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More "Illiterate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enabled to produce a bowstring for his benefactor; and the sultan's "firmaun" appointed him to the vacant pachalik. His qualifications for office were all superlative: he was very short, very corpulent, very illiterate, very irascible, and ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... politicians, to be learned, honest, discreet, well qualified to be fit for any manner of employment in country and commonwealth, war and peace, than to be degeneres Neoptolemi as so many brave nobles are, only wise because rich, otherwise idiots, illiterate, unfit for any manner of service? Udalricus, Earl of Cilia, upbraided John Huniades with the baseness of his birth; but he replied, In te Ciliensis comitatus turpiter exstinguitur, in me gloriose Bistricensis exoritur; thine earldom is consumed with riot; mine begins ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... in fields and forests and mines, but in the free schools, churches, and printing presses. Ignorance breeds misery, vice, and crime. Mephistopheles was a cultured devil, but he is the exception. History knows no illiterate seer or sage or saint. No Dante or Shakespeare ever had ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... conversation. Numberless examples of this polite pastime are provided in the heroic romances; in "Almahide, or the Captive Queen,"[331] among others, we read discussions as to whether it is better for a man to court a lady in verse or in prose, whether an illiterate lover is better than a learned ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... to-day. Never mind consistency, find fault with Christianity on all its sides, and with all its preachers, though you have to contradict yourself in doing so. Object to this man that he is too learned and doctrinal; to that one that he is too illiterate, and gives no food for thought; to this one that he is always thundering condemnation; to that one that he is always running over with love; to this one that he is perpetually harping upon duties; to that other one that he is up in the clouds, and forgets the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... C represents the boundary of the disturbed area, so far as known, for about one-third of the area lies in regions from which no information was procurable, while another third is inhabited by ignorant and illiterate tribes. But, notwithstanding this, the shock is known to have been felt over an area of at least 1,200,000 square miles. If we include the detached region to the west, near Ahmedabad, the portion of the Bay of Bengal ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... no literature in China, not even in the sacred books, which is so generally known as their nursery rhymes. These are understood and repeated by the educated and the illiterate alike; by the children of princes and the children of beggars; children in the city and children in the country and villages, and they produce like results in the minds and hearts of all. The little folks laugh over the Cow, look ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... the woods, rough and illiterate, but with all their physical faculties at a maximum acuteness, senses on the alert and keen as no townsman could comprehend them—were Emerson's avid study. This he had never seen,—the man at his simplest ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... Catherine Peg, or Kep, whose son was afterward made Earl of Plymouth. It must be confessed that in his attachments to English women Charles showed little care for rank or station. Lucy Walters and Catherine Peg were very illiterate creatures. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... the stars were shining in the cloudless sky, dimmed a little in brightness by the faint silvery veil of moisture in the air. The man's soul grew very tender as he stood waiting for his bride. He was rough, illiterate, yet there was something fine about him after all, a kind of simplicity ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... generally made by ignorant and illiterate persons. The true parts of the record were so mixed up with imaginary additions, that cautious men refused to credit the statements that such objects really fell from the sky. Even at the present day it is often extremely difficult ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... true! He was so gross, so tubby, so manifestly over-fed, whereas her mother had ever been elegant and bien soignee. But he had shown kindness to her in his domineering way. He was not quite so illiterate as his accent and his general air of uncouthness seemed to imply. In his speech, the broad vowels of the Lancashire dialect were grafted on to the clipped staccato of a Cockney. He would scoff at anyone who told him that knives and forks had precise uses, or that table-napkins ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... medium, but to scientific facts which the medium can not possibly comprehend. It is a matter of common knowledge that mediums are usually people without technical scientific knowledge. Some of them have some degree of education and some of them are illiterate. Some of the most celebrated belong to ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... he had not felt since that day when he had first come to the city to work out his dreams among men. In the human tide that ebbed and flowed through this world gateway, he saw men of wealth and men of poverty—people of culture and position who had come or were going in Pullman or private cars and illiterate, stupid, animal looking, emigrants who were crowded, much like cattle, in the lowest class. There were business men of large affairs; countrymen with wondering faces; shallow, pleasure seekers; artists and scholars; idle fools; vicious ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... men. In both, the moral and end are substantially the same. The girl's affections are bestowed naturally in her own class, and the disconsolate urban discovers that a wide divergence of feelings and sympathies, a gulf not to be voluntarily bridged over, lies between the man of the world and the illiterate peasant; that the results of habit are not lightly to be got rid of; and that a happiness which lies below us in the social scale may be as unattainable as higher prizes. The relations of the romantic and dreamy Olenin to his barbaric neighbors are finely portrayed. Nothing could be more ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... there is any one of your readers so illiterate as not to have read the Antiquary, {450} there are few memories which are not the better for being from time to time refreshed. My own is not of the best, which is sometimes disadvantageous to me, but not in a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... band was a man far from illiterate: he was able to travel by the stars, or the compass, and had marked, in his erratick expeditions, such places as are most worthy the notice of a passenger. He observed to me, that buildings are always best preserved in places little frequented, and difficult of access: ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... to apply the art of disputation, has been accurately shown by our philosophers (the Stoics); but with respect to the proper use of the things, we are entirely without practice. Only give to any of us, whom you please, an illiterate man to discuss with, and he cannot discover how to deal with the man. But when he has moved the man a little, if he answers beside the purpose, he does not know how to treat him, but he then either abuses ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... same. This was a great disappointment to the dominating element in the Democratic party, who had hoped and expected, through their policy of "Masterly Inactivity" and intimidation of white men, that the convention would be composed almost exclusively of illiterate and inexperienced colored men. Although a minor at that time, I took an active part in the local politics of my county, and, being a member of a Republican club that had been organized at Natchez, I was frequently called upon to address the ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... not sober, or not informed, or not conscientious? The crying need of to-day is, that men and women shall be urged into positions of conviction and activity against this most colossal evil of our time. In our country the responsibility for drunkenness rests not with the illiterate, blasphemous, ex-prison convicts who operate the 250,000 saloons of our Nation, nor yet with the 250,000 finished products of the saloon who go down into drunkards' graves every year, but with the sober, respectable, hard-working, voting citizens of our country. Nor does this ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... church, which was the chief ornament, as well as the great treasure of the village, and there the Indians all joined in a hymn which the Jesuit Fathers had composed for them in their own language. The strain was simple, the temple humble, the congregation illiterate and poorly clad, yet who shall say that colonnaded aisle or fretted dome of proud cathedral ever resounded with music sweeter in the ear of heaven, than was that unpretending hymn of the despised Indians! Who would not envy the emotions of the Venerable Mother and her fervent Sisters, as they ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... paused to dwell on the most fascinating scenery. Accordingly, I hastened to Regla with my letter of introduction, which was interpreted by Bachicha to the Italian grocer, the friend of Rafael, to whom I was confided. Il signore Carlo Cibo was an illiterate man of kind heart, who had adventurously emigrated from Italy to furnish the Havanese with good things; while, in return, the Havanese had been so pleased with his provender, that Carlo may be said to have ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... cases that the parents feel it needful to hire any kind of tutor for THEM. What the average girl knows is simply what her mother can teach her. Perhaps a certain number of Athenian women (of good family, too) are downright illiterate; but this is not very often the case. A normal girl will learn to read and write, with her mother for school mistress.[*] Very probably she will be taught to dance, and sometimes to play on some instrument, ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... all, let us just point out the chief claims of the above pleasing piece of composition. In the first place, it is perfectly stilted and unnatural; the dialogue and the sentiments being artfully arranged, so as to be as strong and majestic as possible. Our dear Cat is but a poor illiterate country wench, who has come from cutting her husband's throat; and yet, see! she talks and looks like a tragedy princess, who is suffering in the most virtuous blank verse. This is the proper end of fiction, and one of the greatest triumphs that a novelist can ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... saying, 'I have traveled much, been among people of royalty, title and nobility, have lived among the rich, and great society leaders, also among great politicians, learned men, spiritual giants, business people, also among the poor, also the illiterate, the abandoned, the offscouring, and the outcasts of society; and I have yet to see the person that is not as good as I.' So you see he thinks that you are just as good as he. Now, dear, don't be discouraged in the least. I know just how my daughter feels; she wants Penloe ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... over can read and write total population: 82% male: 87% female: 77% note: over two-thirds of the world's 785 million illiterate adults are found in only eight countries (India, China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Egypt); of all the illiterate adults in the world, two-thirds are women; extremely low literacy rates are concentrated ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... great wonder and praise in the neighbourhood. On the other hand, those rabid little tracts, which dealt so summarily with the destinies of the human race, even when his growing reason and the perusal of works more classical or more logical had led him to perceive that they were illiterate, and to suspect that they jumped from premises to conclusions with a celerity very different from the careful ratiocination of mechanical science, had still, in the citations and references wherewith they abounded, lured him on to philosophers more specious ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... letter of the 29th, relates the following anecdote:—"Now I am talking of bishops, I must tell you that, not long ago, Bishop Warburton, in a sermon at court, asserted that all preferments were bestowed on the most illiterate and worthless objects; and, in speaking, turned himself about and stared at the Bishop of London: he added, that if any one arose distinguished for merit and learning, there was a combination of dunces to keep him down. I need not tell you that he expected ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... who vary in qualities and resemblances. There are old and young and middle-aged persons, men and women, married and single, persons with many relatives and others with few, native and foreign born, strong and weak, well and ill, good and bad, educated and illiterate. Yet there are certain characteristics that ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... a rugged, headstrong, untamable, illiterate youth. At twelve years of age he could scarcely write his own name. But he knew the ways of the water; when still a youth he commenced ferrying passengers and freight between Staten Island and New York City. For books he cared nothing; the refinements of life he scorned. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... that of the Chet Ramis, or sect of Chet Ram, whose strange history may be found in East and West for July 1905. Chet Ram was an illiterate Hindu, a water-carrier and then a steward in the Indian army that took part in the war with China in 1859-1860. Returning to his native district not far from Lahore, Chet Ram, the Hindu, came under the spell of a Mahomedan ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... you must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable, nay, letter by letter. You might read all the books in the British Museum, if you could live long enough, and remain an utterly illiterate, uneducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter,—that is to say, with real accuracy,—you are forevermore, in some measure, an ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... ended, said that this was their constant way, and that all his life long he had made it a rule, after supper was over, to call out his family to dance and rejoice, believing, he said, that a cheerful and contented mind was the best sort of thanks to heaven that an illiterate peasant could pay— ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... census only one in 10,000 could not read or write, and these dunces were all Slavs. But how even a Slav born under the eye of the Eagle can remain illiterate is a mystery. In 1905 there were 59,348 elementary schools in the empire, and their organisation is as elaborate and well planned as the organisation of the army. In Berlin alone there are 280. All the ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... matter was a serious one; the headmaster had never heard of Villon, and the culprit gave up the name of his literary admirer without remorse. Hence, sorrow for Lucian, and complete immunity for the miserable illiterate Barnes, who resolved to confine his researches to the Old Testament, a book which the headmaster knew well. As for Lucian, he plodded on, learning his work decently, and sometimes doing very creditable Latin and Greek prose. His school-fellows ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... apparition, though the logical inference would have been, that the body which required planks to transport it, could scarcely be classed with anything of the world of spirits. The links in arguments, however, are seldom respected by the illiterate and vulgar, who jump to their conclusions, in cases of the marvellous, much as politicians find an expression of the common mind in the prepared opinions of the few who speak for them, totally disregarding ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... "unsavoury," at the same time hurling at the giver a number of texts conveying epithets of an offensive character. Bramah replied to the farrago of nonsense, which he characterised as "unmannerly, absurd, and illiterate that it must have been composed when the writer was intoxicated, mad, or under the influence of Lucifer," and he threatened that unless Huntington apologised for his gratuitous insults, he (Bramah) would assuredly expose him. The mechanician ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... academical for the stirring age which had now opened, and on which he had unhappily fallen, they nevertheless suited the audience to which they were particularly addressed. His Corinthian style, in which the Maenad of Mr. Burke was habited in the last mode of Almack's, his sarcasms against the illiterate and his invectives against the low, his descriptions of the country life of the aristocracy contrasted with the horrors of the guillotine, his Horatian allusions and his Virgilian passages, combined to produce a whole which ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... Peking, 'that there is here more than I can do, and writing must go to the wall.' And as late in his life as 1890 he added, 'I could have made, and could now make, I believe, money by writing, but I do not write. I settle down to teach illiterate Chinamen and Mongols, heal their sores, and ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... it is probable the fugitive made part of some slaver's crew, and fled from his vessel, as he had previously abandoned the military service in the delicious clime of Brazil. His parents were poor, indolent, and careless, so that Cha-cha grew up an illiterate, headstrong youth. Yet, when he touched the soil of Africa, a new life seemed infused into his veins. For a while, his days are said to have been full of misery and trouble, but the Brazilian slave-trade happened ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... rank in London who had a favourable opinion of the humble Irish adventurer. What a riddle these women are, I have often thought! I have seen the most elegant creatures at St. James's grow wild for love of the coarsest and most vulgar of men; the cleverest women passionately admire the most illiterate of our sex, and so on. There is no end to the contrariety in the foolish creatures; and though I don't mean to hint that I am vulgar or illiterate, as the persons mentioned above (I would cut the throat of any man who dared to whisper a word against my birth or my breeding), ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... large changes we are not yet fit; but as education spreads and we approach the western standard, some power and voice ought to be given to all intelligent enough to use it; that is to say, to the educated classes. I would not—no one in his senses would—give the power of voting to illiterate and ignorant men, who would simply be tools in the hands of the designing and ambitious; but the peoples of the great towns, St. Petersburg, Moskow, Kieff, Odessa, and others should be permitted to send representatives—men of their own choice—to the provincial councils, which ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... ladies, daughters of Colonel Montford, of Halifax county, North Carolina. When Cornwallis and his army were at Halifax, on their way to Virginia, Tarleton was at the house of an American citizen. In the presence of Mrs. Willie Jones, Tarleton spoke of Colonel Washington as an illiterate fellow, hardly able to write his name. "Ah! Colonel," said Mrs. Jones, "you ought to know better, for you bear on your person proof that he knows very well how to make his mark!" At another time, Tarleton was sarcastically speaking ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... appeals not to the illiterate and unlearned (whose obstinacy is too great to receive insturction, and whose prejudices are too strong to be obliterated by any reasons) but to the candid and impartial inquiry of reasoning and unprejudiced men into these principles, and hopes ...
— A Dissertation on Horses • William Osmer
... do, you illiterate old man. What do you know of literature? Aint all them gentlemen as I plays with chice sperits and writers? Isn't it a honour to jine 'em in the old English drammy, and to eat of the wittles and drink of ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... thirty days among them, not so much like a prisoner as a prince surrounded by his guards, and he joined in their sports and exercises with perfect unconcern. He also wrote poems and some speeches which he read to them, and those who did not approve of his compositions he would call to their faces illiterate fellows and barbarians, and he would often tell them with a laugh that he would hang them all. The pirates were pleased with his manners, and attributed this freedom of speech to simplicity and a mirthful disposition. As soon as the ransom came from Miletus and Caesar had ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... people and their rights bore me. I am sick of both. In these modern days to be vulgar, illiterate, common and vicious, seems to give a man a marvellous infinity of rights that his honest fathers never dreamed of. Believe me, Prince, in good democracy every man should be an aristocrat; but these people in Russia who seek to thrust us out are no better than the ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... the spinning-jenny, born at Standhill, near Blackburn; was a poor and illiterate weaver when in 1760 he, in conjunction with Robert Peel, brought out a carding-machine; in 1766 he invented the spinning-jenny, a machine which has since revolutionised the cotton-weaving industry, but which at the time evoked the angry resentment of the hand-weaver; he was driven ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... moments of unreasonable happiness are the most enviable no doubt, for there is neither gall nor satiety in the reaction. All this is as enchanting as—well, as a woman's promise. What lies beyond? Illiterate and mercenary Spaniards, vicious natives, and boundless ennui, one may safely wager. But if all California is as beautiful as this, no man that has spent a winter in Sitka should ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... hesitation and many misgivings, we finally established our quarters at the sign of the "General Armstrong," which was kept by John Hubbard, a tight little Irishman, a regular "broth of a boy," illiterate, not being able to write his name, with a tongue well steeped in blarney, with a conscience as elastic as a piece of India rubber, and a consummate adept in the art of wheedling a ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... with such anxiety, were the joint-proprietors of a small farm in Palestine which they cultivated with their own hands; and the jealous monarch at once saw that, when his fears had been excited by reports of the treasonable designs of such simple and illiterate husbandmen, he had been miserably befooled. After a single interview, these poor peasants met with no farther molestation ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Ivan Kouzmitch read to us, before his wife, Pugatchef's proclamation, drawn up by some illiterate Cossack. The robber proclaimed his intention of marching directly upon our fort, inviting the Cossacks and the soldiers to join him, and counselling the chiefs not to withstand him, threatening them, should they do so, with ...
— The Daughter of the Commandant • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... bounty from his own little savings, not one in a dozen of the children would ever enter a school-room or see a book. As it is, only one sixth part of the children are, or ever were, under instruction. And the instruction they receive is too often from persons themselves illiterate and full of superstition, but who are the best teachers who can be obtained with limited means. Consider, then, the real condition of affairs,—three hundred and fifty thousand blacks, a large share of them children or grandchildren of those who were brought from Africa, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... repeated appeals for the recognition to which she had so long been entitled in the sisterhood of states; of the prompt refusals with which her pleas were persistently met, though other territories with smaller and more illiterate populations, more restricted resources, and in every way weaker claims, were allowed to assume the habiliments of maturity, while Utah, lusty, large and strong, was kept in swaddling clothes. But the cries of the vigorous ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... what I just said about the loves and friendships of illiterate persons,—that is, of the human race, with a few exceptions here and there. I like books,—I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses. I don't think I undervalue them either as companions or as instructors. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... no idea of the strong impression it made on my mind, though conveyed to it through the medium of an illiterate interpreter, Even in this mangled form, I saw the disjecta membra of a regular and splendid oration." [Footnote: Col. Stone's Life and Times ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... Prohibitionists, or Republicans, as the case may be. But a theatre audience is composed of all sorts and conditions of men. The same theatre in New York contains the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the old and the young, the native and the naturalised. The same play, therefore, must appeal to all of these. It follows that the dramatist must be broader in his appeal than any other artist. He cannot confine ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... them; yet we are so familiar with it that it produces on us no impression of being antiquated or quaint, seldom of being grotesque, and what is still more to the purpose, produces that impression as little on illiterate persons to whom many of the words are incomprehensible. So, too, it seems to us, no part of Burns is alien to a man whose mother-tongue is English, in the same sense that some parts of Beranger are; because Burns, though a North Briton, was still a Briton, as Homer, though an Ionian, was still ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... statement, which is merely one of his exaggerations for the sake of point. She had not a fine understanding: though she was neither silly nor stupid, her sense was altogether inferior to her sensibility. Although living in a most bookish circle she was, as Macaulay himself admits, almost illiterate: and (which he does not say) her comparative critical estimates of books, when she does give them, are merely contemptible. This harsh statement could be freely substantiated: but it is enough to say that, when a girl, she preferred some forgotten rubbish ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... Aston-juxta-Birmingham, refers to the tradition that one of the family "murdered his cook, and was afterwards compelled to adopt the red hand in his arms." Este is perfectly correct in his concise but comprehensive particulars. That which, by the illiterate, is termed "the bloody hand," and by them reputed as an abatement of honour, is nothing more than the "Ulster badge" of dignity. The tradition adds, that Sir Thomas Holt murdered the cook in a cellar, at the old family mansion, by "running ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... the horse-fair the next day to look for a good horse, and, may be, to buy one. He went on to state that he had now nearly twenty-five roubles—only one rouble short—and that half of it was a coupon. He took the coupon out of his purse to show to his new friend. The yard-porter was an illiterate man, but he said he had had such coupons given him by lodgers to change; that they were good; but that one might also chance on forged ones; so he advised the peasant, for the sake of security, to change it at once at ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... Pendennis was willing to bow before her and welcome her, and yield her up the first place. But an actress—a mature woman, who had long ceased blushing except with rouge, as she stood under the eager glances of thousands of eyes—an illiterate and ill-bred person, very likely, who must have lived with light associates, and have heard doubtful conversation—Oh! it was hard that such a one should be chosen, and that the matron should be deposed to give place to such ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... be afraid of us, and so had I to be afraid of him. He was a huge, illiterate brute, an ex-Chesapeake-Bay-oyster-pirate, an "ex-con" who had done five years in Sing Sing, and a general all-around stupidly carnivorous beast. He used to trap sparrows that flew into our hall through the open bars. When he made a capture, he hurried away ...
— The Road • Jack London
... always been more of a problem in rural districts than urban. Evidence of this is found in the 1910 Census, which shows that for every illiterate person living in an urban community there are approximately two living in rural communities. The higher per cent of illiteracy in the rural districts is even more marked in the states where immigrants are settling than ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek
... him, or perhaps because of it, the following night Senator Ingalls made his famous speech against suffrage, and it fell to my lot to answer him. In the course of his remarks he asked this question: "Would you like to add three million illiterate voters to the large body of illiterate voters we have in America to-day?" The audience applauded light-heartedly, but I was disturbed by the sophistry of the question. One of Senator Ingalls's most discussed personal peculiarities ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... terms and words, and never any effects which are above the natural power of man? To be convinced of this truth, it suffices to observe that the pretended magicians are, and ever have been, anything but learned; on the contrary, they are very ignorant and illiterate men. Is it credible that so many celebrated persons, so many famous men, versed in all kinds of literature, should never have been able or willing to sound and penetrate the mysterious secrets of this art; and that of so many philosophers spoken of by Diogenes Laertius, neither Plato, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... and we followed her into the house. It was a wretched place; and the smell inside was sickly. I should think a broker would not give half-a-crown for all the furniture we saw. The woman seemed simple-minded and very illiterate; and as she stood in the middle of the floor, looking vaguely round she said, "Aw can hardly ax yo to sit deawn, for we'n sowd o' th' things eawt o'th heawse for a bit o' meight; but there is a cheer theer, sich as it is; see yo; tak' that." When she found that I ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... taken the country over, rather better educated than men. There are more girls than boys in the high schools of the United States; more girls than boys in the higher grammar grades. Fewer women than men are numbered among illiterate. As for the great middle class of women, it is obvious that they are better read than their men. Their specific knowledge of affairs may be less, but their general intelligence is not less ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... which was shown me at the time by Mr. McCreary, Commissioner of Immigration at that point. The cable read, "Arrived Canada safe are free." The change was a little too much for them, and they did not realize that they were not free to become nuisances to others. They were ignorant, illiterate, but had the merit of being conscientious and being willing to suffer for conscience' sake. This latter characteristic always prevented me from condemning them wholly. Once their ignorance was removed they would become industrious ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... detailed and noised abroad.... And it was with a half feeling of shame that she prepared herself that afternoon for one more, perhaps one last attempt, to scale the heavens, as she recollected how many an illiterate monk and nun, from Constantinople to the Thebaid, was probably employed at that moment exactly as she was. Still, the attempt must be made. In that terrible abyss of doubt, she must have something palpable, real; something beyond her own thoughts, and hopes, ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... time. O Yudhishthira, Manu and other royal Rishis of meritorious deeds had undertaken journeys to tirthas. Indeed, a trip to them is capable of dispelling all fear, O king! They that are crooked-minded, they that have not their souls under control, they that are illiterate and perverse, do not, O Kauravya, bathe in tirthas. But thou art ever of a virtuous disposition and conversant with morality and firm in thy promises. Thou wilt surely be able to free thyself from the world. For, O son of Pandu, thou art even as king Bhagiratha, or Gaya, or ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... is he who tells of the robber who, being accustomed to commend himself in his adventures to our Lady, was supported on the gibbet for three days by her white hands, and received his pardon; and of the illiterate monk who suffered shame because he knew no more than his Ave Maria, but who, when dead, was proved a holy man by the five roses that came from his mouth in honour of the five letters of Maria's name; and of the nun who quitted her convent to lead a life of disorder, yet ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... that reading books has its utilitarian side, and that we have to consider printed matter (let me never call it literature!) as the raw material whence we extract some of the information necessary to life. But long familiarity with an illiterate peasantry like the Italian one, inclines me to think that we grossly exaggerate the need of such book-grown knowledge. Except as regards scientific facts and the various practices—as medicine, engineering, and ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... were in danger of coming to look on our mother-tongue as a dead language, to be sought in the grammar and dictionary rather than in the heart, and that our only chance of escape was by seeking it at its living sources among those who were, as Scottowe says of Major-General Gibbons, 'divinely illiterate.' President Lincoln, the only really great public man whom these latter days have seen, was great also in this, that he was master—witness his speech at Gettysburg—of a truly masculine English, classic, because it was of no special period, and level at once to the highest and lowest ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... discovery," he says himself, "of their being affected was to see the white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully fell down their cheeks, black as they came out of the coal-pits." It was not only miners and other illiterate men whom Whitefield impressed by the fervor and passion of his eloquence. Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Horace Walpole, and other men as well qualified to judge, and as little likely to fall under the spell of religions or sentimental enthusiasm, have borne ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... theory as strict as her husband, and for a time made more moan over the aberrations of her favourite son. Like most Scotch mothers of her rank, she had set her heart on seeing him in a pulpit, from which any other eminence seemed a fall; but she became, though comparatively illiterate, having only late in life learnt to write a letter, a student of his books. Over these they talked, smoking together in old country fashion by the hearth; and she was to the last proud of the genius which ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... remaining difference being as to whether any party designations should be printed. Most practical politicians desire that the name "Republican" or "Democrat," or even that some party symbol like a star or flag, should be affixed, which can be understood by the most illiterate voter; also, that the voter should be allowed to make one cross opposite the word "Republican" or "Democrat" when he means to vote the whole of the ticket, "in order to give each candidate the benefit of the full party strength." On ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... them, a quick remembrance shot before her. She saw Nicholas Burr as she had seen him in his youth—ardent, assured, holding out his arms to the future, which was to be love, love, love. Now the future had become the present, and the one affection that remained to him was that of the old, illiterate woman, with the rasping voice. He had lost the thing he had lived for—and ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... Bouquet, who seems to have detested Croghan, wrote to General Gage, at a time when new powers had been conferred upon Indian-agents, "It is to be regretted that powers of such importance should be trusted to a man illiterate, impudent, and ill-bred." Nevertheless, within a few months, Bouquet wrote to Gage recommending Croghan as the person most competent to negotiate with the Western Indians for British control of the French posts in the Illinois country—a mission upon which Croghan was wounded, captured, ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... colours of nature unspoiled; impossible for them to supply beautiful incident and action in their ornament, unless they see beautiful incident and action in the world about them. Inform their minds, refine their habits, and you form and refine their designs; but keep them illiterate, uncomfortable, and in the midst of unbeautiful things, and whatever they do will still ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... any one wonder that I, and other slaves, often doubted the sincerity of every white man's religion? Can it be a matter of astonishment, that slaves often feel that there is no just God for the poor African? Nay, verily; and were it not for the comforting and sustaining influence that these poor, illiterate and suffering creatures feel as coming from an unearthly source, they would in their ignorance all become infidels. To me, that beautiful Sabbath morning was clouded in midnight darkness, and I retired to ponder on what ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... but though compelled to acknowledge the ignorance of the Spaniards in general, I have great pleasure in being able to state that during the latter years it has been becoming less and less, and that the rising generation is by no means so illiterate as the last, which was itself superior in acquirements to the preceding one. It is to be hoped that the progress in improvement will still continue, and that within a few years the blessings of education will be as generally diffused ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... start as doctors or fortune-tellers. Besides painting pictures and fans, and illustrating books, these men write fancy scrolls in the various ornamental styles so much prized by the Chinese; they keep accounts for people, and write or read business and private letters for the illiterate masses. ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... hills of Londesborough. He had only been two or three times in the church at Threlkeld, which was simple and bare, and the full display of a monastic church was an absolute amazement, making him kneel almost breathless with awe, recollecting what the royal hermit had told him. He was too illiterate to follow the service, but the music and the majestic flow of the chants overwhelmed him, and he listened with hands clasped over his face, not daring to raise his eyes to the dazzling gold of the altar, lighted by ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... boast that they are not literally illiterate. They are always saying the ancient barons could not sign their own names—for they know less of history perhaps than of anything else. The modern barons, however, can sign their own names—or someone else's for a change. They can sign their own names; and that is about all they can do. They ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... which had promoted and confirmed Sophie's prosecution, consisted of illiterate, worn-out officers, who had no scruple in committing the procureur-general's victim for trial to the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... indigent patriarch, and a remnant of ten bishops; forty monasteries have survived the inroads of the Arabs; and the progress of servitude and apostasy has reduced the Coptic nation to the despicable number of twenty-five or thirty thousand families; [148] a race of illiterate beggars, whose only consolation is derived from the superior wretchedness of the Greek patriarch ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... Baron du Guenic was illiterate as a peasant. He could read, write, and do some little ciphering; he knew the military art and heraldry, but, excepting always his prayer-book, he had not read three volumes in the course of his life. His clothing, which is not an insignificant point, was invariably the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... are convinced that the narrative which follows was not reduced to writing till the twenty- ninth century. Not only was it unlawful to write or print such matter during that period, but the working-class was so illiterate that only in rare instances were its members able to read and write. This was the dark reign of the overman, in whose speech the great mass of the people were characterized as the "herd animals." All literacy was frowned upon and stamped out. From the statute-books of ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... This Lady, who was for many years known in Somersetshire as an itinerant dealer in earthenware, rags, &c., and occasionally a fortune-teller, died a few years since at Huntspill, where she had resided for the greater part of a century. She was extremely illiterate, so much so, as not to be able to write, and, I think, could scarcely read. She lived for some years in a house belonging to my father, and while a boy, I was very often her gratuitous amanuensis, in writing letters for her to her children. She possessed, however, considerable ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... since taught me that I was in imminent danger of being reduced to beggary. I had no profession, nor any means of subsistence till a profession could be secured; at least no adequate means, unless by retiring to some humble garret, and confining myself to the society of the illiterate, the boorish, and the brutal, between whose habits and mine there was no congeniality. The very day before, Olivia, ecstatic vision, had risen in full view of my delighted hopes, and, forgetting the tormenting distance which malignant fate had placed between ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... strives to hold the people to its own archaic and innocuous religious tenets; why your Church strives so zealously to hold its adherents fast to the rules laid down by pagan emperors and ignorant, often illiterate churchmen, in their councils and synods; and why the Protestant church is so quick to denounce as unevangelical everything that does not measure to its devitalized concept of Christianity. They do not ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... are no signs of this prophecy coming true; but the prophets may cling, if they please, to the hope of its fulfilment. For the rest, it was perfectly clear that the monarchy had done nothing for the material or spiritual advancement of the country, which remained as poverty-stricken and as illiterate as it well could be. Dom Carlos had not even the common prudence to affect, if he did not feel, a sympathy with the nation's pride in its "heroes." The Monarchy could boast neither of good deeds nor of good intentions. Its cynicism was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... arrived at Asti on the 9th of September. Here he was received with great honour by Lodovico and his father-in-law, Duke Ercole, who rode out to meet him on his entry into the town. The magistrates and citizens welcomed him as their liege lord, and the illiterate French barons were amazed to hear a child of eleven, Margareta Solari, declaim a Latin oration with perfect ease and fluency. Two days afterwards Beatrice herself arrived at the castle of Annona, ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... plain as sunshine, for that must correct itself. You know I am homo unius linguae: in English, illiterate, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... had he to do with the world; even its good opinion was scarcely of any importance to him. What to him was the fastidiousness of virtue—to him whom poverty excluded from the refined portion of society, and knowledge and education from the vulgar and illiterate? What could he profit by it? Nothing, absolutely nothing. And yet there was no power on earth could have made this man false to his honour. Partly, perhaps, from his very estrangement from the business of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... mechanic skill. "That Gospel, Paul with zeal and love maintain'd, To others lost, to you is now explain'd; No worldly learning can these points discuss, Books teach them not as they are taught to us. Illiterate call us!—let their wisest man Draw forth his thousands as your Teacher can: They give their moral precepts: so, they say, Did Epictetus once, and Seneca; One was a slave, and slaves we all must be, Until the Spirit comes and sets us free. Yet hear you nothing from ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... fact that one of the few truly original and novel ideas the past century can boast, and the one which has had the deepest influence on geology, had its origin in the brain of an illiterate Swiss chamois hunter named Perraudin. Throughout the Alps, on lofty crags, great bowlders were often found, which had no relation to the geology of the region and which were called erratics, because they had evidently ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... piece, represented for the first time on the metropolitan boards. Here the story rushed on, per fas aut nefas, and the audience went with it. Certes, some man who understood the stage must have put the incidents together, and then left it to each illiterate histrio to find the words,—words, my dear confreres, signify so little in an acting play. The movement is the thing. Grand secret! Analyze, practise it, and restore to grateful stars that lost ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... stories spread abroad and caused great tumult and alarm. From the foundation of New England it had been the custom of the inhabitants, in matters of doubt and difficulty, to look to their ministers for counsel. So they did now; 10 but unfortunately the ministers and wise men were more deluded than the illiterate people. Cotton Mather, a very learned and eminent clergyman, believed that the whole country was full of witches and wizards who had given up their hopes of heaven and signed a covenant with 15 the ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... me that this person should have assurance, in the face of the sun, to go about persuading your Highness that our age is almost wholly illiterate and has hardly produced one writer upon any subject. I know very well that when your Highness shall come to riper years, and have gone through the learning of antiquity, you will be too curious to neglect inquiring into the authors of the very age before you; and to think that this insolent, in the ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... so wide and so wonderful that those who look upon it with the seeing eye and the understanding heart catch glimpses of the King in His beauty through the fairness of the land that is very far off. On past the mossy stone, like an overgrown and illiterate milestone, which marks the boundary between Mershire and Salopshire; and then through a typical English village, noteworthy because the rites of Mayday, with May-queen and May-pole to boot, are still celebrated there exactly as they were celebrated some three hundred years ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... you with only a few months' preparation stood fearless at your post in Mesopotamia and won recognition by your calm collectedness and true heroism? They may say that you are but a small handful, what of the vast illiterate millions? Illiterate in what sense? Have not the ballads of these illiterates rendered into English by our Poet touched profoundly the hearts of the very elect of the West? Have not the stories of their common life appealed to the common kinship of humanity? ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... was in progress then, and the spectacle of an illiterate impostor trying to establish his claim as the rightful heir to a great estate was highly diverting to Mark Twain.—[In a letter of this period he speaks of having attended one of the Claimant's "Evenings."]—He wanted to preserve the evidence as future literary material, and Stoddard ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... work in six large quarto volumes, History, Condition, and Prospects of Indian Tribes, published by Government under his editorship, includes the substance of most of his previous writings. It is a singularly crude and illiterate production, stuffed with blunders and contradictions, giving evidence on every page of a striking unfitness either for historical or philosophical inquiry, and taxing to the utmost the patience of those who would extract what is valuable in it from its oceans ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... of this Apology does not desire it may be inferred from the foregoing remarks, that horror of Atheism, and detestation of its apostles, is confined to the low, the vulgar, the base, or the illiterate. Any such inference would be wrong, for it is certainly true that learned, benevolent, and very able Christian writers, have signalised themselves in the work of obstructing the progress of Atheism by denouncing its principles, and ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... as in other matters, important discoveries are sometimes made, and great events occasionally accomplished, by very ignoble agencies. Mat's deplorable ignorance of Painting in general, and grossly illiterate misunderstanding of the subject represented by Columbus in particular, seemed to mark him out as the last man in the world who could possibly be associated with Art Mystic in the character of guardian genius. Yet such was the proud position which he was now selected by Fate to occupy. In ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... He had promised her that night that he would care for her babe. And his life had long since shown what a promise meant to him. He knew he would be unable to learn of the child's progress directly from these women, for they were both illiterate. But Captain Julio brought an encouraging message from them, and assured Jose that he would always make inquiry for the babe on his trips down the river. Jose's long-distance dealings with the genial captain had been conducted through Juan, who had constituted himself the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... was said, a fellow, whom I afterwards heard called by the name of Jim Davies, asked if I was willing to take an oath that I would be honest. I said, 'Yes.' He stood up and dictated an oath full of blasphemy, shocking with imprecations, and grossly illiterate. The eyes of the crowd fastened upon me, and some of the ruffians watched me in a scowling way with faces dark with suspicion, till I repeated the horrid language of the man Davies, and swore, after which the greater bulk of ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... her as a companion. Indeed, Frank was more than pleased, for he saw in this girl a singular character. Illiterate though she seemed, she was pretty, vivacious, and so bright that it was plain education and refinement would make her ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... lying between St. Just and the sea—a sort of common, covered with heath and furze—on which the ancient Britons have left their indelible mark, in the shape of pits and hollows and trenches, with their relative mounds and hillocks. Here, in the days of old, our worthy but illiterate forefathers had grubbed and dug and turned up every square foot of the soil, like a colony of gigantic rabbits, in order to supply the precious metal of the country to the ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... middle of the nineteenth century, there was a growing feeling, originating in New England and spreading westward, that illiterate voters were a menace to sound government. Accordingly, educational tests were imposed in a number of states. These tests generally require voters to be able to ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... remarkable fact that one of the few truly original and novel ideas the past century can boast, and the one which has had the deepest influence on geology, had its origin in the brain of an illiterate Swiss chamois hunter named Perraudin. Throughout the Alps, on lofty crags, great bowlders were often found, which had no relation to the geology of the region and which were called erratics, because they had evidently come there from ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... into hypocrisy, he carefully retained his folly as a cloak for his knavery. Of his success in deception, the present narrative exhibits abundant proofs. The number of his dupes was not confined to the vulgar and illiterate, but included individuals of real worth and learning, of hostile parties and sects, who courted his acquaintance and respected his predictions. His proceedings were deemed of sufficient importance to ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... a famous Empire run-up by Jordan, the sly builder and decorator who had got on so surprisingly. In James's younger days, Jordan was an obscure and illiterate nobody. And now he had a motor car, and looked at the tottering James with sardonic contempt, from under his heavy, heavy-lidded dark eyes. He was rather stout, frail in health, but silent and insuperable, was A. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... which is merely one of his exaggerations for the sake of point. She had not a fine understanding: though she was neither silly nor stupid, her sense was altogether inferior to her sensibility. Although living in a most bookish circle she was, as Macaulay himself admits, almost illiterate: and (which he does not say) her comparative critical estimates of books, when she does give them, are merely contemptible. This harsh statement could be freely substantiated: but it is enough to say that, when a girl, she preferred some forgotten rubbish called Henry ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... whom they traded. Even ancient Greece showed a wide difference in type of character and culture between the inland and maritime states. The Greek landsman was courageous and steadfast, but crude, illiterate, unenterprising, showing sterility of imagination and intellect; while his brother of the seaboard was active, daring, mercurial, imaginative, open to all the influences of a refining civilization.[255] To-day the distribution of the Greeks along the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... pity anyone reads it!"—she answered—"But what are we to read? If low-minded and illiterate scavengers are employed to write for the newspapers instead of well-educated men, we must put up with the mud the scavengers collect. We know well enough that every journal is more or less a calendar of lies,—all the same we ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... condescends to an intimacy with a simple son of sea and shore who is not only practically illiterate but is entirely ignorant of his patron's prowess, the opinions of the illiterate concerning the personal characteristics of the genius obtain a very remarkable value as being honest criticism by man of man, uninfluenced ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... person, not wholly illiterate and ignorant of Church-History, could go about the metropolis only, seeking after such matters during one month, without gathering into ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... influence exercised by Plato and Swift on the love affairs of Shelley, Hazlitt, and Burns. And afterwards they write essays on the lectures, and the names in order of merit are put in conspicuous places. You see how your little germ has grown? The illiterate middle-class of your days ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... character to a humdrum narrative, and the gestour would know how to make the best of incidents which he knew from experience to be specially interesting to an audience. Such yarns would be most attractive to "lewd" or illiterate men— ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... chastity, must have had pernicious effects on the morals of the inhabitants. But when it is considered too that the Knights of Malta had been for the last fifty years or more a set of useless idlers, generally illiterate, for they thought literature no part of a soldier's excellence; and yet effeminate, for they were soldiers in name only; when it is considered that they were, moreover, all of them aliens, who looked upon themselves not merely as of a superior rank to the native nobles, but as beings ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Huddy, Lavinia thought. But this was nothing. The owner of a travelling play acting booth was as a rule an illiterate showman. ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... bestowed upon him, or perhaps because of it, the following night Senator Ingalls made his famous speech against suffrage, and it fell to my lot to answer him. In the course of his remarks he asked this question: "Would you like to add three million illiterate voters to the large body of illiterate voters we have in America to-day?" The audience applauded light-heartedly, but I was disturbed by the sophistry of the question. One of Senator Ingalls's most discussed personal peculiarities was the parting of his hair in the middle. Cartoonists ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... easily deducible from hence, we shall only appeal to the wonderful effect, which the fable, pronounced by Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon, produced among his hearers; or to the fable, which was spoken by Menenius Agrippa to the Roman populace; by which an illiterate multitude were brought back to their duty as citizens, when no other species of oratory ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... having had children, are precious and final qualifications. It is a natural faculty that is required; it is not merely having a genteel young woman at a table in a ward. One of the finest nurses I met was a red-faced illiterate old Irish woman; I have seen her take the poor wasted naked boys so tenderly up in her arms. There are plenty of excellent clean old black women that would make ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... educational work The existence of non-missionary schools may either increase the need for missionary schools or decrease it The extent to which education is provided for the better educated and the more illiterate The extent to which education is provided for boys and girls, for Christian and non-Christian scholars The extent to which mission schools receive Government grants throws light on their character and purpose The extent to which education is provided for illiterate adults The importance of ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen
... see the lovely colours of nature unspoiled; impossible for them to supply beautiful incident and action in their ornament, unless they see beautiful incident and action in the world about them. Inform their minds, refine their habits, and you form and refine their designs; but keep them illiterate, uncomfortable, and in the midst of unbeautiful things, and whatever they do will still be spurious, vulgar, ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... striking than the contrast between the illiterate locutions and the eccentric orthography of Fenella's letters and the subtle remarks and speculations upon the symbols of nature.—the dukkeripen of the woods, the streams, the stars, and the winds. But when I came to analyse ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... father naturally raised the question in the Hon. Morison's mind as to precisely what the girl's attitude toward escape might be. It seemed, of course, preposterous that this fair and beautiful young woman should prefer to remain in the filthy douar of an illiterate old Arab rather than return to the comforts, luxuries, and congenial associations of the hospitable African bungalow from which the Hon. Morison had tricked her. The man flushed at the thought of his duplicity which these recollections aroused—thoughts which were interrupted by The ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... which has sometimes been doubted. 'Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world?' May it not be the power of God which, amidst this wreck of eloquence and learning, has preserved unmutilated, even to these later days, the simple and unstudied compositions of the illiterate Galileans—the impassioned but rugged addresses of the tent-maker of Cilicia?" Dr. Adam Clarke, no mean judge, pronounced by the late Rev. Robert Hall to have been "an ocean of learning," said, "I have diligently examined the question, and I can conscientiously say that we have the Sacred ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... would render miserable the peasant who still lacked the development to appreciate the elegancies of refinement; while the tidy cottage and plain comforts which might constitute the paradise of the humble and illiterate rustic, would be utterly inadequate to the requirements of larger and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... meant by this well-sounding term was a certain bundle of ideas—some of them very illiterate, some very delicate hair-splitting, some curious even to comicality,—gathered out of the writings of a certain number of men, who assuredly were not inspired, since they often travesty Scripture, and at times diametrically contradict it. Having lived in the darkest times of the Church, they ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... the tell-tale Day! The light will show, character'd in my brow, The story of sweet chastity's decay, The impious breach of holy wedlock vow: Yea, the illiterate, that know not how To cipher what is writ in learned books, Will quote my loathsome ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... teacher" they wished to see, not the "foreign devil." When I rose from the table, half a dozen guests sitting at the other tables rose also and bowed to me as I passed out. Of all people I have ever met, the Chinese are, I think, the politest. My illiterate Laohwan, who could neither read nor write, had a courtesy of demeanour, a well-bred ease of manner, a graceful deference that never approached servility, which it was a constant pleasure to ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... had sprung up between the two men a strange sort of friendship, a strange sort of intimacy. For even when he came to have a strong liking for Lonesome Pete, Conniston could never for a second look upon this illiterate, uncouth cowboy as an equal, could not refrain from feeling toward him an amused and tolerant contempt. If palmy days ever came again, he was used to thinking, he would find a place for the red-headed man in his ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... the life and career of Joseph Smith, Jr., or 'Joe Smith,' as he was universally named, and the Smith family, they were popularly regarded as an illiterate, whiskey-drinking, shiftless, irreligious race of people—the first named, the chief subject of this biography, being unanimously voted the laziest and most worthless of the generation. From the age of twelve to ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... dear, that there are as many novelties attempted to be introduced, the adoption of which would be prejudicial to society, as there are of those which would be beneficial to it. The well-informed, though by no means exempt from error, have an unquestionable advantage over the illiterate, in judging what is likely or not to prove serviceable; and therefore we find the former more ready to adopt such discoveries as promise to be really advantageous, than the latter, who having no other test ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... it was with difficulty that he could refrain from imprecating destruction on his brethren while the cup was passing from hand to hand. After he had been some time a member of the congregation he began to preach; and his sermons produced a powerful effect. He was, indeed, illiterate; but he spoke to illiterate men. The severe training through which he had passed had given him such an experimental knowledge of all the modes of religious melancholy as he could never have gathered from books; and his vigorous genius, animated by a fervent spirit of devotion, enabled ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... situation of a writer may certainly produce a provincial dialect, which will often differ essentially from the language used at the same time in other parts of the same country. But this can only happen in the case of persons of no education and totally illiterate; and such persons seldom write. It is unnecessary however to discuss this point very accurately, as nobody, I believe, will contend, that the poems attributed to Rowley are written in any provincial dialect. If there ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... thousand, the ostracism was imperfect); then, laying every name by itself, they pronounced him whose name was written by the larger number, banished for ten years, with the enjoyment of his estate. As, therefore, they were writing the names on the sherds, it is reported that an illiterate clownish fellow, giving Aristides his sherd, supposing him a common citizen, begged him to write Aristides upon it; and he being surprised and asking if Aristides had ever done him any injury, "None at ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... a fencing-school, and to fear the thrust of an unskilful person who never handled a foil. Thus you, though you speak boldly in the presence of the chief men of the Republic, among whom there might perhaps be found some who would despise you, dare not, nevertheless, speak in the presence of an illiterate multitude, who know nothing of the affairs of state, and who are not capable of despising you, and you fear to be laughed at by them." "Do they not usually," said Charmidas, "laugh at those who speak best?" "So likewise," said Socrates, "do the men of quality with ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... Within a radius of seventy-five miles there are not far from 450,000 Negroes. By the last census, Mississippi's colored population was 650,291. The lowest estimate of the present number is 800,000. At least seventy per cent. of this population is illiterate. Tougaloo is thus in the very midst of America's Africa. Just at hand, also, is the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, into which Negroes are pouring from other States. Here they are gaining homes and establishing communities. Their numbers are expected continually to increase. ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 44, No. 5, May 1890 • Various
... residence" set Defoe a little apart from the literary society of the day. Swift, Pope, Addison, Arbuthnot, and the rest, considered him untrained and uncultured, and habitually spoke of him with the contempt which the regular feels for the volunteer. Swift referred to him as "an illiterate fellow whose name I forget," and Pope actually inserted ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... alone for his invincible arm. But the extent of his empire affords the only remaining evidence of the number and importance of his victories; and the Scythian monarch, however ignorant of the value of science and philosophy, might perhaps lament that his illiterate subjects were destitute of the art which could perpetuate the memory ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... mistress, Euphemia, may require a few words of introduction. Those who have not read the adventures and experiences of Pomona in "Rudder Grange" should be told that she first appeared in that story as a very young and illiterate girl, fond of sensational romances, and with some out-of-the-way ideas in regard to domestic economy and the conventions of society. This romantic orphan took service in the "Rudder Grange" family, and as the story progressed ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... illiterate, and had no sympathy with his son's efforts to educate himself. Fortunately for him, however, his stepmother helped and encouraged him in every way possible. Shortly before her death she said to a biographer of Lincoln: "I induced my husband to ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... an ignorant and illiterate fellow who lets drive at the door with such kicks. You have brought on ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... transplanted from Europe. On the contrary, we had been taught to regard them as most unfortunate in the circumstances under which [11] they so gloriously conquered their merited freedom. We saw them free, but perfectly illiterate barbarians, impotent to use the intellectual resources of which their valour had made them possessors, in the shape of books on the spirit and technical details of a highly developed national existence. We had learnt also, until this new interpreter of history ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... had ceased to be incidental and become portentous, Hazel lay and tried to think. But she only heard two voices in endless contradiction, 'I munna go. I mun go.' At last she got up and fetched the book of charms, written in a childish, illiterate hand, ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... Ned Crawford's provisions, he had continued to board with Anita, or with any mess of military men among whom he might happen to be. He had made many acquaintances, and he had found the ragged, unpaid, illiterate Mexican soldiers a genuinely hospitable lot of patriotic fellows. He came to his supper somewhat late on the evening of March 21st, and that night, after going to care for his pony, he came back and slept on a blanket on the floor ...
— Ahead of the Army • W. O. Stoddard
... and indeed he got the most by them! for I will venture, (contrary to the custom of profound historians, who always assign deep causes to great events,) to ascribe the better half of the Duke of Marlborough's greatness and riches to those graces. He was eminently illiterate, wrote bad English, and spelled it still worse. He had no share of what is commonly called parts; that is, he had no brightness, nothing shining in his genius. He had, most undoubtedly, an excellent good plain understanding, with sound judgment. But these alone ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... with a conviction of imminent disaster. He pulled out a sheet of cheap note-paper—and a wad of bank-notes. His face worked curiously as he read a few lines, scrawled in illiterate, female handwriting. ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... Carmichael concluded that she was still under the glamour of an ancient superstition, and took the veil after a very commonplace and squalid Protestant fashion. This particular "fruit" against whom Carmichael in his young uncharitableness especially raged, because he was more self-complacent and more illiterate than his fellows, married the daughter of a rich self-made man, and on the father's death developed a peculiar form of throat disease, which laid him aside from the active work of the ministry—a mysterious providence, as he often explained—but ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... relieve the Crown) amounted to a libel upon a morally clean book, restricting its perusal in families; and the fact that the shilling book sold by and among humble people was alone prosecuted, diffused among the educated an equally false notion that the "Age of Reason" was vulgar and illiterate. The theologians, as we have seen, estimated more justly the ability of their antagonist, the collaborator of Franklin, Rittenhouse, and Clymer, on whom the University of Pennsylvania had conferred the degree of Master of Arts,—but ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... the profits of the business, and defends him against the charge of inconsistency. Morris may not have thought out the question in all its aspects, but much of the criticism passed upon him was even more illogical and depended on far too narrow and illiterate a use of the word Socialism. He knew as well as his critics that no new millennium could be introduced by merely taking the wealth of the rich and dividing it into equal portions among ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... from this place, as he had been driven from other places, but he was cheap and other workmen were not better, and thus he remained there two years. His life was uneventful. One day he received a letter, written in Esthonian, but as he himself was illiterate, and as the others did not understand Esthonian, the letter remained unread; and as if not understanding that the letter might bring him tidings from his native home, he flung it into the manure with ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... borne good fruit. These literary guilds befitted and denoted a people which was alive, a people which had neither sunk to sleep in the lap of material prosperity, nor abased itself in the sty of ignorance and political servitude. The spirit of liberty pervaded these rude but not illiterate assemblies, and her fair proportions were distinctly visible, even through the somewhat grotesque garb ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... in the persons of Nestorius and others, it took refuge in Syria, where it flourished for many years in the schools of Edessa and Nisibis, the foremost of the time. From these it found its way among the Arabs, and even to the illiterate Muhammad, who gave it (1) theoretic theological expression in the cxii. surah of the Koran: "He is One God, God the Eternal; He neither begets nor is begotten; and to Him there is no peer," in which both the fundamental ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... or late in the etiquette of the trees. A contemporary English novelist was once asked by a foreigner what was the most important crop in England. He answered without a moment's hesitation: "Rye." Ignorance so complete as this seems to me to be touched with magnificence; but the ignorance even of illiterate persons is enormous. The average man who uses a telephone could not explain how a telephone works. He takes for granted the telephone, the railway train, the linotype, the aeroplane, as our grandfathers took for granted the miracles of the gospels. He neither questions ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... emerged from a district which at that time was traversed by few people; perhaps only by some illiterate Mexican adventurers, though it had once been settled by a thrifty people whose stage of culture was that of the Pueblo Indians of to-day, and who had vanished, nobody knows how many centuries ago. Over it all hovered a distinct atmosphere ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... had been warned by an artist friend who had kindly promised to sing songs between the stories, that my audience would be of varying age and almost entirely illiterate. Many of the older men and women, who could neither read nor write, had never been beyond their native village. I was warned to be very simple in my language and to explain any difficult words which might occur in the particular Indian story I had chosen ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... men of letters have developed wonderful feats of memory; and among illiterate persons, by means of points of association, the power of memory has been little short of marvelous. At a large hotel in Saratoga there was at one time a negro whose duty was to take charge of the hats and coats of the guests as they ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Thicknesse undertook to construct a letter, every word of which should be French, yet no Frenchman should be able to read it; while an illiterate Englishman or Englishwoman should decipher it with ease. Here is the specimen ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... believe that his drawings were at first hand, and made by himself from nature. "Thomson's Seasons," read to him about this time by his brother Giles, gave him a glimpse of the union of poetry with natural beauty; and lit up in his mind an ambition which finally transformed the illiterate, rugged, half-tutored youth into the man who wrote "The Village Patriarch," and the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... to recommend that a communicant, who, after conference with his minister, should declare that he could not conscientiously receive the bread and wine kneeling, might receive them sitting. Mew, Bishop of Winchester, an honest man, but illiterate, weak even in his best days, and now fast sinking into dotage, protested against this concession, and withdrew from the assembly. The other members continued to apply themselves vigorously to their task: and no more secessions took place, though there were great differences ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of the band was a man far from illiterate: he was able to travel by the stars, or the compass, and had marked, in his erratick expeditions, such places as are most worthy the notice of a passenger. He observed to me, that buildings are always best preserved in places little frequented, and difficult ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... and delivered like a parcel the fair Andalusian. But to rouse the servants caused delay; and on returning to the street through the broad gateway of the convent, whom should she face but the Alcalde! How he escaped the trench, who can tell? He had no time to write memoirs; his horse was too illiterate. But he had escaped; temper not at all improved by that adventure, and now raised to a hell of malignity by seeing that he had lost his prey. In the morning light he now saw how to use his sword. He attacked Kate with fury. Both were exhausted; and Kate, besides that she ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... the following Memoirs has upon these grounds fair claims to the public favour and attention; he was an illiterate old steward, whose partiality to THE FAMILY, in which he was bred and born, must be obvious to the reader. He tells the history of the Rackrent family in his vernacular idiom, and in the full confidence that Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit, and Sir Condy Rackrent's affairs ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... The chief justice of Louisiana was convicted of fraud. A supreme court judge of South Carolina offered his decisions for sale, and Whipper and Moses, both notorious thieves, were elected judges by the South Carolina Legislature. In Alabama there were many illiterate magistrates, among them the city judge of Selma, who in April 1865, was still living as a slave. Governor Chamberlain, a radical, asserted that there were two hundred trial judges in South Carolina who ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... but an atom in the most renowned of the savage races known to history, a people that, according to the white man's standard, is uncivilized, uneducated, illiterate, and barbarous. Yet the upbringing of every Red Indian male child begins at his birth, and ends only when he has acquired the learning considered essential for the successful man to possess, and which has been predetermined through many ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... principles of the Reformation than the diffusion of the Book of Martyrs on this gigantic scale. In a few years there was scarcely a parish church in England that did not possess a chained copy of the work. The illiterate might frequently be seen standing in a group round the lectern, while one among them better instructed than the rest read to them aloud its graphic and lying legends. Added to this, in many churches ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... lawyers, and were jealous of wealthy merchants. "These lawyers," said Amos Singletary, "and men of learning, and moneyed men that talk so finely and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make us poor illiterate people swallow the pill, expect to get into Congress themselves. They mean to be managers of the Constitution. They mean to get all the money into their hands, and then they will swallow up us little ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... observed by John Bell, "The preservation of health and the attainment of long life are objects of desire to every man, no matter in what age or country his lot is cast, nor by what arbitrary tenure he holds his life. They are the wish of the master and the slave, of the illiterate and the learned, of the timid Hindoo and the warlike Arab, of the natives of New Zealand not less than of the inhabitants of New England,—an indispensable condition for the greatest and longest enjoyment of the senses and propensities; ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... conspicuous compartment facing the door. This is a sort of signature, whose brilliancy eclipses all other names, and really dazzles the eyes of the spectators. But at the same time it draws the attention both of the learned and the illiterate: I will venture to affirm that the name of one of these jewellers is more frequently spelt and pronounced than that of any great man recorded in history, ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... public or semi-public libraries, there were of course great numbers of private libraries. Wealthy and cultivated men throughout the Roman empire and beyond had their private collections, as wealthy and cultivated men do to-day. While the illiterate classes were proportionally much more numerous than they are in modern communities, and the use of books was limited to a comparatively small portion of the population, the small educated class ...
— Books Before Typography - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... herself again, weakly. It was true, she knew the fantastic rigmarole, which made absurd the secret dictates of these illiterate desperadoes. But that absurdity meant death, none the less—death for the one she loved. In her misery, she listened almost apathetically as Hodges went on talking in ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... public Prints: "Passion has not sufficient coolness to pause for metaphor, nor has metaphor ardor enough to keep pace with passion."—Nothing can be less true. Metaphoric strength of expression will burst even from vulgar and illiterate minds when they are agitated. It is a natural effort of roused sensibility in every gradation, from unlettered simplicity to the highest refinement. Passion has no occasion to pause for metaphors, they rush upon the mind which it has ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... nation is lost, irredeemably lost, because it lacks the inner driving power," etc., which has brought Von Kluck so triumphantly through Paris. Even a half-educated Englishman, who has heard of no Italian poet except Dante, knows that he was something more than amiable. Even a positively illiterate Frenchman, who has heard of no Italian warrior except Napoleon, knows that it was not in "inner driving force" that the artilleryman in question was deficient. "Who can live in Italy to-day?" Evidently the Prussian philosopher can't. His impressions are taken from Italian operas; not from Italian ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... to offer the sterile theorists of the new illiterate literature, who are as incapable of appreciating his refined and subtle perversities as they are of admiring the beautiful form in which his full-blooded and exuberant imagination clothes his conceptions. He is an aesthete, but his aestheticism has never expressed itself in barren theory, but has ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... at all. But the House of Lords is not an illiterate audience, and I recollect that on one occasion, when Lord Cromer himself was speaking on preferential treatment for ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... at the big, slouching figure disappearing at the corner. The name of Wood was famous in the Confederacy. The greatest of all the cavalry commanders in a service that had so many, a born military genius, he was an illiterate mountaineer, belonging to that despised, and often justly despised, class known in the South as "poor white trash." But the name of Wood was now famous in every home of the revolting States. It was said that he could neither ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... read out forged letters to the illiterate people. A very judicious expedient, I must say. Village folks can be got to believe anything. But how ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... are familiar with criminal statistics in the United States and other countries, will, I am confident, agree with me that this is a most remarkable record for a population of 300,000,000, illiterate, superstitious, impregnated with false ideas of honor and morality, and packed so densely as the people of India are. The courts of justice have reached a high standard; the lower courts are administered almost exclusively ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... common to both Christians and heathens, that assigns to them the gifts of prophecy and divination. The habit that the mantis has of first stretching out one fore leg, and then the other, and of preserving such a position for some little time, has also led to the belief among the illiterate that it is in the act, in such cases, of pointing out the road ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... once. If you went back it's just possible that into the fellow's dull mind might steal a ghost of suspicion. I'm ready to take my turn now, though I hate the damned inactivity. I am a presumed illiterate. I struggle over the printed page—and with me loafing in his office he would chat ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... picture saw only a ludicrous image, and that image himself, was of another race than that he had ever mingled with. Profoundly indifferent as he had always been to the criticism of his equals in station, the mischievous laughter of this illiterate woman jarred upon him worse than his cousin's sarcasm. It was with a little dignity that he pointed out the fact that at present the child needed nourishment. "It's very young," he added. "I'm afraid it wants ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... observe, that while we give the substance of this worthy gentleman's narrative, we pretend not to give his precise words. It is highly probable that he adapted his language to the humble capacities of his low and illiterate auditors; and we have taken the liberty to clothe his ideas in words better suited to the more intelligent and refined understandings ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... Anglo-Saxon Church," "the Anglo-Saxon church presented a melancholy spectacle to the friends of religion: 1. The laity had resumed the ferocious manners of their pagan forefathers. 2. The clergy had grown indolent, dissolute and illiterate. 3. The monastic order had been apparently annihilated. It devolved on King Alfred, victorious over his enemies, to devise and apply the remedies for these evils." The good king endeavored to restore the monastic institution, but, owing to the lack of candidates ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... and over can read and write total population: 82% male: 87% female: 77% note: over two-thirds of the world's 785 million illiterate adults are found in only eight countries (India, China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Egypt); of all the illiterate adults in the world, two-thirds are women; extremely low ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... any opinion on the proper qualifications for voting, we call attention to the significant facts that in every State there are more women who can read and write than the whole number of illiterate male voters; more white women who can read and write than all negro voters; more American women who can read and write than all foreign voters; so that the enfranchisement of such women would settle the vexed question of rule by illiteracy, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... While many are illiterate, the Belgians are giving much attention to schools these times. Even while they were guests of France, with their government located at Havre, they established twenty-four schools for the children ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... impression of the Volga was poisoned by the rain, by the tear-stained windows of the cabin, and the wet nose of G., who came to meet me at the station. In the rain Yaroslavl looks like Zvenigorod, and its churches remind me of Perervinsky Monastery; there are lots of illiterate signboards, it's muddy, jackdaws with big heads ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... the Congress for the benefit of the most illiterate and humble of our people, and with the intention of encouraging in them industry and thrift. Most of its branches were presided over by officers holding the commissions and clothed in the uniform of the United States. These and other circumstances ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... that Papists have an implicit faith in their priests. What they mean is this: If a piece of arras, or a carpet, is folded up, then it is implicit according to the original Latin word; if it is unfolded and displayed, then it is explicit. Therefore, when a poor illiterate man (suppose a bog-trotter of Mayo or Galway) says to his priest (as in effect always he does say), 'Sir, I cannot comprehend all this doctrine; bless you, I have not the thousandth part of the learning for it, so it is impossible that I should ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... is interesting. He was by no means illiterate. His writing is trim, his accounts in good form and correctly figured. But it was more a fashion in that day to spell as pronounced, and his orthography gives us a ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... bestow competence on her. Three years had intervened, and how, in their pennyless state, could her mother have existed during this time? This excellent woman was worthy of her child's devotion. A perfect confidence and friendship existed between them; besides, she was by no means illiterate; and Lucy, whose mind had been in some degree cultivated by her former lover, now found in her the only person who could understand and appreciate her. Thus, though suffering, she was by no means desolate, and when, during fine summer days, she led her mother into the flowery and shady lanes ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... the vicissitudes of those that are polished by refined nations;[AF] and that, however paradoxical it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that the degeneracy of a language is more frequently to be attributed to an extravagant refinement than to the neglect of an illiterate people, unless indeed external causes interfere. May we not hence conclude, that as the Romansh has never been used in any regular composition in writing till the sixteenth century, nor affected by any foreign invasion or intimate connexion, it is not likely to have received any material ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... A most wonderful scene. The B'hagiratha or Ganges issues from under a very low arch at the foot of the grand snow-bed. The illiterate mountaineers compare the pendent icicles to Mahodeva's hair. Hindoos of research may formerly have been here; and if so, one cannot think of any place to which they might more aptly give the name of a cow's mouth than ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... great importance, and indirectly throw much light on the condition of man in ancient times." [102] But they serve far more purposes than this. They are the raw material, out of which many of our goodly garments of modern science and religion are made up. The illiterate negroes on the cotton plantation, and the rude hunters in the jungle or seal fishery, produce the staple, or procure the skins, which after long labour afford comfort and adornment to proud philosophers and peers. The golden cross on the saintly ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... You will think me an illiterate dog: I am, for the first time, reading ROBERTSON'S SERMONS. I do not know how to express how much I think of them. If by any chance you should be as illiterate as I, and not know them, it is worth while curing ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... but danger; seducing women to learn their husband's secrets; exiling his daughter, not because she had lovers, but because she had other lovers than himself; exiling Ovid because of Livia, who in the end poisoned her prince, and adroitly, too; illiterate, blundering of speech, and coarse of manner—a hypocrite and a comedian in one—so guileful and yet so stupid that while a credulous moribund ordered the gods to be thanked that Augustus survived him, the people publicly ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... status, they are, taken the country over, rather better educated than men. There are more girls than boys in the high schools of the United States; more girls than boys in the higher grammar grades. Fewer women than men are numbered among illiterate. As for the great middle class of women, it is obvious that they are better read than their men. Their specific knowledge of affairs may be less, but their general intelligence is not less ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... results are inevitable. The successful men become egotistic, and it is a common, well-nigh universal, practise for all sorts and conditions of men to speak harshly of the authorities. In the loafers on the street corners, in the illiterate that use the country store as their club, in the very halls of congress, are heard the most unsparing criticisms and denunciations of the administration. These unwarranted comments fell thick and fast on Lincoln, because he was at the post of responsibility ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... that eliminating the Negro factor from the South and taking simply our native white population the percentage of illiteracy in North Carolina of this class is one-tenth of one per cent, greater than the percentage of illiteracy in Ireland, the most illiterate ...
— American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 2, February, 1896 • Various
... gone up slightly. On the other hand, many men of very low intelligence never reached the receiving camps at all, being inmates of institutions for the feebleminded or excluded from the draft because of known mental deficiency; and, of those who reached {280} the camps, many, being illiterate, did not take the Alpha test. It is for this reason that the graph for drafted men stops rather short at the lower end; to picture fairly the distribution of intelligence, it should taper off to the left, beyond the ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... action, had hesitated, reluctant, the wounded man had deliberately torn out the arrow, and with oaths and curses for the other's cowardice had bound up the wound himself with strips torn from his shirt and resumed the fighting. His courage there, and before and after, although he was an illiterate person and could neither read nor write, had caused him to be appointed boatswain of the ship that had carried Morgan's flag, and he had followed his leader for many years with a blind devotion that risked all and stuck at nothing to be of service ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... transcending all example of his own or the previous age, and as a man of general literature so much beyond his contemporaries, except Cicero, that he looked down even upon the brilliant Sylla as an illiterate person,—to class such a man with the race of furious destroyers exulting in the desolations they spread, is to err not by an individual trait, but by the whole genus. The Attilas and the Tamerlanes, who rejoice in avowing themselves ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Actes des Apotres; Suleau and Andre Chenier, in several royaliste or moderee papers,—excited and disputed dominion over the minds of the people. It was the ancient tribune transported to the dwelling of each citizen, and adapting its language to the comprehension of all men, even the most illiterate. Anger, suspicion, hatred, envy, fanaticism, credulity, invective, thirst of blood, sudden panics, madness and reflection, treason and fidelity, eloquence and folly, had each their organ in this concert of every passion and feeling in which the city ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... corruption of taste and language, still preserves the majesty of the Roman laws. In some respects, the office of the Imperial quaestor may be compared with that of a modern chancellor; but the use of a great seal, which seems to have been adopted by the illiterate barbarians, was never introduced to attest the public acts of the emperors. 4. The extraordinary title of count of the sacred largesses was bestowed on the treasurer-general of the revenue, with the intention perhaps of inculcating, that every payment flowed from ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... possibilities of education at such an early age, he was illiterate in his speech and as ignorant of the conventionalities of polite society as an Indian; but he possessed a heart overflowing with the milk of human kindness, was generous in the extreme, and honest ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... household, lent me the aid of his nimble hand to seize the fugitives. I have already stated that the entomologist has need of simplicity of mind. In this important business of the Necrophori, my assistants were a child and an illiterate. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... assured faith, that He was the Son of God. Now it was natural to observe, how it was not flesh and blood that had revealed it to him, but God: for if this knowledge were dependent on natural causes or means, how came it to pass that they, a company of poor fishermen, illiterate men, and persons of low education, attained to the knowledge of the truth; while the scribes and Pharisees, men of vastly higher advantages and greater knowledge and sagacity in other matters, remained ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... influence of public opinion' in biassing the narrative of travellers, we must not forget that the strongest evidence about savage practice is derived from the 'undesigned coincidence' of the testimonies of all sorts of men, in all ages, and all conditions of public opinion. 'Illiterate men, ignorant of the writings of each other, bring the same reports from various quarters of the globe,' wrote Millar of Glasgow. When sailors, merchants, missionaries, describe, as matters unprecedented ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... language is a change from the usual mode of expression, we are not to think of it as being unnatural. It is, in fact, as natural as plain language, and nearly every one, from the illiterate to the most learned, makes use of it, more or less, in his ordinary conversation. This arises from, the fact that we all enjoy comparisons and substitutions. When we say that we have been pegging away all ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... ordinary arrangement was for peasants to hold their scraps of land for life; and land having recently increased in value enormously, a large proportion of these were of the value of forty shillings. Hence, the whole constituency would be altered; thousands of new electors, all of them poor and illiterate, would be added in many constituencies; and the representation of the country would at once pass into Roman Catholic hands. To fix a higher qualification for Roman Catholics than for Protestants would ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... crowd," he says. My friend is very keen on the new crowd; everything else he declares is "passe." Anyhow, it is a very valuable experience to talk with an exhibitor at an art exhibition. Your mind is impregnated, until it swells dizzily in your head. That would be he, the illiterate-looking little creature with the uncombed and ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... game, while mink and otter and muskrat skins will provide him flour and clothes from the fur-trader. Each of Sam's sons is earning seven hundred dollars a year hunting big game on the rock ridge farther north—more than illiterate, unskilled men earn in eastern lands. Then in spring Sam will emerge from his cabin, build another birch canoe and be off to the duck and wild geese haunts. When we paddled away in the morning, Sam still camped on the sand bank. He sat squat whittling away at kin-a-kin-ic, ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... complimentary about his Majesty's ship Pleiades being one of the very few ships in the Service whose captain still maintained so ancient and honoured a custom, the discontinuance of which could only be advocated by common, illiterate persons—such as ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... escaped the most sagacious observers of nature. By so doing, we may discover laws of the animal economy which have no place in our system of Nosology, or in our theories of physic. The practice of physic hath been more improved by the casual experiments of illiterate nations, and the rash ones of vagabond quacks, than by all the once celebrated professors of it, and the theoretic teachers in the several schools of Europe, very few of whom have furnished us with one new medicine, or have taught us better to use ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... regeneration, and the Gospel should reach the masses by a natural and earnest method. The university system calls for reorganization, and a rigid censorship exercised upon the teachings of the professors. Childhood must be no longer neglected, and the illiterate must become indoctrinated into the elements of Scriptural truth. The prevalent social evils should receive severe rebuke from the private Christian and the public teacher. Calixtus, Boehme, Arndt and Gerhard have done nobly, but they have pursued paths so totally divergent that their labors ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... fields and forests and mines, but in the free schools, churches, and printing presses. Ignorance breeds misery, vice, and crime. Mephistopheles was a cultured devil, but he is the exception. History knows no illiterate seer or sage or saint. No Dante or Shakespeare ever had to make ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... arrived at the beach, the darkness of the night was illumined by the light of an immense fire. Ordering his boat's crew (with the intrepid though illiterate William at their head) to keep close and be upon their guard, Boldheart bravely went on, arm in arm with ...
— Holiday Romance • Charles Dickens
... denouncing the outrages inflicted on the friends of the apostolic see. It is hard to dissociate the pope's feeling in this matter from his rejection of the nomination of the king's chancellor, Ralph Neville, Bishop of Chichester, to the see of Canterbury, as an illiterate politician. ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... many American papers seized on the challenge as a great event; and the Sun threw the shadow of Mr Boulnois quite gigantically across its pages. By the paradox already noted, articles of valuable intelligence and enthusiasm were presented with headlines apparently written by an illiterate maniac, headlines such as "Darwin Chews Dirt; Critic Boulnois says He Jumps the Shocks"—or "Keep Catastrophic, says Thinker Boulnois." And Mr Calhoun Kidd, of the Western Sun, was bidden to take his butterfly tie and lugubrious visage down to the little house outside Oxford where Thinker Boulnois ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... with being called John Smith. "Jos Maria Jesus Joo dois Sanctos Sylva da Costa da Cunha" is his name; and he recites it, as I, in my boyhood's days, used to "say a piece" while standing on a chair. There is no school in the town. In Brazil, 84 per cent. of the entire population are illiterate. ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... clear that he is not a college graduate, his letter effectually disproves the allegation that he can neither read nor write. Moreover, even if his education is limited, this cannot be considered exceptional, for the sheriffs of many counties in the South today are illiterate and mentally undeveloped. I judge from the contents of Mr. Evans's letter that there is no truth in the allegation that he divided any part of his own compensation with any one or more of his assistants. He left the office with a spotless record, every dollar of the public funds that passed ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... on the part of those who depose to them. These things could not have occurred as they are narrated, and Dr Bataille is exploiting the ignorance of that class of readers to whom his mode of publication appealed. As products of imagination his marvels are crude and illiterate; in other words, they belong to precisely that type which is characteristic of romances published in penny numbers, and when he pledges his rectitude regarding them he does not enlist our confidence but indicates the slight value which he ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... use special forms of music to produce a definite effect upon the worshippers who hear them. All of you must be aware that there are some kinds of music which have the remarkable effect upon you, of lifting you higher than you can rise by your own unassisted effort. Even the songs of illiterate Christian bodies do have some effect upon them, in raising them to a higher level, although they possess little of the true quality of the mantra. In Theosophy you find all these things dealt with scientifically—a mass of knowledge, but all growing out ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... as many inhabitants as Cuba, more than eleven times as large. Of its 807,000 people, 326,000 are colored and many of the others of mixed blood. They differ little from other Spanish-Americans, being fond of ease, courteous, and hospitable, and, as in other Spanish countries, the common people are illiterate, public education having been grievously neglected. The natives are the agriculturists of the country, and are a majority in the interior, while the Spaniards, who control business and commerce, are found mainly in the towns ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... substantially the same. The girl's affections are bestowed naturally in her own class, and the disconsolate urban discovers that a wide divergence of feelings and sympathies, a gulf not to be voluntarily bridged over, lies between the man of the world and the illiterate peasant; that the results of habit are not lightly to be got rid of; and that a happiness which lies below us in the social scale may be as unattainable as higher prizes. The relations of the romantic and dreamy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... is the Established Church of Russia. The priests are as a class illiterate, and but little removed above the mujicks in their habits of life. A priest is expected to marry, but can only marry one wife. When she dies, he enters the monastic order. His sons enter the clerical seminaries, and his daughters marry priests, while ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... with the genuinely Republican South. The group of Tientsin generals and "politicals," confused by these developments, remained inactive; and this was no doubt responsible for the mad coup attempted by the semi-illiterate General Chang Hsun. In the small hours of July 1st General Chang Hsun, relying on the disorganization in the capital which we have dealt with in our preceding account, entered the Imperial City with his troops by prearrangement ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... miss! I don't know any business you have to think at all: thought does not become a young woman. But the point we would request of you is, that you will promise to forget this fellow—to illiterate him, I ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... practical tendencies, as observers of the other sex, incline them to question the gain of such an expenditure of energy. The dispersal of the alphabet over a printed page is not less perplexing to the illiterate. As soon as Emma Dunstane discovered the Copsley head-gamekeeper at one wicket, and, actually, Thomas Redworth facing him, bat in hand, she sat up, greatly interested. Sir Lukin stopped the carriage at the gate, and reminded ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... neatly chipped away the counterfeit presentment of iron crosses. In some cases, also, they purified the vaults of German bones and gave back in exchange such French ones as they found scattered. They wrote in large letters on tombstones, "Boch no bon," and other illiterate comments unflattering to the dead usurpers; all of which, our old man explained, mightily endeared the Atkinses to ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... system which had borne good fruit. These literary guilds befitted and denoted a people which was alive, a people which had neither sunk to sleep in the lap of material prosperity, nor abased itself in the sty of ignorance and political servitude. The spirit of liberty pervaded these rude but not illiterate assemblies, and her fair proportions were distinctly visible, even through the somewhat grotesque garb which she ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... time when he had felt full faith in "Providence;" but he seemed to have nothing to expect now from that quarter more than from any other. Samuel Tozer! why did that name always come uppermost, staring into his very eyes? It was a curious signature, the handwriting very rude and unrefined, with odd, illiterate dashes, and yet with a kind of rough character in it, easy to identify, ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... aware that this redoubted chieftain is, even in the present days of enlightenment, as famous among his illiterate countrymen for his magical powers as for his patriotism. He says himself—or Shakespeare says it for him, which is much the ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... somewhere in the State, and that the two messengers whom she had sent out would eventually find him. She felt great confidence in Ben, and also in Bradley, who had impressed her as an honest, straightforward man, though illiterate and not at all ...
— Ben's Nugget - A Boy's Search For Fortune • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... effects of it be when vested in an illiterate Chinese or rude Tartar who has no other talent or recommendation for his authority than the power alone which his ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... of the evil spirit, malicious and revengeful, is common to all primitive peoples, and Brittany has its full share of demonology. Wherever, in fact, a primitive and illiterate peasantry is found the demon is its inevitable accompaniment. But we shall not find these Breton devils so very different from the fiends of ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... for litigation over such matters seemed to provide themselves without end. Lands were given to settlers without accurate description of their boundaries; farms were unfenced and cattle wandered into neighboring fields; the notaries themselves were almost illiterate, and as a result scarcely a legal document in the colony was properly drawn. Nobody lacked pretexts for controversy. Idleness during the winter was also a contributing factor. But the Church and the ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... be questioned if by 1847 Liberia had developed sufficiently internally to be able to assume the duties and responsibilities of an independent power. There were at the time not more than 4,500 civilized people of American origin in the country; these were largely illiterate and scattered along a coastline more than three hundred miles in length. It is not to be supposed, however, that this consummation had been attained without much yearning and heart-beat and high spiritual fervor. There was something pathetic in the effort of this small company, most of whose members ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... added its sundering influence. Quite naturally the Panamanians, in the course of less than half a century, had made more than fifty attempts to revolt from Colombia and establish their own independence. The most illiterate of them could understand that, if they were independent, the money which they received and passed on to Bogota., for the bandits there to spend, would remain in their own hands. An appeal to their love of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... were in the direction of greater intelligibility. He used button instead of tache, capital for chapiter, and made Hebrew proper names in the New Testament conform to the usage of the Old. "This will prevent illiterate persons, who compose a large part of the readers of the Scriptures, from mistaking the characters. Every obstacle to a right understanding of the Scriptures, however small, should be removed, when it can be done in consistency ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... him all possibilities of education at such an early age, he was illiterate in his speech and as ignorant of the conventionalities of polite society as an Indian; but he possessed a heart overflowing with the milk of human kindness, was generous in the extreme, and honest ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... brother the monk Macarius. Every school in Serbia and Bulgaria was closed, so that no teaching could be given anywhere save in the monasteries; it is said to be a fact—I have it from Dr. Zmejanovi['c], lately Bishop of Ver[vs]ac—that when Kara George, the beloved and illiterate heiduk, made his first insurrection, there were, in addition to the monks, precisely eight individuals in Serbia—their names are recorded—who could read and write. Thus the absence of printing-presses was not greatly felt: in Bulgaria ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... passing of the Education Act there were thousands of British lads who were absolutely illiterate (this does not apply so much to Scottish boys); and there were hundreds of master-mariners who could neither read nor write, and who had a genuine contempt for those who could. They held the notion that learning, as they ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... him by George Bentinck,[13] who took the trouble. Besides, his fortune consists in great measure of wool, he lives in the country, is well versed in rural affairs and the business of the quarter sessions, has a certain calibre of understanding, is prejudiced, narrow-minded, illiterate, and ignorant, good-looking, good-humoured, and unaffected, tedious, prolix, unassuming, and a duke. There would not have been so much to say about him if they had not excited an idea in the minds of some people of making him Prime ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... "frightful lot" of books. The four walls of the library were plastered with them from floor to ceiling, save only where the door and the two windows insisted on living their own life, even though an illiterate one. To Bill it seemed the most hopeless room of any in which to look for a ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... I'd shake the humdrums out of you, I guess! You'd presently confess You thought that No was Yes. It's just your sort—provided there's no hurry— We like to worry. In twenty minutes, Sir, you wouldn't know Your father from JIM CROW, Or your illiterate self from LINDLEY MURRAY! And now then, dunce, Please move your boots, at once! If 'twere not for some twinges of the gout, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... the business, and defends him against the charge of inconsistency. Morris may not have thought out the question in all its aspects, but much of the criticism passed upon him was even more illogical and depended on far too narrow and illiterate a use of the word Socialism. He knew as well as his critics that no new millennium could be introduced by merely taking the wealth of the rich and dividing it into ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... toward the elimination of the negro. As an additional safeguard, however, an educational clause was added, but the educational requirement did not become effective at once, as that would have made illiterate whites ineligible as voters. Not until the latter were safely registered under the "grandfather clause," was the educational clause applied, and as, under this clause, the would-be voter must read and write ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... doctrine of Rome. Others, however, boldly denied that the Pope had any authority in this realm of England, while they as bravely asserted the Protestant doctrine for which they had been cast into prison. Many of them, of all ranks, some poor and illiterate, did in no wise shrink from the abuse heaped on them by ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... rhetoricians was so immense, that during the reign of Philip II. of Spain more than thirty chambers, composed of fifteen hundred members, often entered Antwerp in triumphal procession. But the effect of these associations, composed for the most part of illiterate men, was to destroy the purity of the language and to produce degeneracy in the literature. The Chamber of Amsterdam, however, was an honorable exception, and towards the close of the sixteenth century it counted among its members distinguished scholars, such as Spieghel, Coornhert, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... sufferer:—nineteen persons, "members of the Church", were executed, and one hundred and fifty persons were put in prison. It was sometime before the conviction began to spread, that even men of sense, education, and fervent piety could entertain the madness and infatuation of the weak, illiterate, and unprincipled. A disbeliever in witchcraft was an 'obdurate sadducee.' That conviction did at last possess men. The disease which affected the supposed bewitched children somewhat resembled St. Vitus' Dance. It was an involuntary ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... franchise, as many legally vote who were never able to bear arms, and others who have become unable to do so by reason of sickness, accident or age; nor does education mark the line, for the learned and the illiterate meet at the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... the same. This was a great disappointment to the dominating element in the Democratic party, who had hoped and expected, through their policy of "Masterly Inactivity" and intimidation of white men, that the convention would be composed almost exclusively of illiterate and inexperienced colored men. Although a minor at that time, I took an active part in the local politics of my county, and, being a member of a Republican club that had been organized at Natchez, I was frequently called upon to address the ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... dissecting partner I had an uncouth cow-puncher from southern Texas. There were in the college a number of these broad-hatted and rather illiterate fellows from the southwest trying to get themselves metamorphosed into doctors. (I would often feel for their prospective patients.) This man who assisted me on the "stiff," as they call the dissecting material, did the cutting and I looked up the points of anatomy. ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... paralyzed Indian. Colonel Howell, having heard the explanation of the finding of the letter, without any hesitation and evidently without any qualms of conscience, drew out the enclosure. The letter was an illiterate scrawl. ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... already: a famous Empire run-up by Jordan, the sly builder and decorator who had got on so surprisingly. In James's younger days, Jordan was an obscure and illiterate nobody. And now he had a motor car, and looked at the tottering James with sardonic contempt, from under his heavy, heavy-lidded dark eyes. He was rather stout, frail in health, but silent and insuperable, ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... however, there has been a sudden and most alarming change, and I have just received no less than a dozen notices from tenants desirous of giving up their habitations at once. Here they are!' And he handed me a bundle of letters, for the most part written in the scrawling hand of the illiterate. 'If you look,' he went on, 'you will see that none of them give any reason for leaving. It is merely—"We CANNOT POSSIBLY stay here any longer," or "We MUST give up possession IMMEDIATELY," which they have done, and in every instance before the quarter was up. Being naturally greatly ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... the depositions of persons interested in the ruin of the Rajah, others were made by persons who then received pensions from him, the said Hastings; and several of the affidavits were made by persons of mean condition, and so wholly illiterate as not to be ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... refusal of the Gold Conspiracy to respectability and editorial law, but when he sent the manuscript on to the Quarterly, the editor of the Quarterly also refused it. The literary standard of the two Quarterlies was not so high as to suggest that the article was illiterate beyond the power of an active and willing editor to redeem it. Adams had no choice but to realize that he had to deal in 1870 with the same old English character of 1860, and the same inability in himself to understand it. As usual, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... growing demand. The nobleman has ceased to consider the patronage of authors as any part of his duty, and the tradition which made him consider writing poetry as a proper accomplishment is dying out. Since that time our aristocracy as such has been normally illiterate. Peers—Byron, for example—have occasionally written books; and more than one person of quality has, like Fox, kept up the interest in classical literature which he acquired at a public school, and added a charm to his parliamentary oratory. The great ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... so Wykoff got his inspiration for a career from studying and admiring the diplomatic parvenus of Queen Anne's time. These Bohemiens de la haute volee, who drew their first motives from study, are by far more interesting and tolerable than those of an illiterate type. ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... reason against the events taking place as described,—when men are represented as acting contrary to the character assigned them, or to human nature in general; as when a young lady of seventeen, brought up in ease, luxury and retirement, with no companions but the narrow-minded and illiterate, displays (as a heroine usually does) under the most trying circumstances, such wisdom, fortitude, and knowledge of the world, as the best instructors and the best examples can rarely produce without ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... it is universally admitted that they are the best educated, the acutest, and the most intelligent in Christendom;—no, I must correct myself; they are all this, except when they are in the act of leasing lands, and then the innocent and illiterate husbandmen are the victims of the arts of ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... judge, I being 'a chip of the old block,' without soliciting money or favor, threw open his cellar, wherein was stowed many bushels of sweet potatoes; invited all the destitute to come. It is needless to say they came. In the spring Tobey, the Negro minister of the Baptist Church—a man illiterate, but with much native sense—after morning service, said: 'Brethren, there's gwine to be a 'lection here next week, and I wants you all to vote in de light dat God has gin you to see de light, but I spects to vote wid de taters.' Now, this may seem ludicrous, but Tobey, in that act, was a ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... was no more and no less than a plain horse-thief, a young man of twenty-six, who had been convicted by a jury of stealing a grocer's horse and selling it. The last man was a negro, a tall, shambling, illiterate, nebulous-minded black, who had walked off with an apparently discarded section of lead pipe which he had found in a lumber-yard. His idea was to sell or trade it for a drink. He really did not belong in this court at all; but, having been caught by an undersized American watchman charged ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... unhappily fallen, they nevertheless suited the audience to which they were particularly addressed. His Corinthian style, in which the Maenad of Mr. Burke was habited in the last mode of Almack's, his sarcasms against the illiterate and his invectives against the low, his descriptions of the country life of the aristocracy contrasted with the horrors of the guillotine, his Horatian allusions and his Virgilian passages, combined to produce a whole which equally fascinated and ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... cried "The result of perusing the evening papers containing a report of the first proceedings before the magistrates! The production of an illiterate man, who knew neither the use of a hyphen nor the correct word to describe the avenue! Not wholly exact either, if ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... good advice; but no serious Protestant, at that day, could relish the tone in which it was given. Threatening letters were sent in from irate and illiterate Irishmen; the Herald was denounced from a Catholic pulpit; its carriers were assaulted on their rounds; but the paper won no friends from the side which it affected to espouse. Every one felt that to this man nothing was sacred, or August, or venerable, or even serious. He was ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... hanging on nails, pans lay about the hearth, a sewing-machine stood on a bare deal table. Over the bed was hung an oleograph, from a Christmas supplement, of the birth of Jesus, and above it a bayonet, under which was printed in an illiterate hand on a rough scroll of paper: "Gave three of em what for at Elandslaagte. S. Hughs." Some photographs adorned the walls, and two drooping ferns stood on the window-ledge. The room withal had a sort ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... would follow the hounds fifty miles an end sometimes, would never own himself either tired or amused. I think no praise ever went so close to his heart, as when Mr. Hamilton called out one day upon Brighthelmstone Downs, "Why Johnson rides as well, for aught I see, as the most illiterate fellow in England."' He wrote to Mrs. Thrale in 1777:—'No season ever was finer. Barley, malt, beer and money. There is the series of ideas. The deep logicians call it a sorites. I hope my master will no longer endure the reproach of not keeping me a horse.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... owner, George, first Duke of Buckingham, was stabbed by Felton; Worcester House, at one time occupied by Lord Chancellor Clarendon; and Essex House, situated near St. Clement Danes, the town residence of Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex, "a sober, wise, judicious, and pondering person, not illiterate beyond the rate of most noblemen of ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... news of Captain Winstanley, who has married a Jewish lady at Frankfort, only daughter and heiress of a well-known money-lender. The bride is reported ugly and illiterate; but there is no doubt as to her fortune. The Captain has bought a villa at Monaco—a villa in the midst of orange-groves, the abandoned plaything of an Austrian princess; and he has hired an apartment in one of the new avenues, just outside the Arc de Triomphe, where, ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... opinions and propagating others probably far more effective than the {418} mauling of men's bodies is the guidance of their minds through direction of their reading and instruction. Naturally, before the invention of printing, and in an illiterate society, the censorship of books would have slight importance. Plato was perhaps the first to propose that the reading of immoral and impious books be forbidden, but I am not aware that his suggestion was acted upon either ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the most by them! for I will venture, (contrary to the custom of profound historians, who always assign deep causes to great events,) to ascribe the better half of the Duke of Marlborough's greatness and riches to those graces. He was eminently illiterate, wrote bad English, and spelled it still worse. He had no share of what is commonly called parts; that is, he had no brightness, nothing shining in his genius. He had, most undoubtedly, an excellent good plain understanding, with sound judgment. But these alone would probably have raised ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Salvation Army lassies at the street corners, and look upon her as a representative of a lower class who are doing good "in their way," prepare to realize that you have made a mistake. The Salvation Army is not an organization composed of a lot of ignorant, illiterate, reformed criminals picked out of the slums. There may be among them many of that class who by the army's efforts have been saved from a life of sin and shame, and lifted up to be useful citizens; but great numbers of them, the leaders and officers, are ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... to the parish, was at great pains to teach an illiterate old man, crippled with rheumatism, his letters so that he could read the Bible. On the clergyman's return after a short absence from the parish, he ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... people found the time and patience to read. One side was packed with the forgotten lumber of bookshelves—an odd volume of sermons, a collection of scientific essays, a technical work out of date. And the men, anxious to improve their minds, stared at the titles with the curious reverence of the illiterate for a printed book. At their elbows boys gloated over the pages of a penny dreadful, and the women fingered penny novelettes with rapid movements, trying to judge the ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... trifling particular—as to whether they came from heaven or from hell. He must believe that those who were thus successful in this extraordinary conspiracy against men's senses and against common sense, were Galilaean Jews, such as all history of the period represents them; ignorant, obscure, illiterate; and, above all, previously bigoted, like all their countrymen, to the very system, of which, together with all other religions on the earth, they modestly meditated the abrogation; he must believe that, appealing to these astounding frauds ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... have been to college, I presume?" asked an illiterate but boastful exhorter of a clergyman. "Yes, sir," was the reply. "I am thankful," said the former, "that the Lord opened my mouth without any learning." "A similar event," retorted the clergyman, "happened ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... regretted the experience. It is easy now to see the absurdity of my idea, but at that time I knew less than I do now of the labouring people's condition, and in furthering the movement I entertained a shadowy hope of finding amongst the illiterate villagers some fragment or other of primitive art. It is almost superfluous to say that nothing of the sort was found. My neighbours had no arts of their own. For any refreshment of that kind they ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... the disguise, the hand that an educated person would write at the time, but is essentially a commonplace and, no doubt intentionally, rather slovenly style of handwriting. The use of small "i's" for the first person seems, in view of modern usage, to suggest an illiterate writer; but educated writers, even the King,[12] then occasionally lapsed into using them. In the letter, however, they are consistently and may have been purposely used, to avert suspicion from being the work of an educated person; though an illiterate ...
— The Identification of the Writer of the Anonymous Letter to Lord Monteagle in 1605 • William Parker
... Elkington a reward of L1000, for his valuable discoveries in the drainage of land. Joseph Elkington was a Warwickshire farmer, and Mr. Gisborne says he was a man of considerable genius, but he had the misfortune to be illiterate. His discovery had created such a sensation in the agricultural world, that it was thought important to record its details; and, as Elkington's health was extremely precarious, the Board resolved to send Mr. John Johnstone to visit, in company ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... doltish to do amiss, does not exist as a type in England. What does exist in every corner of the country is a peasantry speaking a patois that is often of varying inflections, but is always full of racy poetry, illiterate and yet possessed of a vast oral literature, sharing brains with other classes more equally than education, humorous, nimble-witted; clear-sighted, astute, cynical, not too virtuous, and having a lofty, contempt for the wiseacres of ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... had been very much astonished at this unexpected display. Disposed, as he was, to hold, that whatever had been in Greece, was right; he was more than doubtful of the propriety of throwing open the classical adytum to the illiterate profane. Whether, in his interior mind, he was at all influenced, either by the consideration that it would be for the credit of his cloth, with some of his vice-suppressing neighbours, to be able to say that he had expostulated; ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... winter. In the winter he will snare some small game, while mink and otter and muskrat skins will provide him flour and clothes from the fur-trader. Each of Sam's sons is earning seven hundred dollars a year hunting big game on the rock ridge farther north—more than illiterate, unskilled men earn in eastern lands. Then in spring Sam will emerge from his cabin, build another birch canoe and be off to the duck and wild geese haunts. When we paddled away in the morning, Sam still camped on ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... but through a glass darkly. The mind as well as the eye adds something of its own before an image, even of the clearest object, can be painted upon it; and in historical inquiries the most instructed thinkers have but a limited advantage over the most illiterate. Those who know the most approach ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... the above pleasing piece of composition. In the first place, it is perfectly stilted and unnatural; the dialogue and the sentiments being artfully arranged, so as to be as strong and majestic as possible. Our dear Cat is but a poor illiterate country wench, who has come from cutting her husband's throat; and yet, see! she talks and looks like a tragedy princess, who is suffering in the most virtuous blank verse. This is the proper end of ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... began to move slowly and automatically backwards to the porch. When he reached it he sat down, unfolded the letter, and without attempting to read it, turned its pages over and over with the unfamiliarity of an illiterate man in search of the signature. This when found apparently plunged him again into motionless abstraction. Only once he changed his position to pull up the legs of his trousers, open his knees, and extend the distance between his feet, and then with the unfolded pages carefully laid in the moonlit ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... charcoal. In a short time it changes colour; the lead becomes yellow, and is found to be converted into excellent gold: the iron becomes white, and is found to be pure silver. Delisle is altogether an illiterate person. M. de St. Auban endeavoured to teach him to read and write, but he profited very little by his lessons. He is unpolite, fantastic, and a dreamer, and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... to whether any party designations should be printed. Most practical politicians desire that the name "Republican" or "Democrat," or even that some party symbol like a star or flag, should be affixed, which can be understood by the most illiterate voter; also, that the voter should be allowed to make one cross opposite the word "Republican" or "Democrat" when he means to vote the whole of the ticket, "in order to give each candidate the benefit of the full ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... Clonderriff a snowstorm of documents—leases and mortgages and conveyances and post-obits—all the documentary debris of a crumbled estate, from the Elizabethan charter on which the first Hewish had founded Roscarna to the illiterate IOU's of Jocelyn's spider-racing days. Considine, up to his neck in it, called on Gabrielle to help in the ordering of her affairs. At Clonderriff they had not room enough for this accumulation of papers, ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... attending all the dinners, clubs, races, balls, and other diversions that were given by them, within ten miles of his residence. His sermons were pithy and short; and he always spoke of your half-hour preachers, as illiterate prosers, who did not understand how to condense their thoughts. Twenty minutes were his gauge, though I remember to have heard my father say, he had known him preach all of twenty-two. When he compressed down to fourteen, my grandfather ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... by the laws of Aristotle, and finding those laws are violated, determines that the author ought to be hissed, instead of being applauded. This it is to be so excellent a judge; this it is which gives a critic that exalted gratification which can never be attained by the illiterate,—the supreme power of pointing out faults, where others discern nothing but beauties, and preserving a rigid inflexibility of muscle, while the sides of the vulgar herd are shaking with laughter. These merry mortals, thinking with Plato that it is no proof ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... this country. The ranks of the Abolitionists were composed of the most eloquent orators, the ablest logicians, men and women of the purest moral character and best minds in the nation. They were usually spoken of in the early days as "an illiterate, ill-mannered, poverty-stricken, crazy set of long-haired Abolitionists." While the fact is, some of the most splendid specimens of manhood and womanhood, in physical appearance, in culture, refinement, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... to write, and the first form in which his history was committed to paper was from dictation. The person who took down the words as he spoke them, one of his fellow-servants, was but imperfectly educated himself, so that it may be imagined that the result of the narrative of one illiterate person being written down by another was that the style was not likely to aspire to any very high degree of literary merit. Still, to preserve the peculiar character of the book, it has been thought better to ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... To be sure, a flourishing garden may be made and managed by bright-eyed tots just out of the kindergarten, but how can commercial fertilizers be carefully analyzed by a boy who has made no study of general chemistry? and how can a balanced ration be adjusted by an illiterate person? Similarly, the girl in the laundry does not make soap by rote, but by principle; and the girl in the dressmaking-shop does not cut out her pattern by luck, or guess, or instinct, or rule of thumb, but ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... king of the gipsies: if not, some great man's protection is a sufficient warrant for his peregrination, and a meanes to procure him the town-hall, where hee may long exercise his qualities, with clown-claps of great admiration, in a tone sutable to the large eares of his illiterate auditorie. Hee is one seldome takes care for old age, because ill diet and disorder, together with a consumption, or some worse disease, taken vp in his full careere, haue onely chalked out his catastrophe but to a colon: and he scarsely suruiues to ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... claiming him on the strength of a foolish flirtation; knowing herself, at the time, to be privately married to another man? Was this woman—with the voice of a lady, the look of a lady, the manner of a lady—in league (as Geoffrey had declared) with the illiterate vagabond who was attempting to extort money anonymously from Mrs. Glenarm? Impossible! Making every allowance for the proverbial ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... any one, it is not an instinctive sentiment. The contrary is the fact. Unless we are dominated by some other sentiment than justice, we instinctively yield assent to Aristotle's proposition that the prize flute should be awarded to the best flute player whether opulent or indigent, literate or illiterate, citizen or slave. A group of small children exploring the fields and woods for wild flowers will concede to each what flowers he finds whether by his better eyes or better luck. So with groups of small boys fishing in the streams and brooks. In games of cards for stakes, the players do ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... Orford (1302-1310), like his predecessor, Hugh Belsham, was consecrated at Rome, though not, as he had been, by the pope himself. The Archbishop of Canterbury had refused his consent to the appointment on the ground that the elect was illiterate, but the pope overruled the objection. He died at ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... eloquence, which, in the corruption of taste and language, still preserves the majesty of the Roman laws. In some respects, the office of the Imperial quaestor may be compared with that of a modern chancellor; but the use of a great seal, which seems to have been adopted by the illiterate barbarians, was never introduced to attest the public acts of the emperors. 4. The extraordinary title of count of the sacred largesses was bestowed on the treasurer-general of the revenue, with the intention perhaps of inculcating, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... feeble boast that they are not literally illiterate. They are always saying the ancient barons could not sign their own names—for they know less of history perhaps than of anything else. The modern barons, however, can sign their own names—or someone else's for ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... subject, that every solid argument is against the extraordinary court, and that every one in its favor is specious only. It is a transfer from a judicature of learning and integrity, to one, the greatness of which is both illiterate and unprincipled. Yet such is the force of prejudice with some, and of the want of reflection in others, that many of our constitutions have copied this absurdity, without suspecting it to be one. I am glad to hear that our new constitution ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... read and write, the pupil was ready to enter on the coveted career of a scribe. In a community where nearly every one was illiterate, the scribes naturally held an honorable place. They conducted the correspondence of the time. When a man wished to send a letter, he had a scribe write it, signing it himself by affixing his seal. When he received a letter, he usually employed ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... morbidly and fanatically—I was about to say religious: but that is not the word; let me call it pseudo-religious. His strong sense and cultivated taste did not allow him to delight in the raving tracts of illiterate fanatics—and yet out of the benign and simple elements of the Scripture he conjured up for himself a fanaticism quite as gloomy and intense. He lost sight of God the Father, and night and day dreamed only of God the Avenger. His ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have associated to any extent with the people in the rural districts, especially those of American or Dutch-American descent, they, no doubt, have observed that a great many of the older and more illiterate ones among them are very superstitious, being implicit believers in signs, charms, apparitions, etc.; and most of them, also, entertain the opinion that the moon exerts an occult influence over many things of vital importance to the residents of this mundane ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... head sunk between his shoulders. He lived well, and brought up his nephew and godchild, Gil Blas. "In so doing, Per[^e]s taught himself also to read his breviary without stumbling." He was the most illiterate canon of the whole ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... I will begin therefore to discourse of those verses of mine, which they have produced as though they were something of which I ought to be ashamed. You must have noticed the laughter with which I showed my annoyance at the absurd and illiterate manner in ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... Wales. p. 101. Edit. 2. The Saxons were so very illiterate when they were called to Britain by Vortigern, in Welsh, Gwrtheyrn, that they could neither write nor read. And for that reason Messengers were sent to them from Britain, with a verbal Invitation. Mr. Llwyd has proved that the Welsh furnished the Anglo-Saxons with an Alphabet. ...
— An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the - Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 • John Williams
... consistency, find fault with Christianity on all its sides, and with all its preachers, though you have to contradict yourself in doing so. Object to this man that he is too learned and doctrinal; to that one that he is too illiterate, and gives no food for thought; to this one that he is always thundering condemnation; to that one that he is always running over with love; to this one that he is perpetually harping upon duties; to that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... affections are bestowed naturally in her own class, and the disconsolate urban discovers that a wide divergence of feelings and sympathies, a gulf not to be voluntarily bridged over, lies between the man of the world and the illiterate peasant; that the results of habit are not lightly to be got rid of; and that a happiness which lies below us in the social scale may be as unattainable as higher prizes. The relations of the romantic and dreamy Olenin to his barbaric neighbors are finely portrayed. Nothing could be more ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... intention to treat them with injustice. Conscious that they might be crowded out by the greater energy and enterprise of white settlers—that they could no longer depend on their means of livelihood in the past, when the buffalo and other game were plentiful, these restless, impulsive, illiterate people were easily led to believe that their only chance of redressing their real or fancied wrongs was such a rising as had taken place on the Red River in {394} 1869. It is believed that English settlers in the Prince ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... excessive expenditure of strength may be seen in the attempt of an illiterate laborer to sign his name. He grips the pen as though it were a crowbar, and puts forth enough strength to handle a twenty-pound weight. Learning to dance, or to skate, or to row a boat, is usually accompanied in the beginning by ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... Franconian herdsman, John Beheim, of Niklashausen—a 'poor illiterate', Trithemius calls him. In the summer of 1476, as he watched his flocks in the fields, he had a vision of the gracious Mother of God, who bade him preach repentance to the people. His fame soon spread, and multitudes gathered from great distances ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... a man not illiterate: he was an inhabitant of Sky, and therefore was within reach of intelligence, and with no great difficulty might have visited the places which he undertakes to describe; yet with all his opportunities, he has often ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... pocket money, and yet sometimes the whole crew including the skipper were apprentices and under twenty-one years of age. Even after that they were fitted for no other calling but to follow the sea, and had to accept the master's terms. There were no fishermen's unions, and the men being very largely illiterate were often left victims of a peonage system in spite of the Truck Acts. The master of a vessel has to keep discipline, especially in a fleet, and the best of boys have faults and need punishing while on land. These skippers themselves were brought up in a rough school, and those who fell ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... therefrom and within quite recent times, and such I am now disposed to think is the case of the Roman version of Aladdin given by Miss Busk under the title of "How Cajusse was Married," notwithstandtng the circumstance that the old woman from whom it was obtained was almost wholly illiterate. A child who could read might have told the story out of Galland to his or her nurse, through whom it would afterwards assume local colour, with some modifications of the details. But stories having all the essential features of the tale of Aladdin were known throughout Europe ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... and cure of disease which have escaped the most sagacious observers of nature. By so doing, we may discover laws of the animal economy which have no place in our system of Nosology, or in our theories of physic. The practice of physic hath been more improved by the casual experiments of illiterate nations, and the rash ones of vagabond quacks, than by all the once celebrated professors of it, and the theoretic teachers in the several schools of Europe, very few of whom have furnished us with one new medicine, or have taught us better to use our old ones, ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... above what we have been taught.... All great men are seen to possess this freedom. They derive their standard from their own natures, and their observations on life are so natural and spontaneous that it would seem as if the most illiterate person with a scrap of common-sense would have made the same.... We become wiser with them, and know not how the difficult appears easy ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... mothers will wish their children to learn English again, and to speak it for all scholarly purposes; and, if they use, instead, Greek or Latin, to use them only that they may be understood by Greeks or Latins;[2] and not that they may mystify the illiterate many of their own land. Dead languages, so called, may at least be left at rest, if not honored; and must not be torn in mutilation out of their tumuli, that the skins and bones of them may help to hold our living nonsense together; while languages called living, but which live only to ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... or the man of large mental endowment, would render miserable the peasant who still lacked the development to appreciate the elegancies of refinement; while the tidy cottage and plain comforts which might constitute the paradise of the humble and illiterate rustic, would be utterly inadequate to the requirements of larger and more ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... surveyed the remains of antiquity at this place, accompanied by an illiterate fellow, as Cicerone, who called himself a descendant of a cousin of Saint Columba, the founder of the religious establishment here. As I knew that many persons had already examined them, and as I saw Dr. Johnson inspecting and measuring several ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... them a finer kind of reward than the financial. Among other things, they understood and respected the dignity of literature, and would not have expected an editor to run a literary venture in the interests of the illiterate. The further degradation of the public taste was not then the avowed object of popular magazines. Indeed—strange as it sounds nowadays—it was rather the education than the degradation of the public taste at which the editor aimed, and in ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... Surgeon General's Office of the Army. The War Department records show that 24.9 per cent. of the draft army examined by that department's agents were unable to read and understand a newspaper, or to write letters home. In one draft in New York State in May, 1918, 16.6 per cent. were classed as illiterate. In one draft in connection with South Carolina troops in July, 1918, 49.5 per cent. where classed as illiterate. In one draft in connection with Minnesota troops in July of the same year, 14.2 per cent. were ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... day, having some occasion to write, the Indian King, who saw me, believ'd that he could write as well as I. Whereupon, I wrote a Word, and gave it him to copy, which he did with more Exactness, than any European could have done, that was illiterate. It was so well, that he who could read mine, might have done the same by his. Afterwards, he took great Delight in making Fish-hooks of his own Invention, which would have been a good Piece for an Antiquary to ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... the rifle of Roy, the Red Wolf. Mrs. Conyers comes up and thanks me an' John Tom without the usual extremities you always look for in a woman. She says just enough, in a way to convince, and there is no incidental music by the orchestra. I made a few illiterate requisitions upon the art of conversation, at which the lady smiles friendly, as if she had known me a week. And then Mr. Little Bear adorns the atmosphere with the various idioms into which education can fracture the wind of speech. I could ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... was an illiterate coffee-house keeper in Salonica, first came to Egypt at the head of a body of Albanians and co-operated with the English against the French. By his extraordinary vigour and intelligence he became the ruler of Lower Egypt, and succeeded in attaching the Mameluke Beys ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... utterance to its meaning, was there. He had hardly surrendered his commission as chaplain in the army. He had fought to win the freedom of a race. To make that race true free men was a task much more vast than to emancipate them. The parting of the ways had come. An illiterate people must be taught. No longer should it be a crime to instruct them. The rather was he the criminal who should deny them an education. It was an hour for the voice of a prophet. With the ken of a seer, Chaplain Cravath, representing the American Missionary Association, Jan. 9th, 1866, ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various
... He who does not allow that it passed creditably to my teachers, profitably to myself, and beneficially to the world, is a narrow-minded and illiterate man, who knows nothing of the ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... done this ting, nailed this insult to Garth's very door. The illiterate characters stamped it as the work of some one in the lower walks of life, and, with a frown of annoyance, Sara promptly—and quite correctly—ascribed it to ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... alone. It had always been the custom of the mountain dwellers to shoulder their guns and go into the thick of every fray which seemed to them in any way to threaten their native land. They went blindly, they fought desperately, and they endured manfully. Ignorant, illiterate, abjectly poor, inured to hardship through generations, they asked no questions the answers to which they could not understand. It was enough for them to know that their native land was invaded by an armed foe. ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... narrative, and the gestour would know how to make the best of incidents which he knew from experience to be specially interesting to an audience. Such yarns would be most attractive to "lewd" or illiterate men— ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... most men, and paralyzes the will. No education will ensure this greatest and most essential quality. It is born in a man, not communicated. With it his acquired knowledge will be doubly useful, but without it an illiterate slave-trader like Forrest may far outshine him as a soldier. Nor does success as a subordinate give any certain assurance of fitness for supreme command. Napoleon's marshals generally failed when trusted with an independent command, as Hooker did with us; and I do not doubt ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... colours predominated. Content with the product of their labour and having few wants, they lived in perfect equality and with extreme frugality. In an age when learning was confined to the few, they were not more illiterate than the corresponding class in other countries. 'In the summer the men were continually employed in husbandry.' They cultivated chiefly the rich marsh-lands by the rivers and the sea, building dikes along the banks and shores to shut out the tides; and made little effort to clear ...
— The Acadian Exiles - A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline • Arthur G. Doughty
... heart, benevolence, manners and every qualification that distinguishes the worthy man. O my dear! what a degree of patience, what a greatness of soul, is required in the wife, not to despise a husband who is more ignorant, more illiterate, more low-minded than herself!—The wretch, vested with prerogatives, who will claim rule in virtue of them (and not to permit whose claim, will be as disgraceful to the prescribing wife as to the governed husband); How shall such a husband as this be borne, were he, for reasons of convenience ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
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