"Lapidary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Form, shape, and the minutest shades of color were studied, and the result, after many attempts and many failures, and the anxious labor of many months, was the most exquisite triumph that the genius of the lapidary ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... them. You can buy gems in the rough or in blanks, then cut and polish them to make your own jewelry or decorations. This takes practice, plus a cutting and polishing outfit, wood vise, maybe a diamond wheel. (Or you can join a lapidary club that might ...
— Let's collect rocks & shells • Shell Oil Company
... comrades: whereupon the two men drew nigh the place where Calandrino sate alone, and feigning not to see him fell a talking of the virtues of divers stones, of which Maso spoke as aptly and pertinently as if he had been a great and learned lapidary. Calandrino heard what passed between them, and witting that 'twas no secret, after a while got up, and joined them, to Maso's no small delight. He therefore continued his discourse, and being asked by Calandrino, where these stones of such rare virtues were ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... between these, uphill walks begin their climb of the mountains, from the foot of votive shrines set round with tablets commemorating in German, French, Russian, Hebrew, Magyar and Czech, the cure of high-well-borns of all those races and languages. Booths glittering with the lapidary's work in the cheaper gems, or full of the ingenious figures of the toy- makers, alternate with the shrines and the cafes on the way to the Posthof, and with their shoulders against the overhanging cliff, spread for the passing crowd a lure of Viennese ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... when once the wedges became the standard method, the greater frequency with which clay as against stone came to be used, led to an imitation of the wedges by those who cut out the characters on stone. In consequence, there developed two varieties of wedge-writing: the one that may be termed lapidary, used for the stone inscriptions, the official historical records, and such legal documents as were prepared with especial care; the other cursive, occurring only on legal and commercial clay tablets, and becoming ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... second theme, the melody made a more direct appeal: there was a passionate unrest in it, which disquieted all who heard it. The dancers, with flushed cheeks and fixed eyes, responded instinctively to its challenge: the lapidary swing with which they followed the rhythm became less circumspect; and a desire to dance till they could dance no more, took possession of those who were fanatic. No one yielded to the impulse more readily than Louise; she was quite carried away. Maurice felt the change in her; ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... instance of the truth of that rule, poeta non fit, sed nascitur; one is not made, but born a poet. Indeed his learning was but very little; so that as Cornish diamonds are not polished by any lapidary, but are pointed and smooth, even as they are taken out of the earth, so Nature itself was all the art which was ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... scraps of Greek lapidary's work seem beautiful to us, in their sober and cheerful acceptance of life and death. We hope, in Oxford, that the study of ancient art, as well as of ancient literature, may soon be made possible. These tangible ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... which her "young people" had, in their unhallowed thirst for knowledge, discovered and drawn from my trunk, which, by some strange mischance, had been left unlocked! In vain I mumbled something touching my love of mineralogy, and that a lapidary had offered I knew not what for my collection. I was compelled to "bundle," as the idiomatic, but ignorant woman expressed herself. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 7, 1841 • Various
... expression to the ideas and abilities of the author, than to do justice to its subject. But it is in Warren's Lily and the Bee, that the school appears in full bloom. This is said to consist mostly of exclamation points, and is written in a sort of lapidary style, that deals in riddles, pathos without object, sentimentality with irony, world-pain, and allusions to all the kingdoms of heaven and earth, without any explanation as to what relation these allusions bear to each other, and with a Titanic pessimism as ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... St Albans, where, I suppose you know, I saw cousin William.[14] You know the conglomerates. They are generally hard little stones in a casing of sandstone, lime, or other soft matter. I have known for thirty years, in a lapidary's window in Perth, a large piece of conglomerate, where all is hard and flinty, taking a beautiful polish. After much inquiry I found that this was got in Hertfordshire, where St Albans is. I could get ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... not singular in his belief; it was entertained by many of his zealous and learned admirers. The erudite lapidary, Jayme Ferrer, in the letter written to Columbus in 1495, at the command of the sovereigns, observes: "I see in this a great mystery: the divine and infallible Providence sent the great St. Thomas from the west into the east, to manifest in India our holy and Catholic ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... perhaps, never been neglected; but it was not till the writings of Bembo furnished a new code of criticism in the Italian language that they began to study it with the same minuteness as modern Latin.'' "They were encouragers of a numismatic and lapidary erudition, elegant in itself, and throwing for ever little specks of light on the still ocean of the past, but not very favourable to comprehensive observation, and tending to bestow on an unprofitable pedantry the honours of real learning.'' s The Italian nobility, excluded ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... a log cabin. Our churches and our school houses, the bulwarks of our nation's strength and greatness, began to shoot out their branches of education from the 'little old log cabin.' The magnitude of this great country is like the rough gem in the hands of the lapidary. He takes no credit for its possession, but he does take credit for what skill he may exercise in making it beautiful and more valuable. So with the American people, it is left to them to so exercise their skill, mentally ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... she hung over the cases that contained specimens of new designs in metal and stone. Miss Comstock, perceiving her interest in these toys, encouraged Adelle to try her own hand at the manufacture of jewelry, and engaged a needy woman worker to give her the necessary lessons in the lapidary art. Adelle had acquired considerable sloth from her desultory way of living; nevertheless, when the chance was forced into her hands, she took to the new work with ardor and produced some bungling imitations of the new art, which were much admired at the ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo told the reason the earth revolved. The professional teacher who can do nothing but teach—the college professor who is a college professor and nothing else—hates the Natural Method man about as ardently as the person who wears a paste diamond hates the lapidary. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... fact stands recorded, quite incidentally, in a certain Discourse on Epitaphs, huddled into the present Bag, among so much else; of which Essay the learning and curious penetration are more to be approved of than the spirit. His grand principle is, that lapidary inscriptions, of what sort soever, should be Historical rather than Lyrical. "By request of that worthy Nobleman's survivors," says he, "I undertook to compose his Epitaph; and not unmindful of my own rules, produced the following; which however, for an alleged defect of Latinity, a ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... gems with which to crown a successful life; but he was too much of a man to marry a belle as such and be content. He must love her as a woman also, and he had loved what he imagined Stella Wildmere to be. Now he felt, however, like a lapidary who, while gloating over a precious stone, is suddenly shown that it is worthless paste. He may have valued it highly an hour before; now he throws it away in angry disgust. But this simile only in part explains ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... they were waistcoated with bacon,—and I had the charity to hope they had not stolen them! Anyhow, I never called there again. And, while I am in Seven Dials, let me record another useful small experience. There was a lapidary handy, who had at times cut my beach-found choanites for me. One day I found him making scarabaei out of bits of agate and lapis lazuli. "Who gave you an order for these," said I. "Well, sir, I don't rightly know his name; but he was a furriner." "Was the name ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... chat along the road, and pause to repeat these simple and musical poems, each so elegant, so finished, as the monk finished his ivory crucifix, or the lapidary his choicest gem, we have reached the Wayside Inn. It is the title of Longfellow's new volume, "Tales of a Wayside Inn." They are New-England "Canterbury Tales." Those of old London town were told at the Tabard at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... shepherds Egon and Buculus lament the maladies of their flock; and all the saints: Hilaire of Poitiers, defender of the Nicean faith, the Athanasius of the Occident, as he has been called; Ambrosius, author of the indigestible homelies, the wearisome Christian Cicero; Damasus, maker of lapidary epigrams; Jerome, translator of the Vulgate, and his adversary Vigilantius, who attacks the cult of saints and the abuse of miracles and fastings, and already preaches, with arguments which future ages were to repeat, against the monastic vows ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... communicate with each other, or endeavour to do so. I read it conscientiously from beginning to end, admiring, in my physical capacity, the throbbing passion that prompts such public outbursts of confidence and, from a literary point of view, their lapidary style, model of condensation, impossible to render in English and conditioned by the hard fact that every word costs two sous. Under this painful material stress, indeed, the messages are sometimes crushed into a conciseness which the females concerned must have ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... and carried his prize to a lapidary's bench. He perched himself on a stool and reached for his magnifying glass. A queer little hiss broke through his lips. Cut-glass beads, patently Occidental, and here in ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... deeds in that respect were extensive," and his bounty "was conveyed to many of the objects of it in the most delicate manner." From the same authority we find that Hardham once failed in business (we presume, as a lapidary) more creditably than he could have made a fortune by it. This spirit of integrity, which remained a remarkable feature in his character throughout life, induced him to be often resorted to by his wealthy patrons as trustee for the payment of their bounties to deserving objects; ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... these cities, but the portion of the inhabitants who escaped built or occupied suburbs at Nola in Campania and at Naples. In the latter city, the Regio Herculanensium, or Quarter of the Herculaneans, an inscription marked on several lapidary monuments, indicates the part devoted to the population driven ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... never-ending material, quoted and original. The slightest allusion to anything gave him the key to all its peculiarities if he had occasion to allude to the diamond, its bed in the Golconda, its discovery by some poor native, its being associated with commerce, its polish by the lapidary, its adorning the neck of beauty, its rays brilliant and serene, its birth, its life, its history, all flashed upon him. So with every idea in the vast storehouse of his mind. He seemed to know all things, in mass and in ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... And the grand Lapidary had begun his work by incrusting, in this diadem of offices, the hymn of Saint Ambrose, and the invocation taken from the Old Testament, the "Rorate Coeli," that melodious chant of expectation and regret, that obscure gem violet-coloured; the ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... called Odin's Song of Runes. Runes were the Scandinavian alphabet, used for lapidary inscriptions, a thousand of which have been discovered in Sweden, and three or four hundred in Denmark and Norway, mostly on tombstones. This alphabet consists of sixteen letters, with the powers of F, U, TH, O, R, K, H, N, I, A, S, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... colossal statue by Chantrey which bears the following inscription, pronounced to be beyond comparison "the finest lapidary inscription in the English language." It is from the ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... gimmal, terret, manilla, lute; annulation, annulet. Associated Words: annular, annularity, annulate, signet, dactyliology, dactylioglyphy, dactylioglyph, cameo, intaglio, lapidary, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... a thousand times, dear Madam, for your obliging letter and the new Bristol stones you have sent me, which would pass on a more skilful lapidary than I am for having been brillianted by a professed artist, if you had not told me that they came shining -out of a native mine, and had no foreign diamond-dust to polish them. Indeed, can one doubt any longer that Bristol Is as rich and warm a soil as India? I am convinced it ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... tools, boots and shoes, boxes, brushes, buttons, carriages and wagons, coffin trimmings, cooking and heating apparatus, cotton goods, cotton, woollen, and other textiles, electroplating, food preparations, jewelry burnishing, lapidary work, leather, machinery, metallic goods, printing, bleaching, and dyeing. The capital invested in these industries is chiefly devoted to jewelry business, and is placed by the report at a total of $2,924,890; the products are valued at $4,345,809; ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... such Virtues as seem no way competible to Inanimate Agents, if to any Corporeal ones at all, yet as to what is affirm'd concerning the Turquois's changing Colour, I know not well how to reject the Affirmation of so Learned (and which in this case is much more considerable) so Judicious a Lapidary as Boetius de Boot[31], who upon his own particular and repeated Experience delivers so memorable a Narrative of the Turquois's changing Colour, that I cannot but think it worth your Perusal, especially ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... 'A diamond from the lapidary!—Your sentences have many facets. Well, you are conversing with a demagogue, an avowed one: a demagogue and a Jew. You take it as a matter of course: you should exhibit some sparkling incredulity. The Christian is like the politician in supposing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... presented in the nineteenth century by Tennyson in the blank verse lyrics in The Princess, by Browning in the more brilliant parts of One Word More, by Swinburne in his fulminating Sapphics, may be as little repeated as the analogous hardness of Dryden in MacFlecknoe or the lapidary splendour of Gray in his Odes. I should rather look, at least in the immediate future, for a revival of the liquid ease of Chaucer or the soft redundancies of The Faerie Queene. The remarkable experiments of the Symbolists of twenty years ago, and their effect upon ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... pedestal, a third tablet bears the inscription which was written at the instance of Very Rev. Dr. Charles B. Rex, president of the Brighton Theological Seminary. Mgr. Schroeder, the author, interprets the meaning of the whole, in terse rhythmical Latin sentences, after the Roman lapidary style: ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... by half-a-mile of sea, In spotless sand left shapely prints; With agates, then, she loaded me; (The lapidary call'd them flints); Then, at her wish, I hail'd a boat, To take her to the ships-of-war, At anchor, each a lazy mote Black in the ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... Use the word "lapidary" in a sentence. MODEL: "When Queen Victoria wanted the Koh-i-noor to be recut, she sent it to a famous lapidary ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... efficient in her knowledge of what poetry is, as she was certainly proficient as workman. She was lapidary more than painter or sculptor. It was a beautiful cutting away, and a sweeping aside of the rifts and flaws. That is to say, she wanted that. She wanted the white light of the perfect gem, and she could not have been content with just matrix, with here and there embedded ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... I wish that you could see his jewels," cried Guido, growing fervent; and he lovingly catalogued a host of lapidary marvels. ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... success. We have spoken of "the born preacher"; even he must cultivate his gifts in order to realise his highest possibilities. We speak sometimes of "diamonds in the rough"; the value of these precious stones increases as the art of the lapidary is carefully exercised upon them. If it be only to prevent the formation of false methods and bad habits of thought and utterance, a preacher should give attention to the study of Homiletics. He may, ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... obtain a more compact stick or thread, as the fusion of the silica would hold the carbon particles together. He finally abandoned this and all the rest in favor of the hard deposit of carbon which lines the inside of gas-retorts, some specimens of which we found to be so hard that we required a lapidary's wheel to cut ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... of Morrison's ode. To be sure, Reynolds quotes Johnson as pronouncing it "superior to any Poem of the kind that has been publish'd these many years," and Johnson may well have considered praise of this sort as he did lapidary inscriptions. It may be worth noting, however, that none of his recorded comments on Pindaric verse antedate the publication of this ode. Conceivably he himself was unaware of his hostility until, more than ten years later, he ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison
... richesse. And he went aftirward in a certain day in the cite, [and] he found a precious stone, colourid with thre maner of colours, as in oo partie[FN542] white, in an othir partie red, and in the thrid partie blak. Anon he went to a lapidary, that was expert in the vertue of stonys; and he seid, that the vertue of thilke[FN544] stone was this, who so ever berith the stone upon him, his hevynesse[FN545] shall turne in to joy; and if he be povere,[FN546] he shal be made ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... a contingency with a perfect imitation of the coveted jewel. After some show of resistance, he reluctantly acceded to the wishes of his powerful host. The delight of Runjeet was extreme, but of short duration,—the lapidary to whom he gave orders to mount his new acquisition pronouncing it to be merely a bit of crystal. The mortification and rage of the despot were unbounded. He immediately caused the palace of the King of Cabul to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... ones, but they soon get out of shape and are troublesome to care for on this account. All things considered, there is nothing better for polishing than a slip or file made of agate, say one inch long, one-quarter inch wide and one-eighth inch thick. A slip of this kind can be obtained from any lapidary, and after grinding with emery and water until the surface has a very fine grain, it should be mounted by fastening with cement into a brass socket and this is then inserted into a small wooden handle, as shown in Fig. 17. The agate slip should be ground to about ...
— A Treatise on Staff Making and Pivoting • Eugene E. Hall
... observed, 'to our happiness. The relatives of her late husband, by law her guardians, were prejudiced, mercenary wretches, anxious to marry her to an old hunks of a Spaniard, so that the property of her late husband, chiefly consisting of precious stones—he had been a lapidary—might not pass into the hands of foreigners.' I can scarcely believe it now," added Mr. Smith, with great heat; "but if I didn't swallow all this stuff like sack and sugar, I'm a Dutchman! The thought of it, old as I am, sets my ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... from among the publicans! In what waste places our Lord Jesus finds His jewels! What exquisite possibilities Ruskin saw in a pinch of common dust! What radiant glory the lapidary can see in the rough, unpolished gem! The Lord loves to go into the unlikely place, and lead forth His saints. "In the wilderness shall ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... water. These coalesce to stars of snow, which fall upon the mountains in forms so exquisite that, when first seen, they never fail to excite rapture. As to beauty, indeed, they put the work of the lapidary to shame, while as to accuracy they render concrete the abstractions of the geometer. Are these crystals 'matter'? Without presuming to dogmatise, I answer ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... rock crystal, and various kinds of imitations, and paste jewellery are here worked up; also jasper, agate, malachite, cornelian, lapis-lazuli, jet, &c. The work is done by the piece, and the whole family of the lapidary is generally employed. ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... upper earth with him has done; He's buried; save the undertaker's bill, Or lapidary's scrawl, the world has gone For him, unless he left a German will. But where's the proctor who will ask his son? In whom his qualities are reigning still, Except that household virtue, most uncommon, Of constancy to a bad, ...
— English Satires • Various
... and polished as a mirror, reflecting the figure of the owner as he crossed it. Oval ormolu tables, buhl chairs, and oaken and marquetrie cabinets, loaded with cameos, intaglios, Abraxoids, whose "erudition" would have filled Mnesarchus with envy, and challenged the admiration of the Samian lapidary who engraved the ring of Polycrates; these and numberless articles of vertu testified to the universality of what St. Elmo called his "world-scrapings," and to the reckless extravagance and archaistic taste of the collector. On a verd-antique table lay a ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... 1752, makes it probable that, in May, 1753, he was staying in the house at Hammersmith, then occupied by his sole surviving sister, Sarah. In the following year (October 8th) he himself died at Lisbon. There is no better short appreciation of his work than Lowell's lapidary lines for the Shire Hall at Taunton,—the epigraph to the bust by ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... Barle River running over red rocks aslant its course is pushed aside, and races round curving slopes. The first shoot of the rapid is smooth and polished like a gem by the lapidary's art, rounded and smooth as a fragment of torso, and this convex undulation maintains a solid outline. Then the following scoop under is furrowed as if ploughed across, and the ridge of each furrow, where the particles move a little less swiftly than in the hollow of the groove, falls ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... closely. Yes, there was no mistake, the emerald had been fashioned into the form of a perfect crocodile, with open jaws, even the teeth being finely chiselled, a veritable marvel of the lapidary's art. While we were both looking at it puzzled, Liola's eyes suddenly became attracted by sight of something in the package I had just opened, and stooping swiftly, picked out of a mass of ornaments a magnificent diadem of some strange milk-coloured, opaque crystals of a character entirely strange ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... inches, his head on a low pillow, his right hand grasping the handle of his drawn sword. The more I looked at it, both during and after the service, the more convinced I became that this was no mere conventional figure made by some lapidary long after the subject's death, but was the work of an inspired artist, an exact portrait of the man, even to his stature, and that he had succeeded in giving to the countenance the very expression of the living Sir Ranulph. And what it expressed was power and authority and, ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... authority on the earlier printers, then in charge of the prints in the Astor Library, and who, for diversion, ground lenses on the sly, was another prize document. And so was Lockwood, the lapidary, famous as a designer of medals and seals; and many more such oddities. "Fine old copies," Kelsey would say of them, "hand-printed, all of them; one or two, like ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... obtain some notion of their forms. You will see there, also, specimens of beryl, topaz, emerald, tourmaline, heavy spar, fluor-spar, Iceland spar—possibly a full-formed diamond, as it quitted the hand of Nature, not yet having got into the hands of the lapidary. ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... to a class of sins; and he affirms that when we have chemically got possession of the active principle of gems we shall have not only antidotes but preventatives. While waiting for this chimerical dream to be realized and for our medicine to become the mock of lapidary chemists, he uses precious stones to formulate diagnoses of illnesses ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... power and the limitation of Emerson's religious teaching. At the root of it lay a real philosophy. He could not philosophise. He was always passing from the principle to its application. He could not systematise. He speaks of his 'formidable tendency to the lapidary style.' Granting that one finds his philosophy in fragments, just as one finds his interpretation of religion in flashes of marvellous insight, both are worth searching for, and either, in Coleridge's phrase, finds us, whether we search for ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... writing. "I dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature; but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of a house." His journal is "full of disjointed dreams and audacities." Writing by the aid of this, it is natural enough that he should speak of his "lapidary style" and say "I build my ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... something infinitesimal; which is doubtless true enough, as tens of thousands of tons of the same material lie close to the surface under the green turf and golden blossoming furze at the spot where I picked up my specimen. The lapidary would not look at it; nevertheless, it is the only article of jewellery I possess, and I value it accordingly. And I intend to keep this native ruby by me for as long as the lords of Abbotsbury continue in their present mind. The time may come when I shall be ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... religious communities, the offerings made to the gods, and the ceremonies performed in their honor; in short, conclusions as to the secular and profane history of these religions, and in a certain measure their ritual. But the conciseness of the lapidary style and the constant repetition of stereotyped formulas naturally render that kind of text hardly explicit and sometimes enigmatical. There are dedications like the Nama Sebesio engraved upon the great Mithra bas-relief preserved in the Louvre, that caused a number of {17} dissertations to ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... fatigue; it is upon oath, so that rascals and Dr. Johnsons cannot pick holes in it. "Died through the visitation of intense stupidity, by impinging on a moonlight night against the off hind wheel of the Glasgow mail! Deodand upon the said wheel—two-pence." What a simple lapidary inscription! Nobody much in the wrong but an off-wheel; and with few acquaintances; and if it were but rendered into choice Latin, though there would be a little bother in finding a Ciceronian word for "off-wheel," Marcellus himself, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Saint, "will not blame you for following me. I assure you he will not." "But then," said Larry—"Follow me!" cried the Saint, in a hollow voice, and casting upon him his stony eye, drew poor Larry after him, as the bridal guest was drawn by the lapidary glance of the Ancient Mariner; or, as Larry himself afterwards expressed it, "as a jaw tooth is wrinched out of an ould woman with a pair of pinchers." The Saint strode before him in silence, not in the least incommoded ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various
... Too many that were placed there as luminaries have become conspicuous by their obscurity in the midst of that illustrious company. On the whole, the Abbey produces a distinct sense of being overcrowded. It appears too much like a lapidary's store-room. Look up at the lofty roof, which we willingly pardon for shutting out the heaven above us,—at least in an average London day; look down at the floor and think of what precious relics it covers; but do not look around ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... a precious stone kept long in the lapidary's hands before its brilliancy met the public gaze. I had my home under his father's roof, and sat daily at table with him, during my Junior year. We were colleagues afterwards, together with our classmate Jarvis Gregg, in the Western Reserve College; ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... brilliant which has successively graced the necks of a hundred beauties, or glittered for a century upon patrician brows, is weighed by the diamond merchant in the same scale with another which has just escaped from the wheel of the lapidary, and will be purchased or sold by him at the same price per carat. The great mass of commodities is intermediate in its character between these two extremes, and the periods of respective duration are very various. It ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... confused—that is, for the jeweler who sold them to me—one could never be more gallant than you; and since these diamonds cause you so much tender emotion, inspire such gracious compliments, such ingenious flattery, I can do no less than confide to you the charming name of the bewitching lapidary—his name is Ezechiel Rabotautencraff, and he ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... finer than you have discerned. The lapidary was subtle; his work sustains closer analysis. Have you a ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... greatly varied habits, Carabi,[1] Cetoniae, Buprestes, Chrysomelae,[2] rival and even surpass the magnificent Dung-beetles in the matter of jewellery. At times we encounter splendours which the imagination of a lapidary would not venture to depict. The Azure Hoplia,[3] the inmate of the osier-beds and elders by the banks of the mountain streams, is a wonderful blue, tenderer and softer to the eye than the azure of the heavens. You could not find an ornament to match it save ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... may be supposed, therefore, he was often disconnected and irregular, but he knew nothing about it, and nobody else cared; people liked him as he was. His sentences were not like beautiful stones turned and polished by the hand of a lapidary, but they were rough lumps, in all shapes, broken from the great rock of Gospel truth, having their sharp points and jagged edges on them; the consequence being that when slung from the hand of this humble champion they left a mark wherever ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell |
