"Mercurial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon my arrival, to tell me the difference between an infusion and decoction; and the history, the virtues, and the botanical or medical name of the bark. Chambers will tell you more perhaps than you will wish to read of it. Your little mercurial disquisition ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... three miles off, what was there to be said? No possible pretext could be devised for preventing them. Why, oh, why had she persuaded that graceless dragoon to leave Aldershot and share the peace and tranquillity of home? She might have remembered how foreign peace and tranquillity were to Jim's mercurial disposition; and then, Lady Mary reflected ruefully, that flirting Suffolk girl was certain to be present at the sports. In her dismay, she for a second thought of taking counsel with Pansey Cottrell as to what it were best to do ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... by an impetuous and mercurial people, whose lightning sympathies demanded as rapid a response, inevitably threw their supposed possessors into disfavour. The situation was doubly to be regretted, in that both the Princess and her husband were in reality devoted to Brazil and to the best interests of the Brazilians. It ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... confidante, older than she, much more dignified, and of the reticent sort to which the mercurial and loquacious naturally tend to reveal their secrets. She knew all that Annie knew, dreamed, or hoped about Hunt; but had never happened to meet him, much to the annoyance of Annie, who had longed inexpressibly for the time when Lou should have seen him, and she herself ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... china Dinah's mistress arrived in time to see her favorite coffee-set in pieces. The sight was too much for her mercurial temper. "Dinah," she said, "I cannot stand it any longer. I want you to go. I want you to go soon, I want ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... my ideal." She burst into tears and flung her arms about Magdalena's neck: she was always miserable when those she loved were angry with her, much as she delighted to shock the misprized. "Say you forgive me," she sobbed, "or I sha'n't eat or sleep for a week." And Magdalena, who always took her mercurial friend literally, forgave her ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... sorrows and anxieties have rested, but not on one such, and in such measure, as upon that simple, truthful, noble soul, our faithful and sainted Lincoln. Never rising to the enthusiasm of more impassioned natures in hours of hope, and never sinking with the mercurial in hours of defeat to the depths of despondency, he held on with immovable patience and fortitude, putting caution against hope, that it might not be premature, and hope against caution, that it might not yield to dread and danger. ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... No one knew better than he how little regard John M. Hurd really felt for this mercurial youth. Yet Mr. Hurd had resisted with entire success all other means of approach. After all, family connections counted for something, even with the retentive old trolley magnate. So when at last he spoke, it was with the determination to show a ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... of his own pleasure to ever think of sending her money. "Jerry," he thought, "was a mighty stingy fellow, and never spent a cent on himself—and could easily send Nell all she wanted." And yet Gerald Rodman, knowing his brother's weak and mercurial nature, and knowing that he took no care in the welfare of any living soul but himself, would have laid his life down for him, because happy, careless Ned had Nellie's eyes and Nellie's mouth, and in the tones of his voice he heard hers. So as ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... party were of the same mind, the boat was allowed to drift down the gulf with the tide, while the pork and biscuit-bags were opened. Little time was allowed for the meal, nevertheless the mercurial Canadian managed, between mouthfuls, to keep up a running commentary on things in general. Among other things he referred to the property which his master had just purchased ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... "broad gauge" occasioned her to swoon, and dispelled the romantic attachment of Lord Montacute, was but a repetition of the French countesses, who thronged the antechambers of Law a century before. More vehement in their desires, more mercurial in their temperament than the English, the French, when seized with any general mania, push it even into greater excesses, and induce upon themselves and their country more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... hot. Placing the dark card in the same position, it is found cool. The white powder has absorbed far more heat than the dark one. This simple result abolishes a hundred conclusions which have been hastily drawn from the experiments of Franklin. Again, here are suspended two delicate mercurial thermometers at the same distance from a gas-flame. The bulb of one of them is covered by a dark substance, the bulb of the other by a white one. Both bulbs have received the radiation from the flame, but the white bulb has absorbed most, and ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Hilary Vance, an artist who had employed Pollyooly as his model for a set of stories for The Blue Magazine. Hilary Vance was devoted to Pollyooly, and he had a spare bedroom. But for a while the Honourable John Ruffin hesitated; the artist was a man of an uncommonly mercurial, irresponsible temperament. Was it safe to entrust two small children to his care? Then he reflected that Pollyooly was a strong corrective of irresponsibility, and took a ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... offence to his superiors, he began to be depicted as an idiot and a scoundrel, and this judgment promptly displaced the other one in the popular mind. The late Major General Roosevelt was often a victim of that sort of boob-bumping. A man of mercurial temperament, constantly shifting his position on all large public questions, he alternately gave great joy and great alarm to the little group of sagaciously wilful men which exercises genuine sovereignty ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... eyes, and a dark circle round them, spoke of cares and fatigue, and perhaps dissipation. But he had evidently a vigour of constitution that had borne him passably through all; his frame was wiry and nervous; his eye bright and full of life; and there was that abrupt, unsteady, mercurial restlessness in his movements and manner which usually accompanies the man whose sanguine temperament prompts him to concede to the impulse, and who is blessed or cursed with a superabundance of energy, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be turned round its axis by the force of horses, in order that the heat accumulated in the cylinder might from time to time be measured, a small, round hole 0.37 of an inch only in diameter and 4.2 inches in depth, for the purpose of introducing a small cylindrical mercurial thermometer, was made in it, on one side, in a direction perpendicular to the axis of the cylinder, and ending in the middle of the solid part of the metal which formed the bottom ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... and the chief agent in its production was bichromate of potash. This salt is not actively poisonous, and no one thought of attributing injurious properties to materials dyed with the aniline mauve. Next in chronological order came magenta red. It was first made from aniline by the agency of mercurial salts, and afterward by that form of arsenic known to chemists as arsenic acid. The fact that this at one time fashionable color was prepared by means of an arsenical compound was spread through the country in a very impressive manner by the great trial as to whether ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... that she should have gone on to the study of Herodotus. And I described to her the situation of the vivacious and mercurial Athenian, in the early period of Pericles, as repeating in its main features, for the great advantage of that Grecian Froissart, the situation of Adam during his earliest hours in Paradise, himself being the describer to the affable archangel. The same genial climate there ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Richard, much younger than himself. They are the children of the same mother who, some years after her first widowhood, had married an Irish gentleman, of mercurial habit, by whom she had this second child. George had already left home to earn his living, with the consequence that the two brothers had scarcely ever met until the occasion upon which the story opens. Richard, after first trying ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... one or two leeches to the throat, and put mustard poultices to the foot and thighs, retaining them about eight minutes; and, in extreme cases, a mustard poultice to the spine between the shoulders, and at the same time rub mercurial ointment into the armpits and the ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... Mercurial ointment mixed with black cylinder oil and applied every quarter of an hour, or as often as expedient. The following is also recommended as a good cooling compound for heavy bearings:—Tallow 2 lb., plumbage ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... chivalrous respect for women; their courage; their delicate sense of honor; their constancy, which can abide by an opinion or a purpose or an interest of their States through adversity and through prosperity, through the years and through the generations, are things by which the people of the more mercurial North may take a lesson. And there is another thing—covetousness, corruption, the low temptation of money has not yet found any place in ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... 5TH FEBRUARY.—This morning the mercurial column stood higher than I had yet observed it here, and clouds of cirrus lay in long streaks across the sky, ranging from east to west, but these were most abundant towards the northern horizon. The day was comparatively cool and pleasant, the thermometer never ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... so emphatically songs that, in reading them, we feel as if each must have a twin melody born in the same moment and by the same inspiration. Heine is too impressible and mercurial for any sustained production; even in his short lyrics his tears sometimes pass into laughter and his laughter into tears; and his longer poems, "Atta Troll" and "Deutschland," are full of Ariosto-like transitions. His song has a wide compass of notes; he can take us to the shores of the Northern ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... pressure of the atmosphere. If a glass tube and dish of mercury are attached to a board and the dish of mercury is inclosed in a case for protection from moisture and dirt, and further if a scale of inches or centimeters is made on the upper portion of the board, we have a mercurial barometer (Fig. 44). ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... ministry with a new ministry, headed by the Marquis of Rockingham, which included the Duke of Newcastle, Henry Conway, and the Duke of Grafton. Missing was the Old Whigs principal leader, William Pitt, who preferred to pursue his independent and mercurial ways. The Rockingham ministry, most of whose members had disliked the Stamp Act from the beginning, drew their greatest strength from the merchant communities. By the time parliament opened in December, Rockingham and his supporters were in agreement—the act must be repealed. But ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... the East to rule them, demanded their own States, and would not be refused, spoke with contempt of the old social order of ranks and classes in the lands between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic, and proclaimed the ideal of democracy for the vast country which they had entered. Not with the mercurial facility of the French did they follow the river systems of the Great Valley. Like the advance of the glacier they changed the face of the country in their steady and inevitable progress, and they sought the sea. It was not long before the Spaniards at ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... unbending springs May walk on earth, or flap their mimic wings; In tubes of glass mercurial columns rise, Or sink, obedient to the incumbent skies; Or, as they touch the figured scale, repeat The nice gradations of circumfluent heat. But REPRODUCTION, when the perfect Elf Forms from fine glands another like itself, Gives the true character of life ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... stopping to think, she ran down the steps and pursued him, panting and almost weeping. He turned at the sound of her hurrying steps, puzzled by the pursuit and on his guard against her influence. He was suspicious of her intentions now, and waited for her to explain the meaning of this mercurial change. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... keep moving;. put in motion, set in motion; move; impel &c. 276; propel &c. 284; render movable, mobilize. Adj. moving &c. v.; in motion; transitional; motory[obs3], motive; shifting, movable, mobile, mercurial, unquiet; restless &c. (changeable) 149; nomadic &c. 266; erratic &c. 279. Adv. under way; on the move, on the wing, on the tramp, on the march. Phr. eppur si muove [It][Galileo]; es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille[Ger], sich ein Charakter ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... suppose we are more lenient with human nature than theologians generally are. We know that the spirits of men and their views of the present and the future go up and down with the barometer, and that a permanent depression of one inch in the mercurial column would affect the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... hundred years ago a new people was introduced into the north of Ireland. The north is essentially Scottish. Its inhabitants are Protestant and phlegmatic. In the south, the religion is Romanist, and the people are mercurial. They are of the same color. They have had the same history for centuries. For nearly five hundred years, the Turk has been a disturbing factor in Europe. The Turk is Asiatic. He is surrounded by European life. How rapidly has ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., May, 1888., No. 5 • Various
... one man necessary to his comprehensive operation. When his unhappy wife tells him there is no bread in the house for the next day, he retorts: "Very well, then we shall dine at the Hotel Continental." Nothing depresses his mercurial spirits. He borrows from Peter to pay Paul, and an hour later borrows from Paul to pay himself. His boyhood friend he simply plunders. This Ernest, in reality the Graf von Trautenau, is an idealist of the type that Wedekind is fond of delineating. He would save the world from itself, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... is speaking, HERBERT, the call boy, appears from the wings Right, a mercurial youth of about sixteen with ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... horseman, or for reasons best known to themselves, the Tejadas had given Mr. Hinckley a very spirited saddle-mule. The first thing I knew, her rider, carrying a heavy camera, a package of plate-holders, and a large mercurial barometer, borrowed from the Harvard Observatory, was pitched headlong into the sand. Fortunately no damage was done, and after a lively chase the runaway mule was brought back by Corporal Gamarra. After Mr. Hinckley was remounted on ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... the Astronomer Royal on the R. Astr. Soc. Numerical Lunar Theory. Also Remarks (Month. Not.) on Le Verrier's intra-Mercurial Planet. Also on Observations for the ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... the same manner as horses. Mercurial ointment rubbed in small amounts on the skin back of the horns and ears, where the animal cannot lick it, is a common remedy. The absorption of a small amount of this drug does the animal no harm, but a larger quantity may ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... 'a cold, dry, melancholy star.' The Mercurial is neither dark nor fair, but between both, long-faced, with high forehead and thin sharp nose, 'thin beard (many times none at all), slender of body, and with small weak eyes;' long slender hands and fingers are 'especial ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... broke a little. John Doran had died under an operation when Max was ten, but he had adored his father, and still adored his memory. There had been great love between the big, quiet sportsman and the mercurial, hot-headed, enthusiastic little boy whom Jack Doran had spoiled and called "Frenchy" for a pet name. After more than fourteen years, he could hear the kind voice now, clearly as ever. "Hullo, Frenchy! how are things with you to-day?" used ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... display. This populace that watched with joy the cruel torment of a bear or the execution of a Catholic also delighted in the romantic comedies of Shakespeare. This people, so appallingly credulous and ignorant, so brutal, childish, so mercurial compared with Englishmen of to-day, yet set the standard of national greatness. This absurdly decorated gallant could stab a rival in the back or write a penitential lyric. Each man presents strange, ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... he laughed with that mercurial lightness which did more to preserve the balance of what otherwise would have been an overweighted mind than ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... I tumbled in on the back seat, each with a child in his lap to keep us warm; I flanked by Sam Perry, and he by John Rich, both of the mercurial age, and therefore good to do errands. Harry was in front somewhere flanked in like wise, and the other children lay in miscellaneously between, like sardines when you have first opened the box. I had invited Lycidas, because, besides being my best friend, he is the best fellow in the world, ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... out from Fort Laramie to meet The Whirlwind's village. Though aided by the high-bowed "mountain saddle," I could scarcely keep my seat on horseback. Before we left the fort we hired another man, a long-haired Canadian, with a face like an owl's, contrasting oddly enough with Delorier's mercurial countenance. This was not the only re-enforcement to our party. A vagrant Indian trader, named Reynal, joined us, together with his squaw Margot, and her two nephews, our dandy friend, The Horse, and his younger brother, The ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... in a guide-book by Dr. Samuel Mitchell. The idea expanded as Irving proceeded, and he ended by not merely satirizing the pedantry of local antiquaries, but by creating a distinct literary type out of the solid Dutch burgher whose phlegm had long been an object of ridicule to the mercurial Americans. Though far from the most finished of Irving's productions, "Knickerbocker" manifests the most original power and is the most genuinely national in its quaintness and drollery. The very tardiness and prolixity of the story are skilfully made to heighten the humorous effect. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Thynne begged him to be more grave lest his enemies should report his levity. Raleigh answered, 'It is my last mirth in this world; do not grudge it to me.' Dr. Tounson, Dean of Westminster, to whom Raleigh was a stranger, then attended him; and was somewhat scandalised at this flow of mercurial spirits. 'When I began,' says the Dean, 'to encourage him against the fear of death, he seemed to make so light of it that I wondered at him. When I told him that the dear servants of God, in better causes than his, had shrunk back and trembled a little, he denied it ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... mercurial Clenk, as depressed now as a moment earlier he had been easily elated. "We-uns will jes' hev ter take him along of us an' keep him till he ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... better, to call themselves Swedes?—to preserve the fine, manly characteristics of their ancient stock, rather than imitate a people so alien to them in blood, in character, and in antecedents. Those meaningless social courtesies which sit well enough upon the gay, volatile, mercurial Frenchman, seem absurd affectations when practiced by the tall, grave, sedate Scandinavian. The intelligent Swedes feel this, but they are powerless to make headway against the influence of a court which was wholly French, even before Bernadotte's time. "We are a race of apes," said one of them ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... a few months after the publication of the Dunciad. But Pope found a living antagonist, who succeeded in giving him pain enough to gratify the vilified dunces. This was Colley Cibber—most lively and mercurial of actors—author of some successful plays, with too little stuff in them for permanence, and of an Apology for his own Life, which is still exceedingly amusing as well as useful for the history of the stage. He was ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... of mercurial and lustily cheering boys was my friend Andrew, and a little farther on, lo! the knight himself. A motor cap was jammed on his warm curls, and a football guernsey displayed the proportions of his broad chest as his Chesterfield fell open, while with a gaiety and ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... shews, whatever her posture may be, that her mind at least is not supine. I hope the excursion will enable the former to keep pace with its out-stripping neighbor. Pray present our kindest wishes to her, and all. (That sentence should properly have come in the Post Script, but we airy Mercurial Spirits, there is no keeping us in). Time—as was said of one of us—toils after us in vain. I am afraid our co-visit with Coleridge was a dream. I shall not get away before the end (or middle) of June, and then you will be frog-hopping ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... for the excursion across the valley to inspect the ruins of a Roman bath. A late dinner brought us together again in a small dining room, the convalescents having eaten their simple meal and disappeared an hour before. During this time, another transformation had taken place in our mercurial hostess! It was the Calvé of Paris, Calvé the witch, Calvé the capiteuse, who presided at the dainty, flower-decked table ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... from the outskirts was soon taken up in the centre of the city, and now nothing was to be seen in any direction but a dashing and scampering of the mercurial and excitable citizens of the place, each to his lodge or burrow. Far as the eye could reach was spread the city, and in every direction the scene was the same. We rode leisurely along until we had reached the more thickly settled portion of the city, when we halted, ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... measurements can be given in this case. It may be said, however, that it is not desirable to take these at anything less than five-minute intervals. Under ordinary circumstances a three- to five-minute interval is sufficient in the case of all steam-pressure, vacuum—including mercurial columns and ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... must. The former has happily commenced his preparations for the combat in good season, or the enemy might defeat us before he would be in readiness. Did it rest between these two worthies to decide this quarrel, the mercurial Frenchman would defeat his neighbour of Holland, before the latter believed the battle had commenced; but, should he let the happy moment pass, rely on it, the Dutchman would give him trouble. Forget you, Wilder, that the day has been when the countrymen of that slow-moving and ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... to see young Beckford,(198) who seems to possess very extraordinary talents; he is a perfect master of music, but has a voice, either natural or feigned, of an eunuch. He speaks several languages with uncommon facility, and well, but has such a mercurial turn, that I think he may finish his days aux petites maisons; his person and figure are agreeable. I did not come till late, and till he had tired himself with all kind of mimicry and performances. The Duchess of Bedford [was] there, and Lady Clermont. There is ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... intractable, and is to be combated by saline purges, bleeding, and stimulating application to the organ itself. Mercurial ointment, rubbed over the eyebrow, will assist ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... by the Chinaman, and Kerry stood out in the darkness of the dismal, brick-walled street, feeling something as nearly akin to dejection as was possible in one of his mercurial spirit. Something trickled upon the brim of his hat, and, raising his head, Kerry detected rain upon his upturned face. He breathed a prayer of thankfulness. This would put an ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... promised to teach every man who desires wisdom; and in the next place, I have no fear but that the sound practical intellect which that same One has bestowed on the Englishman, will give you a far better auditory in any harvest field, than Socrates could find among the mercurial ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... The weather, too, though cold, is wholesome and often conducive to health. The two months of fog in London are often termed the suicidal months, because of the number of persons who destroy their own lives in those months. The people of Paris with their mercurial temperaments would never endure it for ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... administered to our hair-covered animals by the skin, yet care must be taken in applying some medicines—as tobacco water, carbolic-acid solutions, strong creolin solutions, mercurial ointment, etc.—over the entire body, as poisoning and death follow in some instances from absorption through the skin. For the same reasons care must also be exercised and poisonous medicines not applied over very large raw or abraded surfaces. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... provided for her use, said her evening prayers, looked under the bed—a precaution taken ever since the night upon which she had discovered the burglars—and, finding all right, she blew out her candle and lay down. She could not sleep—many persons of nervous or mercurial temperaments cannot do so the first night in a strange bed. Cap was very mercurial, and the bed and room in which she lay were very strange; for the first time since she had had a home to call her own she was unexpectedly staying all night away from her friends, and ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... and mercurial spirits of the young, something of marvellous and preternatural in that life within life, which the strong passion of science and genius forms and feeds,—that passion so much stronger than love, and so much more self-dependent; ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... miraculous, as tantamount to a re-creation. This Barrister may be likened to an ignorant but well-meaning Galenist, who writing against some infamous quack, who lived by puffing and vending pills of mercurial sublimate for all cases of a certain description, should have no stronger argument than to extol 'sarsaparilla', and 'lignum vitae', or 'senna' in contempt of ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... announcements would have received little attention but for the fact that the motion of Mercury has irregularities which have not been accounted for by known planets; and Le Verrier[3] has stated that an intra-Mercurial planet or ring of asteroids would account for the unexplained part of the motion of the line of apses of Mercury's orbit amounting to ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... with enthusiasm of the former to his father, as 'one who gave men an insight into the real Hero-world, as one from whom he could catch reflected something of the Divine'. But Morier's spirits were mercurial, and between moments of elation he was apt to fall into fits of melancholy, when he could find no outlet for his energies. Waiting for his true profession tried him sorely, and he was even resigning himself to the prospect of a visit to Australia as a professional ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... when you have prescribed the hemp for nervous, overstrung, imaginative people, I have observed that they can stand large amounts of the tincture without evil results, and that the after-effects pass off rapidly. I who am mercurial in temperament, for example, can take any amount of Indian hemp without being made ill by it; while ten drops will send some slow and torpid rustics mad drunk with excitement—drive ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... differed. "It is true he does not show any inclination for the company of young ladies, but he is very much a lady's man all the same. There isn't a young lady in this hall but would be proud to have the honour of Jim Langford's company and companionship at any time. He is of that deep, mercurial disposition that attracts women. It is good for Jim Langford that he does not know his own power," she said, nodding her dainty ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... the mercurial and vivid Greek felt all the wonder and affection of contrast. He could spend hours in surveying its creeping progress, in moralizing over its mechanism. He despised it in ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... bedfellows. It is notable that Bacon seems to have been specially attracted to Welshmen (one might even find evidence of this in the life of the Welshman, Henry VII), a people of vivacious temperament unlike his own; this is illustrated by his long and intimate friendship with the mercurial Sir Toby Mathew, his "alter ego," a man of dissipated habits in early life, though we are not told that he was homosexual. Bacon had many friendships with men, but there is no evidence that he was ever in love or cherished any affectionate intimacy with a woman. Women play ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... their thorough proficiency in all classical and literary studies, the result of old-world method and application. Mentally and physically they were splendid men. The whole race of Flemings and Dutch was found by our young recruits to be a grave and powerful people, although exceptional cases of mercurial temperament were not rare. Some curious individuals were to be found among them, as is more the case in European nationalities in general than in our own. Both Americans were much liked and respected by all their new-found brethren, though Brother Hecker, for reasons ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... of Graham's mercurial pendulum, John Harrison—the same clever mechanician who received L.20,000 from government for making a chronometer that went to Jamaica in one year and returned in another with an accumulated error of only 1 minute and 54 seconds—hit upon another ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... of the group, was the delight of them all. The carriage of a bantam rooster, the courage of a lion, more brain than he could stagger under; a disposition fiery, mercurial, sanguine, witty; he was made, according to Billy Fairfax's dictum, of "wire and brass tacks," and he possessed what Honey Smith (who himself had no mean gift in that direction) called "the gift of gab." He lived by writing magazine articles. Also he wrote ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... on. Road to the right," called the doctor, inwardly amazed at his visitor's mercurial disposition. "They call it Rink's Hotel. Not much of a place. Really a road house. ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... who attended him was named Terro; he thought, by some peculiar train of reasoning, that he could cure him by applying a mercurial ointment to the chest, to which no one raised any objection. The rapid effect of the remedy delighted the two friends, but it frightened me, for in less than twenty-four hours the patient was labouring under great excitement of the brain. The ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... observer now made another experiment which seemed to go entirely the other way, and puzzled him altogether. He took some of this boiled infusion that I have been speaking of, and by the use of a mercurial bath—a kind of trough used in laboratories—he deftly inverted a vessel containing the infusion into the mercury, so that the latter reached a little beyond the level of the mouth of the 'inverted' vessel. You see that he thus had a quantity of the infusion ...
— The Method By Which The Causes Of The Present And Past Conditions Of Organic Nature Are To Be Discovered.—The Origination Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... sown, weedy now, and crossed and recrossed by vividly-green ribbons of vine, with stretches of pale-green lucerne, orchards, and the white village of Monpont near the railway, all embowered, the Isle drawing its mercurial streams through the village-meadow, which is dark with shades of oaks: and to have played there a boy, and used it familiarly from birth as one's own hand or foot, must have been very sweet and homely; after this, the river divides, and takes the ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... exceed in words the number of letters in their alphabet, which consists only in two-and-twenty. But indeed few of them extend even to that length. They are expressed in the most plain and simple terms, wherein those people are not mercurial[81] enough to discover above one interpretation; and to write a comment upon any law is a capital crime. As to the decision of civil causes, or proceedings against criminals, their precedents are so few, that they have little reason to boast of any ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... pension of L200 a year, conferred upon him in consideration of his literary merits, and the little profits he derived from his lectures in Bath, to support with decency himself and his family. The prospects of Halhed were much more golden, but he was far too gay and mercurial to be prudent; and from the very scanty supplies which his father allowed him, had quite as little of "le superflu, chose si necessaire," as his friend. But whatever were his other desires and pursuits, a visit to Bath,—to ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... a man in solitude." But the slowness of which novel-readers will complain is not mere commonplace, least of all is it dulness. It is the leisurely movement of a contemplative mind full of rich thought and stored with varied learning. Such a writer could not have any sympathy with the mercurial, vivacious, light-of-foot story-tellers of the French school. The author of "The New Priest in Conception Bay," we surmise, has not been in the habit of packing up his thoughts for the market, by either writing for the press, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... it is very singular to see how this mercurial French People plunges suddenly from Vive le Roi to Vive la Republique; and goes simmering and dancing; shaking off daily (so to speak), and trampling into the dust, its old social garnitures, ways of thinking, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... The mercurial Felix, who had more cleverness in him than people gave him credit for, smiled outright at this eminently feminine way of covering an ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... notion was carried still farther by an insistence upon frequent changes in the fundamental law or in the actual form of government, not so much to meet imperative needs as to satisfy a zest for experimentation or to suit the whims of mercurial temperaments. The congresses, constituent assemblies, and the like, which drew these instruments, were supposed to be faithful reproductions of similar bodies abroad and to represent the popular will. In fact, however, they were substantially colonial cabildos, enlarged into the semblance ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... culture found expression was formed on English models, dignified and plentifully garnished with Latin and Greek allusions; the commercial spirit ruled, and the relaxations and amusements partook of its hurry and excitement. In their gay, hospitable, and mercurial character, the inhabitants were true progenitors of the present metropolis. A newspaper had been established in 1732, and a theatre had existed since 1750. Although the town had a rural aspect, with its quaint dormer-window houses, its straggling ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... reviews. Perhaps it might be as well, after all, to scrape an acquaintance with him again, especially as he's my own brother. There's no knowing, really, when a man of his peculiar ill-regulated mercurial temperament may be going to turn out famous. Don't you think you'd better find out where they're living now—they've left Holloway, no doubt, since this turn of the tide—and go ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... great body of the social Greek people the gymnasium offered all those attractions which boulevards, cafes, and jardins-chantants do now to the Gallic nation. There is more than one point of resemblance between the two countries; but while the Athenian had the same mercurial qualities, which fitted him for outdoor life, he had even a less comfortable domestic establishment to retain him at home than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... against Bucholz, although circumstantially telling against him, was not of sufficient weight or directness to warrant a conviction upon the charge preferred against him. He had employed eminent legal counsel, and their hopeful views of the case had communicated themselves to the mercurial temperament of the prisoner, and visions of a full and entire acquittal from the grave charge under which he ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... together. I remember a day in the summer of 1859 when Procter had a party of friends at dinner to meet Hawthorne, who was then on a brief visit to London. Among the guests were the Countess of ——, Kinglake, the author of "Eothen," Charles Sumner, then on his way to Paris, and Leigh Hunt, the mercurial qualities of whose blood were even then ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... say little of that staid, opulent, intensely respectable city—not even if the imputation of dullness, cast upon her by the more mercurial South, be a slander; for the few hours of my stay there were spent almost entirely with my Asiatic friend, whose invitations and inducements to a longer sojourn were very hard to resist. But I was impatient to get on (as ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... impregnated with vapours. Endeavours were made to smother the fire, but though the mine remained closed for five weeks, no sooner was it re-opened than the fire burst forth more furiously than at first. The howling of the flames ascending from the lowest depths of the pit awed the spectators, and the mercurial and sulphureous fumes arising from it threatened instant destruction to all who might approach. The director of the mine, as a last resource, came to the decision of flooding the works, and a river ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... last chapter we saw how the ordinary mercurial barometer can be used to ascertain fairly accurately the height of mountains. But the airman does not take a mercurial barometer up with him. There is for his use another form of barometer much more suited to his purpose, namely, the barograph, which is ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... hands thrust into his pockets, and a quid in his cheek, and shook his head slowly from side to side, while he remarked that every one had to die once, an' when the time came no one couldn't escape and that was all about it! Poor Larry O'Hale could not thus calm his mercurial spirit. He twisted his hard features into every possible contortion, apostrophised his luck, and his grandmother, and ould Ireland in the most pathetic manner, bewailed his fate, and used improper language ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... studies, criticising and dissecting, the policies of their rulers. But underlying, you will find a deeply practical sense and appreciation of material benefits. The German Socialist is in fact a practical dreamer, quite in contrast to his mercurial, effervescent Latin prototype. The rulers of Germany have learned the lesson that the stability of a throne rests in the welfare of her people and everyone must admit that they have succeeded in this respect ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... was a Frenchman, but it is well to remember that the typical Frenchman, like the typical Irishman and his brother the Jew, exists only in the comic papers, and on the vaudeville stage. The frivolous and the mercurial were ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... This mercurial brigand, it would appear, has paid Turon another visit, but, with the exception of what may be considered the legalised robbery of the betting ring, has not levied contributions. Rather the other way, indeed. A hasty note for Mr. Dawson, whom he had tricked into ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... William Filby, of a suit of "Tyrian bloom, satin grain, and garter blue silk breeches, L8 2s. 7d." Thus magnificently attired, he attended the theater and watched the reception of the play and the effect of each individual scene, with that vicissitude of feeling incident to his mercurial nature. ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... Scandinavians—fair-haired, blue-eyed Swedes, Norwegians afflicted with the temperamental melancholy of their race, stolid Russian Finns, and a slight sprinkling of Americans and English. It was noted that there was nothing mercurial and flyaway about them. They seemed weighty men, oppressed by a sad and stolid bovine-sort of integrity. A sober seriousness and enormous certitude characterized all of them. They appeared men without nerves and without fear, as though upheld by some overwhelming ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... occasionally possesses some quality, usually dependent upon its having heated in the mow or having become moldy, which produces salivation. Second-crop clover and some irritant weeds in the pasture or forage may cause salivation. Cattle rubbed with mercurial ointment may swallow enough mercury in licking themselves to bring about the same result. (See "Mercury poisoning," p. 57.) Such cases, of course, arise from the constitutional action of mercury, and, on account of the common habit which the animals have of licking themselves, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... my troth," exclaimed the mercurial Jimsy, "ye shall not be disappointed in me fair damsels. Hullo! an ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... theatrical scene of Fingal's Cave and its unusual visitors, the whole adventure ending in the happiest laughter over the expulsion of the dramatist. I may not have any right to say so, but I throw myself on the mercy of my hearers: I remember nothing in any chronicle so mercurial or jovial in its high spirits as this story of the first encounter and the beginning of friendship between ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... the eternities beget chaos, and that the immensities are at the mercy of the divine ananke. Infinitude crouches before a personality. The mercurial essence is the prime mover in spirituality, and the thinker is powerless before the pulsating inanity. The cosmical procession is terminated only ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the door into the coffee room was the only door which pierced the four great walls. All he could then do was to find out from the innkeeper how much of a siege the place could stand, and to this the innkeeper answered volubly and with smiles that this hostelry would easily endure until the mercurial temper of the crowd had darted off in a new direction. It may be curious to note here that all of Peter Tounley's impassioned communication with the innkeeper had been devoted to an endeavour to learn what in the devil was the matter with ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... by Horsley consists in performing laminectomy, opening the theca, and washing it out with 1 in 1000 mercurial lotion. After the wound has healed, mercurial inunction over the spine is employed to hasten the absorption of inflammatory products. The administration of anti-syphilitic drugs ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... them out of their almost unconquerable tendency to sleep. Frank felt the highest possible relief, since he was now freed from the responsibility that had of late been so heavy. In Bob, however, there was the exhibition of the greatest liveliness. Bob, mercurial, volatile, nonsensical, mobile, was ever running to extremes; and as he was the first to fall asleep, so now, when he had awaked, he was the most wide awake of all. He sang, he shouted, he laughed, he danced, he ran; he seemed, in ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... British Association, appointed for this purpose, reported in 1876 that sixty of the most reliable of Joule's experiments gave the mean value 774.1. The experiments were made with water at a temperature of about 60 deg. F., according to the mercurial thermometer, and reduced to its value at the temperature of melting ice, according to the formula given by Regnault for the variation of the specific heat of water at varying temperature under the constant pressure of one atmosphere. According to this formula ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... of my master?" reiterated Gilles de Sille, glowering at his mercurial jailer, without heeding ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... changed into an elastic aeriform fluid, susceptible, like all other gasses, of being received and contained in vessels, and preserving its gasseous form so long as it remains at the temperature of 80 deg. (212 deg.), and under a pressure not exceeding 28 inches of the mercurial barometer. As this phenomenon has not been generally observed, no language has used a particular term for expressing water in this state[10]; and the same thing occurs with all fluids, and all substances, which do not evaporate in the common temperature, ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier |
