"Precocious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Dr. Toner might have said that the Rules contain no allusion whatever to the female sex. This alone proved, to my own mind, that Washington was in nowise responsible for these Rules. In the school he was attending when they were written there were girls; and, as he was rather precocious in his admirations, a compilation of his own could hardly omit all consideration of conduct towards ladies, or in their presence. There were other reasons also which led me to dissent from my friend Dr. Toner, in this instance, and to institute ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway
... has reproved his Dramatic Critic for referring to It, in The Darling of the Gods, as "a precocious babe." He is assured that Mr. BURTIE, who plays this neutral part, "has seen some five-and-twenty summers, and has advanced intellectual views about most things." Mr. Punch's Dramatic Critic has been instructed to "give him double bowing" by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... there are many instances of such precocious boys—enfants terribles they must be in real life. In Ibn Khall. (iii. 104) we find notices of a book "Kitab Nujaba al-Abna" Treatise on Distinguished Children, by Ibn Zakar al- Sakalli (the Sicilian), ob. A. D. 1169-70. And the boy-Kazi is a favourite role in the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... from the Seguins. So impatient, indeed, were they to find themselves once more among the fields that in spite of the doctor's advice Marianne had made the journey but fifteen days after giving birth to her little boy. However, a precocious springtide brought with it that March such balmy warmth and sunshine that the only ill-effect she experienced was a little fatigue. And so, on the day after their arrival—Sunday—Mathieu, glad at being able to remain with her, insisted that she should rest in bed, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... as underscoring the important one which follows. But a word must be spared for it. The habits of ancient days gave a place to the father and mother which modern family life woefully lacks, and suffers in many ways for want of. Many a parent in these days of slack control and precocious independence might say, 'If I be a father, where is mine honour?' There was perhaps not enough of confidence between parent and child in former days, and authority on the one hand and submission on the other too much took the place of love; ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... an episode of his school days, when, in the spirit of precocious research, he had applied carbolic acid to his arm. It occurred to him that he was now being bathed in that burning fluid. He was recovering from the shock. With returning sense came the increase of pain, pain so tormenting ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... later on a judge of the supreme court. Mr. Wetmore, when haranguing St. John audiences, used to depict the dreadful effects of confederation in a manner peculiarly his own. His great plea was an imaginary dialogue between himself and his little son, that precocious infant asking him in lisping tones, "Father, what country do we live in?" to which he would reply, "My dear son, you have no country, for Mr. Tilley has sold us to the Canadians for eighty ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... pulls off the modern Dowbiggin's bonnet and flings it into the lade, which still runs as it used to do, will be careful to say "Erlauben Sie mir," and that the modern Dowbiggin, before rescuing his bonnet, will turn and inquire with mild surprise, "Was wollen Sie, mein Freund?" and precocious lads will delight their parents at the breakfast-table by asking for their daily bread in the language and accent of Paris, because for the moment they have forgotten English. It is my own firm conviction, and nothing can shake it, that Muirtown lads are just ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... Too early menstruation.—Premature or precocious menstruation is when it occurs before puberty. This is in part hereditary, but bad associations may be a cause ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... of his father's; and he was entered at the school on the 18th July 1782. His early bent towards poetry, though it displayed itself in youthful verse of unusual merit, is a less uncommon and arresting characteristic than his precocious speculative activity. Many a raw boy "lisps in numbers, for the numbers come;" but few discourse Alexandrian metaphysics at the same age, for the very good reason that the metaphysics as a rule do not "come." And even among those youth whom curiosity, or ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... verse—have made merry with her bereavements. She is a stock character on the stage. Farce bottleth up her crocodile tears, or labelleth her empty lachrymatories. Comedy mocketh her precocious flirtations—Tragedy even girdeth at her frailty, and twitteth her with "the funeral baked meats coldly furnishing forth the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... month of April in the following year, 1766, that was born Madame Necker's only child, Anne Louise Germaine, who was destined to become one of the most remarkable women of modern times. From the great literary talent displayed by this wonderfully precocious child from girlhood, it is difficult not to imagine but that in some, if merely spiritual, way the genius of her mother's old lover had descended through that mother's brain as a mantle upon herself. That she learnt to look upon Gibbon with admiration at an early age is sure. Michelet informs us ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... movement which should wrest back the Holy City from the clutches of the Saracens, and set a second Godfrey upon the vacant throne of Palestine. To this important end the experiences of his infancy and his training by the Jesuits had undoubtedly tended to urge the precocious young poet. The servants of his father's house at Sorrento must many a time have regaled his eager boyish mind with harrowing tales of the infidel pirates who scoured the Tyrrhene Sea within sight of the watch-towers on the coast; within ken, perchance, of ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... of George Page, there came slowly, in her thirtieth year, a sullen conviction that life was monstrously unfair. From a resentful realization that she was not happy in her marriage, Emeline's mind went back to the days of her pert, precocious childhood and her restless and discontented girlhood, and she felt, with a sort of smouldering fury, that she had never been happy, had never had a ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... Lancaster, in the year 1750, that he made the acquaintance of Mr. William Henry. That gentleman became deeply interested in the precocious boy, and frequently came to watch him at his portrait-painting. One day he said to Benjamin, that if he (Henry) could paint equally well he would not waste his time upon portraits, but would devote himself ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... the bantling's dawning days?— Precocious shall he prove, and harass The world with inconvenient ways And lisped conundrums that embarrass? (Such as Impressionists delight To offer each aesthetic gaper, And faddists hyper-Ibsenite Rejoice ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... precocious child, sank down poisoned did she become aware of the uproar about her. The shouts of the lodger, "Stop—my God, stop! How do you get that way?" augmented a million times. It was this ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... prescribed by her husband, Mrs. Getz had to manoeuver very skilfully to keep her children decently clothed, and Tillie in this matter was a great help to her; for the little girl possessed a precocious skill in combining a pile of patches into a passably decent dress or coat for one of her little brothers or sisters. Nevertheless, it was invariably Tillie who was slighted in the small expenditures that were made each year for the family clothing. The child had always really preferred ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... the impossible answered, "Nothing is impossible," and he said it as if he more than half believed it. Here we have the ambitious maxim challenging truth itself. It is certainly not impossible that Mozart wrote a difficult concerto at the age of five; nor is it impossible that, in precocious children of a different type, worry from failure to accomplish the desired may cause profound despair productive ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... Richelieu's precocious gallantry evidently was not considered as gratuitous as his experimental metallurgy. But as his eyes followed his daughter's wholesome, Phyllis-like figure, a new idea took possession of him: needless to say, however, it ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... had cautiously laid the situation before his young Patroclus, that precocious warrior at once justified the confidence reposed ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... her father died. He had been the playfellow of her childhood. He had never grudged his time or his money for her amusement. She had been brought up like a little princess. She had been utterly spoiled. He had transferred to her precocious mind his love of excitement, his inquisitiveness, his courage and his lack of scruple; and then, when she was sixteen, he had died, leaving as his last command to the Japanese wife who would obey him in death as she had obeyed him living, the strict injunction that Yae was ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... daughter, the object of her passionate solicitude, a very clever and precocious child, was the reverse of beautiful, although she would have had fine eyes but for her red lashless lids. She wore her thick hair cropped short, like a boy, and was pasty and sallow in complexion, hollow-cheeked, thick-featured, and overgrown, with ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... you could see your cousin's little daughter," said Rachel, rather abruptly, as Katherine rose to bid her good-bye. "She's an interesting, naughty little creature, small of her age, but in some ways precocious. I am fond of her, partly, I suppose, because she likes me. There is something familiar to me in her face, yet I cannot say that ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... a brain-feverish sound: children are heard of who are devoted to books to the injury of their health, and so it is assumed that to incite any child to read may be a tempting of Providence. This is a groundless supposition. Even in the few authentic cases of precocious development efficient parents may easily take measures to check the ravages of intellect, while in the far greater number of instances where the mental and physical qualities are pretty evenly balanced, parental efficiency ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... have been used in issuing the invitations. The throng was indiscriminate. Farce comedy was in the air. Religious fanatics, passing before the hero, offered up prayers for the salvation of his soul. Precocious children were thrust forward to his attention. Preposterous questions were propounded by preposterous people. To add to the confusion the names of those persons who fought their way through the throng to be presented to the General were announced to him by a little man ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... was born of humble parentage, in a little town in North Wales, on the fourteenth day of May, 1771. A most precocious child, at seven years of age, so he tells us in his "Autobiography," he had familiarized himself with Milton's "Paradise Lost," and by the time he was ten years old he had grappled with the ages-old problems of ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... the letter and answered it. Since then they had written to each other regularly. There was nothing sentimental, hinted at or implied, in the correspondence. Whatever the faults of Sidney's romantic visions were, they did not tend to precocious flirtation. The Plainfield boys, attracted by her beauty and repelled by her indifference and aloofness, could have told that. She never expected to meet John Lincoln, nor did she wish to do so. In the correspondence itself she ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... wives and mothers, they have none of the habits or character necessary to govern their household and to train their children properly. Hence arise that growing neglect or laxity of family discipline; that insubordination, that lawlessness, and precocious depravity of Young America; that almost total lack of filial reverence and obedience with the children of this generation. Exceptions there happily are; but the number of children that grow up without any proper training or discipline at home is fearfully large, and their evil example ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... Crawford was puzzled to know just how old she was. She was very small, and, judging from her size, one would have said she was hardly three; but the expression of her face was so mature, and she saw things so quickly and understood so readily, that she must have been older. She was certainly very precocious, with a most inquiring turn of mind, and Mrs. Crawford felt herself greatly interested in her as she watched her active movements and listened to the musical prattle she could ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... round, fixed eyes contemplate a certain gingerbread man of lofty stature. It is a general, and it looks a little like Uncle Victor. I take it, I pay for it, and present it to the little pauper, who dares not extend his hand to receive it—for, by reason of precocious experience, he cannot believe in luck; he looks at me, in the same way that certain big dogs do, with the air of one saying, "You are cruel to make fun of ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... was precocious for his age, heard what his mother had said, and seeing that he had not been scolded for his ill behaviour, began to scream and struggle more than ever, and his little sister imitated him, in a dutiful, feminine way. I then lost my patience, ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... of the young prince, and for a time it availed to direct his thoughts to noble aspirations. From his studies, both in English and Pali, he derived an exalted ideal of life, and precocious and inexpressible yearnings. Once he said to me he envied the death of the venerable priest, his uncle; he would rather be poor, he said, and have to earn his living, than be ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... the histrionic or theatrical direction, was, in another way, indicated at a yet earlier date, and not one jot less pointedly. It was so, we mean, at the very opening of his career in authorship, when having just sprung into precocious celebrity as the writer of the Sketches and of the earlier numbers of Pickwick, he contributed an opera and a couple of farces with brilliant success to the boards of the St. James's Theatre. Braham and Parry and Hullah winged with melody the words ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... did not hear him, but Anne smiled faintly, and faintly frowned as she shook her head. She considered Cherry sufficiently precocious without Uncle Lee's ill-considered tolerance. Anne had often told him that Cherry was the "pink-and- white type" that would attract "boys" soon enough without any encouragement from him. But he persisted in regarding her as nothing more than ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... earnest, revolutionary, and progressive age. She was educated as the second daughter of Henry VIII. naturally would be, having the celebrated Ascham as her tutor in Greek, Latin, French, and Italian. She was precocious as well as studious, and astonished her teachers by her attainments. She was probably the best-educated woman in England next to Lady Jane Grey, and she excelled in those departments of knowledge for which novels have given such distaste ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... was to be seen crouched in a pebbly, sunny arroyo, peering across the bleak prairie, a lone watcher. Ascending, Carl saw that it was Eugene Field Linderbeck, a Plato freshman. That amused him. He grinningly planned a conversation. Every one said that "Genie Linderbeck was queer." A precocious boy of fifteen, yet the head of his class in scholarship; reported to be interested in Greek books quite outside of the course, fond of drinking tea, and devoid of merit in the three manly arts—athletics, flirting, and breaking rules by smoking. Genie was small, anemic, and too well dressed. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... established herself in the palace when her maternal terrors were suddenly awakened by intelligence of the dangerous illness of her second son, the Duc d'Orleans, upon which she hastened to St. Germain. The fiat had, however, gone forth, and two days subsequently the little Prince, upon whose precocious intellect and sweetness of disposition so many hopes had been built up, was a corpse in his mother's arms; and within a few hours Madame de Lorraine and her brother had taken leave of their illustrious relative, while the Court of the Louvre, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... were not so dumfounded by Penrod's costume as might have been expected. A few precocious geniuses perceived that the overalls were the Child Lancelot's own comment on maternal intentions; and these were profoundly impressed: they regarded him with the grisly admiration of young and ambitious criminals for a jail-mate about to ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... goroo!"—until the helpless little fellow was obliged to close with an offer of a few pence instead of half a crown for his waistcoat, is the portrait of some actual Jew dealer whom, in one of the back streets of Chatham, the keen eyes of the precocious child, seeming to look at nothing, had curiously watched hovering like a hideous spider on the ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... face, and dabbed his eyes, and proposed this and the other remedy. Some thought that he had better be taken straight to an hospital. One lady remarked that he was so mashed and mauled that she was sure he would never 'come to' again. A precocious youth remarked that he was 'all one as a dead un'.' A cabman observed that he had ''ad it awful 'eavy.' To all these criticisms on his condition Sir Felix himself made no direct reply, but he intimated ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... The precocious little savage was known to every rider on the trail from St. Joe to Sacramento. Of course the Indians were always on the alert to steal the horses that belonged to the stations, but where Little Cayuse was living they never made a success ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... cordial invitation! During the few days which elapsed before our ambulance train started for the front we paid a visit to the theatre, but we found the stage tenanted by a "Lilliputian Company," and it is always tiresome and distressing to watch precocious children of twelve aping their elders. One feels all the time that the whole performance scarcely rises above an exhibition of highly-trained cats or monkeys, and that the poor mites ought all to be in bed long ago. Nevertheless, this dreary ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... for the seventh; that is utterly detestable. What! to stimulate the precocious curiosity of children to pry into dangerous mysteries; to obtrude violently upon their imaginations, ideas and notions which beyond all things you should wish to keep from them! It were far better if such actions as that commandment speaks of were dealt with arbitrarily by some secret tribunal, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... I do, Amy?' 'It's either to go without meat or eggs,' says I. 'Yes, Amy, honey,' says she. 'And you can't pay them each a little?' says I, 'for I am real wise about that way of doing, you know.'" Mrs. Carroll said the last with the air of a precocious child; she looked askance for admiration as she said it, and laughed herself with the others. "'No,' says poor Anna—'no, Amy, there is not enough money for two littles, only enough for one little. What shall we do, Amy?' 'Well,' says Amy, ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Moon saw, what Martha saw, what the Mad Hatter divined with her feverish, precocious brain, Rhoda Vivian could not fail to see. It was Dr. Cautley's business to look after Miss Quincey in her illness, and it was Rhoda's to keep an eye on her in her recovery, and instantly report the ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... Evringham. "Nobody else would. She does it in a spirit of mischief, perhaps, but I shall speak to her. She has a passing curiosity about your ideas because it is odd and rather amusing to find a child who has such unnatural and precocious fancies, and she tries to draw you out; but it will not last with her. Neither will it with you, probably. You seem to be a sensible little girl in many ways." Mrs. Evringham made the addition magnanimously. She really was too much at peace with all the world just now ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... reached in the coronation of little Joash as king, and in the destruction of usurping and wicked Athaliah. Little Joash, by the way, with his rather precocious wisdom of reply, derived to himself, for the moment, a certain factitious interest, from the resemblance, meant by the poet to be divined by spectators, between him and the little Duke of Burgundy, Louis XIV.'s grandson, then of about the same age with the Hebrew ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... family of Dutch descent. At the age of twelve he was placed in the counting-house of a wealthy American merchant, where his marked ability made him friends, and he was sent to the United States to be educated. As a boy he was precocious, like Cicero and Bacon; and the boy was father of the man, since politics formed one of his earliest studies. Such a precocious politician was he while a student in King's College, now Columbia, in New York, that at the age of seventeen he ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... suffers from them less than youth or maturity. Russia is still in that stage of civilization which is naturally subject to attacks of feverish and mystical religion, but one day it will emerge from it; and the precocious skepticism of a large portion of its educated classes shows plainly that no inexorable fate condemns the national ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... was expected to extract his pay from the sale of clandestine concessions to the tenants. Riding beside the Marquess, who swore under his breath at the ravages of the undyked stream and the sight of good arable land run wild and choked with underbrush, the little boy obtained a precocious insight into the evils of a system which had long outlived its purpose, and the idea of feudalism was ever afterward embodied for him in his glimpse of the peasants of Valdu looking up sullenly from their work as their suzerain and protector ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the opposition, and that Godolphin had been removed from the head of the hoard of Treasury. The party which Sunderland had done so much to serve now held a new pledge for his fidelity. His only son, Charles Lord Spencer, was just entering on public life. The precocious maturity of the young man's intellectual and moral character had excited hopes which were not destined to be realized. His knowledge of ancient literature, and his skill in imitating the styles of the masters of Roman eloquence, were applauded by veteran scholars. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... nature has been in bestowing the gift of genius, the pursuit of art is nevertheless a long and continuous labor. Many artists have been precocious, but without diligence their precocity would have come to nothing. The anecdote related of West is well known. When only seven years old, struck with the beauty of the sleeping infant of his eldest sister, ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... his was a precocious intelligence; and it had been fed upon meat for strong men. He had heard of Alexander VI.'s colossal infamies, and those of Caesar Borgia as well; and of the kingdoms ranging to this or that standard after the death ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... a pretty narrative of child life, describing the simple doings and sayings of a very charming and rather precocious child. This is a delightful book for ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... maniac; but the head, thus found so expressive, of this monster, is infinitely more human than the head on the medals of Lionello d'Este, one of the most mild and cultivated of the decently behaved Ferrarese princes. The very flower of precocious iniquity, the young Baglionis, Vitellis, and Orsinis, grouped round Signorelli's preaching Antichrist at Orvieto, are, in their gallantly trimmed jerkins and jewelled caps, the veriest assemblage of ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... of their precocious worldliness to recognise, to feel a little afraid of their new companion's intellectual power. Those obviously meditative souls, which seem "not to sleep o' nights," seldom fail to put others on their guard. Who can tell what they may be judging, planning in silence, ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... The precocious child, even when thoroughly well-meaning, is a source of terror by virtue of its intense earnestness. In the days when Maurice first discredited the doctrine of Eternal Punishment, some learned and theological people were discussing, in a country house near Oxford, the abstract credibility ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... was heavy with moisture and very still and warm; a heady fragrance of precocious blooms flavoured the air, vying with the scent of rain. The silence was profound, but shaken now and then by a grumble of distant thunder. The world hung breathless on the ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... a bench by the flower-beds, gay in their spring charm of belated crocus and hyacinth and daffodil, with here and there a precocious tulip. Paul, sensitive to beauty, discoursed on flowers. Max Field had a studio in St. John's Wood opening out into a garden, which last summer was a dream of delight. He described it. When he came into his kingdom he intended ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... and thoughtful. Flora was crafty, deceitful, and brilliant, but her innocent eyes and baby ways made her cleverness seem like that of a precocious child, so that ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... possessed the precocious penetration he owed to his life of adventure, the young woman and the old gentleman had said enough to enable him to form a correct estimate of the situation. He was certain now that he knew the contents of the letter as perfectly as if he had read it. M. de Coralth's anger, and his order to make ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... was falling, confound it. He isn't at all precocious, speaks very little, doesn't know where he lives, and can't even pronounce his ...
— The Lost Child - 1894 • Francois Edouard Joachim Coppee
... alleviation of the experience that 'this also shall pass away;' time moves with a tardier pace, and in the narrower sphere of interests, there is less to distract the attention from the load of grievances. Hereditary low spirits, a precocious mind, a reserved temper, a motherless home, the loss of her only congenial companion, and the long-enduring effect of her illness upon her health, had all conspired to weigh down the poor girl, and bring on an almost morbid state of gloomy discontent. Her father's second marriage, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Precocious Emotions. The habits which tend to become fixed too soon seem to be of four kinds; the habit of loving, the habit of rebelling, the habit of repressing normal instincts, and the habit of dreaming. In each case ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... ornaments, which analogy would lead us to attribute to the agency of sexual selection. In such cases it may be suggested with more plausibility, that there has been a double or mutual process of sexual selection; the more vigorous and precocious females selecting the more attractive and vigorous males, the latter rejecting all except the more attractive females. But from what we know of the habits of animals, this view is hardly probable, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... Miss Hunter with tearful eyes, as she came down from the sick room one day; 'it is always the good precocious children that die young. Roland has just said, in his little weak, quavering voice, "Auntie, perhaps Olive and I are going to die and be put in a grave." And when I told him that wasn't likely, and he mustn't think of such things, he said in quite a cheerful tone, ...
— Bulbs and Blossoms • Amy Le Feuvre
... he seem'd Active, though not so sprightly, as a page; And everybody but his mother deem'd Him almost man; but she flew in a rage And bit her lips (for else she might have scream'd) If any said so, for to be precocious Was in her eyes a thing ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... Modern schoolboys are precocious: they know the strong and the weak side of life; and, when they take their degree, they already ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... waist. They formed a charming group, these two women of different races, exhibiting, as they did, the characteristic beauty of each: Tahoser elegant, graceful, and slender, like a child that has grown too fast; Ra'hel dazzling, blooming, and superb in her precocious maturity. ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... the springs of the boy's religion. It is easy to call all this a hot-house process; it is easy to dub the child a precocious prig. But at bottom his religion was healthy and sound. It was not morbid; it was joyful. It was not based on dreamy imagination; it was based on the historic person of Christ. It was not the result of mystic exaltation; it was the result of a study of the Gospels. It was not, above ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... patient, and so very—(what's the word for a child that knows a deal more than he has any business to know at his age? Stop! I've got it!—precocious—that's the word)—so very patient and so very precocious that they will sit quiet in the same place for two hours; making believe all the time that they understand every word of the service, whether they really do or not. I don't deny that there may be such children, though I never met with them myself, and should think them all ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... in the 'Apologia,' a picture of his precocious and dreamy boyhood, when he lived in a world of his own, peopled by angels and spirits, a world in which the supernatural was the only nature. He was lonely and reserved, then as always. It is not for nothing that in his sermons he expatiates so often on the impenetrability of the human soul. ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... the whole world seems to stand quivering and breathlessly attent while Nature works out one of her miracles over fields of grain, over prairie flowers, over umbrageous trees and all things borne upon the bosom of Mother Earth, checking the succulence of precocious overgrowths, hardening fibre, turning plant energy away from selfish exuberance in mere stalk building into the altruistic sacrament of ripening fruit and hardening grain. A wise old alchemist is Mother Earth, working in time but ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... loves his new-found element. He clings to mortality; to life, not thought; or, as he puts it, to the concrete, — let the abstract "go pack!" "There's little comfort in the wise," he ends. But in the unfolding of his precocious spirit, the literary control comes uppermost; his boat, finding its keel, swings to the helm of mind. How should it be otherwise for a youth well-born, well-bred, in college air? Intellectual primacy showed itself to him in many wandering "loves", fine lover that he was; ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... appear that he had any precocious predilection for study, and his parents, who for the first ten years of his life were his only teachers, were too wise to stimulate his mind beyond the ordinary attainments of his age. having lost her first four children in infancy, his ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... unwontedly restive that evening, and required an unusual number of cautions to remain still, and of threats as to the punishment that would follow continued disobedience, all of which afforded the most intense and unutterable delight to a very small precocious boy, who, standing concealed on the off side of the animal, tickled its ear with a straw every time it bent its head towards the bundle of hay which lay at its feet. No clown or pantaloon was there to inflict condign punishment, ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... lower animals, we observe certain features common to both. But often among vertebrates there are found animals whose bodies withstand the ravages of time much better than that of man. I think it a fair inference that senility, that precocious senescence which is one of the greatest sorrows of humanity, is not so profoundly seated in the constitution of the higher animals as has generally been supposed. The first facts which we must accept are that human beings who reach extreme ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... So, many a tongue the evening hour prolongs With spangled speeches,—let alone the songs; Statesmen grow merry, lean attorneys laugh, And weak teetotals warm to half and half, And beardless Tullys, new to festive scenes, Cut their first crop of youth's precocious greens, And wits stand ready for impromptu claps, With loaded barrels and percussion caps, And Pathos, cantering through the minor keys, Waves all her onions to the trembling breeze; While the great Feasted views with silent glee His scattered ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... acquire the well-known accomplishments of the real Arthur Dillon, who had sung and danced his way into the hearts of his friends, who had been a wit for a boy, bubbling over with good spirits, an athlete, a manager of amateur minstrels, a precocious gallant among the girls, a fighter ever ready to defend the weak, a tireless leader in any enterprise, and of a bright mind, but indifferent to study. The part was difficult for him to play, since his nature was staidness itself beside the spontaneity and variety of Arthur Dillon: but ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... would be good for him, and throughout life he pursued only those inquiries for pursuing which he found within himself an adequate motive. The most important element in his training was reading, for which he had a precocious desire which was imperative, and proved to be lasting. His opportunities to get books were scanty; but he seized on all such opportunities, and fortunately he early came upon the "Pilgrim's Progress," the Spectator, Plutarch, Xenophon's "Memorabilia," and Locke "On the ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... when undressing, Nana cried and stamped. She wanted to sleep in mother Coupeau's bed. Her mother tried to frighten her; but the child was too precocious. Corpses only filled her with a great curiosity; so that, for the sake of peace, she was allowed to lie down in mother Coupeau's place. She liked big beds, the chit; she spread herself out and rolled ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... cultivated in his youth, was often the solace of his leisure hours. Surrounded by a numerous family, he made the instruction of his children his chief recreation, and omitted nothing which was necessary to render them highly accomplished. His clever and precocious daughter Henriette was very early accustomed to enter society, and to take an intelligent interest in current topics and public events. Accordingly, many of her relations being connected with the Court or holding official positions, she amassed a fund of interesting recollections and characteristic ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... has relaxed the emotions, we may often get in a kindly word and give an enemy something to think about afterwards," he said. "But the boy was obdurate. He is the victim of confused thinking—precocious to a degree in some directions, but very childish in others. At times he alarms me. Poor boy. You must try again to win him. The general sentiment is that the young should be patient with the old; but for my part I think it is quite as difficult sometimes for the old to be patient ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... This precocious youth was suing for a fair girl's favor, and made Ulrich his confidant. One day, when Moor and Sanchez's father had gone with the king to Toledo, he took him to a balcony in the upper story of the treasury, directly opposite to the gate-keeper's lodgings, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Jasper Ewold who has been mellowed by time," he began. "His scholarship was a bond of companionship for you in the isolation of a small community. I know him as boy and young man. He was very precocious. At the age of eight, as I remember, he could read his Caesar. You will appreciate what that meant in a New England town—that he was somewhat spoiled by admiration. And, naturally, his character and mine were very different, ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Aldighieri, was a lawyer, and belonged to the humbler class of burgher-nobles. The family seems to have changed its name into Alighieri, "the wing-bearers," at a later time, in accordance with the beautiful coat of arms which they adopted—a wing in an azure field. Dante was a devout, beautiful, precocious boy, and his susceptible soul caught a touch of "phantasy and flame" from the sight of Beatrice, daughter of Folco de' Portinari, whom he saw clad in crimson for a festa. From that day the fair girl, with her rosy cheeks, and golden hair, and blue eyes, became to the dreamy boy a vision of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... that enjoyed the favour of the million was less concise, and seems to have been originally aimed against precocious youths who gave themselves the airs of manhood before their time. "Does your mother know you're out?" was the provoking query addressed to young men of more than reasonable swagger, who smoked ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... traced to the earliest poets of the sixteenth century, more particularly to Clement Marot. A tinge of the expiring romanticism lingered in 'Les Amoureuses' with a much more substantial admixture of the spirit of an age which made pleasure-hunting its paramount occupation. The precocious child could modulate the 'Romance a Madame' as well as the page of Beaumarchais, if not better; but he could also laugh it down in Gavroche's sneering way; he could intersperse a song of love with the irony of the boulevard or the more genial ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... with extreme sensibility, on which a careful education had imposed due restraint, had barely completed her twelfth year when she was married to Martin Guerre, a boy of about the same age, such precocious unions being then not uncommon, especially in the Southern provinces. They were generally settled by considerations of family interest, assisted by the extremely early development habitual to the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARTIN GUERRE • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... city frequently came to consult him about difficult points of the law. His mature works do not show any profound knowledge either of the Halakah or of the Haggadah, so that the statement is not to be taken strictly. It is probably nothing more than a grandiloquent way of saying that he was a precocious child, who impressed his elders. Paul, too, claimed that he was "a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and zealous beyond those of his own age in the Jews' religion," and yet he can hardly be regarded as an authority on the tradition. The autobiography of Josephus, it is pertinent to remember, was ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... with most portentous gravity. They wear an air of the most winning candour and guileless innocence, when they are all the while plotting some petty scheme against you. They are certainly far more precocious than English children; they realise the hard struggle for life far more quickly. The poorer classes can hardly be said to have any childhood; as soon as they can toddle they are sent to weed, cut grass, gather fuel, tend herds, or ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... was born in the parish of St. Peter-Port, Guernsey, on the 6th of October, 1769, the year which gave birth to Napoleon and Wellington. In his boyhood he was, like his brothers, unusually tall, robust, and precocious, and, with an appearance much beyond his age, remarkable chiefly for extreme gentleness. In his eleventh year he was sent to school at Southampton, and his education was concluded by his being placed for a twelvemonth under ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... is his own work, "From the Diary of a Seminarist." His life opened under rather auspicious influences, for his father owned a candle factory and was so prosperous that his business amounted yearly to a hundred thousand roubles. A shoemaker taught the precocious boy to read, and he was put to school at first in the local school, but this was exchanged in 1841 for the Seminary. Both here and at home he was, however, more cudgelled than educated, and his soul ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... denounced by our stern moralist in the middle of the nineteenth century, have had a place in Pope's works for a hundred years, and it is too late now to seek to delete them. They were written by Pope in his fourteenth or fifteenth year, and gross as they are, are pardonable in a boy of precocious genius, giving way for a laughing hour to his sense of the grotesque. Joe Warton (not Tom) pompously calls them "a gross and dull caricature of the Father of English Poetry." And Mr Bowles says, "he might have added, it is disgusting as it is dull, and no more like ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... of the first courts are to be seen some mounds of earth, planted with shrubbery, at the foot of which are already shooting forth some precocious cowslips and snowdrops; a trellised doorway leads to one of the seven or eight exercise-grounds ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... embarrassing, as to the subject of so much amusement and as to where her governess had really been. She didn't feel at all as if she had been seriously told, and no such feeling was supplied by anything that occurred later. Her embarrassment, of a precocious instinctive order, attached itself to the idea that this was another of the matters it was not for her, as her mother used to say, to go into. Therefore, under her father's roof during the time that followed, she made no attempt to clear up her ambiguity by an ingratiating way with housemaids; ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... have identified as Master Christopher Casby, aged ten: though disguised with a haymaking rake, for which he had had, at any time, as much taste or use as for a diving-bell; and sitting (on one of his own legs) upon a bank of violets, moved to precocious contemplation by the spire of a village church. There was the same smooth face and forehead, the same calm blue eye, the same placid air. The shining bald head, which looked so very large because it shone so much; and the long grey hair at its sides and back, like floss silk or spun glass, which ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... armed with the boat-hook, which he had suddenly seized, he struck down the precocious chicks one after another, and put an end to their aspiring flights by laying ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... with her alertness. Her persistence and her indomitable courage were such futile weapons against the armor of the law that they seemed pathetic, but her droll faith in herself and her absurd comments about the persons with whom she had been talking made him want to laugh as one laughs at a precocious child. ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... of the man of genius, gives many examples of precocious poetical and musical talent: Dante (who at nine years of age wrote sonnets), Tasso (wrote at ten years of age), Wieland (who wrote an epic at 16), Lope de Vega (who wrote verses at 12), Calderoii (at 13), Metastasio (who composed at 10), Handel ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... arrives at puberty, with its upper nature already roused into precocious action. The child nowadays is almost invariably precocious in "understanding." In the north, spiritually precocious, so that by the time it arrives at adolescence it already has experienced the extended sympathetic reactions which should have lain utterly dark. And it has experienced ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... our immediate family circle, there were plenty of now venerable relatives begging to be allowed to play nurse, my aunties among them. Many of my childhood pranks and words they told me in their old age. One of them that the aunties remembered struck me as rather precocious. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... in height 81.39 inches and the fourteen self-fertilised plants 64.07, or as 100 to 79. One self-fertilised plant in Pot 3 exceeded, and one in Pot 4 equalled in height, its opponent. The self-fertilised plants showed no sign of inheriting the precocious growth of their parents; this having been due, as it would appear, to the abnormal state of the seeds from the unhealthiness of their parents. The fourteen self-fertilised plants yielded only forty spontaneously self-fertilised capsules, to which must be added seven, the product ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... the earliest fish are those which have soonest spawned during the preceding autumn, and have since descended towards and recovered in the sea,—then a precocious spawning would necessarily lead to the speediest supply of clean fish in mid-winter; but the fact referred to has not been ascertained, and it may therefore still be as reasonably alleged that the winter ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... precocious huntress: early in youth she passed through the accumulator stage, leaving it to the crude or village belle to rejoice in numbers and the excitement of teasing cubs in the bear-pit. It is the nature of this imagined Carmen to play fiercely with one imitation of love after ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... defiance, that he, a child, adopted a child, that he encumbered himself with a load, when tired and exhausted, thus rendering himself an easier prey to the attacks on his weakness, and, as it were, himself unmuzzling the shadowy monsters in ambush around him; he who, a precocious warrior, had immediately, and from his first steps out of the cradle, struggled breast to breast with destiny; he, whose disproportion with strife had not discouraged from striving; he who, perceiving in everything around him a frightful occultation of the human race, had accepted that ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... said Miss Barrons with an appreciative glance at his precocious brow. "I think that's much better too. You don't have half as good a time if you go ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson |
