"Acerbity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... though it constantly reviles us for our human infirmities, and throws in our teeth the fact that being clergymen we are still no more then men, demands of us that we should do our work with godlike perfection. There is nothing godlike about us: we differ from each other with the acerbity common to man—we allow differences on subjects of divine origin to produce among us antipathies and enmities which are anything but divine. This is all true. But what would you have in place of it? There is no infallible head for ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... the following: "When old age actually came, something curious happened. Destiny, having waited patiently, played a queer trick upon Miss Nightingale. The benevolence and public spirit of that long life had only been equaled by its acerbity. Her virtue had dwelt in hardness, and she had poured forth her unstinted usefulness with a bitter smile upon her lips. And now the sacredness of years brought the proud woman her punishment. She was not to die as ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... mysterious instinct to their neighbor, Nelly Woodridge. She also turned and caught his eye. But to all appearances she not only showed no signs of her usual agitation at his presence, but did not seem to even recognize him. In the acerbity of his pique he was for a moment gratified at what he believed to be the expression of her wounded pride, but his uneasiness quickly returned, and at the conclusion of the service he slipped out of the church with one or two of the more restless in the congregation. ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... kindred social intercourse? Dick, who was fond of his money, would not for a long time look at the matter in this light, but harassed his brother from time to time by applications which were quite useless, and which by the acerbity of their language altogether shut Mrs. Roby out from the good things which might have accrued to her from so distinguished a brother-in-law. But when it came to pass that Thomas Roby was confirmed in office by the coalition which has been mentioned, Mrs. Dick became very energetic. She went ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... days spent at Matching, the great Trumpeton Wood question was at last settled. During the summer considerable acerbity had been added to the matter by certain articles which had appeared in certain sporting papers, in which the new Duke of Omnium was accused of neglecting his duty to the county in which a portion of ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... announced themselves in feminine caligraphy, like a soft whisper, to be Raspberry, Gooseberry, Apricot, Plum, Damson, Apple, and Peach. The scene closing on these charmers, and the lower slide ascending, oranges were revealed, attended by a mighty japanned sugar-box, to temper their acerbity if unripe. Home-made biscuits waited at the Court of these Powers, accompanied by a goodly fragment of plum- cake, and various slender ladies' fingers, to be dipped into sweet wine and kissed. Lowest of all, a compact leaden-vault enshrined the sweet wine and a stock ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... kindly," the big man replied with some acerbity, and plunged out into the darkness and rain. Nor was that long-limbed drover-man ever again seen in the countryside. And the puppy's previous history—whether he was honestly come by or no, whether he was, indeed, of the famous Red McCulloch* ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... for an instructor in the Dresden Nachrichten. At its bureau he ran counter to a lot of ifs and ands at the hands of a surly young clerk. A German, naturally gruff, only needs a small position to increase his acerbity. His newspapers display, likewise, a disagreeable officiousness, being nearly always, to some extent, bureaucratic organs. They are lords, not servants, of the public. They do not appear to ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... at Suvla," said the M.L.O., with the acerbity of an overworked staff-officer. "They never were, and never will be ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... acerbity of Mr. Tyrrel's feelings, it is probable, however, he did some justice to his rival. He regarded him, indeed, with added dislike; but he no longer regarded him as a despicable foe. He avoided his encounter; he forbore to treat ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... breach of promise of marriage as defined by the Pennsylvania decisions. Edgington himself was apparently always from his office. Blodgett's call on Fuller and Cox was most unsatisfactory, Mr. Fuller with some acerbity disclaiming all knowledge of any such case as Scarlett versus Brassfield, and Mr. ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... with some acerbity. "Often, when saying my prayers, I have wished I could forget him, but I can't, so I have to go on being uncharitable and in sin,—if indeed sin it be to harden one's ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... ticklish subject to touch on with the Vidame: since the fact must be admitted that other antiquaries are not less firm in their convictions, nor less hot in presenting them, that the camp of the Roman general was variously elsewhere—and all of them, I regret to add, display a lamentable acerbity of temper in scouting each other's views. Indeed, the subject is of so irritating a complexion that the mere mention of it almost surely will throw my old friend—who in matters not antiquarian has a sweetness of nature rarely ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... did it then?" said Miss Trotter, with an acerbity which she put on to hide a vague, ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... no answering acerbity; the mention of his Attorney-General's name had set his blood humming with the thrill of the fight, and he wondered how it was that Fleetwood had not already been in to clasp hands with him over ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... every gentleman, who is friendly and attentive in perhaps merely a general way, in love with her. As in everything else, there are exceptions, here I only speak of generalities, and I trust not with acerbity. A very little of mutual effort, would bring about a great improvement in these matters. The young have great influence on the young, particularly in the formation of character, and well for those who ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... self-sufficiency, by men of equal ability and honesty. He is weary of wandering over the world, and of finding every petty race wedded to its own opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to be in error, and raising disputes whose violence, acerbity and virulence are in inverse ratio to the importance of the disputed matter. A peculiarly active and acute observation taught him that many of these jarring families, especially those of the same blood, are par in the intellectual processes of perception and reflection; that ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... decided to make her a closer companion. Bustling, keen, loquacious, tart, the good dame scolded servants and petty tradesmen with admirable effect; but even at this distance of time the sensitive ear is pained by her sharp, garrulous tongue, when its acerbity and virulence are turned against her pacific and scholarly husband. A smile follows the recollection that he endeavored to soften her manners and elevate her nature by a system of culture similar to that by which ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... place in the literary history of the times. It was at the coffee-house of Du Laurent that Saurin, La Motte, Danchet, Boindin, Rousseau, &c., met; but the mild streams of the aromatic berry could not mollify the acerbity of so many rivals, and the witty malignity of Rousseau gave birth to those famous couplets on all the coffee drinkers, which occasioned ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... in the tone of disdainful acerbity in which she always addressed the Irishman, Felicia was at work on the bust of the Nabob which she had just begun, adjusting her model, taking up and putting down the modelling tool, wiping her hands with a quick movement on the little sponge, while the light and peace of a lovely Sunday ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... well!" Fanny mocked him; and her suppressed vehemence betrayed a surprising acerbity. "See here, Georgie Minafer, I suggest that you just march straight on into your room and finish your dressing! Sometimes you say things that show you have a ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... Museum. The Rump Parliament, in an excess of Puritanic acerbity, had abolished the observance of Christmas, and forbidden the eating of puddings and pies, as savouring ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... lover at her side until she could see his nerves growing raw under the stress of his worry about herself and the temper which nature had made chivalric giving way to acerbity. Yes, Tollman was right—it required a sacrifice to save a wreck—and because he was right the sun grew dark and the future as black as the ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... returned to his place. Once there, he adjusted his gown, consulted a blank sheet of paper with some acerbity, and then addressed ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... reader of Philodemus' lectures. Philodemus, whether speaking of philosophy or music or poetry, always begins in the negative. He is not happy until he has soundly trounced his predecessors and opponents. The author of the Aetna has learned all too well this scholastic method, and his acerbity usually turns the reader away before he has reached the central theme. There is of course just a little of this tone left in the Georgics—Lucretius also has a touch of it—but the Aeneid ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... better appointment of the kind. Lockhart was a born critic: he had both the faculty and the will to work up the papers of his contributors to the proper level; he was firm and decided in his literary and political views, without going to the extreme Giffordian acerbity in both; and his intelligence and erudition were very wide. "He could write," says a phrase in some article I have somewhere seen quoted, "on any subject from poetry to dry-rot;" and there is no doubt that ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... the recollection, once introduced, generated the usual heat and irritation in her, for, as they neared the front door, she suddenly said, with an acerbity he had not heard ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... key." He locked the door and then turned toward Ernie, sudden comprehension in his face. "Oh, you told him I came over with you. That explains it." Ernie protested. He would have repeated the entire conversation that had taken place if the Colonel had not stopped him with considerable acerbity. ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... policy. He forfeited much of his influence at this time by his indiscriminate abuse of Northern men and Southern opponents, and his defiance of all the conditions of a restored Union. He could have served his people best by more conservative conduct, but he had all the roughness and acerbity of a reformer, dead in earnest. It was owing to his constant arraignment of illegal acts of the post-bellum regime that the people finally aroused, in 1870, and regained the State for white supremacy and ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... is a contemplation worthy of the most exalted soul whether its total abolition is or is not practicable." "A life devoted to" the emancipation problem "would be nobly spent or sacrificed." He talks with much acerbity of expression about the "slave-drivers," and the "flagrant image of human inconsistency" presented by men who had "the Declaration of Independence on their lips and the merciless scourge of slavery in their hands." "Never," he says, "since human sentiments ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... but with a noble principle of self-reliance and a disregard of foreign aid. Both had been irregular at college, Goldsmith, as we have shown, from the levity of his nature and his social and convivial habits; Johnson, from his acerbity and gloom. When, in after life, the latter heard himself spoken of as gay and frolicsome at college, because he had joined in some riotous excesses there, "Ah, sir!" replied he, "I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... Lutherand a certain Lord Chancellor, to whom you just now alluded; but if more courtesy is to be found in polemical writers, who are less sincere than either the one or the other, there is as much acerbity of feeling and as much bitterness of heart. You have a class of miscreants which had no existence in those days—the panders of the press, who live by administering to the vilest passions of the people, and encouraging their most dangerous errors, ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... and fruit-trees leads us thither from Foudai in half-an-hour. It is Sunday afternoon, and a fte day. Young and old in Sunday garb are keeping holiday, the lads and lasses waltzing, the children enjoying swings and peep-shows. No acerbity has lingered among these descendants of the austere parishioners of Oberlin. Here, as at Foudai, the entire population is Protestant. The church and parsonage lie at the back of the village, and we were warmly welcomed by the pastor and his wife, a great-great-granddaughter ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... others to intimidate the proprietors of Covent-Garden Theatre, and force them, to their loss and detriment, to lower their prices of admission. The rule was granted, and an early day fixed for the trial. In the mean time, these proceedings kept up the acerbity of the O. P.s, and every night at the fall of the curtain, three groans were given for John Kemble and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... commander to remedy. Yet with all these small blemishes Granger had many good qualities, and his big heart was so full of generous impulses and good motives as to far outbalance his short-comings; and not-withstanding the friction and occasional acerbity of our official intercourse, we maintained friendly ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 2 • P. H. Sheridan
... The very acerbity of my coming misery, through Miss Dodan's absence, fully realized by me, seemed now only to add a desperation of assumed indifference and gayety to all my actions. I argued against delay, and dwelt with excellent effect upon ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... corresponds in the mental order to conscience in the moral. As he deified Nature, so he emancipated man as forming with Nature an integral part of the supreme Being. He was led upon this path to combat Aristotle and to satirize Christian beliefs, with a subtlety of scholastic argumentation and an acerbity of rhetoric that now pass for antiquated. Much that is obsolete in his writings must be referred to the polemical necessities of an age enthralled by peripatetic conceptions, and saturated with the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... did the recipient understand it to 'mean? Did the writer make his meaning sufficiently clear? Was the recipient justified in his interpretation? Historians have discussed these problems as theologians have discussed puzzling texts of the New Testament, with not less acerbity and with no more conclusive results. Unquestionably the capacity to write two or three dozen consecutive words so as to constitute a plain, straightforward sentence would have been for the moment a ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... reasoning received a curious and apposite illustration. Three or four ladies near us began fainting, or affected to faint, and hartshorn and gentlemen's arms were in general requisition. Notwithstanding his acerbity, Caustic, like a preux chevalier, pressed forward to offer his aid where the pressure was most oppressive, and where the fainting ladies were dropping by dozens, like ripe fruit in autumn. As for myself, I was ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... the needle-end, not quite visible, but almost within reach of teeth, and suddenly went very white. In dismay, Noel put an arm round her, and turned her into a fine chemist's shop. Several ladies were in there, buying perfumes, and they looked with acerbity at this disordered dirty female entering among them. Noel went up to a man behind the counter. "Please give me something quick, for this poor woman, I think she's going to faint. She's run a needle through her hand, and can't ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... seemed content to abandon persiflage, satisfied that his average for acerbity was still high. "Besides," he said peaceably, "I'm all dressed up pretty now, and it doesn't look right for a respectable member of society to be pulling off second-story ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... by military traffic, had stiffened into black grease. Round a bend of the road we skidded alarmingly. Marigold has a theory that in summer time a shirt next the skin is the only wear for humans and square-tread tyres the only wear for motor-cars. With some acerbity I pointed out the futility of his proposition. With the blandness of superior wisdom he assured me that we were perfectly safe. You can't knock into the head of an artilleryman who has been trained to hang on to a limber by the friction of his trousers, that there can ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... religious antagonism had not added much to the acerbity of the conflict. Spain and Austria were the enemies of Lewis; Sweden and Denmark were his allies. Brandenburg accepted his gifts, in money, in jewels, in arras. England was his humble friend. But a change was ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... was not, as far as concerned the substantial person of the woman before him, who, however, seemed somewhat uneasy under his words as well as the demure scrutiny of Miss Jenkinson. "I thought you might have forgotten," she said with slight acerbity, "that you desired an interview with the ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... orator M. Perier was energetic and impassioned: the natural warmth of his temper, added to the irritability produced by illness, frequently imparted a brusque acerbity to his style, which injured both the oratorical and moral effect of his eloquence; but his reasoning was forcible, and his manner commanding and effective. "It is not our province," says the editor of the Journal, whence these particulars have been chiefly obtained, "to examine the merits or demerits ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... him not to be a fool, but she spoke without acerbity, and, speaking, she squeezed his hand. She understood this potent magician better than she intended ever to permit ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... broken shoes, he found my father at a loss for words. 'You must have had access to many books when you wrote that essay,' was what he said. 'That,' said Thompson, his shyness at once replaced by an acerbity that afterwards became one of the most familiar of his never-to-be-resented mannerisms, 'that is precisely where the essay fails. I had no books by me at the time save Aeschylus and Blake.' There was little to be done for him at that interview save ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... avenue de la Grande Armee, stand the epicerie of Jean-Baptiste Caille and the salle de coiffure of Hippolyte Sergeot, and between these two there is a great gulf fixed, the which has come to be through the acerbity of Alexandrine Caille (according to Esperance Sergeot), though the duplicity of Esperance Sergeot (according to Alexandrine Caille). But the veritable root of all evil is Zut, and Zut sits smiling in Jean-Baptiste's doorway, and cares naught for anything ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... labor less productive; and therefore we find from all the eminent men of the time the clearest expression of their opinion that slavery is an evil. They ascribed its existence here, not without truth, and not without some acerbity of temper and force of language, to the injurious policy of the mother country, who, to favor the navigator, had entailed these evils upon the Colonies. I need hardly refer, Sir, particularly to the publications of the day. They are matters ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... the person who had availed himself of the list in which my name was said to figure, for the purpose of bringing an accusation against my honor. He was himself a man of probity, but one who, in the violence of his prejudices and the acerbity of his disposition, could hardly stop short ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... contrast with the foregoing is found in persons of a more strenuous, perhaps more admirable but less agreeable character. The savour of acerbity may be a natural attribute of the critical character, and it is certainly not lessened where moral philosophy is the subject-matter of the criticism. The continual search after solutions of problems that may be insoluble at least makes the seekers excellent judges of wrong solutions. ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... for popular use, is conducted with little artifice, and indeed with a prolixity and minuteness of detail, arising no doubt from the deep interest which as an actor he took in the scenes he describes. His sentiments are expressed with boldness, and sometimes with the acerbity of party feeling. He has been much commended by the best Spanish writers, such as Zurita, Zuniga, Marina, Clemencin, for his veracity. The internal evidence of this is sufficiently strong in his delineation of those scenes in which he was personally engaged; in his account ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... of adulation from one sex was not corrected by any great acerbity from the other. Lord Doltimore at the age of twenty-two was a very good parti; and, whatever his other deficiencies, he had sense enough to perceive that he received much greater attention—whether ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... some gittin' that five hundred dollars paid up," Marthy returned with some acerbity. "I'm much obleeged to yuh, Mr. Seabeck, fer bein' so easy on us. If yuh hadn't drug Billy Louise into it, I'd say yer too good to ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... City Hall," snapped Corson, with an acerbity that matched the Governor's. "I called the mill and was referred to Morrison at City Hall. He's on his way up here! At any rate, he ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... squalid-looking prisoner was undergoing trial for murder. The judges and officers of the court were almost entirely without insignia of office, and the counsel employed, I thought, evinced much tact in their proceedings, especially in the cross-examination of witnesses, although they manifested great acerbity of feeling towards each other, and their acrimonious remarks would not, I imagine, have been allowed to pass without remonstrance in an English court of justice. I was told by a by-stander, with whom I entered into conversation, that if found guilty, the prisoner would be conducted ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... later. He was visited by the inevitable interviewer, and chose the Hamburg News as the medium of communicating to the world his opinion of the new regime and the men who were conducting it; and made use of that paper with such instant vigour and acerbity that little more than two months from his retirement elapsed before the new Chancellor thought it advisable to issue instructions to Germany's diplomatic representatives warning them carefully to distinguish between the "present sentiments and views of the Duke ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... long and affectionate embrace with his future partner, once again braved the cold wind of the night: merely pausing, for a few minutes, in the male paupers' ward, to abuse them a little, with the view of satisfying himself that he could fill the office of workhouse-master with needful acerbity. Assured of his qualifications, Mr. Bumble left the building with a light heart, and bright visions of his future promotion: which served to occupy his mind until he reached the shop of ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... whole paragraph, beginning "Illustrious Holland," are affixed the words "Bad enough;—and on mistaken grounds besides." The bitter verses against Lord Carlisle he pronounces "Wrong also:—the provocation was not sufficient to justify such acerbity;"—and of a subsequent note respecting the same nobleman, he says, "Much too savage, whatever the foundation may be." Of Rosa Matilda (v. 738.) he tells us, "She has since married the Morning Post,—an ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... creed of all Whig Reformers.' Writing to Moore from Genoa on November 9, Lord John says: 'I am just setting off for London. Mackintosh has written me an oily letter, to which I have answered by a vinegar one; but I want you to keep me up in acerbity.' ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... fool, 'n' always wuz," replied the cook, with a seemingly uncalled-for acerbity of tone. "I've allus observed that them that hez the most to say about topknots hez the least idea of what topknots really is. There ain't a touch o' topknot about that ere girl: she's come o' real humbly people. Anybody with half an eye can see ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... "it's no religion, it's curstness," i.e. crabbedness, insinuating that acerbity of temper, as well as zeal, was occasionally the cause of ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... renewed with great violence and acerbity on both sides when Granville proposed to take his wife to the play. Finally, the lawyer, whose sole aim was to defeat the pernicious influence exerted over his wife by her old confessor, placed the question on such a footing that Madame de Granville, in a spirit of defiance, ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... hauteur in her voice. She preserved much of the acerbity which had marked her demeanor when they had said good-by to each other. He would not acknowledge to himself that he hoped she would meet him on another plane; he meekly accepted her attitude as the proper one. He was a sailor, and she was ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... and admired in him was his keenness and his impeccable unworldliness. He was perfectly independent of public opinion and as free from rancour as he was from fear, malice or acerbity. He never said a stupid thing. Some people would say that this is not a compliment, but the amount of silly things that I have heard clever people say makes me often wonder what is left for ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... dear sister, must admit that a marriage with St. Genis was out of the question," retorted the Count in his turn with some acerbity. "I am very fond of Maurice and his name is as old and great as ours, but he hasn't a sou, and you know as well as I do by now that the restoration of confiscated lands is out of the question . . . parliament will never allow it and the King will never ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... P.M., near to sunset. In Hood's understanding, while that signal flew the position of each ship was determined by that of Graves's flagship. None could go closer than the line through her parallel to the enemy. Hence Hood's criticism, which is marked by much acerbity towards his superior, but does not betray any consciousness that he himself needed any justification for his division ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... been sensibly felt by my brother, who was not only remarkable for the mildness of his temper and the amenity and grace of his manner, but whose society was courted in the most distinguished circles of Paris on account of his accomplishments. He perceived in Bonaparte a kind of acerbity and bitter irony, of which he long endeavoured to discover the cause. 'I believe,' said Albert one day to my mother, 'that the poor young man feels keenly his dependent situation.'" ('Memoirs of the Duchesse d'Abrantes, vol. i. p. 18, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... the burden should be hereditary," she interrupted again, but she smiled in a manner that softened the acerbity ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... replied only with dark looks, regarding his intrusion in this inner sanctuary as a fresh provocation for her just displeasure. The jester, however, paid no attention to these signs of new acerbity on her face. ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... acerbity. How childishly foolish of Madeleine to try and deceive him! But all women of the type to which she belonged make ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... black-eyed face which bore in it the possibility of looking extremely acute, and occasionally contemptuous, on market-days, but had now a predominant after-supper expression of hearty good-nature. It is well known that great scholars who have shown the most pitiless acerbity in their criticism of other men's scholarship have yet been of a relenting and indulgent temper in private life; and I have heard of a learned man meekly rocking the twins in the cradle with his left hand, while with his right he inflicted the most lacerating sarcasms on an opponent ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... lady," he replied with an acerbity which sounded sufficiently genuine, "it might scarcely have seemed feasible to go so far from the camp; but for the brave old comrade who was intrusted to my care I would have made even more difficult things possible—and you ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the great Skoda works near Pilsen in Austria. My hotel manager spoke with some acerbity of the amount of advertising the Austrian siege howitzers were receiving. "You can accept my assurance," he said, "that the guns for the bombardment of Dover were made here, and not at the Skoda works, as the ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... adored, the mother of his two boys, died shortly after the new year. For the moment he was overwhelmed; and when he again took his place in the Senate, his colleagues remarked in him a bitterness and acerbity of temper which was not wonted. One hostage that he had given to Fortune had been taken away, and a certain recklessness took possession of him. He grew careless in his personal habits, slovenly in his dress, disregardful of his associates, and if possible more vehemently ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... him. Should these pages prove a means of dissipating the slightest portion of that irritation which has—and naturally—been engendered in every American heart, by the perverted and prejudiced statements of disappointed tourists, whose acerbity of stricture, not even a recollection of much hospitality could repress; and of renewing that healthy tone of feeling which it has been endeavoured to show had existed during the earlier years of ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... definitely changed. Lawyer Royall had kept his word. He had obtained the place for her at the cost of considerable maneuvering, as she guessed from the number of rival candidates, and from the acerbity with which two of them, Orma Fry and the eldest Targatt girl, treated her for nearly a year afterward. And he had engaged Verena Marsh to come up from Creston and do the cooking. Verena was a poor old widow, doddering and ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... the year 1826 the Advocate's criticisms upon certain members of the oligarchical faction were marked by exceptional acerbity. The persons attacked, however, sought in vain throughout the closely-packed columns for any material upon which a criminal prosecution might be founded; for Mr. Mackenzie, whether by prudence or good fortune, contrived for some weeks to say very ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... young man, not English-looking, and wearing colored spectacles, so that I should readily have taken him for an American literary man. I did not have much opportunity of talking with him, nor with anybody else, except Dr. ———, who seemed a shrewd, sensible man, with a certain slight acerbity of thought. Mr. Herbert Ingram, recently elected member of Parliament, was likewise present, and sat ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the Church's government was hardly less complex. The very acerbity with which it was discussed proclaims that we are in an age of settlement. Much of the dispute, indeed, is doubtless due to the dislike of all High Churchmen for William; with their consequent unwillingness to admit the full meaning of his ecclesiastical supremacy. ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... is scarcely less odd that a copy of his despatch reporting it should be in the Pitt Papers.[73] On the whole, then, France had good reason to be satisfied with Pitt. Austria, on the other hand, disliked his conduct. Kaunitz, with his usual acerbity, gave out that England was secretly hostile to the House of Hapsburg; and Keith, finding his position increasingly awkward, begged ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... you honour," Sir Charles answered, with some acerbity. Then he whispered in my ear: "Confounded clever scoundrel, Sey; rather wish we hadn't ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen |
