pedant

So necessary is this to the understanding the characters of men, that none are more ignorant of them than those learned pedants whose lives have been entirely consumed in colleges, and among books; for however exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers, the true practical system can be learnt only in the world.

I never saw a man so distressed as you were by my will; unless it were that hide-bound pedant, Lanyon, at what he called my scientific heresies.

"Of course the man's a pedant. He has no real feeling for beauty.

He was a pedant, to the most extreme point, the greatest pedant I had met on earth, and with that had a vanity only befitting Alexander of Macedon.

This is that Lavalle whom the world, immersed in speculations of immediate gain, did not know nor suspect--the Lavalle whom they adjudged to the last a pedant and a theorist.

I speak of that spiteful and intriguing Italian -- of the pedant who has tried to put on his own head a crown which he stole from under a pillow -- of the scoundrel who calls his party the party of the king -- who wants to send the princes of the blood to prison, not daring to kill them, as our great cardinal -- our cardinal did -- of the miser, who weighs his gold pieces and keeps the clipped ones for fear, though he is rich, of losing them at play next morning -- of the impudent fellow who insults the queen, as they say -- so much the worse for her -- and who is going in three months to make war upon us, in order that he may retain his pensions; is that the master whom you propose to me?

As to the clerks, he pronounced them mere pretenders, not one of whom had ever been among the Indians, nor farther to the northwest than Montreal, nor of higher rank than barkeeper of a tavern or marker of a billiard-table, excepting one, who had been a school-master, and whom he emphatically sets down for "as foolish a pedant as ever lived."

His tones were no longer those of the erudite pedant theorizing upon the abstract and the unknowable; but those of the man of action-- determined, but tinged also by a note of indescribable hopelessness and grief which wrung an answering pang from Clayton's heart.

But the idea of this dried-up pedant, this elaborator of small explanations about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor's back chamber, having first got this adorable young creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole)-- this sudden picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust: he was divided between the impulse to laugh aloud and the equally unseasonable impulse to burst into scornful invective.

my dear fellow," exclaimed La Fontaine, "you are a shocking pedant!"

Her successor and distant cousin, James of Scotland (James I of England), was a bigoted pedant, and under his rule the perennial Court corruption, striking in, became foul and noisome.