"Mercurial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... jet, * And spots of nut brown musk on rosy side face blew:[FN314] Mars tinctured either cheek with tinct of martial red; * Sagittal shots from eyelids Sagittarius threw: Dowered him Mercury with bright mercurial wit; * Bore off the Bear[FN315] what all man's evil glances grew: Amazed stood Astrophil to sight the marvel birth * When louted low the Moon at ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... Jerry's mercurial spirits were mounting now. The past few minutes had given him two beautiful subjects for poetry. He could make some four-lined verses, he thought, about the tree that was a bride in spring and the next winter robed for burial. He could ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... by these happy methods, it is stubborn and litigious. Abeunt studia in mores. This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff the approach of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of the sonnets, we may so far adopt Mr. Fleay's remarkable theory[147] as to surmise that the central episode of faithless love occurred about 1594. If so, here was enough to deepen and impassion the plastic personality of the rhymer of VENUS AND ADONIS; to add a new string to the heretofore Mercurial lyre. All the while, too, he was undergoing the kind of culture and of psychological training involved in his craft of acting—a culture involving a good deal of contact with the imaginative literature of the ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... her use, said her evening prayers, looked under the bed—a precaution taken ever since the night upon which she had discovered the burglars—and, finding all right, she blew out her candle and lay down. She could not sleep—many persons of nervous or mercurial temperaments cannot do so the first night in a strange bed. Cap was very mercurial, and the bed and room in which she lay were very strange; for the first time since she had had a home to call her own she was ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... cricket-time in his earlier life, and how long this attached to the physical delights of his being cannot be told here. His eyes were lodged too far in heaven to have kept the delights for long, to have comprehended all that clogged his impatiently mercurial feet. ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... Procter together. I remember a day in the summer of 1859 when Procter had a party of friends at dinner to meet Hawthorne, who was then on a brief visit to London. Among the guests were the Countess of ——, Kinglake, the author of "Eothen," Charles Sumner, then on his way to Paris, and Leigh Hunt, the mercurial qualities of whose blood were even then perceptible ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... characteristics of their ancient stock, rather than imitate a people so alien to them in blood, in character, and in antecedents. Those meaningless social courtesies which sit well enough upon the gay, volatile, mercurial Frenchman, seem absurd affectations when practiced by the tall, grave, sedate Scandinavian. The intelligent Swedes feel this, but they are powerless to make headway against the influence of a court ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... him was named Terro; he thought, by some peculiar train of reasoning, that he could cure him by applying a mercurial ointment to the chest, to which no one raised any objection. The rapid effect of the remedy delighted the two friends, but it frightened me, for in less than twenty-four hours the patient was labouring under great excitement of the brain. The physician ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... yah!" said the mercurial Berry. "Wal now, ain't dat cool? H'yer he axes me ter come ter his house jest ez soon ez ever Marse Granville routs us offen his plantation, an' ez soon's ever we comes he wants ter know what it means! How's dat fer cousinin', eh? Now don't yer cry, Sally Ann. Jes yer wait ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... to civilize mankind and cheer them in their wintry desolation; that comfortable inmate, whose smile, during eight months of the year, was our sufficient consolation for summer's lingering advance and early flight? Alas! blindly inhospitable, grudging the food that kept him cheery and mercurial, we have thrust him into an iron prison, and compel him to smoulder away his life on a daily pittance which once would have been too scanty for his breakfast. Without a metaphor, we now make our fire in an air-tight stove, and supply it with some half a dozen ...
— Fire Worship (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The speaker, a mercurial youth of two and twenty, was one of a group of young people assembled, some on horseback, some in yellow buckboards, in front of ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... as soon as he can from one another. The idleness and irregularity of children in school often depends more on accidental circumstances than on character. Two boys may be individually harmless and well-disposed, and yet they may be of so mercurial a temperament that, together, the temptation to continual play will be irresistible. Another case that more often happens is where one is actively and even intentionally bad, and is seated next to an innocent, but perhaps thoughtless ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... I.G.'s arrival Gordon's fit of gloom, brought on by the affair of the Wangs, was dissipating; within two it was gone, for a character of such violent "downs" must have equally mercurial "ups"; within three he capitulated to argument and agreed to go back to Soochow and see Li. Impulsive and generous as ever, he then wished that Hart should say he (Hart) had induced him to come to Li. "That will give you immense influence with the Chinese," ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... mercury, arsenic, and even strychnine, are the subjects of several patents. A mixture of coal tar and mercurial ointment ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... best pantomimic farces ever seen' on the English boards at any rate, was produced with great success at the Duke's Theatre, Dorset Garden, in 1687. The character of Scaramouch was admirably suited to Tony Leigh, a low comedian 'of the mercurial kind', who 'in humour ... loved to take a full career', whilst Tom Jevon, young, slim and most graceful of dancers, proved the King of all Harlequins, past, present and to come. Lee and Jevon also acted the parts of Scaramouch and Harlequin in Mountford's three act extravaganza, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... the democracy was thought to be. In some countries the notion was carried still farther by an insistence upon frequent changes in the fundamental law or in the actual form of government, not so much to meet imperative needs as to satisfy a zest for experimentation or to suit the whims of mercurial temperaments. The congresses, constituent assemblies, and the like, which drew these instruments, were supposed to be faithful reproductions of similar bodies abroad and to represent the popular ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... mercurial gauge must be affixed to the machine, showing the steam pressure above forty-five pounds per ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... descend toward the surface of the sea, thus necessitating periodic visits to the pilot-house to renew the vacuum. This set the professor's brain to work, and by nightfall he succeeded— with the aid of a second barometer having a small piece of highly magnetised steel floating on the top of the mercurial column, and a couple of magnetised steel bars—in constructing a somewhat rude but thoroughly efficient apparatus for automatically maintaining the ship at any desired height, unaffected by the movements, be they few or many, of those ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... on the disease, roseola appeared. The syphilis was very obstinate in this patient, compelling me to keep him under the influence of mercury for a long time. In October 1873, the patient presented himself with a very aggravated mercurial stomatitis. The customary remedies, internal as well as external, made little or no impression on the affection. On November 11th, I discontinued all other treatment, and ordered a course of galvanic baths. He took his first ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... that many of the companies were assembled and ready to file out of the company streets before the order reached them. We marched by the moonlight into the space between the belligerent regiments; but Lytle had already got his own men under control, and the less mercurial Thirteenth were not disposed to be aggressive, so that we were soon dismissed with a compliment for our promptness. I ordered the colonels to march the regiments back to the camps separately, and with my staff rode through that of the Thirteenth, ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... nation cannot succumb under the final crises, but must go forth from it, born again, rejuvenated, we can but rejoice over everything which accelerates the course of the disease. And to this the Irish immigration further contributes by reason of the passionate, mercurial Irish temperament, which it imports into England and into the English working-class. The Irish and English are to each other much as the French and the Germans; and the mixing of the more facile, excitable, fiery Irish temperament with the stable, reasoning, persevering English must, in the ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... board upward of seven hundred, comprising a variety of tongues and nations. The bustle and turmoil incident to getting off and being properly domiciled; the confusion of tongues and peculiarity of temperament resembled the Babel of old. Here the mercurial Son of France in search of a case of red wine, hot and impulsive, belching forth "sacres" with a velocity well sustained. The phlegmatic German stirred to excitability in quest of a "small cask of lager and large ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... careful memory and quick powers of combination and calculation. No caffe in Rome or Marseilles would be complete without its little black and white counters; and as it interests at once the most mercurial and fidgety of people and the laziest and languidest, it must have some hidden charm as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... we pass to the previsions constituting what is commonly known as science—that an eclipse of the moon will happen at a specified time; and when a barometer is taken to the top of a mountain of known height, the mercurial column will descend a stated number of inches; that the poles of a galvanic battery immersed in water will give off, the one an inflammable and the other an inflaming gas, in definite ratio—we perceive ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... thorough proficiency in all classical and literary studies, the result of old-world method and application. Mentally and physically they were splendid men. The whole race of Flemings and Dutch was found by our young recruits to be a grave and powerful people, although exceptional cases of mercurial temperament were not rare. Some curious individuals were to be found among them, as is more the case in European nationalities in general than in our own. Both Americans were much liked and respected by all their new-found brethren, ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... thing to rejoice in spite of the world; it is an infinitely better thing to rejoice in company with it. With solitude and freedom, the alarm, the disgust receded, and as he went forward the exultation grew, until once again his mercurial spirits lifted ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... should have gone on to the study of Herodotus. And I described to her the situation of the vivacious and mercurial Athenian, in the early period of Pericles, as repeating in its main features, for the great advantage of that Grecian Froissart, the situation of Adam during his earliest hours in Paradise, himself being the describer to the affable archangel. The ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... and mercurial matter, of which a Lady's blush is made, after coursing from its natural position, the cheek, to the tip of the elbow, and thence diverging for a time to the knee, has finally settled in ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... contrary, Mr. Jeffrey is profuse of his encomiums and admiration of others, but still with a certain reservation of a right to differ or to blame. He cannot rest on one side of a question: he is obliged by a mercurial habit and disposition to vary his point of view. If he is ever tedious, it is from an excess of liveliness: he oppresses from a sense of airy lightness. He is always setting out on a fresh scent: there are always relays of topics; ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... they did; and the effect of their shots was instantly apparent, from the excessive yelping that greeted their ears, and satisfied them that some, at least, of their annoyers had got something to remember; while they were gratified to listen to the fast receding sounds of these "mercurial inhabitants of the plain." The dogs quickly "made themselves scarce," nor did they afterwards attempt to reduce the distance they had placed between themselves and the travellers; who, upon the establishment of quiet, and after supplying fresh material to their fire, nestled themselves in their ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... are rich in health, in constant cheerfulness, in a mercurial temperament which floats them over troubles and trials enough to sink a shipload of ordinary men. Others are rich in disposition, family, and friends. There are some men so amiable that everybody loves them; some so cheerful that they ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... girl whose amused pity he had awakened might be there again. He found California Street quickly, and in a few moments he stood before No. 85. He was a little disturbed to find it a rather large building, and that it bore the inscription "Bank." Then came the usual shock to his mercurial temperament, and for the first time he began to consider the absurd hopelessness ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the Conference, Wilson seems to have fallen under the spell of Lloyd George to some extent, who showed himself quite as liberal as the President in many instances. But Wilson was clearly troubled by the Welshman's mercurial policy, and before he finally left for America, found relief in the solid consistency of Clemenceau. He always knew where the French Premier stood, no matter how much he might differ from him in ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... who had taken his usual lolling attitude in the most comfortable chair he could find, while his more mercurial friend kept pacing the room, now raised his head in surprise, following the quick motions of the other, with his eyes, as if he doubted whether he had rightly heard ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... which the colleges and their clique seek to establish, Priessnitz could never have introduced hydropathy, Pasteur could not have inoculated for hydrophobia without danger of imprisonment, and the great American Medical Reformation, which abolished the lancet and mercurial practice, and which is now represented by seven colleges, would have been strangled at its birth, for its primitive origin was outside of college authority. There are other great ideas, great discoveries, great reforms, not yet strong enough ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... is that both reports were true. There were two Mr. Blaines, as there are two of every mercurial temperament. Of the phlegmatic, slow-pulsed man there is only one. You see him once and you see him as he always is. Not so with the nervous organisation. He has as many moods as the weather, as many changes as the sky. He is bright or dull, serene or tempestuous, cold or hot, up or down, January ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... of the two was a man of middle age, but whom the wear and tear of active life had evidently advanced towards the state called elderly. But there was still abundant life in his quick, dark eye; and that mercurial youthfulness of character which in some happy constitutions seems to defy years and sorrow, evinced itself in a rapid play of countenance and as much gesticulation as the narrow confines of the vehicle and the position of a traveller will permit. The younger ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is!" she differed. "It is true he does not show any inclination for the company of young ladies, but he is very much a lady's man all the same. There isn't a young lady in this hall but would be proud to have the honour of Jim Langford's company and companionship at any time. He is of that deep, mercurial disposition that attracts women. It is good for Jim Langford that he does not know his own power," she said, nodding her ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... affect human life is not easy to disprove even now, to any one who is determined to maintain the possibility of it; but under the training of modern science scarcely any one retains such a belief. Of the influence formerly attributed to the planets, traces survive in such epithets as mercurial, jovial, saturnine. Comets appearing in the sky caused widespread alarm, and any disasters that followed close were confidently connected with them. The most learned scientists observed the stars and cast horoscopes: ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... quantities, appears to affect time, much as acids affect some metals, curiously changing its substance, until dates seem to melt into a mercurial form that renders them elusive even to the eye ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... almost weeping. He turned at the sound of her hurrying steps, puzzled by the pursuit and on his guard against her influence. He was suspicious of her intentions now, and waited for her to explain the meaning of this mercurial change. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... Huron, became a dealer in grain and feed, and gave attention to that business for many years. But he was also active in the lumber industry in the Saginaw district and several other things. It was difficult for a man of such mercurial, restless temperament to stay constant to any one occupation; in fact, had he been less visionary he would have been more prosperous, but might not have had a son so gifted with insight and imagination. One instance of the optimistic vagaries ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... in the dead of winter, the battle and the breeze, bearing in his hand the Charter of Independence, which he had contributed to form, and tendering, from the self-created nation to the mightiest monarchs of Europe, the olive-branch of peace, the mercurial wand of commerce, and the amulet of protection and safety to the man of peace, on the pathless ocean, from the inexorable cruelty and ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... pavement, and adjusting his cloak more carefully about his face, and crushing his hat down over his eyes, he set off at a quick pace in an opposite direction to that part of the street where I was standing. I confess I felt ashamed of the espionage in which I was occupied, and although I followed my mercurial fiend at a safe distance, for the distinct purpose of earthing him wherever he was going, I by no means liked the office which a sort of fatality had forced upon me. But I was somewhat reconciled to it by a secret ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... young. He was tall and sinewy, but slender, for these Venetians are rarely massive in their strength. Each limb is equally developed by the exercise of rowing upright, bending all the muscles to their stroke. Their bodies are elastically supple, with free sway from the hips and a mercurial poise upon the ankle. Stefano showed these qualities almost in exaggeration. The type in him was refined to its artistic perfection. Moreover, he was rarely in repose, but moved with a singular brusque grace. A black broad-brimmed hat was thrown back upon his matted ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... he met with fractious opposition from Bristol. It is difficult to find a consistent clue to all the windings of policy devised by that mercurial brain, and to guess at the objects which inspired him. The Bill was easily passed by the House of Commons, where some opposition might have been expected. In the House of Lords its passage was less easy. Those ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... the race, and he is ruthlessly bereaved of his honor and his glory gone. The idols of yesterday are the broken statues of today; the heroes of yesterday are the "have-beens" of today. So capricious, so ephemeral, so mutable, so mercurial, so impermanent are the whims of humanity, and so unstable its ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... 1796 Wolfe Tone proceeded to Paris to arrange for the despatch of a French auxiliary corps. On 20th April General Clarke, head of the Topographical Bureau at the War Office, agreed to send 10,000 men and 20,000 stand of arms. The mercurial Irishman encountered endless delays, and was often a prey to melancholy; but the news of Bonaparte's victories in Italy led him to picture the triumph of the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... f. Jovial f. Natural f. Mercurial f. Celestial f. Lunatic f. Erratic f. Ducal f. Eccentric f. Common f. Aethereal and Junonian f. Lordly f. Arctic f. Palatine f. Heroic f. Principal f. Genial f. Pretorian f. Inconstant f. Elected f. Earthly f. Courtly f. Salacious and sporting f. Primipilary ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... theory that any boy, if rightly trained, can be made into a gentleman. He chooses a boy from the workhouse, with a bad reputation but with excellent instincts, and adopts him, the story narrating the adventures of the mercurial lad. The restless boyish nature, with its inevitable tendency to get into scrapes, is sympathetically and ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... scale is constructed, the correctness of which is easily verified by transferring the spiral heater into an air bath or oil of high boiling point, and then comparing the readings of the pyrometer scale with those of a mercurial thermometer placed alongside of the spiral heater. By this means it can be clearly demonstrated that, up to the highest point to which it is safe to use a mercurial thermometer, the readings of the pyrometer scale and that of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... count!" exclaimed the mercurial Trenta, in a delighted tone. (He was ready to forgive all the count's transgressions, in the fervor of the moment.) "That is how I love to hear you talk. Now you do yourself justice. Gesu mio! how ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... satisfaction, we turn to contemplate the character of a true-hearted and undaunted Southern patriot, Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee. Coming as he did from a section in which secessionism predominates, and representing a mercurial and sensitive people, he stood out fearlessly and zealously in behalf of the maintenance of the Union at all hazards. He is an admirable example of the self-made man, having received no education in his youth, and owing to the application of maturer ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... be a sign some twenty feet high and a whole block long. Emblazoned upon its broad surface was "Higbee's Hams." At one end and towering another ten feet or so above the mammoth letters was a white-capped and aproned chef abandoning his mercurial French temperament to an utter frenzy of delight over a "Higbee's Ham" which had apparently just been vouchsafed to him by an ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... had these two men for one another. Their mental climates suited; they were akin, yet had strong differences. Perhaps in the quickness of their mutual attraction Frenchman recognised Frenchman. But Ainger was the French Huguenot and du Maurier the French sceptic. Both had mercurial perceptions, and exercised them on much the same objects. Both were wits and humorists, but Ainger was more of a wit than a humorist, and du Maurier was more of a humorist than a wit. Both were men of ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... that the animals, too, bear this polarity as a formative element. The birds represent the spherical (dry, saline) pole; the ruminants the linear (moist, sulphurous) pole. The carnivorous quadrupeds form the intermediary (mercurial) group. As ur-phenomenal types we may name among the birds the eagle, clothed in its dry, silicic plumage, hovering with far-spread wings in the heights of the atmosphere, united with the expanses of space ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... a deer, he never could succeed in knocking over, that is to say the real animals. Clods of earth and tufts of grass which his imagination conjured into game he could sometimes hit, but no living animal would ever be likely to approach near him, for his quick restless movements and mercurial gestures were a standing impediment to any game ever coming within shot of him unless actually driven close past his "stand," and then his excitement either made him fire too soon or else miss. Nevertheless, he enjoyed these sporting excursions, ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... is lost in a band of pure white. Beyond this a protecting influence is powerfully exerted; and notwithstanding the action of the dispersed light, which is very evident over the plate, a line is left, perfectly free from mercurial vapor, and which, consequently, when viewed by a side light, appears quite dark. The green rays are represented by a line of a corresponding tint, considerably less in size than the luminous green rays. The yellow rays ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... three years four months, brought to me labouring under Hooping-cough, with Meningitis, which latter terminated in effusion. Calomel was then given every two hours, the stronger mercurial ointment rubbed upon the temples, and blisters applied to the head. The mercurial influence being established, a profuse discharge of urine occurred; the pupils which had previously been permanently dilated, became once more obedient to light; sensibility ...
— Remarks on the Subject of Lactation • Edward Morton
... the Chinaman, and Kerry stood out in the darkness of the dismal, brick-walled street, feeling something as nearly akin to dejection as was possible in one of his mercurial spirit. Something trickled upon the brim of his hat, and, raising his head, Kerry detected rain upon his upturned face. He breathed a prayer of thankfulness. This would put ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... sure," Julien interposed, setting down his glass. "The politics of Paris are the politics of France, and the spirit of the Parisian is essentially mercurial. Besides, the days of the great alliance draw nearer—the next step forward after the arbitration treaty. Who can doubt that when that is completed, France will embrace the ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... confute a friendly objector decides to select from the workhouse a boy to experiment with. He chooses a boy with a bad reputation but with excellent instincts, and adopts him, the story narrating the adventures of the mercurial lad who thus finds himself suddenly lifted several degrees in the social scale. The idea is novel and handled with Mr. Manville Fenn's accustomed cleverness, the restless boyish nature, with its inevitable tendency to get into scrapes, being sympathetically ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... mercurial companion; "he knows on which side his bread is buttered, and I warrant you has not lived so long among Englishmen, and by Englishmen, to quarrel with us for bearing an English mind. But see, our Scot ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... this disorder, have, in several instances, fallen victims to it's fury. Within this few days, a Dr. Rush has discovered this disorder is not the yellow fever of the West Indies and has applied an opposite mode of cure by copious bleedings, mercurial medicines, &c. with some success. What is truly extraordinary, the infection does ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... around her. But she had to think of Dr. and Mrs. Capes, in whose house she was, and talk civilly to them of their improvements(!). She had to emulate the submission of Dora, who had seen the transfer coming and taken part in it. She had to copy the mercurial spirits of Rose and May. They were so pleased to be with their father and mother again, and to take possession of Phyllis Carey's every free moment, that they declared the Robarts's apartments were the very nicest the girls had ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... spite also of the fact that he was short and very slight, while his brothers were both of them over six feet and broadly built men, there could be no doubt that, as soon as he entered, Coryston held the stage. He was one of the mercurial men who exist in order to keep the human tide in movement. Their opinions matter principally because without them the opinions of other men would not exist. Their function is to provoke. And from the time he was ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of mercurial and lustily cheering boys was my friend Andrew, and a little farther on, lo! the knight himself. A motor cap was jammed on his warm curls, and a football guernsey displayed the proportions of his broad chest as his Chesterfield ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... over the sun's surface or during an eclipse. It has even been named Vulcan. These announcements would have received little attention but for the fact that the motion of Mercury has irregularities which have not been accounted for by known planets; and Le Verrier[3] has stated that an intra-Mercurial planet or ring of asteroids would account for the unexplained part of the motion of the line of apses of Mercury's orbit amounting to 38" ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... natural laziness, which rendered jumping about like a jack- in-the-box impossible, Hugh Mathison preferred to stand on the defensive; while his lighter opponent, giving way to the natural bent of his mercurial temperament and corporeal predilections, comported himself in a manner that cannot be likened to anything mortal or immortal, human or inhuman, unless it be to an insane cat, whose veins ran wild-fire instead of blood. Or perhaps we might liken him to that ingenious ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... such severe penalties should be visited on a woman, for a first and only indiscretion in the suffrage line, when a man may rise up on election morning and go forth, voting and to vote. If he be of an excitable and mercurial nature, one of the sort of citizens which sweet Ireland empties on us by the county, he may sportively flit about among the polls, from ward to ward, of the metropolis, and no man says to him nay; he may even travel hilariously from city to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... its unusual visitors, the whole adventure ending in the happiest laughter over the expulsion of the dramatist. I may not have any right to say so, but I throw myself on the mercy of my hearers: I remember nothing in any chronicle so mercurial or jovial in its high spirits as this story of the first encounter and the beginning of friendship between Charles ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... composed principally of Scandinavians—fair-haired, blue-eyed Swedes, Norwegians afflicted with the temperamental melancholy of their race, stolid Russian Finns, and a slight sprinkling of Americans and English. It was noted that there was nothing mercurial and flyaway about them. They seemed weighty men, oppressed by a sad and stolid bovine-sort of integrity. A sober seriousness and enormous certitude characterized all of them. They appeared men without nerves and without fear, as though upheld by some overwhelming power or carried in ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... routine has been changed in the house. Jack will march away and never see a tear in my eye or feel my pulse tremble. It is not in our Northern blood to give much expression to sentiment, but we feel none the less deeply—much more deeply, I think, than you exuberant Southerners; you are impulsive, mercurial, and fickle." ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... attached to Tapton Everard, and such the story which the lively Caroline Ingoldsby detailed to her equally mercurial cousin, Charles Seaforth, lieutenant in the Hon. East India Company's second regiment of Bombay Fencibles, as arm-in-arm they promenaded a gallery decked with some dozen grim-looking ancestral portraits, and, among others, with that of the redoubted Sir Giles himself. The gallant ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... itself. The second consisted in the bad condition in which they were brought to the islands, and the methods of preparing them for sale. They arrived frequently in a sickly and disordered state, and then they were made up for the market by the application of astringents, washes, mercurial ointments, and repelling drugs, so that their wounds and diseases might be hid. These artifices were not only fraudulent but fatal: but these, it was obvious, would of themselves fall with the trade. A third was, excessive ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... in the discoloured mantle spangled all over, is Euphantaste, a well-conceited Wittiness, and employed in honouring the court with the riches of her pure invention. Her device, upon a Petasus, or Mercurial hat, a crescent; The word; "sic laus ingenii"; inferring that the praise and glory of wit doth ever increase, as doth ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... wit were frequent, slight surprises; his was a slender dart, and rebounded easily to the hand. I like the scintillating, arrowy wit far better than broad, genial humor. The light metallic touch pleases me. When wit appears as fun and jollity, she wears a little of the Silenus air;—the Mercurial is what ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... exceed in words the number of letters in their alphabet, which consists only in two-and-twenty. But indeed few of them extend even to that length. They are expressed in the most plain and simple terms, wherein those people are not mercurial[81] enough to discover above one interpretation; and to write a comment upon any law is a capital crime. As to the decision of civil causes, or proceedings against criminals, their precedents are so few, that they have little reason to boast of any ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... obtained by remaining so long amidst such quantities of it. Then a siesta, and after drove to dine with our kind friends who procured permits for our admission to the "Fabrica del Tobago." After dinner to spend the evening with a Spanish family related to our mercurial friend, Don Caesar de Bazan. Had dancing, polkas and mazourkas being especial favorites; singing also, and music from La Norma and Sonnambula, exquisitely performed. At eleven o'clock were forced to tear ourselves away from ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... tedious torture long remembered as the "hot Sunday," the science-predicted period of returning glaciers and polar snows where palms and lemons now hold sway, seemed even more distant than the epoch suggested by the speculative. In proportion to the elevation of the mercurial vein which mounted to and poisoned itself at 100 degrees, the religious, the devotional, pulse sank lower, almost to zero; consequently, although circumstances of unusual interest attracted the congregation ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... and often conducive to health. The two months of fog in London are often termed the suicidal months, because of the number of persons who destroy their own lives in those months. The people of Paris with their mercurial temperaments would never endure it for a long ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... in town; but he dissembled well, with a show of whimsical exasperation because of this emergency that tore him so soon away from both Gosnold House and his other neighbour at table, a Mrs. Artemas—a spirited, mercurial creature, not over-handsome of face, but wonderfully smart in dress and gesture, superbly stayed and well aware of it; a dark, fine woman who recognised the rivalry latent in Sally's dark looks without dismay—as Sally conceded she ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... was the best "excuse for a glass" ever offered to an Englishman. He availed himself of it with even more than his accustomed freedom. But it cannot be said that the king's debauchery was ever approved of even in London. Both the mercurial Pepys and the grave Evelyn alike deplore it. The misfortune clearly attributable to the king's return was the substitution of a corrupt, inefficient, and unpatriotic administration for the old-fashioned servants of the public whom Cromwell ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... observing a planet have therefore completely failed. We are compelled to resort to extraordinary methods if we would seek to settle the great question as to the existence of the intra-Mercurial planets. There are at least two lines of observation which might be expected ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... on one such, and in such measure, as upon that simple, truthful, noble soul, our faithful and sainted Lincoln. Never rising to the enthusiasm of more impassioned natures in hours of hope, and never sinking with the mercurial, in hours of defeat, to the depths of despondency, he held on with immovable patience and fortitude, putting caution against hope, that it might not be premature, and hope against caution that it might not ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... calico mare both gallops and trots While whisking you off to Bumpville; She paces, she shies, and she stumbles, in spots, In the tortuous road to Bumpville; And sometimes this strangely mercurial steed Will suddenly stop and refuse to proceed, Which, all will admit, is vexatious indeed, When one ...
— Love-Songs of Childhood • Eugene Field
... constitutional melancholy, perhaps from the depression which is natural to a desolate and deprived man, in whose ear mirth is marred, like a pleasant air when performed on a mistuned instrument. But though neither my thoughts nor temperament are Jovial or Mercurial, it becomes me to be grateful to Heaven for the good He has sent me by the means of your ladyship. David, the man after God's own heart, did wash and eat bread when his beloved child was removed—mine is restored to ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... young man, whose mercurial temperament no trouble could repress, had gone away in excellent spirits, leaving her an address where she could always find him, and give him regular news of his aunts, though he made her promise to give them, as yet, no tidings in return, Elizabeth sat still, watching the sun ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... was the first to distinguish between the two branches, and they flourished side by side till Newton's day. Hence the many astrological terms in our tongue, e.g. consider, contemplate, disaster, jovial, mercurial, saturnine, etc. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... "Yes, he's mercurial in all his movements. Laura, we must get out of this. There happens to be something else in the world for me to do than to sit around and ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... aesthetic subtilty of the Greek, the legal breadth and sensual recklessness of the Roman, the martial frenzy of the Goth, the chivalric and dark pride of the Spaniard, the treacherous blood of the Italian, the mercurial vanity of the Frenchman, the blunt ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... in "Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre" arepresentative of Sterne's humor, and he finds in Mittler in the "Wahlverwandtschaften" aunion of seriousness and the comic of caricature, reminiscent of Sterne and Hippel. Friedrich is mercurial, petulant, utterly irresponsible, acreature of mirth and laughter, subject to unreasoning fits of passion. One might, in thinking of another character in fiction, designate Friedrich as faun-like. In all of this one can, however, find little if any demonstrable likeness to Sterne ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... after sunset, it is by no means an easy object to observe on account of the mists which usually hang about low down near the earth. One opportunity, however, offers itself from time to time to solve the riddle of an "intra-Mercurial" planet, that is to say, of a planet which circulates within the path followed by Mercury. The opportunity in question is furnished by a total eclipse of the sun; for when, during an eclipse of that kind, the body of ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... somersaults, lean over my shoulders as I write, bring me puzzles, and shriek and turn head over heels when I can't find them out, and jump on Mr. Maxwell's shoulders begging for dollars. I like them very much, for, though they are so restless and mercurial, they are neither rude nor troublesome. They have kept the house alive with their antics, but they are just starting on my elephants for Kwala Kangsa, on a visit to the Regent. I wonder what will become of them? Their father is an exile in the Seychelles, and though it was once thought ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... that many of the more substantial and far-seeing citizens, if they dared freely to express their opinions, would be found to favor the restoration of the city's ancient autonomy under the aegis of the League of Nations. The Italians of Flume are at bottom, beneath their excitable and mercurial temperaments, a shrewd business people who have the commercial future of their city at heart. And they are intelligent enough to realize that, unless there be established some stable form of government which will propitiate the Slav minority as well as the Italian majority, the Slav ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... reached; and the secondary objects were-(1) to determine the temperature of the dew-point by Daniell's and Regnault's hygrometers, as well as by the dry and wet bulb thermometers, and to compare the results; (2) to compare the readings of an aneroid barometer with those of a mercurial barometer up to the height of 5 m.; (3) to determine the electrical state of the air, (4) the oxygenic condition of the atmosphere, and (5) the time of vibration of a magnet; (6) to collect air at different ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... heat. But one observer now made another experiment, which seemed to go entirely the other way, and puzzled him altogether. He took some of this boiled infusion that I have been speaking of, and by the use of a mercurial bath—a kind of trough used in laboratories—he deftly inverted a vessel containing the infusion into the mercury, so that the latter reached a little beyond the level of the mouth of the inverted vessel. You see that he thus had a quantity of the infusion shut off ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the gloom that besets weaker natures in time of trouble. Alas for him, it was far otherwise with his companions. The impressionable young Gourgaud, the thought-wrinkled Las Cases, the bright pleasure-loving Montholons, the gloomy Grand Marshal, Bertrand, and his mercurial consort, over whose face there often passed "a gleam of distraction"—these were not fashioned for a life of adversity. Thence came the long spells of ennui, broken by flashes of temper, that marked the voyage and the sojourn at ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... chief or army can be kept six months quiet,—another, and a totally different one. That they must either be fighting somebody or going somewhere, else, their life isn't worth living to them; the activity and mercurial flashing and flickering hither and thither, which in the soul of it is set neither on war nor rapine, but only on change of place, mood—tense, and tension;—which never needs to see its spurs in the dish, but has them always ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... permanent never is writ In blood of the passions: mercurial they, Shifty their issue: stir not that pit To the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith |
