Sneer Not

Sneer not

Sneer not, ye cynics, who to school once went
And talked with knowledge at her many marts;
Who through long days and longer nights have spent
Your peace of soul to strengthen mental parts.
The worth ye garnered is not self-confined
But spread in plenty like a trader’s show;
Year in, year out, for all of human kind
What you have learned, a countless number know;
But rather court the grace that wisdom gives
Which simply means—be fearful of thy might;
He knows the most who learns and thereby lives
To feel his weakness as he strengthens sight.
Winnifred Eaton

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People Mentioned

Jean Lee Cole

Jean Lee Cole is Senior Consultant on The Winnifred Eaton Archive, author of The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity (2002), co-editor of A Japanese Nightingale and Madame Butterfly: Two Orientalist Texts (2002, with Maureen Honey), and editor of the original Winnifred Eaton Digital Archive (2004). She is Professor of English at Loyola University Maryland.

Winnifred Eaton

  • Born: August 21, 1875
  • Died: April 08, 1954
See the Biographical Timeline for biographical information on Winnifred Eaton.

Pseudonym used in this text

Joey Takeda

Joey Takeda is the Technical Director of The Winnifred Eaton Archive and a Developer at Simon Fraser University’s Digital Humanities Innovation Lab (DHIL). He is a graduate of the M.A. program in English at the University of British Columbia where he specialized in Indigenous and diasporic literature, science and technology studies, and the digital humanities.

Mary Chapman

Mary Chapman is the Director of The Winnifred Eaton Archive, a Professor of English, and Academic Director of the Public Humanities Hub at University of British Columbia. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and US Modernism (Oxford UP) and of numerous articles about American literature and women writers. She has also edited Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton (McGill-Queen’s UP) and published essays on the Eaton sisters in American Quarterly, MELUS, Legacy, Canadian Literature, and American Periodicals. Her current research project is a microhistory of the Eaton family. For more information, see http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/mchapman/.

Organizations Mentioned

Gall’s Daily News Letter

Kingston-based Jamaican newspaper published daily from 1857 until 1999. Audience described “as ‘fairly liberal white elites and successful mixed-race planters and manufacturers’” (Womack).
Written by Samantha Bowen

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Full Revision History
November 23, 2023JTPublishedAdded citation from bibliography.xml to sourceDesc using utilities/msdesc.xsl.
August 15, 2020JTPublishedRemoved primary source people from respStmt using XSLT.
July 01, 2020MCPublishedAdded note about source.
May 16, 2020MCPublishedproofread.
July 28, 2019MCPublished new facs.
May 15, 2019MCPublished final edits.
May 09, 2019SLReady for Proof Updated transcriber, encoder, and made text edits; changed status to readyForProof.
April 11, 2019JTIn ProgressMerged file, changed xml:id, and associated with bibliography entry bibl126 using XSLT.
February 01, 2019JTCreated file.