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More "Caustic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... welfare of the state. They constitute luridly powerful pictures of a debased and shamelessly corrupt condition of society. Keen contemptuous ridicule, a sardonic irony that held nothing in reverence, a caustic sarcasm that burned like an acid, and a vituperative invective that ransacked the language for phrases of opprobrium—these were the agents enlisted by Juvenal into the service of purging ...
— English Satires • Various
... cat; the other young lady continually harking back to "conjugal" subjects, which seemed to interest her; the mamma slightly flabbergastered at the rather revolutionary nature of the communications; and our host every now and then throwing in a rude or caustic remark. I dreaded to think what might have been the result of a domiciliary visit paid by a Commissioner in Lunacy to ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... particularly of the smaller Jackson sisters, were so breezy and unrestrained that Mrs. Jackson generally felt it necessary to apply the closure. Indeed, Marjory Jackson, aged fourteen, had on three several occasions been fined pudding at lunch for her caustic comments on the batting of her brother Reggie in important fixtures. Cricket was a tradition in the family, and the ladies, unable to their sorrow to play the game themselves, were resolved that it should not be their fault if the standard was not ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... Lord Cochrane's own fearless conduct. He was reasonably aggrieved at the effort made by the Admiralty authorities to attribute to Lord Gambier, who had taken no part at all in the achievements in Basque Roads, all the merit of their success. To use his own caustic but accurate words, "The only victory gained by Lord Gambier in Basque Roads was that of bringing his ships to anchor there, whilst the enemy's ships were quietly heaving off from the banks on which they had been driven nine miles distant from the fleet." ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... stand aside here for a moment and picture some of those who have ascended these stairs in days gone by. A fanfare of trumpets sounds, and Henry VIII goes up with ponderous step. Here too comes Queen Elizabeth, jesting in caustic fashion with her courtiers, as she sweeps along to witness a dramatic entertainment in the Hall. Of lesser folk there pass by Dr. Fell ("I do not like thee, Dr. Fell"), who finished the building of Tom Quad in 1665; and then a quiet studious-looking man, a fellow or ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... feared, too, that he could not admire the girlish airs and graces which did not become that sharpened figure and features. She had not known how much more Matilda talked than any one else; even her father only put in a caustic remark here and there, when Matilda WOULD know all Lord St. Erme's and Lady Lucy's views and habits. Mrs. Moss was silenced whenever her low voice tried to utter a sentence. Annette, quiet and gentle as ever, looked drooping and subdued, and scarcely spoke, while the two fine blooming ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rushed into the hall, still coughing. The match smell had given way to the harsh, caustic stench of burning weeds. He stared at his cigarette in horror and threw it into the sink. The smell grew worse. He threw open the hall closet, expecting smoke to come billowing out. "Ellie! Somebody's ...
— The Coffin Cure • Alan Edward Nourse
... at Bagnols, in the department of Var; famed for his caustic wit; was a Royalist emigrant at the time of the Revolution, and aided the cause by his pamphlets; he was styled by Burke "The Tacitus of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... a caustic bitterness that had its roots. Her own venture in second marriage had been catastrophic—so catastrophic that her neglected bakery had gone very much to the bad. Still more closely to the point, Madame Jolicoeur—incident to finding entomologic specimens misplaced in her breakfast-rolls—had ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... quiet, and then and there examine the various jobs in hand. On such occasions he carried with him a piece of chalk, with which, in a neat and very legible hand, he would record his remarks in the most pithy and sometimes caustic terms. Any evidence of want of correctness in setting things square, or in 'flat filing,' which he held in high esteem, or untidiness in not sweeping down the bench and laying the tools in order, was sure to have a record in chalk made on the spot. ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... and Mrs. Kingsley, as usual, received Mrs. Wrapp's caustic and rather crude opinions with as good grace as they could muster. Plain it was that they felt themselves a shade removed from this younger and newer member of society. But they could not show direct antagonism to her ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... vessel of wood or iron plate, P, the corrugated zinc plates, b, b', b", are placed one above the other, each alternating with a flat one, a, a', a". These plates have previously been scoured, first with a weak solution of caustic soda in order to remove every trace of fatty matter derived from rolling, and then with very dilute hydrochloric acid, and finally are washed with common water. In order to facilitate the disengagement of hydrogen during ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... her caustic comment, it was plain that the mother was enjoying her children's pleasure and that Uncle ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... my admiration, I was accosted by Caustic, and expressed my surprise at finding him in such a scene—'A rout,' he replied, 'is just one of those singular incoherences which supply me with laughter for a month. Was there ever such a tissue of inconsistencies assembled ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... doubt," answered the junior partner, in a tone which implied that he was uttering the last word in caustic criticism. ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... divisions of the capitalist class that the most caustic and virtuous tirades against Gould came. The boards of trade and chambers of commerce were largely made up of men who, while assuming the most vaniloquent pretensions, were themselves malodorous with fraud. To read the resolutions ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... one—when I look around upon all this rampant vulgarity in tinsel and Brussels lace, and think how fortunes go, how men struggle and lose the bloom of their honesty, how women hide in a smiling pretense, and eye with caustic glances their neighbor's newer house, diamonds or porcelain, and observe their daughters, such as these—why, I tremble, and tremble, and this scene to-night, every 'crack' ball this winter, will ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... he became, at the critical time of Peel's change of front, the representative of Shrewsbury, and gradually organized about himself the dissatisfaction and indignation of the landed proprietors with Sir Robert Peel's concessions to the free-trade movement. His strictures on Peel were severe, caustic, and bitter. "What," said this eloquent speaker, "shall we think of the eminent statesman, who, having served under four sovereigns, who, having been called to steer the ship on so many occasions and under such perilous circumstances, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... handed back the "Jessica" essays to her Five A class in English composition. Five A looked glum as they read their marks and the somewhat caustic comments written in their exercise books. Judith flushed as she read: "Neatly and carefully written, Judith, but hardly interesting. You were not asked to give a resume of the play, but a character sketch of Jessica. What do you know about Jessica now ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... their tour, Tubbs's questions and caustic comment would have given McArthur offense, but a longer acquaintance had taught him that none was intended; that his words were merely those of a man entirely without knowledge upon any subject save those which had ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... the professor of chemistry says it is a compound containing three atoms of hydrogen, one of phosphorus, and four of oxygen. It is a syrupy liquid and one of the strongest mineral acids. In concentrated form it is as caustic as oil of vitriol. Why, here you have a Century dictionary. That should tell what phosphoric acid is. This is ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... shouted back, "until you hear the other side. That is Mr. Jackson of Georgia trying to get the floor, and, if I mistake not, he will be in opposition, and he is a strong speaker, with plenty of caustic wit." ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... things, and the first essays of a man of real genius are such, in all their grand and most important features, as no subsequent assiduity can amend. Add to this, that Mr. Fuseli is somewhat of a caustic turn of mind, with much wit, and a disposition to search, in every thing new or modern, for occasions of censure. I believe Mary came something more a cynic out of the school of Mr. Fuseli, than ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... to the lowest pitch of national degeneracy, yet thought to beard with the shadow of their past, the substance of his present greatness, and to dictate terms to a prince, who came not as their servant but as their master. After having delivered himself further in the same caustic style, he asked them what answer they had to give; and, on being informed that they could give none till they had reported their reception to the senate, he haughtily bid ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... Her strenuous and rather overbearing individuality made an impression not altogether agreeable upon many of her contemporaries. Lowell introduced a caricature of her as "Miranda" into his Fable for Critics, and Hawthorne's caustic sketch of her, preserved in the biography written by his son, has given great offense to her admirers. "Such a determination to eat this huge universe!" was Carlyle's characteristic comment on her appetite for knowledge and aspirations ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... my scathing comments at the time of the divorce proceedings. They were too caustic to be repeated here. It is only necessary to state that the proceedings came near to putting two friendly nations into very bad temper. Statesmen and diplomats were drawn into the mess, and jingo congressmen ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... flag back, and in due time the special picked up the gang of surfacers just turning out to the day's work. An Irish foreman was in command, and to him Gallagher appealed, lucidly but not too gently. The reply was a volley of abuse and a caustic refusal to lend his men to ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... characteristic usually preferred to originality, which is often much more slowly recognized. Mrs. Gore's fashionable novels, correct in portraiture and upholstery, clever but monotonous, had had their day; Mrs. Trollope's coarse and caustic delineations; G.P.R. James's combats, adventures, skirmishes, disguises, trials, and escapes, and Bulwer's sentimental and grandiloquent romances, had begun to pall upon the public taste. Miss Braddon perceived that the time had come for something new, so 'Lady ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb is withered. The dear old Vicar had been sketched out by nature as a noble tree. The heart of him was sound, the grain was of the finest, and in the gray-haired man, with his slipshod talk and caustic tongue, there was the main trunk of the same brave, faithful, tender nature that had poured out the finest, freshest forces of its life-current in a first ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... I restrained the caustic jest that rose to my lips, and we proceeded in silence down the street. The boy, whom I had espied loitering in a doorway a little way ahead, as if the great bell above us which had just tolled eleven had drawn him out, peered at us a moment ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... painting—information carefully collected and judiciously communicated—sound and enlarged views of important questions—a hearty and generous love of country—and the whole pervaded by a refined but sometimes caustic humour, which imparts a constant attraction to its pages. We can cordially recommend it to our readers, as well for the amusement of its lighter portions, the vivid brilliancy of its descriptions, and the solid information it contains ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... Eagle did not find her a congenial bird of prey in this region. On the contrary, she had to drag her unwilling friend down into it; and as Miss Tippet was too conscientious and kind-hearted to agree with her in her sweeping censures and caustic observations and wilful misconstructions, it is difficult to conceive wherein she (the Eagle) found pleasure in her society. Probably it was because she found in her one who would submit meekly to any amount of contradiction, and listen patiently to ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... Andreae's caustic pen revelled in satire at the depreciation of this important agency of good. Some of his ideas are by no means ill-timed in the present century. In the Dialogue of the Pulpit Orator ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... the United States Secret Service, who had instructions to run this man down—this man who signed himself The Eye of Allah. And do it quickly for the notes were threatening. Official Washington, it seemed, was getting jumpy and was making caustic inquiries as to why a ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... opportunity to make a caustic speech, in which he fiercely attacked both Mr. Labouchere and Mr. Gladstone, and alluded sarcastically to their "great sacrifices," and said that the latter was about to give up that good development of the principle ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... very small slip of litmus paper in solution of caustic potassa, and then passing the electric spark over its length in the air, I gradually neutralized the alkali, and ultimately rendered the paper red; on drying it, I found that nitrate of potassa had resulted from the operation, and that the paper ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... vol. i. p. 51. This is sufficiently severe: see also the extracts from the Memoires de l'Institut: p. 25, ante. The more ancient foreign writers have not scrupled to call the BIBLIOMANIA by every caustic and merciless terms: thus speaks the hard-hearted Geyler: "Tertia nola est, multos libros coacervare propter animi voluptatem curiosam. Fastidientis stomachi est multa degustare, ait Seneca. Isti per multos libros vagant legentes assidue: ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... hospitals. Bettie Flynn, who lives at the City Home because of epileptic fits, also comes in occasionally. Bettie is a friend of Mrs. Mundy. Owing to kinlessness and inability to care for herself, owing, also, to there being nowhere else to which she could go, she has been forced to enter the Home. Her caustic comments on its management are of a clear-cut variety. Bettie was born for a satirist and became an epileptic. The result at times is speech that is not guarded, a calling of things by names that are ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... even with me it would be necessary for them to make certain incriminating admissions, and to call certain evidence that would entail caustic remarks from a learned judge, and would not improbably lead to a charge of murder being preferred against them. No, Mr. Fairfax, I know my own business, and, what is better, I know theirs. If they like to take fifty thousand pounds, and will ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... harmless ridicule of the foibles of the day, without citing personal instance; and it will be vastly easier, in such Babylon as ours, to designate a virtue, without naming its possessor! Still, you know me too well, to believe that I shall be frightened out of free, or even caustic remark, by any critique of the papers, or by any dignified frown of the literary coteries of the city.... This LORGNETTE of mine will range very much as my whim directs. In morals, it will aim to be correct; in religion, to be respectful; in literature, modest; in the arts, attentive; in fashion, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... gateway; and on coming nearer we found the shepherd busily engaged cutting the feet of his sheep one by one with a keen knife. They had got the foot-rot down in a meadow—they do not suffer from it on the arable uplands where folded—and the shepherd was now applying a caustic solution. Every shepherd has his own peculiar specific, which he believes to be ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... single familiar word. There is a great deal of false sentiment in the world, as there is of bad logic and erroneous doctrine; but—it is very much less disagreeable to hear a young poet overdo his emotions, or even deceive himself about them, than to hear a caustic-epithet flinger repeating such words as "sentimentality" and "entusymusy,"—one of the least admirable of Lord Byron's bequests to our language,—for the purpose of ridiculing him into silence. An overdressed woman is ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... conditions of men, moneyed, well-grounded, and investing in the new government securities, fluctuating like wildcat stock, to pester the President with Jeremiads and counsel. To one deputation from his home parts he administered this caustic rebuke in such illustration as was ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... may be kindled, a fount that may be made to gush, unto the illumination and purification of the whole being. A stray word, an unknown influence, a breath of the Spirit, is continually effecting such changes, such salvations. True, there are many fettered by vices, torn by sins, ploughed by the caustic shares of remorse, lost to peaceful freedom, lost to spiritual joys, lost to the sweet, calm raptures of religious belief and love, and, in that sense, plunged in damnation. But this, they say, is the only hell there is. At the longest, it can ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... method, except that it is difficult to get it ploughed in, particularly in wet weather, immediately after spreading (which is essential where you grow wheat on the same land every year) without injuring the feet of the horses. You speak of ten days or a fortnight being necessary to neutralize caustic lime, but our horses had their feet injured by it six weeks after it had been spread on the land, last year, although the weather had been wet almost the whole of the time, say from the beginning of February to the middle ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... state power, unfortunately for its author in its "Introduction" was this sentence: "Each hour, as life advances, am I made to see how capricious and vulgar is the immortality conferred by a newspaper." This brought upon its writer a whirlwind of caustic criticism in the American papers, and soon became a challenge of battle by one who was to prove himself brave, able, fearless, and right through coming years of hot and bitter strife. By one of the leading editors the glove ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... the caustic remarks that we occasionally hear. Of course the situation is always exaggerated in such criticisms; but, as the old saw puts it, "Where there's so much smoke, there must be some fire." Where does the trouble lie? All sorts of guesses have been made, and some ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... and modesty, would have hesitated to face the audience; but Douglass possessed neither retiring modesty nor the sobriety which comes with years. He not only read the resolutions, but he defended them with such vigorous logic and with such caustic criticism of Whigs and half-hearted Democrats, that he carried the meeting with him in tumultuous approval of the course of ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... side without speaking, and gave a glance up at the window of the summer-house as they passed. And strange enough, that evening of all others, Miss Dora, who had been the victim of some of Miss Leonora's caustic criticisms, had strayed forth, in melancholy mood, to repose herself at her favourite window, and look out at the faint stars, and comfort herself with a feeble repetition of her favourite plea, that it was not "my fault." The poor lady ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... and in a softer mood than he had been before. Unfortunately, these moments never lasted long, and he used to revenge himself on those who had surprised him in such reveries by indulging in the most caustic and cruel remarks which he could devise in order to goad them out of all patience. A strange man with strange instincts; and it is no wonder that, once, a person who knew him well, and who had known him in the days of his youth when he had not yet developed his strength of character, ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... the silken reins of her camel. Behind her veil a sarcastic smile played about the corners of her mouth. Aquila watched her resentfully, waiting with an immense reserve of caustic words for her ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... feel interested, and, when this failed, upon her courtesy, to appear so; but she was conscious of relapses more and more frequent into the dreary regions of Boredom. Every body would agree with every body else so completely! A bold contradiction, a stinging sarcasm, or a caustic retort, would have been worth any thing just then to take off the cloying taste of the everlasting honey. She roused herself at these last words enough to ask languidly, "What has ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... from the common type of fatuous young man. He was himself a merciless critic of fatuity; he had a faculty of shrewd observation, plenty of caustic common sense. Yet the position into which he had drifted threatened him with ridiculous extremes of self-consciousness. Even in his personal carriage, he was not quite safe against ridicule; and he felt it. This must come to ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... putting in merely twenty-six hours a day dictating my autobiography, which, as John Phoenix said in regard to his autograph, may be relied upon as authentic, as it is written exclusively by me. But it is not to be published in full until I am thoroughly dead. I have made it as caustic, fiendish, and devilish as possible. It will fill many volumes, and I shall continue writing it until the time comes for me to join the angels. It is going to be a terrible autobiography. It will make the hair ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... imagination, equal to the comprehension of the greatest objects, and capable of a steady and cool comprehension of them. He had wit at will. He had humor that, when he pleased, was delicate and delightful. He had a satire that was good-natured or caustic, Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais, at his pleasure. He had talents for irony, allegory, and fable, that he could adapt with great skill to the promotion of moral and political truth. He was master of that infantine ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... irritation insummer, and keeps the hands from chapping | | in cold weather. | | | | M'Clinton's Shaving Soap is also made from vegetable oils and the | | ash of plants, and is the only shaving soap so made. | | | | M'Clinton's Tooth Soap is free from the nauseous taste of caustic | | soda. It contains no animal or mineral matter. An ideal dentifrice. | | | | We guarantee these statements, and will return the money to anyone | | dissatisfied with the result of a trial. For 1/6 we will send, post | | paid, a large ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... her correspondence than ever, the more especially as young Langton appeared to her a very pretty fellow, and he being Tom's confidant, was likely to hear her letters read, or at least be given extracts from them. Her caustic condemnation of the fantastical Mistress Clo had gradually lapsed into a doubtful wonder, which later became open amaze not untinged with a pretty spitefulness ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of a strong, enduring frame, and a keen, vehement, caustic spirit. He had the gift of tongues, and was as familiar with the Abenaki and several other Indian languages as he was with Latin.[235] Of the genuineness of his zeal there is no doubt, nor of his earnest and lively interest in the fortunes of the wilderness flock ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... The educational process is complex. There must be first the incitement to thought. Most effective in this direction is criticism. If the roads are such a handicap to the comfort and safety of travel that there is caustic criticism at the next town meeting, public opinion begins to set definitely in the direction of improvement. If city government is corrupt and the tax rate mounts steadily without corresponding benefits to the taxpayers, the newspapers call the attention of citizens to the fact, and they ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... Naples—was collecting like water on the floor of the Projectile, on account of its great specific gravity. It already threatened the poor dog's life, though not yet endangering that of her masters. The Captain, seeing this state of things, hastily laid on the floor one or two cups containing caustic potash and water, and stirred the mixture gently: this substance, having a powerful affinity for carbonic acid, greedily absorbed it, and after a few moments the air ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... aware that with his colleagues he had suddenly become rather a person of importance. His "place" in the country was held in some dim way to increase the grandeur of the College. He found himself deferred to and congratulated. Mr. Redmayne was both caustic and affectionate. ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... pounds of flowers of sulphur in a wooden tub large enough to hold 25 gallons. Wet the sulphur with 3 gallons of water, stir it to form a paste. Then add 20 pounds of 98 per cent. caustic soda (28 pounds should be used if the caustic soda is 70 per cent.) and mix it with the sulphur paste. In a few minutes it becomes very hot, turns brown, and becomes a liquid. Stir thoroughly and add enough ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... communicative; talked freely of Rust, and of every man, woman and child of his acquaintance. He grew merry over the rare doings which had taken place in Rust's den. He then descanted upon the peculiarities of the old man; his fierce fits of passion, his cold, shrewd, caustic manners, his coming in, and his going out; how long he was absent; how profoundly secret he kept himself, his doings, his whereabouts, and his mode of life. 'And,' said he, in conclusion, 'I know nothing of him. He's a queer dog, a wonderfully queer one. It would take a long ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... correctly, sensations of touch in the tongue) are obviously unwholesome and destructive in their character, at least when taken in large quantities. Nobody wishes to drink nitric acid by the quart. The first business of this part of the tongue is, therefore, to warn us emphatically against caustic substances and corrosive acids, against vitriol and kerosene, spirits of wine and ether, capsicums and burning leaves or roots, such as those of the common English lords-and-ladies. Things of this sort are immediately ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... certainly was some compensation. Marcia soon forgot her griefs, and even Gertrude was roused to interest. At some German baths the ladies met Madame la Comtesse, and were indebted to her for an act of friendliness. At Paris they met her again, and here Floyd had occasion to ask himself with a little caustic satire if he had really loved her? She had grown handsomer, she was proud of her rank and station and the homage ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... faded from the king's manner; his countenance, which "at no time would have made a man's fortune," became rancorous, caustic; the corners of his mouth appeared almost updrawn to his nostrils. He had little reason to care for the duke, and this interruption, so flagrant, menacing almost, did not tend to enhance his regard. In nowise daunted, the ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... caustic reply, and then paid no further attention until her keen ear caught the sound of Stephen's name. It was a part of her unhappiness that since her broken engagement no one would ever allude to him, and she longed to hear ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the dinner and Steve cooked the breakfasts,—he's a splendid cook, learned on the plains. It all went merrily the first months, though Aunt Harmony thought I was such a fool to marry, you remember?" She laughed, and Isabella smiled at the memory of the caustic comments which Mrs. Price had made when Alice Vance, a poor niece, had dared to marry a poor man,—"They'll be coming to your father for help before the year is out," she had said. But they hadn't gone to ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... life of Greece, and waken a kindly enthusiasm in every one who approaches them. In Humphrey Prideaux's letters there is not a trace of any such feeling. He does his business, but it is hack-work. In this he differs from the modern student, but in his caustic description of the rude and witless society of the place he is modern enough. In his letters to his friend, John Ellis, of the State Paper Office, it is plain that Prideaux wants to get preferment. His taste and his ambition alike made him detest the heavy, ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... employed for the manufacture of soft soap. As a chemical reagent its action is almost precisely like that of caustic soda, though it is usually considered a stronger base, as K is a ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... casuistry. Take for instance the discussion (II, i, 149-79) on the legitimacy of private vengeance, or (III, i, 10-30) on the nature and effect of sin, or (V, ii) on Nature's "blindness" in her workings. In lighter vein, but winged with the shafts of a caustic humour are Bussy's invectives against courtly practices (I, i, 84-104) and hypocrisy in high places (III, ii, 25-59), while the "flyting" between him and Monsieur is perhaps the choicest specimen of Elizabethan "Billingsgate" that has come ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... demanding what he would take for the horse 'including the rider.' The supposed reply of Coleridge might seem good to those who understand nothing of true dignity; for, as an impromptu, it was smart and even caustic. The baronet, it seems, was reputed to have been bought by the minister; and the reader will at once divine that the retort took advantage of that current belief, so as to throw back the sarcasm, by proclaiming ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... is composed of the carbonate or the sulphate of lime. To prevent the formation it is necessary to use some substance which will precipitate these elements in the water. The cheapest and most universally used for this purpose are soda ash and caustic soda. ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... strangers wanted to see the indefatigable Randall, the economical Holman, the free- trader Morrison, the Greenback Weaver and the argentive Bland, the eloquent McKinley, the sarcastic Reed, the sluggish Hiscock, and the caustic-tongued Butterworth. Old stagers who remembered the shrunken, diminutive form of Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, could but smile when they saw his successor, Major Barnes, who weighs at least three ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Tessie would walk toward the screen door with a little flaunting sway of the hips. Her mother's eyes, following the slim figure, had a sort of grudging love in them. A spare, caustic, wiry little woman, Tessie's mother. Tessie resembled her as a water color may resemble a blurred charcoal sketch. Tessie's wide mouth curved into humor lines. She was the cutup of the escapement department ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... of battles, when physical courage sits so high, the reader—if he is swept off in the general opinion—will expect under such a title something caustic. He will think that I am about to loose against all cowards a plague of frogs and locusts as if old Egypt had come again. But cowardice is its own punishment. It needs no frog to nip it. Even the sharp-toothed locust—for in the days that bordered ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... human charity, or require contemptuous crusade against equally honest, living toilers? Are antiquity and foreign birthplace imperatively essential factors in the award of praise for even faithful and noble work? We lament the caustic moroseness of embittered Schopenhauer, brooding savagely over his failure to secure contemporaneous recognition; yet after all, did he malign his race, or his age, when, in answer to the inquiry where he desired to be buried, he scornfully exclaimed: "No ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... so much by his diligence, his talents, and his modesty, as to obtain the notice and regard of several of the most famous scholars of the times. Even Joseph Scaliger, equally distinguished by his learning and caustic arrogance, noticed him, and condescended to direct his studies. He was scarcely eleven years of age when Douza, one of the princes of the republic of letters in those times, celebrated his praises in verse: He declared that "he could scarcely believe that Erasmus promised so much as Grotius ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... friend, known to all of us, M. Boniface, a great sportsman and a connoisseur of wine, a man of wonderful physique, witty and gay, and endowed with an ironical and resigned philosophy, which manifested itself in caustic humor, and never in melancholy, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... chloride of ammonium with "agar-agar," or Ceylon moss. This type permits the use of larger plates, and adapts the battery for lighting small electric lamps. Skrivanoff has modified the De la Rue cell by substituting a solution of caustic potash for the ammonium chloride, and his battery has been used for "star" lights, that is to say, the tiny electric lamps of the ballet. The Schanschieff battery, consisting of zinc and carbon plates in a solution of basic ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... ladies from traveling." "We have a law," another indignantly replied, "paramount to all others—the law which commands us to take care of the public safety." The debate was finally terminated by the caustic remark of a member who was ashamed of the protracted discussion. "Europe," said he, "will be greatly astonished, no doubt, on hearing that the National Assembly spent four hours in deliberating upon the departure of two ladies who preferred ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... is by the sea, is like a lost island, fabled, remote, its speech Provencal, its soul purely Celt. Laughter loving, warlike and brave in the idyllic years of their prime, the Gruyeriens of to-day are still gay, caustic of wit as they are kindly at heart; and, in a changed world, as tenacious of their new republican rights as they were erstwhile valiant vassals to their pastoral kings. The source of innumerable songs and legends in the rich and melodious Gruyere speech, still pastoral, this country ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... so wonderful a mass of chiffon and silk and lace that Arethusa began to remember sundry lessons in economy also; she feared its cost would prove terrific. She had never seen anything nearly so Wonderful in the shape of a Gown before. Then too, those caustic remarks of so positive a nature concerning green with her red hair, which Miss Eliza had spoken so often in her hearing, began to ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... over the body. The left arm withered more and more, a spitting began, and now it was with difficulty that he uttered a few words. Frictions and sinapisms were successively tried, and an issue, made by a caustic, was kept open for some time without any effect; but no mention is made of what part ...
— An Essay on the Shaking Palsy • James Parkinson
... however, was not framed to express enthusiasm. It was caustic, cold and delicate. His eyes were as clear and as hard as a sky of frosty morning, and his small, firm lips were hard. His chin and lower lip advanced slightly, so that when he smiled his teeth met edge to edge, and the little black moustache, to which he ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... of benevolent malice, the writer pointed out how inevitable it was that the critics should have taken Mr. Price, when Divorce was first produced, for the new dramatic genius they were waiting for. 'There comes a moment,' said this caustic writer, 'in the affairs of men when the new is not only eagerly accepted, but when it is confounded with the original. Wearied by the old stereotyped form of drama, the critics had been astonished by a novelty of subject, more apparent than real, ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... purest motives, they were unable to understand. Their gross suspicions, their coarse jealousies, their calculations of patriotism by place, all that strips the varnish from the face of that fair harlot—Political Ambition—sank like caustic into his spirit. A gentleman seeing him sit silent, with his hat over his moody brows, civilly extended to him the paper ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... reported, had achieved many miraculous cures. The unguent, however, to the horror of the doctors, burned the skull till the bone was as black as the colour of ink; and Olivarez declares he believes it to have been a preparation of pure caustic. On the morning of the 9th of May, the Moor and his unguents were sent away, "and went to Madrid, to send to heaven Hernando de Vega, while the prince went back to our method ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... the whole race that came after them. Nor is it material that they differ in the mode, since they all agree in the kind. Calvus is close and nervous; Asinius more open and harmonious; Caesar is distinguished [b] by the splendour of his diction; Caelius by a caustic severity; and gravity is the characteristic of Brutus. Cicero is more luxuriant in amplification, and he has strength and vehemence. They all, however, agree in this: their eloquence is manly, sound, and vigorous. ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... unnecessary disaster, and grieving over the useless loss and suffering of his gallant men, it was but natural that he should vent his feelings in sharp and caustic denunciation of all who were in any degree responsible for the blunder. He was especially outspoken with Grant and Rawlins, whose confidence he had won in the Chattanooga campaign, and with whom he had since been on terms of the closest intimacy and friendship. It is but just ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... criticized in his proclamation. They united over their own signatures in a public "Protest" against the action of Mr. Lincoln. The paper was prepared by Mr. Davis, which of itself was guaranty that it would be able, caustic, and unqualified. Mr. Wade was known to be a man of extraordinary courage, both physical and moral. To these qualities Mr. Davis added a highly cultivated mind and a style of writing which ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... to his room but came down again with considerable celerity, rubbing his knuckles, and breaking the highly charged silence of the office with a caustic comment upon the inconvenience of sleeping in ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... a time was entrusted with easy analyses by Davy. In those days the Royal Institution published 'The Quarterly Journal of Science,' the precursor of our own 'Proceedings.' Faraday's first contribution to science appeared in that journal in 1816. It was an analysis of some caustic lime from Tuscany, which had been sent to Davy by the Duchess of Montrose. Between this period and 1818 various notes and short papers were published by Faraday. In 1818 he experimented upon 'Sounding Flames.' Professor Auguste De ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... provincial elections in the ensuing month, and thus a favourable opportunity was presented of contrasting the working of the two systems. The grossly unfair results of the provincial elections drew forth from many journals most caustic criticism. Le Peuple expressed the hope that these provincial elections would be the last instance of the use of the majority system in Belgium. "Is it not," it proceeded, "absurd, stupid, detestable ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... hired listeners, if they could find no willing audience otherwise; and whom people heard as they heard the market-crier, without listening to their words or, in the event of needing help, entrusting themselves to their hands. In his caustic fashion the old man describes these fops formed after the model of the Greek talkers of the agora, dealing in jests and witticisms, singing and dancing, ready for anything; such an one was, in his opinion, good for nothing but to exhibit himself as harlequin in a procession and to bandy talk with ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... trees ordinarily received from rainfall. After this trial you will be in a position to know whether your trees need potash or irrigation - by comparing with other trees adjacent. Besides are you sure that your lye dip was caustic potash and not caustic soda? The latter ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... that worthy gentleman—what amount of consideration he got for it, it matters not now to inquire; Mr. M'Ruen very shortly afterwards presented himself at the Internal Navigation, and introduced himself to our hero. He did this with none of the overbearing harshness of the ordinary dun, or the short caustic decision of a creditor determined to resort to the utmost severity of the law. He turned his head about and smiled, and just showed the end of the bill peeping out from among a parcel of others, begged Mr. Tudor to be punctual, he would only ask him to be punctual, and would in ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... of these more or less caustic epigrams amused them. Sometimes one would suggest the topic and the other write the distich; again, one would do the hexameter, the other the pentameter. They agreed that neither should ever claim separate property ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... turned slowly around, showed his pale and hollow-eyed face, and smiled a withering and commiserating smile. "Ye won't go north this week," he remarked—not without sympathy, for somehow he had taken a liking to me, which even prompted him off and on to favor me with caustic expressions of what he thought of the school board and the leading citizens of the town. I, of course, never encouraged him in his communicativeness which seemed to be just what he would expect, and no rebuff ever goaded him into ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... bowed, with great solemnity all round, and retired to his own lodgings, where he applied a caustic to the wart; but it spread in such a manner as to produce a considerable inflammation, attended with an enormous swelling; so that when he next appeared, his whole face was overshadowed by this tremendous nozzle; and the rueful eagerness with which he ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... venture, out upon the uncertain waters of public opinion, I shall say but few words of preface. In the past I have received considerable well-deserved criticism from the gentlemen of the caustic pen, but so far from having any hard feeling toward them, I have rather wondered that they found so much to say that was favorable. How they will judge this simple October story (if they think it worth while to judge it ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... a general of the first rank has survived the over-enthusiastic eulogies of his friends and the first caustic comments of his foes. His strategy has come to be recognized as of the highest order. To begin with, he had to build his army "from the ground up," but ended by having one of the most perfect fighting machines in the history of warfare. ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... cold and tepid spongings, and painting the tonsils with caustic, inadmissible in ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... charcoal in the oxidizing flame of the blowpipe; and also by the yellow precipitate formed when sulphuretted hydrogen is passed though their acidified solutions. This precipitate is insoluble in cold dilute acids, in ammonium sulphide, and in solutions of the caustic alkalis, a behaviour which distinguishes it from the yellow sulphides of arsenic and tin. Cadmium is estimated quantitatively by conversion into the oxide, being precipitated from boiling solutions by ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... (including aviation, communications, computer-aided design and manufactures, medical electronics, fiber optics), wood and paper products, potash and phosphates, food, beverages, and tobacco, caustic soda, cement, construction, metals products, chemical products, plastics, diamond cutting, textiles ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... an example of the 'enemy'-mosity of an ordinary housefly. It hid behind the paper, emitted some caustic fluid, and then departed this life. I have often caught them in such holes.' 30/12/83." The damage is an oblong hole, surrounded by a white fluffy glaze (fungoid?), difficult to represent in a woodcut. The size here given ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... forgotten the day when he was called in question for his zeal. He was felt to be in opposition to his own Board, rather than in co-operation with it. The Secretary and the Assistant-Secretaries would say little caustic things about him to the senior clerks, and seemed somewhat to begrudge him his new honours. But for all this Mr. Hardlines cared little. The President and the Secretary of State, the joint Secretaries and the Chairmen, all allowed themselves to be led by him in this matter. His ambition was about ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... taken in the 'laicisation' of the schools has been already revealed in the famous 'Article 7' of M. Ferry. M. Ferry is the true, though more or less occult, head of the present Administration in France. 'M. Ferry,' said a caustic French Radical to me in Paris, 'ought to be the mask of M. Carnot. Nature gave him a Carnival nose for that purpose. Everything is topsy-turvy now in France, and so M. Carnot is the mask of M. Ferry. But the nose will ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... discomfort to themselves but add to the owner's risk. It is much better, safer and I think more humane to prevent the growth of horns on calves after they are three or four days old by rubbing the elevations where the horns make their appearance with a pencil of Caustic Potash after being moistened with cold water. Repeat this application two or three times, ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... supplied the basis for the manufacture of soda-ash, and at the village of Solvay, adjoining Syracuse on the west, is one of the largest factories for this purpose in the world. Besides soda-ash it produces bicarbonate of soda, caustic soda and crystals, the total output being about 1,000 tons daily. Syracuse ranks among the leading cities of the state in the number and variety of its manufactures. There are 760 establishments employing 25,000 workers, with an annual output of the value of ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... epicycloids, curves which—as the cycloid is generated by a point upon the circumference of a circle rolled along a straight line—are generated by a similar point when the path of the circle becomes any curve whatever. Caustic curves, spirals without number, succeeded, of which but one shall claim our notice,—the logarithmic spiral, first fully discussed by James Bernouilli. This curve possesses the property of reproducing itself in a variety of curious and interesting ways; for which reason ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... have heard first in Dominic's voice. His hand on the tiller and his fearless eyes roaming the horizon from within the monkish hood shadowing his face, he would utter the usual exordium of his remorseless wisdom: "Vous autres gentilhommes!" in a caustic tone that hangs on my ear yet. Like Nostromo! "You hombres finos!" Very much like Nostromo. But Dominic the Corsican nursed a certain pride of ancestry from which my Nostromo is free; for Nostromo's lineage had to be more ancient still. He is a man with the weight of countless generations ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... Drumsheugh inclined for company, and assisted at an exhaustive and caustic treatment of local affairs. When the conduct of Piggie Walker, who bought Drumsheugh's potatoes and went into bankruptcy without paying for a single tuber, had been characterized in language that left nothing to be desired, ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... aquiline,—the upper lip short and chiselled,—the eyes gray, and the forehead, which is by far the finest feature in the countenance, is peculiarly high, broad, and massive. The mouth has but little beauty; it is severe, caustic, and rather displeasing, from the extreme compression of the lips. The great and prevalent expression of the face is energy. The eye, the brow, the turn of the head, the erect, penetrating aspect,—are all strikingly bold, ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... requirements, and dying at the age of sixty-six, without issue or assets, was the last of that particular line of Georges. I say that he handsomely complied with the requirements of the will; but my statement appears to be subject to qualification, for on the day of his obsequies it was remarked of him by a caustic contemporary: "Well, yes, Mr. Jaffrey was a gentleman by profession, but not eminent ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Legislative Council, Madras, was lately described by a member as "a farce." The Supreme Legislative Council was called by one of its members "a glorified Debating Society." A table of resolutions proposed by Indian elected members, and passed or lost, was lately drawn up, and justified the caustic epithets. With regard to the Minto-Morley reforms, the Bureaucracy showed great efficiency in destroying the benefits intended by the Parliamentary Statute. But the third test shows that in giving Indians a fair voice in the Councils the ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... orthodox religious world. Its faults of temper, its repulsive manners, its custom of making home unlovely, its distaste of innocent amusement, its habits of censure, its self-sufficiency and pharisaical character, are touched with a caustic but healing power. Only the hand of a friend could have done this thing. No point of doctrine is questioned, no principle of faith invaded, no charity wounded. She probes in love—her object is cure. This book is fresh and vigorous, worth thousands ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Jo, or Hamlet, or the Beetle, his most frequent appellations in the playground. He kept a black bottle in his desk, at the neck of which he habitually refreshed himself before the whole school; and he addressed the children with an elaborate and caustic levity in a thin shaky voice quite twenty years too old for him. His humour was thrown away upon the rising generation of Waddy, and might have been supposed to be the cat-like pawing of a vicious mind; but Joel Ham was not cruel, and although ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... morning. Throughout the remainder of the day, he sits outside the wall and, by following the sun, he manages to remain in the shade. He watches the road to proclaim the arrival of visitors, smokes cigarettes, and delivers caustic criticisms on the younger generation when he can get anybody ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... twigs and washed free from the coloring matter the product is known as "seed lac." It is then melted and strained and spread out in thin layers in a form called "shell lac." This is what is known as orange shellac in the market. It may be bleached by boiling in caustic potash, and passing chlorine thru it until the resin is precipitated. It is further whitened by being pulled. This is what is known in the market as "white shellac." It comes in lumps. Orange shellac is the stronger and is less likely to deteriorate, ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... 2 ounces of caustic ley, which was prepared from alkali of tartar and unslaked lime and did not precipitate lime water, with half an ounce of the preceding solution of sulphur which likewise did not precipitate lime water. This mixture had a yellow colour. I poured it into the same bottle, and after this had stood ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele
... mind for some means of escaping from his fetters; but no one having rendered him any assistance in this respect, he was absolutely obliged, therefore, to submit to the burden of his own evil thoughts and caustic spirit. ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... filled with slightly consolidated ashes. The concretions contain a small proportion of carbonate of lime: a fragment placed under the blowpipe decrepitates, then whitens and fuses into a blebby enamel, but does not become caustic. The surrounding ashes do not contain any carbonate of lime; hence the concretions have probably been formed, as is so often the case, by the aggregation of this substance. I have not met with any account of similar concretions; and considering ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... Gentleman to the Honourable Ed. Howard, Esq., occasioned by a Civiliz'd Epistle of Mr. Dryden's before his Second Edition of his Indian Emperour. In the Savoy, printed by Thomas Newcomb, 1668." The "Civiliz'd Epistle" was a caustic attack on Sir Robert Howard; and the Letter is signed, "Sir, your faithful and humble servant, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... must operate in a somewhat different manner. After the combustion is finished, and the vessels have cooled, we first take out the cup, and the burnt iron, by introducing the hand through the quicksilver, under the bell-glass; we next introduce some solution of potash, or caustic alkali, or of the sulphuret of potash, or such other substance as is judged proper for examining their action upon the residuum of air. I shall, in the sequel, give an account of these methods of analysing air, when ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... years of age, eccentric in person, habits, and dress. Among other oddities of apparel, he was partial to bright red small-clothes. His tory principles and singularities called down upon him the jibes of the patriots among whom his lot was temporarily cast, but his ready tongue and caustic wit were sufficient weapons of defence. In 1774, as town clerk of Worcester, he recorded a protest of forty-three royalist citizens against the resolutions of the patriotic majority. This record he was compelled in open town meeting to deface, and when he failed to render it sufficiently ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... inorganic matter, water, molasses, farina, and grape, or starch sugar. The latter substance is occasionally, for adulterating purposes, added in Europe to cane sugar; it may be detected by the action of concentrated sulphuric acid and of a solution of caustic potassa; the former blackens cane sugar, but does not affect the starch sugar, while potassa darkens the color of starch sugar, but does not alter that of cane sugar. But the copper test is far more delicate. Add to the solution to be ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... at the bed for an instant, took Mrs. Bent by the shoulders, and said, quietly, "Get me some caustic. Be quick." ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... With the milky juice of this tree the Indians poison their arrows; the dew-drops, which fall from it, are so caustic as to blister the skin, and produce dangerous ulcers; whence many have found their death by sleeping under its shade. Variety of noxious plants abound in all countries; in our own the deadly nightshade, henbane, hounds-tongue, and many others, are seen in almost every high road untouched by animals. ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... little medicine—merely three gallons of castor oil, a few bottles of iodine, some formiate of quinine, strong carbolic and arsenical soaps, permanganate and other powerful disinfectants, caustic—that was about all. These medicines were mostly to be used, if necessary, upon my men and ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... that she could not learn Malay, and did not think she should be any use as a missionary. This despondency was known to me, but I had no idea it cut so deep. Miss J—— had a great deal of quiet fun—she often amused us by her clever and somewhat caustic remarks. But Sarawak was too monotonous a life for her. When, some weeks afterwards, she had quite regained the balance of her mind, she went to Singapore, and became a very useful member of society for many years before she died. I never felt that I could judge ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... Xenophon, who commanded the retreat of the ten thousand, moralist and Intelligent pedagogue displaying much attractiveness in his Cyropoedia, the sensible, refined, and delightful master of familiar and practical life in his Economics; Theophrastus, botanist, very witty satirical moralist, highly caustic and realistic—these three established Greek wisdom for centuries, and probably for ever, erecting a solid and elegant temple wherein humanity has almost continuously sought salutary truths, and where some at least of our descendants, and those not the least illustrious, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... there till the doctor arrives. Give stimulants. Do not touch the burns more than is absolutely unavoidable. For Burns of Acids Dash cold water on the burns, then cover with lime-water and sweet oil, or linseed oil. For Burns of Caustic Alkalies Apply vinegar. Glass, coarse or Give the patient large quantities of bread powdered crumbs, and then induce vomiting. Ivy poison Wash at once with soap and water; using scrubbing brush. Then lay on cloths ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... reviewed enthusiastically by Hallam, but was more or less slated by Christopher North in the columns of Blackwoods' Magazine. Tennyson was very angry about the latter review and replied to the reviewer in some caustic, but entirely ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... of the wound careful attention must be paid to the granulating surface. Where tending to become too vigorous in growth it should be held in check by suitable caustic dressings. At the same time it must be remembered that the granulating process of repair is always more rapid upon the plantar cushion and fleshy sole than upon the bone, or upon tendinous or cartilaginous structures. As a result of this we have ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... his gait rejects all idea of order, and proceeds by spasmodic zig-zags and sudden stoppages, which knock him violently against peaceable citizens on the streets and boulevards of Paris. His conversation, full of caustic humor, of bitter satire, follows the gait of his body; suddenly it abandons its tone of vengeance and turns sweet, poetic, consoling, gentle, without apparent reason; he falls into inexplicable silences, or turns somersets ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... but they were small and carefully finished, and as far as possible from being common. And his grey eyes, though not conspicuous for size or beauty, had a character, an expression. They said something, something I couldn't perfectly translate, something shrewd, humorous, even perhaps a little caustic, and yet sad; not violently, not rebelliously sad (I should never have dreamed that it was a sadness which would drive him to desperate remedies), but rather resignedly, submissively sad, as if he had made up his ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... person missing from that crowd is the stage lady," was Miss Gladys Wragg's caustic comment, when Badminton-Smythe evoked a fresh outburst by protesting that he forgot to eat his fish owing to Spencer's ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... patriotic. Let me just add a sentence more, to say that if Rebellion and Sectional Hate are to be eradicated— and I hope they are—that is the way to do it. Your speech & the passage of such bills, catholic in every sense of love & charity, will do more to heal our Country's wounds than all the caustic of reconstruction which can ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... that I could give them more than many a younger woman. But if beauty is only skin deep the skin is all any man wants, the best of 'em. They treated me with the most impeccable respect—for the first time in my life I hated the word—and liked my society because I was an amusing caustic old woman. Of course they drifted off, either to marry, or because I terrified them with my sharp tongue: when I loved them most and felt as if I had poison in my veins. Well, I saved my pride, at ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... moralist and Intelligent pedagogue displaying much attractiveness in his Cyropoedia, the sensible, refined, and delightful master of familiar and practical life in his Economics; Theophrastus, botanist, very witty satirical moralist, highly caustic and realistic—these three established Greek wisdom for centuries, and probably for ever, erecting a solid and elegant temple wherein humanity has almost continuously sought salutary truths, and where some at least of our descendants, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... in good part by the captain, who at once corrected the mistake. But after going twice round the deck, and drawing forth many humorous as well as caustic remarks as to his size and general appearance, he was forced to the conclusion that his sister was not there. The lower ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... an incident in connection with the writing of his Autobiography. On more than one occasion, he declared that the Autobiography was going to be something awful—as caustic, fiendish, and devilish as he could make it. Actually, he was in the habit of jotting on the margin of the page, opposite to some startling characterization or diabolic joke: "Not to be published until ten (or twenty, or thirty) years ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... the conversation a little further, in the same tone of a half-caustic indulgence. At the end of it, however, Lord Fontenoy was still uneasy. He had only migrated to Malford House for the declaration of the poll, having spent the canvassing weeks mainly in another part of the division. And now, on ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Bagley," added Mr. Jones, in his dry, caustic way, "think soberly. I hope you are sober. I'm not one of the threatening barkin' sort, but I've reached the p'int where I'll bite. The law will protect us, an' the hull neighborhood has resolved, with Mr. Durham here, that you and your children shall make ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... is more caustic than correct. Boabdil never showed a want of courage in the defence of Granada, but he wanted firmness and decision: he was beset from the first by perplexities, and ultimately by the artifices of Ferdinand and the treachery of those in ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... they gave a round sum to the church, and Martin took caustic gratification in the fact that, although his attitude toward it and religion was well known, he too was counted as one of the fold. To do its leaders justice, he admitted that this might have been partly through their hesitancy to hurt Rose who was always to be found ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... but one reply to the other's caustic taunts. Bending low to catch Chandler's fast crystallizing gaze, he pointed to the sleeping lady's door with a gesture so stern and significant that the prostrate man half-lifted his head, with his remaining strength, to ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... set and even desperate by the light at the street corner and yet composed. He was suffering, perhaps. He was credulous. Yet there was something caustic about him. He had in him the seeds of extreme disillusionment, which would come to him from women in middle life. Perhaps if one strove hard enough to reach the top of the hill it need not come to him—this disillusionment from women in ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... him. He found it more and more uncomfortable to follow the ordinary course. Official routine was an agony to him. His caustic and satirical humour expressed itself in a style that astounded government departments. While he jibed at his superiors, his subordinates learned to dread the explosions of his wrath. There were moments when his passion became utterly ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... exception of the Tale of Two Cities, the author's only excursion into the historical novel. In 1841 D. went to America, and was received with great enthusiasm, which, however, the publication of American Notes considerably damped, and the appearance of Martin Chuzzlewit in 1843, with its caustic criticisms of certain features of American life, converted into extreme, though temporary, unpopularity. The first of the Christmas books—the Christmas Carol—appeared in 1843, and in the following year D. went to Italy, where at Genoa he wrote The Chimes, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... air of scorn for the whole system of fashionable education. "Jack is so unwilling to be classed with Stuffy and Ned, as distasteful to Bess, that he came to me a little while ago, and asked me to touch his warts with caustic. I have often proposed it, and he never would consent; but now he bore the smart manfully, and consoles his present discomfort by hopes of future favor, when he can show her ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... Condorcet, the battle-words of Mirabeau, the fierce zeal of St. Just, the iron energy of Danton, the caustic wit of Camille Desmoulins, and the sweet eloquence of Vergniaud found echoes in all lands, and nowhere more readily than in Great Britain, the ancient foe and rival of France. The celebrated Dr. Price, of London, and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... assuming that such a service was expected of her, threw herself into it with her accustomed zeal. But at the outset she perceived a subtle resistance to her efforts. If Mrs. Trenor's manner toward her was unchanged, there was certainly a faint coldness in that of the other ladies. An occasional caustic allusion to "your friends the Wellington Brys," or to "the little Jew who has bought the Greiner house—some one told us you knew him, Miss Bart,"—showed Lily that she was in disfavour with that portion of society which, while contributing ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... his sinciput (if again I may be permitted to use your ingenious metaphor)? Hah, hah! And do you mean to say that when I spoke to you about quarters provided by the State, that—hah, hah! You are very caustic. But I won't revert to that again. By-and-by!—one remark produces another, one thought attracts another—but you were talking just now of the practice or form in vogue with the examining magistrate. But what is this form? You know as I do that in many cases the form means ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... reduced to monosyllables as, miserable and apathetic, they sat thinking of the food they had sent back to Mr. Cone's kitchen with caustic comments, of the various dishes for which the chef of ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... opposition reared its head. She coloured, laughed—and half without intending it repeated some of the caustic things she had heard occasionally from her father or his friends as to the learning of Jesuits. Helbeck, under his lover's sweetness, showed a certain restlessness. He hardly let himself think the thought that Stephen Fountain had been quoted ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The caustic alkalies; sodium hydroxide, NaOH, or potassium hydroxide KOH, have a most deleterious action on wool. Even when very dilute and used in the cold they act destructively, and leave the fibre with a harsh feel and very tender, they cannot ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... corruption or evil hosts, then use burning ridicule and caustic sarcasm to sizzle and destroy the things that need ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... description is hardly less true, if we accept the word in its modern meaning. Raleigh's most notable verses, The Lie, are a challenge to the world, inspired by indignant pride and the weariness of life—the saeva indignatio of Swift. The same grave and caustic melancholy, the same disillusion marks his quaint poem, The Pilgrimage. It is remarkable how many of the verses among his few poetical remains are asserted in the MSS. or by tradition to have been "made by Sir Walter {89} Raleigh the night before he was beheaded." Of one such ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... suppose I wanted to dance with him?" Angie interrupted in immense scorn. "I only permitted him to put his name down on my card in ordinary courtesy because of his sister; she has such a caustic tongue that one must keep on the right side of her. If he chose to ignore his dances with me it was because he was playing a game which you, you conceited little simpleton, couldn't see through. Oh, I heard what he said to you ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... of protest was through the satirical poets. Of these caustic writers, Persius (34-62) is obscure and of a moderate degree of merit. Juvenal (about 55-135), on the contrary, is spirited and full of force. Martial (43-101), a Spaniard by birth, was the author of numerous short poems of a pithy and pointed character, called epigrammata. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... reminiscent of old jokes between the games; John Jennings lagged at cards, but flashed out now and then with fine wit, while his fervently working brain lit up his worn face with the light of youth. The lawyer, who drank more than the rest, played better and better, and waxed caustic in speech if crossed. As for the Squire, his frankness increased even to the risk of self-praise. Before the evening was over he had told the whole story of little Jerome, of Doctor Prescott and himself and the Edwards mortgage. The ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... understood that the more brilliant they supposed my present prospects to be, the more near were they to estimate them justly. One thing certainly gratified me throughout. All seemed rejoiced at my good fortune, and even the old Scotch paymaster made no more caustic remark than that he "wad na wonder if the chiel's black whiskers wad get him made governor of ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... inner one of differently shaped ones, likewise filled with purple fluid, but of a slightly different tint, and differently affected by chloride of gold. These two layers are sometimes well seen when a gland has been crushed or boiled in caustic potash. According to Dr. Warming, there is still another layer of much more elongated cells, as shown in the accompanying section (fig. 3) copied from his work; but these cells were not seen by ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... he could not have stood there thus, a tenth as long, before the copper name-shield of the Claridge, without collecting about him a fawning, favor-hunting throng so dense, so tenacious, and troublesome to traffic that it would have brought the officer from his place beside the surface-car tracks, caustic-tongued, to investigate and disperse it. Nor would that officer have ordered them to move on, six months before, once he had discovered what monarch it was who held informal court there. He would have paused for a bluff joke or two himself, a knowing word of ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... consequence of the simplicity of character under which it acted. Ever since the night of the robbery, he had devoted himself more to the pipe than he had ever been known to do before; he spoke little, too; but what he did say was: ironical, though not by any means without a tinge of quiet but caustic humor. ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... every fifty men who think they can play poker one ain't mistaken," was the Girl's caustic observation. The next instant, however, she jumped down from the table and was back at her post, where, fearful lest he should think her wanting in hospitality, she proposed: "Try a ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... records that he and his father before him had frequent lawsuits.[18] While a uniform tradition represents him as comely, pleasing and attractive, equally does it represent him as a man of ready, aggressive and caustic wit, and rebellious and bitter against opposition.[19] The lines on the slab over his grave are less supplicatory than mandatory against the removal of his bones to the adjacent charnel-house.[20] His name, often written with ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... well indeed with her crutches. But the merry-eyed woman had vanished—she of the Wapello colouring that had persisted during all these years. In her place limped a wan, shrunken, tragic little figure whose humour had soured to a caustic wit. The near-seal coat and the ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... solutions may be prepared which are entirely free from carbon dioxide, and such solutions immediately show by precipitation any contamination from absorption, but the hydroxide is not freely soluble in water; ammonia does not absorb carbon dioxide as readily as the caustic alkalies, but its solutions cannot be boiled nor can they be used with all indicators. The choice of a solution must depend upon the nature of ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... of efficiency. The one element which seemed to be a little lacking was that of a full appreciation of his own responsibility to the nation and the Empire. The brilliant light which blazed around the Throne could find no fault in the actual performance of any duty; but the critical eye and caustic pen had been prone for some years to allege an overfondness for pleasure and amusement and the pursuits ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... accepted the invitation to the card-table. At supper, Vaudemont conversed more than was habitual to him; he especially addressed himself to his host, and listened, with great attention, to Lilburne's caustic comments upon every topic successively started. And whether it was the art of De Vaudemont, or from an interest that Lord Lilburne took in studying what was to him a new character,—or whether that, both men excelling peculiarly in all masculine accomplishments, their conversation ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... or the group. The educational process is complex. There must be first the incitement to thought. Most effective in this direction is criticism. If the roads are such a handicap to the comfort and safety of travel that there is caustic criticism at the next town meeting, public opinion begins to set definitely in the direction of improvement. If city government is corrupt and the tax rate mounts steadily without corresponding benefits to the taxpayers, the newspapers ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... of rhetoric in this adjuration did not discredit it with Odo, to whom the words were as caustic on an open wound. He turned to make some impulsive answer; but as he did so he caught sight of the towers of Pianura rising above the orchards and market-gardens of the suburbs. The sight started a new train of feeling, and Gamba, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... divinity of genius. This is a power that comes complete at once from the hands of the Creator of all things, and the first essays of a man of real genius are such, in all their grand and most important features, as no subsequent assiduity can amend. Add to this, that Mr. Fuseli is somewhat of a caustic turn of mind, with much wit, and a disposition to search, in every thing new or modern, for occasions of censure. I believe Mary came something more a cynic out of the school of Mr. Fuseli, ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... done good work," he said, when he had finished reading her pungent and caustic words; "and yet—" A thoughtful expression crossed his face, he was silent for a moment, then he looked up at the young man, ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... talk with the kings and queens between the acts; to examine the scenery, to handle the properties, to study the "make up" of the imposing personages of full-dress histories; to deal with them all as Thackeray has done with the Grand Monarque in one of his caustic sketches,—this would be as exciting, one might suppose, as to sit through a play one knows by heart at Drury Lane or the Theatre Francais, and might furnish occupation enough to the curious idler who was only in search of entertainment. The mechanical obstacles of half-illegible manuscript, ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and neutralizing the properties of, acids, producing salts by the combination. Alkalies change most of the vegetable blues and purples to green, red to purple, and yellow to brown. Caustic alkali, an alkali deprived of all impurities, being thereby rendered more caustic and violent in its operation. This term is usually applied to pure potash. Fixed alkali, an alkali that emits no characteristic smell, and cannot be volatilized or evaporated without great difficulty. Potash and soda are called the fixed alkalies. Soda is also called a fossil, ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... he felt to be demanded by the weaknesses which he saw around him. The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little,—or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives. I myself regard Esmond as the greatest novel in the English language, basing that judgment upon the excellence of its language, on the clear individuality of the characters, ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... haunt no more St. Stephen's precincts; list not to the roar Of the mad Midland cheers, when FEILDING's plan Of levelling (moneyed) Woman up to Man Wins "Constitutional" support and votes From a "majority" of Tory throats! Mrs. LYNN LINTON, how this vote must vex, That caustic censor of her own sweet sex! Wild Women—with the Suffrage! Fancy that, O fluent Lady, at tart nick-names pat! Girls of the Period? They were bad enough, But what a deal of skimble-skamble stuff Will Mrs. FAWCETT's ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... are first heated to a temperature of about 600 deg. C. or faint redness, then the air pumps, C C, are started. Air is drawn by them through the purifier, D, where it is freed from carbon dioxide and moisture by the layers of quicklime and caustic soda with which the purifier is charged. The air is then forced along the pipe, E, into the small air vessel, F, which acts as a sort of cushion to prevent the baryta in the retorts being disturbed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... them. Any of the arsenical insecticides may be used, as Paris green, Scheele's green, arsenate of lead, etc. The first two are used at the rate of one-half pound to 50 gallons of water. The milk of lime made from 2 to 3 pounds of stone lime should be added to neutralize any caustic effect of the arsenical on the foliage. Arsenate of lead is used at the rate of 2 pounds to ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... two after December 15 the ministers and the court held a meeting at which very hot words passed between Governor Vane and Rev. Hugh Peter. Wilson, the pastor of Boston, also indulged in caustic criticisms directed at Governor Vane and the other friends of Mrs. Hutchinson. By this speech Wilson gave great offence to his congregation, who would have laid a formal church censure upon him had not Cotton interfered and in lieu of it gave his fellow-preacher a good scolding, under ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... bring them here at once. [Exit ORDERLY.] The very men Who meanly shirk their service to the crown! A breach of duty to be remedied, For disaffection like an ulcer spreads Until the caustic ointment of the law, Sternly applied, ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... weaker members of the Democratic Party shouted at once for his resignation. At a question cunningly framed by Dartrey, Tallente rose in the House to defend his position, and acting on the soundest axiom of military tactics, that the best defence is attack, he turned upon Miller, and with caustic deliberation exposed the plot framed for his undoing. He threw caution to the winds, and though repeatedly and gravely called to order, he poured out his scorn upon his enemy till the latter, white as a sheet, rose to demand the protection ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of Alfred Tennyson alone on the title page. The volume was reviewed enthusiastically by Hallam, but was more or less slated by Christopher North in the columns of Blackwoods' Magazine. Tennyson was very angry about the latter review and replied to the reviewer in some caustic, but entirely ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... 'Profissor,' says th' lawyer f'r the State, 'I put it to ye if a wooden vat three hundherd an' sixty feet long, twenty-eight feet deep, an' sivinty-five feet wide, an' if three hundherd pounds iv caustic soda boiled, an' if the leg iv a ginea pig, an' ye said yesterdah about bicarbonate iv soda, an' if it washes up an' washes over, an' th' slimy, slippery stuff, an' if a false tooth or a lock iv hair or a jawbone or a goluf ball across th' cellar eleven ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... she grew positively terrible. She was not old, but she had aged; she deliberately set herself to extort by fear all that the world was inclined to refuse her, and was harsh and rasping as a file. Caustic to excess she had few friends among women; she surrounded herself with prim, elderly matrons of her own stamp, who lent each other mutual support, and people stood in awe of her. As for poor Pons, his relations ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... serious injury to radishes, onions and the cabbage group. Liming the soil and rotation are the best preventives. Destroy all infested plants, being sure to get the maggots when pulling them up. The remaining plants should be treated with a gill of strong caustic lime water, or solution of muriate of potash poured about the root of each plant, first removing an inch or so of earth. In place of these solutions carbolic acid emulsion is sometimes used; or eight to ten drops of bisulphide of carbon are dropped into a hole made near the roots with the dibber ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... his eyes meeting the insolent stare of Roger Manning who was half turned in his seat. Remembering the caustic warning of the confident cadet, Tom fought back the flood in his ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... animal's miserable defects into public notice, and then closing his display by demanding what he would take for the horse 'including the rider.' The supposed reply of Coleridge might seem good to those who understand nothing of true dignity; for, as an impromptu, it was smart and even caustic. The baronet, it seems, was reputed to have been bought by the minister; and the reader will at once divine that the retort took advantage of that current belief, so as to throw back the sarcasm, by proclaiming that neither horse ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... the balm he sought in satire, was a dangerous caustic which, while closing one wound, might well cause others to open. At the same time, the money embarrassments inherited from his predecessor in the estate went on accumulating, and the period was approaching when the cassock, donned in boyish fun, was to ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... there is no limit to the number of times a tale will bear retelling. Occasionally we give it a fresh setting, adorn it with fresh accessories, and present it as new-born to the world; but this is only another indication of our affectionate tenacity. I have heard that caustic gibe of Queen Elizabeth's anent the bishop's lady and the bishop's wife (the Tudors had a biting wit of their own) retold at the expense of an excellent lady, the wife of a living American bishop; and the story ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... even bother to answer; he looked back at Mike the Angel, who was still standing at attention. Quill's voice resumed its caustic saccharinity. "But don't let that go to your head, Mister Gabriel. I repeat: Where is your pretty red ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... wasted in a pompous profusion that delights no one—when I look around upon all this rampant vulgarity in tinsel and Brussels lace, and think how fortunes go, how men struggle and lose the bloom of their honesty, how women hide in a smiling pretense, and eye with caustic glances their neighbor's newer house, diamonds or porcelain, and observe their daughters, such as these—why, I tremble, and tremble, and this scene to-night, every 'crack' ball this winter, will be, not the pleasant society of men and women, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... many things, grave and gay, delivering itself of observations upon the folly of Humans, comparing us very unfavorably with the godlike dignity of trees, the immutability of mountains, and the profound philosophy of brooks. Indeed it waged most eloquent upon this theme, caustic, if you will, but with a ripple, between whiles, like the deep-throated chuckle of the wise old philosopher ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... Frank, and he was glad that Sam was not there to improve the occasion with some further caustic remarks. ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... feminine perversity that led her to acquiesce in his animadversions upon the scene they had just left. It was certainly a function in which she was peculiarly fitted to shine, and she had taken her part with every appearance of enjoyment; yet her comments were more caustic than ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... she was looked upon with fear by all the villagers. Her manner was brusque, her speech sharp, and her criticism of neglectful mothers caustic and much to the point. Prim, always in black bonnet and jet-trimmed cape of years gone by, both in summer and winter, she took no heed of the vagaries of fashion, even when ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... which weighs upon him so cruelly. You gaze at the mortal heap; and, while it fills your eye with what purports to be Byron, you murmur within yourself, "For Heaven's sake, where is he?" Were I disposed to be caustic, I might consider this mass of earthly matter as the symbol, in a material shape, of those evil habits and carnal vices which unspiritualize man's nature and clog up his avenues of communication with the better life. But this would be ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... great contrast in their situation before the Court. Moreau was full of confidence and Georges full of resignation. The latter regarded his fate with a fierce kind of resolution. He occasionally resumed the caustic tone which he seemed to have renounced when he harangued his associates before their departure from the Temple. With the most sarcastic bitterness he alluded to the name and vote of Thuriot, one of the most violent of the judges, often ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... more than this: it is also a cathedral town, with the ever present sense of domination by the cloth even when the cloth is not visible. Chichester has its roughs and its public houses (Mr. Hudson in his Nature in Downland gives them a caustic chapter); it also has its race-week every July, and barracks within hail; yet it is always a cathedral town. Whatever noise may be in the air you know in your heart that quietude is its true characteristic. One might say ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... of caustic, impish brilliance was in her. She turned it upon the people they had rubbed shoulders with at the tables; upon the people walking past them on the ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... in my mind. How would the commander of this floating dwelling-place proceed? Would he obtain air by chemical means, in getting by heat the oxygen contained in chlorate of potash, and in absorbing carbonic acid by caustic potash? Or—a more convenient, economical, and consequently more probable alternative—would he be satisfied to rise and take breath at the surface of the water, like a whale, and so renew for twenty-four hours ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... requests that Mrs. Whiffler will tell Saunders what Tom said about mad bulls; and Mrs. Whiffler relating the anecdote, a discussion ensues upon the different character of Tom's wit and Dick's wit, from which it appears that Dick's humour is of a lively turn, while Tom's style is the dry and caustic. This discussion being enlivened by various illustrations, lasts a long time, and is only stopped by Mrs. Whiffler instructing the footman to ring the nursery bell, as the children were promised that they should come down and taste ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... disgrace at school and had added that he was truly sorry; the reply he received had been terse and rather stern but not unkind. Mr. Blake expressed much regret for his son's conduct and closed his epistle with the caustic comment that he should look for a proof of Van's desire to make good. That was all. Van knew that Dr. Maitland had also written; but what he did not know was that with the fearlessness so characteristic of him Bob Carlton had taken the time and trouble to pen a long ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... almost fainting with the heat before he left the Grosser Carl, but he insisted on being the last man on board, and then guyed the whole performance with caustic gayety when he was dragged out of the water, into which he had been forced to jump, and was set to drain on the floor ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... forms of enteritis are caused by germs and ptomaines in the feed. Drinking filthy water or eating spoiled, mouldy feeds are common causes. In cattle pasturing in low, marshy places, enteritis may be common. The toxic form is caused by irritating poisons, such as caustic ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... amicable understanding with her husband, and, after it, she had a greater sense of freedom. To Lord Hurdly it gave an insight into Bettina's nature which he had not had before. He found her to be possessed of a power of caustic speech which, he was bound to acknowledge, had made him feel uncomfortable. He felt also that he had not succeeded in asserting his supremacy over her quite so conclusively as he could have wished. He had, moreover, an uncomfortable ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... and subdued, that I have hardly fortitude enough to thank you. If your President, instead of pouring forth that delightful mixture of humour and pathos which you have just heard, had been but a caustic, ill- natured man—if he had only been a dull one—if I could only have doubted or distrusted him or you, I should have had my wits at my fingers' ends, and, using them, could have held you at arm's- length. But you have given me ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... wheeled chair, would be brought to him, to him, John C. Bedelle, whom as a boy he had held up to the ridicule of the class! What a revenge that would be, the proud and haughty Roman, the greatest flunker of them all, the Roman of the caustic tongue and the all-seeing eye, actually clinging to his hand, stammering out his thanks . . . the Roman whose mocking voice still echoed in his memory, "Don't dream, John, don't ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... happiness held me back—and presently I began to wonder whether I should attribute it to the influence of those with whom I was temporarily associated. I was almost confirmed in this impression when Mr. Harland's voice, harsh and caustic as it could be when he was irritated or worsted in an ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... for instance, was uncontrollable. Little bags of them came over to her from Hanover, and she sprinkled them on her bread and butter, her cabbage, and even her roast beef. Lady Flora could not resist a caustic observation; it was repeated to the Baroness, who pursed her lips in fury, and so the ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... were cheerless and arid; but he could judge the work of others generously as well as severely. No one of his generation so intelligently appreciated Shakespeare; no one more happily interpreted Montaigne. By swift apercu, by criticism, by anecdote, by caustic raillery, or serious record, he makes the intellectual world of his day pass before us and expound its meanings. The Revolution, the dangers of which he divined early, drove him from Paris. In bidding it farewell he wished that ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... aviation, communications, computer-aided design and manufactures, medical electronics), wood and paper products, potash and phosphates, food, beverages, and tobacco, caustic soda, cement, ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... originality, which is often much more slowly recognized. Mrs. Gore's fashionable novels, correct in portraiture and upholstery, clever but monotonous, had had their day; Mrs. Trollope's coarse and caustic delineations; G.P.R. James's combats, adventures, skirmishes, disguises, trials, and escapes, and Bulwer's sentimental and grandiloquent romances, had begun to pall upon the public taste. Miss Braddon perceived that the time had come for something new, so 'Lady Audley's Secret' ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the wine bottle. There must have been very good talk at these social meetings. Evarts and Schurz were citizens of the world. Evarts was a man of keen intelligence and wide information, and possessed a genial as well as a caustic wit. Schurz could discuss present politics and past history. He was well versed in European history of the eighteenth century and the Napoleonic wars, and could talk about the power of Voltaire in literature and the influence of Lessing on Goethe. ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... damped with water containing 10 parts in 100 of alcoholized caustic soda; at the expiration of one hour the envelopes of the pericarp, and of the testa Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, should be separated by friction in a coarse cloth, having been reduced by the action of the alkali to a pulpy state; each berry should ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... permission to spend the first half in India. This was granted, and my leave commenced from March 27th. By April 9th I was at Nowshera, and by three o'clock on the following morning, with head shaved, a weak solution of caustic and walnut juice applied to hands and face, and wearing the dress peculiar to the Meahs or Kaka Khels, and in company with Hosein Shah, I sallied out as ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... Alexander Quisante it was well to turn from Dick Benyon to Aunt Maria. So May Gaston found when she took the old woman at her word and went to see her, unaccompanied by Lady Attlebridge. She listened awhile to her caustic talk and then charged her roundly with not doing justice ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... larger concretions consist of a mere spherical shell, filled with slightly consolidated ashes. The concretions contain a small proportion of carbonate of lime: a fragment placed under the blowpipe decrepitates, then whitens and fuses into a blebby enamel, but does not become caustic. The surrounding ashes do not contain any carbonate of lime; hence the concretions have probably been formed, as is so often the case, by the aggregation of this substance. I have not met with any account of similar concretions; and considering their great toughness and compactness, ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... propounding such unmitigated nonsense as that power may be exercised, and phenomena produced, by non-entities. But if so, what else is Positivism than another form of that very metaphysicism which it condemns? and a form, too, peculiarly obnoxious to Mr. Mill's caustic remark that 'as in religion, so in philosophy, men marvel at the absurdity of other people's tenets, while exactly parallel absurdities remain in their own, and the same man is unaffectedly astonished that words can be mistaken for things, who is ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... biggest of which was that bathroom without water that had sent Annalise out on strike, was the information that a remittance would oblige. A remittance! Poor Fritzing. He crushed the paper in his hand and made caustic mental comments on the indecency of these people, clamouring for their money almost before the last workman was out of the place, certainly before the smell of paint was out of it, and clamouring, too, in the face of the Shuttleworth ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... the sheet is wound on an iron drum, vulcanized by being put into hot water, lightly varnished with shellac to stiffen it, then wound on a wooden cylinder, and cut into square threads. Boiling these in caustic soda removes the shellac. To make round threads, softened rubber is forced through a die. Rubber bands are made by cementing a sheet of rubber into a tube and then cutting them off at whatever width may be desired. Toy balloons are made of such rubber. Two pieces ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... "the late Lord ——'s library" were not in the manuscript. On the arrival of the final copy they were discovered, and thereby hangs an amusing tale, consisting of a series of letters which, in so far as they were written with a certain caustic, humorous Irish pen, have taken their high place among the "Curiosities of Literature." The upshot of the matter was that the publisher, entangled in the "weeds" brought over by his Mayflower ancestors, found himself as against the author in the position of Mr. Coote as against Shakespeare; ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... level of his audience; eloquent, but with no trace of the empty rhetoric which so often does duty for that quality; full of a high seriousness, but with no suspicion of pedantry; lightened by an occasional epigram or flashes of caustic humour, but with none of the small jocularity in which it is such a temptation to a lecturer to indulge. As one listened to him one felt that comparative anatomy was indeed worthy of the devotion of a life, and that to solve a morphological problem ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... new reservoir near Wilmerding, Pa., a mortar was made as follows: A stock solution of 2 lbs. caustic potash and 5 lbs. alum to 10 quarts of water was made in barrel lots, from which 3 quarts were taken for each batch of 2 bags of cement and 4 bags of sand. A batch of mortar covered an area 68 ft. with a 1-in. coat. The extra cost ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... must needs have been the latter," rejoined the visiter, with a manner that grew still more caustic and emphatic. "The bauble, that was the visible agent, could not have weighed greatly with one so proudly seated before ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... dangerous. Further, it ties the aspirant to his oar for at least ten weeks, which is perhaps its greatest disadvantage; and it involves intense application and a pretty good temper under remarks from the "coach" that are sometimes almost more than caustic. But against these drawbacks are to be set the pleasure of gratified ambition, the healthy life, and, best of all, the sensation of the flight of the boat driven by eight men, of whom none are really bad oarsmen, and some ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... fortune-hunters, lackeys, lank-haired Methodists, Bishops, and boarding-school misses. Ferdinand Count Fathom will be there, as well as my Lord Ogleby; Lady Bellaston (and Mr. Thomas Jones); Geoffry Wildgoose and Tugwell the cobbler; Lismahago and Tabitha Bramble; the caustic Mrs. Selwyn and the blushing Miss Anville. Be certain, too, that, sooner or later, you will encounter Mrs, Candour and Lady Sneerwell, Sir Benjamin Backbite and his uncle, Mr. Crabtree, for this is their main haunt and region—in fact, they were ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... "you have the thick skin necessary to living up to that rule." And the twinkle in his eyes betrayed the man who delights to exercise a real or imaginary talent for caustic wit. Such men are like nettles—dangerous only to ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... adequate idea of the intense rigour of the six months' winter in this part of the world. Stones crack with the noise of thunder; in a crowded hut the breath of its occupants will fall in flakes of snow; wine and spirits turn to ice; the snow burns like caustic; if iron touches the flesh, it brings the skin away with it; the soles of your stockings may be burnt off your feet, before you feel the slightest warmth from the fire; linen taken out of boiling water, instantly stiffens ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... Heaven forfend!), console thyself that thou livest in peaceable and enlightened times, and needest fear that no greater evil can befall thee on account of thy folly in writing than the lash of his satire and the bitterness of his caustic pen. After the manner of thy race thou wilt tempt Fortune again. May'st thou proceed and ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... was destined to fall on evil days. The master of the fifth form was a disagreeable man: strict and very caustic and sarcastic to boot. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... are not aware," resumed Mrs. Denyer, with a smile that made caustic comment on this apology, "that, when we sit at table, your eyes are directed to Miss Doran with a frequency that no one ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... a leader in our group and a keen delight to us all. He was at this time a small, brown-bearded man of thirty-five, whose quick humor, keen insight and unfailing interest in all things literary made him a caustic corrective of the bombast to which our local reviewers were sadly liable. Although a merciless critic of Chicago, he was a native of the city, and his comment on its life had to be confronted with such equanimity as our self-elected ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... did not resent the caustic manner. Its sharpness was turned now towards an impending fate, and to Caius O'Shea had come as to a friend in need. Mechanically he sat in the middle of the small bed, and huddled its blankets about him. The burly farmer, in ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... shortcomings of the orthodox religious world. Its faults of temper, its repulsive manners, its custom of making home unlovely, its distaste of innocent amusement, its habits of censure, its self-sufficiency and pharisaical character, are touched with a caustic but healing power. Only the hand of a friend could have done this thing. No point of doctrine is questioned, no principle of faith invaded, no charity wounded. She probes in love—her object is cure. This book is fresh and vigorous, worth thousands of lifeless ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... after a time was entrusted with easy analyses by Davy. In those days the Royal Institution published 'The Quarterly Journal of Science,' the precursor of our own 'Proceedings.' Faraday's first contribution to science appeared in that journal in 1816. It was an analysis of some caustic lime from Tuscany, which had been sent to Davy by the Duchess of Montrose. Between this period and 1818 various notes and short papers were published by Faraday. In 1818 he experimented upon 'Sounding Flames.' Professor Auguste ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... intercourse in the year 1831 in Paris. I never met with a more sincere, warm-hearted, constant friend. No man came nearer to the ideal I had formed of a truly high-minded man. If he was at times severe or caustic in his remarks on others, it was when excited by the exhibition of the little arts of little minds. His own frank, open, generous nature instinctively recoiled from contact with them. His liberalities, obedient to his generous sympathies, were scarcely bounded ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... Many of Nostromo's speeches I have heard first in Dominic's voice. His hand on the tiller and his fearless eyes roaming the horizon from within the monkish hood shadowing his face, he would utter the usual exordium of his remorseless wisdom: "Vous autres gentilhommes!" in a caustic tone that hangs on my ear yet. Like Nostromo! "You hombres finos!" Very much like Nostromo. But Dominic the Corsican nursed a certain pride of ancestry from which my Nostromo is free; for Nostromo's lineage had to be more ancient still. He is a ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... quiet, benevolent, anxious that people should enjoy themselves in their own way, and yet with a genial firmness of administration which is the greatest of all luxuries if it co-exists with much liberty. He was not a great talker, though he occasionally uttered a witty epigram, often of a somewhat caustic kind; but the air of serene benevolence with which he used to preside always set people at their ease. There was, too, another friend, who was there less often, but who shared the expense of the house, who was a singularly charming and stimulating talker, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Cauong).—A fine palm. Gives a sweet juice which turns into good vinegar. The trunk gives a Sago, called by the natives Yoro. The ripe seeds are a deadly poison. An infusion of the seeds in water is so caustic that it has been used to throw on to Moro pirates and thieves; wherever it touches the body it burns so terribly that none can suffer it or cure it. Sometimes it is thrown into the rivers to stupefy the fish, which then float and can be caught ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... vigorously until he had induced as copious a flow of blood as could reasonably be expected from the two tiny punctures. Then, fumbling in his waistcoat pocket, he drew forth a small stick of lunar caustic (with which he had some time previously provided himself in anticipation of possible snake-bites) and effectually cauterised the wound. The result of which prompt treatment was that the girl, after enduring some three hours' ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Elihu and I were fast friends, nevertheless: he sped many a wearisome hour for me when my uncle was upon his grim, mysterious business in the city; and I had long ago told him that he must not grieve, whatever I said—however caustic and unkind the words—because my uncle's whims must be humored, which was the end to be served by us both. With this assurance of good feeling, old Elihu Wall was content. He took my insolence in good part, ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... make his life a burden to him. At his clubs he had never been a member surrounded and rejoiced over when he made his appearance. The time came when he began to fancy that he was rather edged away from, and he endeavoured to sustain his dignity by being sulky and making caustic speeches when he was approached. Driven occasionally down to Stornham by actual pressure of circumstances, he found the outlook there more ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... gone, that dear companion of many years; she had practised faithfully until six months ago, when she had asked her teacher to tell her father that she could never become even a third-rate musician; and Don Roberto had, after a caustic hour, concluded that he would "throw no more good money after bad;" she had had long and meaning conferences with her mirror, conjuring up phantasms of the beautiful dead women of her race, and decided sadly that the worship of man was not for her. She had never talked for ten consecutive ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... conabatur." Prosperi Santacrucii de Civilibus Galliae dissensionibus commentariorum libri tres (Martene et Durand Amplissima Collectio), v. 1438. After these delineations of his character by not unfriendly pens, it is scarcely surprising that a caustic contemporary pamphlet—Le livre des marchands (1565)—should describe him as "ce cardinal si avare, et si ambitieux de nature, que l'avarice et l'ambition mise dedans des balances, elles demeureroyent egalles entre deux fers." ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... says: "I heard John Randolph (who hated Jefferson) once describe, in his own biting, caustic manner, the delight expressed by him in a new model for the mould-board of ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... often seen his wife in a passion, and he had frequently been a listener to torrents of abuse from her pretty lips and caustic tongue. Although he had been notorious as the rudest member of the Bar, he had generally come off second best in his frequent battles of words with his beautiful helpmate. Stolid and unimpressible as he was, he can hardly have been impervious to the effects of ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... treated with gaseous chlorine or chlorine water, in order to attack the jute pigment, which is very difficult to bleach, until it takes an orange shade. After having removed the acids, etc., formed by this treatment, the jute is placed in a weak alkaline bath, cold or hot, of caustic soda, caustic potash, caustic ammonia, quicklime, sodium or potassium carbonate, etc., or a mixture of several of these substances, which converts the greatest part of the jute pigment, already altered by the chlorine, into a form easily soluble ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... though he has rather more in common with Lamb, the contrast is much more obvious than the resemblance. Each wants the other's most characteristic vein; Hazlitt has hardly a touch of humour, and Lamb is incapable of Hazlitt's caustic scorn for the world and himself. They have indeed in common, besides certain superficial tastes, a love of pathetic brooding over the past. But the sentiment exerted is radically different. Lamb forgets himself when brooding over an ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... have slain the four helpless islanders with his own hands, Hollingsworth Chase had stayed his rage with the single, caustic adjuration: ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... Potash.—The solution of blood obtained in water is boiled, when a coagulum is formed soluble in hot caustic potash, the solution formed being greenish by transmitted ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... ironic thrust, Tessie would walk toward the screen door with a little flaunting sway of the hips. Her mother's eyes, following the slim figure, had a sort of grudging love in them. A spare, caustic, wiry little woman, Tessie's mother. Tessie resembled her as a water color may resemble a blurred charcoal sketch. Tessie's wide mouth curved into humor lines. She was the cutup of the escapement department at the watch factory; ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... all, it must be the content of the performances which is decisive of the incomparable triumph. We have no right to conclude from this that only the merits and excellences are the true causes of their success. A caustic critic would probably suggest that just the opposite traits are responsible. He would say that the average American is a mixture of business, ragtime, and sentimentality. He satisfies his business instinct by getting so much for his nickel, he enjoys his ragtime in the slapstick humor, ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... know him too well not to be on my guard." With that he joined Lord Lilburne's group, and accepted the invitation to the card-table. At supper, Vaudemont conversed more than was habitual to him; he especially addressed himself to his host, and listened, with great attention, to Lilburne's caustic comments upon every topic successively started. And whether it was the art of De Vaudemont, or from an interest that Lord Lilburne took in studying what was to him a new character,—or whether that, both men excelling peculiarly in all masculine accomplishments, their conversation was of a nature ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... land of the monkeys, that the dullness at all disappears. After the country of Leaphigh is reached the story is far less absurd and more entertaining; though (p. 135) Cooper's descriptions are of the nature of caricature rather than of satire. There are, however, many shrewd and caustic remarks scattered up and down the pages of the latter part of the work, but they will never be known to anybody, for nobody will read ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... they said, to draw it to a head, and at last thought it best to open it; so for a long time I had to suffer more from inconvenience than pain, although towards the end of the cure the continual touching with lunar caustic and other corrosive substances could not but give me very disagreeable prospects for every fresh day. The physician and surgeon both belonged to the Pious Separatists, although both were of highly different natural characters. The surgeon, a slender, well-built man, of easy and skilful ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... dry, caustic, with keen, quiet eyes that any subtle, clever man would have feared. But Nash's ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... Abbe Arnaud, Gluck's devoted defender, arose in his box and replied: "Yes! fallen from heaven." While Mademoiselle Levasseur was singing one of the great airs, a voice was heard to say, "Ah! you tear out my ears;" to which the caustic rejoinder was: "How fortunate, if it is to give ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... Fred, for all he may sparkle bright In caustic column, in clever quip, Of a truth must still be hiding his light Beneath ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... those of the sloe, and the seeds are used as coffee or eaten as beans. Kanembe- embe: the pounded leaves used as an extemporaneous glue for mending broken vessels. Katunguru is used for killing fish. Mutavea Nyerere: an active caustic. Mudiacoro: also an external caustic, and used internally. Kapande: another ordeal plant, but used to produce 'diaphoresis'. Karumgasura: also diaphoretic. Munyazi yields an oil, and is one of the ingredients for curing the wounds of ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... meeting the same faces at the boarding house table, hearing the same stale jokes or caustic remarks about Mrs. Atterson's food from Fred Crackit and the young men boarders of his class, or the grumbling of Mr. Peebles, the dyspeptic invalid, or the inane ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... from Valencia, named Priotarete, whose unguents, it was reported, had achieved many miraculous cures. The unguent, however, to the horror of the doctors, burned the skull till the bone was as black as the colour of ink; and Olivarez declares he believes it to have been a preparation of pure caustic. On the morning of the 9th of May, the Moor and his unguents were sent away, "and went to Madrid, to send to heaven Hernando de Vega, while the prince went back ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... "Called 'caustic-creeper' in Queensland. Called 'milk-plant' and 'pox-plant' about Bourke. This weed is unquestionably poisonous to sheep, and has recently (Oct. 1887) been reported as having been fatal to a flock ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... mountains as Ireland is by the sea, is like a lost island, fabled, remote, its speech Provencal, its soul purely Celt. Laughter loving, warlike and brave in the idyllic years of their prime, the Gruyeriens of to-day are still gay, caustic of wit as they are kindly at heart; and, in a changed world, as tenacious of their new republican rights as they were erstwhile valiant vassals to their pastoral kings. The source of innumerable songs and legends in the rich and melodious Gruyere speech, ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... a good deal to say about the danger there was from the teeth of animals or of human beings when enraged, and he emphasised his remarks by the application of a pencil of lunar caustic to each of the marks left ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... substance sui generis [peculiar in kind], which he calls melania. "The melania is a tasteless, black powder, insoluble in alcohol, ether, and water, while cold, but soluble in hot water: the solution is black. Caustic alkalies form with it a solution even in the cold, from which the mineral acids precipitate it unchanged. It contains much azote: it dissolves in, and decomposes, sulphuric acid: it easily kindles at the flame of a candle: it has been found to succeed, as a pigment, in some respects ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... by a sneer. How many a girl has had her society life ruined by the cruelty of a society leader! how many a young man has had his blood frozen by a contemptuous smile at his awkwardness! How much of the native good-will of an impulsive person has been frozen into a caustic and sardonic temper by the lack of a little optional civility? The servant who comes for a place, and seats herself while the lady who speaks to her is standing, is wanting in optional civility. She sins from ignorance, and should be kindly told of her offence, and taught better manners. ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... water, to which add the gold, and it is ready to use. Clear the article to be plated from all dirt and grease with whiting and a good brush; if there are cracks it may be necessary to put the article in a solution of caustic potash. At all events every particle of dirt and grease must be removed; then suspend the article in the cyanuret of gold solution, with a small strip of zinc cut about the width of a common knitting needle, hooking the top over a stick which will reach across the top of the vessel or bottle ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... the village of Ecclefechan Carlyle was born in 1795, the year before Burns's death. His father was a stone-mason, an honest man of caustic tongue; his mother, judged by her son's account, was one of nature's noblewomen. The love of his mother and a proud respect for his father were the two sentiments in Carlyle that went with him unchanged through a troubled and ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Then, here and there, appeared the signed critiques of the men whose opinion counted—and Bertram knew that he had failed. Neither as a work of art, nor as a likeness, was the portrait the success that Henshaw's former work would seem to indicate that it should have been. Indeed, as one caustic pen put it, if this were to be taken as a sample of what was to follow—then the famous originator of "The Face of a Girl" had "a most distinguished ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... connect it with the moon, and to call it Diana and Luna, names previously given to the satellite. For Artemis, the Greek Diana, the Ephesian craftsmen made silver shrines. The moon became the symbol of silver; and to this day fused nitrate of silver is called lunar caustic. It was natural and easy for superstition to suppose that silver was the moon's own metal; and to imagine that upon the reappearance of the lunar deity or demon, its beams should be propitiated by some argentine possession. We find that silver was exclusively used in the worship of ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... the properties of, acids, producing salts by the combination. Alkalies change most of the vegetable blues and purples to green, red to purple, and yellow to brown. Caustic alkali, an alkali deprived of all impurities, being thereby rendered more caustic and violent in its operation. This term is usually applied to pure potash. Fixed alkali, an alkali that emits no characteristic smell, and cannot be volatilized or evaporated without great difficulty. Potash and soda are ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... fortunate," said Austen, resolved not to be the necessary second in a quarrel. He knew his father, and perceived that these preliminary and caustic openings of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... I am giving a little dinner-party—just a few unusual people—to meet an American author who has recently come to England. Do come; but, you brilliant man, don't be too caustic, will you? ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... dotted with men trying to get the maximum amount of water from the sea in a small bucket let down on a line from the moving ship. First efforts in this direction would have been amusing had it not been for the caustic eye of the 'Mate' on the bridge. If the reader ever gets the chance to try the experiment, especially in a swell, he will soon find himself with neither bucket nor water. The poor Mate was annoyed by the ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... by any pleasant trips through picturesque scenery. It is either in you or it is not in you. You either have the slow, tenacious, humorous, patient, imaginative instincts of the country-born; or you have the smart, quick, clever, witty, fanciful, lively, receptive, caustic turn of mind of those bred in ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... specific gravity. It already threatened the poor dog's life, though not yet endangering that of her masters. The Captain, seeing this state of things, hastily laid on the floor one or two cups containing caustic potash and water, and stirred the mixture gently: this substance, having a powerful affinity for carbonic acid, greedily absorbed it, and after a few moments the air ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... fifty years or so—but there will come a writer of genius, and precisely a Russian one, who will absorb within himself all the burdens and all the abominations of this life and will cast them forth to us in the form of simple, fine, and deathlessly—caustic images. And we shall all say: 'Why, now, we ourselves have seen and known all this, but we could not even suppose that this is so horrible! In this coming artist I believe ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... last year, and it has recently assumed the form of extreme relaxation and irritation in the uvula, which is that pendulous appendage which hangs over the orifice of the throat. Mine has become so seriously elongated that, after submitting for four days last week to its being burnt with caustic every morning in the hopes that it might thus crimp and contract itself, I have been obliged to have it amputated. This has left a great soreness, which militates against talking and deglutition, and would render our charming chats after the Madeira over la cheminea ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... asking for a process of purifying which will be long and hard. 'I am ready,' says he, in effect, 'to submit to any sort of discipline, if only I may be clean. Wash me, beat me, tread me down, hammer me with mallets, dash me against stones, rub me with smarting soap and caustic nitre—do anything, anything with me, if only those foul spots melt away from the texture of my soul!' A solemn prayer, my brethren! if we pray it aright, which will be answered by many a sharp application of God's Spirit, by many a sorrow, by much very painful work, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... is a favorable wind to carry it along; or, the gas may be carried in cylinders or other containers and liberated at the desired points. Hand grenades or bombs are also employed which, upon bursting, liberate the gas or in some cases scatter acids or caustic soda. Some of these bombs contain a chemical which when liberated affects the eyes, causing impaired vision. The Germans employ several kinds of shell containing gases of different densities, one of heavy gas fired as a curtain to the rear ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... many of the finest players the colleges have ever seen. In a real football family there isn't much bluffing as to what you can do nor are there many excuses for a fumble or a missed tackle. With your big brothers' ears open and their tongues ready with a caustic remark, it doesn't need "Pop's" keen eye to keep you within the realms of truth as to the length of your run or why you missed ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... be touched with a stick of lunar caustic. You had better get a doctor to do it if they be very bad. The 8th July, 1867, ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various
... statements that cannot be disproved, or arguments that cannot be upset by reason. That which duty bids him do, practice enables him to do with terrible precision and completeness; and in many a case the caustic tone, assumed at the outset as a professional weapon, becomes habitual, and, without the speaker's knowledge, gives more pain within his home than ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... but to the whole race that came after them. Nor is it material that they differ in the mode, since they all agree in the kind. Calvus is close and nervous; Asinius more open and harmonious; Caesar is distinguished [b] by the splendour of his diction; Caelius by a caustic severity; and gravity is the characteristic of Brutus. Cicero is more luxuriant in amplification, and he has strength and vehemence. They all, however, agree in this: their eloquence is manly, sound, and vigorous. Examine their works, and you will see ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... grizzly locks wild staring, thatch'd A head for thought profound and clear, unmatch'd: Yet tho' his caustic wit was biting, rude, His heart was warm, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... again at Cap'n Amazon. That hardy mariner seemed to be quite as self-possessed as usual. His grim lips opened and in caustic ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... stories of London literary society—at least two of them, I think, new ones; and Charles was moved by generous emulation to contribute his own share to the amusement of the company. He was in excellent cue. He is not often brilliant; but when he chooses, he has a certain dry vein of caustic humour which is decidedly funny, though not perhaps strictly without being vulgar. On this particular night, then, warmed with the admirable Wrengold champagne—the best made in America—he launched out into a full and embroidered description of the various ways in which Colonel Clay ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... well-opened blue eyes, chesnut-tinted fair hair in great abundance, a well-formed neck, with the loveliest bust possible, and throughout her entire person a piquant blending of delicacy, grace, vivacity, and passion. The following summary of her character by the clever, caustic, but little scrupulous De Retz, graphic as it is, and based on a certain amount of truth, must not be unhesitatingly accepted, it being over-coloured by wilful exaggeration:—"I have never seen anyone else," ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... the smaller parasitic fungi (rusts, mildews, etc.) may be kept dry for any length of time, and on moistening with a weak solution of caustic potash will serve nearly as well as freshly gathered specimens for ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... fourth and most malicious personage, his name will be enough—it was Bixiou! Not (alas!) the Bixiou of 1825, but the Bixiou of 1836, a misanthropic buffoon, acknowledged supreme, by reason of his energetic and caustic wit; a very fiend let loose now that he saw how he had squandered his intellect in pure waste; a Bixiou vexed by the thought that he had not come by his share of the wreckage in the last Revolution; a Bixiou with a kick for every one, like Pierrot at the Funambules. ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... side and "Fraser's Magazine" on the other; the London "Critic" has kept up a galling fire on Mr. Collier, his folio, and his friends, to which the "Athenaeum" has replied by an occasional shot, red-hot; the author of "Literary Cookery," (said to be Mr. Arthur Edmund Brae,) a well-read, ingenious, caustic, and remorseless writer, whose first book was suppressed as libellous, has returned to the charge, and not less effectively because more temperately; and finally an LL.D., Mansfield Ingleby, of Trinity College, Cambridge, comes forward with a "Complete View of the Controversy," ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... he is an Anglais of dignity,"—Irish in reality, and a thought blusterous. "He has a condensed (SERRE) caustic way of talk; and I know not what of frank which one finds in the English, and does not usually find in persons of his trade. French Tragedies played at Berlin, I myself taking part; an Englishman Envoy ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... first heated to a temperature of about 600 deg. C. or faint redness, then the air pumps, C C, are started. Air is drawn by them through the purifier, D, where it is freed from carbon dioxide and moisture by the layers of quicklime and caustic soda with which the purifier is charged. The air is then forced along the pipe, E, into the small air vessel, F, which acts as a sort of cushion to prevent the baryta in the retorts being disturbed by the pulsation of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... most dunder-headed boy had plenty on the tip of his tongue. A small and indignant knot of townspeople, headed by a stout and severe middle-aged woman, with two big boys, her sons, followed the keeper, endeavouring by caustic remarks and withering glances to stop the flood of chaff, and restore the legitimate authority and the reign ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... true, cannot well flourish in any assemblage of young men, whose plain interest it is to undeceive all self-deception and quell every insurrection of individual vanity, and who soon understand the art of burning the nonsense out of an offending brother by caustic ridicule and slow-roasting sarcasm. But there is danger of mutual deception, springing from a common belief in a false, but attractive principle of culture. The mischief of intellectual conceit in our day consists in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... spook is possessed not only of humor but of a caustic satire as well. His jest is likely to have more than one point to it, and he can haunt so insidiously, can make himself so at home in his host's study or bedroom that a man actually welcomes a chat with him—only to find out too late that his human foibles have been mercilessly ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... was on the point of letting fly some caustic remark on his father's dress at the present moment; but he contented himself with saying, ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... slightest coolness. We were in daily, I can truly say, almost hourly, intercourse in the year 1831 in Paris. I never met with a more sincere, warm-hearted, constant friend. No man came nearer to the ideal I had formed of a truly high-minded man. If he was at times severe or caustic in his remarks on others, it was when excited by the exhibition of the little arts of little minds. His own frank, open, generous nature instinctively recoiled from contact with them. His liberalities, obedient to his generous sympathies, were ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... familiar word. There is a great deal of false sentiment in the world, as there is of bad logic and erroneous doctrine; but—it is very much less disagreeable to hear a young poet overdo his emotions, or even deceive himself about them, than to hear a caustic-epithet flinger repeating such words as "sentimentality" and "entusymusy,"—one of the least admirable of Lord Byron's bequests to our language,—for the purpose of ridiculing him into silence. An overdressed woman is not so pleasing as she might be, but at any rate she is ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... with slightly consolidated ashes. The concretions contain a small proportion of carbonate of lime: a fragment placed under the blowpipe decrepitates, then whitens and fuses into a blebby enamel, but does not become caustic. The surrounding ashes do not contain any carbonate of lime; hence the concretions have probably been formed, as is so often the case, by the aggregation of this substance. I have not met with any ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... power to write would mean to her. Her religion had gone, that dear companion of many years; she had practised faithfully until six months ago, when she had asked her teacher to tell her father that she could never become even a third-rate musician; and Don Roberto had, after a caustic hour, concluded that he would "throw no more good money after bad;" she had had long and meaning conferences with her mirror, conjuring up phantasms of the beautiful dead women of her race, and decided sadly that the worship of man was not for her. She had never ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... into Garangula, under which high-sounding appellation Big Mouth has descended to posterity. He was an astute old savage, well trained in the arts of Iroquois rhetoric, and gifted with the power of strong and caustic sarcasm, which has marked more than one of the chief orators of the confederacy. He shared with most of his countrymen the conviction that the earth had nothing so great as the league of the Iroquois; but, if he could be proud and patriotic, so too he could be selfish and mean. ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... watched Lily. She knew the contrast the girl must be drawing, between the bright little meal, with its simple service and clever talk, and those dreary formal dinners at home when old Anthony sometimes never spoke at all, or again used his caustic tongue like a scourge. Elinor did not hate her father; he was simply no longer her father. As for Howard, she had had a childish affection for him, but he had gone away early to school, and she hardly knew him. But she did not want his ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... was something more than a caustic critic. For the terrible ills of his age and country he had one plain and homely remedy, and that for all true Christians to leave the Church of Rome and return to the simple teaching of Christ and His Apostles. If the reader goes to Peter for systematic theology, he will be grievously ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... having been written at the period referred to. This was entitled, "Terrible Tractoration!! A Poetical Petition against Galvanizing Trumpery and the Perkinistic Institution. Most respectfully addressed to the Royal College of Physicians, by Christopher Caustic, M. D., LL. D., A. S. S., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Aberdeen, and Honorary Member of no less than nineteen very learned Societies." Two editions of this work were published in London ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and attractive, the absence of dogmatism, or superciliousness, or self-assertion,—the mingled deference and independence, the clear and sustained thought, the ready insight, the quick apprehension of proprieties, the intelligent, dexterous, but never caustic reply, the sure appreciation of the feelings of others, and the power of making them, even the lowliest, feel that what they said was listened to with interest,—the sense of the droll and ludicrous, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... Saunders what Tom said about mad bulls; and Mrs. Whiffler relating the anecdote, a discussion ensues upon the different character of Tom's wit and Dick's wit, from which it appears that Dick's humour is of a lively turn, while Tom's style is the dry and caustic. This discussion being enlivened by various illustrations, lasts a long time, and is only stopped by Mrs. Whiffler instructing the footman to ring the nursery bell, as the children were promised that they should come ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... remarkably rapid. Nothing is more striking than the alteration of the tone in Frederick's correspondence during the few months which followed his accession: the voice of the raw and inexperienced youth is heard no more, and its place is taken—at once and for ever—by the self-contained caustic utterance of an embittered man of the world. In this transformation it was only natural that the wondrous figure of Voltaire should lose some of its glitter—especially since Frederick now began to have the opportunity of inspecting that figure in the flesh with his ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... when physical courage sits so high, the reader—if he is swept off in the general opinion—will expect under such a title something caustic. He will think that I am about to loose against all cowards a plague of frogs and locusts as if old Egypt had come again. But cowardice is its own punishment. It needs no frog to nip it. Even the sharp-toothed locust—for in the days that bordered so close upon the mastodon, the locust could ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... family circle, particularly of the smaller Jackson sisters, were so breezy and unrestrained that Mrs. Jackson generally felt it necessary to apply the closure. Indeed, Marjory Jackson, aged fourteen, had on three several occasions been fined pudding at lunch for her caustic comments on the batting of her brother Reggie in important fixtures. Cricket was a tradition in the family, and the ladies, unable to their sorrow to play the game themselves, were resolved that it should not be their fault if the standard was not ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... cunningly framed by Dartrey, Tallente rose in the House to defend his position, and acting on the soundest axiom of military tactics, that the best defence is attack, he turned upon Miller, and with caustic deliberation exposed the plot framed for his undoing. He threw caution to the winds, and though repeatedly and gravely called to order, he poured out his scorn upon his enemy till the latter, white as a sheet, rose to demand the protection of the Speaker. ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... barrister to study morals, or even to consider them," was the somewhat caustic reply. "When once a brief is in my mind, it is a matter of brain, cunning and resource. The guiltier a man, the greater the success if you can get ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... severe criticism when they appeared in 1891, and are considered so far beneath Mr. Kipling's real work that they have been nearly suppressed and are rarely found in a list of his writings. Their very caustic style is of interest to a student and lover of Kipling, and for this reason the publishers believe them worthy of a ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... benevolent use hereafter. Mediaeval barons left money for masses. Plenty of Protestants do exactly the same thing. Brewers will build cathedrals, and found picture galleries, and men that have made their money foully will fancy that they atone for that by leaving it for some charitable purpose. The caustic but true wit of a Scottish judge said about a great bequest which was supposed to be—whether rightly or wrongly, I know not—of that sort, that it was 'the heaviest fire insurance premium that had been paid in the memory of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Scheele's green, arsenate of lead, etc. The first two are used at the rate of one-half pound to 50 gallons of water. The milk of lime made from 2 to 3 pounds of stone lime should be added to neutralize any caustic effect of the arsenical on the foliage. Arsenate of lead is used at the rate of 2 pounds to each 50 gallons ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... President criticized in his proclamation. They united over their own signatures in a public "Protest" against the action of Mr. Lincoln. The paper was prepared by Mr. Davis, which of itself was guaranty that it would be able, caustic, and unqualified. Mr. Wade was known to be a man of extraordinary courage, both physical and moral. To these qualities Mr. Davis added a highly cultivated mind and a style of writing which in political controversy has rarely been surpassed—a style ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... it possible that the mere fact of being engaged to a sweet-natured youth like Theo Joyselle could cause such a miracle as this before his eyes? What was the boy to change Brigit from a sullen, caustic woman into a charming, lovely ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... except his mother and uncle. He, however, sent for Dr Livingstone, who gladly went to him. He and Dr Kirk at once told him that the disease was most difficult to cure, and that he might rest assured he had not been bewitched. They applied lunar caustic externally and hydrate of potash internally, with satisfactory results; so that in the course of a short time the poor chief's appearance ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... or iron plate, P, the corrugated zinc plates, b, b', b", are placed one above the other, each alternating with a flat one, a, a', a". These plates have previously been scoured, first with a weak solution of caustic soda in order to remove every trace of fatty matter derived from rolling, and then with very dilute hydrochloric acid, and finally are washed with common water. In order to facilitate the disengagement of hydrogen during the reaction, care must ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... an escort to be despised, as Ruth soon discovered. She very quickly felt a sort of family pride in his cool, quizzical manner and caustic repartee, that was wholly distinct from the more girlish admiration of his distinguished person. He and Ruth were great friends in a ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... near Wilmerding, Pa., a mortar was made as follows: A stock solution of 2 lbs. caustic potash and 5 lbs. alum to 10 quarts of water was made in barrel lots, from which 3 quarts were taken for each batch of 2 bags of cement and 4 bags of sand. A batch of mortar covered an area 68 ft. with a 1-in. coat. The extra cost of ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... with which to manufacture the supplies are mild carbon steel for the barrels, bayonets, bolt, and locks; well-seasoned ash or maple, straight-grained, for the stocks; brass, iron, powder, antimony, benzol or phenol, sulphuric acid, nitric acid, and caustic soda, &c. Of these various materials the most difficult to secure are those used in ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... brother, Hiley, who subsequently figured so often in the caustic rhymes of Canning, and who, under his brother's auspices, was successively secretary of the treasury, paymaster of the forces, and under-secretary of state. In his twelfth year, Henry, followed by Hiley, was sent to Winchester, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... congenial bird of prey in this region. On the contrary, she had to drag her unwilling friend down into it; and as Miss Tippet was too conscientious and kind-hearted to agree with her in her sweeping censures and caustic observations and wilful misconstructions, it is difficult to conceive wherein she (the Eagle) found pleasure in her society. Probably it was because she found in her one who would submit meekly to any amount of contradiction, ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... 1908 were followed by the provincial elections in the ensuing month, and thus a favourable opportunity was presented of contrasting the working of the two systems. The grossly unfair results of the provincial elections drew forth from many journals most caustic criticism. Le Peuple expressed the hope that these provincial elections would be the last instance of the use of the majority system in Belgium. "Is it not," it proceeded, "absurd, stupid, detestable that the provincial councils are alone excluded from the system of proportional ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... it is not only witnesses that he bullies, but his very brethren of the gown. The barristers themselves who are opposed to him, at any rate, the juniors, are doomed to bear the withering force of his caustic remarks. ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... condition, the parent birds, with tender assiduity, carry out what comes away from their young. Was it not for this affectionate cleanliness the nestlings would soon be burnt up, and destroyed in so deep and hollow a nest, by their own caustic excrement. In the quadruped creation the same neat precaution is made use of; particularly among dogs and cats, where the dams lick away what proceeds from their young. But in birds there seems to be a particular provision, that the dung of nestlings ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... bare the skeleton of the human mind, to tear away all the charming little sentiments and hypocrisies which in the course of time become a part and parcel of human life. A man influenced by such motives, and possessing a frank and caustic tongue, was not likely to attain any very large share of popular favour or to be esteemed a companionable sort of person. The fabric of social life is interwoven with a multitude of delicate evasions, of small hypocrisies, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... agitated Assistant District Attorneys jumped to their feet and barked out an objection to the presence of the accused's wife and family on the inside of the fence, and the court promptly sustained them. He also said some very sharp and caustic things to Smilk's lawyer. Mrs. Smilk and her bewildered seven patiently resumed their seats in the front row of spectators, but not until after a four year old girl, surreptitiously pinched, had caused a mild sensation by piping: "I want my ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... Baylis. Now Miss Baylis at her very best was not a restful individual with whom to come in touch, and after a long morning of hard work and the growing hunger of healthy appetites for food for the body rather than for the mind, the girls did not find "a barbed tongue" and a caustic disposition soothing. ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... Lincoln not only did it grudgingly, but afterwards lampooned the man so severely in satiric verse that he was ashamed to show himself at neighborhood gatherings. All the people about Gentryville feared Lincoln's caustic wit, and disliked him for it, although they were greatly impressed with his ability exhibited thereby. Lincoln recognized his moral obliquity, and curbed his propensity for satire, which was a case of that "exercise of natural faculty" which affects all gifted ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... at him strengthened the impression. He did not approach the circle in which the Contessa sat all the evening, but stood apart, silent, taking little notice of anybody until Mr. Derwentwater secured his ear, when Sir Tom, instead of his usual genial laugh at MTutor's solemnities, discharged little caustic criticisms which astonished his companion. Mr. Derwentwater was going away next day, and he, too, was preoccupied. After that conversation with Sir Tom, he betook himself to Lucy, who was very silent too, and doing little for the ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... chief physician, Grossi, to Chambery, on the demise of King Victor, seemed to favor this idea, or perhaps, first suggest it; however this may be, by flattery and attention she set about managing Grossi, who, in fact, was not very manageable, being the most caustic and brutal, for a man who had any pretensions to the quality of a gentleman, that ever I knew. The reader may judge for himself by two or three traits of character, which I shall add by way ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... as, miserable and apathetic, they sat thinking of the food they had sent back to Mr. Cone's kitchen with caustic comments, of the various dishes for which the chef of The ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... an illustration of the days of chivalry, was written in a spirit of caustic contempt for the fair sex, which suggests the bitterness of ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... is for novelty, a characteristic usually preferred to originality, which is often much more slowly recognized. Mrs. Gore's fashionable novels, correct in portraiture and upholstery, clever but monotonous, had had their day; Mrs. Trollope's coarse and caustic delineations; G.P.R. James's combats, adventures, skirmishes, disguises, trials, and escapes, and Bulwer's sentimental and grandiloquent romances, had begun to pall upon the public taste. Miss Braddon perceived that the time had come ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... they sigh for an historical atmosphere, and then, when they come to Europe and get it, they do not like it, and think Schenectady, New York, "a better place." It is not easy to understand what ailed Hawthorne with Europe; he was extremely caustic in his writings about that continent, and discontented. Our matrons were so stout and placid that they irritated him. Indeed, they are a little heavy in hand, still there are examples of agreeable slimness, even in this poor old country. Fond as he was of the historical past, ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... our witty clubbist in every page; George in his full expansion, "in his armour as he lived;" George, every inch a wit, glittering before us in his full court suit, in his letters, his anecdotes, his whims, his odd views of mankind, his caustic sneerings at the glittering world round him; an epistolary HB., turning every thing into the pleasant food of his pen and pungency. But we cannot discover any letters from him, excepting a few very trifling ones of his youth. We have letters from all sorts of persons, great ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... leisure for him; and Sir Charles Moreton, who was argus-eyed where Lady Mabel was concerned, ventured to ask: "What pleasure can you find in talking to this austere soldier? His smile is a sneer; he warms only to grow caustic, and his cynical air betrays how little he cares even ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... asceticism were in the habit of making periodic trips to this pornographic Mecca for the reason that they could there be accommodated with the simultaneous ministrations of two or even three soiled doves of the stripe of her of whom Martial (ix, 69) makes caustic mention: ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... sugar are inorganic matter, water, molasses, farina, and grape, or starch sugar. The latter substance is occasionally, for adulterating purposes, added in Europe to cane sugar; it may be detected by the action of concentrated sulphuric acid and of a solution of caustic potassa; the former blackens cane sugar, but does not affect the starch sugar, while potassa darkens the color of starch sugar, but does not alter that of cane sugar. But the copper test is far more delicate. Add to the solution to be tested, a few drops of blue vitriol, and then a quantity of potassa ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... to break the news." But each day found it harder to begin, and only the announcement of her intended departure one morning brought him to the hazard. He was beginning to feel less secure of her, and less indifferent to the gibes of the town jokers, who found in his enslavement much material for caustic remark. They called him the "tired cowboy" and ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... step to be taken in the 'laicisation' of the schools has been already revealed in the famous 'Article 7' of M. Ferry. M. Ferry is the true, though more or less occult, head of the present Administration in France. 'M. Ferry,' said a caustic French Radical to me in Paris, 'ought to be the mask of M. Carnot. Nature gave him a Carnival nose for that purpose. Everything is topsy-turvy now in France, and so M. Carnot is the mask of M. Ferry. But the nose ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... Haye looked angry at the rather caustic irony with which I had sprinkled the dialogue; but he was still more vexed when, taking some gold out of my pocket, I returned to him the sum he had lent me in Vienna. A man never argues well except when his purse is well filled; then his spirits are pitched in a high key, unless he ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... for such he became, thus got an early footing at Court, which another would have improved and maintained. But, when he grew too big to be whipped, he had no other means of rendering himself acceptable. A bitter, caustic, and backbiting humour, a malicious wit, and an envy of others more prosperous than the possessor of such amiable qualities, have not, indeed, always been found obstacles to a courtier's rise; but ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... rather overbearing individuality made an impression not altogether agreeable upon many of her contemporaries. Lowell introduced a caricature of her as "Miranda" into his Fable for Critics, and Hawthorne's caustic sketch of her, preserved in the biography written by his son, has given great offence to her admirers. "Such a determination to eat this huge universe!" was Carlyle's characteristic comment on her appetite for ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... maintain any kind of peaceful relationship between them. Barret, as Hemmingwell's chief assistant and supervisor of the project, was naturally superior in rank to Troy, and made the most of it. A placid, easy-going man, Troy took Barret's gibes and caustic comments in silence, doing his work and getting it finished on time. But occasionally he had difficulty in ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... place, I do not propose to open the chest with the bistoury. The operation, even though aided by chloroform, would cause too violent a shock to the nervous system. But I intend to burn through gradually, by successive applications of caustic, as in the procedure for opening hepatic cysts. Deep-seated adhesions would form and shut out the lungs securely, and thus probably obviate the necessity for artificial respiration. The pericardium ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... feeling &c. v.; sentient; sensuous; sensorial, sensory; emotive, emotional; of feeling, with feeling &c. n. warm, quick, lively, smart, strong, sharp, acute, cutting, piercing, incisive; keen, keen as a razor; trenchant, pungent, racy, piquant, poignant, caustic. impressive, deep, profound, indelible; deep felt, home felt, heartfelt; swelling, soul-stirring, deep-mouthed, heart-expanding, electric, thrilling, rapturous, ecstatic. earnest, wistful, eager, breathless; fervent; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... furnish the supply. Some dealers in fresh burned lime have asserted that it was folly to expect any appreciable result from the use of unburned limestone. The manufacturer of ground limestone has pointed out the possibility of injuring a soil by the use of caustic lime, and oftentimes has so emphasized his point that farmers have become unwilling to apply fresh or water-slaked lime to their land. Manufacturers of hydrated lime in some instances have made a confused situation ...
— Right Use of Lime in Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... and womanly. But toward the end of their journeying together, she felt more hopeful. Reticent as she was, Priscilla Gower was a very charming young person. She talked well, and with much clear, calm sense; she laughed musically when she laughed at all, and could make very telling, caustic speeches when occasion required; but still it was singular what a wide difference the difference of six years made in the two girls. As Lady Throckmorton had said, it was not a matter of age. At twenty-two Theodora North would overflow with ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to but one reply to the other's caustic taunts. Bending low to catch Chandler's fast crystallizing gaze, he pointed to the sleeping lady's door with a gesture so stern and significant that the prostrate man half-lifted his head, with his remaining strength, ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... pocket and read, with much sarcastic comment, the scenes they were later to enact. He would incite the Happy Family to poking fun at such lurid performances as Bently Brown described in all seriousness and in detail. He would encourage comment and argument and the play of their caustic imaginations upon the action of the story. He would gradually make them see the whole thing in the light of a huge joke; he would, without saying much himself, bring the Happy Family into the mood of wanting to make Bently Brown appear ridiculous to ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... A caustic was applied to this as soon as the tiny wound had been freely lanced and set bleeding, and then with the proper instrument a strong application of ammonia was forced into one of the mule's larger veins, ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... hostess nursing a weird-looking black cat; the other young lady continually harking back to "conjugal" subjects, which seemed to interest her; the mamma slightly flabbergastered at the rather revolutionary nature of the communications; and our host every now and then throwing in a rude or caustic remark. I dreaded to think what might have been the result of a domiciliary visit paid by a Commissioner in Lunacy to that ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... Operation for Artificial Anus denied to have been performed. 42, Gangrenous Sore Mouth of Children. 43, Operation for Phymosis. 44, Lunar Caustic on Wounds and Ulcers. 45, Haemorrhage from Lithotomy. 46, Extirpation of the Parotid Gland. 47, Aneurism from a Wound, cured by Valsaiva's method. 48, Protrusion and Wound of the Stomach. 49, Oesophagotomy. 50, Retention of ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... the last of that particular line of Georges. I say that he handsomely complied with the requirements of the will; but my statement appears to be subject to qualification, for on the day of his obsequies it was remarked of him by a caustic contemporary: "Well, yes, Mr. Jaffrey was a gentleman by profession, but not eminent ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... manifested itself in Hazlitt precociously in the study of human nature. He characterized some of his schoolmates disdainfully as "fit only for fighting like stupid dogs and cats," and at the age of twelve, while on a visit, he communicated to his father a caustic sketch of some English ladies who "require an Horace or a Shakespeare to describe them," and whose "ceremonial unsociality" made him wish he were back in America. His metaphysical studies determined ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
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