"Precocity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... children in the strictest propriety, welcomed as play-mates for her dears, whom she had kept away from the contaminating associations of the alleys, Belgian children from the toughest quarters of Antwerp, who had a precocity that led to baffling confusion in Mrs. Smith's mind between parental responsibility and patriotic duty. Smart society gave the run of its houses sometimes to gentry who were used to getting the run of that kind of houses by lifting a window with a jemmy on a dark night. ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... was born at Harborne, Staffordshire, England, Aug. 2, 1823. His precocity as a child was remarkable; at seven he read English and Roman history, and at eleven he had acquired a knowledge of Greek and Latin, and had taught himself the rudiments of Hebrew. An increase in fortune in 1848 enabled him to settle down and devote himself to historical ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... cathedral, whilst the long winter evenings were beguiled with fairy-tales and fables, his mother and nurse reading or reciting these, their little listener being always busy with pen or pencil. Something much more than mere precocity is shown in these almost infantine sketches. Exorbitant fancy is here much less striking than sureness of touch, outlined figures drawn between the age of five and ten displaying remarkable precision ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... redeemed another puppy. Now it is very singular that she should have only taken two, the exact number she had been deprived of. Does this not prove to a certain extent the power of calculating numbers in animals? and does not the precocity of the two puppies brought up by the cat, infer there is some grounds for the supposition that with the milk is imbued much of the nature and disposition of the mother? A few experiments made on these points would be ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... The boy's intellectual capacities were steadily, if not systematically, cultivated, sometimes at the expense of his bodily development. It was not unusual for a child of seven or eight to handle a difficult problem in the Talmud, a precocity characteristic to this day of the children hailing from Slavonic countries. Their 'illuyim (prodigies) might furnish ample material for more than one ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... nineteen when he commanded at Towton, at the head of almost fifty thousand men; and two months before he had gained the Battle of Mortimer's Cross, under circumstances that showed skillful generalship. No similar instance of precocity is to be found in the military history of mankind. His victories have been attributed to Warwick, but it is noticeable that he was as successful over Warwick as he had been over the Lancastrians, against whom Warwick originally fought. Barnet was, with fewer combatants, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... had descended to Sylvia amusingly. She had never attended school, but he had taught her systematically at home, and his interests were hers. The students attributed to her the most abstruse knowledge, and stories of her precocity were repeated proudly by the Lane folk. Many evenings spent with her grandfather at the observatory had not been wasted. She knew the paths of the stars as she knew the walks of the campus. Dr. Wandless, the president emeritus, addressed her always as "My Lady of the Constellations," ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... from his place among the men, a step or two outside of the bar, and did not make a remark while his father remained. It was plain from this, that Mr. Slade was not only aware of Frank's dangerous precocity, but had already marked his forwardness ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... and his theorem.* One does not have to believe all the marvelous stories of Pascal's admiring sisters to credit him with wonderful precocity. We have the fact that in 1640, when he was sixteen years old, he published a little placard, or poster, entitled "Essay pour les conique,"(11) in which his great theorem appears for the first time. His manner of putting it may be a little puzzling to one who has only seen it in the form ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... under the Ruling of Beneficent Providence, was the Happy Preserver of a Beautiful and Precious Life of Virtuous Precocity, this Box is presented by the Father of Him whom He saved as a grateful acknowledgment of ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... still hung over him. If it fell—as it might at any fatal moment—then the utmost were indeed done upon him; and this apprehension bathed his soul in night. In his own circle of congenial age and sex he was, by virtue of superior bitterness and precocity of speech, a chief—a moral castigator, a satirist of manners, a creator of stinging nicknames; and many nourished unhealed grievances which they had little hope of satisfying against him; those who attempted it invariably departing with more to avenge than they had brought ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... the pure-mindedness of these aspirations, without reverting to her origin, and also to recent rumours of her father and Lady Grace Halley. As it was, he inquired of the cognizant, whether an intellectual precocity, devoted by preference to questions affecting the state of women, did not rather more than suggest the existence of urgent senses likewise. She, a girl under twenty, had an interest in public matters, and she called on a Mrs. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... children's conversation has perhaps never been told quite so charmingly as du Maurier tells it. We could quote endlessly from the admirably constructed nursery dialogues in which he does not attempt to make a joke, and in which he very carefully refrains from giving a fantastic precocity to his little characters—dialogues in which he is quite content to rely upon our sympathetic knowledge of children's way of putting things, while he rests the appeal of the drawing and legend entirely upon a naive literalness to their remarks. The ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... by many given up, and precocity is discouraged. People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal. The once universal practice of learning by rote is daily falling into discredit. We are substituting ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... have a saying that every Rajput is a king's son, and every Rajputni worthy to be married to an emperor. It was in that atmosphere that Yasmini learned she must either use her wits or be outwitted, and women begin young to assert their genius in the East. But she outstripped precocity and, being Western too, rode rough-shod on convention when it suited her, reserving her concessions to it solely for occasions when those matched the hand she held. All her life she has had to play in a ruthless game, but the trump that she has learned to lead oftenest is unexpectedness. ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... who object to it (not counting coarse people who thoughtlessly seize every opportunity of affecting and parading a fictitious delicacy) are, in effect, advocating ignorance as a safeguard against precocity. If ignorance were practicable there would be something to be said for it up to the age at which ignorance is a danger instead of a safeguard. Even as it is, it seems undesirable that any special emphasis should be given ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... unfortunate judge are said to have rushed one day into their mother's drawing-room exclaiming, "Dear Mamma, may we have jam for tea? One of Papa's judgments has been upheld in the Court of Appeal." An admirable story of commercial precocity reaches me from one of the many correspondents who have been good enough to write to me in connection with this book. It may be commended to the promoters of that class of company which is specially affected by the widow, the orphan, and the curate. ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... flowers on a true male panicle, and likewise hermaphrodite flowers.[572] Azara describes[573] a variety in Paraguay the grains of which are very tender, and he states that several varieties are fitted for being cooked in various ways. The varieties also differ greatly in precocity, and have different powers of resisting dryness and the action of violent wind.[574] Some of the foregoing differences would certainly be considered of specific value with plants ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... stimulate, by proper exercise, the growing organs that they shall grow faster and further than they ever could without our aid. We are not to always hasten it. This is one thing we must bear in mind: precocity is the worst foe of a sound education. It is the boy and the girl who mature slowly but mature surely that in the end possess the earth. We must not hasten the process, but when we find the organ is ready ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... that he was remarkable, for a boy of his age, bred in the country, astonishing. She had heard her father describe Pitt at twenty-one and Byron at eighteen. Without making absurd comparisons, there was, all the same, something of that precocity of manhood here, something also of the arrogance that the great men had exhibited. She was very glad that she had ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... well-known life by Madame Périer, his elder sister, is of course the chief authentic source of his biography. It was written shortly after his death, although not published for some time later; and nothing can be more lively, graphic, and yet dignified, than its portraiture of his youthful precocity, and, again, of the devotions and austerities of his later years. But it leaves many gaps unsupplied. Like other memoirs of the kind, it is written from a somewhat conventional point of view. No one, as M. Havet says, was nearer to him in all ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... other children are encouraged to get bumptiousness; their parents delighted, and showed the children their delight, whenever a child did something sensible and clever; there was no unintelligent admiration of precocity. ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... a sum of 33,000 crowns to various public offices, in order to be allowed to enter unmolested into the enjoyment of his father's gains: 3,800 crowns of this sum went to the Chapter of S. Peter's.[197] He showed a certain precocity; for at the age of fourteen he owned an illegitimate child, and was accused of violence to domestics. In 1563 his family married him to Ersilia, a daughter of the noble Santa Croce house, who brought him a fair dowry. Francesco lived for twenty-one years with this lady, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... early proofs of reason, as well as genius, in Cowley, Milton, and Pope, (Many other names might be added.) but only appeal to experience to decide whether young men, who are early introduced into company (and examples now abound) do not acquire the same precocity. So notorious is this fact, that the bare mentioning of it must bring before people, who at all mix in the world, the idea of a number of swaggering apes of men whose understandings are narrowed by being brought into the society of men when they ought to have been spinning ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... Cicero was born His education and precocity He adopts the profession of the law His popularity as an orator Elected Quaestor; his Aedileship Prosecution of Verres His letters to Atticus; his vanity His Praetorship; declines a province His Consulship; conspiracy of Catiline Banishment of Cicero: his weakness; his recall His law practice; ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... Mansur, the Samanid amir of Bokhara. On the birth of Avicenna's younger brother the family migrated to Bokhara, then one of the chief cities of the Moslem world, and famous for a culture which was older than its conquest by the Saracens. Avicenna was put in charge of a tutor, and his precocity soon made him the marvel of his neighbours,—as a boy of ten who knew by rote the Koran and much Arabic poetry besides. From a greengrocer he learnt arithmetic; and higher branches were begun under one of those wandering scholars who gained a livelihood by cures for the sick ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... smart things of this generation's "four-year-olds" where my father could hear me. To have simply skinned me alive and considered his duty at an end would have seemed to him criminal leniency toward one so sinning. He was a stern, unsmiling man, and hated all forms of precocity. If I had said some of the things I have referred to, and said them in his hearing, he would have destroyed me. He would, indeed. He would, provided the opportunity remained with him. But it would not, for I would have had judgment enough to take some strychnine ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... learning from the family priest; he was sent to a school at Twyford, where he is said to have got into trouble for writing a lampoon upon his master; he went for a short time to another in London, where he gave a more creditable if less characteristic proof of his poetical precocity. Like other lads of genius, he put together a kind of play—a combination, it seems, of the speeches in Ogilby's Iliad—and got it acted by his schoolfellows. These brief snatches of schooling, however, counted for ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... when I saw a copy of the music and read the translation, "The Dream" under the title, I felt a distinct shock of resentment as if the French language had been treacherous to my sacred ideas. Then there was the romantic name of "Ellerslie," which, notwithstanding considerable precocity in reading and spelling I carried off as "Elleressie" Yeas afterward when the actual syllables confronted me in a historical sketch of Wallace, the truth entered like a stab and I closed the book. O sacred first illusions of childhood, you are sweeter than a thousand ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... and me!" said the prince. The tutor observed, that "he had one of his own;" the prince replied, "But mine, if I have one, would govern your wife, and by that means would govern both you and me!" Henry, at this early age, excelled in a quickness of reply, combined with reflection, which marks the precocity of his intellect. His tutor having laid a wager with the prince that he could not refrain from standing with his back to the fire, and seeing him forget himself once or twice, standing in that posture, the tutor said, "Sir, the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... was Hamilton's; a character which cannot be contemplated without frequent admiration, and constant affection. His talents took the form of genius, which Washington's did not. But active, various, and brilliant, as the faculties of Hamilton were, whether viewed in the precocity of youth, or in the all-accomplished elegance of maturer life—lightning quick as his intelligence was to see through every subject that came before it, and vigorous as it was in constructing the argumentation ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... but here the marvelous Jacob, whose physique supported a precocity that would have shattered a Gentile of his years, showed that he had been listening with much comprehension by saying, "You are coming again. Have you got any more ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... become Queen. He devoted his attention then primarily to gaining a predominant influence over the young King, with great success-the result, in no small measure, of his posing as a puritan; for the boy had all the uncompromising partisanship natural to the morbid precocity which his ill-health and Tudor cleverness combined to develop. If Edward had lived, no doubt the Tudor penetration would have unmasked Northumberland in due course; but this the Duke would hardly have anticipated in any case, and, as it was, he laid his plans on the hypothesis ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... a perfectly normal, healthy boy. Fortunately there are no brilliant sayings to record; he did not lisp in periods. Genius was not written upon his brow, nor tied upon his sleeve. He had none of the pale fervor of precocity, or the shyness of premature conceit. He was absorbed in childish things, loved play, shirked his studies, dreamed of a life on the ocean wave, and regarded "Robinson Crusoe" and "Sinbad the Sailor" as the end of all literary things. ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... his father became a teacher in the university. The boy, Francois, was brought up amid refined and pleasant surroundings, and his education was carefully looked to. Although rather delicate in appearance, he was healthy and full of spirits. His precocity upon the piano was such that at the age of nine he played a concerto in public with great success, from which time forward he made many appearances in his native city. He early began to compose, and by the time he was thirteen or fourteen, had undertaken a number of works of considerable magnitude. ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... to recognize. During the first year she took the nom de guerre of Aquilina, one of the characters in Venice Preserved which she had chanced to read. She fancied that she resembled the courtesan in face and general appearance, and in a certain precocity of heart and brain of which she was conscious. When Castanier found that her life was as well regulated and virtuous as was possible for a social outlaw, he manifested a desire that they should live as husband and wife. So she took the name of Mme. de la Garde, in order to approach, as closely ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... cast down. When they looked up, they were very large, odd, and attractive. By the side of many tall and bouncing young ladies in the establishment Rebecca Sharp looked like a child. But she had the dismal precocity of poverty. Many a dun had she talked to, and turned away from her father's door; many a tradesman had she coaxed and wheedled into good-humour, and into the granting of one meal more. She had sat commonly with her father, who was very proud of her wit, and heard the talk ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... the "Cornish genius" when his first works, executed at the age of twenty, were exhibited in the Royal Academy, was a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was born at Truro in May, 1761, the son of a carpenter. His precocity attracted the notice of Dr. Wolcot ("Peter Pindar"), who ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... from the possibility of impregnation. The case is much the same as regards children of the male sex. The fact that a boy is sexually precocious, will greatly facilitate his being led astray by grown females to whom his extreme youth acts as a stimulus. Moreover, his sexual precocity may deliver the boy to the embraces of homosexual men, an outcome which is rendered the more likely by the commonly undifferentiated character of the childish sexual impulse. There are certain homosexual adult males whose impulse is especially directed towards boys ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... language of a child." So it fared with him during the period of his home instruction, the first eight years of his life; and his father having, as scholar and schoolmaster, no doubt noted the strange precocity of his youngest son, appears to have devoted especial attention to his training. "In my ninth year," he continues, "my most dear, most revered father died suddenly. O that I might so pass away, if, like him, I were an Israelite without guile. The image of my father, my revered, kind, ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... all Dr. Malkin's sons were men of more than average ability; but one, who never lived to be a man, "died a most rare boy" of about six years, fully justifying by his extraordinary precocity and singular endowments the tribute which his bereaved father paid his memory in a modest and touching record of ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... poems and tragedies. His predominant characteristics are described as penetration, and that other valuable faculty to which penetration is an indispensable adjunct, but which it by no means invariably implies—a spirit of broad and systematic co-ordination. The unusual precocity of his intelligence was perhaps imperfectly appreciated by his fellow-students, it led him so far beyond any point within their sight. It has been justly said of him that he passed at once from infancy to manhood, and was in the rank of sages before he had shaken off the dust of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... most promising young man who has appeared since - ahem - I appeared. He amazes me by his precocity and various endowment. But he alarms me by his copiousness and haste. He should shield his fire with both hands 'and draw up all his strength and sweetness in one ball.' ('Draw all his strength and all His sweetness up into one ball'? I cannot remember Marvell's words.) So the critics have been saying ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... funny pudding, last night," he announced. "It stuck and broke ve dish to get it out. Good-bye. Vis is where I live." And he clattered up the steps and vanished, hoop and all, through the front doorway, leaving the stranger to marvel at the precocity of western children and at the ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... The precocity of the Australian youth, to be properly understood and believed, can only be fully appreciated by being an eye-witness to some of these very extraordinary young creatures. I have seen a girl of ten years of age possess all the manner of an old lady of sixty: she would flirt ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... find that in my neighbourhood two families and a fraction out of every four, in the lower and middle classes of society, are studying and practising all conceivable arts to keep their infant children down. Understand me. I do not mean down in their numbers, or down in their precocity, but down in their growth, sir. A destructive and subduing drink, compounded of gin and milk in equal quantities, such as is given to puppies to retard their growth: not something short, but something shortening: is administered to these young creatures ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... eyes of hers would look hard, and before her hair was up she'd look a little faded, and there'd be moments of stress and strain when her naively insolent drawl would jar on the nerves, like the talk of a spoiled child too intent on holding the attention of a visitor averse to precocity. And her disdain of the practical would degenerate into untidiness, and her clinging-ivyness, if it clung too much, would probably remind a man in his reactionary moments of ennui that there are subtler pursuits than being a wall, even ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... creek beneath the cave, to convey the women and children into a safe retreat, and the men were just beginning to hide the spears, bone daggers, flint fish-hooks, mats, shell razors, nets, and so forth, when Why-Why gave an early proof of his precocity by entering the world some time before his arrival ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... of giving a children's theater party every Saturday and taking her small guests to the matinee. As the theaters were more limited in number then than now these comparative infants sooner or later saw practically everything that was on the boards—good, bad and indifferent; and they displayed a precocity of criticism that ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... warrant an occasional draft upon his talents for the entertainment of her Majesty's immediate circle, which held itself as far as possible aloof from the court, and was disposed to be self-reliant for its amusements. Daniel had entered upon the vocation of courtier with flattering auspices. His precocity while at Oxford has found him a place in the "Bibliotheca Eruditorum Praecocium." Anthony Wood bears witness to his thorough accomplishments in all kinds, especially in history and poetry, specimens of which, the antiquary tells us, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... an older and experienced man, and to see him everlastingly charging his wooden pipe; but in the Province of Quebec the boys are looked upon as men when they undertake men's work, and as to their precocity in smoking there is always the excellent excuse that it afford some protection in summer against the attacking swarms of black-flies, ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... sawneyness, he is sure to be liked," as his eldest brother wrote in 1828. He suffered at this time from an internal weakness, which made games impossible. His passion, which he never lost, was for Greek, and especially for Homer. With a precocity which Mill or Macaulay might have envied, he had read both the Iliad and the Odyssey twice before he was eleven. The standard of accuracy at Buckfastleigh was not high, and Froude's scholarship was inexact. What he ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... "Industry," with the usual addresses to subscribers and the liveliness natural to family news-columns. The composition is smooth and the manner entertaining, and there is abundance of good spirits and fun of a boyish sort. The paper shows the literary spirit and taste in its very earliest bud; but no precocity of talent distinguished it, though doubtless the thought of authorship fed on its tender leaves. Such experiments belong to the life of growing boys where education is common and literary facility is thought to be a distinction ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... lesson on the flute, both sitting on the drawing-room floor, very deeply engaged." "I am sure," she says, "there is no other love, no other feeling, like a mother's towards her first boy when she loves his father;" and her pride in his looks, and precocity, and docility—"I never met with a child of his age so sensible to praise or blame"—found a justification in his passionate devotion to the man who was ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... he was placed under the care of the Rev. John Blanchard, who kept the best school in Nottingham, where he learnt writing, arithmetic, and French; and he continued there for several years. During that time two facts are related of him which prove the precocity of his talents. When about seven, he was accustomed to go secretly into his father's kitchen and teach the servant to read and write; and he composed a tale of a Swiss emigrant, which he gave her, being too diffident to show it to his mother. In his eleventh year ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... With a precocity that never ceased to amuse and delight Lilly, Zoe, while only half understanding the content of an occasion, could somehow imbibe its essence. She leaned now over the rail of the omnibus, the cross-town streets, as they jogged past, already colloid ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... later years of her childhood, her mother was grievously afflicted with a cancer, which caused her death in 1794, before Theodosia had completed her twelfth year. From that time, such was the precocity of her character, that she became the mistress of her father's house and the companion of his leisure hours. Continuing her studies, however, we find her in her sixteenth year translating French comedies, reading ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... the paradox we have uttered; for in Australia, that land of precocity, where both vegetable and animal nature shoots up into maturity so quickly, the transition appears almost miraculous; and those we have known yesterday as children, we are surprised, probably, after a year or two's absence, to see grown to man or woman's estate. Such cases are not the exception, ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... in danger, of devoting such a disproportionate and unreasonable degree of attention to them as to encroach upon their duties to others. The school, the whole school, is your field, the elevation of the mass in knowledge and virtue, and no individual instance, either of dullness or precocity, should draw you away ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... the Earl. "I've heard of it before. They call it precocity and freedom. Beastly, impudent bad manners; that's what ...
— Little Lord Fauntleroy • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... but he didn't answer—seemed rather miffed, in fact. The child simply will not come, and that is point number one. Now, of course, Uncle Elbert realizes that he has not been what the world would call a good father. And he has figured it out that Mary, evidently a young precocity, has judged him, found him guilty, and sentenced him to banishment from her affections. That hurts, you know. Well, he is certain that if he could once see her and be thrown with her for a few days, she would find that he is not such an old ogre, ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... unfortunate by reason of his vices. Fox was a loving husband, but he was an adoring father, and the extremest zeal and warmth of his adoration was given to his son Charles James. The child was from the first precocious, alert, and gifted beyond his years, and the father fostered and flattered the precocity with a kind of worship that proved, as it was bound to prove, disastrous. It seems to have been Henry Fox's deliberate belief that the best way to bring up a spirited, gifted, headstrong child was to gratify every wish, surrender to every whim, and pander to every passion that ebullient youth ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... a thin, yellow-haired, young creature, promising to be like her mother, the Countess, had a tongue which loved to run, and with the precocity and importance of wifehood at sixteen, she dilated to her companions on her mother's constant attendance on the Queen, and the perpetual plots for that lady's escape. "She is as shifty and active as any cat-a-mount; and at Chatsworth she had a scheme for being off out of her bedchamber ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... finally attained a maturity vigorous alike in body and mind. This is in the nature of a digression, but it can do no harm to call attention thus to the facts which contradict the common notion that intellectual precocity should be discouraged. Nature is the best guide, and it is in accordance with all her workings, that when she has in hand the production of a giant of intellect, the young Hercules should astonish observers by feats ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... at rearing a family. It is at most a fortnight since the Rat was laid in the earth; and here already is a vigorous population on the verge of the metamorphosis. Such precocity amazes me. It would seem as though the liquefaction of carrion, deadly to any other stomach, is in this case a food productive of especial energy, which stimulates the organism and accelerates its growth, so that the victuals may be ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... Englishmen of all times, and chief formulator of the methods of modern science, was born in 1561 (three years before Shakspere), the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Queen Elizabeth and one of her most trusted earlier advisers. The boy's precocity led the queen to call him her 'little Lord Keeper.' At the age of twelve he, like Wyatt, was sent to Cambridge, where his chief impression was of disgust at the unfruitful scholastic application of Aristotle's ideas, still supreme in spite ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... and ambition displayed themselves with a rare and almost unnatural precocity. At seven, the interest which he took in grave subjects, the ardour with which he pursued his studies, and the sense and vivacity of his remarks on books and on events, amazed his parents and instructors. One of his sayings of this date was reported ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... birthday, so that when more than two years later we introduce her to our readers on a hot July morning, she was said to be six years and four months old. In some respects, however, she seemed much older, for there was about her a precocity only found in children who have always associated with people much older than themselves, or into whose lives strange experiences have come. In stature she was very short, though round and plump as a partridge. 'Dutchy,' Mr. Tracy called her, for Mrs. ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... book, and expressed an opinion, formed, he might say, when Mr. Sandys was a lad at school (cheers), that he had a career before him. Tommy bore it well, all except the quotation, which he was burning to correct, but sighed to find that it had set the dominies on his left talking about precocity. "To produce such a graybeard of a book at two and twenty, Mr. Sandys," said Cathro, "is amazing. It partakes, sir, of the nature of the miraculous; it's onchancey, by which we mean a deviation from the normal." And so on. To escape this ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... a sign of genius, but genius is perhaps always accompanied by precocity. This is especially notable in the cases of painting, music, and mathematics; but in the matter of literature genius may chiefly show itself in acquisition, as in Sir Walter Scott, who when a boy knew much, but did little that ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... Anthony, the father, saw in the person of Adelbert Higgins a budding criminal of rare precocity, and a menace to his son; while to the object of his solicitude the aforesaid criminal was nothing more than an entertaining companion, whose bizarre disregard of all established rules of right and wrong matched well with his own careless temper. Higgins, moreover, was an ardent follower ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... ability the children of young parents show best at an early age but rapidly lose their precocity. ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... very young, was required daily to commit prescribed portions of the Word of God to memory; and the child soon became intensely interested in the study of the sacred oracles. The questions which he proposed to his father, as he repeated his appointed tasks, displayed singular precocity of intellect; and Leonides rejoiced exceedingly as he observed from time to time the growing indications of his extraordinary genius. But, before Origen reached maturity, his good parent fell a victim to the intolerance of the imperial laws. In the persecution under Septimius ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... A curious instance of precocity is related in the Third Book of the "Masnavi" (see ante p. 365), of which Mr. E. H. Whinfield gives an outline in his admirable and most useful abridgment of that work: The boys wished to obtain a holiday, and the sharpest of them suggested that when the master came into school ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... same penchant for comedy appears in Down with Knavery, a very free and lively adaptation of the Plutus of Aristophanes. There is no doubt that Randolph's work gives the impression of considerable power. At the same time it is fair to remember that the author's life was one very conducive to precocity, inasmuch as he underwent at once the three stimulating influences of an elaborate literary education, of endowed leisure to devote himself to what literary occupations he pleased, and of the emulation caused by literary society. Jonson's ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... that navigation in the Antarctic seas will probably never be accomplished under more felicitous circumstances—the precocity of the summer season, the permanence of the north wind, the temperature forty-nine degrees at the lowest; all this was the best of good-fortune. I need not add that we enjoyed perpetual light, and the whole twenty-four ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... all the visitors to Ferrara. The letters of princes and ambassadors were full of her praises. The Mantuan envoy who was sent to Ferrara in 1480, to arrange the terms of the marriage contract, was amazed at the little bride's precocity. The six-year-old child not only danced charmingly before him, but conversed with a grace and intelligence which seemed to him little short of miraculous. All her teachers told the same story. Whatever Madonna Isabella did was ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... family, and was born at a farm called Hayes, near the mouth of the river Otter, in Devonshire, in the year 1552. He went to Oriel College, Oxford, at an early age, and gained high praise for the quickness and precocity of his talents. In 1569 he began his military career in the civil wars of France, as a volunteer in the Protestant cause. It is conjectured that he remained in France for more than six years, and returned ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... know what it is myself, I'm sure, but"—the thirteen sank back again, feeling somewhat touched that they should be so restrained. The president ran his eye over the missive. He smiled as one does sometimes at the precocity of an infant. "The letter, gentlemen," said he, slipping the paper through his fingers, "is from the paying teller. It is a request for"—here the president delayed as if about making a humorous point—"for a larger salary." Then he dropped ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... by the time he was ten, but he did not manifest any especial precocity in this direction: his published compositions with opus number contain only one movement, it is believed, which he wrote before he was twenty or twenty-one years of age. After the death of his father he was left, as he had been practically for ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... to side by cords, behind which the musicians sang some ancient romance, without the guitar." [50] In fact, no further apparatus was employed than that demanded for the exhibition of mysteries, or the pastoral dialogues which succeeded them. The Spaniards, notwithstanding their precocity, compared with most of the nations of Europe, in dramatic art, were unaccountably tardy in all its histrionic accompaniments. The public remained content with such poor mummeries, as could be got up by strolling players and mountebanks. There was no fixed theatre in Madrid until the ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... vividly the days of her childhood, when he always used to spend his business vacations at her mother's home in Maine. He had possessed for her that almost hypnotic influence which young men sometimes exert upon little girls. It was a sort of phantom love affair, subjective and fanciful, a precocity of instinct, like that tender and maternal concern which some little girls feel for their dolls. Yet this childish infatuation is capable of all the depressions and exaltations of love itself, it has its bitter jealousies, cruel disappointments, ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... house, they would have been less astonished at their pupil's unusual docility. Trained as he had been, he must have shown a more than human perversity had he displayed any opposition to his uncle's wishes. He had been permitted no childhood either of thought or action. His natural precocity had been seized as the engine to force his faculties into a perilous and unwholesome maturity; and when his new duties demanded his attention, he entered on them with the same sincerity of enthusiasm which his boyish coevals would have exhibited ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... on teaching for ever, and in whose innocence he might still love his fellow man. On the third day of his acquaintance with Muche he brought an alphabet to the office, and the lad delighted him by the intelligence he manifested. He learned his letters with all the sharp precocity which marks the Parisian street arab, and derived great amusement from the woodcuts illustrating ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... precocity for science a very successful impetus and left me at his death fully in possession of the ideas and projects he cherished. Amongst these projects, one partially realized, was the acceleration of plant growth by means of electric light, ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... studied simplicity, when detected by the pupil, repels rather than attracts him. The subjects are more miscellaneous; but still, as far as possible, kept to those which can appeal to the minds of scholars of eleven or twelve years of age, without either calling for, or encouraging, precocity. In Books II., III., and IV., a few old ballads and other pieces have been purposely introduced; as nothing so readily expands the mind and lifts it out of habitual and sluggish modes of thought, as forcing upon ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... and frivolous round of idle and selfish gayeties. I compare their intellects to a rich tropical plant, which blossoms gorgeously and early, but rarely fruitens. The Southern women are, for the most part, a capable but undeveloped race of beings. With their precocity, like the exuberance of their vegetation, and with their quick, impassioned feelings, like their storm-freighted air, always bearing latent lightning in its bosom, they might become a something rich, rare, and admirable; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... too aptly of their great and elderly master. Borrowing the seeds of culture from Asia and Egypt,[823] Crete nursed and tended them through the Neolithic and Bronze Age, transformed them completely, much as scientific tillage has converted the cotton tree into a low shrub. The precocity of this civilization is clear. At early as 3000 B.C. it included an impressive style of architecture and a decorative art naturalistic and beautiful in treatment as that of modern Japan.[824] From this date till the zenith of its development ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... his elder brother Anthony, of Trinity college Cambridge. At this seat of learning he remained three years, during which, besides exhibiting his powers of memory and application by great proficiency in the ordinary studies of the place, he evinced the extraordinary precocity of his penetrating and original intellect, by forming the first sketch of a new system of philosophy in opposition to ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... all opposition: but he is cured of this quixotic and pugnacious spirit, as he goes more into the world, where he finds that there are other opinions and other pretensions to be adjusted besides his own. When this asperity wears off, and a certain scholastic precocity is mellowed down, the conversation of men of letters becomes both interesting and instructive. Men of the world have no fixed principles, no groundwork of thought: mere scholars have too much an object, a theory always in view, to which they wrest everything, and not unfrequently, ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... thus spoken, the senior demons were amazed at his precocity, and performed a pradakshina, exclaiming, "Truly thou art a highly superior young devil!" They then departed to prepare the new infernal chamber, agreeably ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... rob your children of their physical education to shew off their intellectual acquirements, the more injury you do their health and your own; and in the effort to do too much, you violate the laws of nature, defeat your own object, and make the school a hot-bed of precocity, instead of a rational infants' school for the training and educating infants. I have been blamed, by writers on the infant system, for that which I never did, and never recommended; I have been made answerable for the errors and mis-conceptions ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... many of my readers will exclaim. But that is rather a question of race and climate. In Spanish America, land of feminine precocity, there is many a wife and mother not yet ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... already begun to enjoy the maternal delight of human doll dressing, an extravagance in which she was lavishly encouraged by her husband. Babcock was glad of any excuse to spend money on his daughter, who seemed to him, from day to day, a greater marvel of precocity—such a child as became Selma's beauty and cleverness ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... Scandinavian mythology. Bodmer soon afterwards published for the first time the Nibelungen Lied. Macpherson startled the literary world in 1762 by what professed to be an epic poem from the Gaelic. Chatterton's career (1752-1770) was a proof not only of unique poetical precocity, but of a singular facility in divining the tastes of the literary world at the time. Percy's Reliques appeared in 1765. Percy, I may note, had begun oddly enough by publishing a Chinese novel (1761), and a translation of ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... normal individuals, the abundance, variety, and precocity of wrinkles almost invariably manifested by criminals, cannot fail to strike the observer. The following are the most common: horizontal and vertical lines on the forehead, horizontal and circumflex lines at the root of the nose, the so-called crow's-feet on the temple at the outer ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... of lyric poetry, James Macdonald was born in September 1807, in the parish of Fintry, and county of Stirling. His father was employed in the cotton factory of Culcruich. Of unwonted juvenile precocity, he attracted the attention of two paternal uncles, whose circumstances enabled them to provide him with a liberal education. Acquiring the rudiments of learning at Culcruich, he afterwards studied at the grammar school of Stirling, and proceeded, in 1822, to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... an opinion on the subject seem to agree that children of most native races are fully, or more than a match, for those of Europeans, in aptitude for intellectual acquirement. Indeed, it appears to be a singular law of Nature, that there is less precocity in the European race than almost any other. In those races in which we seem to have reason for believing that the intellectual organization is lower, perception is quicker, and maturity earlier.—Merivale On ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... to a Mr. and Mrs. Prentice, instructors in physical culture in the public schools, first of St. Louis and later of St. Paul, Minnesota. As a child, and afterwards as a young girl, she exhibited great precocity and a considerable amount of real ability in drawing and in English composition, but her very cleverness and versatility were the means of her becoming much more sophisticated than most young women of her age, with the result that while still in her teens she ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... at Montpellier in 1798, of a family of intense Roman Catholic piety. He showed at school a precocity which might bear comparison with Mill's. Expelled from school, cast off by his parents, dismissed by the elder Casimir Perier, whose secretary he had been, he eked out a living by tutoring in mathematics. Friends of his philosophy ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... (1757-1804), because of his wonderful youthful precocity, reminds us of Jonathan Edwards (p. 50). In 1774, at the age of seventeen, Hamilton wrote in answer to a Tory who maintained that England had given New York no charter of rights, and that she could not complain that her rights had been ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... a real boy. He smoked cubeb cigarettes with an almost unprecedented precocity. He nearly learned to chew tobacco. He could snap a sparrow off a telegraph-wire with a nigger-shooter almost infallibly. He had the first air-gun in town and a shot-gun at fifteen. He thought that he was manlier than Drury because he was wiser and stronger. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... preceding. She was brought up at home by her parents, in order that she might remain ignorant of the realities of life, but intercourse with the servants in a large tenement-house early developed her unnatural precocity. Pot-Bouille. ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... rather at such times when his parents permitted, for they were simple folk who were rather alarmed at their boy's interests and zeal. No noticeable difference from other boys was noted aside from precocity in study, yet even at the age of ten life was running in two great currents for this boy. The one current was the outer world with its ever varied happenings, the other was the inner world of thoughts and moods, deeply, fascinatingly interesting. ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... the custom, at a certain age, to put these children out to different trades and callings; and those who show precocity of talent are often received into the ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... Such precocity is less unusual, even in children of the Rich, than most grown people imagine. However, it was a new experience for the Reverend Malloch Smith, and left him in a state of excitement. He at once wrote a note to Georgie's mother, describing the crime according ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... our narrative is assigned the customary precocity of intellect; for he is said to have spoken Latin at five, and written it at nine. Add four years to conform with the true date, and the facts assume a little more reasonable aspect. In 1623, he was matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained three ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... for an instant only, has never been granted to men before the fortieth day from his birth, and then it is looked upon as a miracle of precocity. ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... is more pronounced in the cases of love between children and adults of the opposite sex on account of the child's being less able to monopolize the attention of the adult and on account of the precocity of the child concerned in such cases. A fuller discussion of jealousy belongs in another section ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... noble and generous culture which dwarfs the tree that early ripened or peculiarly flavored fruit may be obtained; and it is not a noble and generous culture of the child which forces into unnatural activity certain faculties or powers that surprise us by their precocity, or excite wonder by the skill exhibited in their use. Rather let the child grow, expand, mature, according to the law of its own being, giving it only encouragement and example, which are the light and air of mental and moral life. I am not conscious that any one has given us a philosophical, ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... intellect. Her ancestors were refugees from persecution, and in her burned that ardor of faith which persecution kindles. Fragile and sensitive, she was educated at home, by her cultivated father and mother, under whose solicitous training she developed an alarming precocity. At the age of twelve she had written a heroic drama on her favorite hero, Gustavus Vasa. At fourteen she had published a volume of poems. At twenty-four she accomplished her chief work on the Jewish religion, 'The Spirit of Judaism,' a book republished in America with ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... then only fourteen years old, was, though under the usual age, selected by Monsieur de Keralio, the inspector of the twelve military schools, to be sent to have his education completed in the general school of Paris. It was a compliment paid to the precocity of his extraordinary mathematical talent, and the steadiness of his application. While at Paris he attracted the same notice as at Brienne; and among other society, frequented that of the celebrated Abbe Raynal, and was admitted to his literary parties. His taste did not become ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... scale; but all was done under the terrible drawback of climate. Mrs. Boardman never was well from the time she landed at Moulmein, and her beautiful flower-covered house at Tavoy was the constant haunt of sickness, under which her elder child, Sarah, died, after showing all that precocity that white children often do in these fatal regions. A little boy named George had by this time been born, and shared with his mother the dangers of the Tavoy rebellion, an insurrection stirred up by a prince of the Burmese ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... of thought, that has ever been written. Berkeley, indeed, published the Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, the Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, and the Three Dialogues, between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-eight; and thus comes very near to Hume, both in precocity and in influence; but his investigations are more limited in their scope than ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... thoroughly shaking off this hated yoke, she did but exchange her Persian for Greek masters, when the empire of Cyrus perished. Since then, Greeks, Romans, Saracens, and Turks have, each in their turn, been masters of the Egyptian race, which has paid the usual penalty of precocity in the early ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... ago. It was a woman's, of course; for "Il est toujours les femmes qui sont malheureuses," says an old proverb, and perhaps it is right. This woman—a child, she would be called elsewhere, save in this land of tropical growth and precocity—lost her heart to one who never knew, a very common story, by the way, but one which would have been quite distasteful to the haughty judge, ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... and avocations of the novel society. Thoranc was a connoisseur in art, and gave frequent commissions to the artists of the town; and Goethe, already interested in art through his father's collections, found his opportunity in these tastes of Thoranc, who was struck by the boy's precocity and even took ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... of his own, imitated the fiddling of his elders with two bits of wood, so the family orchestra was complete. The last accident was the arrival of one Frankh, a distant relative. This was long before the magical feats of the baby Mozart had set every grasping parent staring for signs of musical precocity in his children. But Mathias undoubtedly wanted to do his best for his boy, and Joseph himself must have had ambition of a sort—witness his endeavours to play the fiddle without a fiddle to play—and when Frankh undertook to place the boy in a choir and teach him music, the offer was ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... another story of his infant precocity generally circulated, and generally believed, the truth of which I am to refute upon his own authority. It is told, that, when a child of three years old, he chanced to tread upon a duckling, the eleventh of a brood, and killed it; upon which, it is said, he dictated ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... now sixteen, and the woman-famine in all the land had gifted her with a surprising precocity. Eudora knew her value and meant to make the most of it. Unlike her mother in the old Black Hill days, she expected more than a "home of her own." To-night four suitors sat at table with Eudora, and she might ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... energies to poetry. His first poem, Festus (1839), is, for the daring of its theme and the imaginative power and moral altitude which it displays, one of the most notable of the century; as the work of one little past boyhood it is a prodigy of intellectual precocity. Along with its great qualities it has many faults in execution, and its final place in literature remains to be determined. It was pub. anonymously, and had great success, but has fallen into unmerited, but perhaps temporary, neglect. Among its greatest admirers was Tennyson. The subsequent poems ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... had always enjoyed his children's precocity, and, provided they amused him, they could make him do anything. So after the conference he announced that he had been questioning Angelica, and had found that she really was too far advanced for a governess, and he had therefore decided that she should share ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... of this difference and the precise age at which it occurs vary with the individual and the race. Corresponding to this is a mental difference; in many branches of study, though not all, the girl of fourteen is superior to the boy, quicker, more intelligent, gifted with a better memory. Precocity, however, is a quality of dubious virtue. It is frequently found, indeed, in men of the highest genius; but, on the other hand, it is found among animals and among savages, and is here of no good augury. ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... love. He had also a finely developed form, which his close-fitting garments set off to the best advantage, and, above all, what had the most charm for the eyes of his friends as they so heartily welcomed him to their house was the evident precocity of his organs of love, which in their quiescent state showed a most ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... beginning and the preliminary condition for thinking. One's own perceptions awaken one's own conceptions, and these awaken one's own thinking in later stages of development. Let us have no precocity, but natural, that ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... said that the little Edward VI. was of an extraordinary precocity. When he was eight years old he wrote to Archbishop Cranmer in Latin. When he was nine he knew four books of Cato by heart as well as much of the Bible. To show you the way in which royal infants were treated in those days,—we read that ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... concerts have confirmed all we have said of this wonderful girl violinist. Two concerts, attended by an intelligent, nay, an exacting, audience delighted almost to tears—and yet not money enough in the house to pay expenses! Indifference to flaming advertisements of precocity is well; but it is not well, not worthy of the taste of Boston thus to neglect one of the finest manifestations of genius that ever seemed to come to us so straight from heaven. It was one of the most beautiful, most ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... the Anthophora's cells. Among these cells are some which contain larvae and which result from the labours of last May; others, though of the same date, are already occupied by the perfect insect. The precocity of metamorphosis varies from one larva to another; however, a few days' difference of age is enough to explain these inequalities of development. Other cells, as numerous as the first, contain a ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... a great deal at first, but in my heart I was not sorry to get rid of the responsibility; a lively girl of sixteen, with strong individuality and marked precocity, is likely to be a formidable charge; but Mrs. Barton lamented her absence in no ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... her poise and sense of humour won the child's respect. After that first experiment there were no more spasms of howling. Miss Watts never tried to sentimentalize their relationship. She recognized the child's unusual quality, and her precocity. She was at present an unendurable human being, thanks to her bringing up. Her ideas and ideals were servant-made. If she could be brought to see herself as socially an outcast, because of her bad manners, Miss Watts knew ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... the Talmud. There are some writings of his on mathematics and astronomy extant. He directed the education of his son, who, like many another distinguished scholar in later life, seems to have exhibited very little talent in his early years. There is no rule in the matter. Precocity often disappoints. Genius is often dull in childhood, but there are exceptions that prove both rules. The basis of education in Spain at that time among the Jews was the Bible, the Talmud, mathematics, and astronomy, a good rounded education in literature, the basis of law, and some ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... anxious for an opportunity to send Louis fils to a school; but fortune had not been liberal with him in later years, though the sweat was constantly upon his brow, and his good wife's fingers were never still. This son had unusual precocity, and strangers who looked upon him used to say that a great fire slumbered in his eye. He was bright, quick and piquant; and it is said that it was impossible to know the lad and not be pleased with his person and manners. ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... (1779-1852), by his literary and social gifts, had made his name several years before 1811, when he first became personally acquainted with Byron. His precocity was as remarkable as his versatility. The son of a Dublin grocer, for whom his political interest secured the post of barrack-master, he went, like Sheridan, to Samuel Whyte's school, and was afterwards ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... precocity of girls is another aspect of the biological factor in sexual mental differences. It is a psychic as well as a physical fact. This has been shown conclusively by careful investigation in many parts of the civilised world and notably in America, where the school system renders ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... on good authority, where a French child but three years old underwent all the physical changes incident to puberty, and grew to be a healthy woman. But what children can surpass the American in precocity? This French child-woman is quite left in the shade by one described in a recent number of a western medical journal, who from her birth had regular monthly changes, and the full physical development which marks the ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... know why, unless it was because I did n't know anything of life, and I could repeat a little Latin, stumble through a sentence of Greek, and, after having solved a problem seventy-six thousand times to show my wonderful precociousness, could do it again when called upon. Perhaps I'm extravagant. It was n't more than half that number of times. At any rate, sir, I was thought a prodigy—a most astonishing intellectual—I don't know ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... old man," "the true scout," "Sir Morton the good knight," and to her mother as "the Princess Pauline," or "one's mama," giving to mama the French pronunciation. All this seemed to Sylvia to be in keeping with Marian's general precociousness. ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... insignificant tail in true mocking-bird fashion. I think the parents disapproved this early ambition, for they did not feed him for a long time, though they passed him to go to the nest. So far from being lightened, their cares were greatly increased by the precociousness of the youngster, and from this moment their trouble and worry were grievous to see. So much self-reliance has the mocking-bird, even in the nest, that he cannot be kept there until his legs are strong enough to bear his weight, or his wings ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller |
