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Clerkly   Listen
adjective
Clerkly  adj.  Of or pertaining to a clerk.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Clerkly" Quotes from Famous Books



... been a man of limited capacity and singular simplicity of character, formal and credulous, and tedious in his intercourse with the world. His letters to Lord Buckingham, written in a great clerkly hand, are full of solemn platitudes and ceremonious civilities; and whatever other excellent qualities he possessed, it cannot be inferred that he was a man of much mental reach or vigour. Obsolete in manners ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos

... is free to return with you, if he yet be under tutors and governors, or afraid of the master's stripes. Go, Earl William, I made a mistake; I thought you had been a man. But since I was wrong I bid you get back to the monk's chapter house, to clerkly copies and childish toys." ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett

... when she had read through the confused line or two, in the half-boyish, half-clerkly hand of Robin, scribbled and dispatched by the hands of Dick scarcely two ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson

... book which I am quoting from is called "Indo-Anglian Literature," and is well stocked with "baboo" English—clerkly English, hooky English, acquired in the schools. Some of it is very funny, —almost as funny, perhaps, as what you and I produce when we try to write in a language not our own; but much of it is surprisingly correct and free. If I were going to quote good English—but I am not. India is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... lime-barges. The men had found food and rest in the Army, and now they were going to fight "niggers" - people who ran away if you shook a stick at them. Wherefore they cheered lustily when the rumour ran, and the shrewd, clerkly non-commissioned officers speculated on the chances of batta and of saving their pay. At Headquarters men said: "The Fore and Fit have never been under fire within the last generation. Let us, therefore, ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling

... be a very clever man," said I—"no, not a clever man, for clever signifies clerkly, and a clever man one who is able to read and write, and entitled to the benefit of his clergy or clerkship; but a person may be a very acute person without being able to read or write. I never saw a more acute countenance ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow

... brain, Busied with his all-important balance of accounts, may deem Weighing words superfluous trouble: cheat to clerkly ears may seem Just the joke for friends to venture: but we are not friends, you see! When a gentleman is joked with,—if he's good at repartee, He rejoins, as do I—Sirrah, on your knees, withdraw in full! Beg ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... Sportsman. He was a garrulous person and Doggie a good listener. To please him Doggie backed horses, through the old firm, for small sums. The fact of his being a man of large independent means both he and Phineas (to his credit) had kept a close secret, his clerkly origin divined and promulgated by Mo Shendish being unquestioningly accepted, so the bets proposed by Taffy were of a modest nature. Once he brought off a forty to one chance. Taffy rushed to him with the news, dancing with excitement. Doggie's stoical ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke

... running to and fro on Old or New Roads may do thee good. It will afford thee time to rest eye and hand, and furnish thee with more glimpses of this working world than are to be seen from a library-window. But if it chance that thou be not clerkly, then mayest thou both 'run to and fro' and 'increase thy knowledge' even with the aid of so poor a guide as he who now bids thee ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne

... Affonso, and two of his knights, Emigio Moniz and Sancho Nunes. There on the great iron-studded doors he found, as he had been warned, the Roman parchment pronouncing him accursed, its sonorous Latin periods set forth in a fine round clerkly hand. ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini

... strove with herself, and became of better heart, and set herself strongly to the learning of the clerkly lore; she gathered her wits together, and no longer looked for every day and every hour to bring about the return of the Champions, nor blamed the day and the hour because they failed therein, and in all wise she strove to get through the day unworn ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris

... adventures we are about to relate was a very different man from John Esquemeling, who was a literary pirate and nothing more. Being of a clerkly disposition, the gentle John did not pretend to use the sabre or the pistol. His part in life was simply to watch his companions fight, burn, and steal, while his only weapon was his pen, with which he set down their exploits ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton

... story of peace, breaking like a quiet idyll the war-storms of his house. Alone of his race Fulk the Good waged no wars: his delight was to sit in the choir of Tours and to be called "Canon." One Martinmas eve Fulk was singing there in clerkly guise when the French king, Lewis d'Outremer, entered the church. "He sings like a priest," laughed the king as his nobles pointed mockingly to the figure of the Count-Canon. But Fulk was ready with his reply. "Know, my lord," wrote the Count of Anjou, "that a king unlearned is ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green

... that brought me now to consider my condition; to ask myself whither I should turn. Money I had none—not so much as a single copper grosso. To sell I had nothing but the clothes I stood in—black, clerkly garments that I had got yesterday at Mondolfo. Not so much as a weapon had I that I might have bartered for a few coins. There was the mule; that should yield a ducat or two. But when this was spent, ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini

... she shook into her lap. The sealed, foreign-looking letter she picked up first. It was addressed in a clerkly ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr

... course of the next afternoon the Vicar of Bleakirk called at the Hall with a paper which he had found pinned to the church door. It was evidently a scrap torn from an old letter, and bore, scribbled in pencil by a clerkly hand, these words: "The young Squire Cartwright in straits by the foot-bridge, six miles toward Netherkirk. ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... mind, whether it were safe to avail himself of the gifts of a spirit which did not even pretend to belong to the class of angels, and might, for aught he knew, have a much worse lineage than that which she was pleased to avow. "I will speak of it," he said, "to Edward, who is clerkly learned, and will tell me what I should do. And yet, no—Edward is scrupulous and wary.—I will prove the effect of her gift on Sir Piercie Shafton, if he again braves me, and by the issue, I will be myself a sufficient judge whether there ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... he not twit our sovereign lady here With ignominious words, though clerkly couch'd, As if she had suborned some to swear False allegations ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]

... similar institution in Scotland, designs that were destined to be carried out after his death by Kennedy; and Malcolm perforce heard many inquiries and replies, but he held aloof from friendship with his clerkly cousin Kennedy, and closed his ears as much as might be, hanging back as if afraid of returning to his books. There was in this some real dread of Ralf Percy's mockery of his clerkliness, but there was more real distaste ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge

... sombreness that was out of harmony in that sunlit, vernal landscape. But the sad-hued coat belied that morning a heart that sang within his breast as joyously as any linnet of the woods through which he strayed. That he was garbed in black was but the outward indication of his clerkly office, for he was secretary to the most noble the Marquis de Fresnoy de Bellecour, and so clothed in the livery of the ink by which he lived. His face was pale and lean and thoughtful, but within his great, intelligent eyes there shone a light of new-born ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini

... applied their art to literature, then the preservation of the Epic is explained. Written first in a prae-Phoenician script, it continued to be written in the Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. There was not yet, probably, a reading public, but there were a few clerkly men. ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... story with you," the Paymaster would say tolerantly. "You cannot see that if this country has not its wars and rumours of wars, its marchings-off and weedings-out, it would die of a rot. I hope you are not putting too many notions of that clerkly kind in the boy's head. Eh? I would be vexed to have my plans for him spoiled and a possible good soldier turned ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro

... he might yet have found in the peace of the good old men, and the holy rites and doctrine that they preserved; but before there was time for these things to find their way into the wounds of his spirit, his expulsion from home had sent him forth to see another side of monkish and clerkly life. ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... traders. Others doubtless obtained the journal from the haughty brass-bound pursers (there are no "supercargoes" now) of the Sydney and Auckland steamers. For the steamers, with their high-collared, clerkly pursers, have supplanted for good the trim schooners, with their brown-faced, pyjama-clad supercargoes, and the romance of the South Seas has gone. But it has not gone in the ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke

... it and read what was written, hurriedly but in a clerkly hand, and in the French tongue. It ran thus: "The sword of a brave man. Bury it with him if he be dead, and give it back to him if he lives, as I hope. My master would wish me to do this honour to a gallant foe whom in ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard

... "Very clerkly read," he spake, "and all runs smooth; methinks myself had been no poor scribe, were I but a clerk. Hadst thou written other matter, to betray my innocence, thou couldst not remember what I said, even word for word," he added gleefully. "Now ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang

... fury's pace: "A royal messenger he came, 75 Though most unworthy of the name. A letter forged! Saint Jude to speed! Did ever knight so foul a deed! At first, in heart, it liked me ill, When the King praised his clerkly skill. 80 Thanks to Saint Bothan, son of mine, Save Gawain, ne'er could pen a line. Saint Mary mend my fiery mood! Old age ne'er cools the Douglas blood; I thought to slay him where he stood. 85 'Tis pity of him, too," he cried: "Bold can he speak, ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty

... microscopic minority, as Lord Dufferin described it, when compared with the people proper, but still a very interesting class, seeing that it is of our own creation. It is composed almost entirely of those of the literary or clerkly castes who have received an ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... Tirette, although he has been worried for some time by blood-red streaks in his eyes—for some unknown and mysterious reason. Farfadet keeps himself aloof, in pensive expectation. When the post is being given out he awakes from his reverie to go so far, and then retires into himself. His clerkly hands indite numerous and careful postcards. He does not know of Eudoxie's end. Lamuse said no more to any one of the ultimate and awful embrace in which he clasped her body. He regretted—I knew it—his whispered confidence to me that evening, and up to his death he ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... the bitter end of it!" said I to myself, stunned by this pitiful conclusion. My mind groped back on the events of the whole waeful winter. I saw Argile again at peace among his own people; I heard anew his clerkly but wavering sentiment on the trade of the sword; I sat by him in the mouth of Glen Noe, and the song and the guess went round the fire. But the picture that came to me first and stayed with me last was Argile standing in his chamber in the castle of Inneraora, the pallor of the study on his face, ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro

... of Holloway prison we were conducted through a passage under the staircase to the basement of the reception wing. Our pockets were emptied, but not searched, and every article stowed away in a little bag. One by one we went into an office, where a clerkly official wrote our descriptions in a book. "What religion?" he inquired, when he came to the theological department. "None," I replied. "What!" he rejoined, "surely you're Catholic or Protestant ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote

... We have granted too much, ye ask for more; I am not skill'd in your clerkly lore, I scorn your logic; I had rather die Than live like Hugo of Normandy: I am a Norseman, frank and plain; Ye must ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon

... not made a pun for four days running, a thing unprecedented. Dinner over, he slipped away to his rooms, lit a pipe, and read the letters, the contents of two of which, three including the Squire's formal one, are already known. Another, in a fine clerkly hand, was ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell

... of the mental picture, uprose a left-hand page of his pass book; and its tidings of great joy, written in clerkly hand, served to dispel ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer

... by the Helen he fondly had wooed, A love-stricken swain in a region campestris, Thus "clerkly" gave vent to his sorrowful mood, Ah! vota si ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 472 - Vol. XVII. No. 472., Saturday, January 22, 1831 • Various

... this raiment a clerkly-looking man, who had been loitering in the office of the concierge, moved to the neighborhood of the door, where he occupied himself in study of a railway map ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang

... the confidential clerk was impervious to surprise or shock. This was fortunate, for otherwise, his employment as practical aide to Average Jones would probably have driven him into a madhouse. He now ran his long, thin, clerkly hands through ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... the madman say to the merchant? He took the cool, calculating villain by the throat, and cried, 'Write me out, in your round, clerkly hand, a full avowal of your guilt in this matter, or I'll strangle you!' The merchant knew he would, so he wrote this document with trembling fingers, and he ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... forever the value of this old copy of Pope's immortal poem, I find the following little note, in Lamb's clerkly chirography, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... these days Of clerkly and sluggish calm— To the petrel the swooping gale! Austere he seemed, but the hearts Of all men beat in his breast; No fetter but galled his wrist, No wrong that was not his own. What if those eloquent lips Curled with the old-time scorn? What if in needless ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... was a man of a subtler type—a man capable of dealing with the intrigues of a court and with problems of law, and, as such, suited for guiding the middle age of the kingdom, which the different qualities of his predecessors had been equally suited to found. Like his brother, Amalric I., he was a clerkly and studious king versed [v.03 p.0247] in law, and ready to discuss points of dogma. In an excellent sketch of Baldwin's character (xvi. cii.), William of Tyre tells us that he spent his spare time ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... guide to the pilgrims, deeming he would surely light on someone compassionate enough to pay him a supper in guerdon of his fine stories. But the first folk he had offered his services to had bidden him begone because his ragged coat bespoke neither good guidance nor clerkly wit; so he had come back, downhearted and crestfallen, to the Bishop's wall, where he had his bit of sunshine and his kind gossip Marguerite. "They reckon," he said bitterly, "I am not learned enough to ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France

... having been several times in communication with this clerkly essence, both on its own ground and at the Bower, had no difficulty in identifying it when he saw it up in its dusty eyrie. To the second floor on which the window was situated, he ascended, much pre-occupied in mind by the uncertainties besetting ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... not possible to establish the identity of Dr. Strong's house—"a grave building in a courtyard, with a learned air about it that seemed very well suited to the stray rooks and jackdaws who came down from the Cathedral towers, and walked with a clerkly bearing on the grass plot"—but Canon Benham has asserted his conviction that Mr. Wickfield's house—where David made the acquaintance of Agnes and of Uriah Heap—is at the corner of Broad Street and Lady Wotton's Green, though it is another residence, by the West Gate, ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin

... the pleasaunce, I almost overran the Prince himself. He was seated under a tree, a parchment of troubadours' songs lay by him, illuminated (to judge by the woeful pictures) by no decent monkish or clerkly hand. He had a bottle of Rhenish at hand, and looked the same hearty, hard-headed, ironic soldier he ever was, and yet, what is more strange, every inch of him ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... end of this while, it befell on a day, as he was leaving his hostel for his booth in the market, and had the door in his hand, there stood before him three mariners in the guise of his own country, and with them was one of clerkly aspect, whom he knew at once for his father's scrivener, Arnold Penstrong by name; and when Walter saw him his heart failed him and he cried out: "Arnold, what tidings? Is all well with the ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris

... have yet to learn that he has left me no whit more satisfied than himself. I was unprepared for so abrupt a departure; and as I had still much to say to him on the subject of our disagreement, I find myself compelled to the exercise of my clerkly skill, and am now occupied in telling him in writing all that I had left unsaid. There is the letter," she continued with a bitter smile, as she threw the ample scroll across the table; "read it, and tell ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... when the noon was come, The Prince and Channa passed beyond the gates, Which opened to the signet of the King, Yet knew not they who rolled the great doors back It was the King's son in that merchant's robe, And in the clerkly dress his charioteer. Forth fared they by the common way afoot, Mingling with all the Sakya citizens, Seeing the glad and sad things of the town: The painted streets alive with hum of noon, The traders cross-legged 'mid their spice and grain, The buyers with their money in the cloth, The war of ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold

... Milesien" Habits of mind and feeling, Possibly. But in Ealing With the most bank-clerkly ...
— Hugh Selwyn Mauberley • Ezra Pound

... looked for his name in the book. It was written in a fair, clerkly hand. He lived at Streatham. Suddenly I hated him. The dogged fool, to keep his nose on the grindstone like that. What was all his courage but the very tip-top of cowardice? What a vile nature—almost ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence

... citizen, a merchant. Clachan, a small village about a church. Claeding, clothing. Claes, claise, clothes. Claith, cloth. Claithing, clothing. Clankie, a severe knock. Clap, the clapper of a mill. Clark, a clerk. Clark, clerkly, scholarly. Clarkit, clerked, wrote. Clarty, dirty. Clash, an idle tale; gossip. Clash, to tattle. Clatter, noise, tattle, talk, disputation, babble. Clatter, to make a noise by striking; to babble; to prattle. Claught, clutched, seized. Claughtin, clutching, grasping. ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... the French tongue," said Alleyne, "and in a right clerkly hand. This is how it runs: 'A le moult puissant et moult honorable chevalier, Sir Nigel Loring de Christchurch, de son tres fidele ami Sir Claude Latour, capitaine de la Compagnie blanche, chatelain de Biscar, ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle

... to be endued with that he works in. Thus, in course of time, the merchant becomes bound up in his ventures and his ledger; an indefinable flavour of the pharmacopoeia lingers about the physician; the bombasine and horse-hair of the lawyer eat into his soul—his experiences are docketed in a clerkly hand, bound together with red tape, and put away in professional pigeon-holes. A man naturally becomes leavened by the profession which he has adopted. He thinks, speaks, and dreams "shop," as the colloquial phrase ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... ye sent it back, It was written sae clerkly and well! Now the message it brought, and the boon that it sought, I must even ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll

... back from Middletown in the afternoon, stopped at the post-office and got the mail. In it was a letter which she knew must be from her father, although the outer envelope was addressed in the same precise, clerkly hand which she associated with the mysterious ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long

... walls. I will take you where an altar stands. There is no lack of holy priest to join their hands together. Your companion, Father Ambrose, as you call him, will do the office fittingly. He has essayed his clerkly skill already ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth



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