precisians

Great precisians of mean conditions and very illiterate, most part by a preposterous zeal, fasting, meditation, melancholy, are brought into those gross errors and inconveniences.

Anatomy of Melancholy 2007

But see the devil, that will never suffer the Church to be quiet or at rest: no garden so well tilled but some noxious weeds grow up in it, no wheat but it hath some tares: we have a mad giddy company of precisians, schismatics, and some heretics, even, in our own bosoms in another extreme.

Anatomy of Melancholy 2007

There were dismal precisians, like William Prynne, illiberal and vulgar fanatics, the Tribulation Wholesomes, Hope-on-high Bombys, and Zeal-of-the-land Busys, whose absurdities were the stock in trade of contemporary satirists from Johnson to Butler.

Henry A. Beers (1847-1926) 1989

The worst that can be laid to his charge is that he had a great liking for some diversions, quite harmless in themselves, but condemned by the rigid precisians among whom he lived, and for whose opinion he had a great respect.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" Various

There were tomboys and hoydens and solemn students; hard-working sculptresses and dreamy poetesses; girls who wanted to be boys, and girls who wanted to be nuns; girls who were frantic to vote, and girls who loathed the thought of independence; girls who ached to shock people, and girls of the prunes-and-prismatic type, patricians and precisians, anarchists and Bohemians.

We Can't Have Everything Rupert Hughes 1914

Let the precisians call my speech that of the Lothians.

Underwoods: Note 1913

This is an unmistakable offence against logic, and lays one open to the condemnation of examiners and precisians.

Grammar & Punctuation. 1908

The precisians had deserted the English Liturgy for the Genevan Book of Common Order; both sides were appealing to Beza, in Geneva, and were wrangling about the interpretation of that Pontiff's words. {259c}

John Knox and the Reformation Lang, Andrew, 1844-1912 1905

Moreover, the saddest of precisians could find no fault with the conduct of the shop.

Cabbages and Kings 1904

If the precisians of Port Nassau had made religion her tragedy, this man had come in, by an after-blow, to turn it into a blasphemous farce.

Lady Good-for-Nothing Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch 1903