"Acerbity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you did it then?" said Miss Trotter, with an acerbity which she put on to hide a vague, ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... hoped not yet," said Lucy, hurrying her sister away before Mr Wentworth could come out and join them; for affairs were seriously compromised between the perpetual curate and the object of his affections; and Lucy exhibited a certain acerbity under the circumstances which somewhat amazed ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... but with a noble principle of self-reliance and a disregard of foreign aid. Both had been irregular at college, Goldsmith, as we have shown, from the levity of his nature and his social and convivial habits; Johnson, from his acerbity and gloom. When, in after life, the latter heard himself spoken of as gay and frolicsome at college, because he had joined in some riotous excesses there, "Ah, sir!" replied he, "I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for frolic. I was miserably poor, and I thought to ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... sister, must admit that a marriage with St. Genis was out of the question," retorted the Count in his turn with some acerbity. "I am very fond of Maurice and his name is as old and great as ours, but he hasn't a sou, and you know as well as I do by now that the restoration of confiscated lands is out of the question . . . parliament ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... out. Oh! Oh!" She bit at the needle-end, not quite visible, but almost within reach of teeth, and suddenly went very white. In dismay, Noel put an arm round her, and turned her into a fine chemist's shop. Several ladies were in there, buying perfumes, and they looked with acerbity at this disordered dirty female entering among them. Noel went up to a man behind the counter. "Please give me something quick, for this poor woman, I think she's going to faint. She's run a needle through her hand, and can't ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wrote, "is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union, and it is a contemplation worthy of the most exalted soul whether its total abolition is or is not practicable." "A life devoted to" the emancipation problem "would be nobly spent or sacrificed." He talks with much acerbity of expression about the "slave-drivers," and the "flagrant image of human inconsistency" presented by men who had "the Declaration of Independence on their lips and the merciless scourge of slavery in their hands." "Never," he says, "since human sentiments ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... her design, it might prove difficult if not impossible to capture her. His anxiety to speedily get alongside her and force her to action accordingly grew almost momentarily more intense, as also did his acerbity of temper, until at length he became so nearly unbearable that, had he just then happened to have been washed overboard, I believe not a single man in the ship— apart from the officers, that is, of course—would have raised a hand or joined in ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... drawn face showed worry and self-absorption in the frankest manner. He began at once to explain how badly he had slept; indeed he asserted that he had not slept at all; and he complained with extreme acerbity of the renewal of his catarrh. 'Constant secretion. Constant secretion,' was the phrase he used to describe the chief symptom. Then by a forced transition he turned to the profession of architecture, and restated his celebrated theory that it was the Cinderella of professions. The ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... government was hardly less complex. The very acerbity with which it was discussed proclaims that we are in an age of settlement. Much of the dispute, indeed, is doubtless due to the dislike of all High Churchmen for William; with their consequent unwillingness to admit ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... weary of wandering over the world, and of finding every petty race wedded to its own opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to be in error, and raising disputes whose violence, acerbity and virulence are in inverse ratio to the importance of the disputed matter. A peculiarly active and acute observation taught him that many of these jarring families, especially those of the same blood, are par in the intellectual processes of perception and reflection; ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... iron-grey beard; but his eyes are bright and piercing. He has the reputation of being a rigid disciplinarian, and of shooting freely for insubordination. I understand he is rather unpopular on this account, and also by reason of his occasional acerbity of manner. He was extremely civil to me, and gave me permission to visit the outposts, or any part of his army. He also promised to help me towards joining Morgan in Kentucky, and he expressed his regret that a boil on his hand would ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... fine early autumn days spent at Matching, the great Trumpeton Wood question was at last settled. During the summer considerable acerbity had been added to the matter by certain articles which had appeared in certain sporting papers, in which the new Duke of Omnium was accused of neglecting his duty to the county in which a portion of his property ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... and not a very noble intellectual origin. It does not, however, follow that its author was, as is so often asserted, a mere impostor. He reiterates again and again, I am nothing more than a public preacher. He defends, not always without acerbity, his work from those who, even in his own life, stigmatized it as a confused heap of dreams, or, what is worse, a forgery. He is not the only man who has supposed himself to be the subject of supernatural and divine communications, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... possibly could be in mine. I replied that if such were his opinion he very often obscured it, but that I hoped he would acquit me of any conscious unfairness to himself. His first letters were not without a touch of acerbity, but he ended with amicably stating what his actual views were, and saying that if I only amended certain passages relating to himself, he was in entire agreement with my ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... or improve, is his only through a legal fiction. When the matter of legal fiction was explained to Colonel Bumble and he was told that legally a husband knew the whereabouts of his wife, because the law regarded a man and wife as one, Colonel Bumble replied with acerbity, "The ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... mother-in-law's acerbity was softened by her weakness. We grew quite companionable in the winter days when Dicky's absence at the studio left us together. Altogether I felt that life had been very ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... dollars per annum which his father allowed him from the profits of "Dr. Hoff's Catarrh-Killer," proved sadly insufficient to his needs. He mentioned this fact to his father, so Average Jones' information ran, early in April, and suggested an increase, only to be refused with some acerbity. ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... when we returned to find no sign of the car, I was extremely annoyed. It was rapidly growing dark and it had become cold. Adele was tired and had had no tea. The market was up, with the result that the streets were swarming. I cursed my brother-in-law with pardonable acerbity. ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... election of Mr. Adams, was sent to the United States Senate by Virginia. His enmity to Mr. Clay had received a new whetting through the events of the year or two just past; and the natural acerbity of his nature was soured into bitter malignity. He believed every word of the story of Creemer, and harped upon it with the pertinacity of the Venetian upon the daughter of Shylock. He was scarcely ever upon the floor that some ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... lady had thought Paul very much poorer than he was, and had been in fear that he might in some way become a burden to her. The fancy did not touch Paul at the time, but he remembered afterwards how swiftly the acerbity ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... of the year 1826 the Advocate's criticisms upon certain members of the oligarchical faction were marked by exceptional acerbity. The persons attacked, however, sought in vain throughout the closely-packed columns for any material upon which a criminal prosecution might be founded; for Mr. Mackenzie, whether by prudence or good fortune, contrived for some weeks to ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... moral. As he deified Nature, so he emancipated man as forming with Nature an integral part of the supreme Being. He was led upon this path to combat Aristotle and to satirize Christian beliefs, with a subtlety of scholastic argumentation and an acerbity of rhetoric that now pass for antiquated. Much that is obsolete in his writings must be referred to the polemical necessities of an age enthralled by peripatetic conceptions, and saturated with the ecclesiastical ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... unlawfully conspiring with certain others to intimidate the proprietors of Covent-Garden Theatre, and force them, to their loss and detriment, to lower their prices of admission. The rule was granted, and an early day fixed for the trial. In the mean time, these proceedings kept up the acerbity of the O. P.s, and every night at the fall of the curtain, three groans were given for John Kemble and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Thordsson (ed. Vigfusson, ch. 146). To my notion, the poet has succeeded admirably in reproducing the cool coloring, the ironic-pessimistic attitude, that uncompromisingly masculine sentiment we know so well in their refreshing acerbity from the best sagas. Not the least meritorious thing in the play, by the way, is the very slight insistence on Thorolf's relations to Helga, notwithstanding its temptation to the author of a social drama betraying strong influence of Ibsen; ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... King's Pamphlets, British Museum. The Rump Parliament, in an excess of Puritanic acerbity, had abolished the observance of Christmas, and forbidden the eating of puddings and pies, ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... temperament of genius without the electric spark itself, magnified the help he had given, and felt extreme bitterness at the shortness of memory shown by the great writer, whom he vainly strove to sting into feeling by the acerbity of his attacks. ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... answering acerbity; the mention of his Attorney-General's name had set his blood humming with the thrill of the fight, and he wondered how it was that Fleetwood had not already been in to clasp hands with ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... he had felt that she was far superior to the other Biamite maidens, not only in beauty but in everything else. The very acerbity of her nature had seemed charming. To win this wonderful, pliant creature, slender as a cypress, whose independence merged into fierce obstinacy, had appeared to him worth any sacrifice; and having perceived in her an admirable model for his Arachne, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Parnell, and anywhere from Blarney to Balleck you will get into dire difficulties if you hint ill of Parnell. Gladstone and O'Shea are still unforgiven. In Cork I once spoke to a priest of Kitty O'Shea, and with a little needless acerbity the man of God corrected me and said, "You mean Mrs. Katharine ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... dispute was renewed with great violence and acerbity on both sides when Granville proposed to take his wife to the play. Finally, the lawyer, whose sole aim was to defeat the pernicious influence exerted over his wife by her old confessor, placed the question on such a footing that Madame ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... sore head," became evident only a few weeks later. He was visited by the inevitable interviewer, and chose the Hamburg News as the medium of communicating to the world his opinion of the new regime and the men who were conducting it; and made use of that paper with such instant vigour and acerbity that little more than two months from his retirement elapsed before the new Chancellor thought it advisable to issue instructions to Germany's diplomatic representatives warning them carefully to distinguish between the ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... success of another, condemned to chronic discontent because he was never content with himself. Lucien began to understand the sour look which seemed to add to the bleak expression of envy on Vernou's face; the acerbity of the epigrams with which his conversation was sown, the journalist's pungent phrases, keen and elaborately wrought as a stiletto, were ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... did not openly, or in words, betray the feelings which were striving in her soul; but the general restraint which she put upon herself in my presence, the acerbity of her tone, manner, and language, to poor Julia, and the unvaried querulousness of her remarks, were sufficient to apprize me of the spite which she would have willingly bestowed upon myself, had she any tolerable occasion for doing so. A few weeks served ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... locked the door and then turned toward Ernie, sudden comprehension in his face. "Oh, you told him I came over with you. That explains it." Ernie protested. He would have repeated the entire conversation that had taken place if the Colonel had not stopped him with considerable acerbity. ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... the great Skoda works near Pilsen in Austria. My hotel manager spoke with some acerbity of the amount of advertising the Austrian siege howitzers were receiving. "You can accept my assurance," he said, "that the guns for the bombardment of Dover were made here, and not at the Skoda works, ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... lectures. Philodemus, whether speaking of philosophy or music or poetry, always begins in the negative. He is not happy until he has soundly trounced his predecessors and opponents. The author of the Aetna has learned all too well this scholastic method, and his acerbity usually turns the reader away before he has reached the central theme. There is of course just a little of this tone left in the Georgics—Lucretius also has a touch of it—but the Aeneid has freed ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... some gittin' that five hundred dollars paid up," Marthy returned with some acerbity. "I'm much obleeged to yuh, Mr. Seabeck, fer bein' so easy on us. If yuh hadn't drug Billy Louise into it, I'd say yer too good to ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... of film for every thousand he used. They had to cut out more Kedzie to let in the titles and subtitles, and it angered her to see how much space was given to other members of the cast. She simply loathed the scenes she was not the center of, and she developed an acerbity of protest against any "trespass" on her "rights" that proved ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... that day six months. Mr. Wakley seconded this amendment. The motion was carried by a majority of two hundred and one against fifty-four. But although the principle of the bill was thus emphatically confirmed, yet on several occasions the attacks upon it were renewed by its opponents with much acerbity. Upon the motion for the committal of the bill, Mr. Townley Parker moved, and Mr. Grimsditch seconded the motion, that it should be committed that day six months: but this was negatived by a large majority, and the bill was committed. When ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... learned from Mrs. Pittaway that the obliging Terror had himself fetched the cigarette-case from his bedroom. A flash of intuition connected the Terror with the watered boot; and he begged her, with loud acerbity, never again to let any one—any one!!—enter his bedroom. Mrs. Pittaway objected that slops could not be emptied, or beds made without human intervention. He begged her, not perhaps unreasonably, not to talk like a fool; and she liked him none the ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... acerbity of Mr. Tyrrel's feelings, it is probable, however, he did some justice to his rival. He regarded him, indeed, with added dislike; but he no longer regarded him as a despicable foe. He avoided his encounter; he forbore to treat him with random hostility; he ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... right," growled Otto uncomfortably. Then he added, with considerable acerbity: "I'm goin' to tell her you said she was forty-two, ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... of perspiration on her flushed forehead and hands trembling with exertion so that she could scarcely hold the saw—replied with pardonable acerbity: "I didn't get a man because I couldn't. You know that. Talk about unemployment! I only know you can't get a jobbing gardener for half a day, even if you put your pride in your pocket and crawl all round Thorhaven on your ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... piqued at the effect produced by an article I had written on the subject of the difficulty of getting arms from Georgia with the volunteers from that State. One of the spunky Governor's organs had replied with acerbity, not only defending the Governor, but striking at the Secretary himself, to whom the authorship was ascribed. My article had been read and approved by the Secretary before its insertion; nevertheless he now regretted it ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... your sleeves cut off," said some of the citizens to others, with a bit of acerbity, as they crowded ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the average beggar, with no shirt beneath his coat and bare feet in broken shoes, he found my father at a loss for words. 'You must have had access to many books when you wrote that essay,' was what he said. 'That,' said Thompson, his shyness at once replaced by an acerbity that afterwards became one of the most familiar of his never-to-be-resented mannerisms, 'that is precisely where the essay fails. I had no books by me at the time save Aeschylus and Blake.' There was little to be done for him ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... of hauteur in her voice. She preserved much of the acerbity which had marked her demeanor when they had said good-by to each other. He would not acknowledge to himself that he hoped she would meet him on another plane; he meekly accepted her attitude as the proper one. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... Hall," snapped Corson, with an acerbity that matched the Governor's. "I called the mill and was referred to Morrison at City Hall. He's on his way up here! At any rate, he ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... hear it," said Mr. Bertram, who, however, did not give any proof of his gladness, seeing that he evinced some little addition of acerbity in his temper and asperity in his manner. It was hard to have to deal with a nephew with whom he could find so little ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... merry heart that doeth good like a medicine. For this all the children of the community knew him; and to the last day of his walking out, when they saw him coming down the lane, shouted, 'Here comes grandfather!' No gall, no acerbity, no hypercriticism. If there was a bright side to anything, he always saw it, and his name, in all the places where he dwelt, will long be a synonym for ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... themselves to be working to establish the Soviet government over Europe. They had been angry all this summer because the Glasgow conference of the I.L.P. had broken with the Third International. They spoke with acerbity of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald and Mr. and Mrs. Philip Snowden. But now, in August, they had little acerbity to spare for anything but the ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... social intercourse? Dick, who was fond of his money, would not for a long time look at the matter in this light, but harassed his brother from time to time by applications which were quite useless, and which by the acerbity of their language altogether shut Mrs. Roby out from the good things which might have accrued to her from so distinguished a brother-in-law. But when it came to pass that Thomas Roby was confirmed in office ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... The very acerbity of my coming misery, through Miss Dodan's absence, fully realized by me, seemed now only to add a desperation of assumed indifference and gayety to all my actions. I argued against delay, and dwelt with excellent effect upon the charms of the visit. I assumed that Miss Dodan needed ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... Madame Lecoeur's acerbity of temper was brought to a pitch by what she called La Sarriette's ingratitude, and she spoke of the girl in the most violent and abusive language. They broke off all intercourse, the aunt fairly exasperated, and the niece and Monsieur Jules concocting stories ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... whole paragraph, beginning "Illustrious Holland," are affixed the words "Bad enough;—and on mistaken grounds besides." The bitter verses against Lord Carlisle he pronounces "Wrong also:—the provocation was not sufficient to justify such acerbity;"—and of a subsequent note respecting the same nobleman, he says, "Much too savage, whatever the foundation may be." Of Rosa Matilda (v. 738.) he tells us, "She has since married the Morning Post,—an exceeding good match." To the verses, "When some brisk youth, the tenant ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... M. Perier was energetic and impassioned: the natural warmth of his temper, added to the irritability produced by illness, frequently imparted a brusque acerbity to his style, which injured both the oratorical and moral effect of his eloquence; but his reasoning was forcible, and his manner commanding and effective. "It is not our province," says the editor of the Journal, whence these particulars have been chiefly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... Lebedeff, with some acerbity. "I confess I thought of doing you the service of handing the letter over to yourself, but I decided that it would pay me better to deliver it up to the noble lady aforesaid, as I had informed her of everything hitherto by anonymous letters; so when I sent her up a note from myself, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... for the defence returned to his place. Once there, he adjusted his gown, consulted a blank sheet of paper with some acerbity, and then addressed himself to ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... at last of my father; of how he would take this matter, of his increasing acerbity, and of my own unhappy life, where I found nothing to replace my mother's love. My last disaster and poor Jack's wound seemed like enough to widen the gap between me and my parent, and my Aunt ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... poor, and adds a quaint humor to his criticism by placing it in the mouths of the laird's Newfoundland and the cotter's collie. The dogs themselves are delightfully and vividly characterized, and their comments have a detachment that frees the satire from acerbity without rendering it tame. The account of the life of the idle rich may be that of a somewhat remote observer; it has still value as a record of how the peasant views the proprietor. But that of the hard-working farmer lacks no touch ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... I had encountered on the evening of my first day in Concord, when I rang the door bell of the Alcott residence and asked if the seer was within. I fancied that there was a trace of acerbity in the manner of the tall lady who answered my ring, and told me abruptly that Mr. Alcott was not at home, and that I would probably find him at Mr. Sanborn's farther up the street. Perspiring ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... Lockhart was a born critic: he had both the faculty and the will to work up the papers of his contributors to the proper level; he was firm and decided in his literary and political views, without going to the extreme Giffordian acerbity in both; and his intelligence and erudition were very wide. "He could write," says a phrase in some article I have somewhere seen quoted, "on any subject from poetry to dry-rot;" and there is no doubt that an editor, if he cannot exactly write on any subject from poetry to dry-rot, should ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... figure, with a ruddy black-eyed face which bore in it the possibility of looking extremely acute, and occasionally contemptuous, on market-days, but had now a predominant after-supper expression of hearty good-nature. It is well known that great scholars who have shown the most pitiless acerbity in their criticism of other men's scholarship have yet been of a relenting and indulgent temper in private life; and I have heard of a learned man meekly rocking the twins in the cradle with his left hand, while with his right he inflicted the most lacerating sarcasms on ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... do much more than get your bracelet back, ma'am," Mrs. Lawrence replied with acerbity. "Such a fuss and calling every one thieves, too! I'd be ashamed to be ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... hospital, to learn how matters were going on there; and as he walked across the hallowed close, and looked up at the ravens who cawed with a peculiar reverence as he wended his way, he thought with increased acerbity of those whose impiety would venture to disturb the goodly ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... sweetness, cleanliness, prettiness, and order. The other is dirty, frowsy, disorderly, and of evil odour. The Papists deny the right of the Protestants to be in the island at all, speak of them with acerbity, call them the Colonists, the perverts, the Soupers, the Jumpers, the heretics; and look forward to the time when a Dublin Parliament will banish law and order, so that these interlopers may be for ever swept ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... was gone. She resented what she chose to consider an attempt at patronage of the West, and Harley again was made the target for the arrows of her sarcasm. Yet he did not resent it with his original acerbity; custom was dulling the sharp edge of her weapons, and, instead of wounding him, they rather provoked and drew him on. He was able to reply lightly, to suggest vaguely the crudities of Idaho, and to incite her to yet more strenuous battle for her ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... on the part of the government, 'a great exaggeration.' The secretary had addressed himself particularly to this observation in his speech on the 27th, the night of the division, and had noticed it in a tone of acerbity. He had even intimated that it might have been used by one who was a disappointed solicitor for high office, and whom the government had declined to assist in an unwarrantable arrangement of the duties and salary of the judicial post he ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... Democrats to power in Congress came one of those great moral struggles which convulses a nation with an agitation only surpassed by a physical contest between hostile armies. The approach of the Presidential contest added to the acerbity of the debates, although some of the participants evidently adopted as their motto the Quaker apothegm, "Treat your enemy as if you thought he might some day become your friend, and your friend as though he ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... no doubt, would have spoken with less acerbity but for the fact that his nerves were jangling badly. The lift was started promptly, but it required all his self-control to remain seated in his chair during the slow progress upward of the great machine of which ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... controversy is carried on with more decency than it was by Martin Lutherand a certain Lord Chancellor, to whom you just now alluded; but if more courtesy is to be found in polemical writers, who are less sincere than either the one or the other, there is as much acerbity of feeling and as much bitterness of heart. You have a class of miscreants which had no existence in those days—the panders of the press, who live by administering to the vilest passions of the people, and encouraging their most dangerous ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... caligraphy, like a soft whisper, to be Raspberry, Gooseberry, Apricot, Plum, Damson, Apple, and Peach. The scene closing on these charmers, and the lower slide ascending, oranges were revealed, attended by a mighty japanned sugar-box, to temper their acerbity if unripe. Home-made biscuits waited at the Court of these Powers, accompanied by a goodly fragment of plum- cake, and various slender ladies' fingers, to be dipped into sweet wine and kissed. Lowest of all, a compact leaden-vault enshrined the sweet wine and a stock of ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens |
