"Mordant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... sharp, cutting, sarcastic, caustic, scathing, bitter, satirical, pungent, piquant; nipping, blasting; erosive, corrosive, acrid, mordant. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... 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
... had many years ago 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 answer ran ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... 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
... 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 twenty years—but twenty ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... 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
... the natural coloring matters, these "mordant dyes," as they may be conveniently termed, are much more numerous than the "direct dyes;" but be it observed, we have fast and fugitive ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 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 ...
— Dickory Cronke - The Dumb Philosopher, or, Great Britain's Wonder • Daniel Defoe
... 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
... weak face was flushed; he was, as an old clubman had recently said of him, "so very young." He lacked the restraint usual in cultured Englishmen, and had the frankly passionate manner which one associates with the South. His uncle, Colonel Deacon, a mordant ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... 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 and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... 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 |
