"Lapidary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ranged on pedestals between the windows, the bronze Venus Callipyge, and various tables of pietra commessa set out with vases and tazzas of antique pattern. A knot of virtuosi gathered about one of these tables were engaged in examining a collection of engraved gems displayed by a lapidary of Florence; while others inspected a Greek manuscript which the Bishop had lately received from Syria. Beyond the windows, a cedrario or orange-walk stretched its sunlit vista to the terrace above ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... King sending his chamberlain, Lord Fitzhugh, to carry to Paris a seal already bearing his shield, but lacking the small private mark that authenticated it as his signet. Fitzhugh would stand over the lapidary and see this added, and bring it back. Ralf Percy had meantime been sent to bring a report of the diggers, but he was long in returning; and when Henry became uneasy, James had volunteered to go himself, and Henry ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... character is revealed by the concussion of misfortune, as the splendor of the precious jewel of the mine is developed by the blows of the lapidary.—F.A. DURIVAGE. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • 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, ...
— A Treatise on Staff Making and Pivoting • Eugene E. Hall
... eradicate than that of smoking. With the mound-builder tobacco was the greatest of luxuries; his solace in his hours of relaxations, and the choicest offering he could dedicate to the Great Spirit. Upon his pipe he lavished all the skill he possessed, in the lapidary's art. ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... no one until he reached a bazaar of jewels near the temple square. An armed watchman stood before the tightly closed front of the lapidary's booth, above the portal of which a flaring torch was ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... "Sir Theodore," said the 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
... Use the word "lapidary" in a sentence. MODEL: "When Queen Victoria wanted the Koh-i-noor to be recut, she sent it to a ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... the 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 pen of ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... a shaft Shall King Ludwig build for him,— In Bavarian lapidary Style these words be ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... the feelings of a lapidary would be—an enthusiast whose life is given to the study of precious stones, and whose sole delight is in the contemplation of their manifold beauty—if a stranger should come in to him, and, opening his hand, exhibit a new unknown gem, splendid as ruby ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... fathoms may be found. As I walked upon the edge I could see far and wide over the sandy bottom of the bay; the sun shone clear and green and steady in the deeps; the bay seemed rather like a great transparent crystal, as one sees them in a lapidary's shop; there was naught to show that it was water but an internal trembling, a hovering within of sun-glints and netted shadows, and now and then a faint lap and a dying bubble round the edge. The shadows ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this fine scheme, and especially in order successfully to check that decadence which had alarmed the best minds in France, there was a pioneer work to be done. It was necessary to intensify and purify the light of criticism. For this purpose the conversations of the salons culminated in the lapidary art of La Rochefoucauld, who was not a creator like Racine and Moliere, like Bossuet and Fenelon, but who prepared the way for these slightly later builders of French literature by clearing the ground of shams. Segrais, whose recollections of him are among the most ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... and Betel do not at once perceive that one shines with a brilliant white light and the other burns with a glowing red, as different in their brilliancy as the precious stones on a lapidary's table, perhaps for the same reason. And so there is an endless variety of tints ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... with great enjoyment collecting specimens. There were shells to be had on the sand, and mermaids' purses, and bunches of whelks' eggs, and lovely little stones that looked capable of being polished on the lapidary wheel which Miss Jones had set up in the carpentering-room. For lack of a basket Dona filled her own handkerchief and commandeered Marjorie's for the same purpose. For the first time since she had ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... inscriptions. Latin orthography was in the main phonetic (Quintilian, I. 7. 11). The language was pronounced as it was spelled. But as is always the case, changes in orthography lagged a little behind changes in the pronunciation. Hence even the blunders made by an ignorant lapidary in cutting an inscription are often a source of information ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck
... 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 ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... fugitive wild boar and biting him; and, in this ferocious menagerie, peopled with lions and panthers, two rabbits are scampering about, undoubtedly to the great amusement of the throng. The Romans were fond of these contrasts, which furnished Galienus an opportunity to be jocosely generous. "A lapidary," says M. Magnin, "had sold the emperor's wife some jewels, which were recognized to be false; the emperor had the dishonest dealer arrested and condemned to the lions; but when the fatal moment came, he ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... geologising together, I'll tell you how I got on at 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 no account of any rock ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... 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 ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... but God has a throne burnished for her arrival, and on one side of that throne in heaven there is a vase containing two jewels, the one brighter than the Kohinoor of London Tower, and the other larger than any diamond ever found in the districts of Golconda—the one jewel by the lapidary of the palace cut with the words: "Inasmuch as ye did it to father;" the other jewel by the lapidary of the palace cut with the words: "Inasmuch as ye did it to mother." "Over the Hills to the Poorhouse" is the exquisite ballad of Will Carleton, who found ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... 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
... hear no more of 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
... able state paper have already been made in the preceding pages, though it is so brilliant a piece of work that to quote is only to mutilate. Its argument, denunciation, humor, and satire are interwoven in a masterly combination. The renowned "sketch in the lapidary style," prepared for the gravestone of Thomas and Richard Penn, with the introductory paragraphs, constitutes one of the finest assaults in political literature.[12] It is unfortunately impossible to give any adequate idea or even abstract of a document which covers ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... 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
... instance of the truth of that Rule, Poeta non fit, sed nascitur; one is not made, but born a Poet; so that as Cornish Diamonds are not polished by any Lapidary, but are pointed and smoothed even as they are taken out of the Earth, so Nature itself was all the Art which was used ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... 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, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... Varius related (you see my theme has full possession of me, and the book is, a collation of facts on the subject of fascination of all kinds, even down to that of the serpent) that a friend of his saw a fascinator with a look break in two a precious gem in the hands of a lapidary—typical this, I suppose, of some fond, foolish, female heart. Fire, according to this author, represents the quality of fascination; and toads and moths are subject to its influence, as well as some higher animals—deer, for instance, who are hunted ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... like 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; and they both were members of my ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... influence of the sun, he should find the productions of nature sublimated by its rays to more perfect and precious qualities. He was strengthened in this belief by a letter written to him, at the command of the queen, by one Jayme Ferrer, an eminent and learned lapidary, who, in the course of his trading for precious stones and metals, had been in the Levant and in various parts of the East; had conversed with the merchants of the remote parts of Asia and Africa, and the natives of India, Arabia, and Ethiopia, and was considered deeply versed in geography ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... 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 to be found, made answer:—"Chiefly ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... 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 ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... noble entertainment you gave me at Bury; and the pains you took in showing me the antiquities of that place. In requital, I can tell you of a strange thing I saw lately here, and I believe 'tis true. As I passed by St. Dunstan's in Fleet Street the last Saturday, I stepped into a lapidary, or stone-cutter's shop, to treat with the master for a stone to be put upon my father's tomb; and casting my eyes up and down, I might spy a huge marble with a large inscription upon't, which was ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... 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 old Silas, ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... In that piece of lapidary work, "How Sandro Botticelli Saw Simonetta in the Spring," is a bit of heart psychology which, I believe, has never ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... specimens of any value have been extracted, the color being uniformly black. The garnets are large trapezohedral-faced crystals of an intense color, but penetrated with rifts and flaws. Many, no doubt, will afford serviceable gem material, but their resources have not yet been tested by the lapidary. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... paragraphs would now be like so many stone blocks which had been placed in their proper positions so as to form a polylithic frieze, but each of which still remained to be carved, as though by a sculptor or lapidary, so as to be part of a continuous pattern or a series of connected figures. My next task would be to work at them one by one, till each was sculptured into an image of my own minute intentions. The task of thus carving each and fitting it to ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... 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
... 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 ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... better spared than that. 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 you with the hope of getting ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... bloody, sanguinary deadly, mortal red, florid bank, riparian hard, arduous wound, vulnerable written, graphic spotless, immaculate sell, mercenary son, filial salt, saline meal, farinaceous wood, ligneous wood, sylvan cloud, nebulous glass, vitreous milk, lacteal water, aquatic stone, lapidary gold, aureous silver, argent iron, ferric honey, mellifluous loving, amatory loving, erotic loving, amiable wedded, hymeneal plow, arable priestly, sacerdotal arrow, sagittal wholesome, salubrious warlike, bellicose timely, temporary ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... room, pointed to numerous specimens of granite, 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 7, 1841 • Various
... precious metals that few draw plates are desired. The prices now are no more than from $1.25 up to say $8, but it is very rare that one is required the cost of which is more than $4. And of that a very large part must go to the lapidary to pay for the stone and for his work in cutting it to an even round disk. Then, what I get for the long and hard work of boring the stone by hand is very little. 'By hand?' Oh, yes. That must always be the only good way. The work of the machine is not perfect. It never produces such good plates ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... of the 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
... should not be considered as saying nothing but what is strictly true. Allowance must be made for some degree of exaggerated praise. In lapidary inscriptions a man ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... patience change the mulberry-leaf To shining silk; the lapidary's skill Makes the rough diamond sparkle at his will, And cuts a gem from quartz or coral-reef. Better a skillful cobbler at his last Than unlearned poet twangling on the lyre; Who sails on land and gallops on the blast, And mounts the welkin on a braying ass, Clattering ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... Realidad, although it is true that his lack of practical experience was compensated at first by the personal advice of a trained impresario, don Emilio Mario. Second, the drama is above all the genre of condensation, and Galds, even as a novelist, never condensed. His art was not that of the lapidary, nor even that of the short story writer. He has few novelas cortas to his credit, and he required pages and pages to develop a ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... other objects] roller, steam roller, lawn roller, rolling pin, rolling mill; sand paper, emery paper, emery cloth, sander; flat iron, sad iron; burnisher, turpentine and beeswax; polish, shoe polish. [art of cutting and polishing gemstones] lapidary. [person who polishes gemstones] lapidary, lapidarian. V. smooth, smoothen^; plane; file; mow, shave; level, roll; macadamize; polish, burnish, calender^, glaze; iron, hot-press, mangle; lubricate &c (oil) 332. Adj. smooth; polished &c v.; leiodermatous^, slick, velutinous^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... From this expression it may be inferred, that besides his mercantile speculations in jewels, Cesar Frederick was a lapidary.—E.] ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... Accordingly he gave me a great piece of carnelian and an hundred thousand dinars and a present, which I took, and with which I betook myself to the land of Babel. Then I sought out the Shaykh and when he was shown to me I delivered to him the money and the present, which he accepted and sending for a lapidary, bade him fashion the carnelian into this amulet. Then he abode seven months in observation of the stars, till he chose out an auspicious time for engraving it, when he graved upon it these talismanic characters which thou seest, and I took it and returned with ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... a second lecture on lapidary archaeology, even more brilliant than the first, transformed the history of Pascal's life into a terrible yet amusing drama, and vanished. In all, he had remained in the church for the space of ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... 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 ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... in words that all is vanity. But with the passing of the players to the 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 ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... 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 ...
— English Satires • Various
... improve it, above all to abridge it, is the proposed Inscription for the Pillar at Naseby. You need not scruple a moment to make any change that strikes you; I am well aware it is good for nothing except its practical object, and that I have no skill in lapidary literature. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... Free Church missionary to the Parsees of India, submitted to me specimens of fossil woods which he had picked up in the Egyptian Desert, in order that I might if possible determine their age, I told him, ere yet the optical lapidary had prepared them for examination, that if they exhibited the coniferous structure, they might belong to any geologic period from the times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone downwards; but that if they manifested in their ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... diamond. The guest, however, had provided himself against such 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 be invested, and ransacked from top to bottom. But for a long while ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... toil, through manifold embodiments, long-continued self renunciation, and sacrifices not yet known or understood. Its initiations are endless; its revelations of the infinite law are, at times, too seemingly trifling for recognition; but as the lapidary leaves no facet of the jewel uncut and unpolished, so the guardians—the guides and teachers of the candidates for spiritual unfoldment—omit no least lesson or discipline that can aid in ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... a perfect knowledge of optics and be a skilful stone-cutter. The numerous planes or faces which he cuts on the surface of the diamond are called facets. In the treatment three distinct processes are utilized—cleaving, cutting, and polishing. The lapidary must study the individual character of each stone and determine whether to cleave or grind off the superfluous matter so as to correct flaws and imperfections. All this calls for the judgment which comes only with long experience, for if ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... surmised that they arose from aristocratic prejudices of rank. Nor is it impossible but that M. le Comte de Buffon instinctively foresaw, with some repugnance, his approaching confraternity with a man formerly a lapidary; but was not Maury the son of a shoemaker? This very small incident of our literary history seemed doomed to remain in obscurity; chance has, I believe, given me ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... Schools these 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 relics of the past bring ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... capacity for co-ordination. He wants concentration and continuity. It is not that he has no claims to be considered a philosopher or an artist, but rather that he is both imperfectly, for he thinks and writes marvelously, on a small scale. He is an entomologist, a lapidary, a jeweler, a coiner of sentences, of adages, of criticisms, of aphorisms, counsels, problems; and his book, extracted from the accumulations of his journal during fifty years of his life, is a collection of precious stones, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sylvan labyrinths where the buck and doe were only half afraid; copses alive with small game; rare openings where the squatter's wooden ploughshare lay forgotten; dark chasms scintillant with the treasures of the chemist, if not of the lapidary; outlooks that opened upon great seas of billowing forest, whence blue mountains peered up, sank and rose again like ocean monsters at play; glens where the she-bear suckled her drowsing cubs to the ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... brace of partridges—or was it quails? for 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 ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... in hand. I turned up the long winding road towards my quarters. It was a cold moonlight night, and every twig of broom and beech was sharply defined as in a black-and-white drawing. Overhead each star was hard and bright, as though a lapidary had been at work in the heavens, and never had the Great Bear seemed so brilliant. But none so bright and legible—or so it seemed to me—as Mars in all that ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... Bertha Holcomb. It's all up to you, Harry. Find out all that is possible; but go slow. Trace down that ring; find out everything that you can. Go and see Bertha Holcomb. Perhaps she can give you some data. Watson said no; but perhaps you may uncover it. Take the ring to a lapidary; but don't let him cut it. Last of all, and most important, buy the house of the Blind Spot. Draw on me. ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... lyric, with no great depth of feeling or reach of thought, has come down the stream of time, and will float upon it for ever. No doubt Dr. Johnson was right in calling it a waste of time to carve cherrystones, but precious stones are the more valued and admired for the art of the lapidary. Whitman did not cultivate versification. He almost despised it. He sneered at "dulcet rhymes." Yet this may hinder his access to posterity. Mr. Meredith hints as much in his sonnet entitled "An Orson of the Muse," which surely ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... word: the greatest word ever uttered; we must examine it for a moment as a lapidary examines under a powerful glass a rare ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... he held there now were such as a lapidary would spend his life willingly in the getting. If not another stone were found in the cave, these alone represented a fortune worthy of the expedition. Each stone as it stood was worth probably from three to eight hundred dollars, and some of the larger would run into the thousands. ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... calculated to harmonize their united effect. 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 and ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... 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 ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... worth visiting. Besides diamonds and precious stones, 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 ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... and it had no pleasanter moments than those spent on the beach at sunset, whither the school flocked down after tea for half an hour's leisure in the after- glow. There is plenty of amusement for them on this broad reach of sand and shingle. Some are groping for shells or for pebbles, which the lapidary will transform for a trifle into dazzling jewels; others are playing ducks and drakes on the waves, or entertaining themselves like ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... 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 Villa Ponitowski. ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... race. That noble chess-board, the men whereof were of gold and silver, was also in the Monastery in the days of King Don Alfonso the Wise, but it hath long since been lost, no man knoweth how. Moreover there is in this Sacristy a precious stone of great size, black and sparkling; no lapidary hath yet known its name. The Convent have had an infant Jesus graven thereon, with the emblem of the Passion, that it might be worthily employed. It is thought also that the great cross of crystal which is set so well and wrought with such great cunning, is made of different pieces of crystal which ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... 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 since a much later and ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... 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
... Manomet was no longer chaotic and menacing, but was stippled with dancing light on a soft, rich blue that was as soothing to the sense as the other had been disquieting. Along the south of White Horse Beach the lapidary surf had strewn quartz pebbles that gleamed in the clear sun like precious stones. It took little effort of the imagination to find pocketfuls of rubies, pearls, sapphires, and amethysts among these, and had it indeed been "bright ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... their supports, are never so considered. A 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 is evident that the average price of those things which are consumed in the ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... 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 them ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... kind of devilry at Iberville's large and sensuous mouth, but his eyes were steady and provoking, and while Gering's words went forth pantingly, Iberville's were slow and concise, and chosen with the certainty of a lapidary. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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 obliged to throw it ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... paragraph, "were attracted thither by the wide-spreading influence of a great original thinker who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village.... People that had lighted on a new thought or a thought they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary, to ascertain its quality and value." And Hawthorne enumerates some of the categories of pilgrims to the shrine of the mystic counsellor, who as a general thing was probably far from abounding in their own sense (when this sense was perverted), but gave them a due measure ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... tomb. He was lying extended full length, six feet and five 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. ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... but this is not true. The fact is that there chanced to be a glass cutter so skilful that he was appointed lapidary to Rudolph the Second; he had a workshop at Prague, but though he did some very wonderful glass cutting, which gained him much fame, he did not invent the art. It was, by the way, one of his workmen who later migrated to Nuremburg and carried the ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... glow of gold, the chaste sheen of silver, the dance and sparkle of light in multitudinous gems, arrested his attention as he one evening perambulated the streets of a great city. He beheld a jeweller's shop. The grey-headed, spectacled lapidary sat at a bench within, sedulously polishing a streaked pebble by the light of a small lamp. A sudden thought struck Otto; he entered the shop, and, presenting the ring to the jeweller, inquired in a tone of ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... 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 ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... a manner not clearly explained, the Dosey Asteroids Company had lost six months' production of gem-quality cut star hyacinths valued at nearly a hundred million credits. It lost also its Chief Lapidary and seventy-eight other company employees who had been in the station dome at ...
— The Star Hyacinths • James H. Schmitz
... knowledge, the promptness of his mind in producing it on all occasions in conversation, and the vivid eloquence with which he clothed his thoughts, however suddenly called upon.' Parr, regardless of Johnson's rule that 'in lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath' (ante, ii. 407), replied, that if he mentioned his conversation he should have to mention also his roughness in contradiction, &c. As for the epithet probabili, he 'never reflected upon it without ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... 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
... 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
... A lapidary's skill and delight for working in small forms belongs to Gerrit Smith. His "Aquarelles" are a good example of his art in bijouterie. This collection includes eight songs and eight piano sketches. The first, "A Lullaby," begins with the unusual skip of a ninth for the voice. A subdued accentuation ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... quartz found in all colours, and spotted, striped, and clouded; is valued in ornamental lapidary work because of the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 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 jewelry in garnets, opals, amethysts, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... how a poet could have been found in Somersetshire in those days to produce such spirited verse. The Elizabethan age, so splendid in great poetry, was apt to be tortured and affected in what Dr. Johnson called "lapidary inscriptions." ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... One sees both the 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 ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... compromise the affair, at the price of almost my whole fortune. Yet this accommodation was not made so secretly, but that my character was blasted, and my credit overthrown; so that I was fain to relinquish my occasional equipage, and hire myself as journeyman to a lapidary, an employment which I had exercised in my youth. In this obscure station, I laboured with great assiduity, until I made myself perfect in the knowledge of stones, as well as in the different methods of setting them off to the best advantage; and having, by dint of industry ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... out with a finished stone whether or not the lapidary has cut it properly as regards its optical properties one may use the dichroscope, and if there is little or no dichroism in evidence when looking through the table of the stone ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... mighty forests, rivers and valleys of the West, many portions of which have never been explored, furnish abundant resources for the gratification of the Naturalist, the Lapidary, and the Antiquarian. It is with the view of directing attention to these sources of information, that the author has grouped together in this little work, many startling incidents in prairie life, and alluded to relics of antiquity, ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... surroundings that rural England can provide, and by reason, perhaps, of the lack of restrictions, had helped him to enlarge his experiences and develop all the facets of a luminous mind. The expression is chosen deliberately. Man's mind is like a diamond, and experience is the lapidary. Every action, every stroke of good fortune or of bad, leaves its definite mark; every association does the same. As a boy Shakespeare lived in close touch with Nature. His father's business would have brought him into contact with farmers, given him the freedom of their fields, taught ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... it 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 ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... 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
... 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 and physically, in improving and beautifying ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... makes his 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
... 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 Graydon's feelings. He not only recognized Miss ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... the Princes I have little to say. To pass from Michelangelo's sacristy to this is an error; see it, if see it you must, first. While the facade of S. Lorenzo is still neglected and the cornice of Brunelleschi's dome is still unfinished, this lapidary's show-room is being completed at a cost of millions of lire. Ever since 1888 has the floor been in progress, and there are many years' work yet. An enthusiastic custodian gave me a list of the stones which were used in the designs of the coats of arms of Tuscan cities, of which that ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... 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
... aided, carrying a stone in its mouth of three colours; the one white, another black, and the third red. It opened its mouth and let the stone fall into Guido's lap. Having done this, it departed. Guido took the stone to a skilful lapidary, who had no sooner inspected it than he knew its virtues, and would willingly have paid him a hundred florins for it. But Guido refused; and by means of that singular stone, obtained great wealth, and was promoted to ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... rather to give 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 ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... 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, as the end of all his ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... in vain. In vain the delving antiquary tries To find the tomb where generous Harvard lies Here, here, his lasting monument is found, Where every spot is consecrated ground! O'er Stoughton's dust the crumbling stone decays, Fast fade its lines of lapidary praise; There the wild bramble weaves its ragged nets, There the dry lichen spreads its gray rosettes; Still in yon walls his memory lives unspent, Nor asks a braver, nobler monument. Thus Hollis lives, and Holden, honored, praised, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... therefore at his praise 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 ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison
... me candidly how you relish This, which they call The lapidary style? Opinions vary. The late Mr. Mellish Could never abide it. He thought it vile, And coxcombical. My friend the Poet Laureat, Who is a great lawyer at Anything comical, Was the first who tried it; But Mellish ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... such a manner as this:—"He is a highly cultivated artist, but not one thought of any vivid novelty did he put out in all his many books. You become placid reading him, but think of Ossian and Shakspeare, and be silent. He is a lapidary polishing pebbles,—a pretty art, but not vested with the glories of sculpture, nor the mathematical magnitude of architecture. He does not walk a demigod, but a stiff Anglicised imitator of French paces. He is a symmetrical, but a small invisible personage at rapier practice." ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... marvelled at the lapidary style of this metal work, in which the artist with the finest understanding of his art displayed a wealth of composition within ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... bit further on Hawthorne speaks of these pilgrims as "hobgoblins of flesh and blood," people, he humourously comments, who had lighted on a new thought or a thought they fancied new, and "came to Emerson as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and value." With Emerson himself Hawthorne was on terms of easy intimacy. "Being happy," as he says, and feeling, therefore, "as if there were no question to be put," he was not in any sense desirous of metaphysical ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... honor. It is La Chouette who came and proposed to me to entice the broker here, when she learned through my son, that Morel, the lapidary, who lived in the Rue du Temple, cut real instead of false stones, and that Mother Mathieu had often about her jewels of value. I accepted the affair, proposing for La Chouette to add Barbillon and the Martials, so as to have the ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... find 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
... no longer regarded as dangerous to speak lightly of hell, or even to suggest that the golden streets and jeweled architecture of the sky might be regarded as symbols of hope rather than exhibits of actual bullion and lapidary construction. Clemens re-read his extravaganza, Captain Stormfields Visit to Heaven, gave it a modernizing touch here and there, and handed it to his publishers, who must have agreed that it was no longer dangerous, for ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... a personal, subjective, confessional note. When at home I read the text of the Second Article in silence, and then read Luther's explanation aloud, it seems to me as if a hymn rushing heavenward arises from the lapidary record of facts. It is no longer the language of the word, but of the sound as well. The text reports objectively, like the language of a Roman, writing tables of law. The explanation witnesses and confesses subjectively. It is Christianity ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... their dispute. "We were disputing," said they, "concerning the superiority of our professions; for each of us possesses complete skill in his own." "What are your professions?" replied the sultan. "I am," said one, "O sovereign, a lapidary of wonderful skill." "I fear thou art an ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous |
