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Lapidary   Listen
adjective
Lapidary  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to the art of cutting stones, or engraving on stones, either gems or monuments; as, lapidary ornamentation.
2.
Of or pertaining to monumental inscriptions; as, lapidary adulation.
Lapidary style, that style which is proper for monumental and other inscriptions; terse; sententious.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Lapidary" Quotes from Famous Books



... character is revealed by the concussion of misfortune, as the splendor of the precious jewel of the mine is developed by the blows of the lapidary.—F.A. DURIVAGE. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various

... like to know the virtues of the diamond, (as men may find in THE LAPIDARY that many men know not), I shall tell you, as they beyond the sea say and affirm, of whom all science and all philosophy cometh from. He that beareth the diamond upon him, it giveth him hardiness and manhood, and it keepeth the limbs of ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown

... malady, and also to a class of sins; and he affirms that when we have chemically got possession of the active principle of gems we shall have not only antidotes but preventatives. While waiting for this chimerical dream to be realized and for our medicine to become the mock of lapidary chemists, he uses precious stones to formulate diagnoses of illnesses produced ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... eminent instance of the truth of that rule, poeta non fit, sed nascitur; one is not made, but born a poet. Indeed his learning was but very little; so that as Cornish diamonds are not polished by any lapidary, but are pointed and smooth, even as they are taken out of the earth, so Nature itself was all the art which ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature; but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of a house." His journal is "full of disjointed dreams and audacities." Writing by the aid of this, it is natural enough that he should speak of his "lapidary style" and say "I ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... holes in it. "Died through the visitation of intense stupidity, by impinging on a moonlight night against the off hind wheel of the Glasgow mail! Deodand upon the said wheel—two-pence." What a simple lapidary inscription! Nobody much in the wrong but an off-wheel; and with few acquaintances; and if it were but rendered into choice Latin, though there would be a little bother in finding a Ciceronian word for "off-wheel," Marcellus himself, that great master of sepulchral ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... dealt in the fragrant vegetable whence he derived his name; and Theobald atte Home, the hatter, who being of a poetical disposition, displayed a landscape entitled, as was well understood, the Hart's Bourne. Beyond these stretched far away to the east other shops—those of a mealman, a lapidary, a cordwainer—namely, a shoemaker; a lindraper, for they had not yet added the syllable which makes it linen; a lorimer, who dealt in bits and bridles; a pouchmonger, who sold bags and pockets; a parchment-maker; a treaclemonger, a spicer, a chandler, ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt

... voices. The most of them seemed to know Sir Harry well and greeted him with an odd mixture of respect and familiarity. Their talk was full of mysterious names and expressions, and Taffy thought at first they must be Freemasons. "The Moor point-to-point was a walk-over for the Milkman; Lapidary was scratched, which left it a soft thing, unless Sir Harry fancied a fox-catcher like Nursery Governess, in which case Billy behind the bar would do as much business as he liked at six-to-one." After a while Taffy discovered ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... study, and toil, through manifold embodiments, long-continued self renunciation, and sacrifices not yet known or understood. Its initiations are endless; its revelations of the infinite law are, at times, too seemingly trifling for recognition; but as the lapidary leaves no facet of the jewel uncut and unpolished, so the guardians—the guides and teachers of the candidates for spiritual unfoldment—omit no least lesson or discipline that can aid ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield

... happiness. The relatives of her late husband, by law her guardians, were prejudiced, mercenary wretches, anxious to marry her to an old hunks of a Spaniard, so that the property of her late husband, chiefly consisting of precious stones—he had been a lapidary—might not pass into the hands of foreigners.' I can scarcely believe it now," added Mr. Smith, with great heat; "but if I didn't swallow all this stuff like sack and sugar, I'm a Dutchman! The thought of it, old as I am, sets my very ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... and especially in order successfully to check that decadence which had alarmed the best minds in France, there was a pioneer work to be done. It was necessary to intensify and purify the light of criticism. For this purpose the conversations of the salons culminated in the lapidary art of La Rochefoucauld, who was not a creator like Racine and Moliere, like Bossuet and Fenelon, but who prepared the way for these slightly later builders of French literature by clearing the ground of shams. Segrais, whose recollections ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse

... pretension of his countrymen to this noble production[557]. M. Mustoxidi has not been left without a reply; but, as yet, he has received no answer. It should seem that the horses are irrevocably Chian, and were transferred to Constantinople by Theodosius. Lapidary writing is a favourite play of the Italians, and has conferred reputation on more than one of their literary characters. One of the best specimens of Bodoni's typography is a respectable volume of inscriptions, all written by his friend Pacciaudi. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... author, than to do justice to its subject. But it is in Warren's Lily and the Bee, that the school appears in full bloom. This is said to consist mostly of exclamation points, and is written in a sort of lapidary style, that deals in riddles, pathos without object, sentimentality with irony, world-pain, and allusions to all the kingdoms of heaven and earth, without any explanation as to what relation these allusions ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... of generous sensibility. In reading these rigorous maxims one might be tempted to believe that this legislator of morality is a man without a heart, and, if we were not touched by the original sincerity of the language, one would only see in this lapidary style the conventional precepts of a chimerical system or the aspirations of an impossible perfection." The Discourses are more illustrative, more argumentative, more diffuse, more human. In reading them one feels oneself face to face with a human being, not with the marble ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... all stones the diamond is most clearest, and yet most hard for the lapidary to cut: as of all flowers the rose is the fairest, and yet guarded with the sharpest prickles: so of all our country lasses Phoebe is the brightest, but the most coy of all to stoop unto desire. But let her take heed," quoth he, "I have heard of Narcissus, ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge

... main plot out of his Pretieusee's Ridiculee's; the Counterplot of Sganarelle out of his Escole des Femmes, and out of the Escole des Marys, the two Naturals; all which, like so many Pretieuse stones, I have brought out of France; and as a Lapidary set in one Jewel to adorn ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere

... and silver, was also in the Monastery in the days of King Don Alfonso the Wise, but it hath long since been lost, no man knoweth how. Moreover there is in this Sacristy a precious stone of great size, black and sparkling; no lapidary hath yet known its name. The Convent have had an infant Jesus graven thereon, with the emblem of the Passion, that it might be worthily employed. It is thought also that the great cross of crystal which is set so well and wrought with such great cunning, ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various

... stir." "Sir Theodore," said the Saint, "will not blame you for following me. I assure you he will not." "But then," said Larry—"Follow me!" cried the Saint, in a hollow voice, and casting upon him his stony eye, drew poor Larry after him, as the bridal guest was drawn by the lapidary glance of the Ancient Mariner; or, as Larry himself afterwards expressed it, "as a jaw tooth is wrinched out of an ould woman with a pair of pinchers." The Saint strode before him in silence, not in the least incommoded by the stones and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various

... the ruined Baths of Caracalla the uncompleted church of S. Petronio in Bologna, and many a stark mosque on many a sandy desert show only bare skeletons of whose completed glory we can only guess. In them the fabric was a framework for the display of the lapidary or the ceramic art—a garment destroyed, rent, or tattered by time and chance, leaving the bones ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... each other, or endeavour to do so. I read it conscientiously from beginning to end, admiring, in my physical capacity, the throbbing passion that prompts such public outbursts of confidence and, from a literary point of view, their lapidary style, model of condensation, impossible to render in English and conditioned by the hard fact that every word costs two sous. Under this painful material stress, indeed, the messages are sometimes crushed into a conciseness which the females concerned must have some difficulty ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... at first by the personal advice of a trained impresario, don Emilio Mario. Second, the drama is above all the genre of condensation, and Galds, even as a novelist, never condensed. His art was not that of the lapidary, nor even that of the short story writer. He has few novelas cortas to his credit, and he required pages and pages to develop a situation ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos

... turned up the long winding road towards my quarters. It was a cold moonlight night, and every twig of broom and beech was sharply defined as in a black-and-white drawing. Overhead each star was hard and bright, as though a lapidary had been at work in the heavens, and never had the Great Bear seemed so brilliant. But none so bright and legible—or so it seemed to me—as Mars ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... Many quotations from this able state paper have already been made in the preceding pages, though it is so brilliant a piece of work that to quote is only to mutilate. Its argument, denunciation, humor, and satire are interwoven in a masterly combination. The renowned "sketch in the lapidary style," prepared for the gravestone of Thomas and Richard Penn, with the introductory paragraphs, constitutes one of the finest assaults in political literature.[12] It is unfortunately impossible to give any adequate idea ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... varied habits, Carabi,[1] Cetoniae, Buprestes, Chrysomelae,[2] rival and even surpass the magnificent Dung-beetles in the matter of jewellery. At times we encounter splendours which the imagination of a lapidary would not venture to depict. The Azure Hoplia,[3] the inmate of the osier-beds and elders by the banks of the mountain streams, is a wonderful blue, tenderer and softer to the eye than the azure of the heavens. ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... accommodation was not made so secretly, but that my character was blasted, and my credit overthrown; so that I was fain to relinquish my occasional equipage, and hire myself as journeyman to a lapidary, an employment which I had exercised in my youth. In this obscure station, I laboured with great assiduity, until I made myself perfect in the knowledge of stones, as well as in the different methods of setting them off to the best advantage; ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett



Words linked to "Lapidary" :   gemstone, engraver, expert, lapidist, lapidarist



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