Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Mercurial   Listen
noun
Mercurial  n.  
1.
A person having mercurial qualities.
2.
(Med.) A preparation containing mercury.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Mercurial" Quotes from Famous Books



... the premier ambassador, incidentally ridiculing some of his own countrymen's war ideals, President Harding and Secretary Hughes, gravely and with rather obvious emphasis, tried to set the matter aright as best they could. But there was no hint of reprimand; only a fervent hope that the mercurial Harvey would remain quiescent until the memory of the ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous

... wall, his 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 in ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne

... cantharides 2 oz., strong mercurial ointment 4 oz., oil of turpentine 4 oz., iodine 3 oz., mix all with a sufficiency of lard to make a thin ointment; apply to the spavin only once a day until it bursts; then oil it with sweet oil until healed. If the bunch is not then removed, apply it again, and again if necessary, ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young

... dose. Fortunately, however, for the prevention of accidents, but unfortunately for the therapeutic value of the soap, a decomposition of the sublimate occurs as soon as it is incorporated in the soap mass, by which an insoluble mercurial soap is formed. This change takes place independently of the alkali used in the soap; in fact, as mentioned above, a well-made soap contains no appreciable amount of free alkali, but is due to the action of the fat acids. Corrosive sublimate is incompatible with ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various

... 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

... has any theatrical novelty to offer, whether as a political mountebank, or a bogus hero, or a peculiarly atrocious crime, is sure of a large audience. For there is a wide range of appreciation in that mercurial nature which, according to Voltaire, is half ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray

... 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 ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson

... plainly it tells of religiousness and perhaps of fanaticism! The Sun finger is not long. Nay, it is not long enough. There is too little love of glory here. And the Saturnian finger is too long. The life is too much under the dominion of Fate or Destiny. The Mercurial finger is short. He will be firm in his friendships. The moons all correspond. They, also, are too large. The Mount of Venus, here at the base of the thumb, is excessively developed, and indicates ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... no means confined to the Oriental peoples of Babylon and Syria, of Phrygia and Egypt; they were not a product peculiar to the religious mysticism of the dreamy East, but were shared by the races of livelier fancy and more mercurial temperament who inhabited the shores and islands of the Aegean. We need not, with some enquirers in ancient and modern times, suppose that these Western peoples borrowed from the older civilisation of the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... far more effective in arousing the liver to action than "blue pills," the old-fashioned compound cathartic pills, calomel or other mercurial preparations, and have the further merit of being purely vegetable in their composition and perfectly harmless in any condition of the system. Furthermore, no particular care ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... great man; and in order to confute a friendly objector decides to select from the workhouse a boy to experiment with. He chooses a boy with a bad reputation but with excellent instincts, and adopts him, the story narrating the adventures of the mercurial lad who thus finds himself suddenly lifted several degrees in the social scale. The idea is novel and handled with Mr. Manville Fenn's accustomed cleverness, the restless boyish nature, with its inevitable tendency to get into scrapes, ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty

... again, this time with better results. For five minutes he beat the bedclothes; then his spirits rose and, like the mercurial Celt that he was, he chanted blithely a verse from "The ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... Genius fain wou'd Court superiour Blessings; those Passions are too hurrying to last; Vapours that start from a Mercurial Brain, whose wild Chimera's flush the lighter Faculties, which tir'd i'th'vain pursuit of fancy'd Pleasures; a Passion more substantial Courts our Reason, solid, persuasive, elegant, sublime, where ev'ry Sense crowds to the ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker

... great soul behind it; the clear eyes of china blue; the glistening white hair, still with the wave and spring of youth in it; the slender legs, and Dean's dress, which becomes all but the portly, with, on festal occasions, the red ribbon of the Bath crossing the mercurial frame: there are still a few pictures and photographs by which these characteristics are dimly recalled to those at least who knew the living man. To my father, who called him "Arthur," and to all the ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... most active being, its habits conforming to the organisation with which it is endowed. Such an array of paddles prophesies of a mercurial temperament and an energetic character. It can, however, anchor itself and lie by when occasion offers. It is provided with two long cables, prettily set with spiral filaments or tendrils, by means of which it can make fast to any point. ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various

... 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 Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... as to the instruments used up to this time for determining altitudes. These were, in general, ordinary mercurial barometers, protected in various ways. Green encased his instrument in a simple metal tube, which admitted of the column of mercury being easily read. This instrument, which is generally to be seen held in his hand in ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon

... nightclothes Clara had 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 ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... theory[147] as to surmise that the central episode of faithless love occurred about 1594. If so, here was enough to deepen and impassion the plastic personality of the rhymer of VENUS AND ADONIS; to add a new string to the heretofore Mercurial lyre. All the while, too, he was undergoing the kind of culture and of psychological training involved in his craft of acting—a culture involving a good deal of contact with the imaginative literature of the ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson

... animal kingdom, however, we find that the animals, too, bear this polarity as a formative element. The birds represent the spherical (dry, saline) pole; the ruminants the linear (moist, sulphurous) pole. The carnivorous quadrupeds form the intermediary (mercurial) group. As ur-phenomenal types we may name among the birds the eagle, clothed in its dry, silicic plumage, hovering with far-spread wings in the heights of the atmosphere, united with the expanses of space through its ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs

... like unto the sign of the Indian Bacchus at the Tobacconist's, would they dance and stamp and foot it merrily—with plenty of fruit, salt fish, pork, roasted plantain, and so forth, to regale themselves withal, not forgetting punch and sangaree—quite forgetful, poor mercurial wretches, for the time being of Fetters and the Scourge and the Driver that would hurry them to their dire labour the morrow morn. Surely there never did exist so volatile, light-spirited, feather-brained ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... with care through all that glittering sea Of gems and plumes and pearls and silks to where He deems it is his proper place to be Dissolving in the waltz to some soft air Or proudlier prancing with Mercurial skill Where science ...
— A Pioneer Railway of the West • Maude Ward Lafferty

... form contributed very much to the quota of general noise. Although Henderson had chaffed Daubeny on his virtuous stillness, yet all the boys sat very nearly as quiet as Dubbs himself during school hours. Even Henderson and such mercurial spirits were awed into silence and sobriety. You would hardly have known that in that quarter of the room there was a form at all. Quicksilver itself would have lost its volatility ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... art; the former who had to deal with a people of much more politeness, learning, and wit, laid the greatest weight of his oratory upon the strength of his arguments, offered to their understanding and reason: whereas Tully considered the dispositions of a sincere, more ignorant, and less mercurial nation, by dwelling almost entirely ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift

... what literary 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 ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner

... questioned. Even if French thought and literature did for a moment pay tribute at the throne of Louis XIV the closing years of the century were marked by the names of Leibnitz, Bayle and Newton; the mercurial intelligence of France could not long remain stagnant with such forces as these casting their influence over European civilization. {16} The new century was not long in, the Regent Philip of Orleans had not long been in power, before France showed that Versailles had ceased to control ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston

... sets once every eighty-eight days. There are, in reality, two of these lune-shaped regions, one at the east and the other at the west, each between 1,200 and 1,300 miles broad at the equator. At the sunward edge of these regions, once in eighty-eight days, or once in a Mercurial year, the sun rises to an elevation of forty-seven degrees, and then descends again straight to the horizon from which it rose; at the nightward edge, once in eighty-eight days, the sun peeps above the horizon and quickly sinks from sight again. The result is that, neglecting the effects of atmospheric ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss

... inquired from an official what that steamer might be, and was told that it was the eight o'clock from Dover, which had broken down, put into Calais for some slight necessary repairs, and was arriving at its destination nearly four hours late. Her mercurial spirits rose again. A minute ago she was regarding herself as no better than a ninny engaged in a wild-goose chase. Now she felt that after all she had been very sagacious and cunning. She was morally sure that she would find the Zerlinski woman on this second steamer, and she took all the credit ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett

... everything around her. But she had to think of Dr. and Mrs. Capes, in whose house she was, and talk civilly to them of their improvements(!). She had to emulate the submission of Dora, who had seen the transfer coming and taken part in it. She had to copy the mercurial spirits of Rose and May. They were so pleased to be with their father and mother again, and to take possession of Phyllis Carey's every free moment, that they declared the Robarts's apartments were the very nicest ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler

... much 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 ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... December. 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 a ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett

... germination if subjected to heat. But one 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 shut ...
— 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

... change from snow to rain, the wind shifted to the southeast, and the cold became, suddenly, very severe. According to the engineer's calculation, the mercurial column of a Fahrenheit thermometer would not have marked less than eight degrees below zero, and this intense cold, rendered still more painful by a sharp gale, lasted for several days. The colonists ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne

... the after-results are most undesirable. But 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 them ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... During the first weeks of the Conference, Wilson seems to have fallen under the spell of Lloyd George to some extent, who showed himself quite as liberal as the President in many instances. But Wilson was clearly troubled by the Welshman's mercurial policy, and before he finally left for America, found relief in the solid consistency of Clemenceau. He always knew where the French Premier stood, no matter how much he might differ from ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour

... surrounded by a very delicate rose hue, which is lost in a band of pure white. Beyond this a protecting influence is powerfully exerted; and notwithstanding the action of the dispersed light, which is very evident over the plate, a line is left, perfectly free from mercurial vapor, and which, consequently, when viewed by a side light, appears quite dark. The green rays are represented by a line of a corresponding tint, considerably less in size than the luminous green rays. The yellow rays appear to be without action, or to act negatively, ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling

... time above the horizon after sunset, it is by no means an easy object to observe on account of the mists which usually hang about low down near the earth. One opportunity, however, offers itself from time to time to solve the riddle of an "intra-Mercurial" planet, that is to say, of a planet which circulates within the path followed by Mercury. The opportunity in question is furnished by a total eclipse of the sun; for when, during an eclipse of that kind, the body of the moon for a few minutes entirely ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage

... 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 Charles Nodier ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker

... arrangement of exhibits, the fair at Paris was better than that at Chicago. The French people are well adapted for such exhibits. The city of Paris is itself a good show. Its people almost live out of doors six months of the year. They are quick, mercurial, tasteful and economical. A Frenchman will live well on one-half of what is consumed or wasted by an American. I do not propose to describe the wonderful collection of the productions of nature or the works of men, but I wish to convey some idea of life in Paris ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... 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 end to ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer

... have done the moment before he met the wedding-guest—when, in fact, he had nobody to button-hole, and felt the strong necessity of boring some one!' There was a tone of gayety in this reply, which told me how changeable and mercurial my companion could be; and I read an evident understanding of the character and mission of the noun-substantive 'bore,' which assured me that he was the last person in the world likely to play such a part. 'However,' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... are apt to think ill of any graduation but our own); but it was a poor consolation. The fact remained that his herald Mercury, standing a tiptoe, could look down on mine. I seem to glimpse something of this familiar weakness in Mr. White. He, too, has shared in these mercurial triumphs and defeats. Nor do I doubt that he had a true country-gentleman's interest in the weather-cock; that his first question on coming down of a ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell

... verses and sold them on the streets of Boston; doubted everything at fifteen; left home for good at seventeen; started the first public library in Philadelphia before he was twenty-one. Robert Fulton was poor, dreamy, mercurial, devoted to nature, art, and literature. He became a painter of talent, then a poet, and left home at seventeen. Bryant was sickly till fourteen and became permanently well thereafter; was precociously devoted to nature, religion, prayed for poetic genius and wrote ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... satisfaction, we turn to contemplate the character of a true-hearted and undaunted Southern patriot, Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee. Coming as he did from a section in which secessionism predominates, and representing a mercurial and sensitive people, he stood out fearlessly and zealously in behalf of the maintenance of the Union at all hazards. He is an admirable example of the self-made man, having received no education in his youth, and owing to the application of maturer years ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... Venetians are rarely massive in their strength. Each limb is equally developed by the exercise of rowing upright, bending all the muscles to their stroke. Their bodies are elastically supple, with free sway from the hips and a mercurial poise upon the ankle. Stefano showed these qualities almost in exaggeration. The type in him was refined to its artistic perfection. Moreover, he was rarely in repose, but moved with a singular brusque ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... that any boy, if rightly trained, can be made into a gentleman. He chooses a boy from the workhouse, with a bad reputation but with excellent instincts, and adopts him, the story narrating the adventures of the mercurial lad. The restless boyish nature, with its inevitable tendency to get into scrapes, is ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty

... transient as harebells. She had dropped into a different world, and the old one would fade like a receding star. She would soon find her that her only choice must be to make new associations and friendships and find new pleasures; and this her mercurial, frank, and fearless nature would incline her to ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... that country must 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

... germinations of free intellectual or social intercourse amongst ourselves. One was the national reserve;' and this was strengthened by concurring with a national temperament—not phlegmatic (as is so falsely alleged), but melancholic, dignified, and for that reason, if there had been no other, anti-mercurial. But the main cause of this reserve lay in the infrequency of visits consequent upon the difficulties of local movement. The other frost lay in the Spanish stateliness and the inflexibility of our social ceremonies. Our social meetings of this period, even ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey

... was in an agony. He was menaced with the very thing he was in the hope of staving off, or a discussion on the subject of the sick man's previous life. The doctor was so mercurial and quick of apprehension, that, once fairly on the scent, he was nearly certain he would extract every thing from the patient. This was the principal reason why the deacon did not wish to send for him; the expense, though ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... a visionary, but a visionary of an uncommon and successful kind. The manner in which his ardent, imaginative, and mercurial nature was controlled by a powerful judgment, and directed by an acute sagacity, is the most extraordinary feature in his character. Thus governed, his imagination, instead of exhausting itself in idle flights, lent aid to his judgment, and enabled him to form ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving

... 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 no part at all in his ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... more simple, of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government, only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance, by ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath

... 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 and ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory

... patient. And as the English nation cannot succumb under the final crises, but must go forth from it, born again, rejuvenated, we can but rejoice over everything which accelerates the course of the disease. And to this the Irish immigration further contributes by reason of the passionate, mercurial Irish temperament, which it imports into England and into the English working-class. The Irish and English are to each other much as the French and the Germans; and the mixing of the more facile, excitable, fiery Irish temperament with the stable, reasoning, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels

... breed, whose mercurial condition was influenced by every breath of wind, shook with apprehension, but Pepin came to the rescue. To be called "a thing" by an Indian was an insult that cut into the quick of his nature. He ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie

... why water would not rise in a tube more than thirty-three feet. No one knew of the weight of the atmosphere, so late as the early days of this republic. Many did not believe the theory long after that time. Torricelli, by his experiments, demonstrated the fact and invented the mercurial barometer, long known as the "Torricellian Tube." This last instrument led to another discovery; that the weight of the atmosphere varied from time to time in the same locality, and that storms and weather ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele

... vitiated state of the blood, wherein that fluid becomes incompetent to sustain the vital forces in their vigorous action, and leaves the system to fall into disorder and decay. The scrofulous contamination is variously caused by mercurial disease, low living, disordered digestion from unhealthy food, impure air, filth and filthy habits, the depressing vices, and, above all, by the venereal infection. Whatever be its origin, it is hereditary in the constitution, descending ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... the latter: the time necessary to produce a well developed image of the velvet being about six times longer than that required to produce an equally defined image of plaster. The manner of judging correctly of the time is by the appearance of impression after it has been developed by the mercurial vapors. Should it present a deep blue or black appearance it is solarized or over-timed. This sometimes is to an extent, that a perfect negative is formed, the white being represented black, ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey

... can live long. I was last night at Lady Lucan's, 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 ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue

... 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 not ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... commence with a scream; and if he is not at his best, then the scream may degenerate into a whimper before the moment for the climax has arrived. Like Spohr, with whom he had much in common, despite the difference between his mercurial temperament and the pedagogic gravity of the composer of "The Last Judgment," he set great store upon his learning, and was fond of trivial themes that admitted of obvious contrapuntal treatment. Even when he avoided that failing, his ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... possibility. He knew that whatever she did—her quick generosities, her hot enthusiasms or angers, her birdlike caressing ways—was unbelievably sincere. Her extravagant moods at the same time shocked and fascinated him. Her voice was as mercurial as her feelings. There were no even tones, and she talked with her hands. Yet, in her mouth, English was a new and beautiful language, softly limpid, with an audacity of phrase and tellingness of expression that conveyed ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London

... visit to Paris of this year, which paved the way for better relations in the future between Britain and France, the King made a successful tour of a part of Ireland—July 21st to August 1st—and impressed himself upon the mercurial temperament of the sons of Erin. In September came the memorable retirement of Mr. Chamberlain from the Balfour Government; his declaration of devotion to the new-old ideal of limited protective tariffs for the ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins

... injuring fath—without injuring the name." His voice 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 to ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson

... glass matrass into a stream of running water and leave them there twenty days; by that time they will contract the natural hardness and solidity of pearls. Then take them out of th matrass and hang them in mercurial water, where they will moisten, swell, and assume their Oriental beauty; after which shift them into a matrass hermitically closed to prevent any water coming to them, and let it down into a well, to ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... autumn, leaves of wild laurel were glistening and gyrating on the white foam of the Kodor like a quantity of mercurial salmon fry. And as I sat on some rocks overlooking the river there occurred to me the thought that, as likely as not, the cause of the gulls' and cormorants' fretful cries where the surf lay moaning behind a belt of trees to the right ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky

... the fifth 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. ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore

... was too mercurial and too adventurous to remain long under the weight of fear or sadness. He reasoned as follows: To-day, as heretofore, I have little or nothing to lose; if I decide to go out from this house, I continue to pass for the duke, and I am treated like a prince until some one discovers ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue

... interest you. Do not let yourselves be anywise forced into admiring it; there is, indeed, nothing more here than an approximately true rendering of a healthy youthful face, without the slightest attempt to give an expression of activity, cunning, nobility, or any other attribute of the Mercurial mind. Extreme simplicity, unpretending vigor of work, which claims no admiration either for minuteness or dexterity, and suggests no idea of effort at all; refusal of extraneous ornament, and perfectly arranged disposition ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... up a certain fluid from the circumfluent blood, and pour it into the mouth. They are sometimes stimulated into action by the blood, that surrounds their origin, or by some part of that heterogeneous fluid: for when mercurial salts, or oxydes, are mixed with the blood, they stimulate these glands into unnatural exertions; and then an unusual quantity of saliva ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... life, and how long this attached to the physical delights of his being cannot be told here. His eyes were lodged too far in heaven to have kept the delights for long, to have comprehended all that clogged his impatiently mercurial feet. ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... 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 6 oz., sugar of lead 4 oz. Melt the ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson

... he is speaking, HERBERT, the call boy, appears from the wings Right, a mercurial youth of about sixteen with a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... her departure had disturbed Lorry. As she dressed for the opera that night she pondered on it, and back from it to the change she had noticed in the girl of late. She hadn't been like the old, easy-going Chrystie; her indolent evenness of mood had given place to a mercurial flightiness, her gay good-humor been broken by flashes ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... hurried off, and tossing a twenty-franc piece to the sleepy hotel porter who was holding Ruspardi's horse outside, he flung himself into the saddle and galloped away. Ruspardi, young and hotblooded, was of too mercurial a disposition to anticipate any really serious results of the night's adventure;— his contempt for a coward was far greater than his fear of death, and he was delighted to think that in all probability the Marquis would use his riding-whip ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... desolation; that comfortable inmate, whose smile, during eight months of the year, was our sufficient consolation for summer's lingering advance and early flight? Alas! blindly inhospitable, grudging the food that kept him cheery and mercurial, we have thrust him into an iron prison, and compel him to smoulder away his life on a daily pittance which once would have been too scanty for his breakfast. Without a metaphor, we now make our fire ...
— Fire Worship (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... 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 these people, as a man about to be ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane

... constriction and let a little of the poison into the system at a time to be neutralized. In cases of chemical poisoning do not follow the usual method of treating poisoning. Do not make the patient vomit, but give him something fat or albuminous such as raw eggs or milk. This forms mercurial albuminate. Ptomaine poisoning (symptoms are headache, cramps, nausea, high fever and chills, etc.). Drink salt water, vomit and repeat the procedure to clean out the stomach. A purgative should also ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker

... first summer after her marriage! And now the hot weather was coming again. That was not the root of the trouble, however—Bridget was honest enough to confess it. The root lay in herself—in her own instability of purpose, her mercurial temperament. She had been born with that temperament. All the O'Haras loved change—hungered after strong sensation. She was spoiling now ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed

... a good thing to rejoice in spite of the world; it is an infinitely better thing to rejoice in company with it. With solitude and freedom, the alarm, the disgust receded, and as he went forward the exultation grew, until once again his mercurial spirits lifted ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... extreme development of the idea that physical processes can produce spiritual results is found in Rasesvara Darsana or the Mercurial System described in the Sarva-Darsana-Sangraha chap. IX. Marco Polo (Yule's Edition, vol. II. pp. 365, 369) had also ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... the bookseller Purcell. At the moment Daddy was in a new and unaccustomed phase of piety. After a period of revolutionary spouting, in which Byron, Tom Paine, and the various publications of Richard Carlile had formed his chief scriptures, a certain Baptist preacher laid hold of the Irishman's mercurial sense. Daddy was awakened and converted, burnt his Byron and his Tom Paine in his three-pair back with every circumstance of insult and contumely, and looked about for an employer worthy of one of the elect. Purcell at the time had a ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... 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 temporary ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood

... expands and contracts with temperature about the same as glass, and hence there is little chance of the glass cracking through unequal stress. The vacuum in the bulb is made by a mercurial air pump of the Sprengel sort, and the pressure of air in it is only about one-millionth of an atmosphere. The bulb is fastened with a holder like that shown in figure 64, where two little hooks H connected ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro

... and lives. This instrument also affords the means of accurately determining the heights or depressions of mountains and valleys. This is the mercurial barometer; another, the aneroid barometer, invented by Monsr. Vidi, measures approximately, but not with the permanence of the mercurial. It is constructed to measure the weight of a column of air or pressure of the atmosphere, by pressure on a very delicate metallic box hermetically sealed. It is more sensible to passing changes, but not so reliable as the mercurial barometer. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... we went fishing. Though our bodies were not yet fully grown, we were persons of enlarged ideas; and to suppose that we, two mercurial spirits, could sit like a couple of noodles, each with a long stick in our hands, waiting for the fish to pay us a visit, was the height of absurdity. No, we were rather too polite for that; and as it was we, and not the ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... he was now inclined to estimate them somewhat differently. Verschoyle's intellect had, indeed, revealed itself chiefly by fitful flashes, brilliant and dazzling enough in their effect at the moment, but leaving no lasting impression of very high powers; and this, with his mercurial temperament, might render his success in ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... 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 that place which contained the two persons he most valued in ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore

... spirit, the contriver, the busybody, the trusty rogue, the wonder-worker, the man in disguise, the mercurial one, lives on buoyantly in France to the age of Moliere. He is officious and efficacious in the skin of Mascarille and Ergaste and Scapin; but he tends to be a lacquey, with a reference rather to Antiquity and the Latin comedy than to the Middle Ages, as on ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell

... "Halifax a eu une reprimande severe publiquement dans le conseil par le Prince d'Orange pour avoir trop balance."—Avaux to De Croissy, Dublin, June 1689. "his mercurial Wit," says Burnet, ii. 4., "was not well suited with the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... long-distance telephone and market reports and golf links and very good horses, and lots of people stop there as a matter of course in their flight between Florida and Newport. They go up and down the coast like the mercury in a thermometer—up when it's warm, down when it's cold. There's the secret of our mercurial temperament." ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson

... however, the Aydelots became one of the leading families in the development of the colonies. Their descendants fell heir to the traits of their French-English forbears: freedom of belief, courage to follow a cause, a touch of the wanderlust, the mercurial French mind, and the steady poise of the followers of the Inward Light. A trace of bitterness had come down the years, however, with the family history; a feud-like resentment against the family ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter

... instantly apparent, from the excessive yelping that greeted their ears, and satisfied them that some, at least, of their annoyers had got something to remember; while they were gratified to listen to the fast receding sounds of these "mercurial inhabitants of the plain." The dogs quickly "made themselves scarce," nor did they afterwards attempt to reduce the distance they had placed between themselves and the travellers; who, upon the establishment of quiet, ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro

... submission to her mother's will was consideration for her brother and his career. For while for her father she cherished an affectionate pride and for her mother an amused and protective pity, her great passion was for her brother—her handsome, vivacious, audacious and mercurial brother, Tony. With him she counted it only joy to share her all too meagre wages whenever he found himself in financial straits. And a not infrequent situation this was with Tony, who, while he seemed to have inherited ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor

... for what we frequently see, to wit, that dull Fellows prove very good Men of Business. Business relieves them from their own natural Heaviness, by furnishing them with what to do; whereas Business to Mercurial Men, is an Interruption from their real Existence and Happiness. Tho' the dull Part of Mankind are harmless in their Amusements, it were to be wished they had no vacant Time, because they usually undertake something that makes their Wants ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... 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 ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse

... juice has been used in small doses as an alterative in the treatment of tuberculous leprosy, but it has not given results any better than many other drugs. In syphilis and mercurial cachexia its results are ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera

... 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 ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... many dramatis personae. "Enter a Song singing" is the stage-direction in a seventeenth-century play whose name escapes me. The sentiment dramatized in a lyric is not necessarily a personal expression. In one of his couplets Herrick neatly denies that his more mercurial utterances ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... The condition of the unsuccessful minority is truly pitiable. Rejected from the higher class, they are also despised by the lower. They have neither the matured and systematically trained powers of the Polygonal Bachelors and Masters of Arts, nor yet the native precocity and mercurial versatility of the youthful Tradesman. The professions, the public services, are closed against them; and though in most States they are not actually debarred from marriage, yet they have the greatest difficulty in forming suitable alliances, as experience shews that the offspring of such unfortunate ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott

... with its indescribable glamour, its affecting sincerity, its restraint, its exquisite and unflagging simplicity. The hesitant and melancholy personages who invest its scenes—Melisande, timid, naive, child-like, wistful, mercurial, infinitely pathetic; Pelleas, dream-filled, ardent, yet honorable in his passion; old Arkel, wise, gentle, and resigned; the tragic and brooding figure of Golaud; Little Yniold, artless and pitiful, a figure impossible ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman

... danger 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 ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat

... is but reasonable to suppose that he imbibed some portion of his master's excellence in writing. That he did so is abundantly evident from the testimony of Eunapius, who particularly commends his style for its clearness, purity, and grace. "Hence," he says, "Porphyry being let down to men like a mercurial chain, through his various erudition, unfolded every thing into perspicuity, and purity." And in another place he speaks of him as abounding with all the graces of diction, and as the only one that exhibited and proclaimed the praise of his ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor

... seated herself on a rock at a little distance, called to them. Her strength was restored by the fresh meat, and her childish spirits had risen with the hope of safety. The mercurial little creature had wreathed seaweed about her head, and holding in her hand a long twig decorated with a tuft of leaves to represent a wand, she personified one of the heroines of ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke

... reported to be composed principally of 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 ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... temperature of the dew-point by Daniell's and Regnault's hygrometers, as well as by the dry and wet bulb thermometers, and to compare the results; (2) to compare the readings of an aneroid barometer with those of a mercurial barometer up to the height of 5 m.; (3) to determine the electrical state of the air, (4) the oxygenic condition of the atmosphere, and (5) the time of vibration of a magnet; (6) to collect air at different elevations; (7) to note the height and kind of clouds, their density and thickness; ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... 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 ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... "Pshaw!" answered his mercurial companion; "he knows on which side his bread is buttered, and I warrant you has not lived so long among Englishmen, and by Englishmen, to quarrel with us for bearing an English mind. But see, our Scot has done gazing at St. Dunstan's, and comes our way. By this light, a proper lad and a ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... practised by the invaders reached their ears, or that their heads were turned by the hysterical enthusiasm, the lavish hospitality, with which they were received in England? That as a result of being thus lionized, many of these ignorant and mercurial people became fault-finding and overbearing, there is no denying. Nor can it be truthfully gainsaid that, for a year or more after the war began, there hung about the London restaurants and music-halls a number of young Belgians who ought to have been with their army on the firing-line. ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell

... to be lamented that antiquarian zeal is so often diverted from subjects of real to those of merely fanciful interest. The mercurial young gentlemen who addict themselves to that exciting department of letters are open to censure as being too fitful, too prone to flit, bee-like, from flower to flower, now lighting momentarily upon an indecipherable tombstone, now perching upon a rusty morion, here dipping ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various

... interval of plain being occupied by yellow ploughed lands which were never 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 shape of a ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... Our mercurial Premier lays himself open to a good deal of legitimate criticism, but for this immense relief, unstinted thanks are due to his energy and the devoted labours of the munition workers, ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch

... strict analogy with the divine thought and the divine arrangement; and there is no misconstruction more utterly untrue and fatal than this: that oratory is an artificial thing, which deals with baubles and trifles, for the sake of making bubbles of pleasure for transient effect on mercurial audiences. So far from that, it is the consecration of the whole man to the noblest purposes to which one can address himself—the education and inspiration of his fellow men by all that there is in learning, by all that there is in thought, by all that there ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... lived in a cottage at the wrong end of Taylor Street Hill, and, Mrs. Dwight having received a small legacy from a sister recently deceased which had convinced her, if not her less mercurial husband, that their luck had finally turned, had sent Gora, then a rangy girl of thirteen, fond of books and study, to a large private school in ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... 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 the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... a large, broad chamber, its groined roof supported by six squat stone pillars. Light came not only from mercurial lamps affixed to the ceiling, but from others suspended above the three rows of benches which ran ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace

... physical strength, which Americans had dignified with the name of army, into a real army which Frederick himself might have accepted. He had but little English at his command as yet, but at his side there was a mercurial young Frenchman, Peter Duponceau, who knew how to interpret both his graver thoughts and the lighter gallantries with which the genial old soldier loved to season his intercourse with the wives and daughters of his new fellow-citizens. As the years passed away, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... struggle with the life she had known in dreams and the bald every day experiences? Zay laughed at the favors and pleasures showered upon her but she would not have been the bright, merry girl without them. Would the gravity of the one help to tone down the mercurial temperament of the other? Oh, it was so good to have them both! Could he ever be thankful enough? And he forgave the poor woman in ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... Andy was of a mercurial and nervous temperament, and this fact perhaps may account for the anomaly of a mountain-boy who was a poor shot. Andy was the ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... the Red Sea, which is the Virgin's Milk upon the top of the vessel, white. Red Sea is the sun & moon calcinated & brought & reduced into water mineral which in some time, & most of the whole time, is red. 2ndly, the fat of mercurial wind, that is the fat or quintessence of sun & moon, earth & water, drawn out from them both, & flies aloft & bore up by the operation of our mercury, that is our fire which is our air or wind." This is as satisfactory as Lepidus's ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... wealthy brewers, but not the powerful Consul Casimir, the 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 ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... of observing a planet have therefore completely failed. We are compelled to resort to extraordinary methods if we would seek to settle the great question as to the existence of the intra-Mercurial planets. There are at least two lines of observation which might be expected to answer ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... at the rector's wife, and a kind of flame came into his eyes. He and Mrs. Seaton were old enemies, and he was a quick-tempered mercurial sort ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... 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 is ingenious, and ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... Mercurial Whately, forgetting his various troubles and experiences in the excitement of change and return to active duty, bade her a rather boisterous and good-hearted farewell. His mind was completely relieved as to Maynard, and he did not dream of Scoville as ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe

... 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 ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... why no man of lofty genius or character has ever condescended to remain an actor. His lot pressed heavily even on so mercurial a trifler as David Garrick, who has given utterance to the feeling in lines as good perhaps as any ever ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell

... traditions of past greatness, made rather a dim and neutral tint, against which such a girl as Charlotte Marsden appeared as the glowing embodiment of the vivid and intense spirit of the present age. Her naturally energetic and mercurial nature had been cradled among the excitements of the gayest and giddiest city on the continent. A phlegmatic uncle had remarked to her, in view of inherited and developed characteristics, "Lottie, what in ordinary girls is a soul, in you is ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... with any ordinary individual—in Edinburgh. But DAUBINET is not an ordinary individual, and the ordinary laws of motion to and from any given point do not apply to him. He is a Flying Frenchman—here, there, and everywhere; especially everywhere. So mercurial, that he will be in advance of Mercury himself, and having written a letter in the morning to say he is coming, it is not unlikely that he will travel by the next train, arrive before the letter, and then wonder that you weren't prepared to receive ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 22, 1891 • Various

... repletion of human applause. He kept aloof from all around him, and condescended to no social intercourse with any one on the stage, and appeared to entertain a contempt for his audience.... He has now lost that mercurial, youthful appearance which was then so conspicuous, and which doubtless aided in laying the foundation of his widespread reputation. He was then straight as an arrow and elastic as a circus-rider, the very beau-ideal of physical perfection: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... variety of tongues and nations. The bustle and turmoil incident to getting off and being properly domiciled; the confusion of tongues and peculiarity of temperament resembled the Babel of old. Here the mercurial Son of France in search of a case of red wine, hot and impulsive, belching forth "sacres" with a velocity well sustained. The phlegmatic German stirred to excitability in quest of a "small cask of lager and large box of cheese;" John Chinaman ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

... place, change one's quarters, shift one's quarters; dodge; keep going, 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 ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... such as these were gained, it is no wonder that Law should have been almost worshipped by the mercurial population. Never was monarch more flattered than he was. All the small poets and litterateurs of the day poured floods of adulation upon him. According to them he was the saviour of the country, the tutelary divinity of ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... one, was secretly, she guessed, quite as much disconcerted by the reported contretemps in town; but he dissembled well, with a show of whimsical exasperation because of this emergency that tore him so soon away from both Gosnold House and his other neighbour at table, a Mrs. Artemas—a spirited, mercurial creature, not over-handsome of face, but wonderfully smart in dress and gesture, superbly stayed and well aware of it; a dark, fine woman who recognised the rivalry latent in Sally's dark looks without dismay—as Sally conceded ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... The speaker, a mercurial youth of two and twenty, was one of a group of young people assembled, some on horseback, some in yellow buckboards, in front ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller

... 'hydrargyrism,' 'ptyalism,' or 'salivation,' including most of the symptoms enumerated above. May get eczema mercuriale and periostitis. Profound anaemia often a prominent symptom; neuritis not uncommon. If fumes of mercury inhaled, mercurial tremors develop. ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson

... and would tell petty lies to keep them apart from him. She brought with her two children of a former marriage—Charles (who was unhappy in this strange home and went early abroad) and Jane. On this clever, pretty and mercurial daughter all her partiality was lavished; and the unhappy girl, pampered by a philistine mother in a revolutionary atmosphere, was at the age of seventeen seduced by Byron, and became the mother of the ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... and crushing his hat down over his eyes, he set off at a quick pace in an opposite direction to that part of the street where I was standing. I confess I felt ashamed of the espionage in which I was occupied, and although I followed my mercurial fiend at a safe distance, for the distinct purpose of earthing him wherever he was going, I by no means liked the office which a sort of fatality had forced upon me. But I was somewhat reconciled to it by a secret conviction that the abominable ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... while he called for a clean handkerchief. God, we'll simply have to dress the character. I want puce gloves and green boots. Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. Mercurial Malachi. A limp black missile flew out of his ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... six chapters were written." In 1771 he published his "History of England." It was in this year that Reynolds, coming one day to Brick Court, perhaps about the portrait of Goldsmith he had painted the year before, found the mercurial poet kicking a bundle, which contained a masquerade dress, about the room, in disgust at his folly in wasting money in so foolish a way. In 1772, Mr. Forster mentions a very characteristic story of Goldsmith's warmth of heart. He one day found a ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... you rise and bristle; when I am pleased, you wag; when I am alarmed, you tuck yourself in out of danger. You are too mercurial—you disclose all my emotions. My notion is that tails are given to conceal thought. It is my dearest ambition to be as ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce

... of conception and decision possible only to mercurial-minded persons, his thought darted back to Tandy's, that unkempt, morally malodorous back-of-beyond and No Man's Land. Its vacant whitewashed countenance and long-eared chimney-stacks had welcomed him, if roughly and grudgingly, to England ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... appeal to the demagogic instincts of the race, and he is ruthlessly bereaved of his honor and his glory gone. The idols of yesterday are the broken statues of today; the heroes of yesterday are the "have-beens" of today. So capricious, so ephemeral, so mutable, so mercurial, so impermanent are the whims of humanity, and so ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins

... The very waiters glanced at her apprehensively. It was not that she made a fuss, but her back was most extraordinarily vocal. One never needed to see her face to know what she was full of that day. Yet she was certainly not mercurial. Her flesh seemed to take a mood and to "set," like plaster. As he put her into the cab, Fred reflected once more that he "gave her up." He would attack her when his lance ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather

... consisted in the bad condition in which they were brought to the islands, and the methods of preparing them for sale. They arrived frequently in a sickly and disordered state, and then they were made up for the market by the application of astringents, washes, mercurial ointments, and repelling drugs, so that their wounds and diseases might be hid. These artifices were not only fraudulent but fatal: but these, it was obvious, would of themselves fall with the trade. A third was, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson

... is strange that such severe penalties should be visited on a woman, for a first and only indiscretion in the suffrage line, when a man may rise up on election morning and go forth, voting and to vote. If he be of an excitable and mercurial nature, one of the sort of citizens which sweet Ireland empties on us by the county, he may sportively flit about among the polls, from ward to ward, of the metropolis, and no man says to him nay; he may even travel hilariously from city to city, with free passes and free drinks—who ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... harmless one. Alkaline solutions are antidotes for the mineral acids; as soap in solution, a simple remedy, and always at hand. Lard, magnesia, and oil are antidotes for poisoning by arsenic; albumen,—in the form of the white of an egg,—milk, etc., for corrosive sublimate, and other mercurial preparations. ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings

... upon it as childish. But I know not why. It is by no means easy to play well, and requires a careful memory and quick powers of combination and calculation. No caffe in Rome or Marseilles would be complete without its little black and white counters; and as it interests at once the most mercurial and fidgety of people and the laziest and languidest, it must have some hidden charm as yet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... countries the 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, ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd

... spirit be not tamed and broken by these happy methods, it is stubborn and litigious. Abeunt studia in mores. This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... 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

... toward the surface of the sea, thus necessitating periodic visits to the pilot-house to renew the vacuum. This set the professor's brain to work, and by nightfall he succeeded— with the aid of a second barometer having a small piece of highly magnetised steel floating on the top of the mercurial column, and a couple of magnetised steel bars—in constructing a somewhat rude but thoroughly efficient apparatus for automatically maintaining the ship at any desired height, unaffected by the movements, be they few or many, ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... epithet. But how much 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 ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... their common friend, 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

... in this tent, and many regiments are represented among the patients; there is an Imperial Light Horse man, who has been in most of the big fights, a mercurial Argyll and Sutherland Highlander, with a witty and voluble tongue; men of the Wilts, Berks, and Yorks regiments, and in the next bed a trooper of the 18th Hussars, who was captured at Talana Hill in the first fight of the war, had spent seven months at Waterval in ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers

... very frequently about the other, and their relatives have been often associated. "We have a good deal in common," says the Barometer. "Of the same blood, as we may say; quicksilver is thicker than water." "Yes," says the little Fahrenheit, "and we are both of the same mercurial temperament." While their columns are dancing up and down with laughter at this somewhat tepid and low-pressure pleasantry, there come in a New York Reaumur and a Centigrade from Chicago. The Fahrenheit, which has got warmed up to temperate, ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... scenes,—apparently by no effort, but as sphered apart by the atmosphere of refinement and superiority which enveloped her. Yet she almost constantly accompanied her husband to rehearsal and play, where, for a time, her presence was grateful both to the pride and a more amiable passion of her mercurial lord. But the sight of that shy, shadowy figure haunting the wings, of those keen, critical eyes ever following the business of the stage, at last grew irksome to him, and he would fain have persuaded her to remain quietly at their lodgings, whilst he was attending to his professional duties. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... generally,—such a man, if he went well recommended, would be likely to find, I imagine, constant employment in the town of Danbury. He might make arrangements to take his meals on the jump, and would sleep of course with his hat and boots on. Browne is mercurial. Browne would be happy in Danbury. Till he died. For a fortnight, say—one brief, glowing, ecstatic fortnight. Fourteen giddy days would surely finish him. Imagine Browne (him of the eagle eye) up in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various

... gloomily against the wall; Krantz, more mercurial, walked up and down three steps ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat

... with wit and satire at once droll and tormenting. Even a lecture-room was not exempt from these irrepressible sallies; and our tutor, who was formal and wished to be grave, but had not the gift of gravity, never felt safe in the presence of his mercurial pupil. Lockhart with great readiness comprehended the habits and tone of the new society in which he was placed, and was not for a moment wanting in any of its requirements; but this adaptive power never interfered with the marked individuality of his own character and bearing. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... lime, while calcium nitrate and chloride became known at about the beginning of the 17th century. Antimonial, bismuth and arsenical compounds were assiduously studied, a direct consequence of their high medicinal importance; mercurial and silver compounds were investigated for the same reason. The general tendency of this period appears to have taken the form of improving and developing the methods of the alchemists; few new fields were opened, and apart from a more complete knowledge ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... Amorous Prince,' a mercurial young gallant, son to the Duke of Florence, under a solemn promise of marriage debauches Cloris, sister to his friend and confidant, Curtius. The girl has always led a secluded country life, and this relationship is unknown to the Prince, who upon hearing the praises of ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn



Words linked to "Mercurial" :   changeable, fickle, erratic, changeful, quicksilver, mercury



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com