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More "Mordant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Of course, women are, as a rule, much heavier eaters than men, but these delicate, pallid girls of the Ghetto set you marvelling. I have occasionally joined a party, and delightful table companions they were. For they can talk; they have, if not humour, at any rate a very mordant wit, as all melancholy peoples have; and they languish in the most ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... of the Candles, the infernal circus of the Witches' Sabbath. Rooted to the ground, Baldur realized with fresh amazement and vivid pain the fair beauty of Adam's prehistoric wife, her luxurious blond hair, her shapely shoulders, her stature of a goddess—he trembled, for she had turned her mordant gaze in his direction. And he strove in vain to bring back the comforting vision of the chamber. She smiled, and the odours of sandal, coreopsis, and aloes encircled his soul like the plaited strands of her glorious hair. She ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... personification of Intemperance in grief. Hearing that her husband, sir Mordant, had been enticed to the Bower of Bliss by the enchantress Acra'sia, she went in quest of him, and found him so changed in mind and body she could scarcely recognize him; however, she managed by tact to bring him away, but he died on the road, and Amavia stabbed herself from ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... City Politicks. This comedy by Crowne is a mordant satire upon the Whigs. It was produced with great success at the Theatre Royal and printed quarto 1683. A certain Florio feigns to be dying in order to prevent the Podesta suspecting an intrigue between his wife, Rosaura, 'the Lady Mayoress', and so impotent an invalid. Artall is in love with Lucinda, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... he lacks originality. It was a daring stroke—body-snatching in 1914. To produce a work like Spoon River Anthology required years of accumulated experience; a mordant power of analysis; a gift of shrewd speech, a command of hard words that will cut like a diamond; a mental vigour analogous to, though naturally not so powerful, as that displayed by Browning in The Ring and the Book. It is still a debatable proposition whether or not ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... a week, except for Ted Billett who would have to go back after Labor Day—and before eight hours of it were over, Oliver was watching Ted with grandmotherly interest, a little mordant jealousy, and humor, that, at times, verged toward the hysterical. Nancy—and especially the loss of her—had made him sensitive as a skinless man to the winds and vagaries of other young people in love—and ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... use of the alizarins for reds was for application of styles, that is colors containing at once the mordant and the coloring matter and fixed upon the cloth by the action of steam. Good steam-reds were easily obtained by using receipts originally designed for extracts of madder (mixtures of alizarin and purpurin). On the other hand, the first attempts ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... theatrical enterprise. The practical knowledge of the stage which this gifted enfant terrible of literature contributed was doubtless of great value in the early days of the dramatic adventure, though Moore's free thoughts, frank speech, and mordant irony brought an element of discord into Dublin literary circles, which may well have left Yeats and his associates with a feeling that they had paid too dear for a piper to whose tunes they refused to dance. Be that as it may, in 1899 Yeats's dream ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... ironic achievements of Mark Twain, in brief compass, are the two stories: 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' and 'Was it Heaven or Hell'? They reveal the power and subtlety of his art as an ironic humorist—or shall we rather say, ironic wit? For they range all the way from the most mordant to the most pathetic irony—from Mephistophelean ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... could not at first determine. She was no longer confined to the inner shrine of the back drawing-room. Her chair was placed in the large room, and she was the centre of a lively group of callers who were discussing the events of the week in Parliament, with the light and mordant zest of people well acquainted with the personalities they were talking of. She was apparently better in health, he noticed; at any rate, she was more at ease, and enjoying herself more than on the previous Wednesday. All her social characteristics were in full play; the blunt ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... En se heurtant comme des blocs, Les dogues de l'abme aboient Et hurlent en mordant les rocs; —Mais demain tous ces flots rebelles Se changeront, unis et doux, En miroirs pour les ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... substance employed to fix the dye to the material. In general, different ones are needed for different dyes and various materials. In some cases the mordant is added to the dye liquid; in others the material is previously treated with it before being colored. The most important are the mineral mordants, such as the alumina, the iron, the tin, and the chrome. These are not used in the Philippines with local vegetable dyes. Tannin ...
— Philippine Mats - Philippine Craftsman Reprint Series No. 1 • Hugo H. Miller
... stories peer the murky faces and towsled heads of some of the inmates. One of the latter spits his furthest into the yard—evidently with the intention of hitting myself: but all his efforts prove vain. Another one shouts with a mordant expletive: ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... abandoned all pretense of working. To him it seemed that the climax of the turpentine had come instantly; there was no more working up about it than there was about a live red coal. The mordant tooth bit into his blood; he rose and tramped the floor, muttering savagely to himself. But he would not pluck the hateful thing off, no, no—for that would have been an admission that he was wrong in putting it on; ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... soon acquired a deep blue color with a greenish tinge; upon boiling and immersing a piece of calico on which the mordants of iron and alumina had been printed, it was dyed a sea green color of greater or less intensity according to the strength of the mordant—the portions ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... deception lead more surely to distrust of men than self-deception to suspicion of principles. The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience. Enthusiasm is good material for the orator, but the statesman needs something more durable to work in,—must be able to rely on the deliberate reason and consequent firmness of the people, without which that presence of mind, no less essential in times ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... days, through the veil of illusion which alcohol had flung across his brain, he had been able to regard the contempt of the men as the intimacy of friendship, the scorn of the women as the laughter of light love. But now drink gave him nothing but the mordant insight of morbidity, which cut through his rotten soul like cheese. Yet night after night he came to this place, to be tortured afresh by the ridicule of the sordid frequenters, and by the careless music of the orchestra which told him of a flowerless spring and of a ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... that Voltaire in his youth spent three years in England, and mastered the philosophy of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, the Deism of the English Freethinkers, and the English theory of political liberty. That these doctrines, recommended by Voltaire's mordant genius and matchless style, and circulating in a community prepared by tyranny to receive them, acted as a powerful solvent on the intellectual basis of French society, is indeed likely enough. But to pursue ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... He recognised its mordant fang, and knew that its ravages, though only just begun, would last his lifetime. Nothing could stop them now, nothing, nothing. And he laughed, as the thought went home; laughed at the irony of fate and its inexorableness; laughed at his own defeat ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... Strassburg he was under treatment for a serious ailment of his eyes, and Goethe was assiduous in his attendance on him, often remaining with him for whole days. Their intercourse was not an unmixed pleasure for either. Herder's mordant humour and spirit of contradiction were a daily trial to Goethe's temper, and he describes his feelings of alternating attraction and repulsion as a wholly new experience in his life. Herder, who had known Diderot and D'Alembert and Lessing, appears, indeed, ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... far back in 1667 had given grievous offence to the Jesuits, and the unholy acting of plays was now declared an open profanity. Nicomede and Mithridate were condemned as immoral; but when Tartuffe, Moliere's mordant satire upon religious hypocrisy, was put upon the boards, the limits of endurance ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... knowledge of the stage which this gifted enfant terrible of literature contributed was doubtless of great value in the early days of the dramatic adventure, though Moore's free thoughts, frank speech, and mordant irony brought an element of discord into Dublin literary circles, which may well have left Yeats and his associates with a feeling that they had paid too dear for a piper to whose tunes they refused to dance. Be that as it may, in 1899 ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... our scheme of manners and morals would nevertheless be the most momentous and mischievous event of modern history. Compared with the action of this destructive solvent, that of all other disintegrating agencies concerned in our decivilization is as the languorous indiligence of rosewater to the mordant fury of ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... put up with her intrusion? But wasn't the house, perhaps, itself at a disadvantage, its sting drawn in presence of such invincible materialism? For how impress a creature at once so light and so pachydermatous? The position lent itself to rather mordant comedy. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... sarcastic, caustic, scathing, bitter, satirical, pungent, piquant; nipping, blasting; erosive, corrosive, acrid, mordant. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... was no sign of gratitude in Britt's countenance just then. His crazed rage was shifted to this presumptuous person who had interfered and was manhandling him; at that moment the liveliest emotion in Britt was the mordant jealousy that he had been trying to stifle. It awoke and raged, finding real excuse for the venting of its rancor on the man who had made ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... emotional lady of the highest circles. The story is clothed in a mystical garb that does something to soften its tragic ending. The interesting novel Ju-lin wai-shih ("Private Reports from the Life of Scholars"), by Wu Ching-tzu (1701-1754), is a mordant criticism of Confucianism with its rigid formalism, of the social system, and of the examination system. Social criticism is the theme of many novels. The most modern in spirit of the works of this period is perhaps the treatment of feminism ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... Politicks. This comedy by Crowne is a mordant satire upon the Whigs. It was produced with great success at the Theatre Royal and printed quarto 1683. A certain Florio feigns to be dying in order to prevent the Podesta suspecting an intrigue between his wife, Rosaura, 'the Lady Mayoress', ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... used as a depot for marble. It was adorned in 1763 with an equestrian statue of Louis XV., by Pigalle, elevated on a pedestal which was decorated at the corners by statues of the cardinal virtues. Mordant couplets, two of which we transcribe, affixed on the base, soon expressed the judgment ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... Les eaux flamboient En se heurtant comme des blocs, Les dogues de l'abme aboient Et hurlent en mordant les rocs; —Mais demain tous ces flots rebelles Se changeront, unis et doux, En ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... in this direction were not altogether successful, but the still fury which they aroused in the great wolf's breast doubtless obscured the mordant anguish in his foot. One terrific leap at his enemy, resulting in an ignominious overthrow as the chain stopped him in mid-air, had convinced the subtle beast of the vanity of such tactics. Crouching back, he eyed his adversary ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... a bit of the treacherous stuff. It takes the eye, but it is a fickle friend. They say a mordant has been found to stay the flight of its lovely colours. Perhaps; it may be. But what weaver of tapestry would be willing to confide his labour to the care of a dye that has not known the test of ages? Aniline ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... her bed, motionless, her round, dark eyes like black, unhappy pools. He could only see the black, bottomless pools of her eyes. Perhaps she suffered. The sensation of her inchoate suffering roused the old sharp flame in him, a mordant pity, a passion ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... and mordant beauty, and I do not deny that somehow she excites me, although age, sublime meditations, and the miseries of an agitated life have sufficiently mortified in me the lust of the flesh. You're suffering ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... Intemperance in grief. Hearing that her husband, sir Mordant, had been enticed to the Bower of Bliss by the enchantress Acra'sia, she went in quest of him, and found him so changed in mind and body she could scarcely recognize him; however, she managed by tact to bring ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... clamor for the most mechanical and superficial sort of logic. The dramatic reason for making the clergyman what Mrs Warren calls "an old stick-in-the-mud," whose son, in spite of much capacity and charm, is a cynically worthless member of society, is to set up a mordant contrast between him and the woman of infamous profession, with her well brought-up, straightforward, hardworking daughter. The critics who have missed the contrast have doubtless observed often enough that many clergymen are in the Church through no genuine calling, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... circus of the Witches' Sabbath. Rooted to the ground, Baldur realized with fresh amazement and vivid pain the fair beauty of Adam's prehistoric wife, her luxurious blond hair, her shapely shoulders, her stature of a goddess—he trembled, for she had turned her mordant gaze in his direction. And he strove in vain to bring back the comforting vision of the chamber. She smiled, and the odours of sandal, coreopsis, and aloes encircled his soul like the plaited strands of her glorious hair. She was that other Lilith, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... red dye, "says-tozzie-batch," is extracted from the bark and the roots of the sumac, and ground alder bark, with the ashes of the juniper as a mordant. She now immerses the wool and allows it to remain in the dye for half an hour or ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... Revolution the fact that Voltaire in his youth spent three years in England, and mastered the philosophy of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, the Deism of the English Freethinkers, and the English theory of political liberty. That these doctrines, recommended by Voltaire's mordant genius and matchless style, and circulating in a community prepared by tyranny to receive them, acted as a powerful solvent on the intellectual basis of French society, is indeed likely enough. But to pursue the theme would carry us too far back into ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... Beverout in a well-employed man. He that dealeth in the produce of the beaver must have the animal's perseverance and forethought! Now, were I a king-at-arms, there should be a concession made in thy favor, Myndert, of a shield bearing the animal mordant, a mantle of fur, with two Mohawk hunters for supporters, and the ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... cursed their drink, and asked if they had no Lyons Water-of-Life, stark and mordant, or social Hollands, or indeed anything that was not mere compound of whey and dirty water. Whereat they wondered, and held me thereafter in great respect as a good ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... in about one hour to the boiling point. With this precaution, level and thoroughly dyed goods are always obtained. If the wool is entered in a hot bath, or if it is rapidly brought to a boil, the dyestuff is too rapidly fixed by the mordant and is liable to run up unevenly, and, with piece-goods, more superficially. For the same reason the goods must always be well wetted ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... character and views of the clergy and of the ruling class among the laity of the Church of England, early in the nineteenth century, are pictured with love and humour in Trollope's novels. They form the background in many of George Eliot's books, where, in more mordant manner, both their strength and weaknesses are shown. Even the remarks which introduce Dean Church's Oxford Movement, 1891, in which the churchly element is dealt with in deep affection, give anything but an ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... from the appearance of Spring's Awakening (1891) to his Stone of Wisdom, (1909) and his most recent works, proves him to be concerned with nothing but the moral problem. He treats social morality with mordant irony from an a-moral standpoint. The distinction between a-moral and immoral must be borne in mind in any attempt to interpret the puzzling and paradoxical personality of the author and to arrive at an approximate understanding of the man behind ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... It fuses at 92 deg. C. in its own water of crystallization. "Neutral alum'' is obtained by the addition of as much sodium carbonate to a solution of alum as will begin to cause the separation of alumina; it is much used in mordanting. Alum finds application as a mordant, in the preparation of lakes for sizing hand-made paper and in the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... aloud her shy and reticent hours; Dragging to light her blinking, slothful moods; Publishing fretful seasons when her powers Worked wild and sullen in her solitudes, Or when her mordant laughter ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... company; and only when it chanced that Beauchamp's name was mentioned did she cast that quick supplicating nervous glance at the earl, with a shadow of an elevation of her shoulders, as if in apprehension of mordant pain. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... period dominated by rationalism. Locke regarded his Human Understanding as the preliminary to an ethical enquiry; and Hume seems to have considered his Principles of Morals the most vital of his works. It may be true, as the mordant insight of Mark Pattison suggested, that "those periods in which morals have been represented as the proper study of man, and his only business, have been periods of spiritual abasement and poverty." Certainly no one will be inclined to claim for the eighteenth ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... boiling point. With this precaution, level and thoroughly dyed goods are always obtained. If the wool is entered in a hot bath, or if it is rapidly brought to a boil, the dyestuff is too rapidly fixed by the mordant and is liable to run up unevenly, and, with piece-goods, more superficially. For the same reason the goods must always be well wetted out ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... Overcome by the mordant satire in his tone, Mrs. George glanced speechlessly at Lucinda. Behold, Lucinda had squarely turned her back on the party and was gazing out into the garden, with a very decided flush on the snowy curves of her neck and cheek. Then Mrs. George looked at her sisters-in-law. ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... this condiment, your poet begs The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs; Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen-sieve, Smoothness and softness to the salad give; Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl, And, half-suspected, animate the whole. Of mordant mustard add a single spoon, Distrust the condiment that bites so soon; But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault, To add a double quantity of salt. And, lastly, o'er the flavored compound toss A magic soup-spoon of anchovy sauce. Oh, green and glorious! ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... why, if one should prefer even Chicago roast beef to an Irish policeman, that should be held against one." This was Mrs. Carrington's indignant comment on the narrative of the mordant martyr. ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... of self, were an admirable antidote to his extreme moods, uneasy vanity, and morbid depression. Communion with her serene equity, her matchless beauty, her inexhaustible tenderness, the experience of her constant homage, soothed his haughty and mordant, but magnanimous and affectionate, nature, and were an infinite luxury to him. An admiring recognition is almost a necessity for those highly endowed with genius. And Madame Recamier's intense faculty of admiration, with her self-forgetting ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... abandoned in the gallery than de Naarboveck-Fantomas had slipped out and away. When leaving his magnificent house forever, and all the securities and privileges of his position, he had sent Wilhelmine to announce his escape to Juve! Could cynicism—could mordant irony ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... watched to keep it from spreading, and on it he roasted half a dozen plover's eggs which he had picked up during the day in his hillside ranging. On these high moors the moor-fowls go on laying till August. These being served on warmed and buttered scones, and sharpened with a whiff of mordant heather smoke, were most delicious to Ralph, who smiled to himself, well pleased under his warm covering of ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... is no pretence of balancing that mordant saying with any decorous platitude of Christian Deism, we are led finally to the admission that Shakspere sounded a further depth of philosophy than Montaigne's unembittered "cosmopolitan view of things." Instead of reacting against Montaigne's "scepticism," as ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... of old inns, so, when they had admired the cathedral, and shuddered at the memory of Richard the Third—who wrote at Gloucester the order to Brackenbury for the murder of the princes in the Tower of London—and smiled at Cromwell's mordant wit in saying that the place had more churches than godliness when told of the local proverb, "As sure as God's in Gloucester," Medenham brought them to Northgate Street, where the New Inn—which is nearly always the most antiquated hostelry in ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... it. He chewed tobacco enormously. After pricking away for a few minutes at the design on the arm or some portion of the body, he would deluge it with a flood of tobacco spit, which, he claimed, acted as a kind of mordant. Piping this off with a filthy rag, he would study the effect for an instant, and then go ahead with another series of prickings and ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... returned the other. "It is the other way. Enjoyment is the universal solvent of all arguments. No reason can resist its mordant action. It will dissolve any philosophy not founded upon it and modelled out of its substance, as Aqua Regia will dissolve all metals, even to gold itself. Enjoyment? Enjoyment is the protest of reality against the ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... Candles, the infernal circus of the Witches' Sabbath. Rooted to the ground, Baldur realized with fresh amazement and vivid pain the fair beauty of Adam's prehistoric wife, her luxurious blond hair, her shapely shoulders, her stature of a goddess—he trembled, for she had turned her mordant gaze in his direction. And he strove in vain to bring back the comforting vision of the chamber. She smiled, and the odours of sandal, coreopsis, and aloes encircled his soul like the plaited strands of her glorious hair. She was that other Lilith, the ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... violent) 173; wind up &c. (strengthen) 159. strike home, into home, hard home; make an impression. Adj. strong, energetic, forcible, active; intense, deep-dyed, severe, keen, vivid, sharp, acute, incisive, trenchant, brisk. rousing, irritation; poignant; virulent, caustic, corrosive, mordant, harsh, stringent; double-edged, double-shotted[obs3], double-distilled; drastic, escharotic|; racy &c. (pungent) 392. potent &c. (powerful) 157; radioactive. Adv. strongly &c. adj.; fortiter in re[Lat]; with telling effect. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... INK FOR MARKING LINEN.—Von Bele gives the following method for preparing an ink for marking linen and cotton: Neutralize 75 grains of carbonate of ammonia with pure nitric acid, and triturate 45 to 60 grains of carmine with the solution. Mordant the fabric with a mixed solution of acetate of alumina and tin salt, and write upon it, when it is perfectly ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... sulphate of alumina combined with another sulphate, as potash, soda, etc. It is much used as a mordant in dyeing and calico printing, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... The mordant tone in which this was said disconcerted Mrs. Hilbrough. She felt that she was in danger of becoming an accomplice in a lovers' quarrel that might prove disastrous to the pretty romance that had begun in her own house. She ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... republican future, that was to be the death of art and literature, and the rags of a feudal present, whose conditions sustained him while they disgusted him. If Heine fought, scratched and bit with all his might among the convulsions of the politics he was helpless to rearrange, he was equally mordant when he turned his attention to society, and perhaps more frightfully impartial. He hated the English for "their idle curiosity, bedizened awkwardness, impudent bashfulness, angular egotism, and vacant delight in all melancholy objects." As for the French, they are "les comediens ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... A general history of quadrupeds appeared with its vivid animals and its humorous and mordant tailpiece vignettes, he was hailed in terms that have hardly been matched for adulation. Certainly no mere book illustrator ever received equal acclaim. He was pronounced a great artist, a great man, ...
— Why Bewick Succeeded - A Note in the History of Wood Engraving • Jacob Kainen
... nothing so deliberately tedious as Robert Elsmere has been produced, things are not much better. M. Guy de Maupassant, with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style, strips life of the few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us foul sore and festering wound. He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very tears. ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... need of an Introduction it would be the delightful story that is called "Mary, Mary" on one side of the Atlantic Ocean and "The Charwoman's Daughter" on the other. It was written in 1910, when the author was known as the poet of "Insurrections" and the writer of a few of the mordant studies that belong to a later book, ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... to intrude upon her at one of these moments would find her bathed in perspiration, her eyes blazing, her false hair pushed awry and exposing the baldness of her brows. Francoise must often, from the next room, have heard these mordant sarcasms levelled at herself, the mere framing of which in words would not have relieved my aunt's feelings sufficiently, had they been allowed to remain in a purely immaterial form, without the degree of substance and reality which she added to them by murmuring them half-aloud. ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... faculties of observation and retention, were quickened by an irritation of the cuticle, that in France it was customary to whip the children annually at the boundaries of the parish, lest the true place of them might ever be lost through neglect of so inexpensive a mordant for the memory. From this practice the older school of critics would seem to have taken a hint for keeping fixed the limits of good taste, and what was somewhat vaguely called classical English. To mark these limits in poetry, they set up as Hermae the images they had made to them ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... a sigh: "If I could even get out on crutches, do you know whither I would go? Straight to church." And when his hearer looked incredulous, he added: "Most decidedly to church. Where else should one go with crutches?" Such exquisite and mordant irony is strange indeed in a defender of the holy and ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... seconds of pause and doubt that great commanders assert themselves; it is these electric seconds from which the hero gathers his vital lightning and forges his mordant bolt. Genius claims and rules these instants, and the gods are on the side of those who boldly grasp loose wisdom and bind it into sheaves of judgment. Cleggett (whom Homer would have loved) was the first to recover ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... pictures by Lawrence and Hoppner. One can comprehend, too, that the person whom nature had so ungenerously endowed, might be perfectly capable of retorting to rudeness, or the still-smarting recollection of rudeness, with those weapons of mordant wit and acrid epigram which are not unfrequently the protective compensation of physical shortcomings. But this conceded, there are numberless anecdotes which testify to Rogers's cultivated taste and real good breeding, to his ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... Moody silentema. Moon luno. Moonlight lunbrilo. Moor stepo. Moor (a ship, etc.) alligi per sxnurego. Moot disputebla. Mope malgxojigxi. Moral morala. Morality moraleco. Morals etiko, moro. Morass marcxejo—ajxo. Morbid malsana. Mordant morda. More (than) pli (ol). More plu. More, the—the more ju pli—des pli. Moreover plie. Morgue mortulejo. Moribund mortanto. Morning mateno. Morocco (leather) marokeno. Morose malgaja. Moroseness malgajeco. Morrow morgauxtago. Morsel peceto. Mortal (subject to ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... this was an idea that persisted for centuries; facts with all their mordant logic were impotent to kill it. Hardly in Dante's time did men guess that the Roman empire and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... even the potential productive force of modern society as to lead many to believe that something is radically wrong. Many are persuaded that Christianity as now organized and led is socially sterile; they have withdrawn themselves from the church; many of them have become its mordant critics; the more extreme of them have disowned religion as well as its organized form, and the violently radical would dethrone any conception of the Divine and take the word God out of our vocabulary. This extreme group has not for the most part associated itself with ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... Shade:—Boil the goods in a mordant of alum two parts, copperas three parts; then rinse them through a bath of madder. The tint depends on the relative proportions of the copperas and alum; the more copperas, the darker the dye; joint ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... good strength.[3] The gelatine is dissolved in hot water, but should not be boiled, as that partially destroys the size. When dissolved, a little powdered alum is also stirred in, about as much as will lie on a shilling to a pint of water. The addition of the alum is important, as it acts as a mordant and helps to make a better ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... Aver, and was probably at some time cultivated, for manufactured indigo was once exported. The India-rubber is made into balls for a game resembling "fives," and calumba-root is said to be used as a mordant for certain colours, but not as ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... attracted some attention. It is a picture of the coronation of George V. by one Fernand Piret, a French aviator—so the story goes—who never before dabbled in terrene arts. It may be so. In any case he has contrived a mordant comment on that ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... of working. To him it seemed that the climax of the turpentine had come instantly; there was no more working up about it than there was about a live red coal. The mordant tooth bit into his blood; he rose and tramped the floor, muttering savagely to himself. But he would not pluck the hateful thing off, no, no—for that would have been an admission that he was wrong in putting it on; ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the character of a wet blanket, but as a teller of jocund tales and a retailer of humorous anecdotes, must not be taken as an isolated and transient transformation, but as foreshadowing a general conversion of writers and publicists hitherto associated with utterances of a mordant, bitter, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... and asked if they had no Lyons Water-of-Life, stark and mordant, or social Hollands, or indeed anything that was not mere compound of whey and dirty water. Whereat they wondered, and held me thereafter in great respect as a good companion and approven ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... Arabs Hajar Jehannum, or "Rock of Hell." As for their uniforms, though now dry as bone, the way in which they were shrunken and wrinkled told that not long ago they had been drenched in water of strongly mordant qualities. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... caricatures par excellence, embodiments of a single attribute. Leaena of the Cur. is the perpetually thirsty lena: "Wine, wine, wine!"[164] Cleaerata of the As. is a plain caricature, but is exceptionally cleverly drawn as the lena with the mordant tongue. Phronesium's thirst in the Truc., is gold, gold, gold! The danista of the Most. finds the whole expression of his nature in the cry of "Faenus!"[165] Assuredly, he is the progenitor of the ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... tortured is the frightful seed The spark intense within it, all without Mordant corrosion gnashing and champing hard For ruin on the naked ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... under the spell of Bakkus. like him she loved talk, although her education allowed her only the lightest kind. She loved its give-and-take, its opportunities for the flash of wit or jest. Bakkus could talk about an old boot. She too. He could analyse sentiment in his mordant way. She could analyse it in her own unsophisticated fashion. Now Andrew, though death on facts and serious argument, remained dumb and bewildered in a passage-at-arms about apparently nothing at all; and while Bakkus and Elodie enjoyed themselves ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... furnished by his contemporaries, we should but know that he had introduced into Portugal representa[c,][o]es of eloquent style and novel invention imitating Enzina's eclogues with great skill and wit[93], and that the mordant comic poet Gil Vicente, who hid a serious aim beneath his gaiety and was skilled in veiling his satire in light-hearted jests, might have excelled Menander, Plautus and Terence if he had written in Latin instead of in the ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... which nature had denied to Luis de Leon. He was aware of this himself, to judge from his statement that he had nothing of the jester or scoffer in him.[161] But if Luis de Leon was relatively poor in humour, he had an abundant store of mordant sarcasm and a faculty for ironic banter, as Medina and Castro learned to their chagrin.[162] Pacheco's opinion of Luis de Leon's versatile talent is borne out by the scrap of evidence given at the trial by Francisco ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... eaters than men, but these delicate, pallid girls of the Ghetto set you marvelling. I have occasionally joined a party, and delightful table companions they were. For they can talk; they have, if not humour, at any rate a very mordant wit, as all melancholy peoples have; and they languish in the most delicately ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... are classified as "anilines." They have worked a revolution in all the arts in which colors are used. Employed without a mordant, with few exceptions, they are measurably affected by both light, heat, moisture, or other changes and as made into inks are never permanent. Hence they should not be used for records, because if obliterated from any cause ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... said Jose, with his upcurling, mordant smile. "The wind has roared through it all day and swept away every trace of tobacco ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... year he printed one scene of "A Family Affair," which appeared in complete form three years later, in 1850, and established its author's reputation as a dramatist of undoubted talent. Unfortunately, by its mordant but true picture of commercial morals, it aroused against him the most bitter feelings among the Moscow merchants. Discussion of the play in the press was prohibited, and representation of it on the stage was out ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... the film as much of the mordant as the cover-glass will hold. Grasp the cover-slip with the forceps and hold it, high above the flame, until steam rises. Allow the steaming mordant to remain in contact with the film ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... will not stay as they used to! They will be voyaging," said the guest. "They build outlandish craft and forthfare, no matter what you cry to them!" His voice had a mordant note. "I know. I've got one myself—a nephew, not a son. But I am his guardian and he's in my house, and it is the same. If I buy Black Hill, Glenfernie, I hope that your son and my nephew may be friends. They're about ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... in Strassburg he was under treatment for a serious ailment of his eyes, and Goethe was assiduous in his attendance on him, often remaining with him for whole days. Their intercourse was not an unmixed pleasure for either. Herder's mordant humour and spirit of contradiction were a daily trial to Goethe's temper, and he describes his feelings of alternating attraction and repulsion as a wholly new experience in his life. Herder, who had known Diderot and D'Alembert and Lessing, appears, indeed, ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... myself! I was walking the deck with her without the slightest qualm. I was even able to look over the side from time to time and comment on the beauty of the moon on the water.... I have said some mordant things about women since I came on board this boat. I withdraw them unreservedly. They still apply to girls like Wilhelmina Bennett, but I have ceased to include the whole sex in my remarks. Jane Hubbard has restored my faith in ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... work Domenico truly deserves praise, for he was the first who began to counterfeit with colours certain trimmings and ornaments of gold, which had not been done up to that time; and he swept away in great measure those borders of gilding that were made with mordant or with bole, which were more suitable for church-hangings than for the work of good masters. More beautiful than all the other figures is the Madonna, who has the Child in her arms and four little angels ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... picturesque speech. How he could bite in a picture, an ugly, ill-tempered one enough very often, as when he called Coleridge a "weltering" man! Many of his sketches are mere Gillray caricatures of people, seen through bile unutterable, exasperated by nervous irritability. And Mrs. Carlyle had a mordant wit enough. But still both of them had au fond a deep need of love, and a power of lavishing love. It comes out in the old man's whimsical notes and prefaces; and indeed it is true to say that if a person ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... is formed by discharging colour from a previously dyed cloth, is to print on it a pattern with paste; then, passing it into the dying-vat, it comes out dyed of one uniform colour But the paste has protected the fibres of the cotton from the action of the dye or mordant; and when the cloth so dyed is well washed, the paste is dissolved, and leaves uncoloured all those parts of the cloth to which ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... depraved, was scarcely confirmed in her recovery, when, stifling the dictates of honour, gratitude, and every natural affection, she again accused her husband, who was once more apprehended, and taken before Sir John Mordant, Knight, and one of ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... troubles to-day. She was paying the price of yesterday's exaltation and her spirits had sunk down to nowhere. What a fool's paradise yesterday had been with its vision of her big self-sufficient husband coming to her for mothering because he had lost a law-suit! What a piece of mordant irony it was, that she should have found herself, after all her silly hopes, sobbing in his arms, while he comforted her for her bitter disappointment over not being able to comfort him! She had told ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... master, whose loss afflicted him to the last degree, one Mrs. Mary Mordant, a gentlewoman of great virtue and piety, and a very good fortune, took him into her service, and carried him with her, first to Bath, and then to Bristol, where, after a lingering distemper, which continued for about four ...
— Dickory Cronke - The Dumb Philosopher, or, Great Britain's Wonder • Daniel Defoe
... mutually agreed to leave the realm of farcical extravagance, and to turn to satire of a peculiarly keen-edged and delicate kind—that satire which caresses while it cuts, and somehow contrives to win sympathy for its object even when it is most mordant. There are people nowadays who have been known to declare that the "aesthetic" movement had no existence outside the imagination of Mr. Gilbert and 'Mr. Punch.' In the eighties, however, everybody believed in it, and believed too that 'Patience' killed it. What is quite certain is that, whoever ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... through kitchen sieve, Smoothness and softness to the salad give; Of mordant mustard add a single spoon; Distrust the condiment that bites too soon; But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault, To add a double quantity of salt. Four times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown, And twice with vinegar procured from town; True flavor needs it, and your poet begs The pounded yellow ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss
... chemists were able to produce very bright dyes by methods then unknown to Greece or Rome. They dipped the cloth first into a liquid of one colour, called a mordant, to prepare it, and then into a liquid of a second colour; and it came out dyed of a third colour, unlike either of the former. The ink with which they wrote the name of a deceased person on the mummy-cloth, like our own marking-ink, was made with nitrate of silver. Their ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... in the produce of the beaver must have the animal's perseverance and forethought! Now, were I a king-at-arms, there should be a concession made in thy favor, Myndert, of a shield bearing the animal mordant, a mantle of fur, with two Mohawk hunters for supporters, and the ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... objection to war, the realization of its antisocial and inhuman qualities, is becoming a religious purpose which unites Christians and non-Christians, atheists and agnostics, and which carries with it at once a mordant condemnation of the interpretations of the past, and an irrepressible demand for a future free from the old menace and the old mistakes. All sane men and women want to abolish war. General Smuts believes that a passion for peace has ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... them and occasionally the raising of stock and the tilling of soil, though usually as proprietors only, it is true. Sometimes they are swept into strange waters where, if they float about long enough, they manage by some inherent mordant capacity to colour the entire complexion to their own. There are exceptions, ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... the two stories: 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' and 'Was it Heaven or Hell'? They reveal the power and subtlety of his art as an ironic humorist—or shall we rather say, ironic wit? For they range all the way from the most mordant to the most pathetic irony—from Mephistophelean ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... either of these two charms, Madam, it is difficult to put even a clever cobbler, much less a Prime Minister, into leading strings! No,—it is the spendthrift women of a corrupt society that I mean,—the women who possess beauty, and are conscious of it,—the women who have a mordant wit and use it for dangerous purposes—the women who give up their homes, their husbands, their children and their reputations for the sake of villainous intrigue, and the feverish excitement of speculative money-making;—with these—and with the stealthy spread of Romanism,—will ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... and woof in woven manufactures, so that the fibres ran longitudinally in each direction, and opposed in each an equal resistance to violence. The surface was then polished with a shell, or some hard smooth substance. The ink used was a simple black liquid, containing no mordant to give it durability, so that the writing was easily effaced by the application of a sponge. The length of the Greek papyri is said to vary from eight to twelve inches; the Latin often reach sixteen; the writing is in columns, placed at right ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... would have joyed at his death. When I loved Berna most exquisitely, when I gazed with tender joy upon her sweetness, when, with glad, thankful eyes, I blessed her for the sympathy and sunshine of her presence, then between us would come a shadow, dark, menacing and mordant. So the joy-light would vanish from my eyes and a great ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... enterprise. The practical knowledge of the stage which this gifted enfant terrible of literature contributed was doubtless of great value in the early days of the dramatic adventure, though Moore's free thoughts, frank speech, and mordant irony brought an element of discord into Dublin literary circles, which may well have left Yeats and his associates with a feeling that they had paid too dear for a piper to whose tunes they refused to dance. Be that as it may, in 1899 Yeats's dream was measurably ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... also assumed the mental attitude of the sixteenth century owing to his viridity, his crudity, his lack of avoidance of obscenity, even though he was a true poet, vigorous, powerful, oratorical, and epigrammatical, as well as a witty and mordant caricaturist. ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... herself could now scarcely realize at times that the stout, good-natured, short-sighted little man with the big white brow, who had lounged with her daily at the end of the pier, telling her stories, was the most mordant wit in Europe, "the German Aristophanes"; and that those nursery tales, grotesquely compact of mermaids, water-sprites, and a funny old French fiddler with a poodle that diligently took three baths a day, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... suspended by her outstretched hands. Oh, it was quite vain to seek any longer. It must be enchantment, and the door had disappeared. An indefinable dream crept over Thusnelda, and she was cast down. For the first time a jest failed her trembling lips, and she wept with anguish. Yes, she, the keen, mordant, jesting little woman, prayed and implored her Maker to unloose her from the enchantment, and permit her to find the long-sought-for entrance. But praying was in vain, the door was not to be found, it was witch craft, and she must submit to it. The rustling and moving ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... an object! Can any expenditure be called excessive which enables us to hear Comrade Waller being mordant and ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... the tissues as faintly, as possible. Sometimes a simple watery solution of the dye is sufficient, but very often the best result is obtained by increasing the staining power, e.g. by addition of weak alkali, application of heat, &c., and by using some substance which acts as a mordant and tends to fix the stain to the bacteria. Excess of stain is afterwards removed from the tissues by the use of decolorizing agents, such as acids of varying strength and concentration, alcohol, &c. Different ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... one is content to remain more or less ignorant of many things which interest his fellow-creatures. We gain a good deal of knowledge through the atmosphere; we learn a great deal by accidental hearsay, provided we have the mordant in our own consciousness which makes the wise remark, the significant fact, the instructive incident, take hold upon it. After the stage of despair comes the period of consolation. We soon find that we are not so much worse off than most of our neighbors as we supposed. The ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... strong light, he tried to stain his flag with the berries of a sort of shrub which grew at the foot of the dunes. He obtained a very vivid red, which he could not make indelible owing to his having no mordant, but he could easily re-dye the cloth when the wind ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... it had not the Augustan urbanity. Go back now to the Elizabethan, and avoiding Shakespeare as a law unto himself, which is the right of genius—for the sonnets have wit as well as passion (but a mordant wit), everything that real love-poetry must have, and much that no poetry but Shakespeare's could possibly survive—avoiding Shakespeare, I say, take two snatches in ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... affection may have warmed his being, just as it does that of many a day-laborer. But in the arid air of Wall Street all his intellectual and ethical possibilities will have wilted and died. Lust for greater riches and a mordant, ever-smouldering disappointment at not having attained them, will replace the healthier impulses of adolescence. Books will have no savor for him; men of high attainments, unless their coffers brim with ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... fatty acids in it form, with the lime and magnesia, insoluble compounds called lime and magnesia soaps, which are sticky, greasy, adhesive bodies, that precipitate and fix some colouring matters like a mordant. We have in such cases, then, a kind of double mischief—(i) waste of soap, (ii) injury to colours and dyes on the fabrics. But this is not all, for colours are precipitated as lakes, and mordants also are precipitated, and thus wasted, in much the same ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... episodes which are to follow in the narrative will develop other startling and ingenious deviltries. But, before going on, the sequel to the Utah affair deserves a place in the story. A sequel there was, and my readers will agree, I think, that it has a mordant humor quite its own. To-day, after the years that have gone by, I cannot think of this tremendous bunco game, in spite of its cruel and tragic phases, without a laugh at the manner in which the smart gentlemen who composed the Utah Consolidated ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... no need of self-reproach because one is content to remain more or less ignorant of many things which interest his fellow-creatures. We gain a good deal of knowledge through the atmosphere; we learn a great deal by accidental hearsay, provided we have the mordant in our own consciousness which makes the wise remark, the significant fact, the instructive incident, take hold upon it. After the stage of despair comes the period of consolation. We soon find that we are not so much worse off than most of our neighbors as we supposed. The fractional value of the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to dye than wool or silk. Although there are now what are called "direct" cotton colors, the usual process is to first treat the cotton goods with a "mordant"—various salts of aluminum, chromium, iron, tin and copper, fixing these on the fiber by means of tannin or alkali. The mordanted cloth is then entered into the dye bath and boiled for an hour or longer, until the desired shade is obtained or the dye bath ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... film as much of the mordant as the cover-glass will hold. Grasp the cover-slip with the forceps and hold it, high above the flame, until steam rises. Allow the steaming mordant to remain in contact with the ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... enough, this was an idea that persisted for centuries; facts with all their mordant logic were impotent to kill it. Hardly in Dante's time did men guess that the Roman empire ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... paying the price of yesterday's exaltation and her spirits had sunk down to nowhere. What a fool's paradise yesterday had been with its vision of her big self-sufficient husband coming to her for mothering because he had lost a law-suit! What a piece of mordant irony it was, that she should have found herself, after all her silly hopes, sobbing in his arms, while he comforted her for her bitter disappointment over not being able to comfort him! She had told the truth when she said he was the one, really, who didn't know ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Monument monumento. Mood modo. Moody silentema. Moon luno. Moonlight lunbrilo. Moor stepo. Moor (a ship, etc.) alligi per sxnurego. Moot disputebla. Mope malgxojigxi. Moral morala. Morality moraleco. Morals etiko, moro. Morass marcxejo—ajxo. Morbid malsana. Mordant morda. More (than) pli (ol). More plu. More, the—the more ju pli—des pli. Moreover plie. Morgue mortulejo. Moribund mortanto. Morning mateno. Morocco (leather) marokeno. Morose malgaja. Moroseness malgajeco. Morrow morgauxtago. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... some photographs of old inns, so, when they had admired the cathedral, and shuddered at the memory of Richard the Third—who wrote at Gloucester the order to Brackenbury for the murder of the princes in the Tower of London—and smiled at Cromwell's mordant wit in saying that the place had more churches than godliness when told of the local proverb, "As sure as God's in Gloucester," Medenham brought them to Northgate Street, where the New Inn—which is nearly always the most antiquated hostelry ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... were not altogether successful, but the still fury which they aroused in the great wolf's breast doubtless obscured the mordant anguish in his foot. One terrific leap at his enemy, resulting in an ignominious overthrow as the chain stopped him in mid-air, had convinced the subtle beast of the vanity of such tactics. Crouching back, ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... nevertheless, unpretending and simple in company; and only when it chanced that Beauchamp's name was mentioned did she cast that quick supplicating nervous glance at the earl, with a shadow of an elevation of her shoulders, as if in apprehension of mordant pain. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... condiment, your poet begs The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs; Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen-sieve, Smoothness and softness to the salad give; Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl, And, half-suspected, animate the whole. Of mordant mustard add a single spoon, Distrust the condiment that bites so soon; But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault, To add a double quantity of salt. And, lastly, o'er the flavored compound toss A magic soup-spoon of anchovy ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... penetrating book. Fortunately, it is an omission that does not disable the book as (in my judgment) it disabled the hero of the play, because Mr Harris left himself out of his play, whereas he pervades his book, mordant, deep-voiced, and with an unconquerable style which is ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... ways, and to enlist in the theatrical enterprise. The practical knowledge of the stage which this gifted enfant terrible of literature contributed was doubtless of great value in the early days of the dramatic adventure, though Moore's free thoughts, frank speech, and mordant irony brought an element of discord into Dublin literary circles, which may well have left Yeats and his associates with a feeling that they had paid too dear for a piper to whose tunes they refused to dance. Be that as it may, in 1899 ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... solution of the dye is sufficient, but very often the best result is obtained by increasing the staining power, e.g. by addition of weak alkali, application of heat, &c., and by using some substance which acts as a mordant and tends to fix the stain to the bacteria. Excess of stain is afterwards removed from the tissues by the use of decolorizing agents, such as acids of varying strength and concentration, alcohol, &c. Different bacteria behave very differently to stains; some take them ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... paid homage in the dark ages of the past. The truth is that the spiritual objection to war, the realization of its antisocial and inhuman qualities, is becoming a religious purpose which unites Christians and non-Christians, atheists and agnostics, and which carries with it at once a mordant condemnation of the interpretations of the past, and an irrepressible demand for a future free from the old menace and the old mistakes. All sane men and women want to abolish war. General Smuts believes that a passion for peace has been born which will prove stronger than ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... occasionally the raising of stock and the tilling of soil, though usually as proprietors only, it is true. Sometimes they are swept into strange waters where, if they float about long enough, they manage by some inherent mordant capacity to colour the entire complexion to their own. There ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... flower between My fingers, till its head lay back, its fangs Poised at her. Like a weapon my hand was white and keen, And I held the choked flower-serpent in its pangs Of mordant anguish, till she ceased to laugh, Until her pride's flag, smitten, cleaved ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... things. Humour was, however, one of the few gifts which nature had denied to Luis de Leon. He was aware of this himself, to judge from his statement that he had nothing of the jester or scoffer in him.[161] But if Luis de Leon was relatively poor in humour, he had an abundant store of mordant sarcasm and a faculty for ironic banter, as Medina and Castro learned to their chagrin.[162] Pacheco's opinion of Luis de Leon's versatile talent is borne out by the scrap of evidence given at the ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... trunk. As he thought that the white colour would only be visible in a strong light, he tried to stain his flag with the berries of a sort of shrub which grew at the foot of the dunes. He obtained a very vivid red, which he could not make indelible owing to his having no mordant, but he could easily re-dye the cloth when the wind or rain ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... your poet begs The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs; Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen-sieve, Smoothness and softness to the salad give; Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl, And, half-suspected, animate the whole. Of mordant mustard add a single spoon, Distrust the condiment that bites so soon; But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault, To add a double quantity of salt. And, lastly, o'er the flavored compound toss A magic soup-spoon of anchovy ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... ground, Baldur realized with fresh amazement and vivid pain the fair beauty of Adam's prehistoric wife, her luxurious blond hair, her shapely shoulders, her stature of a goddess—he trembled, for she had turned her mordant gaze in his direction. And he strove in vain to bring back the comforting vision of the chamber. She smiled, and the odours of sandal, coreopsis, and aloes encircled his soul like the plaited strands of her glorious hair. She was that other Lilith, the only offspring of the old Serpent. On what ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... greenish tinge; upon boiling and immersing a piece of calico on which the mordants of iron and alumina had been printed, it was dyed a sea green color of greater or less intensity according to the strength of the mordant—the portions not ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... characters are caricatures par excellence, embodiments of a single attribute. Leaena of the Cur. is the perpetually thirsty lena: "Wine, wine, wine!"[164] Cleaerata of the As. is a plain caricature, but is exceptionally cleverly drawn as the lena with the mordant tongue. Phronesium's thirst in the Truc., is gold, gold, gold! The danista of the Most. finds the whole expression of his nature in the cry of "Faenus!"[165] Assuredly, he is the progenitor of the modern low-comedy Jew: "I vant my inderesd!" Calidorus of the Ps. and ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... sixteenth century owing to his viridity, his crudity, his lack of avoidance of obscenity, even though he was a true poet, vigorous, powerful, oratorical, and epigrammatical, as well as a witty and mordant caricaturist. ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... the dead! At first those endless groups of drawn and grinning faces filled us with a shuddering horror. So vivid and mordant was the impression that I can live over again that slow descent of the station hill, the passing by the nurse-girl with the two babes, the sight of the old horse on his knees between the shafts, ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... summing up and the chief expression of a movement that has reached its hey-day, from which the sap has already been cut off. It is, indeed, the thing to disparage them for their very finest quality, the vividness with which they express the texture of Madrid, the animated humorous mordant conversation about cafe ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... mercy of Whistler, once, in some Velasquez controversy of which I forget the details, but they are all set out, for those who like mordant ridicule, in "The Gentle Art of ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... the changes in colouring materials has arisen the necessity for discovering new mordants. The gas colour of madder is exactly the same chemically as that extracted from the vegetable, but the old mordant does not fix it, and it changes very soon to ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... was an idea that persisted for centuries; facts with all their mordant logic were impotent to kill it. Hardly in Dante's time did men guess that the Roman empire and its ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... inspiration to Coleridge, Poe, De Quincey, James Thomson, or Baudelaire. The city of dreadful night shown us by Rops is the city through whose streets he has passed his life long. Not the dream cities of James Ensor or De Groux, the Paris of Rops is at once an abode of disillusionment, of mordant joys, of sheer ecstasy and morbid hallucinations. The opium of Rops is his imagination, aided by a manual dexterity that is extraordinary. He is a master of linear design. He is cold, deadly cold, but correct ever. Fabulous and absurd, delicious and abominable as he may be, his ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... swagger; it had not the Restoration cynicism; it had not the Augustan urbanity. Go back now to the Elizabethan, and avoiding Shakespeare as a law unto himself, which is the right of genius—for the sonnets have wit as well as passion (but a mordant wit), everything that real love-poetry must have, and much that no poetry but Shakespeare's could possibly survive—avoiding Shakespeare, I say, take two ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... there, which for her sake I am a little sorry for, though for his it is but fit she should live where he hath a mind. Here were several people come to see and take leave of her, she going to-morrow: among others, my Lady Mordant, which was Betty Turner, a most homely widow, but young, and pretty rich, and good natured. Thence, having promised to write every month to her, we home, and I to my office, while my wife to get things together for supper. Dispatching my business at the office. Anon come our guests, old Mr. Batelier, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... purple crystals and have some practical uses in the tanning industry and in photography. A number of the salts of chromium are also used in the dyeing industry, for they hydrolyze like aluminium salts and the hydroxide forms a good mordant. ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... not stay as they used to! They will be voyaging," said the guest. "They build outlandish craft and forthfare, no matter what you cry to them!" His voice had a mordant note. "I know. I've got one myself—a nephew, not a son. But I am his guardian and he's in my house, and it is the same. If I buy Black Hill, Glenfernie, I hope that your son and my nephew may be friends. They're ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... mordant of fancy, And, despite the wear and tear Of time or distance or trouble, Insists on its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... their own nationality. Hajji Baba is a Persian of the Persians, typical not merely of the life and surroundings, but of the character and instincts and manner of thought of his countrymen. And yet it is from his lips that flows the delightful stream of naive confession and mordant sarcasm that never seems either ill-natured or artificial, that lashes without vindictiveness, and excoriates without malice. In strict ratio, however, to the verisimilitude of the performance, must be esteemed the talents of the non-Oriental writer, ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... reception of Ghosts was proved by the instant success of The Enemy of the People. Presented to the public in this new and audacious form, the problem of a "moral water-supply" struck sensible Norwegians as less absurd and less dangerous than they had conceived it to be. The reproof was mordant, and the worst offenders crouched under the lash. Ghosts itself was still, for some time, tabooed, but The Enemy of the People received a cordial welcome, and has remained ever since one of the most popular of Ibsen's writings. It is still extremely effective on the stage, and ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... to reviewing the metaphorical applications of such terms as 'caustic,' 'mordant,' 'piquant,' etc., in their burning, biting, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... comedy by Crowne is a mordant satire upon the Whigs. It was produced with great success at the Theatre Royal and printed quarto 1683. A certain Florio feigns to be dying in order to prevent the Podesta suspecting an intrigue between his wife, Rosaura, 'the Lady Mayoress', ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... could even get out on crutches, do you know whither I would go? Straight to church." And when his hearer looked incredulous, he added: "Most decidedly to church. Where else should one go with crutches?" Such exquisite and mordant irony is strange indeed in a defender of the holy ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... dissolved in hot water, but should not be boiled, as that partially destroys the size. When dissolved, a little powdered alum is also stirred in, about as much as will lie on a shilling to a pint of water. The addition of the alum is important, as it acts as a mordant and helps to make a better ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... even a clever cobbler, much less a Prime Minister, into leading strings! No,—it is the spendthrift women of a corrupt society that I mean,—the women who possess beauty, and are conscious of it,—the women who have a mordant wit and use it for dangerous purposes—the women who give up their homes, their husbands, their children and their reputations for the sake of villainous intrigue, and the feverish excitement of speculative money-making;—with these—and ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
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