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More "Mordant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wisdom, beautiful repose, and sweet oblivion of self, 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 faculty of admiration, with her self-forgetting devotedness, exactly fitted her for this ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... to be dyed has either no affinity for the colouring matter, or not sufficient power to retain it, the combination is effected, or strengthened, by the intervention of a third substance, called a mordant, or basis. The mordant must have a strong affinity both for the colouring matter and the substance to be dyed, by which means it causes them to combine ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... launched his strongest bit of ironical 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... to produce very bright dyes by methods then unknown to Greece or Rome. They dipped the cloth first into a liquid of one colour, called a mordant, to prepare it, and then into a liquid of a second colour; and it came out dyed of a third colour, unlike either of the former. The ink with which they wrote the name of a deceased person on the mummy-cloth, like our own marking-ink, was made ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... owe to reviewing the metaphorical applications of such terms as 'caustic,' 'mordant,' 'piquant,' etc., in their burning, biting, and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 Book. It is still a debatable proposition whether or not this is high-class ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... monumento. Mood modo. Moody silentema. Moon luno. Moonlight 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 malgaja. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... second and the third stories peer the murky faces and towsled heads of some of the inmates. One of the latter spits his furthest into the yard—evidently with the intention of hitting myself: but all his efforts prove vain. Another one shouts with a mordant expletive: ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... Twain, 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 ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... begotten children by her; domestic affection may have warmed his being, just as it does that of many a day-laborer. But in the arid air of Wall Street all his intellectual and ethical possibilities will have wilted and died. Lust for greater riches and a mordant, ever-smouldering disappointment at not having attained them, will replace the healthier impulses of adolescence. Books will have no savor for him; men of high attainments, unless their coffers brim with lucre, affect ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... 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, ...
— Dickory Cronke - The Dumb Philosopher, or, Great Britain's Wonder • Daniel Defoe
... pattern 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
... title would cover the creations 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 ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... attributed much of his success in the field to the fact that he was not hampered by governments at home. Every modern commander, down certainly to the present moment, must have envied him. Kinglake's mordant pen depicts with felicity and compression the men of Downing Street, who without military experience or definite political aim, thwarted, criticised, over- ruled, tormented, their much-enduring General. We have Aberdeen, deficient in mental clearness and propelling force, by his horror ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... art not a diplomatist! Why lug in Lawrence, who has inspired mordant jealousy and envy in the heart ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... these, Candide is evidently one, and more than 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
... sharp, cutting, sarcastic, caustic, scathing, bitter, satirical, pungent, piquant; nipping, blasting; erosive, corrosive, acrid, mordant. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... 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 ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... 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 ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... can legitimately be 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 personal betrayal, ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... 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 the images they had made to them ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... to-day. She was paying the price of yesterday's exaltation and her spirits had sunk down to nowhere. What a fool's paradise yesterday had been with its vision of her big self-sufficient husband coming to her for mothering because he had lost a law-suit! What a piece of mordant irony it was, that she should have found herself, after all her silly hopes, sobbing in his arms, while he comforted her for her bitter disappointment over not being able to comfort him! She had told the truth when she said he was the one, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... 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
... 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
... from a sea of silver, form one of the salient features of this glorious landscape. This is an interesting peculiarity of Scotch scenery;—civilization sapping the barbarism of the wilderness; wheat-fields mordant biting in upon peaty moorlands, or climbing to the tops of cold, bald mountains, shearing off their thorny locks of heather and covering them with the well-dressed chevelure of yellow grain. Where the farmer's horse cannot climb with the plough, or the little sheep cannot graze to advantage, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... 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. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... 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 man ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... "says-tozzie-batch," is extracted from the bark and the roots of the sumac, and ground alder bark, with the ashes of the juniper as a mordant. She now immerses the wool and allows it to remain in the dye for half an hour or ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... 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 ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... 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 ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... aloud 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 ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... beautiful 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
... 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... afterwards, the manuscript was sent across the Atlantic and delivered to M. Chevalier. Within another month it was on the bookstalls. "I have retouched it very little," says the editor in his preface, "as I was anxious to preserve Madame Lola's distinctly original style. Her pen is as mordant as her dog-whip." ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... a prodigious deal of chemistry had gone to the making of 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 ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... 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 myself hugely inside ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... 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 ...
— Dickory Cronke - The Dumb Philosopher, or, Great Britain's Wonder • Daniel Defoe
... that she was "great," "a genius," the legitimate successor of Ambrose Bierce, whom she remotely resembled, and Bret Harte, whom she did not resemble at all. This they would have done if only to prove that California no longer "knocked" as in the mordant nineties, nor waited for the anile East to set the seal of its dry approval before discovering that a new volcano was sending forth its fiery swords in ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... and falsehood, merely waiting for the proper seed. And Clarence Darrow in his elegiac Farmington had insisted that one village at least had been the seat of as much restless longing as of simple bliss. Spoon River Anthology in its different dialect did little more than to confirm these mordant, neglected testimonies. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... a bit 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
... outline produced by a resist or a mordant in a printed textile, where the colours used are full and rich, often has a good effect, lightening the effect while giving point and definition to certain leading forms. Instances of the use of white outlines may be ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... happened to intrude upon her at one of these moments would find her bathed in perspiration, her eyes blazing, her false hair pushed awry and exposing the baldness of her brows. Francoise must often, from the next room, have heard these mordant sarcasms levelled at herself, the mere framing of which in words would not have relieved my aunt's feelings sufficiently, had they been allowed to remain in a purely immaterial form, without the degree of substance and reality which she added to ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... rather pleased at the humour—may I venture to qualify it as mordant?—of the suggestion. Even Barbara smiled. Of course, I was right. Let her fight it out ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... She was paying the price of yesterday's exaltation and her spirits had sunk down to nowhere. What a fool's paradise yesterday had been with its vision of her big self-sufficient husband coming to her for mothering because he had lost a law-suit! What a piece of mordant irony it was, that she should have found herself, after all her silly hopes, sobbing in his arms, while he comforted her for her bitter disappointment over not being able to comfort him! She had told the truth when she said he was the one, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... of satirical comedy, with a good deal of pathos in it, too. The line (691) [Greek: chaireis horon phos, patera d' ou chairein dokeis]; ("Thou lovest the light, thinkest thou thy father loves it not?") seems to me one of the most characteristic in Euripides. It has a peculiar mordant beauty in its absolutely simple language, and one cannot measure the intensity of feeling that may be behind it. Pheres shows great power of fight, yet one feels his age and physical weakness. See ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... 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 faculty ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... double line of windows on the second and the third stories peer the murky faces and towsled heads of some of the inmates. One of the latter spits his furthest into the yard—evidently with the intention of hitting myself: but all his efforts prove vain. Another one shouts with a mordant expletive: ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... (1733-1814) and others, Annalen des Krieges (Berlin, 1806). These brilliant but unorthodox works, distinguished by an open contempt of the Prussian system, cosmopolitanism hardly to be distinguished from high treason, and the mordant sarcasm of a disappointed man, brought upon Buelow the enmity of the official classes and of the government. He was arrested as insane, but medical examination proved him sane and he was then lodged as a prisoner ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... 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 ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... 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
... 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
... 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 road, and Amavia stabbed herself from excessive ...
— 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.
... wrong, as usual," returned the other. "It is the other way. Enjoyment is the universal solvent of all arguments. No reason can resist its mordant action. It will dissolve any philosophy not founded upon it and modelled out of its substance, as Aqua Regia will dissolve all metals, even to gold itself. Enjoyment? Enjoyment is the protest of reality ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... much less 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 superior or inferior ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... 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
... would only be 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 ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... 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 malgaja. Moroseness malgajeco. Morrow morgauxtago. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Christianity and even the potential productive force of modern society as to lead many to believe that something is radically wrong. Many are persuaded that Christianity as now organized and led is socially sterile; they have withdrawn themselves from the church; many of them have become its mordant critics; the more extreme of them have disowned religion as well as its organized form, and the violently radical would dethrone any conception of the Divine and take the word God out of our vocabulary. This extreme group has not for the most part associated itself with ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... an ugly, ill-tempered one enough very 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 a person once actually penetrated into ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... 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 exceptions, ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... a diplomatist! Why lug in Lawrence, who has inspired mordant jealousy and envy in the heart of his ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... the alizarins for reds was for application of styles, that is colors containing at once the mordant and the coloring matter and fixed upon the cloth by the action of steam. Good steam-reds were easily obtained by using receipts originally designed for extracts of madder (mixtures of alizarin and purpurin). On the other hand, the first attempts at dyeing red grounds and red pieces ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... past give it in places a strange air of tragedy. I challenge this grey old earth to produce a strip of country more beautiful, also more poignant and catastrophic in natural connotation, than the one which includes these cypresses of Monterey. Yet this same mordant area holds Point Lobos, a headland which displays in moss and lichens all the minute delicacy of a gleeful, elfin world. I challenge the earth to produce a region more beautiful, yet also more gay and debonair in natural connotation, than the one which enfolds San Francisco. For here the water ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... 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 more than one-eighth of weight of goods. ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... St. Helena attributed much of his success in the field to the fact that he was not hampered by governments at home. Every modern commander, down certainly to the present moment, must have envied him. Kinglake's mordant pen depicts with felicity and compression the men of Downing Street, who without military experience or definite political aim, thwarted, criticised, over- ruled, tormented, their much-enduring General. We have Aberdeen, ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... Fangle (a rich and whimsical widow) Emmeline. Caroline (a sprightly heiress) Charlotte. Jemima (Mrs. Fangle's waiting-maid) Bessy. Sir Mordant Idem (in love with Mrs. Fangle, and elderly, and hating anything new) Henry. Opal (nephew to Sir Mordant, and hating everything old, in love with Caroline, and wild for illuminatism) Sneyd. Count Babelhausen ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... 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 of a tapestry factory, may last ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... for the institution. This, at least, 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
... Can any expenditure be called excessive which enables us to hear Comrade Waller being mordant and ironical at the ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... 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 ...
— 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.
... 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 ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... 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 ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... 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 ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... be thought to have need of an 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 later book, "Here ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... 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
... 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. ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... in the grim Marius senior; in Southerne's The Loyal Brother (1682) Ismael, a villainous favourite; in Venice Preserved (1682) the lecherous Antonio; in the same year Banks caricatured him as a quite unhistorical Cardinal Wolsey, Virtue Betray'd; or, Anna Bullen; in Crowne's mordant City Politics (1683) the Podesta of a most un-Italian Naples; the following year Arius the heresiarch in Lee's Constantine the Great; in the operatic Albion and Albanius (1685), Dryden does not spare even physical infirmities ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... London from 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
... 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 ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... 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 the images they had made to them of Dryden, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... to see 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
... 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 a touch ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... achievements of Mark Twain, 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
... marriage: you can only undo the mischief with infinite woe. I know 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, ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... "pleasure," which is also the root of Rama-tea. Armamithres may then be compared with Rheomithres, Siromitras, and Sysimithres, which are respectively "fond of splendor," "fond of beauty," and "fond of light." Mandauces is perhaps "biting spirit—esprit mordant," from mand, "coeur, esprit," and dahaka, "biting." M Parsondas can scarcely be the original form, from the occurrence in it of the nasal before the dental. In the original it must have been Parsodas, which would mean "liberal, much giving," ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... 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
... Archie was so charmed with it—here Mattie, with a blush, deposited a neatly-sealed little packet in Nan's hand—that he had actually proposed that she should have another gown made after the same pattern for every-day wear. And he had taken her himself directly after breakfast down to Mordant's, and had chosen her this dress. He had never done such a thing before, even for Grace: so no wonder Mattie was in the seventh ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... and then slowly to raise the temperature in about one hour to the boiling point. With this precaution, level and thoroughly dyed goods are always obtained. If the wool is entered in a hot bath, or if it is rapidly brought to a boil, the dyestuff is too rapidly fixed by the mordant and is liable to run up unevenly, and, with piece-goods, more superficially. For the same reason the goods must always be well wetted out before ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... is no pretence of balancing that mordant saying with any decorous platitude of Christian Deism, we are led finally to the admission that Shakspere sounded a further depth of philosophy than Montaigne's unembittered "cosmopolitan view of things." Instead of reacting ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... 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 they were ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... disdain, and their habitual attitude toward what men believe in, and get into sweats about, and bellow for, is substantially the same, It takes twice as long to convert a body of women to some new fallacy as it takes to convert a body of men, and even then they halt, hesitate and are full of mordant criticisms. The women of Colorado had been voting for 21 years before they succumbed to prohibition sufficiently to allow the man voters of the state to adopt it; their own majority voice was against it to the end. During the interval ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... 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 ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... tragic mood or 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. ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dark ages of the past. The truth is that the spiritual 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 for peace has been born which will prove stronger than all the passion ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... 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 Book. It is still a debatable proposition whether ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... 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 with the ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... is true that he says, "All the passions are nothing but divers degrees of heat or cold in the blood." It is true that he says, "All men naturally hate one another," and again, "Our virtues are mostly vices in disguise." Yet again, he defines the subject of his mordant volume in terms which seem to exclude all bountiful theories concerning the disinterested instincts of the human soul, for he says "Amour-propre is the love of one's self and of all things for one's self; it turns men into their own idolators, and, if fortune gives them ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... proclaimed to the world (of California) that she was "great," "a genius," the legitimate successor of Ambrose Bierce, whom she remotely resembled, and Bret Harte, whom she did not resemble at all. This they would have done if only to prove that California no longer "knocked" as in the mordant nineties, nor waited for the anile East to set the seal of its dry approval before discovering that a new volcano was sending forth its fiery swords ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... its mordant fang, and knew that its ravages, though only just begun, would last his lifetime. Nothing could stop them now, nothing, nothing. And he laughed, as the thought went home; laughed at the irony of fate and its inexorableness; laughed at his own defeat and his nearness to a barred Paradise. ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... water, this fluid soon acquired a deep blue color with a greenish tinge; upon boiling and immersing a piece of calico on which the mordants of iron and alumina had been printed, it was dyed a sea green color of greater or less intensity according to the strength of the mordant—the portions not coated ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... 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 and glorious! Oh, herbaceous ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... 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 ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... 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 ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... speech. How he could bite in a picture, an ugly, ill-tempered one enough very 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 a person once ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... information about Gil 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 Latin instead ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... although they vary a good deal in detail. Generally speaking, the Turkoman takes the greatest care to have his work perfectly done. In order to give fixity to the color the dyer steeps the wool in a mordant of alum and water. The dye is almost invariably brought from Bokhara. At Ashkabad the Turkomans dye the wool themselves when it is intended to be yellow, but when any other shade is desired it is sent to the city to be dyed. Camel's hair is largely used in ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... away 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 ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... 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 ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
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