"Mordant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... from the rather constrained ice-breaking in the banker's library a renewed resolve to cut his obligation to Jasper Grierson as short as possible. How he should begin again the mordant struggle for existence was still an unsolved problem. Of the one-thousand-dollar spending fund there remained something less than half: for a few weeks or months he could live and pay his way; but after that.... Curiously enough, the alternative ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... 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 ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... his guise of moderation, this academician exuded gall. The discourse which he delivered to Parliament in 1848 was diffuse and abject, but his articles, first printed in the Correspondant and since collected into books, were mordant and discerning under the exaggerated politeness of their form. Conceived as harangues, they contained a certain strong muscular energy and were astonishing in ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... coloring matters, these "mordant dyes," as they may be conveniently termed, are much more numerous than the "direct dyes;" but be it observed, we have fast and fugitive colors ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... 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 snatches in order. ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... 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)
... 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 ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... 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 ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... 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 it ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... wretched, throttled 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 down ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... 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!" ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... said with 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
... 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 too 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. O green and glorious!—O ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... 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 ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... &c. (render 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. Phr. the steam is up; vires acquirit eundo[Lat]; "the race by ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 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 ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... he had chosen an odd moment to quarrel with his captain, whose mordant humor in the matter of the mistletoe was only accentuated by his reference to Iris's reported engagement. The pungent smell of the mangrove swamp was wafted now to his nostrils. It brought a species of warning that the disagreeable conditions ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... 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 ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... he said slowly, 'I ought to have known—you would not remember, of course. But I do. I brought out those Pants. Your mordant pen tore them to tatters. You convinced me that I had mistaken my career, and, thanks to your monitions, I ceased to practise as a Poet, and became the Photographer you ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... 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 ...
— 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.
... 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, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... 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, were the frolicsome improvisations of perhaps the greatest lyric poet of his age. She recalled ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... his 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 years, she ...
— Dickory Cronke - The Dumb Philosopher, or, Great Britain's Wonder • Daniel Defoe
... acknowledgment that Stevenson was a good fellow. We all know the air of false candour which lends a disputant so much advantage in debate. In Victor Hugo's tremendous indictment of Napoleon le Petit we remember the telling allowance for fine horsemanship. It spreads an air of impartiality over the most mordant of Hugo's pages. It is meant to do that. An insignificant praise is meant to show how a whole Niagara of blame is poured on the victim of invective in all sincerity, and even with ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... principles, some critics allege, if they do not curtly call him immoral. Yet his work, 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 German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... numerous in the writings of Sebastian Bach. Numberless confusions have been produced in the interpretation of the mordant,[5] or biting note. It should be executed above or below the principal note depending on whether the notes which precede the mordant are ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... under two minutes I was not merely freed from the nausea caused by your cigar. I was smoking 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 ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... that I had been admitted to the privilege of communion with him, for he was my senior by five or six years, and a man of brilliant parts who had already won his spurs in journalism, and who enjoyed deservedly the reputation of an Admirable Crichton. What drew me to him was his mordant wit (to-day, alas! wasted on anonymous journalism! If he would only reconsider his indetermination, the reading public would be the richer!) Together we planned plays, novels, treatises on political economy, and contributions ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... 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 ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... 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
... of one man who has an error of youth of this kind on his mind—a fancy-dress costume affair, Crusader or Templar—of which he is more ashamed than many men would be of the meanest sins. For sometimes the camera has its mordant moods, and amazes you by its saturnine estimate of your merits. This man was perhaps a little out of harmony with the garments of chivalry, and a trifle complacent and vain at the time. But the photograph of him is so cynical and contemptuous, so merciless in its exposure of his element of foolishness, ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... 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 Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... by moonlight alone, and deluge Europe and Asia with blood shed for my intoxicating beauty. I am primeval, savage, unlicensed, unchartered, unfathomable, unpetticoated, tumultuous, inexpressible, irrepressible, overpowering, crude, mordant, pugnacious, polyandrous, sensual, fiery, chaste, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... 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, sardonic and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... form of Dogberry as the type of German officialdom. Swift he quoted with admirable effect, but it was Swift the reviler, not Swift the jester. He says that he made a "wooden Oxford audience laugh aloud with two pages of Heine's wit"; but the lecture, as we read it, shows more of mordant sarcasm than of the material for laughter. Scott he knew by heart, and Carlyle he honestly revered; but he admired the one for his romance and the other for his philosophy. Thackeray, sad to remember, he "did not think a great writer," and so Thackeray's humour disappears, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... friend!' Mr. Thomasson remonstrated. 'But your wit was always mordant—mordant! Too keen for ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... lid 'im to the nirrest polissstation; or weel you go and tell the poliss yourself?" asked the Portuguese, in the same tone of mordant irony. ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... enjoyed in single great passages, of which there are more in the "Inferno" than in the other sections of the poem. His peculiar quality is a certain blending of mordant realism with a high and penetrating beauty. There is no need in reading him to vex oneself with symbolic interpretations. He is at his best, when from behind his scholastic philosophy, bursts forth, in direct ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... testing is done by fallacious methods and often by biased hands. So fallacious, indeed, are some of these tests, that grossly adulterated extracts are often declared superior to the purer ones, the cause of this being the application of an insufficient proportion of mordant in the dyeing or printing trials, and the consequent waste of the excess of coloring matter in the case of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... he was, as an old clubman had recently said of him, "so very young." He lacked the restraint usual in cultured Englishmen, and had the frankly passionate manner which one associates with the South. His uncle, Colonel Deacon, a mordant wit, ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... 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 miroirs ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... 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 dye, says the director ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... 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
... on 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 ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... flower between My fingers, till its head lay back, its fangs Poised at her: like a weapon my hand stood 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 ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... 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 ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... no, he 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
... 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 ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... 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 ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... carefully 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 hay and ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... 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 ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... whether numbers shall multiply confidence or discouragement. Nor does 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 ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... "relatively speaking," "for instance," and "et cetera"; of which phrases he would add sackfuls to his speech. He could also "embellish" his words by the simple expedient of half-closing, half-winking one eye; which trick communicated to some of his satirical utterances quite a mordant effect. Nor were his colleagues a wit inferior to him in enlightenment. For instance, one of them made a regular practice of reading Karamzin, another of conning the Moscow Gazette, and a third of never looking ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... actress in the part of one of Moliere's volatile heroines had brought pleasure-loving Paris to witness this revival of "Le Misanthrope," with new scenery, dresses, and the aforesaid charming actress to add piquancy to the master's mordant wit. ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... 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 ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... stinging, sharp, cutting, sarcastic, caustic, scathing, bitter, satirical, pungent, piquant; nipping, blasting; erosive, corrosive, acrid, mordant. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... of that incomparable humourist. He is, indeed, more than caricaturist in the sense in which we shall use this term of his artistic successors. His pictured moralities teem with portraits drawn from the very life. He is a satirist, as mordant and merciless as Juvenal, or, in his own day, the terrible Dean of St. Patrick's; from his house in Leicester Fields he looks out upon the London of his day, and probes with his remorseless brush or graver to the hidden roots of its follies, ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... towards the partners of his toil, the companions of his struggles. He is not blind to their manifold weaknesses, nor is he the dupe of their easy emotionalism, but he is tolerant of their failings, and towards them, at least, his irony is never mordant. ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... 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; and ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... not a diplomatist! Why lug in Lawrence, who has inspired mordant jealousy and envy in the heart of ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... cheeks, the bright eyes, the fluff of waving hair, and—yes, actually a knot of fragrant violets at her breast, had given her an unpleasant shock of surprise. "I am sure I hope you can afford all this," was her comment, with a deliberate adjustment of eyebrows and glasses calculated to add mordant point and ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley
... desk of mine; there is a package, bring it here. Story of stories, gem of all; essence and triumph, key and clue; Tale of a loving woman's fall; soul swept hell-ward, and God! it's true. I was the man — Oh, yes, I've paid, paid with mighty and mordant pain. Look! here's the masterpiece I've made out of my sin, my manhood slain. Art supreme! yet the world would stare, know my mistress and blaze my shame. I have a wife and daughter — there! take it and thrust it in ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... spinning. The standing dye-stuff was the inner bark of the white walnut, from which we obtained that peculiar and permanent shade of dull yellow, the butternut [so common and typical in the clothing of the backwoods farmer]. Oak bark, with copper as a mordant, when father had money to purchase it, supplied the ink with which I learned to write. I drove the horses to and from the range, and salted them. I tended the sheep, and hunted up the cattle in the woods." [Footnote: Do., pp. 90, in, etc., condensed.] This was the life of the thrifty pioneers, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... potatoes, pressed 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 ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss
... view. But the little white volcano seemed quietly cross, and held her small head very high as she led the Princess from one ward to another to the beautifully fitted operating-room; and when she spoke her tone was strangely cold and mordant, as a woman's voice sometimes sounds in the Alps, when she speaks across an ice-fall or ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... smiling at the end. 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 ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... lodgings and his cosmopolitan 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 ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... as a religious teacher were summed up in my impressions of that one sermon. Though his tone in delivering it was one of unusual tenderness, there lurked in it, nevertheless, a mordant and petulant animus against the Christian religion as a whole, if regarded as miraculously revealed or as postulating the occurrence of any definite miracle. It was the voice of one who, while setting all belief ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... Remember he gives his recollections, while his memory is still fresh enough to be vivid, of a generation that closed, for literary if not for political purposes, with the Peace Conference. There is a power of wit and mordant humour and a sufficiency of descriptive power and insight into human ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... troops were yielding. The French mordant was too much for Prussians as well as Saxons, who in many villages of France and in the hollows of the downs were heavily punished by the Anglo-French artillery, and routed by bayonet charges thrust home with incredible ferocity. The ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... 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, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... 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 laughter ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... 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 |
