I wonder what he is? He might be an artist, but he doesn't seem quite like an artist; or a dilettante, but he doesn't seem in the least like a dilettante. Or he might be an architect; I think that is the most probable guess of all. Perhaps he is only "going to be" one of these things, for he can't be more than twenty-five or twenty-six. Still he looks as if he were something already; that is, he has a kind of self-reliance in his mien,--not self-assertion, nor self-esteem, but belief in self, as if he were able, and knew that he was able, to conquer circumstances.英文原著 · 《A Cathedral Courtship》
Why, dilettante records say An Alderman, who came that way, Woo'd you and made you Lady Day; You crowned his civic flame. It suits a melancholy song To think your heart had suffered wrong, And that you lived not very long To be a City dame!英文原著 · 《Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations》
Dialect, 293. DiERL, 21, 259. DiETz, 436. Dilettantes, 393. 1)imension, third, and image, 235. Discursiveness, help against, 19. Dishonesty, in women, 341; causes hypocrisy, 343. Dispositions, 234; and habit, 408.英文原著 · 《Criminal Psychology》
How stupid of me not to have thought of it before. Here had we been racking our brains and our bodies, trying to explain our wants to an uneducated German, while, all the time, there lay to our hands a book specially written and prepared to assist people out of the very difficulty into which we had fallen--a book carefully compiled with the express object of enabling English travellers who, like ourselves, only spoke German in a dilettante fashion, to make their modest requirements known throughout the Fatherland, and to get out of the country alive and uninjured.英文原著 · 《Diary of a Pilgrimage》
A month later, after his return to England, he was unexpectedly relieved from these alternatives of extenuation and approval. A paragraph in the morning paper announced the sudden death of Doctor Lombard, the distinguished English dilettante who had long resided in Siena. Wyant's justification was complete. Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.英文原著 · 《Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton-Part 1》