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More "Mercurial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not be so sure," Julien interposed, setting down his glass. "The politics of Paris are the politics of France, and the spirit of the Parisian is essentially mercurial. Besides, the days of the great alliance draw nearer—the next step forward after the arbitration treaty. Who can doubt that when that is completed, France will embrace the chance ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... who shared these hearty laughs with her aunts—James's eldest daughter, Anna—differed widely from her cousin, Edward's daughter, Fanny. She was more brilliant both in looks and in intelligence, but also more mercurial and excitable. Both occupied a good deal of Jane's thoughts and affections; but Anna must have been the one who caused her the most amusement and also the most anxiety. The interest in her was heightened when she became engaged to ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... her own occupations to attend to; and besides, she is too old to run after a child, and he is too mercurial to be ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... Mrs. Capes, in whose house she was, and talk civilly to them of their improvements(!). She had to emulate the submission of Dora, who had seen the transfer coming and taken part in it. She had to copy the mercurial spirits of Rose and May. They were so pleased to be with their father and mother again, and to take possession of Phyllis Carey's every free moment, that they declared the Robarts's apartments were the very nicest the girls had ever seen. They, the apartments, were delightfully cosy (which meant ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... remained closed for five weeks, no sooner was it re-opened than the fire burst forth more furiously than at first. The howling of the flames ascending from the lowest depths of the pit awed the spectators, and the mercurial and sulphureous fumes arising from it threatened instant destruction to all who might approach. The director of the mine, as a last resource, came to the decision of flooding the works, and a river turned ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... very fine aneroid barometer were securely bolted to the bulkhead, side by side, in such a position that they could be seen from outside by merely glancing through the window. And near them, hung in gimbals from a long bracket, was a very fine Fitzroy mercurial barometer. ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... guessed, quite as much disconcerted by the reported contretemps in town; but he dissembled well, with a show of whimsical exasperation because of this emergency that tore him so soon away from both Gosnold House and his other neighbour at table, a Mrs. Artemas—a spirited, mercurial creature, not over-handsome of face, but wonderfully smart in dress and gesture, superbly stayed and well aware of it; a dark, fine woman who recognised the rivalry latent in Sally's dark looks without dismay—as Sally conceded she ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... litigious. Abeunt studia in mores. This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff the approach of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of trouble. Alas for him, it was far otherwise with his companions. The impressionable young Gourgaud, the thought-wrinkled Las Cases, the bright pleasure-loving Montholons, the gloomy Grand Marshal, Bertrand, and his mercurial consort, over whose face there often passed "a gleam of distraction"—these were not fashioned for a life of adversity. Thence came the long spells of ennui, broken by flashes of temper, that marked the voyage and the sojourn ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... cinnabar and five of rhubarb taken every night, but not to be cured by this process. As these worms are found only in the rectum, variety of clysters have been recommended. I was informed of a case, where solutions of mercurial ointment were used as a clyster every night for a month without success. Clysters of Harrowgate water are recomended, either of the natural, or of the factitious, as described below, which might have a greater proportion of liver of sulphur in it. As the cold ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... on. Road to the right," called the doctor, inwardly amazed at his visitor's mercurial disposition. "They call it Rink's Hotel. Not much of a place. Really a road house. But you'll find ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... abrupt termination by the angry "Now, then, sir!" of the guard, and the reckless thrusting of the little gentleman into his second-class carriage, to the endangerment of his life and limbs, and the exaggerated display of authority on the part of the railway official. Mr. Bouncer's mercurial temperament had enabled him to get over the little misfortune that had followed upon his examination for his degree; but he still preserved a memento of that hapless period in the shape of a wig of curly black hair. For he found, during the ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... idea!" The mercurial Percy's face shone again. "Splendid idea! Fill it full of old tins and china—what? And when we hear the second fellah hit the floor and start breakin' up the home we can pull the string and let down the trap-door. Splendid idea! Doocid clever of you, ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... irritation produced about the tail the horse continually rubs and it is well to apply Mercurial Ointment to both tail ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... docility, expressing no wish for greater or more frequent relaxation than consisted with his father's anxious and severe restrictions. When he did indulge in any juvenile frolics, his father had the candour to lay the whole blame upon his more mercurial ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... no man of lofty genius or character has ever condescended to remain an actor. His lot pressed heavily even on so mercurial a trifler as David Garrick, who has given utterance to the feeling in lines as good perhaps as any ever written by ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... master-politician of his age. During the first weeks of the Conference, Wilson seems to have fallen under the spell of Lloyd George to some extent, who showed himself quite as liberal as the President in many instances. But Wilson was clearly troubled by the Welshman's mercurial policy, and before he finally left for America, found relief in the solid consistency of Clemenceau. He always knew where the French Premier stood, no matter how much he might differ from him in ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... disorder, have, in several instances, fallen victims to it's fury. Within this few days, a Dr. Rush has discovered this disorder is not the yellow fever of the West Indies and has applied an opposite mode of cure by copious bleedings, mercurial medicines, &c. with some success. What is truly extraordinary, the infection does not affect people ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... that Swedenborg in his youth studied astrology, for in his visions the Mercurial folk have this desire of knowledge as their ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... old-world method and application. Mentally and physically they were splendid men. The whole race of Flemings and Dutch was found by our young recruits to be a grave and powerful people, although exceptional cases of mercurial temperament were not rare. Some curious individuals were to be found among them, as is more the case in European nationalities in general than in our own. Both Americans were much liked and respected by all their new-found ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... springs from an habitual elevation of thought, bearing witness to the purity of its source, as a clear eye and ruddy cheek bear witness to the purity of the air you daily breathe. In some respects he was the mercurial Frenchman to the last day of his life; yet his general bearing, that in which he comes oftenest to my memory, was of calm earnestness, tempered and mellowed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... and traders; what literary culture found expression was formed on English models, dignified and plentifully garnished with Latin and Greek allusions; the commercial spirit ruled, and the relaxations and amusements partook of its hurry and excitement. In their gay, hospitable, and mercurial character, the inhabitants were true progenitors of the present metropolis. A newspaper had been established in 1732, and a theatre had existed since 1750. Although the town had a rural aspect, with its quaint dormer-window ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... kept my grasp on Enriquez' arm, and succeeded in restraining his mercurial impulses for the moment. He halted, and puffed vigorously at his cigarette; but the next instant he started forward again. "Let us, however, follow with discretion in the rear; we shall pass her house; we shall gaze at it; it ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... affection. In the old days she had not been moved by any great feeling of affection for her; she pitied her along with the rest and enjoyed her society after a fashion, but she stood not a little in awe of her mercurial temperament and her aristocratic ways, and much preferred the friendship of the simple, dispassionate Winnebagos. But now that she and Veronica had met after a year's separation, Sahwah suddenly realized that the dark-eyed, temperamental little Hungarian girl had an irresistible ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... ran down the steps and pursued him, panting and almost weeping. He turned at the sound of her hurrying steps, puzzled by the pursuit and on his guard against her influence. He was suspicious of her intentions now, and waited for her to explain the meaning of this mercurial change. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... the permanent never is writ In blood of the passions: mercurial they, Shifty their issue: stir not that pit To the game our ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... She did her best to help him throw off his misgivings; she defended him from himself; she promised him her help, not with the old effusion, but still with a cousinly kindness. And his mercurial nature soon passed into another mood—a mood of hopefulness that the doctor would set everything right, that Alice would consent to place herself under proper care, that the crisis would end ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sturdy independence in the Spanish character, and an impatience of dictation that harmonises more nearly with the English character than with that of her Latin neighbours.... There is a gravity and reticence also in the Spaniard that is absent from his mercurial neighbour, and which is, indeed, much more akin ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... lamented that antiquarian zeal is so often diverted from subjects of real to those of merely fanciful interest. The mercurial young gentlemen who addict themselves to that exciting department of letters are open to censure as being too fitful, too prone to flit, bee-like, from flower to flower, now lighting momentarily upon an indecipherable tombstone, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... and that the after-results are most undesirable. But when you have prescribed the hemp for nervous, overstrung, imaginative people, I have observed that they can stand large amounts of the tincture without evil results, and that the after-effects pass off rapidly. I who am mercurial in temperament, for example, can take any amount of Indian hemp without being made ill by it; while ten drops will send some slow and torpid rustics mad drunk with excitement—drive them into ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... confined to the Oriental peoples of Babylon and Syria, of Phrygia and Egypt; they were not a product peculiar to the religious mysticism of the dreamy East, but were shared by the races of livelier fancy and more mercurial temperament who inhabited the shores and islands of the Aegean. We need not, with some enquirers in ancient and modern times, suppose that these Western peoples borrowed from the older civilisation of the Orient the conception of the Dying and Reviving ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... I met the mercurial Gosling at the club a few days ago. As I hadn't seen him for some time I asked if he had been on a holiday. "Yes," he said, "down at Shinglestrand. Golfing? No—yes. I did play one game, the first since the War, and rather a remarkable ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 15, 1917 • Various
... the doctrine of Bourbon authority must also be questioned. Even if French thought and literature did for a moment pay tribute at the throne of Louis XIV the closing years of the century were marked by the names of Leibnitz, Bayle and Newton; the mercurial intelligence of France could not long remain stagnant with such forces as these casting their influence over European civilization. {16} The new century was not long in, the Regent Philip of Orleans had not long been in ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... requires a careful memory and quick powers of combination and calculation. No caffe in Rome or Marseilles would be complete without its little black and white counters; and as it interests at once the most mercurial and fidgety of people and the laziest and languidest, it must have some hidden charm as yet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... undergone no other alteration than that produced by lassitude, he is already prepared, therefore, to renew his communications with its different members, all of whom were well disposed to show off in their respective characters, the moment they were favored with an opportunity. The mercurial Pippo, as he had been the most difficult to restrain during the day, was the first to steal from his lair, now that the Argus-like eyes of Baptiste permitted the freedom, and the exhilarating, coolness of the sunset invited action. His success ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... visits to the sick stranger remained unobstructed. He had no notion of teaching him; but the foreign boy in his languor and helplessness curiously fascinated him, perhaps from the very contrast of the passive, indolent, tropical nature with his own mercurial temperament. The Spaniard, or perhaps the old Mexican, seemed to predominate in Fernando, as far as could be guessed in one so weak and helpless. He seemed very quiet and inanimate, seldom wanting or seeking ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... appointed for this purpose, reported in 1876 that sixty of the most reliable of Joule's experiments gave the mean value 774.1. The experiments were made with water at a temperature of about 60 deg. F., according to the mercurial thermometer, and reduced to its value at the temperature of melting ice, according to the formula given by Regnault for the variation of the specific heat of water at varying temperature under the constant pressure of one ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... I bore the discomforts of the situation as philosophically as we could. We smoked always, and we read and played bezique alternately, but our mercurial French friends were less happy, and on the third day of this detestable weather, on entering the little smoking-room on deck, I discovered them both sitting in tears, and bewailing the fact that they were not at home with their mothers. ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... also that in the first Creation, which was performed of nothing, three things arose; to wit, a Soulish, Spiritual, Invisible Essence, which represented a Mercurial Water, a Sulphurous Vapour, and a Terrene Salt; these three gave a compleat and perfect, a tangible and formal Body to all things wherein especially all the four Elements are contained, as I have already mentioned in my Writing where I treat ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus
... Mercurial ointment mixed with black cylinder oil and applied every quarter of an hour, or as often as expedient. The following is also recommended as a good cooling compound for heavy bearings:—Tallow 2 lb., plumbage 6 oz., sugar of lead 4 oz. Melt the tallow with ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... chief, is one question—whether either chief or army can be kept six months quiet,—another, and a totally different one. That they must either be fighting somebody or going somewhere, else, their life isn't worth living to them; the activity and mercurial flashing and flickering hither and thither, which in the soul of it is set neither on war nor rapine, but only on change of place, mood—tense, and tension;—which never needs to see its spurs in the dish, but has them always bright, and on, ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... Pellets" are far more effective in arousing the liver to action than "blue pills," the old-fashioned compound cathartic pills, calomel or other mercurial preparations, and have the further merit of being purely vegetable in their composition and perfectly harmless in any condition of the system. Furthermore, no particular care ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... people stop there as a matter of course in their flight between Florida and Newport. They go up and down the coast like the mercury in a thermometer—up when it's warm, down when it's cold. There's the secret of our mercurial temperament." ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... remember a day in the summer of 1859 when Procter had a party of friends at dinner to meet Hawthorne, who was then on a brief visit to London. Among the guests were the Countess of ——, Kinglake, the author of "Eothen," Charles Sumner, then on his way to Paris, and Leigh Hunt, the mercurial qualities of whose blood were even ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... was closed by the Chinaman, and Kerry stood out in the darkness of the dismal, brick-walled street, feeling something as nearly akin to dejection as was possible in one of his mercurial spirit. Something trickled upon the brim of his hat, and, raising his head, Kerry detected rain upon his upturned face. He breathed a prayer of thankfulness. This would put an end ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... powerful Consul Casimir, the one man necessary to his comprehensive operation. When his unhappy wife tells him there is no bread in the house for the next day, he retorts: "Very well, then we shall dine at the Hotel Continental." Nothing depresses his mercurial spirits. He borrows from Peter to pay Paul, and an hour later borrows from Paul to pay himself. His boyhood friend he simply plunders. This Ernest, in reality the Graf von Trautenau, is an idealist of the type that Wedekind is fond of delineating. He would save the world ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... but our own); but it was a poor consolation. The fact remained that his herald Mercury, standing a tiptoe, could look down on mine. I seem to glimpse something of this familiar weakness in Mr. White. He, too, has shared in these mercurial triumphs and defeats. Nor do I doubt that he had a true country-gentleman's interest in the weather-cock; that his first question on coming down of a ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... mare both gallops and trots While whisking you off to Bumpville; She paces, she shies, and she stumbles, in spots, In the tortuous road to Bumpville; And sometimes this strangely mercurial steed Will suddenly stop and refuse to proceed, Which, all will admit, is vexatious indeed, When one is en ...
— Love-Songs of Childhood • Eugene Field
... suppose we are more lenient with human nature than theologians generally are. We know that the spirits of men and their views of the present and the future go up and down with the barometer, and that a permanent depression of one inch in the mercurial column would affect the whole ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Enthusiasm Domino Book Fanatic Grotesque Cheat Auction Economy Illegible Quell Cheap Illegitimate Sheriff Excelsior Emasculate Danger Dunce Champion Shibboleth Calico Adieu Essay Pontiff Macadamize Wages Copy Stentorian Quarantine Puny Saturnine Buxom Caper Derrick Indifferent Boycott Mercurial Gaudy ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... encumber, or scatter In a thousand mercurial gleams, And those feet whose impetuous patter I hear and ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... long the fowls kept it alive with sound and movement; for of all mercurial and fussy things there is nothing on the face of the earth to equal cocks and hens. They have such an utterly exaggerated sense, too, of their own importance; they make such a clacking and clucking over every egg, such a scratching and trumpeting over ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... horseman, or for reasons best known to themselves, the Tejadas had given Mr. Hinckley a very spirited saddle-mule. The first thing I knew, her rider, carrying a heavy camera, a package of plate-holders, and a large mercurial barometer, borrowed from the Harvard Observatory, was pitched headlong into the sand. Fortunately no damage was done, and after a lively chase the runaway mule was brought back by Corporal Gamarra. After Mr. Hinckley was remounted on his dangerous ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... from the outskirts was soon taken up in the centre of the city, and now nothing was to be seen in any direction but a dashing and scampering of the mercurial and excitable citizens of the place, each to his lodge or burrow. Far as the eye could reach was spread the city, and in every direction the scene was the same. We rode leisurely along until we had reached the more thickly settled portion of the city, when ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... L200 a year, conferred upon him in consideration of his literary merits, and the little profits he derived from his lectures in Bath, to support with decency himself and his family. The prospects of Halhed were much more golden, but he was far too gay and mercurial to be prudent; and from the very scanty supplies which his father allowed him, had quite as little of "le superflu, chose si necessaire," as his friend. But whatever were his other desires and pursuits, a visit to Bath,—to that place which ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... face, and crushing his hat down over his eyes, he set off at a quick pace in an opposite direction to that part of the street where I was standing. I confess I felt ashamed of the espionage in which I was occupied, and although I followed my mercurial fiend at a safe distance, for the distinct purpose of earthing him wherever he was going, I by no means liked the office which a sort of fatality had forced upon me. But I was somewhat reconciled to it by ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... sentences of indifferent Dutch which I yet conserved from my education amongst the Vee boors, at the Cape, served as a passport to their civility. Without this accomplishment, all strangers are suspected of being Irishers; and, as such, partake of the dislike and dread in which their more mercurial neighbours are held by this sober-sided and ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... own. Charles Lever himself complained that in the supper scene of his second number, Lorrequer bore so striking a resemblance to his contemporary, Nicholas Nickleby; while his biographer, Mr. Fitzpatrick, observes that the identity of Harry Lorrequer is never maintained throughout the novel, that mercurial hero being alternately represented old, young, good-looking, and ugly. So much indeed was Lever impressed with the fact, that he actually besought the artist to represent O'Malley the same person throughout ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... with mercurial rise of spirits. "I'm the luckiest dog in England today. Happy chance has beaten all the tricks of the studio. O ye goddesses, inspire me to heights worthy ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... 16th Rice had an attack of acute indigestion, which might have resulted seriously had it not been for the mercurial pills which promptly relieved him. The reader should observe that practically all of this testimony comes from Jones. There is no extraneous evidence that Patrick induced the giving of the mercury. Patrick, however, spread false rumors as to Rice's general health and also ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... du Syst. du Monde', p. 229 and 263; 'Mecanique Celeste', t. v., p. 18 and 72. It should be remarked that the fraction 1/306th of a degree of Fahrenheit of the mercurial thermometer, given in the text as the limit of the stability of the Earth's temperature since the days of Hipparchus, rests on the assumption that the dilation of the substances of which the Earth is composed is equal to that of glass, that is to say, 1/18,000th for 1 degree. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... remarkable theory[147] as to surmise that the central episode of faithless love occurred about 1594. If so, here was enough to deepen and impassion the plastic personality of the rhymer of VENUS AND ADONIS; to add a new string to the heretofore Mercurial lyre. All the while, too, he was undergoing the kind of culture and of psychological training involved in his craft of acting—a culture involving a good deal of contact with the imaginative literature of the Renaissance, so far as then translated, and a psychological training of ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... tube; this is equal to 11/2 in. per 100 deg. Fahr., and from these data a scale is constructed, the correctness of which is easily verified by transferring the spiral heater into an air bath or oil of high boiling point, and then comparing the readings of the pyrometer scale with those of a mercurial thermometer placed alongside of the spiral heater. By this means it can be clearly demonstrated that, up to the highest point to which it is safe to use a mercurial thermometer, the readings of the pyrometer scale and that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... his chin on his hands and surveyed her quizzically. Felix, despite his protests, was not enamoured of Delgratz, and his mercurial temperament rejoiced in the near ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... ministry, headed by the Marquis of Rockingham, which included the Duke of Newcastle, Henry Conway, and the Duke of Grafton. Missing was the Old Whigs principal leader, William Pitt, who preferred to pursue his independent and mercurial ways. The Rockingham ministry, most of whose members had disliked the Stamp Act from the beginning, drew their greatest strength from the merchant communities. By the time parliament opened in December, Rockingham and his supporters were in agreement—the act must be repealed. But ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... time lived in a cottage at the wrong end of Taylor Street Hill, and, Mrs. Dwight having received a small legacy from a sister recently deceased which had convinced her, if not her less mercurial husband, that their luck had finally turned, had sent Gora, then a rangy girl of thirteen, fond of books and study, to a large private school in ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... by which he is, even to this day, supposed—by the faithful—to have discovered Neptune, he had already announced the probable existence of an Intra-Mercurial body, or group of bodies. He had five observations besides Lescarbault's upon something that had been seen to cross the sun. In accordance with the mathematical hypnoses of his era, he studied these six transits. Out of them he computed elements giving "Vulcan" a period of about 20 days, ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... afterwards Separate them, but only Pulverize them; whereof an Instance is afforded us by the Common Preparation of Mercurius Dulcis, where the Saline Particles of the Vitriol, Sea Salt, and sometimes Nitre, Employ'd to make the Sublimate, do so unite themselves with the Mercurial Particles made use of, first to Make Sublimate, and then to Dulcifie it, that the Saline and Metalline Parts arise together in many successive Sublimations, as if they all made but one Body. And sometimes too the Fire does ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... quadruped was a beautiful little bay, whose tendency to bound over every little stick and stone, as if it were a five-barred gate, and to run away upon all and every occasion, admirably suited the tastes and inclinations of its mercurial rider. ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... heresy, however, the Aydelots became one of the leading families in the development of the colonies. Their descendants fell heir to the traits of their French-English forbears: freedom of belief, courage to follow a cause, a touch of the wanderlust, the mercurial French mind, and the steady poise of the followers of the Inward Light. A trace of bitterness had come down the years, however, with the family history; a feud-like resentment against the family ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... boiling heat, is changed into an elastic aeriform fluid, susceptible, like all other gasses, of being received and contained in vessels, and preserving its gasseous form so long as it remains at the temperature of 80 deg. (212 deg.), and under a pressure not exceeding 28 inches of the mercurial barometer. As this phenomenon has not been generally observed, no language has used a particular term for expressing water in this state[10]; and the same thing occurs with all fluids, and all substances, which do not evaporate in the common temperature, ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... attached to Tapton Everard, and such the story which the lively Caroline Ingoldsby detailed to her equally mercurial cousin, Charles Seaforth, lieutenant in the Hon. East India Company's second regiment of Bombay Fencibles, as arm-in-arm they promenaded a gallery decked with some dozen grim-looking ancestral portraits, and, among others, with that of the redoubted Sir Giles ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... of this year, which paved the way for better relations in the future between Britain and France, the King made a successful tour of a part of Ireland—July 21st to August 1st—and impressed himself upon the mercurial temperament of the sons of Erin. In September came the memorable retirement of Mr. Chamberlain from the Balfour Government; his declaration of devotion to the new-old ideal of limited protective tariffs for the United Kingdom plus preferential duties ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... a Roman bath. A late dinner brought us together again in a small dining room, the convalescents having eaten their simple meal and disappeared an hour before. During this time, another transformation had taken place in our mercurial hostess! It was the Calvé of Paris, Calvé the witch, Calvé the capiteuse, who presided at the dainty, flower-decked table and led the ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... mercury one can learn the pressure of the atmosphere. If a glass tube and dish of mercury are attached to a board and the dish of mercury is inclosed in a case for protection from moisture and dirt, and further if a scale of inches or centimeters is made on the upper portion of the board, we have a mercurial barometer (Fig. 44). ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... purse is low my spirits sink, as the mercury does with the cold. You used to say my spirits were mercurial—I ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... has any theatrical novelty to offer, whether as a political mountebank, or a bogus hero, or a peculiarly atrocious crime, is sure of a large audience. For there is a wide range of appreciation in that mercurial nature which, according to Voltaire, is ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... Fortunately, however, for the prevention of accidents, but unfortunately for the therapeutic value of the soap, a decomposition of the sublimate occurs as soon as it is incorporated in the soap mass, by which an insoluble mercurial soap is formed. This change takes place independently of the alkali used in the soap; in fact, as mentioned above, a well-made soap contains no appreciable amount of free alkali, but is due to the action of the fat acids. Corrosive sublimate is incompatible with any ordinary ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... mercurial and lustily cheering boys was my friend Andrew, and a little farther on, lo! the knight himself. A motor cap was jammed on his warm curls, and a football guernsey displayed the proportions of his broad chest as his Chesterfield fell ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... theory that any boy, if rightly trained, can be made into a gentleman. He chooses a boy from the workhouse, with a bad reputation but with excellent instincts, and adopts him, the story narrating the adventures of the mercurial lad. The restless boyish nature, with its inevitable tendency to get into scrapes, is sympathetically and ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... roseola appeared. The syphilis was very obstinate in this patient, compelling me to keep him under the influence of mercury for a long time. In October 1873, the patient presented himself with a very aggravated mercurial stomatitis. The customary remedies, internal as well as external, made little or no impression on the affection. On November 11th, I discontinued all other treatment, and ordered a course of galvanic baths. He took his first bath on the same day. ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... Miss Vosburgh," said Mr. Lanniere, in a choking voice, for he could not fail to note the merriment which the mercurial Strahan strove in vain to suppress; "I will leave you to more congenial society. I have paid you the highest compliment in my power, ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... enjoyed greatly a meeting with Tennyson and Browning, and wrote with enthusiasm of the former to his father, as 'one who gave men an insight into the real Hero-world, as one from whom he could catch reflected something of the Divine'. But Morier's spirits were mercurial, and between moments of elation he was apt to fall into fits of melancholy, when he could find no outlet for his energies. Waiting for his true profession tried him sorely, and he was even resigning himself to the prospect of a visit to Australia as a professional journalist, when fortune ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... a deep breath, wanting to wind up the illimitable discussion of what might have been, though nothing could be legally proven, "it is a strange story. So our mercurial Ladislaw has a queer genealogy! A high-spirited young lady and a musical Polish patriot made a likely enough stock for him to spring from, but I should never have suspected a grafting of the Jew pawnbroker. However, there's no knowing what a mixture will turn out beforehand. Some sorts of dirt ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... London; the hardy Gael from the Highlands of Scotland; the solemn Moravian from Herrnhut; the phlegmatic German from Salzburg in Bavaria; the reflecting Swiss from the mountainous and pastoral Grisons; the mercurial peasant from sunny Italy, and the ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... make the same error, and this error can be readily corrected by frequent observations to determine latitude and longitude. A series of barometrical observations was kept going whether we were on the move or not. That is, a mercurial barometer was read three times a day, regularly, at seven, at one, and at nine. We had aneroid barometers for work away from the river and these were constantly compared with and adjusted to the mercurials. The tubes of mercury sometimes got broken, and ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... atmosphere, which lose their power of germination if subjected to heat. But one observer now made another experiment which seemed to go entirely the other way, and puzzled him altogether. He took some of this boiled infusion that I have been speaking of, and by the use of a mercurial bath—a kind of trough used in laboratories—he deftly inverted a vessel containing the infusion into the mercury, so that the latter reached a little beyond the level of the mouth of the 'inverted' vessel. You ...
— The Method By Which The Causes Of The Present And Past Conditions Of Organic Nature Are To Be Discovered.—The Origination Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... effect of their shots was instantly apparent, from the excessive yelping that greeted their ears, and satisfied them that some, at least, of their annoyers had got something to remember; while they were gratified to listen to the fast receding sounds of these "mercurial inhabitants of the plain." The dogs quickly "made themselves scarce," nor did they afterwards attempt to reduce the distance they had placed between themselves and the travellers; who, upon the establishment ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... contributed very much to the quota of general noise. Although Henderson had chaffed Daubeny on his virtuous stillness, yet all the boys sat very nearly as quiet as Dubbs himself during school hours. Even Henderson and such mercurial spirits were awed into silence and sobriety. You would hardly have known that in that quarter of the room there was a form at all. Quicksilver itself would have lost its volatility under Mr ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... together without rubbing shoulders. It will also be observed, that the passage through the centre of the carriages enables any one to pass with ease throughout the whole length of the train. This is a privilege of which the mercurial blood and inquisitive mind of the American take unlimited advantage, rendering the journey one continued slamming of doors, which, if the homoeopathic principle be correct, would prove an infallible cure for headache, could the sound only be triturated, and passed through the finest ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... inquired from an official what that steamer might be, and was told that it was the eight o'clock from Dover, which had broken down, put into Calais for some slight necessary repairs, and was arriving at its destination nearly four hours late. Her mercurial spirits rose again. A minute ago she was regarding herself as no better than a ninny engaged in a wild-goose chase. Now she felt that after all she had been very sagacious and cunning. She was morally sure that she would find the Zerlinski woman ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... foret, with its indescribable glamour, its affecting sincerity, its restraint, its exquisite and unflagging simplicity. The hesitant and melancholy personages who invest its scenes—Melisande, timid, naive, child-like, wistful, mercurial, infinitely pathetic; Pelleas, dream-filled, ardent, yet honorable in his passion; old Arkel, wise, gentle, and resigned; the tragic and brooding figure of Golaud; Little Yniold, artless and pitiful, a figure impossible anywhere save in Maeterlinck; ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... even now, to any one who is determined to maintain the possibility of it; but under the training of modern science scarcely any one retains such a belief. Of the influence formerly attributed to the planets, traces survive in such epithets as mercurial, jovial, saturnine. Comets appearing in the sky caused widespread alarm, and any disasters that followed close were confidently connected with them. The most learned scientists observed the stars and cast horoscopes: ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... quite saint-like, it was at least suggestive of a good man who was walking in the way which he pointed out to others. But these qualities were not those with which he was most highly endowed. Energy and sterling common-sense, which he had inherited from his father, an elastic, mercurial, and passionate nature, which had come to him from his Huguenot mother,—these were the strong points in his character, and it belongs to neither of them to take the lead in the Church. Sydney had scanned the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... was so contagious that many of the companies were assembled and ready to file out of the company streets before the order reached them. We marched by the moonlight into the space between the belligerent regiments; but Lytle had already got his own men under control, and the less mercurial Thirteenth were not disposed to be aggressive, so that we were soon dismissed with a compliment for our promptness. I ordered the colonels to march the regiments back to the camps separately, and with my staff rode through that of the Thirteenth, to see how matters were there. All ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... him for the Congress. Elected to the House, he was immediately greeted by connoisseurs of the best stamp— President Martin van Buren, "prince of good fellows;" Webster, another intellect, saturnine in repose and mercurial in activity; the convivial Senator Douglas, and the like. These formed the rapt ring around Lincoln in his own chair in the snug corner of the congressional chat-room. Here he perceived that his rusticity and shallow skimmings placed him under the trained politicians. It was here, too, that his stereotyped ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... recent instance was the overthrow of President Legitime and the instalment of Hyppolite. The peace and prosperity of Hayti would be promoted by reducing the term of the Presidential office to two years. The contests that are sure to arise among a mercurial people would thus be transferred from the battle-field to the ballot- box. Who could have answered for the peace of the United States in 1868 if President Johnson's term had been six years instead ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... fifth of the group, was the delight of them all. The carriage of a bantam rooster, the courage of a lion, more brain than he could stagger under; a disposition fiery, mercurial, sanguine, witty; he was made, according to Billy Fairfax's dictum, of "wire and brass tacks," and he possessed what Honey Smith (who himself had no mean gift in that direction) called "the gift of gab." He lived by writing magazine ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... had taken his usual lolling attitude in the most comfortable chair he could find, while his more mercurial friend kept pacing the room, now raised his head in surprise, following the quick motions of the other, with his eyes, as if he doubted whether he had rightly ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... during his life was no less noted as a philosopher and musician than as a physician. He continued the work of Honain, and advanced therapeutics by introducing more extensive use of chemical remedies, such as mercurial ointments, sulphuric acid, and aqua vitae. He is also credited with being the first physician to describe small-pox and ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Jovial f. Natural f. Mercurial f. Celestial f. Lunatic f. Erratic f. Ducal f. Eccentric f. Common f. Aethereal and Junonian f. Lordly f. Arctic f. Palatine f. Heroic f. Principal f. Genial f. Pretorian f. Inconstant f. Elected f. Earthly ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... upon my arrival, to tell me the difference between an infusion and decoction; and the history, the virtues, and the botanical or medical name of the bark. Chambers will tell you more perhaps than you will wish to read of it. Your little mercurial disquisition ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... three miles off, what was there to be said? No possible pretext could be devised for preventing them. Why, oh, why had she persuaded that graceless dragoon to leave Aldershot and share the peace and tranquillity of home? She might have remembered how foreign peace and tranquillity were to Jim's mercurial disposition; and then, Lady Mary reflected ruefully, that flirting Suffolk girl was certain to be present at the sports. In her dismay, she for a second thought of taking counsel with Pansey Cottrell as to what it were best to do ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... by an impetuous and mercurial people, whose lightning sympathies demanded as rapid a response, inevitably threw their supposed possessors into disfavour. The situation was doubly to be regretted, in that both the Princess and her husband were in reality devoted to Brazil and to the best interests of the Brazilians. It ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... confidante, older than she, much more dignified, and of the reticent sort to which the mercurial and loquacious naturally tend to reveal their secrets. She knew all that Annie knew, dreamed, or hoped about Hunt; but had never happened to meet him, much to the annoyance of Annie, who had longed inexpressibly for the time when Lou should have seen him, and she herself ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... china Dinah's mistress arrived in time to see her favorite coffee-set in pieces. The sight was too much for her mercurial temper. "Dinah," she said, "I cannot stand it any longer. I want you to go. I want you to go soon, I want ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... my ideal." She burst into tears and flung her arms about Magdalena's neck: she was always miserable when those she loved were angry with her, much as she delighted to shock the misprized. "Say you forgive me," she sobbed, "or I sha'n't eat or sleep for a week." And Magdalena, who always took her mercurial friend literally, forgave her ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... sorrows and anxieties have rested, but not on one such, and in such measure, as upon that simple, truthful, noble soul, our faithful and sainted Lincoln. Never rising to the enthusiasm of more impassioned natures in hours of hope, and never sinking with the mercurial in hours of defeat to the depths of despondency, he held on with immovable patience and fortitude, putting caution against hope, that it might not be premature, and hope against caution, that it might not yield to dread and danger. ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... No one knew better than he how little regard John M. Hurd really felt for this mercurial youth. Yet Mr. Hurd had resisted with entire success all other means of approach. After all, family connections counted for something, even with the retentive old trolley magnate. So when at last he spoke, it was with the determination to show a ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... of his own pleasure to ever think of sending her money. "Jerry," he thought, "was a mighty stingy fellow, and never spent a cent on himself—and could easily send Nell all she wanted." And yet Gerald Rodman, knowing his brother's weak and mercurial nature, and knowing that he took no care in the welfare of any living soul but himself, would have laid his life down for him, because happy, careless Ned had Nellie's eyes and Nellie's mouth, and in the tones of his voice he heard hers. So as ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... party were of the same mind, the boat was allowed to drift down the gulf with the tide, while the pork and biscuit-bags were opened. Little time was allowed for the meal, nevertheless the mercurial Canadian managed, between mouthfuls, to keep up a running commentary on things in general. Among other things he referred to the property which his master had just purchased ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... "broad gauge" occasioned her to swoon, and dispelled the romantic attachment of Lord Montacute, was but a repetition of the French countesses, who thronged the antechambers of Law a century before. More vehement in their desires, more mercurial in their temperament than the English, the French, when seized with any general mania, push it even into greater excesses, and induce upon themselves and their country more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... hot. Placing the dark card in the same position, it is found cool. The white powder has absorbed far more heat than the dark one. This simple result abolishes a hundred conclusions which have been hastily drawn from the experiments of Franklin. Again, here are suspended two delicate mercurial thermometers at the same distance from a gas-flame. The bulb of one of them is covered by a dark substance, the bulb of the other by a white one. Both bulbs have received the radiation from the flame, but the white bulb has absorbed most, and ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Hilary Vance, an artist who had employed Pollyooly as his model for a set of stories for The Blue Magazine. Hilary Vance was devoted to Pollyooly, and he had a spare bedroom. But for a while the Honourable John Ruffin hesitated; the artist was a man of an uncommonly mercurial, irresponsible temperament. Was it safe to entrust two small children to his care? Then he reflected that Pollyooly was a strong corrective of irresponsibility, and took a ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... offence to his superiors, he began to be depicted as an idiot and a scoundrel, and this judgment promptly displaced the other one in the popular mind. The late Major General Roosevelt was often a victim of that sort of boob-bumping. A man of mercurial temperament, constantly shifting his position on all large public questions, he alternately gave great joy and great alarm to the little group of sagaciously wilful men which exercises genuine sovereignty ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... eyes, and a dark circle round them, spoke of cares and fatigue, and perhaps dissipation. But he had evidently a vigour of constitution that had borne him passably through all; his frame was wiry and nervous; his eye bright and full of life; and there was that abrupt, unsteady, mercurial restlessness in his movements and manner which usually accompanies the man whose sanguine temperament prompts him to concede to the impulse, and who is blessed or cursed with a superabundance of energy, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be turned round its axis by the force of horses, in order that the heat accumulated in the cylinder might from time to time be measured, a small, round hole 0.37 of an inch only in diameter and 4.2 inches in depth, for the purpose of introducing a small cylindrical mercurial thermometer, was made in it, on one side, in a direction perpendicular to the axis of the cylinder, and ending in the middle of the solid part of the metal which formed the bottom ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... and the chief agent in its production was bichromate of potash. This salt is not actively poisonous, and no one thought of attributing injurious properties to materials dyed with the aniline mauve. Next in chronological order came magenta red. It was first made from aniline by the agency of mercurial salts, and afterward by that form of arsenic known to chemists as arsenic acid. The fact that this at one time fashionable color was prepared by means of an arsenical compound was spread through the country in a very impressive manner by the great trial as to whether ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... that she should have gone on to the study of Herodotus. And I described to her the situation of the vivacious and mercurial Athenian, in the early period of Pericles, as repeating in its main features, for the great advantage of that Grecian Froissart, the situation of Adam during his earliest hours in Paradise, himself being the describer to the affable archangel. The same genial climate there ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Richard, much younger than himself. They are the children of the same mother who, some years after her first widowhood, had married an Irish gentleman, of mercurial habit, by whom she had this second child. George had already left home to earn his living, with the consequence that the two brothers had scarcely ever met until the occasion upon which the story opens. Richard, after first trying ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... one or two leeches to the throat, and put mustard poultices to the foot and thighs, retaining them about eight minutes; and, in extreme cases, a mustard poultice to the spine between the shoulders, and at the same time rub mercurial ointment into the armpits and the ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... chivalrous respect for women; their courage; their delicate sense of honor; their constancy, which can abide by an opinion or a purpose or an interest of their States through adversity and through prosperity, through the years and through the generations, are things by which the people of the more mercurial North may take a lesson. And there is another thing—covetousness, corruption, the low temptation of money has not yet found any place in ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... 5TH FEBRUARY.—This morning the mercurial column stood higher than I had yet observed it here, and clouds of cirrus lay in long streaks across the sky, ranging from east to west, but these were most abundant towards the northern horizon. The day was comparatively cool and pleasant, the thermometer never ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... so emphatically songs that, in reading them, we feel as if each must have a twin melody born in the same moment and by the same inspiration. Heine is too impressible and mercurial for any sustained production; even in his short lyrics his tears sometimes pass into laughter and his laughter into tears; and his longer poems, "Atta Troll" and "Deutschland," are full of Ariosto-like transitions. His song has a wide compass of notes; he can take us to the shores of the Northern ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... pressure of the atmosphere. If a glass tube and dish of mercury are attached to a board and the dish of mercury is inclosed in a case for protection from moisture and dirt, and further if a scale of inches or centimeters is made on the upper portion of the board, we have a mercurial barometer (Fig. 44). ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... ministry with a new ministry, headed by the Marquis of Rockingham, which included the Duke of Newcastle, Henry Conway, and the Duke of Grafton. Missing was the Old Whigs principal leader, William Pitt, who preferred to pursue his independent and mercurial ways. The Rockingham ministry, most of whose members had disliked the Stamp Act from the beginning, drew their greatest strength from the merchant communities. By the time parliament opened in December, Rockingham and his supporters were in agreement—the act must be repealed. But ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... the East to rule them, demanded their own States, and would not be refused, spoke with contempt of the old social order of ranks and classes in the lands between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic, and proclaimed the ideal of democracy for the vast country which they had entered. Not with the mercurial facility of the French did they follow the river systems of the Great Valley. Like the advance of the glacier they changed the face of the country in their steady and inevitable progress, and they sought the sea. It was not long before the Spaniards at ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... unbending springs May walk on earth, or flap their mimic wings; In tubes of glass mercurial columns rise, Or sink, obedient to the incumbent skies; Or, as they touch the figured scale, repeat The nice gradations of circumfluent heat. But REPRODUCTION, when the perfect Elf Forms from fine glands another like itself, Gives the true character of life ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... stopping to think, she ran down the steps and pursued him, panting and almost weeping. He turned at the sound of her hurrying steps, puzzled by the pursuit and on his guard against her influence. He was suspicious of her intentions now, and waited for her to explain the meaning of this mercurial change. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... keep moving;. put in motion, set in motion; move; impel &c. 276; propel &c. 284; render movable, mobilize. Adj. moving &c. v.; in motion; transitional; motory[obs3], motive; shifting, movable, mobile, mercurial, unquiet; restless &c. (changeable) 149; nomadic &c. 266; erratic &c. 279. Adv. under way; on the move, on the wing, on the tramp, on the march. Phr. eppur si muove [It][Galileo]; es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille[Ger], sich ein Charakter ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... hundred years ago a new people was introduced into the north of Ireland. The north is essentially Scottish. Its inhabitants are Protestant and phlegmatic. In the south, the religion is Romanist, and the people are mercurial. They are of the same color. They have had the same history for centuries. For nearly five hundred years, the Turk has been a disturbing factor in Europe. The Turk is Asiatic. He is surrounded by European life. How rapidly has ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., May, 1888., No. 5 • Various
... one man necessary to his comprehensive operation. When his unhappy wife tells him there is no bread in the house for the next day, he retorts: "Very well, then we shall dine at the Hotel Continental." Nothing depresses his mercurial spirits. He borrows from Peter to pay Paul, and an hour later borrows from Paul to pay himself. His boyhood friend he simply plunders. This Ernest, in reality the Graf von Trautenau, is an idealist of the type that Wedekind is fond of delineating. He would save the world from itself, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... is speaking, HERBERT, the call boy, appears from the wings Right, a mercurial youth of about sixteen with ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the Astronomer Royal on the R. Astr. Soc. Numerical Lunar Theory. Also Remarks (Month. Not.) on Le Verrier's intra-Mercurial Planet. Also on Observations for the ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... the same manner as horses. Mercurial ointment rubbed in small amounts on the skin back of the horns and ears, where the animal cannot lick it, is a common remedy. The absorption of a small amount of this drug does the animal no harm, but a larger quantity may ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... 'a cold, dry, melancholy star.' The Mercurial is neither dark nor fair, but between both, long-faced, with high forehead and thin sharp nose, 'thin beard (many times none at all), slender of body, and with small weak eyes;' long slender hands and fingers are 'especial ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... broke a little. John Doran had died under an operation when Max was ten, but he had adored his father, and still adored his memory. There had been great love between the big, quiet sportsman and the mercurial, hot-headed, enthusiastic little boy whom Jack Doran had spoiled and called "Frenchy" for a pet name. After more than fourteen years, he could hear the kind voice now, clearly as ever. "Hullo, Frenchy! how are things with you to-day?" used ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... display. This populace that watched with joy the cruel torment of a bear or the execution of a Catholic also delighted in the romantic comedies of Shakespeare. This people, so appallingly credulous and ignorant, so brutal, childish, so mercurial compared with Englishmen of to-day, yet set the standard of national greatness. This absurdly decorated gallant could stab a rival in the back or write a penitential lyric. Each man presents strange, ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... he laughed with that mercurial lightness which did more to preserve the balance of what otherwise would have been an overweighted mind than ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... I tumbled in on the back seat, each with a child in his lap to keep us warm; I flanked by Sam Perry, and he by John Rich, both of the mercurial age, and therefore good to do errands. Harry was in front somewhere flanked in like wise, and the other children lay in miscellaneously between, like sardines when you have first opened the box. I had invited Lycidas, because, besides being my best friend, he is the best fellow in the world, ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... out from Fort Laramie to meet The Whirlwind's village. Though aided by the high-bowed "mountain saddle," I could scarcely keep my seat on horseback. Before we left the fort we hired another man, a long-haired Canadian, with a face like an owl's, contrasting oddly enough with Delorier's mercurial countenance. This was not the only re-enforcement to our party. A vagrant Indian trader, named Reynal, joined us, together with his squaw Margot, and her two nephews, our dandy friend, The Horse, and his younger brother, The ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... in a guide-book by Dr. Samuel Mitchell. The idea expanded as Irving proceeded, and he ended by not merely satirizing the pedantry of local antiquaries, but by creating a distinct literary type out of the solid Dutch burgher whose phlegm had long been an object of ridicule to the mercurial Americans. Though far from the most finished of Irving's productions, "Knickerbocker" manifests the most original power and is the most genuinely national in its quaintness and drollery. The very tardiness and prolixity of the story are skilfully made to heighten the humorous effect. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Thynne begged him to be more grave lest his enemies should report his levity. Raleigh answered, 'It is my last mirth in this world; do not grudge it to me.' Dr. Tounson, Dean of Westminster, to whom Raleigh was a stranger, then attended him; and was somewhat scandalised at this flow of mercurial spirits. 'When I began,' says the Dean, 'to encourage him against the fear of death, he seemed to make so light of it that I wondered at him. When I told him that the dear servants of God, in better causes than his, had shrunk back and trembled a little, he denied it ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... better, to call themselves Swedes?—to preserve the fine, manly characteristics of their ancient stock, rather than imitate a people so alien to them in blood, in character, and in antecedents. Those meaningless social courtesies which sit well enough upon the gay, volatile, mercurial Frenchman, seem absurd affectations when practiced by the tall, grave, sedate Scandinavian. The intelligent Swedes feel this, but they are powerless to make headway against the influence of a court which was wholly French, even before Bernadotte's time. "We are a race of apes," said one of them ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... a few months after the publication of the Dunciad. But Pope found a living antagonist, who succeeded in giving him pain enough to gratify the vilified dunces. This was Colley Cibber—most lively and mercurial of actors—author of some successful plays, with too little stuff in them for permanence, and of an Apology for his own Life, which is still exceedingly amusing as well as useful for the history of the stage. He was ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... of mercurial and lustily cheering boys was my friend Andrew, and a little farther on, lo! the knight himself. A motor cap was jammed on his warm curls, and a football guernsey displayed the proportions of his broad chest as his Chesterfield fell open, while with a gaiety and ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... shews, whatever her posture may be, that her mind at least is not supine. I hope the excursion will enable the former to keep pace with its out-stripping neighbor. Pray present our kindest wishes to her, and all. (That sentence should properly have come in the Post Script, but we airy Mercurial Spirits, there is no keeping us in). Time—as was said of one of us—toils after us in vain. I am afraid our co-visit with Coleridge was a dream. I shall not get away before the end (or middle) of June, and then you will be frog-hopping ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... for the excursion across the valley to inspect the ruins of a Roman bath. A late dinner brought us together again in a small dining room, the convalescents having eaten their simple meal and disappeared an hour before. During this time, another transformation had taken place in our mercurial hostess! It was the Calvé of Paris, Calvé the witch, Calvé the capiteuse, who presided at the dainty, flower-decked table ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... measurements can be given in this case. It may be said, however, that it is not desirable to take these at anything less than five-minute intervals. Under ordinary circumstances a three- to five-minute interval is sufficient in the case of all steam-pressure, vacuum—including mercurial columns and ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... must. The former has happily commenced his preparations for the combat in good season, or the enemy might defeat us before he would be in readiness. Did it rest between these two worthies to decide this quarrel, the mercurial Frenchman would defeat his neighbour of Holland, before the latter believed the battle had commenced; but, should he let the happy moment pass, rely on it, the Dutchman would give him trouble. Forget you, Wilder, that the day has been when the countrymen of that slow-moving and ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... to see young Beckford,(198) who seems to possess very extraordinary talents; he is a perfect master of music, but has a voice, either natural or feigned, of an eunuch. He speaks several languages with uncommon facility, and well, but has such a mercurial turn, that I think he may finish his days aux petites maisons; his person and figure are agreeable. I did not come till late, and till he had tired himself with all kind of mimicry and performances. The Duchess of Bedford [was] there, and Lady Clermont. There is ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... intractable, and is to be combated by saline purges, bleeding, and stimulating application to the organ itself. Mercurial ointment, rubbed over the eyebrow, will assist ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... by the Chinaman, and Kerry stood out in the darkness of the dismal, brick-walled street, feeling something as nearly akin to dejection as was possible in one of his mercurial spirit. Something trickled upon the brim of his hat, and, raising his head, Kerry detected rain upon his upturned face. He breathed a prayer of thankfulness. This would put an ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... promised to teach every man who desires wisdom; and in the next place, I have no fear but that the sound practical intellect which that same One has bestowed on the Englishman, will give you a far better auditory in any harvest field, than Socrates could find among the mercurial ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... The weather, too, though cold, is wholesome and often conducive to health. The two months of fog in London are often termed the suicidal months, because of the number of persons who destroy their own lives in those months. The people of Paris with their mercurial temperaments would never endure it for ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... administered to our hair-covered animals by the skin, yet care must be taken in applying some medicines—as tobacco water, carbolic-acid solutions, strong creolin solutions, mercurial ointment, etc.—over the entire body, as poisoning and death follow in some instances from absorption through the skin. For the same reasons care must also be exercised and poisonous medicines not applied over very large raw or abraded surfaces. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... provided for her use, said her evening prayers, looked under the bed—a precaution taken ever since the night upon which she had discovered the burglars—and, finding all right, she blew out her candle and lay down. She could not sleep—many persons of nervous or mercurial temperaments cannot do so the first night in a strange bed. Cap was very mercurial, and the bed and room in which she lay were very strange; for the first time since she had had a home to call her own she was unexpectedly staying all night away from her friends, and ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... miraculous, as tantamount to a re-creation. This Barrister may be likened to an ignorant but well-meaning Galenist, who writing against some infamous quack, who lived by puffing and vending pills of mercurial sublimate for all cases of a certain description, should have no stronger argument than to extol 'sarsaparilla', and 'lignum vitae', or 'senna' in contempt of ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... announcements would have received little attention but for the fact that the motion of Mercury has irregularities which have not been accounted for by known planets; and Le Verrier[3] has stated that an intra-Mercurial planet or ring of asteroids would account for the unexplained part of the motion of the line of apses of Mercury's orbit amounting to ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... with enthusiasm of the former to his father, as 'one who gave men an insight into the real Hero-world, as one from whom he could catch reflected something of the Divine'. But Morier's spirits were mercurial, and between moments of elation he was apt to fall into fits of melancholy, when he could find no outlet for his energies. Waiting for his true profession tried him sorely, and he was even resigning himself to the prospect of a visit to Australia as a professional ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... when you have prescribed the hemp for nervous, overstrung, imaginative people, I have observed that they can stand large amounts of the tincture without evil results, and that the after-effects pass off rapidly. I who am mercurial in temperament, for example, can take any amount of Indian hemp without being made ill by it; while ten drops will send some slow and torpid rustics mad drunk with excitement—drive ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... differed. "It is true he does not show any inclination for the company of young ladies, but he is very much a lady's man all the same. There isn't a young lady in this hall but would be proud to have the honour of Jim Langford's company and companionship at any time. He is of that deep, mercurial disposition that attracts women. It is good for Jim Langford that he does not know his own power," she said, nodding her dainty ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... the mercurial and vivid Greek felt all the wonder and affection of contrast. He could spend hours in surveying its creeping progress, in moralizing over its mechanism. He despised it in ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... bedfellows. It is notable that Bacon seems to have been specially attracted to Welshmen (one might even find evidence of this in the life of the Welshman, Henry VII), a people of vivacious temperament unlike his own; this is illustrated by his long and intimate friendship with the mercurial Sir Toby Mathew, his "alter ego," a man of dissipated habits in early life, though we are not told that he was homosexual. Bacon had many friendships with men, but there is no evidence that he was ever in love or cherished any affectionate intimacy with a woman. Women play ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... their thorough proficiency in all classical and literary studies, the result of old-world method and application. Mentally and physically they were splendid men. The whole race of Flemings and Dutch was found by our young recruits to be a grave and powerful people, although exceptional cases of mercurial temperament were not rare. Some curious individuals were to be found among them, as is more the case in European nationalities in general than in our own. Both Americans were much liked and respected by all their new-found brethren, though Brother Hecker, for reasons ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... of Graham's mercurial pendulum, John Harrison—the same clever mechanician who received L.20,000 from government for making a chronometer that went to Jamaica in one year and returned in another with an accumulated error of only 1 minute and 54 seconds—hit upon another ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... of the group, was the delight of them all. The carriage of a bantam rooster, the courage of a lion, more brain than he could stagger under; a disposition fiery, mercurial, sanguine, witty; he was made, according to Billy Fairfax's dictum, of "wire and brass tacks," and he possessed what Honey Smith (who himself had no mean gift in that direction) called "the gift of gab." He lived by writing magazine articles. Also he wrote ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... who attended him was named Terro; he thought, by some peculiar train of reasoning, that he could cure him by applying a mercurial ointment to the chest, to which no one raised any objection. The rapid effect of the remedy delighted the two friends, but it frightened me, for in less than twenty-four hours the patient was labouring under great excitement of the brain. The ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... observer now made another experiment which seemed to go entirely the other way, and puzzled him altogether. He took some of this boiled infusion that I have been speaking of, and by the use of a mercurial bath—a kind of trough used in laboratories—he deftly inverted a vessel containing the infusion into the mercury, so that the latter reached a little beyond the level of the mouth of the 'inverted' vessel. You see that he thus had a quantity of the infusion ...
— The Method By Which The Causes Of The Present And Past Conditions Of Organic Nature Are To Be Discovered.—The Origination Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... sown, weedy now, and crossed and recrossed by vividly-green ribbons of vine, with stretches of pale-green lucerne, orchards, and the white village of Monpont near the railway, all embowered, the Isle drawing its mercurial streams through the village-meadow, which is dark with shades of oaks: and to have played there a boy, and used it familiarly from birth as one's own hand or foot, must have been very sweet and homely; after this, the river divides, and takes the ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... exceed in words the number of letters in their alphabet, which consists only in two-and-twenty. But indeed few of them extend even to that length. They are expressed in the most plain and simple terms, wherein those people are not mercurial[81] enough to discover above one interpretation; and to write a comment upon any law is a capital crime. As to the decision of civil causes, or proceedings against criminals, their precedents are so few, that they have little reason to boast of any ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... pension of L200 a year, conferred upon him in consideration of his literary merits, and the little profits he derived from his lectures in Bath, to support with decency himself and his family. The prospects of Halhed were much more golden, but he was far too gay and mercurial to be prudent; and from the very scanty supplies which his father allowed him, had quite as little of "le superflu, chose si necessaire," as his friend. But whatever were his other desires and pursuits, a visit to Bath,—to ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... a man in solitude." But the slowness of which novel-readers will complain is not mere commonplace, least of all is it dulness. It is the leisurely movement of a contemplative mind full of rich thought and stored with varied learning. Such a writer could not have any sympathy with the mercurial, vivacious, light-of-foot story-tellers of the French school. The author of "The New Priest in Conception Bay," we surmise, has not been in the habit of packing up his thoughts for the market, by either writing for the press, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... it is very singular to see how this mercurial French People plunges suddenly from Vive le Roi to Vive la Republique; and goes simmering and dancing; shaking off daily (so to speak), and trampling into the dust, its old social garnitures, ways of thinking, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... The mercurial Felix, who had more cleverness in him than people gave him credit for, smiled outright at this eminently feminine way of covering an ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... notion was carried still farther by an insistence upon frequent changes in the fundamental law or in the actual form of government, not so much to meet imperative needs as to satisfy a zest for experimentation or to suit the whims of mercurial temperaments. The congresses, constituent assemblies, and the like, which drew these instruments, were supposed to be faithful reproductions of similar bodies abroad and to represent the popular will. In fact, however, they were substantially colonial cabildos, enlarged into the semblance ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... culture found expression was formed on English models, dignified and plentifully garnished with Latin and Greek allusions; the commercial spirit ruled, and the relaxations and amusements partook of its hurry and excitement. In their gay, hospitable, and mercurial character, the inhabitants were true progenitors of the present metropolis. A newspaper had been established in 1732, and a theatre had existed since 1750. Although the town had a rural aspect, with its quaint dormer-window houses, its straggling ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... reviews. Perhaps it might be as well, after all, to scrape an acquaintance with him again, especially as he's my own brother. There's no knowing, really, when a man of his peculiar ill-regulated mercurial temperament may be going to turn out famous. Don't you think you'd better find out where they're living now—they've left Holloway, no doubt, since this turn of the tide—and go ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... great body of the social Greek people the gymnasium offered all those attractions which boulevards, cafes, and jardins-chantants do now to the Gallic nation. There is more than one point of resemblance between the two countries; but while the Athenian had the same mercurial qualities, which fitted him for outdoor life, he had even a less comfortable domestic establishment to retain him at home than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... against Bucholz, although circumstantially telling against him, was not of sufficient weight or directness to warrant a conviction upon the charge preferred against him. He had employed eminent legal counsel, and their hopeful views of the case had communicated themselves to the mercurial temperament of the prisoner, and visions of a full and entire acquittal from the grave charge under which he ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... together. I remember a day in the summer of 1859 when Procter had a party of friends at dinner to meet Hawthorne, who was then on a brief visit to London. Among the guests were the Countess of ——, Kinglake, the author of "Eothen," Charles Sumner, then on his way to Paris, and Leigh Hunt, the mercurial qualities of whose blood were even then ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... say little of that staid, opulent, intensely respectable city—not even if the imputation of dullness, cast upon her by the more mercurial South, be a slander; for the few hours of my stay there were spent almost entirely with my Asiatic friend, whose invitations and inducements to a longer sojourn were very hard to resist. But I was impatient to get on (as ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... impregnated with vapours. Endeavours were made to smother the fire, but though the mine remained closed for five weeks, no sooner was it re-opened than the fire burst forth more furiously than at first. The howling of the flames ascending from the lowest depths of the pit awed the spectators, and the mercurial and sulphureous fumes arising from it threatened instant destruction to all who might approach. The director of the mine, as a last resource, came to the decision of flooding the works, and a river ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... last chapter we saw how the ordinary mercurial barometer can be used to ascertain fairly accurately the height of mountains. But the airman does not take a mercurial barometer up with him. There is for his use another form of barometer much more suited to his purpose, namely, the barograph, which is ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... hands thrust into his pockets, and a quid in his cheek, and shook his head slowly from side to side, while he remarked that every one had to die once, an' when the time came no one couldn't escape and that was all about it! Poor Larry O'Hale could not thus calm his mercurial spirit. He twisted his hard features into every possible contortion, apostrophised his luck, and his grandmother, and ould Ireland in the most pathetic manner, bewailed his fate, and used improper language ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... studies, criticising and dissecting, the policies of their rulers. But underlying, you will find a deeply practical sense and appreciation of material benefits. The German Socialist is in fact a practical dreamer, quite in contrast to his mercurial, effervescent Latin prototype. The rulers of Germany have learned the lesson that the stability of a throne rests in the welfare of her people and everyone must admit that they have succeeded in this respect ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... was a Frenchman, but it is well to remember that the typical Frenchman, like the typical Irishman and his brother the Jew, exists only in the comic papers, and on the vaudeville stage. The frivolous and the mercurial were ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... This mercurial brigand, it would appear, has paid Turon another visit, but, with the exception of what may be considered the legalised robbery of the betting ring, has not levied contributions. Rather the other way, indeed. A hasty note for Mr. Dawson, whom he had tricked into ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... William Filby, of a suit of "Tyrian bloom, satin grain, and garter blue silk breeches, L8 2s. 7d." Thus magnificently attired, he attended the theater and watched the reception of the play and the effect of each individual scene, with that vicissitude of feeling incident to his mercurial nature. ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... Scandinavians—fair-haired, blue-eyed Swedes, Norwegians afflicted with the temperamental melancholy of their race, stolid Russian Finns, and a slight sprinkling of Americans and English. It was noted that there was nothing mercurial and flyaway about them. They seemed weighty men, oppressed by a sad and stolid bovine-sort of integrity. A sober seriousness and enormous certitude characterized all of them. They appeared men without nerves and without fear, as though upheld by some overwhelming ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... occasionally possesses some quality, usually dependent upon its having heated in the mow or having become moldy, which produces salivation. Second-crop clover and some irritant weeds in the pasture or forage may cause salivation. Cattle rubbed with mercurial ointment may swallow enough mercury in licking themselves to bring about the same result. (See "Mercury poisoning," p. 57.) Such cases, of course, arise from the constitutional action of mercury, and, on account of the common habit which the animals have of licking themselves, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... my troth," exclaimed the mercurial Jimsy, "ye shall not be disappointed in me fair damsels. Hullo! an ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... theatrical scene of Fingal's Cave and its unusual visitors, the whole adventure ending in the happiest laughter over the expulsion of the dramatist. I may not have any right to say so, but I throw myself on the mercy of my hearers: I remember nothing in any chronicle so mercurial or jovial in its high spirits as this story of the first encounter and the beginning of friendship between ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... the eternities beget chaos, and that the immensities are at the mercy of the divine ananke. Infinitude crouches before a personality. The mercurial essence is the prime mover in spirituality, and the thinker is powerless before the pulsating inanity. The cosmical procession is terminated only ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the door into the coffee room was the only door which pierced the four great walls. All he could then do was to find out from the innkeeper how much of a siege the place could stand, and to this the innkeeper answered volubly and with smiles that this hostelry would easily endure until the mercurial temper of the crowd had darted off in a new direction. It may be curious to note here that all of Peter Tounley's impassioned communication with the innkeeper had been devoted to an endeavour to learn what in the devil was the matter with ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... by Horsley consists in performing laminectomy, opening the theca, and washing it out with 1 in 1000 mercurial lotion. After the wound has healed, mercurial inunction over the spine is employed to hasten the absorption of inflammatory products. The administration of anti-syphilitic drugs ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... them out of their almost unconquerable tendency to sleep. Frank felt the highest possible relief, since he was now freed from the responsibility that had of late been so heavy. In Bob, however, there was the exhibition of the greatest liveliness. Bob, mercurial, volatile, nonsensical, mobile, was ever running to extremes; and as he was the first to fall asleep, so now, when he had awaked, he was the most wide awake of all. He sang, he shouted, he laughed, he danced, he ran; he seemed, in ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... British Association, appointed for this purpose, reported in 1876 that sixty of the most reliable of Joule's experiments gave the mean value 774.1. The experiments were made with water at a temperature of about 60 deg. F., according to the mercurial thermometer, and reduced to its value at the temperature of melting ice, according to the formula given by Regnault for the variation of the specific heat of water at varying temperature under the constant pressure of one atmosphere. According to this formula ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... of my master?" reiterated Gilles de Sille, glowering at his mercurial jailer, without heeding ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... changed into an elastic aeriform fluid, susceptible, like all other gasses, of being received and contained in vessels, and preserving its gasseous form so long as it remains at the temperature of 80 deg. (212 deg.), and under a pressure not exceeding 28 inches of the mercurial barometer. As this phenomenon has not been generally observed, no language has used a particular term for expressing water in this state[10]; and the same thing occurs with all fluids, and all substances, which do not evaporate in the common temperature, ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... killed at Chancellorsville had a parallel in the endearing friendship which sprung up between Grant and his principal subordinate, William T. Sherman, who was to bear a hardly less momentous part than his own in the conclusion of the war. Sherman was a man of quick wits and fancy, bright and mercurial disposition, capable of being a delightful companion to children, and capable of being sharp and inconsiderate to duller subordinates. It is a high tribute both to this brilliant soldier and to Grant himself that ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... again, this time with better results. For five minutes he beat the bedclothes; then his spirits rose and, like the mercurial Celt that he was, he chanted blithely a verse from "The Night Before Larry ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... being autumn, leaves of wild laurel were glistening and gyrating on the white foam of the Kodor like a quantity of mercurial salmon fry. And as I sat on some rocks overlooking the river there occurred to me the thought that, as likely as not, the cause of the gulls' and cormorants' fretful cries where the surf lay moaning behind a belt of trees to the right was that, like myself, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... danger from the outskirts was soon taken up in the centre of the city, and now nothing was to be seen in any direction but a dashing and scampering of the mercurial and excitable citizens of the place, each to his lodge or burrow. Far as the eye could reach was spread the city, and in every direction the scene was the same. We rode leisurely along until we had reached the more thickly settled portion of the city, when ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... marked for martyr. There is the note of cricket-time in his earlier life, and how long this attached to the physical delights of his being cannot be told here. His eyes were lodged too far in heaven to have kept the delights for long, to have comprehended all that clogged his impatiently mercurial feet. ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... principles furnished by the Tomato will, when concentrated, produce, if taken medicinally, effects very similar to those brought about by taking mercurial salts, viz., an ulcerative-state of the mouth, with a profuse flow of saliva, and with excessive stimulation of the liver: peevishness also on the following day, with a depressing backache in men, suggesting paralysis, and with a profuse fluor albus ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... spirits till he got in sight of Huntercombe Hall; and then it suddenly occurred to his mercurial mind that he should probably not be received with an ovation, petty larceny being a novelty in that ancient house ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... one's quarters, shift one's quarters; dodge; keep going, keep moving;. put in motion, set in motion; move; impel &c. 276; propel &c. 284; render movable, mobilize. Adj. moving &c. v.; in motion; transitional; motory[obs3], motive; shifting, movable, mobile, mercurial, unquiet; restless &c. (changeable) 149; nomadic &c. 266; erratic &c. 279. Adv. under way; on the move, on the wing, on the tramp, on the march. Phr. eppur si muove [It][Galileo]; es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille[Ger], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... adventure ending in the happiest laughter over the expulsion of the dramatist. I may not have any right to say so, but I throw myself on the mercy of my hearers: I remember nothing in any chronicle so mercurial or jovial in its high spirits as this story of the first encounter and the beginning of friendship between ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... had seated herself on a rock at a little distance, called to them. Her strength was restored by the fresh meat, and her childish spirits had risen with the hope of safety. The mercurial little creature had wreathed seaweed about her head, and holding in her hand a long twig decorated with a tuft of leaves to represent a wand, she personified one of the ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... of summoning the fire brigade; also, that nine ounces of poison to eleven ounces of other ingredients, well worked into the hands at different times, as it must be, when handling, or returning skins painted with it, would not tend to lengthen the life of the learner? Corrosive sublimate being a mercurial preparation—i.e, bichloride of mercury—I ask any chemist amongst my readers what effect three ounces of that dangerous preparation, six ounces of arsenic, yellow soap, and spirits of wine would have upon the constitution? Would it not be readily absorbed through the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... in, we presume, the most approved fashion. Owing to his bulk and natural laziness, which rendered jumping about like a jack- in-the-box impossible, Hugh Mathison preferred to stand on the defensive; while his lighter opponent, giving way to the natural bent of his mercurial temperament and corporeal predilections, comported himself in a manner that cannot be likened to anything mortal or immortal, human or inhuman, unless it be to an insane cat, whose veins ran wild-fire instead ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... lose their power of germination if subjected to heat. But one observer now made another experiment, which seemed to go entirely the other way, and puzzled him altogether. He took some of this boiled infusion that I have been speaking of, and by the use of a mercurial bath—a kind of trough used in laboratories—he deftly inverted a vessel containing the infusion into the mercury, so that the latter reached a little beyond the level of the mouth of the inverted vessel. You see that he thus had a quantity of the infusion shut off from any ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... pregnancy; a mild laxative is therefore occasionally necessary. The mildest must be selected, as a strong purgative is highly improper, and even dangerous. Calomel and all other preparations of mercury are to be especially avoided, as a mercurial medicine is apt to weaken the system, and sometimes even to produce a miscarriage. Let me again urge the importance of a lady, during the whole period of pregnancy, being particular as to the state of her bowels, as costiveness is a ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... was consideration for her brother and his career. For while for her father she cherished an affectionate pride and for her mother an amused and protective pity, her great passion was for her brother—her handsome, vivacious, audacious and mercurial brother, Tony. With him she counted it only joy to share her all too meagre wages whenever he found himself in financial straits. And a not infrequent situation this was with Tony, who, while he seemed to have inherited from his mother the vivacity, quick wit and general ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... of the sun occurred in 1878, [Page 138] astronomers were determined that the question of the existence of an intra-mercurial planet should be settled. Maps of all the stars in the region of the sun were carefully studied, sections of the sky about the sun were assigned to different observers, who should attend to nothing but to look for a possible planet. It is now conceded ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... ready to file out of the company streets before the order reached them. We marched by the moonlight into the space between the belligerent regiments; but Lytle had already got his own men under control, and the less mercurial Thirteenth were not disposed to be aggressive, so that we were soon dismissed with a compliment for our promptness. I ordered the colonels to march the regiments back to the camps separately, and with my staff rode through that of the Thirteenth, to see how matters were there. All was quiet, the ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... KIRKLAND alone such grace from Heaven could win, His features radiant as the soul within; That smile would let him through Saint Peter's gate While sad-eyed martyrs had to stand and wait. Here flits mercurial Farrar; standing there, See mild, benignant, cautious, learned Ware, And sturdy, patient, faithful, honest Hedge, Whose grinding logic gave our wits their edge; Ticknor, with honeyed voice and courtly grace; And Willard, larynxed like a double bass; And Channing, with his bland, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Danube to that splendid lake!" cried the mercurial stripling; "and what is there in all the lordship of Stramen to vie ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... a touch of embarrassment. It occurred to him that he had been betrayed by his mercurial temperament into an attitude which, considering the circumstances, was perhaps a trifle too jubilant. He gave his mustache a pull, and reverted ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... large, broad chamber, its groined roof supported by six squat stone pillars. Light came not only from mercurial lamps affixed to the ceiling, but from others suspended above the three rows of benches which ran the length ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... Road to the right," called the doctor, inwardly amazed at his visitor's mercurial disposition. "They call it Rink's Hotel. Not much of a place. Really a road house. But you'll find ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... Jack Skyscrape, a mercurial man, Who fluttered over all things like a fan, More brave than firm, and more disposed to dare And die at once than wrestle with despair, Exclaimed, "G—d damn!"—those syllables intense,— Nucleus of England's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... the hydrogen-gas thermometer is the almost universal standard with which mercurial thermometers may be compared, while above this point the nitrogen-gas thermometer is used. In both of these standards the change in temperature is measured by the change in pressure of a constant ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... that in the supper scene of his second number, Lorrequer bore so striking a resemblance to his contemporary, Nicholas Nickleby; while his biographer, Mr. Fitzpatrick, observes that the identity of Harry Lorrequer is never maintained throughout the novel, that mercurial hero being alternately represented old, young, good-looking, and ugly. So much indeed was Lever impressed with the fact, that he actually besought the artist to represent O'Malley the same person throughout ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... of old-world method and application. Mentally and physically they were splendid men. The whole race of Flemings and Dutch was found by our young recruits to be a grave and powerful people, although exceptional cases of mercurial temperament were not rare. Some curious individuals were to be found among them, as is more the case in European nationalities in general than in our own. Both Americans were much liked and respected by all their new-found brethren, though Brother Hecker, for reasons soon to be ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... Sure I am that a Quack sold 21 Pills for 20 l. whereof the Patient took 4 at two doses, to the great hazard of his life, who then repairing to me for my advice, I by Tryal of one of them found them to be Mercurial, and wished him to return them back, but the Quack would not give him 10 s. for the ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett
... At the moment Daddy was in a new and unaccustomed phase of piety. After a period of revolutionary spouting, in which Byron, Tom Paine, and the various publications of Richard Carlile had formed his chief scriptures, a certain Baptist preacher laid hold of the Irishman's mercurial sense. Daddy was awakened and converted, burnt his Byron and his Tom Paine in his three-pair back with every circumstance of insult and contumely, and looked about for an employer worthy of one of the elect. Purcell at the time had ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... used for the purposes of health. Sister Marshman was seized with a disease of the liver, a disease which proves fatal in three cases out of four. Sister Ward was ill of the same disorder, and both of them underwent a long course of mercurial treatment, as is usual in that disease. Exercise was considered by the physicians as of the first importance, and we certainly thought no expense too great to save the valuable lives of our sisters. ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... tube containing a 50 per cent. solution of alcohol and water, plunge it into water of 20 deg.C., and put its interior in hermetic communication with the receiver of a mercurial air-pump. ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... securely bolted to the bulkhead, side by side, in such a position that they could be seen from outside by merely glancing through the window. And near them, hung in gimbals from a long bracket, was a very fine Fitzroy mercurial barometer. ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... consented—for what did he want with a one-third share in a core-drill?—whereupon Tom, the load of debt being off his mind, brightened up again in an instant—he was a most mercurial fellow—and forthwith he fell to begging my father's consent to his making one more attempt—just one. He was sure of striking it this time, he had studied the formation carefully and he had selected a spot where the chances of disappointment ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... and Bellair, whose billet regarding the "broad gauge" occasioned her to swoon, and dispelled the romantic attachment of Lord Montacute, was but a repetition of the French countesses, who thronged the antechambers of Law a century before. More vehement in their desires, more mercurial in their temperament than the English, the French, when seized with any general mania, push it even into greater excesses, and induce upon themselves and their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... great man; and in order to confute a friendly objector decides to select from the workhouse a boy to experiment with. He chooses a boy with a bad reputation but with excellent instincts, and adopts him, the story narrating the adventures of the mercurial lad who thus finds himself suddenly lifted several degrees in the social scale. The idea is novel and handled with Mr. Manville Fenn's accustomed cleverness, the restless boyish nature, with its inevitable tendency to get into scrapes, being ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... own occupations to attend to; and besides, she is too old to run after a child, and he is too mercurial to be ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... right bauld ye set your nose out, As plump and gray as onie grozet; [gooseberry] O for some rank mercurial rozet, [rosin] Or fell red smeddum! [deadly, dust] I'd gie you sic a hearty doze o't, Wad ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... a most active being, its habits conforming to the organisation with which it is endowed. Such an array of paddles prophesies of a mercurial temperament and an energetic character. It can, however, anchor itself and lie by when occasion offers. It is provided with two long cables, prettily set with spiral filaments or tendrils, by means of which it can make fast to any point. When not in ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... suit and the flannel shirt, in spite also of the fact that he was short and very slight, while his brothers were both of them over six feet and broadly built men, there could be no doubt that, as soon as he entered, Coryston held the stage. He was one of the mercurial men who exist in order to keep the human tide in movement. Their opinions matter principally because without them the opinions of other men would not exist. Their function is to provoke. And from the time he was a babe in the nursery Coryston ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... helm. But I have scarcely introduced this extraordinary gentleman to the reader. He was a tall, black-haired, mercurial Frenchman, with an eye like a falcon, who, with only an occasional Gallicism purposely indulged in, spoke American like a native. I had every confidence in his prudence and skill in the management of his craft; and still, as I perceived that we were gradually settling ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... mankind and cheer them in their wintry desolation; that comfortable inmate, whose smile, during eight months of the year, was our sufficient consolation for summer's lingering advance and early flight? Alas! blindly inhospitable, grudging the food that kept him cheery and mercurial, we have thrust him into an iron prison, and compel him to smoulder away his life on a daily pittance which once would have been too scanty for his breakfast. Without a metaphor, we now make our fire in an air-tight stove, and supply it with some half a dozen sticks of wood ...
— Fire Worship (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... satisfaction, we turn to contemplate the character of a true-hearted and undaunted Southern patriot, Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee. Coming as he did from a section in which secessionism predominates, and representing a mercurial and sensitive people, he stood out fearlessly and zealously in behalf of the maintenance of the Union at all hazards. He is an admirable example of the self-made man, having received no education in his youth, and owing to the application of maturer years the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... we are more lenient with human nature than theologians generally are. We know that the spirits of men and their views of the present and the future go up and down with the barometer, and that a permanent depression of one inch in the mercurial column would affect the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the canal bank Mr. Mortimer continued to carol. Mercurial man! Like all actors he loved applause, but unlike the most of them he was capable of supplying it when the public failed; and this knack of being his own best audience had lifted him, before now, out of quite a number ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... friends at dinner to meet Hawthorne, who was then on a brief visit to London. Among the guests were the Countess of ——, Kinglake, the author of "Eothen," Charles Sumner, then on his way to Paris, and Leigh Hunt, the mercurial qualities of whose blood were even then perceptible ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... dissecting, the policies of their rulers. But underlying, you will find a deeply practical sense and appreciation of material benefits. The German Socialist is in fact a practical dreamer, quite in contrast to his mercurial, effervescent Latin prototype. The rulers of Germany have learned the lesson that the stability of a throne rests in the welfare of her people and everyone must admit that they have succeeded in this ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... intercourse amongst ourselves. One was the national reserve;' and this was strengthened by concurring with a national temperament—not phlegmatic (as is so falsely alleged), but melancholic, dignified, and for that reason, if there had been no other, anti-mercurial. But the main cause of this reserve lay in the infrequency of visits consequent upon the difficulties of local movement. The other frost lay in the Spanish stateliness and the inflexibility of our social ceremonies. Our social meetings of ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... which Reasons I would never recommend this Method where the Patient labours under no other Disorder which requires the Use of Mercury, and would confine it entirely to Cases where Patients, having the Itch, labour, at the same Time, under the Lues venerea, and require the free Use of mercurial Frictions; under such Circumstances the mercurial Ointment may be as well rubbed on the Parts affected with the ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... and hence this method is admirably adapted to the examination of medicinal antimonial compounds. The arsenites of silver and copper are reduced by the formiate of soda to their metals, mixed with metallic arsenic. The mercurial salts are all reduced with the metal plainly visible as a bright silvery ring on the cool portion of the tube. The chloride and nitrate of silver are completely reduced, and may be obtained after working out the soda, as bright metallic spangles. The salts of antimony and zinc are thus reduced; ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... Ancona, he reaches Rome just when a beautiful and mysterious poetess, the delight of Roman society, is being crowned on the Capitol. The only name she is known by is Corinne. The pair are soon introduced by the mercurial Erfeuil, and promptly fall in love with each other, Corinne seeking partly to fix her hold on Nelvil, partly to remove his Britannic contempt for Italy and the Italians, by guiding him to all the great spectacles of Rome and indeed of the country generally, and by explaining to him at great length ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... antidotes for the mineral acids; as soap in solution, a simple remedy, and always at hand. Lard, magnesia, and oil are antidotes for poisoning by arsenic; albumen,—in the form of the white of an egg,—milk, etc., for corrosive sublimate, and other mercurial preparations. ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... mental climates suited; they were akin, yet had strong differences. Perhaps in the quickness of their mutual attraction Frenchman recognised Frenchman. But Ainger was the French Huguenot and du Maurier the French sceptic. Both had mercurial perceptions, and exercised them on much the same objects. Both were wits and humorists, but Ainger was more of a wit than a humorist, and du Maurier was more of a humorist than a wit. Both were men of fancy rather than of imagination, men of sentiment ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... are submitted to the patient's horrified inspection. Frightened by the hideous pictures before him, and at the same time soothed and charmed by the high-flown encomiums which the quack pronounces on his particular "non-mercurial mode of treatment," the patient becomes anxious to submit himself to the process. The quack is equally ready to take the case in hand, and the only stumbling-block likely to be in the way, may be the patients' inability to pay the large fee demanded. When the victim, however, is manifestly pecunious, ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... emotion with which he was seized, when Leverrier, from his great height, and with that blunt intonation which he can command, thus addressed him: "It is then you, sir, who pretend to have observed the intra-mercurial planet, and who have committed the grave offence of keeping your observation secret for nine months. I warn you that I have come here with the intention of doing justice to your pretensions, and of demonstrating either that you have been dishonest or deceived. Tell me, then, unequivocally, what ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... is notable that Bacon seems to have been specially attracted to Welshmen (one might even find evidence of this in the life of the Welshman, Henry VII), a people of vivacious temperament unlike his own; this is illustrated by his long and intimate friendship with the mercurial Sir Toby Mathew, his "alter ego," a man of dissipated habits in early life, though we are not told that he was homosexual. Bacon had many friendships with men, but there is no evidence that he was ever in love or cherished any affectionate ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... pride in their profession—assume generally a looseness of style: there may be an appropriateness in this, considering the mercurial contents of their pockets. In walking, a freedom of gait, approaching the swagger, is generally adopted; cigar-smoking at the office door is considered respectable; hands may be inserted ad libitum in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... See The Ontario High School Physics, page 223, also Science of Common Life, page 41. Try to graduate it from the mercurial thermometer. Have the boys ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... for not having informed Mr. Galloway of his intended departure—as from the message, it would appear he had not done—she determined to go round; and did so, following closely on the heels of the maid. Her ladyship had already wonderfully recovered her spirits. They were of a mercurial nature, liable to go up and down at touch; and Hamish had contrived to cheer ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... and hawk-faced, with khaki tunic and riding-breeches, drab putties, a scarlet cummerbund, and a skin tanned to the red of a Scotch fir by sun and wind, and mottled by the mosquito and the sand-fly. The other—small, quick, mercurial, with blue-black, curling beard and hair, a fly-switch for ever flicking in his left hand—was Scott, of the Courier, who had come through more dangers and brought off more brilliant coups than any man in the profession, save the ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the leading families in the development of the colonies. Their descendants fell heir to the traits of their French-English forbears: freedom of belief, courage to follow a cause, a touch of the wanderlust, the mercurial French mind, and the steady poise of the followers of the Inward Light. A trace of bitterness had come down the years, however, with the family history; a feud-like resentment against the family of Jerome Thaine ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... elasticity, different degrees of tension, and different degrees of capacity to hold vapor. Dalton, by a series of experiments with barometer-tubes, into which he introduced air and vapor at certain temperatures, found what its force was upon the mercurial column from degree to degree. He also experimentally determined the ratio of the weight of moisture and of air, the former being five-eights of the latter,—in other words, how many grains of moisture additional could be held by the air, advancing from degree to degree of temperature. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... Fleay's remarkable theory[147] as to surmise that the central episode of faithless love occurred about 1594. If so, here was enough to deepen and impassion the plastic personality of the rhymer of VENUS AND ADONIS; to add a new string to the heretofore Mercurial lyre. All the while, too, he was undergoing the kind of culture and of psychological training involved in his craft of acting—a culture involving a good deal of contact with the imaginative literature of the Renaissance, so far as then translated, and a psychological ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... least is not supine. I hope the excursion will enable the former to keep pace with its out-stripping neighbor. Pray present our kindest wishes to her, and all. (That sentence should properly have come in the Post Script, but we airy Mercurial Spirits, there is no keeping us in). Time—as was said of one of us—toils after us in vain. I am afraid our co-visit with Coleridge was a dream. I shall not get away before the end (or middle) of June, and then ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Herrick, with his habitual reserve, his nature refined, critical, and yet imaginative, with its strong bias to pessimism, and its intolerance of all shams, and Cedric, with his facile, pleasure-loving temperament, at once indolent and mercurial—a creature of moods and tenses, as fiery as a Welshman, but full of lovable ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... of their mercurial nature: I was once spending the summer at a village in the mountains, and not far from my chamber-window were three or four cabins occupied by very cleanly, orderly negroes, who had hitherto been a source of no annoyance, for I am very fond of negroes and like ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... the most extraordinary is that called Rasesvara or the mercurial system.[788] According to it quicksilver, if eaten or otherwise applied, not only preserves the body from decay but delivers from transmigration the soul which inhabits this glorified body. Quicksilver is even asserted to be identical with the supreme self. This curious Darsana is ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... conducive to health. The two months of fog in London are often termed the suicidal months, because of the number of persons who destroy their own lives in those months. The people of Paris with their mercurial temperaments would never endure it for a ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... remarks apply equally to the various forms of chronic rheumatism, chorea, paralysis agitans, infantile paralysis, hysterical paralysis, mercurial and lead poisoning, muscular atrophy; rigid atrophy, consequent upon the rheumatic diathesis; locomotor ataxia, as a result of rheumatism; syphilis, or local injury; cranial, facial, and intercostal neuralgia; sciatica, lumbago, and their ...
— Buxton and its Medicinal Waters • Robert Ottiwell Gifford-Bennet
... Ruthven Smith been blessed or cursed by an anonymous letter. He did not know what to make of it, or how to treat it. Instead of exciting him, as it might had he been a man of mercurial ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... harebells. She had dropped into a different world, and the old one would fade like a receding star. She would soon find her that her only choice must be to make new associations and friendships and find new pleasures; and this her mercurial, frank, and fearless nature would incline her ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... at different times, for several days together. These ulcers came without any apparent cause, have continued for many weeks, and have only been a little benefitted by rest, although he has applied many kinds of ointment, the last consisting of equal parts of mercurial and of the tar ointment. I applied the lunar caustic upon each ulcer, but not over the excoriation, and I enjoined the patient to leave the ...
— An Essay on the Application of the Lunar Caustic in the Cure of Certain Wounds and Ulcers • John Higginbottom
... The speaker, a mercurial youth of two and twenty, was one of a group of young people assembled, some on horseback, some in yellow buckboards, in front of a stately ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... the transit of the stratum a' a' a a the barometer falls, and this fall has been characterised as the posterior slope; and when the edge a a occupies the place of b b, the descent of the mercurial column is completed, another minimum extends in the direction of the former, and this minimum has been ...
— The Hurricane Guide - Being An Attempt To Connect The Rotary Gale Or Revolving - Storm With Atmospheric Waves. • William Radcliff Birt
... the group, was the delight of them all. The carriage of a bantam rooster, the courage of a lion, more brain than he could stagger under; a disposition fiery, mercurial, sanguine, witty; he was made, according to Billy Fairfax's dictum, of "wire and brass tacks," and he possessed what Honey Smith (who himself had no mean gift in that direction) called "the gift ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... suit of "Tyrian bloom, satin grain, and garter blue silk breeches, L8 2s. 7d." Thus magnificently attired, he attended the theater and watched the reception of the play and the effect of each individual scene, with that vicissitude of feeling incident to his mercurial nature. ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... guide-book by Dr. Samuel Mitchell. The idea expanded as Irving proceeded, and he ended by not merely satirizing the pedantry of local antiquaries, but by creating a distinct literary type out of the solid Dutch burgher whose phlegm had long been an object of ridicule to the mercurial Americans. Though far from the most finished of Irving's productions, "Knickerbocker" manifests the most original power and is the most genuinely national in its quaintness and drollery. The very tardiness and prolixity ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... after another change from snow to rain, the wind shifted to the southeast, and the cold became, suddenly, very severe. According to the engineer's calculation, the mercurial column of a Fahrenheit thermometer would not have marked less than eight degrees below zero, and this intense cold, rendered still more painful by a sharp gale, lasted for several days. The colonists were again shut up in Granite House, and as it was necessary ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... as these were gained, it is no wonder that Law should have been almost worshipped by the mercurial population. Never was monarch more flattered than he was. All the small poets and litterateurs of the day poured floods of adulation upon him. According to them, he was the saviour of the country, the tutelary divinity ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... the young man, whose mercurial temperament no trouble could repress, had gone away in excellent spirits, leaving her an address where she could always find him, and give him regular news of his aunts, though he made her promise to give them, as yet, no tidings ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... array of figures—beautiful, revolting, sly, fatuous, witty, brave, pusillanimous, mean, generous—meets the eye as we recall one by one these famous stories; beautiful and amorous, but mercurial ladies with henna scented feet and black eyes—often with a suspicion of kohl and more than a suspicion of Abu Murreh [456] in them—peeping cautiously through the close jalousies of some lattice; love sick princes overcoming all obstacles; executioners with blood-dripping scimitars; ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... the stuffed leather of an armed chair. Learning somehow or other sinks down to that part into which it was first driven, and produces therein a leaden heaviness and weight, which counteract those lively emotions of the brain that might otherwise render students too mercurial and agile for the safety of established order. I leave this conjecture to the consideration ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... attended him was named Terro; he thought, by some peculiar train of reasoning, that he could cure him by applying a mercurial ointment to the chest, to which no one raised any objection. The rapid effect of the remedy delighted the two friends, but it frightened me, for in less than twenty-four hours the patient was labouring under ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... not necessary for Mackellar to tell us that, whereas Mr. Henry is phlegmatic and deliberate, the Master is impulsive and mercurial. It is not necessary for him to attempt analysis of the emotions and thoughts of the leading characters, since these are sufficiently evident from what they do and say. The action happens to the eye and ear, without the interpretation of an analytic intellect; but the ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... variable, inconstant, unstable, unsteadfast, reversible, alterable, revocable, mobile, convertible, transmutable, commutable, kaleidoscopic, transformable, impermanent; volatile, fickle, mercurial, protean, irresolute, capricious, vacillating, fitful, inconstant, erratic, eccentric, crotchety; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... to tell me the difference between an infusion and decoction; and the history, the virtues, and the botanical or medical name of the bark. Chambers will tell you more perhaps than you will wish to read of it. Your little mercurial disquisition is ingenious, ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Materials.—"The indefatigable Rumford made an elaborate series of experiments on the conductivity of the substances used in clothing. His method was this:—A mercurial thermometer was suspended in the axis of a cylindrical glass tube ending with a globe, in such a manner that the centre of the bulb of the thermometer occupied the centre of the globe; the space between the internal surface of the globe and the ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... I have a mercurial temperament. My spirits rise and fall as if they were Consols. Monotonous Egypt depressed me, as it depressed the Israelites; but the passage of the Red Sea set me sounding my timbrel. I love fresh air; I love the sea, if the sea will but ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... man, if he went well recommended, would be likely to find, I imagine, constant employment in the town of Danbury. He might make arrangements to take his meals on the jump, and would sleep of course with his hat and boots on. Browne is mercurial. Browne would be happy in Danbury. Till he died. For a fortnight, say—one brief, glowing, ecstatic fortnight. Fourteen giddy days would surely finish him. Imagine Browne (him of the eagle eye) up in the morning, his face washed, hair combed, breakfast taken aboard, and everything trim ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... An extreme development of the idea that physical processes can produce spiritual results is found in Rasesvara Darsana or the Mercurial System described in the Sarva-Darsana-Sangraha chap. IX. Marco Polo (Yule's Edition, vol. II. pp. 365, 369) had ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... waters are very useful in the treatment of rheumatism, gout, neuralgia, and kindred diseases, and in glandular affections and certain chronic diseases of the stomach, liver, intestines, spleen, kidneys, bladder and uterus, and in dropsy, scrofula, chlorosis and mercurial diseases. It is beneficial, used both internally and externally in the form of baths at different degrees of temperature, best determined in each case by the physician under whose advice, as a general rule, they should ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... were troubled in their minds, and wailed piercingly, for they seem to be mercurial in temperament, and no better weather ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... quantity, perhaps, when it is remembered that four grains is a fatal dose. Fortunately, however, for the prevention of accidents, but unfortunately for the therapeutic value of the soap, a decomposition of the sublimate occurs as soon as it is incorporated in the soap mass, by which an insoluble mercurial soap is formed. This change takes place independently of the alkali used in the soap; in fact, as mentioned above, a well-made soap contains no appreciable amount of free alkali, but is due to the action of the fat acids. Corrosive ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... personae. "Enter a Song singing" is the stage-direction in a seventeenth-century play whose name escapes me. The sentiment dramatized in a lyric is not necessarily a personal expression. In one of his couplets Herrick neatly denies that his more mercurial utterances are intended ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... eclipse. It has even been named Vulcan. These announcements would have received little attention but for the fact that the motion of Mercury has irregularities which have not been accounted for by known planets; and Le Verrier[3] has stated that an intra-Mercurial planet or ring of asteroids would account for the unexplained part of the motion of the line of apses of Mercury's orbit amounting ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... sunset, it is by no means an easy object to observe on account of the mists which usually hang about low down near the earth. One opportunity, however, offers itself from time to time to solve the riddle of an "intra-Mercurial" planet, that is to say, of a planet which circulates within the path followed by Mercury. The opportunity in question is furnished by a total eclipse of the sun; for when, during an eclipse of that kind, the body of the moon for a few minutes entirely hides the sun's face, and the ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... was in an agony. He was menaced with the very thing he was in the hope of staving off, or a discussion on the subject of the sick man's previous life. The doctor was so mercurial and quick of apprehension, that, once fairly on the scent, he was nearly certain he would extract every thing from the patient. This was the principal reason why the deacon did not wish to send for him; the expense, though a serious objection ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
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