"Mordant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... resided in Strassburg he was under treatment for a serious ailment of his eyes, and Goethe was assiduous in his attendance on him, often remaining with him for whole days. Their intercourse was not an unmixed pleasure for either. Herder's mordant humour and spirit of contradiction were a daily trial to Goethe's temper, and he describes his feelings of alternating attraction and repulsion as a wholly new experience in his life. Herder, who ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... 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 ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... 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 which that presence of mind, no less essential in times of moral than of material ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... betrays a mind curious, inquisitive and mordant; and that plaid shawl is as unexpected as an adjective of Flaubert's. A portrait by Manet hangs close by, large, permanent and mysterious as nature. Degas is more intellectual, but how little is intellect compared with a gift like Manet's! ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... regard without effort. The law claims many of them and occasionally the raising of stock and the tilling of soil, though usually as proprietors only, it is true. Sometimes they are swept into strange waters where, if they float about long enough, they manage by some inherent mordant capacity to colour the entire complexion to their own. There are ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... dark purple crystals and have some practical uses in the tanning industry and in photography. A number of the salts of chromium are also used in the dyeing industry, for they hydrolyze like aluminium salts and the hydroxide forms a good mordant. ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... like him she loved talk, although her education allowed her only the lightest kind. She loved its give-and-take, its opportunities for the flash of wit or jest. Bakkus could talk about an old boot. She too. He could analyse sentiment in his mordant way. She could analyse it in her own unsophisticated fashion. Now Andrew, though death on facts and serious argument, remained dumb and bewildered in a passage-at-arms about apparently nothing at all; and while Bakkus and Elodie enjoyed themselves prodigiously, he gaped ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... Sabbath. Rooted to the ground, Baldur realized with fresh amazement and vivid pain the fair beauty of Adam's prehistoric wife, her luxurious blond hair, her shapely shoulders, her stature of a goddess—he trembled, for she had turned her mordant gaze in his direction. And he strove in vain to bring back the comforting vision of the chamber. She smiled, and the odours of sandal, coreopsis, and aloes encircled his soul like the plaited strands of her glorious hair. She was that other Lilith, the only offspring of the old Serpent. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... intriguing valets, the Scapins and Figaros. Ladies that soar in the realms of Rose-Pink, whose language wears the nodding plumes of intellectual conceit, are traceable to Philaminte and Belise of the Femmes Savantes: and the mordant witty women have the tongue of Celimene. The reason is, that these two poets idealized upon life: the foundation of their types is real and in the quick, but they painted with spiritual strength, which is ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... 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 ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... its omission is the one glaring defect in Mr Harris's otherwise extraordinarily penetrating book. Fortunately, it is an omission that does not disable the book as (in my judgment) it disabled the hero of the play, because Mr Harris left himself out of his play, whereas he pervades his book, mordant, deep-voiced, and with an unconquerable style which is ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... 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? ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... nothing so deliberately tedious as Robert Elsmere has been produced, things are not much better. M. Guy de Maupassant, with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style, strips life of the few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us foul sore and festering wound. He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very tears. M. Zola, true to ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... mean that he lacks originality. It was a daring stroke—body-snatching in 1914. To produce a work like Spoon River Anthology required years of accumulated experience; a mordant power of analysis; a gift of shrewd speech, a command of hard words that will cut like a diamond; a mental vigour analogous to, though naturally not so powerful, as that displayed by Browning in The Ring and ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... in brief compass, are the two stories: 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' and 'Was it Heaven or Hell'? They reveal the power and subtlety of his art as an ironic humorist—or shall we rather say, ironic wit? For they range all the way from the most mordant to the most pathetic irony—from Mephistophelean laughter ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... condiment, your poet begs The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs; Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen-sieve, Smoothness and softness to the salad give; Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl, And, half-suspected, animate the whole. Of mordant mustard add a single spoon, Distrust the condiment that bites so soon; But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault, To add a double quantity of salt. And, lastly, o'er the flavored compound toss A magic soup-spoon of anchovy sauce. Oh, green ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... Boulogne table d'hote? And she 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 ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... 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 and ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... writing—Lord Birkenhead, then F. E. Smith, who had spoken of the Welsh Disestablishment Bill as having "shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe."—The last lines of Chesterton's mordant answer ran ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... lunbrilo. Moor stepo. Moor (a ship, etc.) alligi per sxnurego. Moot disputebla. Mope malgxojigxi. Moral morala. Morality moraleco. Morals etiko, moro. Morass marcxejo—ajxo. Morbid malsana. Mordant morda. More (than) pli (ol). More plu. More, the—the more ju pli—des pli. Moreover plie. Morgue mortulejo. Moribund mortanto. Morning mateno. Morocco (leather) marokeno. Morose ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... found that his 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 German Headquarters Staff, receiving these reports from ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... 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 in Woman. ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... partially destroys the size. When dissolved, a little powdered alum is also stirred in, about as much as will lie on a shilling to a pint of water. The addition of the alum is important, as it acts as a mordant and helps to make a better ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... first great emotional poetry of the modern world—the sense of the greatness and tragedy of human passion has perhaps never been expressed in more moving terms than in the Tristan and Iseult of Thomas or Beroul—but it also includes the mordant satire of the Renard poetry and of Jean de Meun, and the gross realistic humour of the Fabliaux. The mediaeval drama, in whose complex development we have to trace many strands, probably represents in its oldest forms the coarse farcical buffoonery which may be related to the last fashions of ...
— Progress and History • Various
... Shade:—Boil the goods in a mordant of alum two parts, copperas three parts; then rinse them through a bath of madder. The tint depends on the relative proportions of the copperas and alum; the more copperas, the darker the dye; joint weight of both should not be ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... favourite 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
... some photographs of old inns, so, when they had admired the cathedral, and shuddered at the memory of Richard the Third—who wrote at Gloucester the order to Brackenbury for the murder of the princes in the Tower of London—and smiled at Cromwell's mordant wit in saying that the place had more churches than godliness when told of the local proverb, "As sure as God's in Gloucester," Medenham brought them to Northgate Street, where the New Inn—which is nearly always the most antiquated hostelry in an English country-town—supplied ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... retention, were quickened by an irritation of the cuticle, that in France it was customary to whip the children annually at the boundaries of the parish, lest the true place of them might ever be lost through neglect of so inexpensive a mordant for the memory. From this practice the older school of critics would seem to have taken a hint for keeping fixed the limits of good taste, and what was somewhat vaguely called classical English. To mark these limits in poetry, they set up as Hermae ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... flower between My fingers, till its head lay back, its fangs Poised at her. Like a weapon my hand was white and keen, And I held the choked flower-serpent in its pangs Of mordant anguish, till she ceased to laugh, Until her pride's flag, smitten, cleaved ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... expression of a movement that has reached its hey-day, from which the sap has already been cut off. It is, indeed, the thing to disparage them for their very finest quality, the vividness with which they express the texture of Madrid, the animated humorous mordant conversation about cafe ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... "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 at a book at all. Likewise, although ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... are classified as "anilines." They have worked a revolution in all the arts in which colors are used. Employed without a mordant, with few exceptions, they are measurably affected by both light, heat, moisture, or other changes and as made into inks are never permanent. Hence they should not be used for records, because if obliterated ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... nevertheless, unpretending and simple in company; and only when it chanced that Beauchamp's name was mentioned did she cast that quick supplicating nervous glance at the earl, with a shadow of an elevation of her shoulders, as if in apprehension of mordant pain. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Les eaux flamboient En se heurtant comme des blocs, Les dogues de l'abme aboient Et hurlent en mordant les rocs; —Mais demain tous ces flots rebelles Se changeront, unis et doux, En ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... carthamin, furnishes a pigment of exquisite beauty, marked by richness, transparency, and free working. Its extreme fugacity, however, militates against its employment by artists. As a dye, its manner of fixing upon fibre is different from that of any other colouring matter; requiring no mordant, like madder or cochineal, and needing no solution, like indigo or anotta, but fixing at once as soon as the cloth is brought into contact with it. But even for a dye the colour is fugitive, fading after a few hours' exposure to sunshine, and sometimes being quite bleached in the course ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... sure, could make the process nastier than any other that I ever saw attempt it. He chewed tobacco enormously. After pricking away for a few minutes at the design on the arm or some portion of the body, he would deluge it with a flood of tobacco spit, which, he claimed, acted as a kind of mordant. Piping this off with a filthy rag, he would study the effect for an instant, and then go ahead with another series of prickings and tobacco ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... though the successful dramatist felt ever grateful 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
... fuses at 92 deg. C. in its own water of crystallization. "Neutral alum'' is obtained by the addition of as much sodium carbonate to a solution of alum as will begin to cause the separation of alumina; it is much used in mordanting. Alum finds application as a mordant, in the preparation of lakes for sizing hand-made paper and in the clarifying of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... easel, just nearing completion, rested a portrait of her godmother. It was rather a wonderful portrait. The artist seemed to have penetrated beyond the mere physical lineaments of his sitter into the very crannies of her soul. It was all there—the thoroughly worldly shrewdness, the mordant, somewhat cynical humour, and the genuine kindness of heart which went to make up Lady Arabella's personality as her world knew it. And something more. Behind all these one sensed the glamour of a long-past romance, the unquenched spark of a faith that, ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... pictures by Lawrence and Hoppner. One can comprehend, too, that the person whom nature had so ungenerously endowed, might be perfectly capable of retorting to rudeness, or the still-smarting recollection of rudeness, with those weapons of mordant wit and acrid epigram which are not unfrequently the protective compensation of physical shortcomings. But this conceded, there are numberless anecdotes which testify to Rogers's cultivated taste and real good breeding, to his genuine ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... Pliny records white lead, cinnabar, verdigris and red oxide of iron; and the preparation of coloured glasses and enamels testifies to the uses to which these and other substances were put. Salts of ammonium were also known; while alum was used as a mordant in dyeing. Many substances were employed in ancient medicine: galena was the basis of a valuable Egyptian cosmetic and drug; the arsenic sulphides, realgar and orpiment, litharge, alum, saltpetre, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... his mattress-grave, he 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 ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... through the sand projected ridges of vertical, sharp stone—the black basalt named by the Arabs Hajar Jehannum, or "Rock of Hell." As for their uniforms, though now dry as bone, the way in which they were shrunken and wrinkled told that not long ago they had been drenched in water of strongly mordant qualities. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... the inside than most novelists of his time. In While I 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
... Baba is a Persian of the Persians, typical not merely of the life and surroundings, but of the character and instincts and manner of thought of his countrymen. And yet it is from his lips that flows the delightful stream of naive confession and mordant sarcasm that never seems either ill-natured or artificial, that lashes without vindictiveness, and excoriates without malice. In strict ratio, however, to the verisimilitude of the performance, must be esteemed the talents of the non-Oriental writer, who was responsible ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... without either of these two charms, Madam, it is difficult to put even a clever cobbler, much less a Prime Minister, into leading strings! No,—it is the spendthrift women of a corrupt society that I mean,—the women who possess beauty, and are conscious of it,—the women who have a mordant wit and use it for dangerous purposes—the women who give up their homes, their husbands, their children and their reputations for the sake of villainous intrigue, and the feverish excitement of speculative money-making;—with these—and ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... in grief. Hearing that her husband, sir Mordant, had been enticed to the Bower of Bliss by the enchantress Acra'sia, she went in quest of him, and found him so changed in mind and body she could scarcely recognize him; however, she managed by tact to bring him away, but he died on the road, and Amavia ...
— 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.
... enough, this was an idea that persisted for centuries; facts with all their mordant logic were impotent to kill it. Hardly in Dante's time did men guess that the Roman empire ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... this direction were not altogether successful, but the still fury which they aroused in the great wolf's breast doubtless obscured the mordant anguish in his foot. One terrific leap at his enemy, resulting in an ignominious overthrow as the chain stopped him in mid-air, had convinced the subtle beast of the vanity of such tactics. Crouching back, he eyed his adversary in silence, with ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... one of Candide's smaller companions have at least something of the same characteristic. Yet one may also say that if Voltaire himself had not written these, he must have written other things of the kind. The mordant wit, the easy, fluent, rippling style, so entirely free from boisterousness yet with constant "wap" of wavelet and bursting of foam-bubble; above all, the pure unadulterated faculty of tale-telling, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... The others when once rent are past repair. The steam is introduced by means of a caoutchouc pipe, and when brought to the boil the pipe is removed. After the colors are discharged, rinse through three warm waters. They are then ready to receive the mordant ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... the delightful story that is called "Mary, Mary" on one side of the Atlantic Ocean and "The Charwoman's Daughter" on the other. It was written in 1910, when the author was known as the poet of "Insurrections" and the writer of a few of the mordant studies that belong to a later book, ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... why, if one should prefer even Chicago roast beef to an Irish policeman, that should be held against one." This was Mrs. Carrington's indignant comment on the narrative of the mordant martyr. ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... and depraved, was scarcely confirmed in her recovery, when, stifling the dictates of honour, gratitude, and every natural affection, she again accused her husband, who was once more apprehended, and taken before Sir John Mordant, Knight, and one of ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... was the novices' point of 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 a ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... more personal than a Miltonic Sonnet. The rigid principles of form, adhered to so scrupulously in the medium used, intensify, rather than detract from, his individualistic character. That Miltonic wit, so granite-like and mordant, how well it goes with the magical whispers ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... FOR MARKING LINEN.—Von Bele gives the following method for preparing an ink for marking linen and cotton: Neutralize 75 grains of carbonate of ammonia with pure nitric acid, and triturate 45 to 60 grains of carmine with the solution. Mordant the fabric with a mixed solution of acetate of alumina and tin salt, and write upon it, when it is ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... it. For the copper was there to produce a 'lake' or copper-salt of the vegetable alkaloids, which copper-lakes are among the most brilliant and most permanent of colouring matters; the alum was there as a 'mordant'; and even the blood was doubtless there incorporated for better reasons than superstitious ones, in all probability for the purpose of clarifying (by means of its coagulating albumen) the seething and ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... mordant satire in his tone, Mrs. George glanced speechlessly at Lucinda. Behold, Lucinda had squarely turned her back on the party and was gazing out into the garden, with a very decided flush on the snowy curves of her neck and cheek. Then Mrs. George looked at her sisters-in-law. They ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... her shy and reticent hours; Dragging to light her blinking, slothful moods; Publishing fretful seasons when her powers Worked wild and sullen in her solitudes, Or when her mordant laughter shook the woods. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... mental attitude of the sixteenth century owing to his viridity, his crudity, his lack of avoidance of obscenity, even though he was a true poet, vigorous, powerful, oratorical, and epigrammatical, as well as a witty and mordant caricaturist. ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... occur in all the escutcheons of the Baroja, Alzate and Zornoza families, in so far as I have been able to discover, and I take them to be more or less authentic. We have wolves passant, wolves rampant, and wolves mordant. The Goni escutcheon also displays hearts. If I become rich, which I do not anticipate, I shall have wolves and hearts blazoned on the doors of my dazzling automobile, which will not prevent me from enjoying ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... was, however, one of the few gifts which nature had denied to Luis de Leon. He was aware of this himself, to judge from his statement that he had nothing of the jester or scoffer in him.[161] But if Luis de Leon was relatively poor in humour, he had an abundant store of mordant sarcasm and a faculty for ironic banter, as Medina and Castro learned to their chagrin.[162] Pacheco's opinion of Luis de Leon's versatile talent is borne out by the scrap of evidence given at the trial by Francisco de Salinas—the sightless dedicatee of El aire se serena. ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... extreme moods, uneasy vanity, and morbid depression. Communion with her serene equity, her matchless beauty, her inexhaustible tenderness, the experience of her constant homage, soothed his haughty and mordant, but magnanimous and affectionate, nature, and were an infinite luxury to him. An admiring recognition is almost a necessity for those highly endowed with genius. And Madame Recamier's intense faculty of admiration, with her self-forgetting devotedness, exactly fitted ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... Vicente furnished by his contemporaries, we should but know that he had introduced into Portugal representa[c,][o]es of eloquent style and novel invention imitating Enzina's eclogues with great skill and wit[93], and that the mordant comic poet Gil Vicente, who hid a serious aim beneath his gaiety and was skilled in veiling his satire in light-hearted jests, might have excelled Menander, Plautus and Terence if he had written in ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... in the character of a wet blanket, but as a teller of jocund tales and a retailer of humorous anecdotes, must not be taken as an isolated and transient transformation, but as foreshadowing a general conversion of writers and publicists hitherto associated with utterances of a mordant, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... 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 with the ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... word of condemnation for the writers who are sucking the life-blood of Faith from our people, should one of ourselves show style in his sermons, or attach his name to a magazine article, the amount of mordant criticism he has to face is sufficient to make the ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... death of 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 ...
— Dickory Cronke - The Dumb Philosopher, or, Great Britain's Wonder • Daniel Defoe |
