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Didactic   /daɪdˈæktɪk/   Listen
Didactic

adjective
1.
Instructive (especially excessively).  Synonym: didactical.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Didactic" Quotes from Famous Books



... some of the great writers, of Scott's day; borrowing at the same time a later name. I shall start with that strange figure, Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was too subjective to be merely a descriptive poet, too metaphysical to be vague, and too imaginative to be didactic. As Scott was the most dramatic, Wordsworth the most profound, Byron the most passionate, so Shelley was the most spiritual writer of his time. Scott's poetry was the result of vivid emotion, Wordsworth's of quiet observation, Byron's of passion, and Shelley's of passion and reflection. ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall

... to Montesquieu what Homer has been to the didactic writers on epic poetry. As the latter have considered the work of the immortal bard as the perfect model from which the principles and rules of the epic art were to be drawn, and by which all similar works were to be ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

... age ought not to think about convenience. You ought to have been taught to keep things clear and distinct," said Lady Beauleigh in a heavy, didactic voice. ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson

... terms, uncomprehended by any class of readers, be used, it is simply for the sake of brevity; and because, as Kant says, "completeness must not be sacrificed to popularity," the attainment of which would be "a didactic triumph, attained only by omitting everything complicated, and saying only what exists already in ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... the quaintness of the figure are the real subjects of discussion, but all the time the great lesson is making its subtle appeal. Cardinal Newman's Definition of a Gentleman (Volume IV, page 170) is more obviously a didactic selection, but here again the definition is given so clearly and so forcibly that no possible offense can be taken and the weight of the statements will produce their effect without ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester

... intensely moral was it. She had her doubts about it from the beginning, for her lively fancy and girlish romance felt as ill at ease in the new style as she would have done masquerading in the stiff and cumbrous costume of the last century. She sent this didactic gem to several markets, but it found no purchaser, and she was inclined to agree with Mr. Dashwood that morals ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... Victorian period, the latter work has special historical interest for the philosophical and theological student; in this respect it may be likened to Pater's "Marius the Epicurean," which vividly reproduces the Intellectual ferment of an earlier age. "Thorndale," however, is primarily didactic, and the philosophical dialogues (interesting as these are to the metaphysician) hardly atone to the general reader for an almost entire absence of plot. The above is, doubtless, an altogether extreme instance, but the exclusion of several other works from the category of Romance seems ...
— A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales • Jonathan Nield

... it is not susceptible of any other proof; for otherwise, there would be no fallacy. To deduce from a proposition propositions from which it would itself more naturally be deduced, is often an allowable deviation from the usual didactic order; or at most, what, by an adaptation of a phrase familiar to mathematicians, may ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... fantastic, dull, and, although childish, stagnant; that farther, in their fantastic stagnation; they were savage,—and in their innocent dullness, criminal; so that the future character and fortune of the race depended on the critical advent of the didactic and disciplinarian Norman baron, at once to polish ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin

... them; preferred to run away before long: and after him came one and the other, whom the reader is not to be troubled with here. Enough if the patient reader have seen, a little, into that background of Friedrich Wilhelm's existence; and, for the didactic part, have caught up his real views or instincts upon Spiritual Phosphorescence, or Stupidity grown Vocal, which are much sounder ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... Thebais or any other cyclical epic. On the other hand, again, an old tradition tells of the contest between Homer and Hesiod, which proves that when these two names were mentioned people instinctively thought of two epic tendencies, the heroic and the didactic; and that the signification of the name "Homer" was included in the material category and not in the formal. This imaginary contest with Hesiod did not even yet show the faintest presentiment of individuality. From the time ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche

... doctrine, and illustration of the poem depends, as essentially as the plot of the Iliad on the anger of Achilles." [Footnote: Mure's "Language and Literature of Ancient Greece," vol. ii., p.384.] The whole work has been well characterized by another writer as "the most ancient specimen of didactic poetry, consisting of ethical, political, and minute economical precepts. It is in a homely and unimaginative style, but is impressed throughout with a lofty and solemn feeling, founded on the idea that the gods have ordained justice among men, have made labor the ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... two, and some more, while others object to none. We might then proceed to enquire (be the number of them to be admitted, more or less) whether they are equally common to every kind of style; for the narrative, the persuasive, and the didactic have each a manner peculiar to itself; or whether the different species of Oratory should be accommodated with their different numbers. If the same numbers are equally common to all subjects, we ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... being spontaneous—by being a second nature: justly are habits called so. Gentleness of tone and manner—attention to conventional proprieties—to people's little wants and feelings—are of these. This same politeness being a sort of summary of such, I will end this little didactic digression by advising all those who have the rearing of the young in their hands, carefully to form them in matters of this description, so that they shall attain habits—so that the delicacy of their perceptions, the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various

... this stage of my sermon, I must not be tempted to say a word about the light which our Lord throws, in these declarations in the context, into that dim unseen world. His words seem to me to be too solemn and didactic to be taken as accommodations to popular prejudice, and a great deal too grave to be taken as mere metaphor. And I, for my part, am not so sure that, apart from Him, I know all things in heaven and earth, as to venture to put aside these solemn words of His—which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... exegesis. The teachers of the Haggadah, called Rabbanan d'Aggadta in the Talmud, were no folklorists, from whom a faithful reproduction of legendary material may be expected. Primarily they were homilists, who used legends for didactic purposes, and their main object was to establish a close connection between the Scripture and the creations of the popular fancy, to give the latter a firm basis and secure a long ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... to his evident intention that his book should be an appeal to all classes, but especially to the mass of the people, for amendment of their follies. In evidence of this it may be noticed that in the didactic passages, and especially in the L'envois, which are additions of his own, wherever, in fact, he appears in his own character of "preacher," his language is most simple, and his vocabulary ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt

... a significance she had never seen in it before; the tone of the prayer, too, was different from the set didactic utterances too often called prayer, in which there is as much doctrine and as little devotion as extempore prayer is capable of. It was not expostulatory either, as if our Heavenly Father needed much urging to make Him listen to our wants and our aspirations, ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence

... and others, whose knowledge is fragmentary, would like to be at home, too, in that pleasant palace. But it is of the essence of such talk that it should be natural and attractive, not professional or didactic. People who are not used to Universities tend to believe that academical persons are invariably formidable. They think of them as possessed of vast stores of precise knowledge, and actuated by a merciless desire to detect and to ridicule deficiencies of attainment among unprofessional ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson

... can scarcely be of extreme antiquity. Probably, in the original poem, the dead return to rebuke the extreme grief of the Mother, but the poem is perhaps really more affecting in the absence of a didactic motive. Scott obtained it from an old woman in West Lothian. Probably the reading "fashes," (troubles), "in the flood" is correct, not "fishes," or "freshes." The mother desires that the sea may never cease to be troubled till her sons return (verse 4, line 2). The peculiar doom of women dead ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang

... Duff, and some of the other contemporary associatioassociationistsnlsts. In order, however, to emphasize the importance of imagination, by which he largely means the imagistic liveliness of the poet's mind, he allows that the imagination is secondary only in didactic or ethical poetry. Such forms are perhaps best understood as hybrid, a kind of poetizing of philosophy, a sort of reasoning in verse, and therefore forms in which the imagination is not given full exercise. Given his premises it is not surprising that Ogilvie often emphasizes ornamentation ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie

... poems attributed to Hesiod. The Iliad, whatever its date, whatever the place of its composition, was intended to please a noble class of warriors. The Hesiodic poems, at least the Theogony, have clearly a didactic aim, and the intention of presenting a systematic and orderly account of the divine genealogies. To neither would we willingly attribute a date much later than the ninth century of our era, but the question of the dates of all the epic and ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... is the only book of a didactic sort written by Mrs. Prentiss. It is not, however, wholly didactic, but contains also touches of narrative and character that add to its interest. Among the topics discussed are: The Bible, Temptation, ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... very fine to me: I think I should have thought so independent of the original: all except the dry theoretic System, which I must say I do all but skip in the Latin. Yet I venerate the earnestness of the man, and the power with which he makes some music even from his hardest Atoms; a very different Didactic from Virgil, whose Georgics, quoad Georgics, are what every man, woman, and child, must have known; but, his Teaching apart, no one loves him better than I do. I forget if Lucretius is in Dante: he should have ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald

... Observer complaining bitterly of the state of the morass leading to the Aerodrome at Hendon. This gentleman does not realise that there is a didactic purpose in the cause of his annoyance. Learn to fly and you will keep your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various

... Grandma again open her lips. She had seemed to be thinking intently, as if making up her mind how to begin. Perhaps she was praying for guidance, Barrie told herself; but the morning and evening prayers in the dining-room with a few servants assembled were like harangues or didactic instructions to Heaven rather than supplications. Barrie thought that her grandmother had created a God for herself in her own image, and considered that she had a right, therefore, to tell Him what to do. Why should an all-good, all-wise God create a disagreeable, ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... passages in his letters, Clarendon's first intentions are clear. The History was to be a repository of authentic information on 'this most lovely Rebellion', constructed with the specifically didactic purpose of showing the King and his advisers what lessons were to be learned from their errors; they would be 'the wiser for knowing the most secret truths'. At first he looked on his work as containing the materials of a 'perfect story', but as he proceeded his ambitions grew. He had begun to ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various

... upon your subject, you must next consider the tone, or manner, of your narration. There is the tone didactic, the tone enthusiastic, the tone natural—all common—place enough. But then there is the tone laconic, or curt, which has lately come much into use. It consists in short sentences. Somehow thus: Can't be too brief. Can't be too snappish. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... is even probable that, if my father had devoted himself to the art, he might have become the author of some elegant and popular didactic poem, on some ordinary subject, which his fancy would have adorned with grace and his sensibility invested with sentiment; some small volume which might have reposed with a classic title upon our library shelves, and served as a prize volume at Ladies' Schools. This celebrity ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... latest outpouring of the human spirit, and, worst of all, kidnaps young people as pupils and persuades them that his limitations are rules, his observances dexterities, his timidities good taste, and his emptinesses purities. And when he declares that art should not be didactic, all the people who have nothing to teach and all the people who don't want to ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... into his waistcoat, and in his most didactic of tones).—"From a remote period, the choice of a title has perplexed the scribbling portion of mankind. We may guess how their invention has been racked by the strange contortions it has produced. To begin with the Hebrews. 'The Lips of the Sleeping' ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... leave Herr Liebert, because everything I say to him causes him to hop, flying somewhere to show me something, and I am sure it is bad for his foot. I go and see that my men are safely quartered. Kefalla is laying down the law in a most didactic way to the soldiers. Herr Liebert has christened him "the Professor," and I adopt the name for him, but I fear "Windbag" would fit ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... collection is not didactic. If it were it would be a school-book and not an anthology in the Greek sense, where the first principle was to seek what was of literary value, artistic in expression, and noble in thought. Yet the mere bringing together of examples of prose from the writings of the great ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various

... book," though jointly purchased by the Basins from a travelling salesman, as a highly illuminated volume, promising much of a lively nature, had turned out to be to an altogether unexpected degree serious and didactic. ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... failure of her efforts. Denis's deductions were, of course, a little less direct than his mother's. He had, besides, been fond of Arthur, and his efforts to keep the poor fellow straight had been less didactic and more spontaneous. Their result read itself, if not in any change in Arthur's character, at least in the revised wording of his will; and Denis's moral sense was pleasantly fortified by the discovery that it very substantially paid to ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton

... the moral sentiments in the human heart, in early life,—and every thing in fact which relates to the formation of character,—is determined in a far greater degree by sympathy, and by the influence of example, than by formal precepts and didactic instruction. If a boy hears his father speaking kindly to a robin in the spring,—welcoming its coming and offering it food,—there arises at once in his own mind, a feeling of kindness toward the bird, and toward all the animal creation, ...
— Stuyvesant - A Franconia Story • Jacob Abbott

... act and authority of Jerome, contributed to fix in their ever since undisturbed harmony and majesty, the canons of Mosaic and Apostolic Scripture. All that the young reader need know is, that when Jerome died at Bethlehem, this great deed was virtually accomplished: and the series of historic and didactic books which form our present Bible, (including the Apocrypha) were established in and above the nascent thought of the noblest races of men living on the terrestrial globe, as a direct message to them from its Maker, containing whatever it was necessary for them ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin

... structure. The serranas are particularly free and unconventional. The Chancellor Pero LOPEZ DE AYALA (1332-1407), wise statesman, brilliant historian and trenchant page xiv satirist, wrote religious songs in the same style and still more intricate in versification. They are included in the didactic poem usually ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various

... satisfactory as, the epistles of 1613 prepared under the Advocate's instructions, had been, while the exuberant commentary upon the royal text, delivered in full assembly by his ambassador soon after the reception of the letter, was more than usually didactic, offensive, and ignorant. Sir Dudley never omitted an opportunity of imparting instruction to the States-General as to the nature of their constitution and the essential dogmas on which their Church was founded. It is true that the great lawyers and the great theologians of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... longest study I have said little, save incidentally, either of treatment or prevention. The omission of such considerations at this stage is intentional. It may safely be said that in no other field of human activity is so vast an amount of strenuous didactic morality founded on so slender a basis of facts. In most other departments of life we at least make a pretence of learning before we presume to teach; in the field of sex we content ourselves with the smallest and vaguest minimum of information, often ostentatiously ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... club was often, as was to be expected from its composition, scientific, but Professor Playfair says it was always free, and never didactic or disputatious, and that "as the club was much the resort of the strangers who visited Edinburgh from any objects connected with art or with science, it derived from them an extraordinary ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae

... the American press, and show up the sausage-venders and Cleons of the Republic in their true light? How long will the richest field of national folly in the world remain unreaped, save by the crotchety sickles of dull moralists and didactic pamphleteers? ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various

... the shelter of respectable lodgings; his next, to introduce himself, to explain his projects and to submit his tragedy to the manager of a London theatre. The manuscript was returned after some months delay, with the intimation that it was too poetic and too didactic, and would require extensive revision before it could be brought upon the stage. Accident, rather than good luck, threw Banim across his path, and he proved to be a valuable and a faithful friend. In the little sanctum ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various

... and I was wrong, and gladly gave myself up to hear. He never was in haste to publish; partly because he corrected a good deal.... He preferred such of his poems as touched the affections to any others; for whatever is didactic—what theories of society, and so on—might perish quickly, but whatever combined a truth with an affection was good to-day and good for ever" (English Traits, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... of a right mind knows not this, and who with a wrong one will heed it? The only point is that the commonest truisms come upon utterance sometimes, and take didactic form too late; even as we shout to our comrade prone, and beginning to rub his poor nose, "Look out!" And this is what everybody did with one accord, when he was down upon his luck—which is ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... to her advice, and when he was nearly fifty years of age became a poet. He had acquired the faculty of verse-writing, as we have seen; he had even to some extent formed his manner when he was young. Age must by this time have quenched his fire, and tamed his imagination, so that the didactic style would suit him best. In the length of the interval between his early poems and his great work he resembles Milton; but widely different in the two cases had been the current of the intervening years. Poetry written late in life ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith

... tones, the kindly eye, and the mirth-provoking look of Lincoln. His voice was husky, his manner didactic, and his physique unimposing, but he had the gift of expression, and the ability to formulate his opinions and marshal his facts in lucid sentences that harmonised with Northern sentiments and became at once the creed and rallying cry of his party; and, on this occasion, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... struggled bravely against physical weakness, but their work has not usually been of a creative order, dependent for its success on high animal spirits. They have written histories, essays, contemplative or didactic poems, works which may more or less be regarded as 'dull narcotics numbing pain.' But who, in so fragile a frame as Robert Louis Stevenson's, has retained such indomitable elasticity, such fertility of invention, such unflagging energy, not merely to collect and arrange, but to project ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... effect, but also the cause of a deficiency of striking genius in the candidates for the laurel. Collins and Gray were dead; Mason had hung up the lyre; and Thomas Warton was then thought too laboured and quaint; Hayley had succeeded beyond expectation by a return to moral and didactic poetry at a moment when the public was satiated by vile imitations of lyrical and descriptive composition; but Cowper gave a new impulse to the curiosity of poetical readers, by a natural train of thought and the unlaboured effusions of genuine feeling. There is no doubt that ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins

... the Water Lily. Then Joe was on board, and the flag was because Nancy was in trouble. The reasoning was intuitive rather than didactic; but the conviction was so forcible that I instinctively rose to return to the hospital for the black bag that is my fidus Achates ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... of them are performed in the course of the day at the temple of Bhuvaneshwar in Orissa. It is clear that the spirit of these rites is very different from that which inspires public worship in other civilized countries at the present day. They are not congregational or didactic, though if any of the faithful are in the temple at the time of the god's levee it is proper for them to enter and salute him. Neither do they recall the magical ceremonies of the Vedic sacrifices.[415] The waving of lights (arati) before the god and the ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... a Roman poet of whose personal history nothing is known, only that he was the author of a poem entitled "De Rerum Natura," a philosophic, didactic composition in six books, in which he expounds the atomic theory of Leucippus, and the philosophy of Epicurus; the philosophy of the work commends itself only to the atheist and the materialist, but the style is the admiration of all scholars, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... matter with which he has a bowing acquaintance. That an expert should sit mute when his own subject is in debate, surprises your statesman profoundly. That the expert should not be brimming over with a didactic and confident flow of words when he has been invited to promulgate his views, confounds your statesman altogether. General Wolfe-Murray never seemed to succeed in getting on quite the proper terms ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... intensity of admiration with which I read it. It seemed to me, as I told my nieces, that our English fiction writers had better shut up altogether and have done with it, for one will have no patience with any but didactic writing after yours. My nieces (and you may have heard that Maria, my nurse, is very, very clever) are thoroughly possessed with the book, and Maria says she feels as if a fresh department of human ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... question indeed which among those who care for him most has always been at issue. Or again, what degree of true inspiring and illuminating power belongs to the gospel, or gospels, airily encouraging or gravely didactic, which are set forth in the essays with so captivating a grace? Or whether in romance and tale he had a power of inventing and constructing a whole fable comparable to his admitted power of conceiving and presenting single scenes and situations in a manner which stamps them indelibly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... To be didactic and at the same time demonstrative of affection is difficult, even with mothers towards their children, though with them the assumption of authority creates no sense of injury. Emily specially desired to point out to the erring one the ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope

... impelled by their own evolutional process to seek the development in themselves of these psychic powers; and to these a word of warning seems necessary, so that at the risk of appearing didactic I must essay the task. To some it may seem unwelcome, to others redundant and supererogatory. But we are dealing with a new stage in evolutional progress—the waking up of new forces in ourselves and the prospective ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial

... some curious observations I should like to make about the mental machinery, but I think we are getting rather didactic. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... may be learned from didactic works or from general military histories. There are very few good elementary works on this branch of the military art. The general treatises of the Archduke Charles, and of General Wagner, in German, (the former has been translated into French,) are considered as the best. The ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck

... addressing a people of peasants, used the same license with his metres that we have observed in other poetries of his own race. Nor is it credible that whatever the purpose of his message was—reminiscence, or dirge, or threat of doom or call to repent, or a didactic purpose—Jeremiah, throughout the very various conditions of his long ministry of forty years, employed but one metre and that only in its strictest form allowing of no irregularities. This, I ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... pity changes to respect. Surely it is a most potent egg, a gallinaceous Swift. After all, anything but pointless and childless, since it has this strange quality of being offensive and engendering thought. Food for the mind if not food for the body—didactic if not delightful—a bit of modern literature, earnest and fundamentally real. I must try and understand you, Ibsen Ovarum. Possibly it is a profound parable I have stumbled upon. Though I scarcely reckoned on a parable with my bread and butter. Frankly, I must confess ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells

... With the story of the small boy who stole a pin, repented of and confessed that crime, and then became a good and great man, I was as familiar as if I myself had invented that ingenious and instructive tale; I could lisp the moral numbers of Watts and the didactic hymns of Wesley, and the annual reports of the American Tract Society had already revealed to me the sphere of usefulness in which my grandmother hoped I would ultimately figure with discretion and zeal. And yet my heart was free; wholly ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field

... limitations and peculiarities of the language, have prevented the possibility of the appearance of such divine geniuses. There is, its critics declare, an absence of sustained power and sublimity in Japanese literature generally, while the didactic and philosophical, if not altogether lacking, is extremely rare therein. But it seems to me the height of absurdity to compare the literature of a country like Japan with the literature of some other land where everything is, and always has been, essentially different. To properly comprehend, ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... skill, his force lay in vituperation, sarcasm, and repartee. 'To Sokrates,' says Epiktetus, 'Zeus assigned the cross-examining function; to Diogenes, the magisterial and chastising function; to Zeno (the Stoic), the didactic and dogmatical.' ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... Something of the peculiar virtue of each of these Puritan writers seems to have given tone to Hawthorne's no less individual nature. In Bunyan, who very early laid his hand on Hawthorne's intellectual history, we find a very fountain-head of allegory. His impulse, of course, was supremely didactic, only so much of mere narrative interest mixing itself with his work as was inseparable from his native relish for the matter of fact; while in Milton's poetry the clear aesthetic pleasure held at least ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... more than once received important information through my dreams," said my companion in the didactic manner which he loved to affect. "I make it a rule now when I am in doubt upon any material point to place the article in question beside me as I sleep, and to hope for some enlightenment. The process ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... meaning and of the functions of the writ hardly less remarkable than that evinced in the passage from "Henry VIII.," though expressed in a different manner, owing chiefly to the fact that Drayton wrote a didactic poem and Shakespeare a drama. But Drayton is not known to have been an attorney's clerk, nor has he been suspected, from his writings, or any other cause, to have had any knowledge of the law. Both he and Shakespeare, however, read ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various

... on about "popple," the local word for poplar, and the right month for peeling and whether it really paid to cut it if you had to hire. Raven loved Dick at times like these, when he was neither sulky over Nan's aloofness nor didactic about democracy and free verse. Amelia choked ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... fecundity and a more directly successful appeal to the public, were, somewhat later, the characteristics of Perez y Galdos, whose vigorous novels, spoiled a little for a foreign reader by their didactic diffuseness, are well-known in this country. In the hands of Galdos, a further step was taken by Spanish fiction towards the rejection of romantic optimism and the adoption of a modified realism. In Pereda, so the Spanish critics tell us, a still more valiant ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds

... so little to be done for their young, it is no wonder, in a didactic and over-articulate world, that parent Tridges take almost too kindly to sententiousness; and young Tridges, being so numerous as to constitute a public meeting in themselves, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 30, 1917 • Various

... us very near the essential difference between prose and poetry, or rather between the poetic and the didactic treatment of a subject. The essence of creative art is always the same; namely, interior movement and fusion; while the method of the didactic or prosaic treatment is fixity, limitation. The latter must formulate and define; but the principle of the former is to flow, to suffuse, ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... could compose lyrics in Arabic and Turkish as well as in Persian. He was even led to give forth erotic verses. Fondly we hope that he did this last at the command of some patron or ruler! But Sa'di is known to us chiefly by his didactic works, and for these we cherish him. The "Bustan," or "Tree-Garden," is the more sober and theoretical, treating of the various problems and questions of ethics, and filled with Mystic ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... (HEINEMANN) brings Mr. EDEN PHILLPOTTS back to Devonshire, and I wave my little flag to welcome him. Of late he has sometimes been a shade too didactic for my liking, but here he gives us yet another plain tale of his beloved moor, and he is instructive only in showing the danger of too much money—a danger at which most of us can in these days afford to smile. The Mortimers ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various

... dear," she said in her didactic, slow voice, "as well as we do, what the world is. Of course we understand, but people ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White

... Church Fathers, born about 250 A.D., and died about 330, probably at Treves. He wrote Divinarum Institutionum Libri VII. and other controversial and didactic works against the learning and ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... living at the age of seventy-five."[243] The one supernatural idea which seems to have deepened with old age and remained undisturbed to the end was his belief in his attendant genius. In what he wrote during his last years his mood was almost entirely introspective, contemplative, and didactic, yet here and there he introduces a sentence which lets in a little light from his way of life and personal affairs, and helps to show how he occupied himself, and what his humour was. He tells how one day, in 1576, he was writing about the fennel plant in his treatise De Tuenda Sanitate, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... may have written The Editor with a "purpose," his vivid dramatic sense kept him from becoming merely didactic. The little tragedy that takes place amongst this homely group of people makes quite a moving play, thanks to the skill with which the types are depicted—the bourgeois father and mother, with their mixture of timidity and self-interest; the manly, straightforward young politician, resolute ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... antiquity. This, added to the crude wild life which he pictures, the vigorous sweep of his action, the sincere glow of romance which bathes his story—all so tonic in their effect upon minds long used to the stuffy decorum of didactic poetry, completed the triumph of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... of these sets was imitated in style from Miss Edgeworth; he called it, "Harry and Lucy Concluded; or, Early Lessons." Didactic he was from the beginning. It was to be in four volumes, uniform in red leather, with proper title, frontispiece, and "copper-plates," "printed and composed by a little boy, and also drawn." It was begun in 1826, and continued at intervals ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood

... amazing versatility he reminds us of the gentleman who wrote the immortal handbills for Mrs. Jarley, for his subjects range from Dr. Carter Moffatt and the Ammoniaphone to Mr. Whiteley, Lady Bicyclists, and the Immortality of the Soul. His verses in praise of Zoedone are a fine example of didactic poetry, his elegy on the death of Jumbo is quite up to the level of the subject, and the stanzas on ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... nature of things, ignorant of dialectic philosophy, and therefore incapable of naming rightly what they had failed to apprehend correctly. Plato's view of actual language, as far as it can be made out from the critical and negative rather than didactic and positive dialogue of "Kratylos," seems to have been very much the same as his view of actual government. Both fall short of the ideal, and both are to be tolerated only in so far as they participate in the perfections of an ideal state and an ideal language.[2] Plato's "Kratylos" is ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... direct ethical influence of natural objects may be overrated. Nature is not didactic, but simply healthy. She helps everything to its legitimate development, but applies no goads, and forces on us no sharp distinctions. Her wonderful calmness, refreshing the whole soul, must aid both conscience and intellect in the end, but sometimes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... the same writer, "of the increase of indirect consumption. Vain would be the attempt to acquit Parisian adulteration: it exists; it has its masters, its adepts, its literature, its didactic and classic treatises. . . . France possessed exquisite wines; what has been done with them? What has become of this splendid wealth? Where are the treasures created since Probus by the national genius? And yet, when one considers the excesses to which wine gives rise wherever it is dear, wherever ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... which the latter indulged in unsympathetic deceptions or even in practical jokes. The objection, however, is not only false, but very much the reverse of the facts. The fairy-tales are at root not only moral in the sense of being innocent, but moral in the sense of being didactic, moral in the sense of being moralising. It is all very well to talk of the freedom of fairyland, but there was precious little freedom in fairyland by the best official accounts. Mr. W.B. Yeats and other ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton

... direct American intervention in favour of the Spanish prisoners. General Rios, whose importance was being overshadowed by Senor Fuset's productive activity, cabled to Madrid that he would attend to the matter himself. But the didactic tone of his letters to Aguinaldo was not conducive to a happy result, and having frankly confessed his failure, the general made an appeal to the consuls and foreign merchants to exercise conjointly their influence. A letter of appeal from them was therefore drawn up and ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... the mind of youth of both sexes"; the author of "Sanford and Merton" has here his literary progenitor. The sub-title, "or Virtue Rewarded," also indicates the homiletic nature of the book. And since the one valid criticism against all didactic aims in story-telling is that it is dull, Richardson, it will be appreciated, ran a mighty risk. But this he was able to escape because of the genuine human interest of his tales and the skill he displayed with psychologic analysis ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton

... raise inquiries, not to give instruction. A story must stimulate not merely inform. This is the trouble with our "informational literature" for children, of which very little is worthy of the name. Indeed, I am not sure it is not a contradiction of terms. It is frankly didactic. It aims to make clear certain facts, not to stimulate thought. It assumes that if a child swallows a fact it must nourish him. To give the child material with which to experiment,—this lies outside its present range. Reaction ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell

... that better things have been expected of one may be soothing in view of how much better things one had expected from oneself in this art which, in these days, is no longer justified by the assumption, somewhere and somehow, of a didactic purpose. ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad

... departing from that of his original. He has almost re-created the stanza for his purpose, giving it new movement, and successfully adapting to the exigencies of dialogue and of narrative what has hitherto chiefly been associated with elegiac and didactic poetry. Something of this may be seen in the following passages (from the description of the transit through the frozen circle of Caina), which moreover appear to us among the best sustained of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... arithmetic, recipes, prescriptions, marvels of science or pseudo-science, conundrums, tables of the assize of food; the laws respecting the sale of meat, bread, beer, wine, and other necessaries; while above and beyond all are a collection in various handwritten of ballads, songs, hymns, and didactic poems of a religious kind, some few of which have been met with elsewhere; but of the greater number of them no other ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... with disdain. From thenceforward they laboured upon the Grecian model; and though they were never able to rival their masters in dramatic composition, they soon surpassed them in many of the more soothing kinds of poetry. Elegiac, pastoral, and didactic compositions began to assume new beauties in the Roman language; and satire, not that rude kind of dialogue already mentioned, but a nobler ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... because they have studied the subject less. Biased, as we may be, both by our knowledge and by our ignorance, it is easy for men to differ respecting matters of expediency; but that clearness, order, and consistency, are both expedient, and requisite, in didactic compositions, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... we have a record in the elegies of Theognis, in which the poet has embodied, for the benefit of Kurnus his friend, the ripe experience of an eventful life. The poems for the most part are didactic in character, consciously and deliberately aimed at the instruction and guidance of the man to whom they are addressed; but every now and again the passion breaks through which informs and inspires this virile intercourse, and in such a passage as the following gives us the key to this and to all ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... being didactic, he upheld his end in most discussions on applied sciences or philosophic arguments, putting forth his deep knowledge in an unobtrusive way. I found this trait to be an invariable rule with most of the Japanese ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves

... attractive, has been married since the age of eighteen. She has two children, and her husband, ten years her senior, is a man of whose character she says, "Every one thinks he is perfect." A little overstaid and over dignified, inclined to be pompous and didactic, he is kind-hearted and loyal, and successful in a small business. He is an immigrant Swiss and she is American ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson

... our own novelists, who had at one time a fair degree of transient popularity. A lack of skill in the creation or accurate delineation of individual character, which, instead of representing men and women, are didactic exhibitions of the author himself, projected into various personages, and all bearing an unmistakable family resemblance—this it is that is at the bottom of the sudden decadence into which the writings of one or two of our more prolific ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... she must bear months of silence, knowing that they may perish at sea or fall into the hands of privateers; but she writes with indomitable cheer, sending the lad tender letters of good advice, a little didactic to modern taste, but throbbing with affection. "Dear as you are to me," says this tender mother, "I would much rather you should have found your grave in the ocean you have crossed than see you an immoral, profligate, or ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... makes me too weak. Do they mean in the head, I wonder?... "Let the sanguine then take warning, and the disheartened take courage, for to every hope and every fear, to every joy and every sorrow, there comes a last day," which is but a didactic form of dear Mademoiselle Descuillier's conjuring of our impatiences: "Cela viendra, ma chere, cela viendra, car tout vient dans ce monde; cela passera, ma chere, cela passera, car tout passe dans ce monde." ... I finished my drawing, and copied some of "The Star of Seville." ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... In didactic poetry, Lucretius was preeminent, and is regarded by Schlegel as the first of Roman poets in native genius. [Footnote: Born B.C. 95, died B.C. 52. Smith's Dict.] He lived before the Augustan era, and died at the age of forty-two by his own hand. His great ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... perhaps we are right. As to conversation, there is no use in sending the bucket into the well when the well is dry—it only makes a rattling of windlass and chain. We do not wish to be understood to be an enemy of the light traffic of human speech. Deliver us from the didactic and the everlastingly improving style of thing! Conversation, in order to be good, and intellectually inspiring, and spiritually restful, need not always be serious. It must be alert and intelligent, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... didactic that night. If he had been simply loving, he would have done Little Dorrit more good; but she accepted him as he was—when had she not accepted him as he was!—and made the most and best of him. Mrs General at length retired. Her retirement for the night was always her frostiest ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... didactic point of view, this prologue is a gratuitous impertinence. Not so its music. Structurally, it is little more than a loose-jointed pot-pourri; but it serves the purpose of a thematic catalogue to the chief melodic incidents of the play which is to follow. In this it bears a faint ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... told her the news. She was sitting behind her tea and coffee things, staring at him: he, on his part, a cup of tea in one hand, a dry biscuit in the other, was marching up and down the room sipping and munching, and holding forth, in didactic fashion, on crime and detection. Miss Raven gave me a glance as I slipped into a place ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher

... became slightly censorious and mildly didactic, and slowly Isidore Diamantstein came to forsake the paths of evil and to spend long afternoons in the serene and admiring companionship of Morris Mogilewsky, Patrick Brennan and Nathan Spiderwitz. But when, early in December, ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly

... printed at Northallerton in 1831. Twelve years later it occupies the first place in a volume of poems published by the author at Whitby under the title, Awd Isaac, The Steeplechase, and Other Poems. Like most of his other poems, "Awd Isaac" is strongly didactic and religious; its homely piety and directness of speach have won for it a warm welcome among the North Yorkshire peasantry, and many a farmer and farm-labourer still living knows much of the poem by heart. As "Awd Isaac " is too long for ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman

... life as a spectacle, which made up so much of the artist's attitude? When one had a wife and child one no longer enjoyed tragedies—one lived, them; and one got from them, not katharsis, but exhaustion. One became timid and cautious and didactic, and other inartistic things. One learned that life was real, life was earnest, and the grave was ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... stanza vi. line 3), which was written about the same time as the despatch. Byron quotes them in his "Ode from the French," stanza iv. line 8 (see Poetical Works, 1900, iii. 434, note 1). There is a satirical allusion to the Duke's "assumption of the didactic" about teaching a "great moral lesson" in the Preface to the first number of the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... bribes, almonds and raisins, and bumpers of sweet wine. But mark the difference between him and the pig. Instead of greasy letters and old cards, which are used for the learned pig, before the little human animal are cast the finest morsels from our first authors, selections from our poets, didactic, pathetic, and ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth

... can," he finished, feeling inadequate and hopelessly didactic. "Cure them; send them out with a smile; and—leave the ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... Colophon, an Alexandrian didactic poet. The [Greek: theriaka] survives, is over 1,000 lines long, and deals with the bites of ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius

... five years more, (February 1746,) he was nominated one of the Physicians to the Hospital for Invalid Soldiers behind Buckingham House; and in 1760, Physician to the Army in Germany. Meantime (in 1744) he had published his Art of Preserving Health, a didactic poem, that soon made its way to notice, and which, by the judiciousness of the precepts, might have tended to raise some opinion of his medical skill. At the ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... Way" belongs to the second group of Bjoernson's novels, of which the first group is represented by early peasant tales like "Arne." In this later category the stories are of a more or less didactic nature. Although "In God's Way" lacks something of the freshness and beauty that distinguished "Arne," it is, nevertheless a powerful and vivid picture of Norwegian religious life; and it is, of all Bjoernson's books, the one by which he is most widely known outside his native country. In this ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various

... officially a King withal, comported himself in the Eighteenth Century, and managed not to be a Liar and Charlatan as his Century was, deserves to be seen a little by men and kings, and may silently have didactic ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle

... More ingenious, more didactic, and altogether more meritorious than these is another series of designs belonging to the same period of time. They are not only as a rule conceived in better taste, but are, almost consequently, better in their execution. The following example from Cooling, a small ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent

... in one of the inner rooms, was writing a home letter, which was chiefly remarkable for what it failed to relate. It gave long accounts of the scenery, it waxed didactic over the future of the country; but the adventures of the trip, with her incidental acquaintance with the Daxes and Chugg, were not recorded. Eudora announced the arrival of Mrs. Yellett, and Mary, at the news, dropped the contents of her portfolio and started up with much the feeling a marooned ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... to matters more didactic. Diamonds are not imbedded in rock ledges fifty miles long, like the Johannesburg gold, but are distributed through the rubbish of a filled-up well, so to speak. The well is rich, its walls are sharply ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... nothing else? Without affirming that it is so, we may at least ask the question. If other poets of our time show more intellectual strength than he, are they, perchance, given sometimes to adulterating their poetry with ratiocination and didactic preachments such as were better left to the proseman? Without affirming that it is so, we may at least ask the question. If other poets of our time can reach a finer frenzy than he and give it voice ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... the children of God, his followers have honoured his memory by re-erecting in a new place the barriers which he laboured to cast down. But his wonderful songs survive, the spontaneous expressions of his vision and his love; and it is by these, not by the didactic teachings associated with his name, that he makes his immortal appeal to the heart. In these poems a wide range of mystical emotion is brought into play: from the loftiest abstractions, the most otherworldly passion for the Infinite, to the most intimate and personal realization ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)

... comfort that Alves derived from this unusually didactic speech was the assurance that he would not be drawn away from her. She bowed to his conception, and sought to help him. While he was attending the cases in Burnside, she did some work as nurse. Beginning ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... She also made a compilation from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Free-holder, with a preliminary discourse, which she published in 1811. It was called 'The Female Speaker,' and intended for young women. The same year her 'Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,' a patriotic didactic poem, wounded national self-love and drew upon her much unfriendly criticism, which so pained her that she would publish no more. But the stirring lines were widely read, and in them Macaulay found the original of his famous traveler from New Zealand, who meditates ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... themselves, caused them, with more or less of firmness, to constitute themselves into a society, partly monastic, partly predicatory, called "Pre-Raphaelite": and also recognized as such, with indignation, by the public, caused the youthfully didactic society to be regarded with various degrees of contempt, passing into anger (as of offended personal dignity), and embittered farther, among certain classes of persons, even into a ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... exploited the aesthetic values to be had by knowledge. They pursued erudition and built their poetry upon erudition, not in the didactic way of the Augustans, but as a mine of poetic material and suggestion. Far more truly than Wordsworth's this poetry could claim to be the impassioned expression which is in the face of science; for Wordsworth's knowledge is a mystic insight wholly estranged from erudition; his celandine, ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various

... to express that we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the beauty; that we learn by rote before we can get by heart; that the freshness is worn away, and the future pleasure and advantage deadened and destroyed by the didactic anticipation, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of compositions, which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as Latin and Greek, to relish or to reason upon. For the same reason, we never can be aware of the ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... the easiest, in which even the Prophet was caught napping sometimes, at the dangerous risk of following the perilous leadership of Imru 'l-Kays. It is the metre of improvisation, of ditties, and of numerous didactic poems. In the latter case, when the composition is called Urjuzah, the two lines of every Bayt rhyme, and each Bayt has a rhyme of its own. This is the form in which, for instance, Ibn Malik's Alfiyah is written, as well as the remarkable ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... can persist! The racy old odors, which are as new as now, that still hover about the political and amorous quips of the Greeks. The nose-crinkling ones of the French, more vinegar-acrid than perfumed, although a seventeenth-century proverb calls France "a monarchy tempered by epigrams." The didactic Teutonic ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland

... not a series of nursery-rules for man—formal, didactic droppings of a pedant's tongue. Homiletics is the appeal of man to man, for the welfare of his soul, and the true progress of mankind. Exegesis is not a matter of Hebrew or Greek alone. It includes the spiritual interpretation of the great problems of the race. Homer, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... undoubtedly heretical, and in the Oxford of 1849 heresy was the unpardonable sin. The Senior Tutor of Exeter, the Reverend William Sewell, burnt the book during a lecture in the College Hall. Sewell, afterwards founder and first Warden of Radley, was a didactic Churchman, always talking or writing, seldom thinking, who contributed popular articles to The Quarterly Review. The editor, Lockhart, knew their value well enough. They tell one nothing, he said, they mean nothing, they are nothing, but they ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... the soul. There is a fine art of passion, but an impassioned fine art is a contradiction in terms, for the infallible effect of the beautiful is emancipation from the passions. The idea of an instructive fine art (didactic art) or improving (moral) art is no less contradictory, for nothing agrees less with the idea of the beautiful than to give a determinate tendency ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... expressed may enter her mind in the form of approval and not of condemnation, and the effect will be very different. The sentiments will, at any rate, now not be rejected from the mind, but the way will be open for them to enter, and the conversation will have a good effect, so far as didactic teaching can have effect in ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott

... creature into a lackadaisical young lady; though, as she tried her very best to do so, none ought to blame her because she failed of success. All her stock of novels she lent to Laura, who read them, every one, in secret, skipping only the dull and didactic pages. That she was not spoiled by this experiment was due less to the strength of Laura's understanding than to the liveliness of her temper, which, in this strait, stood her in very good stead of more solid qualities and a wiser experience. As it was, she learned to talk in a romantic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... the university likewise differ in their methods of work. The college seeks the highest results in discipline. Its method is more formal and didactic. In the later years of the college course a certain amount of specialization is usually allowed, both for the ends of discipline and as a provision for the work of the university proper. The university adopts ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker

... in everything; and we should not deign to notice it, if it had occurred in a work of small pretensions; but M. Curmer's book professes to be a complete exposition of the scientific principles of cookery, and holds a high rank in the didactic literature of France. We half suspect that M. Curmer obtained his knowledge of English beef in the same way as did the poor Frenchman, whom the late Mr. Mathews, the comedian, so humorously described. Mr. Lewis, in his "Physiology of Common Life," has thus revived ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton



Words linked to "Didactic" :   instructive, informative



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