequence of their ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... the Chechenses could think of to head an address to a distinguished Russian general whose gallantry in battle had won their respect. The serpent, in the Caucasus, is the Cardinal Mezzofanti of the brute world. To know as many languages as a serpent is the ne plus ultra of polyglot erudition. A swaggering coward is compared to a drunken mouse; and many a boaster on the porch of the Caucasian village mosque has been silenced by some sceptical bystander with the well-known quotation from a popular beast-fable: "'What has become of all the cats?' inquired ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... classed him with the children of twelve or thirteen. However, as learning was considered in New Canaan a superfluous and wholly unnecessary adjunct to the means of living, Absalom's want of agility in imbibing erudition never troubled him, nor did it in the least call forth the pity or contempt of ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... from this fount the streamlets flow, That widen in their course. Hero and sage arise to show Science the mighty source, And laud the land whose talents rock The cradle of her power, And wreaths are twined round Plymouth Rock, From erudition's bower. ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... the Sixth Patriarch was a great genius, and may be justly called a born Zen teacher. He was a man of no erudition, being a poor farmer, who had served under the Fifth Patriarch as a rice-pounder only for eight months, but he could find a new meaning in Buddhist terms, and show how to apply it to practical life. On one occasion, for instance, Fah Tah (Ho-tatsu), a monk who had read over the Saddharma-pundarika-sutra[FN46] ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... reason. In the study of my profession I was interested in the designing of fonts and baptisteries, and by a natural process I was led to investigate the history of baptism; and some of the arguments I then learnt up still remain with me. That's the simple explanation of my erudition.' ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... steps, crossed the hall-way, and passed in beneath the dome of the reading-room, he wondered if, amid those mountains of erudition surrounding him, there was any wisdom so strange, and so awful, ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... whom were the families of two or three farmers of substance, while the village and its neighbourhood contributed a portion of the poorest of the inhabitants. A year or two before I came, their minister died, and they had chosen another, a very worthy man, of considerable erudition, but of extreme views, as I heard, upon insignificant points, and moved by a great dislike to national churches and episcopacy. This, I say, is what I had made out about him from what I had heard; and my reader will very probably be inclined to ask, ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... proof of the truth of this assertion. Should you, instead of that, happen to disprove me, the concern indeed would be mine, but the loss will be yours. Lord Bolingbroke is a strong instance on my side of the question; he joins to the deepest erudition, the most elegant politeness and good-breeding that ever any courtier and man of the world was adorned with. And Pope very justly called him "All-accomplished St. John," with regard to his knowledge ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... academy, he entered the army as a sub-lieutenant, knowing, as he tells us, a little Latin, and no Greek, but possessing, with very tolerable acquirements in the mathematics, a fair share of the scattered erudition won by readings ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... possessed the fire, the imagination, and the genius of a poet, she nevertheless had not the criticism, or erudition, of a man of letters. For example; she informs us, that before her fables were translated into English, they had already been turned from Greek into Latin by Aesop.[22] She then gives the fable of an ox that assisted at ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... furthermore, confront the morning breeze, the evening moon, the willows by the steps and the flowers in the courtyard, methinks these would moisten to a greater degree my mortal pen with ink; but though I lack culture and erudition, what harm is there, however, in employing fiction and unrecondite language to give utterance to the merits of these characters? And were I also able to induce the inmates of the inner chamber to understand and ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... reign in Jerusalem and Constantinople, pass emphatically before us in the stately pages which once charmed readers of English as the model of historic eloquence, and now excite the admiration of scholars as a monument of erudition and elaborate but artificial writing. There was a new attraction in the pleasing style of Robertson and the characterization of Hume; the winsome language of the one and the transparent diction of the other made historical reading not so much a task to cumber the memory as a pastime ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... ancient historians," says he, "are crowded with those views of things, from which we may derive the utmost utility, even though the facts that suggest them, should be mistaken. But we are unskilled to derive any real advantage from history. The critique of erudition absorbs every thing; as if it imported us much whether the relation were true, provided we could extract from it any useful induction. Men of sense ought to regard history as a tissue of fables, whose moral is perfectly adapted to the ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... that first strikes us is the very scanty foundation of instruction, upon which he contrived to raise himself to such eminence both as a writer and a politician. It is true, in the line of authorship he pursued, erudition was not so much wanting; and his wit, like the laurel of Caesar, was leafy enough to hide any bareness in this respect. In politics, too, he had the advantage of entering upon his career, at a time when habits of business and a knowledge of details were less looked for ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... rendered was the cultivation of learning and knowledge. With wonderful assiduity they poured forth works of erudition, of history, of criticism, recorded the annals of their own times, and stored these priceless records in their libraries, which have done such good service to the historians of modern times. The monasteries ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... classical author; and he has prefixed to it a chronological abridgment of sacred and profane history connected, from the beginning of the world, which, though not critically adapted to his main design, is of far more intrinsic value, and indeed displays a vast fund of historical erudition. On the whole, though this father of the English learning seems to have been but a genius of the middle class, neither elevated nor subtile, and one who wrote in a low style, simple, but not elegant, yet, when we reflect upon the time in which he lived, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... by your compliment to my national erudition, a very scanty stock in my best of times, and now nearly used up, in 'furnishing forth' the pages of many an idle tale, worked out in the 'Irish Interest,' as the mouse nibbled at the lion's net,—the same presumption, if not with the same results! However, I will rub ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... devotion. If Plato was instructed by Socrates, Aquinas was taught by Albertus Magnus; if Plato travelled into Italy, Greece, and Egypt, Aquinas went to Cologne, Naples, Bologna, and Rome; if Plato was famous for his erudition, Aquinas was no less noted for his universal knowledge. Both were naturally meek and gentle; both led lives of retirement and contemplation; both loved solitude; both were celebrated for self-control; both were brave; both ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... his predecessor in talent, he manifestly excelled him in scholarship. A sojourn at the University had supplied him with a fine assortment of Latin tags, and he delighted to prove his erudition by the citation of the Chronicles. Had he possessed a sense of humour, he might have smiled at the irony of committing a theft upon the historian of thieves. But he was too vain and too pompous to smile at his own weakness, and thus he would pretend himself a ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... this city of acknowledged taste and erudition, who saw him in England, we have had a description of Mr. Dwyer. He says that nature has been uncommonly bountiful to this actor. That he is very handsome, has a fine person, and might, in lively, bustling, genteel comedy, be as great as ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... mental mistiness, is not very unusual in ghost seers. The brother of a friend of my own, a man of letters and wide erudition, was, as a boy, employed in a shop in a town, say Wexington. The overseer was a dark, rather hectic-looking man, who died. Some months afterwards the boy was sent on an errand. He did his business, but, like a boy, returned by a longer and more interesting route. ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... had a pretty good stock of general learning and knowledge'—all conspire to shew that, if he had no more learning than what he could not help, James Boswell was altogether, as Dominie Sampson said of Mannering, 'a man of considerable erudition despite of ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... which he found himself, and viewing the particular traits required in the development of capitalistic institutions, it was the most appropriate training that he could have received. Book erudition and the cultivation of fine qualities would have been sadly out of place; his father's teachings were precisely what were needed to sustain and augment his possessions. On every hand he was confronted either by competitors ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... if it had been done accidentally, for he dropped it before coming quite up. If so, it was a fortunate accident, for it served as the tiny fulcrum on which to place the point of that mighty lever which was destined ere long to raise him to the pinnacle of canine erudition. Dick Varley immediately lavished upon him the tenderest caresses and gave him a lump of meat. But he quickly tried it again lest he should lose the lesson. The dog evidently felt that if he did not fetch that mitten ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... not show any remarkable erudition, indeed all opportunity to do so was carefully shut off. No University, I fancy, would have given him a chair of theology on the strength of his replies on that occasion. There was more than one premature assertion ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... Mamurra and Caesar, pathics both. Nor needs amaze: they share like stains—this, Urban, the other, Formian,—which stay deep-marked nor can they be got rid of. Both morbidly diseased through pathic vice, the pair of twins lie in one bed, alike in erudition, one not more than other the greater greedier adulterer, allied rivals of the girls. A ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... the present day, one of the social changes which impresses me most is the general decay of intellectual cultivation. This may sound paradoxical in an age which habitually talks so much about Education and Culture; but I am persuaded that it is true. Dilettantism is universal, and a smattering of erudition, infinitely more offensive than honest and manly ignorance, has usurped the place which was formerly occupied by genuine and liberal learning. A vast deal of specialism, "mugged up," as boys say, at the British Museum or the London Library, may coexist with a profound ignorance ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... describing commercial England in a state of panic, which is very nearly as appropriate as a disquisition on the Primary Rocks, or an inquiry into the origin of the Cabala would be, but which is so palpably introduced for the purpose of displaying the author's financial erudition, that he feels himself called upon to apologize in a brief preface for its intrusion. In the concluding chapters, too, the various threads of interest are gathered together with very little artistic compactness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Mannering," it had even a larger sale. Scott himself regarded it as superior to both; but an author is not always the best judge of his own productions, and we do not accept his criticism. It probably cost him more labor; but it is an exhibition of his erudition rather than a revelation of himself or of Nature. It is certainly very learned; but learning does not make a book popular, nor is a work of fiction the place for a display of learning. If "The Antiquary" were published in these times, it would be pronounced pedantic. Readers ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... satisfactorily cope with, and he must needs ask the indulgence of his readers for his painfully-felt shortcomings in dealing with the mass of material which he has to manipulate. And more especially is this the case when the volume which immediately precedes his in the series is such a mine of erudition as the 'Celtic Britain' of ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... Professor at work with an exquisitely illuminated Chinese manuscript before him. He explained to me that it was a very interesting Chinese document of the twelfth century, and that he was translating it into Arabic for the benefit of his pupils. The amazing erudition of a man who could translate off-hand an ancient Chinese manuscript into Arabic, without the aid of dictionaries or of any works of reference, amidst all the hubbub of the smoking-room of an ocean liner, left ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... rests on the primaeval earth—its crest is lost in the shadowy splendour of the empyrean; while the great authors, who for traditionary ages have held the chain of science and philosophy, of poesy and erudition, are the angels ascending and descending the sacred scale, and maintaining, as it were, the communication between man and heaven. This feeling is so universal that there is no combination of society in any age in which it ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... Lyttelton:—"He had attained to so eminent a degree of knowledge in mathematics, philosophy, languages, and in every branch of useful and polite learning, as few have acquired in a long life wholly devoted to study; yet to this erudition he joined, what can rarely be found with it, great talents for business, great propriety of behaviour, great politeness of manners: his eloquence was sweet, correct and flowing; his memory vast and exact; his judgment strong ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... comprehension, an universal genius, and most profound learning. There are also one Mr. Rymer and one Mr. Dennis, most profound critics. There is a person styled Dr. Bentley, who has wrote near a thousand pages of immense erudition, giving a full and true account of a certain squabble of wonderful importance between himself and a bookseller; he is a writer of infinite wit and humour, no man rallies with a better grace and in more ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... irrelevant episodes would be less reprehensible were it not that such episodes are for the most part either dull or a fresh excuse for bombast or (worse still) a display of erudition.[296] He devotes no less than 170 lines in the first book to a description of the prodigies that took place at Rome on the outbreak of the Civil War, and of the rites performed to ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... undertook this general history of Astronomy, the science possessed nothing of the sort. Erudition had seized upon some special questions, some detailed points, but no commanding view had presided over ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... unfaded, but which made the fair woman of the scene almost as grimly picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer. Here the pale clergyman piled up his library, rich with parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis, and monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines, even while they vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet constrained often to avail themselves. On the other side of the house, old Roger Chillingworth arranged his study and laboratory: not such as a modern man of science would reckon even tolerably ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Infant, and left me sole Heiress of his immense possessions. Young and wealthy, I was sought in marriage by the noblest Youths of Madrid; But no one succeeded in gaining my affections. I had been brought up under the care of an Uncle possessed of the most solid judgment and extensive erudition. He took pleasure in communicating to me some portion of his knowledge. Under his instructions my understanding acquired more strength and justness than generally falls to the lot of my sex: The ability ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... struck up a warm friendship. He delighted in the galleries and scenery of Florence, though with Rome he was less impressed. "But for some beautiful palaces," he said, "it might just as well be any town in Germany." In an interview with Pope Gregory XVI, he took the opportunity of displaying his erudition. When the Pope observed that the Greeks had taken their art from the Etruscans, Albert replied that, on the contrary, in his opinion, they had borrowed from the Egyptians: his Holiness politely acquiesced. Wherever he went he was eager to increase his knowledge, ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... being, in all their admirable purity and learned polyphony. Hard and inflexible laws engendered an art analogous to primitive painting. Melody was almost entirely absent and was relegated to dance tunes and popular songs. But the dance tunes of the time, on which, perhaps, erudition was not used sufficiently, were written in the same polyphonic style and with the same rigid correctness as the ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... characteristic of these Handbooks is their exceeding simplicity, the excellent order with which they are arranged, the completeness of their details, and the remarkable accuracy and elaborate erudition which they exhibit in every page. They have this further advantage, which it is impossible to over-estimate—that they bring down their respective subjects to the very latest period, and present us with the results of the most recent investigations of the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 182, April 23, 1853 • Various
... drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy and incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow dabbler in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous fiction (founded the immortal system) of Homoeopathy. I am very fair, you see,—you can help yourself to either ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... Confessions, although his scholarly acquirements enabled him to treat philosophical, critical, and historical subjects with wonderful grace and ease. His biographer, Masson, says, "De Quincey's sixteen volumes of magazine articles are full of brain from beginning to end." The wide range of his erudition is shown by the fact that he could write such fine literary criticisms as On Wordsworth's Poetry and On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, such clear, strong, and vivid descriptions of historical events and characters as The Caesars, Joan of Arc, and The Revolt ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... authors we could find (of course for cheapness) for our former pieces of information, we have this time engaged a gentleman to mystify a few common-place subjects, in the style of certain articles in the "Penny Cyclopaedia." As his erudition is too profound for ordinary comprehensions—as he scorns gain—as the books he has hitherto published (no, privated) have been printed at his own expense, for the greater convenience of reading them himself, for nobody else does so—as, in short, he is in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... usual impatient stride, falling in with the slow, dignified step of his sire, who, though of broad build, would have been as tall as his son, had it not been for a slight stoop, of which he was proud, as it gave him an air of erudition. ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... subsisted until our time: it has never been without writers of the greatest taste, judgment and erudition; the names of Cujacius, Augustinus, the Gothofredi, Heineccius, Voetius, Vinnius, Gravina and Pothier, are as dear to the scholar as they are to the lawyer; an Englishman however must reflect with pleasure, that the Commentaries of his countryman, Sir William Blackstone, will not suffer in ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... and fearful insinuations about my grammar and my erudition. Now, as regards grammar, I hold that, in prose at any rate, correctness should always be subordinate to artistic effect and musical cadence; and any peculiarities of syntax that may occur in Dorian Gray are deliberately ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... at Saint Louis in the State of Missouri. Such a disruption as this was for a time complete; but after five years Mr. Peacocke appeared again at Oxford, with a beautiful American wife, and the necessity of earning an income by his erudition. ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... Revolution. Behind it could be plainly perceived a huge scaffolding of erudite labour, and the working of an intellect of abnormal power; but what was not so apparent, and is now only being slowly recognised, was that much of this erudition was hasty and inspired by preconceived opinions, and that Taine's genius was more philosophic than historic. Assuming the validity of the impressions he had formed when witnessing the agony of Paris in the spring of 1871, his history of the Revolution ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... 1518: 'Janus and Erasmus, Germans though they are and moderns, give me as much satisfaction to read as do Politian and Hermolaus, or even Virgil and Cicero.' Erasmus in 1518 writes to thank a canon of Mainz who had entertained him at supper. After compliments on his host's charming manners, his erudition free from superciliousness—if he could have known Gibbon, he surely must have used those immortal words of praise, 'a modest and learned ignorance'—and his wit and elegance of speech, he goes on: 'One might ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... Plato had the further qualification of a comprehensive knowledge of all that had been achieved by his predecessors. In this regard he had enjoyed advantages superior to those of Socrates. Socrates was deficient in erudition, properly so called. He had studied men rather than books. His wisdom consisted in an extensive observation, the results of which he had generalized with more or less accuracy. A complete philosophic method demands not only a knowledge of contemporaneous opinions and modes of thought, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... sayings is not exactly new. You can't possibly mistake a man who means to be honest for a literary pickpocket. I once read an introductory lecture that looked to me too learned for its latitude. On examination, I found all its erudition was taken ready-made from D'Israeli. If I had been ill-natured, I should have shown up the little great man, who had once belabored me in his feeble way. But one can generally tell these wholesale thieves easily enough, and they are not worth the trouble of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... head in approval. "True," he said in a resolute tone. "Go, you cursed villains, into everlasting punishment, since you did not give food to the hungry, but swallowed it all yourself. Serves them right! I have read the holy Nikodim's writings," he added, showing off his erudition. ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... In the youth of Boethius the studies of Rome were not totally abandoned; a Virgil [90] is now extant, corrected by the hand of a consul; and the professors of grammar, rhetoric, and jurisprudence, were maintained in their privileges and pensions by the liberality of the Goths. But the erudition of the Latin language was insufficient to satiate his ardent curiosity: and Boethius is said to have employed eighteen laborious years in the schools of Athens, [91] which were supported by the zeal, the learning, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... aside, and (in pursuance of my old determination) betook myself wholly to this work. Nor am I discouraged from it because I see signs in the times of the decline and overthrow of that knowledge and erudition which is now in use. Not that I apprehend any more barbarian invasions (unless possibly the Spanish empire should recover its strength, and having crushed other nations by arms should itself sink under its own weight); ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... of enlightening and giving just ways of thinking to our citizens, but particularly the establishment of a university; where the youth from all parts of the United States might receive the polish of erudition in the arts, sciences and belles-lettres." Eventually he reduced this idea to a plea for the people to "promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge," ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... part as much amongst the canon-settlers. Yet all this marvellous learning fumes away in boyish impertinence. It confounds itself. And every Christian says, Oh, take away this superfluous weight of erudition, that, being so rare a thing, cannot be wanted in the broad highways of religion. What we do want is humility, docility, reverence for God, and love for man. These are sown broadcast amongst human hearts. Now, these apply themselves to the sense of Scripture, not to its ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... facts is surely a necessary part of all education, for it is an indispensable means of giving the content of experience upon which wisdom as a selective appreciation of experience is based. But erudition is only a part of education. We must hold firmly now to the principle which is indeed an aspect of the democratic ideal itself, that participation is also a necessary part of education. Institutions become real to the ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... allured Reynolds from that easel which has preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads of so many writers and statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many noble matrons. It had induced Parr to suspend his labors in that dark and profound mine from which he had extracted a vast treasure of erudition; a treasure too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still precious, massive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous charms of her to whom the heir of the throne had in secret plighted his ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... the ultimate source of much of his own teaching. Yet, deep as that indebtedness was, and anxious as he might be to acknowledge it, he was as a humourist keenly alive to certain glaring defects of the great German writers; to their frequent tendency to lose themselves among the mere minutiae of erudition, and thus to confuse the unimportant and the important; to their habit of rising at times into the clouds rather than above the clouds, and of there disporting themselves in regions "close-bordering on the impalpable inane;" to their too conspicuous ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... to me the hopes of succession, I should have been, according to my mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of founder of a family; I should have left a son, who, in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed, in science, in erudition, in genius, in taste, in honor, in generosity, in humanity, in every liberal sentiment and every liberal accomplishment, would not have shewn himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of those whom he traces in his ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... of Soho Square and Covent Garden. Even the beaus and coquettes of that age, the Wildairs and the Lady Lurewells, the Mirabells and the Millaments, congratulated each other on the way in which the gay young gentleman, whose erudition sate so easily upon him, and who wrote with so much pleasantry and good breeding about the Attic dialect and the anapaestic measure, Sicilian talents and Thericlean cups, had bantered the queer prig of a doctor. Nor was the applause ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... original in the fact that many references not of general psychological or criminological interest or not readily accessible to English readers have been eliminated, and in some instances more accessible ones have been inserted. Prof. Gross's erudition is so stupendous that it reaches far out into texts where no ordinary reader would be able or willing to follow him, and the book suffers no loss from the excision. In other places it was necessary ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... had bought a very well written guide-book, by Mr W.H. Thomas, which, at the small outlay of one shilling, made us as learned on "the Wye, with its associated scenery and ruins," as if we had lived among them all our days. Inspired by his animated pages, we descanted with the profoundest erudition, to our astonished companion on the box, about its machicolated towers, and the finely proportioned mullions of the hall. "If you ascend the walls of the castle," we exclaimed in a paroxysm of enthusiasm, as if we were perched on the very top, "you will see that the castle ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... power of the constitution to sustain itself amid the ever-varying changes to which it is exposed, has been learned by common observation, as well by the peasant as by the man of erudition. The fact, that man, "made of one blood, can dwell" in all the varieties of climate, "on the face of the whole earth," and can sustain himself, without any change of organization, at one period on the burning sands of a Numidian desert, at another among the ice-bergs of a Greenland winter—exhibits ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... imperfectly trace its growth. The instrument, indeed, has found an historian,—Dr. Rimbault of London,—who has gathered the scattered notices of its progress into a handsome quarto, now accessible in some of our public libraries. It is far from our desire to make a display of cheap erudition; yet perhaps ladies who love their piano may care to spend a minute or two in learning how it came to be the splendid triumph of human ingenuity, the precious addition to the happiness of existence, which they now find it to be. "I have had my share of trouble," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... others. It is as though he said to them, like Gideon, Do as I do, or with St. Paul, Be ye followers of me, as I also am of Christ.[3] Such a one does not walk in darkness and those who follow him are sure to reach the haven. Though he has not talents of learning and erudition such as would make him shine in the pulpit, yet he has enough if he can, as the Apostle says, exhort in sound doctrine and convince the gainsayers.[4] Remark," he added, "how God taught Balaam by the mouth of his ass." Thus, his charity dexterously covered ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... however valuable for his industry and erudition, is yet more to be esteemed for having dared so freely in the midst of France to declare his disapprobation of the Patriarch Oviedo's sanguinary zeal, who was continually importuning the Portuguese to beat up their drums for missionaries, who might preach the gospel with swords in their ...
— A Voyage to Abyssinia • Jerome Lobo
... on this subject, and about agape as against gnosis in art, said, "Oh that men should put an enemy into their brains to steal away their hearts." At any rate he and I have written "Narcissus" on these principles, and are not without hope that what it has lost in erudition it may have gained in freshness. I have, however, dealt with the question of how to study painting more at length in the chapter on the Decline of Italian ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... what category are my relations with Carlotta to be classified? I do not regard her as a daughter; still less as a sister: not even as a deceased wife's sister. For a secretary she is too abysmally ignorant, too grotesquely incapable. What she knows would be made to kick the beam against the erudition of a guinea-pig. Yet she must be classified somehow. I must allude to her as something. At present she fills the place in the house of a pretty (and expensive) Persian cat; and like a cat she has made herself ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... would be beyond his knowledge; but as Saunderson always gave the answer himself in the end, and imputed it to the student, anxiety was reduced to a minimum. Saunderson, indeed, was in the custom of passing all candidates and reporting them as marvels of erudition, whose only fault was a becoming modesty—which, however, had not concealed from his keen eye hidden treasures of learning. Beyond this sphere the good man's services were not used by a body of shrewd ecclesiastics, as the inordinate ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... purpose, the main thing to learn is not the art of accumulating material, but the sublimer art of investigating it, of discerning truth from falsehood and certainty from doubt. It is by solidity of criticism more than by the plenitude of erudition, that the study of history strengthens, and straightens, and extends the mind 60. And the accession of the critic in the place of the indefatigable compiler, of the artist in coloured narrative, the skilled limner of character, the persuasive ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... scarcely mean anything else than his disapprobation of the University system. Notwithstanding this he had been received on a former occasion with unexpected favour, and on the present is able to say, "I triumph as one placed among the stars that so many men, eminent for erudition, and nearly the whole University have flocked hither." We have thus a miniature history of Milton's connection with his Alma Mater. We see him giving offence by the freedom of his strictures on the established practices, ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... brethren, Mr. Cargill alternately commanded respect by the depth of his erudition, and gave occasion to laughter from his odd peculiarities. On the latter occasions he used abruptly to withdraw from the ridicule he had provoked; for notwithstanding the general mildness of his character, his solitary habits had engendered a ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... presence accuses, and which it threatens to destroy, whenever the hour of vengeance shall arrive. (* The argument deduced from the civilization of Rome and Greece in favour of slavery is much in vogue in the West Indies, where sometimes we find it adorned with all the graces of erudition. Thus, in speeches delivered in 1795, in the Legislative Assembly of Jamaica, it was alleged that from the example of elephants having been employed in the wars of Pyrrhus and Hannibal, it could not ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... from a dissertation by the Abbe de Fontenu[15], a copy of whose engraving of the place I insert. Indebted as I am to him for his hints, I can, however, by no means subscribe to his reasoning, by which he labors with great erudition to prove that, neither the popular tradition which ascribes this camp to Caesar, nor its name, evidently Roman, nor some coins and medals of the same nation that have been found here, are at all evidences of its Latin origin; but that, as ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... nugis Curialium," his "Metalogic," his "Enthetic" (in verse), and his eulogy on Becket.[280] John is only too well versed in the classics, and he quotes them to an extent that does more credit to his erudition than to his taste; but he has the gift of observation, and his remarks on the follies of his time have a great historical value. In his "Policratic" is found a satire on a sort of personage who was then beginning to play his part again, after ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... Covent-Garden Journal. Compared with his novels, they are insignificant enough. But even the worst work of such a man is notable in its way; and Fielding's contributions to the Journal are by no means to be despised. They are shrewd lay sermons, often exhibiting much out-of-the-way erudition, and nearly always distinguished by some of his personal qualities. In No. 33, on "Profanity," there is a character- sketch which, for vigour and vitality, is worthy of his best days; and there is also a very thoughtful paper on "Reading," containing a kindly reference to "the ingenious Author of ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... I may mention That this erudition sham Is but classical pretension, The result of steady "cram.": Periphrastic methods spurning, To my readers all discerning I admit this show of learning Is the ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... page crackles faintly; the big irregular print meets the eye with a pleasant and leisurely mellowness. But what do they tell one? Very little, alas! that one need know, very much which it would be a positive mistake to believe. That is the worst of erudition—that the next scholar sucks the few drops of honey that you have accumulated, sets right your blunders, and you are superseded. You have handed on the torch, perhaps, and even trimmed it. Your errors, your patient explanations, were a necessary ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the Conscience and Conduct; the Historian and Annalist recorded the Institutions; the Poet and Musician celebrated and sung the Exploits of their Kings and Leaders: No Wonder then this Kingdom should have been revered at Home, and admired Abroad; when Religion formed, Erudition nurtured, Philosophy strengthened, History preserved, Rhetorick adorned, Musick softened, and Poesy refined, the National Wisdom and Accomplishments; to all which was added, a thorough Knowledge of Tactics, and great Skill and Agility in all the ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... denouement of the scene he threw off all restraint, and laughed aloud. Everybody laughed as he did, and the two philosophers were saluted with unanimous felicitations. La Fontaine, however, was declared conqueror, on account of his profound erudition and his irrefragable logic. Conrart obtained the compensation due to an unsuccessful combatant; he was praised for the loyalty of his intentions, and the purity ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... literature—philosophical, political, and artistic—is striking in this respect. What wealth of idea, of form, of color, what erudition, what art, but what a lack of serious matter, what dread of any exactitude of thought or expression! Subtleties, allegories, humorous fancies, the widest generalizations, but nothing simple and clear, nothing going straight to the point, that is, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... through the sea of books like a vessel without a pilot or a rudder. Nothing perhaps increases by indulgence more than a desultory habit of reading, especially under such opportunities of gratifying it. I believe one reason why such numerous instances of erudition occur among the lower ranks is, that, with the same powers of mind, the poor student is limited to a narrow circle for indulging his passion for books, and must necessarily make himself master of the few he possesses ere he can acquire more. Edward, on the contrary, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... nowhere do we detect a measurement taken, they are free of tricks—that is to say of ignorance assuming airs of learning. That red chalk drawing of a naked girl, how simple, loose, and unaffected, how purged of the odious erudition of the modern studio. And her precious and natural remembrance of the great century, with all its love of youth and the beauties of youthful lines, is especially noticeable in the red chalk drawing of the girl wearing a bonnet, the veil falling and hiding her beautiful ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... rightly and intelligibly again.' It is this power of connecting events and explaining how one movement leads to another which makes the stimulating quality of Green's work; and to a nation like the English, too little apt to indulge in general ideas, this quality may be of more value than the German erudition which tends to overburden the intelligence with too great a load of 'facts'. And, after all the labours of Carlyle and Froude, of Stubbs and Freeman, and all the delving into records and chronicles, who shall say what are facts, and what ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... diffused ballad as based on the Apocryphal legend of Judith and Holofernes. If so, the legend is diablement change en route. More probably the origin is a Marchen of a kind of Rakshasa fatal to women. Mr. Child has collected a vast mass of erudition on the subject, and by no means acquiesces in Prof. Bugge's ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... in fact, just this adaptability of metre to mood, an adaptability due to an intensive study of metre, that constitutes an important element in Pound's technique. Few readers were prepared to accept or follow the amount of erudition which entered into "Personae" and its close successor, "Exultations," or to devote the care to reading them which they demand. It is here that many have been led astray. Pound is not one of those poets who make no demand ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... Fry seem to under-rate the erudition of Devonshire magistrates, I venture to offer copy of a letter from a Justice of the Peace to his bookseller, circa 1810 A.D., now in ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... was acquainted with five different languages, and the range of his intellect was worldwide; but where did he get this vast erudition? We do not know, and we excuse ourselves by saying that he lived three ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... learned men to change their names. They showed at once their contempt for vulgar denominations and their ingenious erudition. They christened themselves with Latin and Greek. This disguising of names came, at length, to be considered to have a political tendency, and so much alarmed Pope Paul the Second, that he imprisoned several persons for their using certain affected names, and some, indeed, which they ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... brother-in-law. And I said, 'I am Philip Ormond Berkley; how do you do!' And he said, 'How do you do!' And I said, 'I'm a relation,' and he said, 'I believe so.' And I said, 'I was educated at Harvard and in Leipsic; I am full of useless accomplishments, harmless erudition, and insolvent amiability, and I am otherwise perfectly worthless. Can you give me ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... father was anxious to prove the great talents of his son. When old Denis got the young sogarth fairly in motion, he gently drew himself out of the dispute, but continued a running comment upon the son's erudition, pointed out his good things, and occasionally resumed the posture of the controversialist to reinspirit the boy if he ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... offered nothing more attractive than the keen discussions, the piercing satire, and the calm philanthropy of Socrates. But now it is politics which rules the city and the country; the times of deep reflection, of slowly maturing thought, are past; and now that erudition is a jest, ancient learning an exploded chimera, and elaborated eloquence known chiefly by recollection, the ample gazette runs its daily career, and heralds, in ephemeral language, the deeds of the passing hours. The age of accumulated learning is past, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... any thought of shame at their lack of petticoats, and did multitudes of things which, in their early married life, they would have considered shocking.... They would greatly have liked to see Daniel shine in society. Of his erudition they were proud even to worship. The young man never had any business, and his father never seemed to think of giving him any, knowing, as Billy would say, that he had stamps enough to "see him through." If Daniel liked, his father would have endowed ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... succession, I should have been, according to my mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of founder of a family: I should have left a son, who, in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed,—in science, in erudition, in genius, in taste, in honour, in generosity, in humanity, in every liberal sentiment, and every liberal accomplishment,—would not have shown himself inferior to the duke of Bedford, or to any of those whom he traces in his line. His grace ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... the connection could be between his address and this question, was not sorry to display his erudition. Assuming an air of importance, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... returned to the benches of evening school. He learned to write his beautiful copper-plate hand, and knocked the bottom out of arithmetic and geography. Then came sheer erudition—the nature of chemical elements, stars in their courses, kings of England with their Magna Chartas and habeas corpuses. Nor content even then, he must needs grapple with Roman emperors and Greek republics, and master the fabled lore concerning gods and goddesses, cloven-footed satyrs, ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... 1695, the first phrase of it quoted above was translated as "those Pedants who profess a kind of Religion which consists of worshipping the Ancients" (p.294). Fontenelle's phrase more nearly than that of the English translator describes Rapin. Though Rapin's erudition was great, he escaped the quagmire of pedantry. He refers most frequently to the scholiasts and editors in "The First Part" (which is so trivial that one wonders why he ever troubled to accumulate so much insignificant material), but ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... when we consider that the Quaker ministers are often persons of but little erudition, and that their principles forbid them to premeditate on these occasions, that we can hardly expect to find the same logical division of the subject, or the same logical provings of given points, as in the sermons of those who spend hours, or even days together, ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... o'er his moral page, And spread truth's sacred light to many an age? For all his works with innate lustre shine, Strength all his own, and energy divine. While through life's maze he sent a piercing view, His mind expansive to the object grew. With various stores of erudition fraught, The lively image, the deep-searching thought, Slept in repose;—but when the moment press'd, The bright ideas flood at once confess'd;[50] Instant his genius sped its vigorous rays, And o'er the letter'd world diffus'd a blaze: As womb'd with fire the ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... seemly and generous acts and affairs,' wrote Milton, as the end of his self-education—something like that I intend, if I am allowed, to give this child. I have the greatest contempt for knowledge and erudition qua knowledge and erudition. A man who has laboriously edited the Fathers seems to me only to deserve the respect due to a man who has carried through an arduous task, and one that must have been, to anyone of human feelings and real enthusiasm for ideas, uncongenial ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... we have hinted, was a fine linguist. She made herself mistress of nine languages. Her historical erudition was profound; her mind was continually in search of new knowledge. She seemed to have inherited from one of her illustrious friends, M. von Humboldt, that "fever of study," that insatiable ardour, which, if not genius, is closely ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... other raised his arm with an expostulatory gesture. "Many things I know," he interrupted; "odds and ends of erudition, but a woman's mind I know not, nor want to know. I had as soon question Beelzebub as her; yea, to stir up the devil with a stick. If sparing my life is contingent on my knowing why she does this, or that, then let me pay the debt ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... their system of education, they have produced that general benefit, to which we at first alluded. Nor have they been of less consequence in maturity; but particularly to those of inferiour capacities, or little erudition, whom they have frequently served as a guide to conduct them in life, and as a medium, through which an explanation might be made, on ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... hoste Vulneris auxilium Pellas hasta fuit. Ovid, Rem. Amor. 47. The same allusion was made by Bernard de Ventadour, a Provencal poet in the middle of the twelfth century: and Millot observes, that it was a singular instance of erudition in a Troubadour. But it is not impossible, as Warton remarks, (Hist. of Engl. Poetry, vol. ii. sec. x. p 215.) but that he might have been indebted for it to some of the ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... Epigrams of Catullus, Martial, and Ausonius, of some Satires of Horace and Juvenal, and several other Pieces of Ancient and Modern Authors, which are read and commented upon; and about which even celebrated Jesuits and other religious Persons, as eminent for their Piety as their Erudition, have employed their Studies. Yet who has condemn'd or complain'd of them? We must confess, such Things should be managed with Address; and those of them who have meddled with any of the Authors I have named, have shewn that ...
— The Lovers Assistant, or, New Art of Love • Henry Fielding
... and unjust to me, by wresting and forcing my meaning, in the preface to another book, as if I condemned and exposed all learning, though they knew I declared that I greatly honoured and esteemed all men of superior literature and erudition, and that I only undervalued false or superficial learning, that signifies nothing for the service of mankind; and that as to physic, I expressly affirmed that learning must be joined with native genius to make a physician of the first rank; but if those talents are separated, ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... Ladies of Honor or of the Palace." This remark displeased the Emperor, and many members of the council cited many examples to refute it, notably that of Maria de' Medici. Joseph, who had foreseen their arguments, displayed unexpected erudition: "Maria de' Medici," he said, "was accompanied only by Queen Margaret, the first wife of Henri IV., and by Madame (Catherine of Bourbon), the King's sister. The train was carried by a very distant relative. Queen Margaret had, indeed, offered a fine example of generosity by being present ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... harder, for the Thirty Years War had, as he confesses, made many people doubt the benefits of the Reformation, distrust its principles, and reject its doctrines. He discharged the thankless labor of apology in a work of enormous erudition, still valuable to the special student ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the day after her conversation with Mo about the convict—the day, that is, after Gwen's last visit to Sapps Court—that Aunt M'riar said to Dave, just departing to absorb erudition at his School, that if he should see Michael Ragstroar he might tell him she had a note for his, Michael's, aunt at Hammersmith; and if he was a-going there Sunday, he might just every bit as well make himself useful, and carry it and ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... if extravagantly idealized, figure of Mr. Shandy takes bodily shape and consistency before our eyes. It is a mistake, I think, of Sir Walter Scott's to regard the portrait of this eccentric philosopher as intended for a satire upon perverted and deranged erudition—as the study of a man "whom too much and too miscellaneous learning had brought within a step or two of madness." Sterne's conception seems to me a little more subtle and less commonplace than that. Mr. Shandy, I imagine, is designed to personify not "crack-brained ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... that subject and standing in his own name. An attempt to perform the difficult manoeuvre of getting out of his own light was frustrated by the SPEAKER, who, to the argument that the motion on the Paper dealt with a wider subject, replied "Majus in se minus continet." Overwhelmed by this display of erudition, the victim ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... rewards professors in their declining years with the affectionate regard of their whilom best students, now become wise and strong men in the Church's service, I cordially commend to all who may read these words, this outcome of Dr. Johnston's Christian erudition and conscientious ...
— Presbyterian Worship - Its Spirit, Method and History • Robert Johnston
... about it, and to realise the results of such a deed, that I should then, in a cool and calculated fashion, seek out a victim, strike the blow, and then leave the weapon in the body which must be inevitably traced to me, is a deed of such madness that I can only wonder that a gentleman with the erudition of the counsel should have thought it worth ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... their analogues. He then passes in review, following the zooelogical order, the fossils which had been discovered by naturalists. He even described one of them as a new species, besides citing, with an erudition then rare, all the authors and all the works where they were described. He did no more than to indicate but not name each species. Thus he was the means of soon producing a number of German authors who made little advance from lack ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... erudition so greatly exceeds my poor intellectual capacity that you must excuse my seeking elsewhere for information which I ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... died on the 17th of February 1710. During the time of the Commonwealth he adhered to the forms of the Church of England, and under James II. preached strenuously against Roman Catholicism. His works display great erudition and powerful thinking. The Harmonia Apostolica (1670) is an attempt to show the fundamental agreement between the doctrines of Paul and James with regard to justification. The Defensio Fidei Nicenae (1685), his greatest work, tries to show ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Herr Lassalle, who brings you this letter, is a young man of remarkable intellectual gifts. With the most thorough erudition, with the widest learning, with the greatest penetration that I have ever known, and with the richest gift of exposition, he combines an energy of will and a capacity for action which astonish me. In no one have I found united so much ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... study of metaphysics, or whose knowledge of the science is superficial. Hamilton has the immense advantage of being a scholar in that large sense which implies the exercise, not merely of attention and memory, but of every faculty of the mind, in the acquisition and arrangement of knowledge. His erudition is great, but it is also critical and interpretative. He knows intimately every philosophical writer from the dawn of speculation to the last German thinker, including the somewhat neglected Schoolmen ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... thousand others that might be asked by a person with a slight attack of curiosity?... No one does ask and assuredly no one answers. These riddles, it would seem, are included among the forbidden mysteries of the sphynx. The critics assert with authority and some show of erudition that the Spohrs, the Mendelssohns, the Humperdincks, and the Montemezzis are great composers. They usually admire the grandchildren of Old Lady Tradition but they neglect to justify this partiality. Nor can we trust the public with its favourite ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... learning, let see also the reward which will be meted out to him." God said: "Go, return and see." Moses saw them sell the flesh of the martyr Akiba at the meat market. He said to God: "Is this the reward for such erudition?" But God replied: "Be silent, thus have ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... world has no sure ground of judgment, for the true critical faculty is inseparable from the creative. The least critical word of the most prejudiced and ignorant creative artist is more valuable than whole volumes writ by dilettanti of measureless refinement and erudition. I am not aware of the identity of the persons who sat down together and compiled the pleasing preliminary list of twenty-seven academicians, but I am perfectly certain that the predominant among them were ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... the lowest depth of which Milton located the infernal world called Hell. These four regions embraced universal space; and in the elaboration of his great epic Milton relied upon his imaginative genius, his brilliant scholarship, his vast erudition, and the divine inspiration of the heavenly muse. With these, aided by the power and vigour of his intellect, he was enabled to produce a cosmical epic that surpassed all previous efforts of a similar kind, and which still ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... You have always heard, that, while the ministers were, no doubt, men of excellent intentions and much sound learning, what with their morbid notions of life, and what with the weight of a rather heavy sort of erudition, they were saints with the very poorest kind of bodies. Just the contrary. No class lives longer. We once made out a list of the thirty most remarkable preachers of the last four centuries that we could ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... which had private gatherings for whist on Sunday afternoons. But he went to the conference, travelling down by the same train with his nephew; but not in the same compartment, as he solaced with tobacco the time which Lord Mistletoe devoted to parliamentary erudition. ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... we must ever remember, of peculiar organization. He is a being born with a predisposition which with him is irresistible, the bent of which he cannot in any way avoid, whether it directs him to the abstruse researches of erudition or induces him to mount into the fervid and turbulent atmosphere ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... the good of his state and the glory of his realm, an office of controller, supervisor, corrector, reviser and restorer in general of the said inscriptions; and with this office to honour your suppliant, as well in consideration of his rare and eminent erudition, as of the great and signal services which he has rendered to the state and to your Majesty, by making the anagram of your said Majesty in French, Latin, Greek, ...
— The Bores • Moliere
... at the dinner we were miserably tired and worn—but we were posted. Yes, it is fair to claim that. In fact, erudition is a pale name for it. New Zealand was the only subject; and it was just beautiful to hear us ripple it out. And with such an air of unembarrassed ease, and unostentatious familiarity with detail, and trained and seasoned mastery of the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... reverts to the views of Bale and Pits and suggests as approximate figures for the birth and death of Gilbert the years 1170-80 to 1230. This discrepancy of twenty-five or thirty years between the views of two competent and unprejudiced investigators, as a mere question of erudition and interpretation, is perhaps scarcely worthy of prolonged discussion. But as both biographers argue from substantially the same data, the arguments reveal so many interesting and pertinent facts, and the numerous difficulties attending the interpretation of these facts, that some comparison ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... how prone we are to judge the ancients wrongly: the exaggerated sense of literature, for example, or, as Wolf, when speaking of the "inner history of ancient erudition," calls it, "the ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche |
