"Trenchant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... presently); they live in an orderly, quiet way themselves, as far as possible removed from the feelings of a Roman slave-owner or a Legree; they know that the poor exist, but their sufferings do not present themselves to them in a trenchant and dramatic way; they themselves have troubles to bear, and they think doubtless that to bear trouble is the lot of humanity, nor have they any means of comparing the troubles of their lives with those of people lower ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... doctor, however, had no way of knowing that my statement was not true. To deny my request was simply one of his ill-advised whims, and his refusal was given with customary curtness and contempt. I met his refusal in kind, and presented him with a trenchant ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... field he had no superior. For many years he was a recognized leader of his party, and one of the chief managers in all its national conventions. His contributions to the literature of three decades of political campaigns were almost unparalleled. As a forcible, trenchant writer he is to be mentioned with Greeley, Raymond, Prentice, and Dana. His career, too, as a public lecturer, has been both successful and brilliant. The Congressional service of Mr. Watterson terminated with the session just mentioned. His speech, near its close, ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... country would express no sympathy with their efforts. Poets and authors in general were denounced. Gail Hamilton, who had the good of woman in her heart, who was better informed on public affairs than perhaps any woman in the United States, and whose trenchant pen cut deep and spared not, always reprobated the cause. Mrs. Stowe stood aloof, and so did Catherine Beecher, though urged to the contrary course by Henry Ward Beecher and Isabella Beecher Hooker. In a letter to Mrs. Cutler, Catherine Beecher said: "I am not opposed to women's ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... forth his hand to take hold of the Countess's veil. With the readiness which frequent use had given to the warlike lady, she withdrew herself from the heathen's grasp, and with her trenchant sword dealt him so sufficient a blow, that Toxartis lay lifeless on the plain. The Count leapt on the fallen leader's steed, and crying his war-cry, "Son of Charlemagne, to the rescue!" he rode amid the rout of heathen cavaliers with a battle-axe, which he ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... side, Near his undaunted heart, was ty'd, With basket-hilt, that would hold broth, And serve for fight and dinner both. In it he melted lead for bullets, To shoot at foes, and sometimes pullets; To whom he bore so fell a grutch, He ne'er gave quarter t'any such. The trenchant blade, Toledo trusty, For want of fighting was grown rusty, And ate into itself, for lack Of somebody to hew and hack. The peaceful scabbard where it dwelt The rancor ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... admits that Ossian's Poems were admired by men of taste and of genius. But it never seems to have occurred to him that this fact should have made him pause and reconsider his opinions ere he expressed them in such a broad and trenchant style. Hugh Miller speaks of a critic of the day from whose verdicts when he found himself to differ, he immediately began to re-examine the grounds of his own. This is a very high compliment to a single writer; but Macaulay on the Ossian question has a multitude of the first ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... Revenge is sweeter than the honeycomb. But let it not take mastery so strong That Reason totters on her wabbly throne. I fear me there are lions in the way, And we must not in open battle wage; But let our minds deep strategy conceive And thus achieve what otherwise might fail. Quezox: Most trenchant Francos, how thy words do prick; I fear unjust suspicion rears its head, For it is not the nature of our race To open deal, when stealth can compass well The object which our surging souls shall seek; For practice which necessity hath caused Hath built a cunning ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... Orvieto, when compared with Michelangelo's in the Sistine, mark the transition from the art of the fourteenth, through the art of the fifteenth, to that of the sixteenth century, with broad and trenchant force. They are what Marlowe's dramas were to Shakespeare's. They retain much of the mediaeval tradition both as regards form and sentiment. We feel this distinctly in the treatment of Dante, whose genius seems to have exerted at least as strong an influence over Signorelli's imagination ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... more natural and generous feelings. Our ardent and dauntless reformer followed out the moral of the parable of the Good Samaritan into its most rigid and repulsive consequences with a pen of steel, and let fall his "trenchant blade" on every vulnerable point of human infirmity; but there is a want in his system of the mild and persuasive tone of the Gospel, where "all is conscience and tender heart." Man was indeed screwed up, by mood and figure, into a logical ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... the softness, tenderness, gentle affection as of a child; but all this is as if congealed into sharp contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless pain. A soft ethereal soul looking out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a silent pain too, a silent scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of god-like disdain of the thing that is eating-out his heart,—as if it were withal ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... These trenchant passages were written partly, it may be imagined, to suit the English taste of the day. In that object they must have succeeded, for they were frequently transcribed into contemporary periodicals. In extenuation of Smollett's honesty of purpose, however, it may be urged ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... comic power and (wiser, in this respect, than Ford) is aware of his deficiency. We find in Nero none of those touches of swift subtle pathos that dazzle us in the Duchess of Malfy; but we find strokes of sarcasm no less keen and trenchant. Sometimes in the ring of the verse and in turns of expression, we seem to catch Shakespearian echoes; ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... smattering way, and we do not love them at all. When Mr. Mark Pattison suggested that a well-to-do man reasonably expend 10 per cent. of his income on books, he roused a burst of kindly laughter, and it was suggested that solitary confinement would do him a great deal of good. That was a fine trenchant mode of looking at the matter. When, in meditative hours, I compare the two generations of readers, I think that the mental health of the old school and the new school may be compared respectively ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... and bade Richard see to it; so he dealt with the host, and bought good war-gear of him, and a trenchant sword, and an axe withal; and when the Sage was armed he looked as doughty a warrior as need be. By this time was Richard's horse and war-gear come, and he armed him speedily and gave money to the host, and they rode therewith all four out ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... in the smaller forms that the French composer finds the trenchant utterance of his fancy. A Scherzo, after the ballad of Goethe, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," tells the famous story of the boy who in his master's absence compels the spirit in the broom to fetch the water; but he cannot say ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... never happened; Carlyle truly and beautifully said that the reason why the past always appeared to be beautiful, in retrospect, was that the element of fear was absent from it. William Morris said a trenchant thing on the same subject. He attended a Socialist Meeting of a very hostile kind, which he anticipated with much depression. When some one asked him how the meeting had gone off he said, "Well, it was fully as damnable as I had expected—a thing which seldom happens." A good test ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... hanging and his hands plunged deep into his trouser pockets, pale, visibly moist with perspiration, saying never a word, a very wreck of soul and body; the other sat on the divan close by the chimney, and attracted notice by a trenchant dissimilarity from all the rest. He was probably upwards of forty, but he looked fully ten years older; and Florizel thought he had never seen a man more naturally hideous, nor one more ravaged by disease and ruinous excitements. He was no more than skin and bone, was partly paralysed, ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a very trenchant article from an American pen on the power of the moneyed members of a church to dictate the tone of the pulpit; and it is a common accusation against ministers, that they flatter the prevailing classes ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... remembered that the ancient law of Rome, the Twelve Tables, authorized creditors to take an insolvent debtor, kill him and divide his body amongst them, a real execution against the person more trenchant if not more effective than the capias ad satisfaciendum dear to the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... wore away, the spring came, and after spring, summer, with its greenery and flowers. Godfrey was happy enough during this time. To begin with, the place suited him. He was very well now, and grew enormously in that pure and trenchant air, broadening as well as lengthening, till, notwithstanding his slimness, he gave promise of becoming a ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... as clear as a drop of morning dew, my dear fellow," replied Heliobas. "There was nothing puzzling about him. His remarks were all true and trenchant—hitting smartly home to the heart like daggers plunged down to the hilt. That was the worst of him—he was too clear—too honest—too disdainful of opinions. Society does not love such men. What do I mean, you ask, by accepting everything as it comes, and trying to find out the reason ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... did not discuss, in memorable phrase and trenchant, clever epigram. For he saw that I believed in him, worshipped whole-heartedly at his shrine of genius, and he gave me, in return, of his best. For the first time I saw what human language is for. I thought of Goethe at Weimar ... Wilde's clever ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... clients were landed gentry, bankers, peers and sons of peers. The superior clergy, too: he handled the affairs of a Bishop of Lukesboro', and those of no less than three Deans and Chapters. Tall, dark and trenchant, with a strong nose and chin, and clouded grey eyes, a handsome man with a fine air of arrogant comfort on him, he stood well, and you could not but see what good clothes he wore—to my taste, I confess, a little ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... down after my twenty-mile walk that morning. He was commonplace in complexion, in features, in manners, and in voice. He was of middle size and of ordinary build. His eyes, of the usual blue, were perhaps remarkably cold, and he certainly could make his glance fall on one as trenchant and heavy as an axe. But even at these times the rest of his person seemed to disclaim the intention. Otherwise there was only an indefinable, faint expression of his lips, something stealthy—a smile—not ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... "that silken bonnet keeps out no steel blade!" So trenchant was the Templar's weapon, that it shore asunder, as it had been a willow-twig, the tough and plaited handle of the mace, which the ill-fated Saxon reared to parry the blow, and, descending on his head, levelled ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... by force. Shots had been fired, blood had been spilled, and the whole affair added nothing to Yuba County's reputation for law and order. The matter created some talk in San Francisco, and the Evening Mail, among other papers, expressed its opinion in one of those trenchant personal articles which are the spice of Western journalism. Two or three days later, when the incident had been almost forgotten in the office, the city editor ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... another not less revolutionary. A very industrious man, and setting, like all highly organized men, a high value on his time, he seemed the only man of leisure in town, always ready for any excursion that promised well, or for conversation prolonged into late hours. His trenchant sense was never stopped by his rules of daily prudence, but was always up to the new occasion. He liked and used the simplest food, yet, when some one urged a vegetable diet, Thoreau thought all diets a very small matter, saying that "the man who shoots the buffalo ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... key-note of explanation to the tactics now in vogue out there in the front ranks. He says that instead of being the preparation for life, education is life itself. Some without trying to probe deeply into the thought back of the trenchant expression, have said that this was a mere play upon words. But Dewey is not a man who plays with words. What he meant by the statement is that the child is best prepared for life as an adult by living the right kind of life as a child. That is by living a life that has real meaning ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... too, that there is such a thing as turning the grace of God into lasciviousness. The German proverb that the best things may become the worst, is along the same line; but it is commonplace compared with the trenchant words of Jude. According to him, even "grace" may become "lasciviousness." We have there a solemn warning. It does seem to me that really worthy thoughts of God are not compatible with the idea of ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... orthodox could not fight in the open. They entrenched themselves behind a passive resistance. In this struggle, as was observed above, Gordon occupied the foremost place. Thenceforth a single idea animated him, opposition to the enemies of light. His bitter, trenchant sarcasm, his caustic, vengeful pen, were put at the service of this cause. Even his historical poems quiver with his resentment. He loses no opportunity to scourge the Rabbis and their ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... the folk-plays in English of the Abbey Theatre, that there is almost warrant for including him. I cannot, of course, but I must at least bear testimony to the many powers of these plays. Dr. Hyde can be trenchant, when satire is his object, as in "The Bursting of the Bubble" (1903); or alive with merriment when merriment is his desire, as in "The Poorhouse" (1903); or full of quiet beauty when he writes of holy things, as in the "Lost Saint" (1902). There are many other playwrights in Irish than Dr. Hyde, ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... vote against Mr. Williams. The measure was not an honest one on the part of the Hebdomadal Board, and deserved to be defeated. Among the pamphlets which the discussion produced, two by Mr. James Mozley gave early evidence, by their force of statement and their trenchant logic, of the power with which he was to take part in the questions which ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... remember this: Christ, bring me to thy bliss. Mary, maid withouten wem, Keep me! I am lone, I wis, Yet besides I have made this By myself: Give me a kiss, Dear God dwelling up in heaven! Also: Send me a true knight, Lord Christ, with a steel sword, bright, Broad, and trenchant; yea, and seven Spans from hilt to point, O Lord! And let the handle of his sword Be gold on silver, Lord in heaven! Such a sword as I see gleam Sometimes, when they ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... that their conversation turned upon the larger question of Irish self-government. When Lord Dunraven was attacked in the House of Lords for his Devolution plans Lord Lansdowne "declined to follow Lord Rathmore in the trenchant vituperation Lord Dunraven's scheme had encountered," and he admitted that Sir Antony MacDonnell had been in the habit of conferring with Lord Dunraven on many occasions, with the full knowledge and approval of the ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... thieves. Infinitely more precious are the treasures of a life well spent, the wealth of good deeds, the account of which is kept in heaven, where the riches of righteous achievement are safe from moth, rust, and robbers. Then followed the trenchant lesson: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... elbow work—"would endeavour," and so on and so on, in what seemed to one listener at least to be the merest insincerity. His irony was perfect, his assumption of earnestness a farce. Robert Lowe was put up to answer him, and after coughing out a score or two of biting trenchant phrases, with a page of notes almost touching his white albino eyebrows and the tip of his nose, every sentence punctuated with a roar of laughter, cheers and protests, he sat down. Among the speakers I heard that ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... his habits of work, conscientious in the performance of his duties down to the last jot and tittle of the law, he was preeminently fitted for the neat and expeditious dispatch of official business; and his sane and trenchant mind, habituated by long practice to the easy mastery of details, was prompt to pass upon any practical matter, however complicated, an intelligent and just judgment. It was doubtless thought, in an age when the law was not too highly specialized to be understood by any but the indoctrinated, that ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... easiest form of writing) is overdone, and description dispenses with any need for thinking on the part of the author or reader. You bring up the fiction of Voltaire, Diderot, Sterne, and Le Sage, so trenchant, so compact of the stuff of life; and turn from them to the modern novel, composed of scenery and word-pictures and metaphor and the dramatic situations, of which Scott is full. Invention may be displayed in such work, but there is no room ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... to talk about, and we may be sure that they did not neglect the opportunity. What do not young ladies at school discuss? Scarcely anything escapes, and these criticisms are often very trenchant and severe. ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... place if you take it aright—namely, if you recognise that it is the creation of a profound humorist, is designed for wholly practical and personal uses, and proceed to adapt your conduct to that knowledge in all light-heartedness and good faith. Thus, though in less trenchant phrase since she was still happily very young, meditated Madame de Vallorbes, while standing in the pensive October sunshine upon the wide flight of steps which leads down from the main entrance of Brockhurst House. Tall, stone pinnacles ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the accession to power of a party not without obligations to the fearless manager of the little theatre in the Haymarket. During these years the Opposition, even though supported by Pope and Chesterfield, Thomson and Bolingbroke, could scarcely fail to utilise the trenchant scorn, the whole-hearted vigour, the boisterous humour, of Fielding's genius; and Murphy, speaking vaguely of Fielding's legal years, says that a "large number of fugitive political tracts, which had their value when the incidents were actually passing on the great scene of ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... interest. He was always in a better temper when he had been talking to Angela. He did most of the talking—it must be owned that he liked to hear himself talk—and she made a perfect listener. He, in turn, amused and interested her very much. She had never come across a man of his type before. His trenchant criticisms of literature, his keen delight in politics, his lively argumentativeness, were charming to her. He had always had the knack of quarrelling with Elizabeth, even when he was most devoted to her; but he did not quarrel with Angela. ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... opinion was based largely upon Rosenblatt's deposition, taken by Sergeant Cameron and Dr. Wright when he was supposed to be in extremis, and upon various newspaper interviews with him that appeared from time to time. The Morning News in a trenchant leader pointed out the danger to which Western Canada was exposed from the presence of these semibarbarous peoples from Central and Southern Europe, and expressed the hope that the authorities would deal with the present case in such a manner as would give a severe but necessary ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... trenchant, savage attack on all the leading literary and artistic idols of the time by a man of great intellectual power, immense range of knowledge, and the possessor of a lucid style rare among German writers, and becoming rarer everywhere, owing to the very influences which Nordau attacks ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... of caprice. There are plenty of phrases that shock the attention sufficiently to keep it from stagnating on the smooth surface of the verse; such are—"ever-highering eagle-circles," "there were none but few goodlier than he," "tipt with trenchant steel," and the expression, already famous, of "tip-tilted" for Lynette's nose; to which may be added the object of Gareth's attention, mentioned in the third line of the poem, when he "stared at the spate." But in the matter of descriptive power we do not know that the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for judgment and action; to the other, the world of life is more largely displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionally widened. They are taught to follow different virtues, to hate different vices, to place ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an Anglomaniac. Short hair, starched frills, a pea-green, long-skirted coat with a number of little collars; a soar expression of countenance, something trenchant and at the same time careless in his demeanor, an utterance through the teeth, an abrupt wooden laugh, an absence of smile, a habit of conversing only on political or politico-economical subjects, a passion for under-done roast beef and port wine—every thing in him ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... deign to answer purely personal attacks. But in defense of his undertakings, to protect them and the people who had put money into them, he was ready to fight. His defense commonly took the form of criticism of his critics, and in such writing his pen was decidedly trenchant. Probably no man ever incurred more foolish criticism, and probably none ever pointed out more plainly how foolish it was. Even "the ablest of his adversaries confessed themselves afraid of his pen." Besides this parrying of ...
— James B. Eads • Louis How
... Some of the most exquisite passages in "Intentions" refer to his poetry. Was the "Divine Comedy" too clear-cut and trenchant for Walter Pater? It is strange how Dante has been left to second-rate interpreters! His illustrators, too! O these sentimentalists, with their Beatrices crossing the Ponte Vecchio, and their sad youths looking on! All this is an insult—a ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... supreme court, Ulrich Varenbuler, often mentioned as a friend in the letters of Erasmus and Pirkheimer, and the subject of the largest of Duerer's portrait woodcuts, which shows him to us some ten years later, still a handsome trenchant personality, with a liking for fine clothes, and the self-reliant expression of a man who is conscious that the thought he takes for the morrow is not likely to be ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... having been able to evoke our interest. There may have been too much philosophy and too little art in the presentation of the subject, too little reality and too much soaring into the heights. That is not so with Strindberg's drama. It is a trenchant settling of accounts between a complex and fascinating individual—the author—and his past, and the realistic scenes have often been transplanted in detail from his own ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... hotel instead of at the Parisian Restaurant; but he came to be a formidable visitor in the Hinkle parlor. His competition reduced Bud to an inspired increase of profanity, drove Jacks to an outburst of slang so weird that it sounded more horrible than the most trenchant of Bud's imprecations, and made ...
— Options • O. Henry
... systematically reads articles by Elbert Hubbard, Alfred Henry Lewis, Samuel Blythe and other writers whose trenchant pens replenish his storage with similes, metaphors ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... denied them, that if I made any difficulty, they would all come and cut my throat in the shippe. Thus was I constrained to signe their Passe-port, and forthwith to grant them certaine mariners, with Trenchant an honest and skilfull Pilot. When the barks were finished, they armed them with the kings munition, with powder, with bullets, and artillery, asmuch as they needed, and chose one of my Sergeants for their Captain, named Bertrand Conferrent, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... in the interval, the lesson most difficult to his direct and trenchant nature: that compromise is the law of married life. On the afternoon of his talk with his wife he had sought her out, determined to make a final effort to clear up the situation between them; but he learned that, immediately after luncheon, she had gone ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... (I do not name him, as the communication is not quite friendly in tone) writes thus:—"I wish to add, very respectfully, that I think it would be in better taste if you were to abstain from the very trenchant expressions which you are accustomed to indulge in when criticising the answer. That such a tone must not be" ("be not"?) "agreeable to the persons concerned who have made mistakes may possibly ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... the fortunes of Tacitus to make him trenchant, biting and cynical; but, on the contrary, most gentle, as he was, and most placid and benign. Such being his character, a kind interpretation and a candid sense of actions and individuals meet us on every page of his History. Still in enumerating the virtues of eminent persons he does not ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... dead wood on you," said the Arizonan, a trenchant saltness in his speech. "I'll shoot you down ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... "suggest the policy of your postponing them for a session to give time to form an Irish Party, to assist the Ministry, if willing; to urge them on, if lagging; in procuring justice for Ireland." O'Connell replied in a letter, rich with the vigorous trenchant logic of his very best days. He reviews the many attempts made, at various times, to form an Irish party, all of which ended in unmitigated failure. His answer to Lord Miltown, therefore is, that he cannot comply with ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... gone there to see: what would she think of him? He knew well enough that her trenchant classifications of life admitted no overlapping of good and evil, made no allowance for that incalculable interplay of motives that justifies the subtlest casuistry of compassion. Miss Talcott was too young to distinguish the intermediate tints of ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... trenchant joke, Napoleonic government stood firm in France, and soon, this all-important point having been gained, there was not a little infectious enthusiasm, which grew in proportion as the Emperor deployed with ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... cleanly, if he willed, with the delicate white fire which few men were fine enough to know. . . . In the soft hollow of Diane's hand had lain the destiny of a man who had the will to go unerringly the way he chose. . . . Love and hunger—they were the great trenchant appetites of the human race: one for its creation, the other for its perpetuation. . . . To every man came first the call of passion; then the love-hunger for a perfect mate. The latter had come to him to-night as Diane stood in the doorway, a slender, ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... had dwelt for many a day; As any peacock he was proud and gay. He could pipe well, and fish, mend nets, to boot, Turn cups with a lathe, and wrestle well, and shoot. A Norman dirk, as brown as is a spade, Hung by his belt, and eke a trenchant blade. A jolly dagger bare he in his pouch: There was no man, for peril, durst him touch. A Sheffield clasp-knife lay within his hose. Round was his face, and broad and flat his nose. High and retreating was his bald ape's skull: ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... by over-employment is another romantic instrument, eminently characteristic of Heine, namely, irony. Nothing could be more trenchant than his bland assumption of the point of view of the Jew-baiter, the hypocrite, or the slave-trader. It is as perfect as his adoption of childlike faith in The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar. Many a time he attains an effect of ironical ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... eyes read her through, as so often. With a trenchant dart he glanced from her to me. I could see he began to suspect a confederacy. "That will do," he went on, with slow deliberateness. "Better so. Nurse Wade, I don't know what's beginning to come over you. You are losing your ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... anti-slavery struggle, which constituted the greater part of the politics of the United States in those and many succeeding years. He became a journalist in the anti-slavery cause; and, in 1850, he wrote a trenchant answer to Mr. Carlyle's then just published "Latter Day Pamphlets." Later on, slavery having been at length abolished, he appeared as a writer in yet another field, publishing several works, one as lately as ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... flourish Round about the King, They who love gold treasures All around to fling. Lords, the first of heroes, With their trenchant swords; Counsellors held in ...
— Mollie Charane - and Other Ballads • Thomas J. Wise
... celebrate his firmness and vindicate his shiftings, Richard Rockney takes front rank. A journalist altogether given up to his craft, considering the audience he had gained, he was a man of forethought besides being a trenchant writer, and he was profoundly, not less than eminently, the lover of Great Britain. He had a manner of utterance quite in the tone of the familiar of the antechamber for proof of his knowing himself ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... views, was prevented by a mixture of contrariness and magnanimity from joining in the general denunciation of her former allies, compromising as were the circumstances under which they had elected to take their departure. In her society, therefore, he was not obliged to overhear trenchant criticisms upon his Tom's behaviour, and could dilate, at least uncontradicted, upon those gifts and graces in the young man, which recent events had certainly placed ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... Clarence, sticking to his point like a good interviewer, "have read the trenchant, but some say justifiable remarks of the Rev. Canon Edgar Sheppard, D.D., Sub-Dean of His Majesty's Chapels Royal, Deputy Clerk of the Closet, and ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... the centers around whom the reformers rallied. James directed their counsels in the House and Jeff pounded away in the World with vital trenchant editorials and news stories. Every day that paper carried to the farthest corner of the state bulletins of the battle. Farmers and miners and laboring men watched its roll of honor to see if the local representatives were standing firm. As the weeks passed the fight ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... Mr. Bingham, who has brought to the aid of the prosecution, in this trial, such ready and trenchant astuteness in the law, has laid the following down as an invariable rule, and it will pass ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... diphtheria and the true; treating internal cancer and fibrous tumours as digestive derangements for happy, profitable years, until the specialist comes by, and dissipates with a brief examination and with half a dozen trenchant words the victim's ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... charged, and proceeds in good earnest to the assassination of Vittoria. But at this critical moment Lodovico and his masquers appear; brother and sister both die unrepentant, defiant to the end. Vittoria's customary pride and her familiar sneers impress her speech in these last moments with a trenchant truth to nature: ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... as his singing-voice, was sweet, but with a kind of trenchant edge upon it, a genial asperity, that gave ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... hurried at his meals, prolonged them most surprisingly. Sometimes during the day he threw himself on a sofa, a romance in his hand which he simply pretended to read, and seemed absorbed in deep reverie. Verses were sent to him from Paris which he read aloud, expressing his opinion in a brief and trenchant style; he spent three days writing regulations for the French comedy at Paris. It is difficult to understand this attention to such frivolous details when the future was so ominous. It was generally believed, and ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... absolute ignorance. The problem of the connection of body and soul is as insoluble, in its modern form, as it was in the prescientific ages. Phosphorus is known to enter into the composition of the human brain, and a trenchant German writer has exclaimed, 'Ohne Phosphor, kein Gedanke!' That may or may not be the case; but even if we knew it to be the case, the knowledge would not lighten our darkness. On both sides of the zone ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... work looked over by Father Payne, who had been somewhat trenchant. "You have been beating a broken drum, you know," he had said, with ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... than he talks. But incisive native writing about American traits is not lacking. If a missionary, say in South Africa, has read the New York Nation every week for the past forty years, he has had an extraordinary "moving picture" of American tendencies, as interpreted by independent, trenchant, and high-minded criticism. That a file of the Nation will convey precisely the same impression of American tendencies as a file of the Sun, for instance, or the Boston Evening Transcript, is not to be affirmed. The ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... of the same cast. It varied as greatly as were the moods of the composer. The sublimity of Ossian had its opposite in the biting sarcasm and trenchant ridicule of some of the ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... be deprived of his right to a reply; and was just commencing with a suitable attitude for the purpose, when lo! the trenchant knight, who sat on a small stool beside the corner buttress, with a loud cry, suddenly disappeared, and a gaping cavity in the floor sufficiently accounted for the precipitate mode of his departure. Uprising on the ruins of Sir Thomas, started forth a ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... one: Pitty not honour'd Age for his white Beard, He is an Vsurer. Strike me the counterfet Matron, It is her habite onely, that is honest, Her selfe's a Bawd. Let not the Virgins cheeke Make soft thy trenchant Sword: for those Milke pappes That through the window Barne bore at mens eyes, Are not within the Leafe of pitty writ, But set them down horrible Traitors. Spare not the Babe Whose dimpled smiles from Fooles exhaust their mercy; Thinke it a Bastard, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... to finish the two small vessels on which the carpenters had been for some time at work. In a fortnight they were ready for sea, armed and provided with the king's cannon, munitions, and stores. Trenchant, an excellent pilot, was forced to join the party. Their favorite object was the plunder of a certain church, on one of the Spanish islands, which they proposed to assail during the midnight mass of Christmas, whereby a triple end ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... that perhaps the mind which admittedly knew much of what we think we know about ethics and economics, knew a little more than we are beginning to know about psychology and psychic phenomena. I remember reading, not without amusement, a severe and trenchant article in the Hibbert Journal, in which Christ's admission of demonology was alone thought enough to dispose of his divinity. The one sentence of the article, which I cherish in my memory through all the changing years, ran thus: "If he was God, he knew there ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... His singing of that simple ballad, Martin, is the most trenchant rendering I ever heard in the whole course ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... also intensified by the solitude to which she was necessarily left so much. She meditated a great deal upon the character of her children, and she liked to analyse and censure it both in her own mind and openly in their presence. She was very trenchant and definite in these estimates of them; she liked to ticket them, and then ticket them anew. She explored their ancestral history on both sides for the origin of their traits, and there were times when she reduced them in formula ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... terrible thorns were, they could do no more than dent his heavy armor. His powerful left arm, driving the double-razor-edged dirk in short, resistless arcs, managed to keep the snaky tendrils from coiling about his right arm, which was wielding the heavy, trenchant sword. Every time that mighty blade descended it cleaved its length through snapping spikes and impotently grinding leaves; but more than once a flailing tendril coiled about his neck armor and held his helmet immovable as though in a vise, while those frightful, grinding ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... in earnest in 1835. The western demand for responsible government pointed the way, and Howe became, with Baldwin, its most trenchant advocate. In spite of the determined opposition of the sturdy old soldier Governor, Sir Colin Campbell, and of his successor, Lord Falkland, who aped Sydenham and whom Howe threatened to "hire a black man to horse-whip," the reformers won. In 1848 the first responsible ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... it is unnecessary to say more than to quote Durand's observation that in it 'the words "justice and necessity" were applied in a manner for which there is fortunately no precedent in the English language,' and Sir Henry Edwardes' not less trenchant comment that 'the views and conduct of Dost Mahomed were misrepresented with a hardihood which a Russian ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... point which demands notice is that Ibsen has gained a surprising mastery over the arts of theatrical writing since we met with him last. There is nothing of the lyrical triviality of the verse in The Feast at Solhoug about the trenchant prose of The Vikings, and the crepuscular dimness of Lady Inger is exchanged for a perfect lucidity and directness. Whatever we may think about the theatrical propriety of the conductor of the vikings, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... Sheridan wittily said, like the blank page between the Old and the New Testament. Others have taken refuge in a kind of highly rationalised Judaism little different from pure Theism. Some of the most independent, scientific, and trenchant criticism of the Old Testament writings has proceeded from members of the race which was once distinguished for the most complete and superstitious worship of the letter of the law. Spinoza in his 'Tractatus Theologico-Politicus' led the way in this path, and in our own day ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... criticism," said Don, "at once so trenchant and so unobjectionable, to what earlier phase should you ascribe the wit of ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... what words shall I describe this dread exploit, by what language shall I make it credible to ages to come, what eulogies are there unmeet for thee, though they be hyperboles piled on hyperboles! On foot, alone, undaunted, high-souled, with but a simple sword, and that no trenchant blade of the Perrillo brand, a shield, but no bright polished steel one, there stoodst thou, biding and awaiting the two fiercest lions that Africa's forests ever bred! Thy own deeds be thy praise, valiant Manchegan, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... reeking with fever and leprosy; when their unclad bodies, undermined by famine, sent a thin blood to their brutish brains; when wars, atrocious laws, and legends of sorcery filled their dreams with vivid and melancholy images." Hear him tell over one of the trenchant tales from the ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... Darrell—laid, of course, all the blame on Caroline. Alas! had not she always warned him that Caroline was not worthy of him?—him, the greatest, the best of men, &c., &c. Darrell replied by a single cut of his trenchant sarcasm—sarcasm which shore through her cushion of down and her veil of gauze like the sword of Saladin. The old Marchioness turned her back upon Mrs. Lyndsay. Lady Selina was crushingly civil. The pretty woman ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... garden. The Duchess's debts, the Duke's devotions, the Belverde's extortions, Heiligenstern's mummery, and the political rivalry between Trescorre and the Dominican, were sauce to the citizen's daily bread; but there was nothing in these popular satires to suggest the hunchback's trenchant irony. ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... for trenchant force, And will like a dividing spear; Have praised the keen, unscrupulous course, Which knows no doubt, which feels ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Eachard. The likeness between them cannot be traced further; they were both, it is true, humorists, but there is little in common between the austere and bitter, yet, at the same time, delicious flavour of the one, and the trenchant and graphic, but coarse and rollicking, humour of ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... that trenchant thrilling now. The look in Worry's eyes had been enough. He threw speed to Halloway, and on the third ball retired him, Raymond to McCord. Stern came second to bat. In Ken's mind this player was recorded with a weakness on low curves. And Ken ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... Burke in 1773, 'that has ever been written against these people is that in which the author has collected in a body the whole of the Infidel code, and has brought their writings into one body to cut them all off together.' If the subject was to be dealt with in this trenchant fashion, no one could have done it more honestly than Leland has done. But the great questions which the Deists raised cannot be dealt with thus summarily. Perhaps no book professedly written 'against these people' ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... graver branches of literature. In an essay or a treatise we do not so much care for well-balanced disposition of parts or beautifully rounded periods, though elegance may be thought essential to classic masterpieces, as for weighty matter and trenchant observations. Having the latter, we can dispense at need with the former. The Italians of the Renaissance, under the sway of the fine arts, sought after form, and satisfied themselves with rhetoric. Therefore we condemn their ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... the gods Thor only, the god of thunder, never passed over the bridge, for fear lest his heavy tread or the heat of his lightnings would destroy it. The god Heimdall kept watch and ward there night and day. He was armed with a trenchant sword, and carried a trumpet called Giallar-horn, upon which he generally blew a soft note to announce the coming or going of the gods, but upon which a terrible blast would be sounded when Ragnarok should come, and the frost-giants and Surtr ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... trenchant critics of the Government since its formation have been Mr. PRINGLE and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... classic Muse, The keen collector meaner paths will choose: And first the MARGIN'S BREADTH his soul employs, Pure, snowy, broad, the type of nobler joys. In vain might Homer roll the tide of song, Or Horace smile, or Tully charm the throng; If crost by Pallas' ire, the trenchant blade Or too oblique, or near, the edge invade, The Bibliomane exclaims, with haggard eye, 'NO MARGIN!'—turns in haste, and ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... this curious oscillation between believing and seeing are set forth in the most trenchant way in the Book of Job. Job, placed in an agonizing situation, condemned without hope to the death of sinners, and yet conscious of his godliness, demands vengeance for his blood unjustly shed. But the vengeance is to be executed on God, and ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... imagination afire to see a strain of remarkable blood proclaiming itself in so diverse a fashion through members of one household; a household that has come from the pinch of want. Take the girl. Leave her beauty out of the question, because beauty is not genius. But her mind is as trenchant as her brother's. She could reign on any throne in Europe and stand out as conspicuous in brilliant contrast to that colorless royalty as a torch flaming among candles. I'll wager that her courage is as unflinching as his and her ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... them in their less ostentatious moments, and makes us as familiar with their weaknesses as with the despotic power of their beauty. Nothing that transpired in the great world escaped his knowledge, nor the trenchant sallies of his wit, rendered the more cutting by his unrivalled talent as a raconteur. Whatever he observed found its way into his letters, and thus is formed a more perfect narrative of the Curt-of its intrigues, political and otherwise-of the manoeuvres of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... stepmother, the fair Stepdaughter, kind and leal, The bull and bear so debonair, The trenchant fairy steel. ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... passed his thirtieth year. He was a man of middling height, spare figure, and olive complexion, wearing a short chestnut-colored beard. He spoke with vivacity and copious rhetoric, aiming rather at force than at purity of diction, indulging in trenchant metaphors to adumbrate recondite thoughts, passing from grotesque images to impassioned flights of declamation, blending acute arguments and pungent satires with grave mystical discourses. The impression of originality produced by his familiar ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... But even that was doubtful. Her trenchant remark about civilization wasn't the product of a conditioned mind. But why was he worrying about her attitudes? They weren't important—she wasn't even human. He shook his head. That was a sophistry. The fact that she wasn't human had nothing to ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... Borgia (graceful in all that he did) drooped easily forward on his prie-dieu, like the Archangel Gabriel who brought the great tidings to Madonna Maria. Amilcare, at that rate, was like Michael, his more trenchant colleague, that "bird ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... of the year 1821, O'Connell, during the intervals of Ms laborious occupations in court and on circuit, addressed a series of stirring letters to "the People of Ireland," remarkable as containing some of the best and most trenchant of his political writings. His object was to induce the postponement of the annual petition for Emancipation, and the substitution instead of a general agitation for Parliamentary reform, in conjunction ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... Douglass deeply wounded the religious feelings of his race by declaring; "I shall not dwell in any hackneyed cant by thanking God for this deliverance which has been wrought out through our common humanity." A hundred pulpits, a hundred trenchant pens sprang at the declaration with fiery indignation; and it was some years before the bold orator was able to make himself tolerable to his people. There was little of the spirit of tolerance among the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... interminable spinner of intolerable verse, who afflicted the world in his day with plays worse than plagues, and poems as worthless as his plays. It was to a quarrel for and a quarrel against this gentleman that we are indebted for the most trenchant satire in the language. Sir Robert had fallen out with Dryden about rhyming tragedies, of which he disapproved; and while it lasted, the contest was waged with prodigious acrimony. Among the partisans ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... is the best book of its kind since Arnold Bennett's How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day, a little book of trenchant advice to which it is a pleasure again to call attention. Of all Mr. Bennett's pocket philosophies—Self and Self-Management, Friendship and Happiness, The Human Machine, Mental Efficiency and Married Life—How to Live ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... as the gymnastic for all other spheres and toils. At Oxford, not long ago, four years were spent in mastering some fourteen books. Whatever may be our criticism of the process, we may not deny its singular effect. In its best estate it forged many a trenchant blade. To the man who asks for its monument, it can point to British thought, law, statesmanship. Bacon and Burke, Coke and Eldon, Hooker and Butler, Pitt and Canning, shall make answer. The whole massive ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... with a success that amazed himself. His hope was that he might be kept humble, and not called to Edinburgh for at least two years; and now he lifted the sheets with fear. The brilliant opening, with its historical parallel, this review of modern thought reinforced by telling quotations, that trenchant criticism of old-fashioned views, would not deliver. For the audience had vanished, and left one careworn, but ever beautiful face, whose gentle eyes were waiting with a yearning look. Twice he crushed ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... become hard and trenchant like that knife to which he was so ready to make constant allusion. But Chauvelin still remained silent. There was really nothing that ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... levelled at ecclesiastical superstition. Rousseau, indeed, had begun the most famous of his political speculations by crying that man, who was born free, is now everywhere in chains. But Rousseau was vague, abstract, and sentimental. In the System of Nature we have a clear presage of the trenchant and imperious invective which, twenty years after its publication, rang in all men's ears from the gardens of the Palais Royal and the benches of the Jacobins' Hall. The writer has plainly made up his mind that the time has at last come for dropping all the discreet ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... surrender an undoubted inheritance of twelve thousand a year on a point of feeling. He would have rejected it as a proposed crime, and talked much of the indefeasible rights of the coming heirs of the new heir. He would have been as firm as a rock, and as trenchant as a sword in defence of his patron's claims. But now, having in his hands that short, pithy letter from Owen Fitzgerald, he could not but look at the matter in a more Christian light. After all, was not justice, ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... nominal Protestant. Knox at first was forbidden to return to his pulpit, and he visited the Churches in Ayrshire and Fife, occupying himself among other things in revising the first four books of his history—the only part which is finished by his trenchant pen. But in December the General Assembly met in Edinburgh, and Knox was with them. We have already seen the striking answer sent by this Assembly[115] as to the proposed gifts of the Queen. But their attention was arrested at this moment ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... calamaries. Swooping and circling they gathered over the hideous final struggle, and from time to time one or another would drop perpendicularly downward to stab the crown or the face of one of the preoccupied fish-beasts with his trenchant beak. Such of the fish-beasts as were thus disabled were promptly torn to pieces and devoured by ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... trio was the dwarfish fool with his shaggy black head, twisted mouth, and watchful, wandering eye, whose foolishness was but the flaunting cover of shrewd observation and trenchant vision. Going where he would, and saying what he listed, now in the Queen's inner chamber, then in the midst of the Council, unconsidered, and the butt of all, he paid for his bed and bounty by shooting shafts of foolery ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... justice, the equites were henceforth supreme. Even the senators themselves depended on their verdict for acquittal or condemnation, and the chief power in the State had changed hands. Of course the change would not be felt at once to the full; but this was the most trenchant stroke which Gracchus aimed at the Senate's power. Here, again, it is customary to write of his actions as if they were governed solely by feeling, quite apart from all considerations of right and ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... whistle rang down from the ridge, splitting the air, strong and trenchant, the fiery, shrill ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... up by the House of Lords, where she was defended by Lord Brougham. To this day the proceedings of the trial are remembered as one of the most outrageous scandals in England. The feelings thereby engendered in the people have been immortalized in the trenchant writings of Thackeray. Before the trial was concluded, Lord Liverpool's bill was brought up for the third time in Parliament. It passed by a majority of a few votes. With so slender an indorsement, the Ministry had cause to tremble for its existence. Lord Liverpool prevailed upon the King ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... so-called new science of spiritualism as the invention of impostors and mountebanks. His address, which lacked the author's constitutional caution and discretion, was severely handled in several of the leading journals, and a trenchant pen, in an Edinburgh cotemporary, "cut up rough" with a vengeance. Among others who replied to Dr. Thomson's strictures was Dr. Robert H. Collyer, of London, who claims to be the original discoverer of electro-biology, phreno-magnetism, and stupefaction, by ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... began to rebel and to demand the recall of romance. The long books about the black poverty of cities became quite insupportable. The Berkshire tragedy had a chorus; but the London tragedy has no chorus. Therefore people welcomed the return of adventurous novels about alien places and times, the trenchant and swordlike stories of Stevenson. But I am not narrowly on the side of the romantics. I think that glimpses of the gloom of our civilization ought to be recorded. I think that the bewilderments of the solitary and sceptical soul ought to be preserved, if it be ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... the early, roistering playwrights who frequented the Court of Elizabeth, later served as a soldier in the Low Countries, accompanied Sir Humphrey Gilbert's expedition to Newfoundland in 1578, and was at the Battle of Zutphen in 1586. He was a trenchant critic of the contemporary drama, contending for greater reality and rationality. His play, Promos and Cassandra, translated from Cinthio's Hecatomithi, was used by Shakespeare ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... up from that great immolation, but Poland's loyalty to Europe will not be rooted in anything so trenchant and burdensome as the sense of an immeasurable indebtedness, of that gratitude which in a worldly sense is sometimes called eternal, but which lies always at the mercy of weariness and is fatally condemned by the instability ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... perplexing way with boastful misery to tempt his particular friends into this subject, and the moment they touch it, to turn on them with that trenchant severity about the chords in the human mind, both Mr. Jobling and Mr. Smallweed decline ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... On the contrary, there was something extremely winning in his eagerness to hear the reply of his interlocutor. "Well, there's a great deal in that," he would graciously and cordially say, and proceed to give the opposing statement what benefit he thought it deserved. He could be very trenchant, but I do not think that any one whom he had advanced to the privilege of his confidence can remember that he was so ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... of the fight we have not paused to particularize, neither have we enumerated, the list of the combatants. Amongst them, however, were Jerry Juniper, the knight of Malta, and Zoroaster. Excalibur, as may be conceived, had not been idle; but that trenchant blade had been shivered by Ranulph Rookwood in the early stage of the business, and the knight left weaponless. Zoroaster, who was not merely a worshipper of fire, but a thorough milling-cove, had engaged to some purpose in a pugilistic ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Vargrave's fantastical holiday nature, Had sharply drawn forth to his full size and stature The real man, conceal'd till that moment beneath All he yet had appear'd. From the gay broider'd sheath Which a man in his wrath flings aside, even so Leaps the keen trenchant steel summon'd forth by a blow. And thus loss of fortune gave value to life. The wife gain'd a husband, the husband a wife, In that home which, though humbled and narrow'd by fate, Was enlarged and ennobled by love. Low ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... singer. He seemed an embodied Journal, including the Leading Article, the Law Reports, Foreign Intelligence, the Court Circular, down to the Births, Deaths, and Marriages. Gordon from time to time interrupted this flow of soul with brief, trenchant remarks, which evinced his own knowledge of the subjects treated, and a habit of looking on all subjects connected with the pursuits and business of mankind from a high ground appropriated to himself, and through the ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of serious and earnest discussion of the pressing problems now close at hand. Brevard, a short, spare man, editor of the recently-suppressed "San Francisco Revolutionist" and now in hiding, made a few trenchant remarks, from time to time. Grantham and his wife, both active speakers on the "Underground Circuit" and both under sentence of long imprisonment, said little. Most of the conversation was between Catherine, Craig and Gabriel. Long before the supper was done, lamps had to be brought ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... terms of a noble peace. I was met with anger and contumely; the dignity of the ambassador of peace rubbed off at a touch, like the golden dust from the butterfly's wing. I took my scolding like a meek child; and then, when she was in the middle of a trenchant phrase, her eye fixed daggerlike on mine, I calmly went to put the enemy's house in order! It was ridiculous, ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... himself on a post near the gate, and there consented to remain until the return of his messenger. The latter went straight to the dark walk, and found the sword, sure enough. But, instead of returning it to its owner this discourteous knight broke the trenchant blade at the hilt; and flinging the steel away, pocketed the baser silver metal, and lurked off by the private door consecrated to the ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Mitchill alone stood above him. He lacked the creative genius of Hamilton, the prescient gifts of Jay, and the skill of Burr to marshal men for selfish purposes, but he was at home in debate with the ablest men of his time, a master of sarcasm, of trenchant wit, and ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the better when it is blunt, and converts the fact into an allegory of human affairs showing that decorous dulness is an over-match for genius. Macaulay was incapable, both in a good and bad sense, of Swift's trenchant misanthropy. His dislike to Walpole was founded not so such upon posthumous jealousy—though that passion is not so rare as absurd—as on the singular contrast between the character and intellect of the two men. The typical Englishman, with his rough, strong sense, passing at times into the ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Goliath of Gath, or the terrible Og, king of Bashan; One was Pecksuot named, and the other was called Wattawamat. Round their necks were suspended their knives in scabbards of wampum, Two-edged, trenchant knives, with points as sharp as a needle. Other arms had they none, for they were cunning and crafty. "Welcome, English!" they said,—these words they had learned from the traders Touching at times on the coast, to barter and chaffer for peltries. Then in their native ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... parish-priest, and, as well as his friend Master Gottfried, held greatly by the views left by the famous Strasburg preacher, Master John Tauler. After the good housemother had, in strong terms, laid the case before him, she expected a trenchant decision on her own side, but, to her surprise and disappointment, he declared that Master Gottfried was right, and that, unless Hugh Sorel demanded anything absolutely sinful of his daughter, it was ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge |
