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More "Asperity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... returned to the conference, which was conducted, on the part of his superior, with a degree of excitation, mingled with a sharp asperity of manner, something unwonted for him in the arranging of any mere matter ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... flow from such a movement of the indians, and altho he had been in possession of this information since early in the morning when it had been communicated to him by his Indian woman yet he never mentioned it untill the after noon. I could not forbear speaking to him with some degree of asperity on this occasion. I saw that there was no time to be lost in having those orders countermanded, or that we should not in all probability obtain any more horses or even get my baggage to the waters of the Columbia. I therefore Called the three Cheifs together and having smoked ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... Pamela herself who broke the stillness. "Theo," she said, with some elder-sister-like asperity, "it appears to me that you might find something better to do than to stand with your arms folded, as you have been doing for the last half hour. There is a whole basketful of the boys' socks that need ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... be the result, Philip?—what will be the result?" added Venner, with a curious mingling of exultation and asperity. "If our victims appeal to Nick Carter for help—are we not also already in his good graces? Have we not insured his confidence in us by this little move of to-day? Will he not reveal himself and his suspicions to us, just as I have ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... mentioned the Short View in the preface to his Fables. He complained, with some asperity, of the harshness with which he had been treated, and urged some matters in mitigation. But, on the whole, he frankly acknowledged that he had been justly reproved. "If," said he, "Mr. Collier be my enemy, let him triumph. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... we reached St. Louis, I was walking along Fourth Street when a grizzly-headed man gave a sort of start as he passed me, then stopped, came back, inspected me narrowly, with a clouding brow, and finally said with deep asperity— ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... point, as the man said to the assassin who tried to stab him with the hilt of his dagger," retorted Doctor Johnson, with some asperity. "Of course, complaint-books are for the reception of complaints—nobody disputes that. What I want to have determined is whether it is necessary or proper for the complaints to ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... in his young wife's voice, with just the hint of asperity in it. "She must trudge out her tantrum first. I think her idea was to show that she remembered the old place and the lane where she used to pick blackberries. You needn't worry about her getting ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... prosecution of Laud. After this he turned his attention to the Independents, whom he hated scarcely less than the Prelatists, and was among those expelled from the House of Commons by Cromwell, whom he had opposed in regard to the execution of the King with such asperity that he again suffered imprisonment, from which he was released in 1652. He supported the Restoration, and was by Charles II. appointed Keeper of the Records in the Tower. Here he did good service by compiling the Calendar of Parliamentary Writs and Records. He pub. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... this narrative are confirmed by Lord Clarendon.—'Continuation of his Life', p. 33. It is difficult to speak of the persons concerned in this infamous transaction without some degree of asperity, notwithstanding they are, by a strange perversion of language, styled, all ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... decorative point of view) became a person of considerable importance in the boarding-house. It was not merely that she was an engaged young lady; for, as Miss Bishop pointed out to her with some natural asperity, anybody can be engaged; but she had now the privilege, denied to any other boarder, of going in and out of Mr. Rickman's study. She said that she went in to tidy it; but strange to say, the more Flossie tidied it the more hopeless ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... write or discuss the passing of Brann and Davis, beyond rendering the tributes of love and affection, unless our people are to learn from the deaths the lessons of forbearance and tolerance and subordination of passion and prejudice to the nobler and better ends and aims of life. Asperity and bitterness must be buried in the ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... palate. Conversation would become dull and vapid, if negligence were not sometimes roused, and sluggishness quickened, by due severity of reprehension. But acids unmixed will distort the face and torture the palate; and he that has no other qualities than penetration and asperity, he whose constant employment is detection and censure, who looks only to find faults, and speaks only to punish them, will soon be ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... withdraw him, it is to place him out of danger," he retorted with asperity. "Not because I wish to mortify him, naturally. Is that clear? Does he want to pass the next thirteen ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... with a touch of asperity. He could not stand it that Elsmere should be so much narrowed and warped by that wife of his, and her prejudices. Why should that gifted creature be cribbed, cabined, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... suppose that, after this introduction, I made haste to explain every particular. My mother was surprised and grieved. She rebuked me, with some asperity, for my reserves. Had I acquainted her with my brother's demands, she could have apprized me of all that I had since discovered. My brother, she asserted, was involved beyond any one's power to extricate him, and his temper, ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... see Olive Dering crimping her hair, and laughing instead of scowling, I will look for the end of the world," said Ernestine, with some asperity, as she walked over to the glass and surveyed her own hair, which Kittie had intimated was inferior to Olive's. "She can't do it, she was made to frown and stay by herself ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... write is not written on slate; and no finger, not of Time himself, who dips it in the clouds of years, can efface it. To condemn what is evil and to commend what is good is consistent. To soften an asperity, to speak all the good we can after worse than we wish, is that, and more. If I must understand the meaning of consistency as many do, I wish I may be inconsistent with all my enemies. There are many hearts which have risen ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... you're drivin' at," Bert said with asperity. "An' all I can tell you is, livin' or dead, in a job or out, no matter what happens to me, if you will lead that way, you will, an' ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... accepted the mission near the king of France, monsieur le cardinal," retorted the comte, though with less asperity, for he thought he had sufficiently the advantage to show ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... tiresome!' said Clare, still in her sweet gentle voice, not at all as if she was angry, only expressing an obvious truth. Molly felt very guilty and very unhappy. Clare went on, with a shade of asperity in her tone: 'You see, I don't know what to do with you here if you don't eat enough to enable you to walk home. And I've been out for these three hours trapesing about the grounds till I'm as tired as can be, and missed my lunch and all.' Then, as if a new idea had struck her, she said,—'You ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... of such an arrangement, or want of arrangement, is obvious; and it must have caused much friction in the House. We can imagine the officer in charge of the finances resenting the intrusion of his brother of the library with an asperity not wholly in accordance with fraternal charity. And yet, so strong is the tendency of human nature to put up with whatever exists, rather than be at the trouble of changing it, no effectual steps in the way of remedy were taken until the fifteenth century. In that century, however, we find ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... adjurations he did at last prevail with her to give him her pardon; nay, by joint consent, they tarried there a great while to the exceeding great delight of both. Indeed the lady, finding her lover's kisses smack much better than those of her husband, converted her asperity into sweetness, and from that day forth cherished a most tender love for Ricciardo; whereof, using all circumspection, they many a time had solace. God grant ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... would, Nathaniel," she returned, with a slight asperity. "But I should prefer it if you would leave ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... with all my heart. Months ago,—it seems to be years now,—when Cecilia Holt had caught your fancy, I did regard her as the most fortunate girl. But I did not regard you as the happiest of men, because I felt sure that there was a something between you which would not suit. There is an asperity, rather than strictness, about her which I knew your spirit would not brook. She would have borne the battlings which would have arisen with an equal temper. She can indeed bear all things with equanimity—as she does her present position. But you, though you would have battled and have conquered, ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... the "conversations" between leaders which had taken place during the winter, said that since no definite agreement had been reached the Government had decided to reopen the matter in the House. This meant, as Redmond pointed out with some asperity, that the Prime Minister had accepted responsibility for taking the initiative in making proposals to meet objections whose reasonableness he did not admit. The Opposition, he thought, should have been left to put forward ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... you think it necessary to tell me this?" she inquired, with a touch of asperity. "Have you not got enough police to arrest the fugitives, who must pass through the entire country ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... right," Jernyngham broke in with a trace of asperity. "It's proper that the blundering fellow who misled us all should have his stupidity impressed ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... who watched over his health, his well-being, and every part of education in which a female could be useful. You had lost a mother who would have cherished you, whose talents you inherited, who would have softened the asperity of our father's temper, and probably have prevented his unaccountable partialities. You have always shown a noble independence of spirit, that the pecuniary difficulties you often had to encounter could not induce ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... offered to help her. She was most grateful, when, not without difficulty, Jones succeeded in whittling for her a piece about an inch long, and as thick as the wood of a match box. "Per Bacco," she exclaimed, still agitated, and not without asperity, "I never saw such a cross in my life." The old cross, considered to be now past further whittling, was lying by the roadside ready to be taken away. I had wanted to get the lady a chip from this, thinking ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... from Mulberry Sthreet Irish to Washington Square Yankees," Judy said with a shade of asperity. "It began wid the dog-show an' the opera. Oh, but I thought I'd die wid laughin', whin I had to shtan' at the doors o' wan place or the other, waitin' on Micksheen, or listenin' to the craziest music that ever was played or sung. After that kem politics, an' nothin' ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... English Periodical, such as they name Magazine, appears something like a Dissertation on this very subject of Fashionable Novels! It sets out, indeed, chiefly from a Secular point of view; directing itself, not without asperity, against some to me unknown individual named Pelham, who seems to be a Mystagogue, and leading Teacher and Preacher of the Sect; so that, what indeed otherwise was not to be expected in such a fugitive fragmentary sheet, the true secret, the Religious physiognomy and physiology ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... a happy turn of mind for military affairs, From early youth applied himself to the military art. Brave, intrepid, and firm in purpose, He was ennobled by gentleness, and softened the asperity of the soldier by the ease of his manners. He was placed over the Royal Scotch Legion, Enlisted by himself, By the most Christian King, Louis XV. Whilst the Civil War was raging in Britain He led ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... still cheerfully. As she turned away, however, she tossed her head. "A new pose, indeed!" she muttered, with some asperity. "Just as if there could be a new pose after all those she ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... strike her as strange that a taxi, with its flag up for hire, should be standing opposite the bank door, blocking the way for arriving vehicles; or that, having persistently refused many irate would-be hirers, and patiently listened to the asperity of their remarks, the driver should have opened the door and held it back as she walked straight across the pavement, got in, and, without hesitating gave the address of ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... who might be forgiven for regarding the destroyers of her household gods with some asperity, contents herself, in writing to Mrs. Barbauld, with the sarcasm that the Birmingham people "will scarcely find so many respectable characters, a second time, to make a ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... anti-Protestant party by which she was surrounded, seconded by her own personal feelings, tended to exasperate Marie against all who professed the reformed faith. She consequently received the appeal with considerable asperity, declaring that it was impossible to calculate the demands which would be made upon the indulgence of the Crown, although there was no doubt that they would prove both unjust and extravagant; but being unable to refuse to confirm the provisions ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... — N. roughness &c adj.; tooth, grain, texture, ripple; asperity, rugosity^, salebrosity^, corrugation, nodosity^; arborescence^ &c 242; pilosity^. brush, hair, beard, shag, mane, whisker, moustache, imperial, tress, lock, curl, ringlet; fimbriae, pili, cilia, villi; lovelock; beaucatcher^; curl paper; goatee; papillote, scalp lock. plumage, plumosity^; plume, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of patience with her more tender sister, yet at this moment her love and her patriotism—by which is meant her heart and soul—were violently in conflict. Fearing lest the former might prevail, she replied with greater asperity: ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... relish labour. He can do a little amateurish shop-keeping, he is fairly good as a cook, but his true strength, as he frankly admits, consists in eating and drinking. That is as it should be. It befits the tone of a metropolis that outsiders shall do its work. That undercurrent of asperity is less noticeable here than in many towns of the peninsula. There is something of the grande dame in Rome, a flavour of old-world courtesy. The inhabitants are better-mannered than the Parisians; a workday crowd in Rome is as well-dressed as a Sunday crowd in Paris. And over all hovers ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... Mr. Gillett with some asperity, "you need be apprehensive on that score, Captain Macpherson. Sir Charles and m'lady are not ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... in the morning came her sister, her ambassadress. Then began the usual phrases: 'She is in a terrible state. What is the matter?' 'Why, nothing has happened.' I spoke of her asperity of character, and I added that I had done nothing, and that I would not take the first step. If she wants a divorce, so much the better! My sister-in-law would not listen to this idea, and went away ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... Demilt wishes to say," cut in Miss Doolittle with some asperity, "is that Mr. Thomas Faulkenstone Demilt is her brother." She did not add, as extreme candour would have urged, "And I have some hope—remote, alas! but there—of becoming sister to Miss ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... Though she interrupted him with so little ceremony, there was no asperity in the voice. It was as if she said, "Even good women have their limitations. I may forgive Philip de Commines, but you cannot expect ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... lain in this state of felicity it is impossible to say, for his slumbers were rudely interrupted by a slight lurch of the schooner, which caused the blocks and cordage attached to the sheet of the jib to sweep slowly, but with rasping asperity, across his face. Any ordinary man would have been seriously damaged—at least in appearance—by such an accident; but this particular sea-dog was tough in the skin,—he was only awakened by it—nothing more. He yawned, raised himself lazily, and gazed round with that vacant ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... or moral consideration, it is dangerous to be too rigidly in the right. Sensibility may, by an incessant attention to elegance and propriety, be quickened to a tenderness inconsistent with the condition of humanity, irritable by the smallest asperity, and vulnerable by the gentlest touch. He that pleases himself too much with minute exactness, and submits to endure nothing in accommodations, attendance, or address, below the point of perfection, will, whenever he enters the crowd of life, be harassed with innumerable ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... said, with some asperity, "my name's Reeves, and I don't want you to—" But the comedy of the thing came to his rescue, and he ended ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... Europe. There, extensive marshes, great lakes, aged, decayed, and crowded forests, with the other circumstances that mark an uncultivated country, are supposed to replenish the air with heavy and noxious vapours, that give a double asperity to the winter; and during many months, by the frequency and continuance of fogs, snow, and frost, carry the inconveniencies of the frigid zone far into the temperate. The Samoiede and the Laplander, however, have their counterpart, though on a lower latitude, on the shores of America: ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... Rampson with asperity; then correcting himself quickly, and with a rather ghastly smile, "I say, you two did distinguish ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... narrative, relates his arrival at the island of AEolus, his departure thence, and the unhappy occasion of his return thither. The monarch of the winds dismisses him at last with much asperity. He next tells of his arrival among the Laestrygonians, by whom his whole fleet, together with their crews, are destroyed, his own ship and crew excepted. Thence he is driven to the island of Circe. By her the half of his people are transformed into swine. Assisted by Mercury, he resists ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... said, with some return to her old asperity, "I am sorry that I 've made your life so hard that you think that you have been a slave. I am sorry that my home has been so onpleasant that you 're so powerful glad to git away from it, even to go into a strange city full of ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... commons and his own trial. Neither the threats of the commons, nor the entreaties of the senate, could ever persuade him not only to change his garb, or address persons as a suppliant, but not even so far as to soften or relax any thing from the usual asperity of his style, when his cause was to be pleaded before the people. The expression of his countenance was the same; the same stubbornness in his looks, the same spirit of pride in his language; so that a great part of the commons felt no less awe ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... this moment, and rebuked her with more asperity than Waverley had ever heard him use to any one. 'Was it not a shame,' he said, 'that she should exhibit herself before any gentleman in such a light, as if she shed tears for a drove of horned nolt and milch kine, like the daughter of a Cheshire yeoman! Captain Waverley, I must request ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... of the personal characteristics of the householder with an asperity which was still restrained. She had a hairy chin, said Mrs. Makebelieve: she had buck teeth and a solid smile, and was given to telling people who knew their business how things ought to be done. Beyond this she would not say anything.—The amount of soap the lady allowed to wash out ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... been behaving as a gentleman should," replied Harley, with some asperity; "and if I have been unlucky enough to incur her dislike, I shall endure it as best ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... recent favorable season of 1880. The previous autumn was unfavorable for the ripening of young wood, and the trees in an unprepared condition were exposed during a great part of December, 1879, to an asperity of climate unprecedented in this latitude. This might have led one to expect a falling off in the growth of wood, and it appeared, from comparison of measurements, that, with very few exceptions, the growth of wood last year was even more below the average of favorable years than ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... was fought for Mrs. Minchin, tooth and nail indeed, yet perhaps with more asperity than conviction, and certainly at times upon points which were hardly worth the fighting. Yet, on the Friday afternoon, when her counsel at last played his masterstroke, and, taking advantage of the then new Act, put the prisoner herself in the ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... a little squeak; then, without a moment's interval, continued her lecture as if nothing had happened. She looked down from her perch like a hen from a ladder, and laid down the law to David with seriousness and asperity. ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... writing of Thoreau, says: "He improves with age—in fact requires age to take off a little of his asperity, and fully ripen him. The world likes a good hater and refuser almost as well as it likes a good lover and accepter—only it ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... wi' yer leave,' his father was beginning, with a wink, when his mother, with something of her old asperity, said: ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... heels were quite cool by this time, but his blood was boiling. This was a deuce of a way to treat a fellow who had gone to the trouble to come all the way out in a stuffy train, by Jove, it was! With considerable asperity he rang for a servant and commanded him to fetch a time table, and to be quick about it, as there might be a train leaving before he could get back if it took him as long to find it as it took other people to remember their obligations! His sarcasm failed to impress Murray, ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... for the Dictionary was duly read aloud to her, betwixt sleep and waking, as it proceeded towards an infinitely distant completion; and the Doctor was a little sore on the subject of mummies, and sometimes resented an allusion with asperity. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I never will," he replied, with a touch of asperity; "but I feel that Fred has shown very ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... more put out than it became a philosopher to be. "I came," he cried, with a kind of asperity, "for a very different purpose, not to be corrected in my Italian. I came——" but here his feelings were too strong for him, "to lay my life and my heart at your feet. Do you understand me now? To tell you that I love you—no, that is not enough, it is not ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... a certain asperity. She felt that Ann Veronica had duped her in that dream, and now that she had come up to London she might ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... Sarah would have defended her own sex with much asperity; instead, there was something ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... Excelsior's deck, seemed to bear out Mr. Banks' sweeping indictment of the day before. A few low, dome-like hills, yellow and treeless as sand dunes, scarcely raised themselves above the horizon. The air, too, appeared to have taken upon itself a dry asperity; the sun shone with a hard, practical brilliancy. Miss Keene raised her eyes to Senor Perkins with a pretty impatience that she sometimes indulged in, as one of the privileges of accepted beauty and ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... with some asperity, "if there is anything on earth that changes its mind as often as a weather-vane, that is less CERTAIN, ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... its further overflow. I think much depends upon the manner, the inflection, and the tone of voice in which the desire is expressed, and I am sorry to say that upon the occasion to which I refer, there was more of the asperity of profanity than the calmness of constructive suggestion in my father's manner. In any event I did not blame him, for here was I coming along, undeniably imminent, a tempest raging, and no doctor in sight, and consequently no telling when my venerable sire would ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... Bassett, with such a sudden brevity and asperity that Miss Bruce looked up and opened her lovely eyes. Mr. Richard Bassett replied to this mute inquiry, "We don't speak." Then, after a pause, "He has robbed me of ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... punctual and precise in his habits. Associating constantly with fashionable folk his naturally dignified behavior was increased. He was an aristocrat- -there is no other word—and he did not care to be hail-fellow- well-met with the musicians. A certain primness and asperity did not make him popular. While teaching, his manner warmed, the earnest artist came to life, all halting of speech and polite insincerities were abandoned. His pupils adored him. Here at least the sentiment was one of solidarity. De Lenz is his most censorious critic and did not really ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... please her. "No, no, no," she answered with much asperity. "I wish them to be with me. I have told you so already; ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... asperity grew in the foreman's voice as he thought of it; for, as his wife used to say, he "set a great store by 'Lije's girl, not havin' no daughter ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... see in the Seat of Peter a reformer, who should have courage to apply surgery to the festering wounds of the Church. She had her desire; Urban began at once a drastic policy of Church reform. But his domineering asperity proved unbearable to the College of Cardinals, and schism broke upon a ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... you made so insulting a speech to Herr Hardy," said the Pastor, with some asperity, "that it should be withdrawn. To tell a man that he is a coward and has false pride is too galling, and when not a single ground for it exists the more so. You might thereby have tempted him to risk his life, to say nothing of ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... she had, but it was combativeness with the edge taken off. It served to direct her choice of topics, but not to give asperity or polemical form to her discourses. Suddenly introduced to the very heart of Vanity Fair, she had caught her first inspiration by opposition, and this led her to hold forth on such themes as consecration. But as her acquaintance with ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... with a tenderness like mine, And sensibilities so fine! I envy that unfeeling shrub, Fast rooted against every rub." The plant he meant grew not far off, And felt the sneer with scorn enough; Was hurt, disgusted, mortified, And with asperity replied. ("When," cry the botanists, and stare, "Did plants call'd Sensitive grow there?" No matter when—a poet's muse is To make them grow just where she chooses): "You shapeless nothing in a dish, You that are but almost a fish, ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... latter from the Catholic, historian—the praise that party spirit failed to weaken; the heroic gallantry, the indomitable perseverance, and the patient and resolute endurance under suffering, of both, having deprived political partizans of their asperity—compelling them, for once at least, to render justice to their opponents; all having readily subscribed to the opinion that "Derry and Limerick will ever grace the historic page, as rival companions and monuments of Irish bravery, generosity, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... easy to fathom the reason for the employment of girls as ushers in the London theatres. Perhaps it is to heighten the glamour of a place whose glamour hardly needs heightening, or more probably it is to soften the asperity of the play-goer who finds himself asked sixpence for that necessary evil, the programme. But, now I come to think of it, most of the play-goers in London are Englishmen who have been always used to paying, ancestrally and personally, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... o' the Maggie," Scraggs reminded him with just a touch of asperity, "you've got to leave these details to me. You've managed with the old boiler this long, so it 'pears to me you might be patient an' bear with it a ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... a greater mistake," Hood returned with asperity. "But the question that now agitates us is simply this: do we eat ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... regimental (particuliers) officers are the first to show a bad example, the punishments are neither sufficiently known nor sufficiently seen. Everything smacks of indiscipline, of disgust at the king's service, and of asperity towards one's self. I see with pain that it will be indispensable to put in practice the most violent and the harshest measures." The king's army, meanwhile, was continuing to fall back; a general outcry ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... dauntless conduct on the field of battle shows him to have been a man of fearless spirit; and he was universally allowed to be an accomplished disciplinarian. His melancholy end, too, disarms censure of its asperity. Whatever may have been his faults and errors, he in a manner expiated them by the hardest lot that can befall a brave soldier, ambitious of renown—an unhonored grave in a strange land: a memory clouded by misfortune, and a name for ever coupled ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Buckland pursued, with some asperity, throwing away the stump of his cigar. 'It comes, I suppose, of their ridiculous education—their minds are never trained to fixity of purpose. They never understand themselves, and scarcely ever make an effort to understand any one else. Their ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... indolence capable of energies.... I cannot breathe through my nose, so my mouth, with sensual thick lips, is almost always open. In conversation I am impassioned, and oppose what I deem error with an eagerness which is often mistaken for personal asperity; but I am ever so swallowed up in the thing said that I forget my opponent. Such am I." The Rev. Leapidge Smith, in his "Reminiscences of an Octogenarian," remembered him as "a tall, dark, handsome young man, with long, black, flowing hair; eyes not merely dark, but black, and keenly ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... him," retorted the lady, with some asperity: "you have told me how much I owe him, and it strikes me the desire ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... not amiable. They might have angered another man; but Cardo detected a tremor in the voice and an anxious look in the eyes which softened their asperity. ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... bank, and the tariff. The conflict between the parties grew steadily in bitterness, despite the conciliatory and engaging manner in which Hamilton presented his cause in his state papers and despite the constant efforts of Washington to soften the asperity of the contestants. ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... angry look and curt rebuke, he half turned, and sidled away into the shrubbery, whence the tray presently rose into the air, flew across the laurel hedge, and descended with a peal of stage thunder on the stooped shoulders of Josephs. Miss Wilson, after asking the housekeeper with some asperity why she had allowed that man to interfere in the attendance, explained to the guests that he was the idiot of the countryside. Mr. Jansenius laughed, and said that he had not seen the man's face, but that his figure reminded him forcibly of some one; he could ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... year than there have been for the last nine years," said Gerard, thinking to soften the asperity of ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... he found obdurate in another direction, speaking with great asperity against Lord Derby and his party; he would make no vows as to junction, not even that he would not join Disraeli; but he thought this government must be opposed and overthrown; then those who led the charge against it would reap the reward; if ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... she drew Pyrrhus apart, and, as best she knew how, conveyed her lady's message to him. Which Pyrrhus found passing strange to hear, for 'twas in truth a complete surprise to him, and he doubted the lady did but mean to try him. Wherefore he presently, and with some asperity, answered thus:—"Lusca, believe I cannot that this message comes from my lady: have a care, therefore, what thou sayst, and if, perchance, it does come from her, I doubt she does not mean it; and if perchance, she does mean it, why, ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... this tune less than any that he preceded it, for it began to wake up a sort of echo in his conscience; so he interrupted and said with decision, though without asperity, that he was not in a situation to help her, and wasn't going ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in the same direction with the novels. Its most important offices aside from this were perhaps to present large and kindly views of literature and literary characters, especially through biographical essays; and to ameliorate somewhat the prevailing asperity of periodical criticism. ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... punishment for special wickedness, and is therefore itself a proof of such wickedness. They accordingly exhort him to repent of his sins, and seek God's forgiveness, as the sure means of removing his present misfortunes. Conscious of his integrity, Job, with much warmth and asperity, repels their unjust charges, and refutes their false arguments by an appeal to facts. The ground he takes is that, by some inscrutable plan of God, calamity comes alike upon good and bad men. He passionately beseeches God to show ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... mio, at my sorrowful plight," said the bruised Ricardo, with some asperity; "I have met with dangers of venomous serpents, and been stabbed cruelly ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... my hair with extreme violence. The sensation was unpleasant, but I began to hope that no worse would befall me, and I knew that with a few dulcet words in private I could remove from Saccharissa's mind the asperity induced by my ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... critical asperity, the last two volumes of Froude's English in Ireland for Macmillan's Magazine* he referred to Home Rule as a moderate and constitutional movement. His own History was not completed till 1890. But when Gladstone introduced his first Home Rule Bill, in 1886, Lecky opposed ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... cried Joseph, with some asperity, "I mean that our troops must be marched into Bavaria at once; for by the extinction of the finale line of Wittelsbach, the electorate is open to us as an imperial ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the other side of the Seine, when I perceived the woman of the Jardin des Plantes approach. Tyrrell (for that, I afterwards discovered, was really his name) started as she came near, and asked her, in a tone of some asperity, where she had been? As I was but a few paces behind, I had a clear, full view of the woman's countenance. She was about twenty-eight or thirty years of age. Her features were decidedly handsome, though somewhat too sharp and aquiline for my individual taste. Her eyes ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... parliament confess their willingness to receive and observe whatsoever shall be shown from the word of God to be Christ or his church, their rights or due; albeit I was sorry to see any, in the delivery thereof, intermix any of their own personal asperity, any aspersions upon this assembly, or reflections on another nation; so in this day of law for Christ, wherein justice is offered, if he get not right in not shewing his patent from his father, and his churches from himself, it will be ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... see the world unless we go round it?" exclaimed the Baron, with some asperity in his tone. "That is what I thought ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... because I am so eagerly looking forward to the end, when I shall see darling, pretty Mother, my own sweetheart, and the very nicest of all nice daughters—you blessed girlie. Do you remember when you explained, with some asperity, that of course you wished Ted were at home, because you didn't have anybody as a really intimate companion, whereas Mother had "old Father"? It is a great comfort to have a daughter to whom I can write about all kinds ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... at once radiant with gratitude, and its effect upon the cottage mistress was to further soften her asperity, so that though she again ejaculated that contemptuous "Huh!" it was in a milder tone; and, with something like interest she demanded, "How long 's that baby been that feverish she is now? She looks 's if she was ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... hissed, and the sudden asperity of his voice coerced her as a bit might do, "you will go to Capharnahum, you will seek him, you will say Iohanan is descended into the tombs to ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... virtue, that led him for a time to overlook these disadvantages. "I am going," said he, "to dwell among scenes of unvitiated nature. I will form the peasant to generosity and sentiment. I will teach laborious industry to look without envy and without asperity upon those above them. I will be the friend and the father of the meanest of my flock. I will give sweetness and beauty to the most rugged scenes. The man, that banishes envy and introduces contentment; the man, that converts the little circle in which he dwells into a terrestrial paradise, ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... beggars. It is a thousand to one that they are impostors, but yet we do ourselves a wrong by hardening our hearts against them. At last, without turning round, I told her that I should give her nothing,—with some asperity, doubtless, for the effort to refuse creates a bitterer repulse than is necessary. She still followed us a little farther, but at last gave it up, with a deep groan. I could not have performed this act of heroism on my first arrival ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... deeply afflicted in 1814 at the misfortunes of his brother, and was eager to offer him his fortune and his services. This, generous offer did not entirely efface from the heart of Napoleon the remembrance, of their ancient differences, but it softened the asperity of them; and it might be foreseen, that their ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... substantial Lowland wealth, who would dare to insult Upper Canada with the official presence, as its ruler, of such an equivocal character as this Mr. What-do-they-call-him—Francis Bond Head." Ever and anon the Tory press retorted on him in a spirit by no means calculated to soften the asperity of his heart. The most contemptuous epithets were freely bestowed upon him, and he was from time to time taunted with his humble origin. It seems almost unnecessary to say that those who indulged in such taunts as these had very little wherewith to reproach Mackenzie on the score of birth ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... announced, and the asperity of Miss Jemima's feelings softened a little by that, especially as she reflected that her father would be obliged to lead Mrs. Mellen into the dining-room. But that dreadful Elsie destroyed ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... the constable with asperity; "but I think you haven't half searched. Maybe he's hiding somewhere up ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... of getting rich in some other way, my dear," said the Contessa presently, with an asperity that did not escape Aurora, but produced no impression ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... sudden asperity: "I reckon he hev got sense enough ter view a light whenst it shines inter his eyes. He 'pears ter be feeble-minded ginerally, and mought n't be able ter pick out the favor o' the features on the hillside, but surely he'd blink ef a light ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... together that day, and at last, after perhaps half an hour of unbroken silence, fell back on what seemed the only possible explanation. She was thinking of her father. But why that suspicion of asperity on her face? Was this ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... the Professor's mind; in fact, she had known it for some time, but had assured herself that he would never have the courage to put his hints, and suggestions, and allusions, into an actual declaration. So she replied with some asperity, "What made you think I was looking for a situation ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... will call her Fanny Monsell, when we declare that she was one of the pleasantest companions that could be brought near to a man, as the future partner of his home, and owner of his heart. And if high principles without asperity, female gentleness without weakness, a love of laughter without malice, and a true loving heart, can qualify a woman to be a parson's wife, then was Fanny Monsell qualified to fill that station. In person she was ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... the ties of nature, to attempt illicit intercourse with a female domestic drawn from the lowest strata of society! Nay, had the hussy's scouringbrush not been her tutelary angel, it had gone with her as hard as with Hagar, the Egyptian! In the question of the grazing lands his peevish asperity is notorious and in Mr Cuffe's hearing brought upon him from an indignant rancher a scathing retort couched in terms as straightforward as they were bucolic. It ill becomes him to preach that gospel. Has he not nearer home a seedfield that lies ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... have I been tellin' th' dudes in th' head office all th' while?" asked Flannery with asperity. "What but that th' late deceased dead cat was defunct an' no more? An' thim insultin' an honest man with their 'Have ye stholen th' cat out av th' box, Flannery, an' put in an inferior short-haired cat?' I want no more av thim! Here's the key. ...
— Mike Flannery On Duty and Off • Ellis Parker Butler
... architect. Mr. Canning appointed him Master of the Rolls, an office previously, it has been said, offered to Mr. Brougham. Leach was fond, says Mr. Jay, of saying sharp, bitter things in a bland and courtly voice. "No submission could ameliorate his temper, no opposition lend asperity to his voice." In court two large fan shades were always placed in a way to shade him from the light, and to render Sir John entirely invisible. "After the counsel who was addressing the court had finished, and resumed his seat, there would be an awful pause for a ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... hearts they knew that they must swallow the man; events were too strong for them. Dick Benyon had forced him on them in one side of life, May Gaston now did the like in another; henceforward he must be and would be among them. This consciousness mingled an ingredient of asperity with their genuine pity for May. She would not merely have herself to thank for the troubles which would certainly come upon her; her misfortunes must be regarded as in part a proper punishment for the annoyance she was inflicting on ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... older than Joe," Mrs. Newbolt corrected him, with some asperity, "and she's one of the kind that'll keep. Well, I was married myself, and had a baby, when I was ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... is not different from that of the balance of the district in which it is situated, and, although some days in winter are severely cold and some in summer hot, its dry atmosphere softens the asperity of its cold, and its generous crop yields are full compensation for the heat of the summer's sun. Its mean temperature ranges from 30 degrees to 40 degrees in winter and from 50 to 74 degrees in summer. Its usual coldest days are 20 degrees to 25 degrees and its hottest ranging ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
... I have spoken with some asperity against sentiment as opposed to principle, yet I am convinced, that true genuine sentiment, (not the sort I have been describing) may be so connected with principle, as to bestow on it its brightest lustre, and its most captivating graces. And enthusiasm is so far from being ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... for a moment allow yourself," I replied, with some asperity, "to be influenced by that absurdly impossible yarn which ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... blandness, softness, mildness, and meekness. It is the opposite of harshness, roughness, etc. It is sweetness of disposition, mildness of temper, softness of manner, kindness, tenderness, etc. Those who are of a gentle disposition act and speak without asperity. They are not morose, sour, crabbed, and uneven, but are smooth, mild, and even. Good manners are intimately connected with gentleness, and good manners are ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... expression of disappointment. His own was slightly marked with annoyance, and, suddenly ceasing to arrange some folded law papers that he held in his hands, and had gathered up from the table at which he was standing, he exclaimed in tones of mingled surprise and asperity: "Still at the old song! still harping, harping, harping! Peace, no more of it. Heaven would be insufferable with but one hymn, hell thrice horrible with but one howl, earth uninhabitable with but one evil. Oh, variety, what ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... be enough," returns Marcia, with asperity. "Floyd should display a little good sense, ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... at breakfast, when Miss Osborne, with the asperity of her age and character, ventured to make some remark reflecting slightingly upon the Major's appearance or behaviour—the master of the house interrupted her. "You'd have been glad enough to git him for yourself, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... party had gone too far, and hoped time would soften their asperity, and reclaim those who had so loudly complained of persecution, from continuing to be persecutors. He enlarged on the beautiful simplicity of primitive worship, as described in Scripture; talked of the mistakes which had proceeded from a misapplication of the word Bishop ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... naturally rough and austere, that disappointments have soured, or prosperity has elated you, or that habits of command have rendered you quick in expression, and impatient of contradiction; or if, from whatever other cause, you have contracted an unhappy peevishness of temper, or asperity of manners, or harshness and severity of language, (remember that these defects are by no means incompatible with an aptness to perform services of substantial kindness); if nature has been confirmed by habit till ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... down," interposed Mrs. Wood, softening her asperity. "What I said about natural children doesn't apply to you. Don't suppose," she added, with a scornful glance at her helpmate, "that I would pay him the compliment of thinking he could possibly be the father of such ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... earth have you been buying? Jewelry? You must have gone off your head," said Mrs. Peniston with asperity. "But if you have run into debt, you must suffer the consequences, and put aside your monthly income till your bills are paid. If you stay quietly here until next spring, instead of racing about all over the country, you will have no expenses at all, and surely ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... current state of German nationalism will of course appear biased to anyone who has been in the habit of rating German Culture high in all its bearings, and to whom at the same time the ideals of peace and liberty appeal. Indeed, such a critic, gifted with the due modicum of asperity, might well be provoked to call it all a more or less ingenious diatribe of partisan malice. But it can be so construed only by those who see the question at issue as a point of invidious distinction between this German animus on the one hand ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... Ned would not have been so enchanted with his new name for her. Indeed, a few years ago she had been described by an only half-appreciative friend as "a splendid girl without a mite of tact," and if she had succeeded in somewhat softening the asperity of her natural frankness, there was enough of it left to lend a delicate shade of humour to ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... stipulated reward on my return." Akaitcho did not seem prepared to hear such declarations from his brothers, and instantly changing the subject, began to descant upon the treatment he had received from the traders in his concerns with them, with an asperity of language that bore more the appearance of menace than complaint. I immediately refused to discuss this topic, as foreign to our present business, and desired Akaitcho to recall to memory, that ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... tenacity; and as they cannot bear to have them taken from them one after another, they become more fierce, and rough, and harsher both in their language and manners. But Panaetius, wishing to avoid their moroseness and asperity, would not approve of either the bitterness of their sentiments, or their captious way of arguing: and so in one respect he was more gentle, and in the other more intelligible. And he was always quoting Plato, and Aristotle, and Xenocrates, and Theophrastus, and Dicaearchus, as his ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... you have the candour to confess it, Agnes, but speak for yourself another time, please, it's quite enough responsibility for a young lady of your age," replied Mona with asperity, "Your notions of what is right or wrong are of no consequence to ...
— Hollowmell - or, A Schoolgirl's Mission • E.R. Burden
... battle, or sends the immortal war-god whimpering to his father; and innocence, no more than philosophy, can protect us from this sting. As for taste, when we bear in mind the excesses of unmitigated sugar which delight a youthful palate, "it is surely no very cynical asperity" to think taste a character of the maturer growth. Smell and hearing are perhaps more developed; I remember many scents, many voices, and a great deal of spring singing in the woods. But hearing is capable of vast improvement as a means of pleasure; and there ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Despite the occasional asperity referred to, the Apology, as a whole, is written with modesty and moderation. Melanchthon sought to keep the track as clear as possible for a future understanding. In the interest of unity, which he never lost sight of entirely, he was conservative ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... if you get the police here at once, Jonas, we shall find both the thief and the loot under our very roof," she replied, not without asperity. ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... here another significant look at the young master, and another fond look at Mirandy, as she puffed away reflectively. "His wife hadn't no book-larnin'. She'd been through the spellin'-book wunst, and had got as fur as 'asperity' on it a second time. But she couldn't read a word when she was married, and never could. She warn't overly smart. She hadn't hardly got the sense the law allows. But schools was skase in them air days, and, besides, ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... Holly resumed her dishwashing with some asperity. "Well, I should think that might have been ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... you?" cried Mr. Verner, with asperity. "Do you mean to deny that anything had occurred to put you in a state of agitation, when you were met ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... Perhaps the result of their efforts was better than it would have been had both possessed the disposition of either one of them. Her firmness and energy atoned for the negligence resulting from his easy temper, and his sunny smile and kind words softened the asperity with which she would have ruled her household. Their son was engaged in mercantile business in a neighboring city, and their home would have been desolate but for the presence of little Clara. She was the sunshine of the old man's heart, and he forgot toil and weariness when he sat down ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed, till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations, where no benefit has been received; or to be unwilling that the publick should consider me as owing that to a patron, which providence has enabled me ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... the province for the king!" retorted Amelie, with all the asperity her gentle but patriotic spirit was capable of. "Some say ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... its influence, and the too natural consequence in a mind unattuned to soft emotions was, that the attentions of Adrian became distasteful to her. She grew capricious; her gentle conduct towards him was exchanged for asperity and repulsive coldness. When she perceived the wild or pathetic appeal of his expressive countenance, she would relent, and for a while resume her ancient kindness. But these fluctuations shook to its depths the soul of the sensitive youth; he no longer deemed the world subject ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... questioned vaguely. There was no asperity in her voice now, only puzzled helplessness. It was the inevitable surrender of the commonplace in the light of a greater understanding—in the realization of an unknown law to the significance of which some never ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... one feels that Maes's master, Rembrandt, could have added nothing. It is even conceivable that he might have injured it by some touch of asperity. From this picture all Newlyn ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... will be disposed to question this extreme sensitiveness, since instances of similar effects on men of genius are by no means rare. Whoever has read Mr. Moore's Life of Byron must have remarked the asperity with which he inveighs against blundering printers in the Letters ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... with asperity. "Your pronoun 'he' stands for your antecedent 'Gilmer.' But what's the English tongue when we have a Jacobin in the house! Women like strange animals, and they are vastly fond of pitying. But you were always a home body, Jacqueline, and left Unity to run after the sea lions and learned pigs! ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... on to remark with asperity that Murillo painted like an ignoramus. But all at once he stopped short in the middle of ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... (with some asperity). "Members are well aware what Home Rule meant. It was a plan—or rather it was a scheme—that is to say, it was an act of parliament, or I should say a bill, in fact, Mr. Speaker, I don't mind confessing that, not having my papers with me, ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... Jefferson, with asperity. "Of course I'm sure! It's not easy to mistake her, I fancy. I can't think why you didn't catch sight of her. She just looked in as ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... the history of the Embargo we can account for the asperity of feeling towards the Democratic leaders, and the distrust of their measures and men, which pervaded New England from the passage of the Embargo Act until the close ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... of some subtle difference in the spirit of the home. As to Thomas so to his father a change had come. The old man was as silent as ever, indeed more so, but there was no asperity in his silence. His critical, captious manner was gone. His silence was that of a great sorrow, and of a great fear. While there was more cheerful conversation than ever at the table, there was through all a new respect and a certain tender consideration shown toward the silent ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... bade Tancred as usual good-night, his voice was different from its accustomed tones; he had replied to Tancred with asperity several times during the evening; and when he was separated from his companion, he felt relieved. All unconscious of these changes and symptoms was the ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... Americans have retorted with some asperity upon criticisms in which any approach to such insolent insularism is even ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... Martha showed in her dress and manner, all the outward signs of her state and condition. An imperturbable gravity sat upon those harsh features which were never known to relax into a smile, and in whose expression predominated a mixture of religious asperity and pride, vainly disguised under the cloak of humility. However, Martha was far from practising the rigid austerities her whole appearance seemed to indicate. She only assumed this outward demeanor, in the ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... at the asperity with which his friend spoke. He little knew how easily acquaintance who call themselves friends can change when their interest comes in the slightest degree in competition with their friendship. Hurried by ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... hat from the table, the pastor went down among his flower-beds, followed by Bioern, to whose innate asperity of temper was added the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... imagination, and I look back over the region I have traveled. Thank God, the same plastic feeling, which used to deck all the future with the hues of fairyland, throws a soft coloring over the past, until the very roughest places, through which I struggled with many a heartache, lose all their asperity in the distance." ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... divined what was on the Professor's mind; in fact, she had known it for some time, but had assured herself that he would never have the courage to put his hints, and suggestions, and allusions, into an actual declaration. So she replied with some asperity, "What made you think I was looking for a ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... women,' Buckland pursued, with some asperity, throwing away the stump of his cigar. 'It comes, I suppose, of their ridiculous education—their minds are never trained to fixity of purpose. They never understand themselves, and scarcely ever make an effort to understand any one else. Their life ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... to see the world unless we go round it?" exclaimed the Baron, with some asperity in his tone. "That is what I thought ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... fine wine. But if there are good wines, there are also very bad ones, and these, I am sorry to say, represent the bulk in every cellar I visited. Some of the wines are cloudy, sweetish, with a good deal of asperity. Others present tartaric, lactic, and ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... and undertook to lecture on the Psalms. His eloquence and his imagination, his retentive memory enabling him to illustrate his texts by parallel passages drawn from the books of the Old Testament, and in a certain way his exaggerations, his strength of diction, and his asperity of language towards all with whose views he did not find himself in agreement, made his lectures most popular at the university, and filled his hall with an eager and attentive audience. Amongst the students Luther had no rival, and even the few professors ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... intensified by the love of God and his cause. Of course the disputants viewed the matter from different angles, and both, we must think, were equally sincere in their convictions. The present writer was not of those who thought upon the whole harm would come of this dispute, though he deeply regretted the asperity with which it was conducted. In our present imperfect state we need, I doubt not, these conflicts to remind us of our frailty, and if only we have grace to profit by them, God will turn them to our good and to His own ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... think him high-tempered beyond the requisites of manhood," she replied, with something like asperity in her tone. "I cannot endure your meek, mild mannered men, who seem to forget their sex, and almost make me long to change my own with them, that their sweet ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... numerous quarrels and controversies in England were very amusing. Yet, in spite of the personal bitterness growing out of her own irritable temper and professional rivalry, she remained a great artistic favorite with the public. Underneath the asperity and obstinacy of her character there was a vein of deep tenderness and generosity, which she showed in various cases, especially in forwarding the interests of struggling artists. Michael Kelly, the Irish composer, in ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... passed together out of the room, she turned. "Soulsby," she said with half-playful asperity, "I'm disappointed in you. For a man who's knocked about as much as you have, I must say you've picked up an astonishingly small outfit of gumption. That poor creature in there is no more drunk than I am. He's been drinking—yes, drinking ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... know anything of, but flirting?" said Charlotte with asperity, glancing out into the grounds where Kilian was murmuring softest folly to her under ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... pleased to be amusing," said Ginger with more than his usual asperity. "Mr. Archer says seven-pence. Well, I'll say five guineas. Any advance on five guineas, ladies and gentlemen? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... evident that there was nothing in the world else she cared so much to do, and though indeed it was equally evident that she was one of the best-natured little creatures in the world, she did not deny herself a certain more or less constant asperity of reference to occupations which kept her on her feet from morning till night, and made her the slave of the whole house, in spite of four big idle daughters. And she with rheumatism too, so bad that she could hardly get up and ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... awry by the fall, was ever straightened. When I spoke to her of the new law and her removal to a stand near the counter, she said it was a good thing. "No woman of proper feeling," she said with some asperity, "would have borne it as long as I did. I never wanted to stand there and be gazed at by men, it looked so bold. As for those women of brass that like it, it is all very well, but I couldn't stand it. Admiration ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... practised it, and as they held action to be the criterion of oratory, made the best actors their models; nor was this a groundless opinion adopted by a few or superficial men; for Demosthenes having remarked with some asperity that the worst orators were heard in the rostrum in preference to him, the celebrated actor SATYRUS, in order to show him how much grace, dignity, and action add to the celebrity of a public man, repeated to him several passages from Sophocles and Euripides, which ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... me so," said the old gentleman, putting on his spectacles, and looking over them at me with asperity, while he folded his paper into a convenient shape. "I wish to read you what must have made me have that instinct. It was this editorial. Listen, and see if it ...
— Editorial Wild Oats • Mark Twain
... and the regimental (particuliers) officers are the first to show a bad example, the punishments are neither sufficiently known nor sufficiently seen. Everything smacks of indiscipline, of disgust at the king's service, and of asperity towards one's self. I see with pain that it will be indispensable to put in practice the most violent and the harshest measures." The king's army, meanwhile, was continuing to fall back; a general outcry arose at Paris against the general's supineness. On the 23d of June he was surprised by Duke ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... used his influence to the utmost. Debtors have been let out of the workhouses on condition of voting against the men of the people; clients have been posted to hiss and interrupt the favorite candidates; Appius Claudius Crassus has spoken with more than his usual eloquence and asperity: all has been in vain, Licinius and Sextius have a fifth time carried all the tribes: work is suspended; the booths are closed; the Plebeians bear on their shoulders the two champions of liberty through the Forum. Just at this moment it is announced ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to fathom the reason for the employment of girls as ushers in the London theatres. Perhaps it is to heighten the glamour of a place whose glamour hardly needs heightening, or more probably it is to soften the asperity of the play-goer who finds himself asked sixpence for that necessary evil, the programme. But, now I come to think of it, most of the play-goers in London are Englishmen who have been always used to paying, ancestrally and personally, sixpence for their programmes ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... Mr. Wilberforce made his motion. He began by expressing a hope, that the present debate, instead of exciting asperity and confirming prejudice, would tend to produce a general conviction of the truth of what in fact was incontrovertible; that the abolition of the Slave Trade was indispensably required of them, not only by morality and religion, but by sound ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... such an arrangement, or want of arrangement, is obvious; and it must have caused much friction in the House. We can imagine the officer in charge of the finances resenting the intrusion of his brother of the library with an asperity not wholly in accordance with fraternal charity. And yet, so strong is the tendency of human nature to put up with whatever exists, rather than be at the trouble of changing it, no effectual steps in the way of remedy were taken until the fifteenth century. In ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... travels. He is labeling his trophies, now. I picked up one a while ago, and found it marked "Fragment of a Russian General." I carried it out to get a better light upon it—it was nothing but a couple of teeth and part of the jaw-bone of a horse. I said with some asperity: ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to read by," Grandmother announced, with considerable asperity, "and you don't need to hunt around for no more lamps, neither. I've got ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... entered, and his grandmother, taking the letter from Bertha, and placing it in his hand, accosted him with no little asperity of tone. ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... thousand to one that they are impostors, but yet we do ourselves a wrong by hardening our hearts against them. At last, without turning round, I told her that I should give her nothing,—with some asperity, doubtless, for the effort to refuse creates a bitterer repulse than is necessary. She still followed us a little farther, but at last gave it up, with a deep groan. I could not have performed this act of heroism on my first ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... interest. He was still more attracted by the controversy that then raged in Edinburgh and elsewhere on the value of Phrenology and Animal Magnetism. Hamilton, as all students of contemporary philosophy are aware, denounced the pretensions of Phrenology with curious vehemence and asperity. It was the only doctrine, his friends said, that he could not even tolerate. On Animal Magnetism he held a very different opinion, and he wrote to Greg encouraging his enthusiasm in that direction. 'There has always,' he said, 'seemed to me a foundation ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... congratulations. He made a personal claim on their cordiality, which was not the least of his political resources. Nature had fitted him to public uses; the impression overflowed the ranks of his own supporters and softened asperity among his opponents. Illustration lies, at this moment close to us. They had not been in the same room a quarter of an hour before he was in deep and affectionate converse with Lorne Murchison, whose party we know, and whose political weight was increasing, as this influence often does, with a ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... seldom out of patience with her more tender sister, yet at this moment her love and her patriotism—by which is meant her heart and soul—were violently in conflict. Fearing lest the former might prevail, she replied with greater asperity: ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... her mood. I went over all we had said and done together that day, and at last, after perhaps half an hour of unbroken silence, fell back on what seemed the only possible explanation. She was thinking of her father. But why that suspicion of asperity on her face? Was this ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... stimulating the palate. Conversation would become dull and vapid, if negligence were not sometimes roused, and sluggishness quickened, by due severity of reprehension. But acids unmixed will distort the face and torture the palate; and he that has no other qualities than penetration and asperity, he whose constant employment is detection and censure, who looks only to find faults, and speaks only to punish them, will soon ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... sends the immortal war-god whimpering to his father; and innocence, no more than philosophy, can protect us from this sting. As for taste, when we bear in mind the excesses of unmitigated sugar which delight a youthful palate, "it is surely no very cynical asperity" to think taste a character of the maturer growth. Smell and hearing are perhaps more developed; I remember many scents, many voices, and a great deal of spring singing in the woods. But hearing is capable of vast improvement as a means of pleasure; and there is all the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... contradiction is naturally so strong in Lismahago, that I believe in my conscience he has rummaged, and read, and studied with indefatigable attention, in order to qualify himself to refute established maxims, and thus raise trophies for the gratification of polemical pride. — Such is the asperity of his self-conceit, that he will not even acquiesce in a transient compliment made to his own individual in particular, or to his ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... being an edged-tool against neutral nations, a curiously narrow, hide-bound politician, whose language was as insolent as his manners were offensive. The Governor's reference, therefore, had not been too severe, nor had his statement overleaped the truth; yet Jonas Platt attacked it with great asperity, arraigning the national administration and charging that the country had more cause for war with France than with Great Britain. This was both unwise and untenable. The Governor had aimed his criticism at France as well as at England. He spoke of one as controlling the destinies of the European ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the Catholics pray to images and say the second commandment, I'd like to know?" said Mrs. Thorne, one morning, with some asperity. ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... understanding whereof, we may consider, that there is in mens aptnesse to Society; a diversity of Nature, rising from their diversity of Affections; not unlike to that we see in stones brought together for building of an Aedifice. For as that stone which by the asperity, and irregularity of Figure, takes more room from others, than it selfe fills; and for the hardnesse, cannot be easily made plain, and thereby hindereth the building, is by the builders cast away as unprofitable, ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... sharp, the chin round and sometimes retreating. The body is angular and generally convex in outline, with sharpness at all angles. This temperament is usually accompanied with great activity of mind and vivaciousness of disposition, and sometimes develops great energy and asperity. It is very likely to exhaust ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... wished that," replied the lady, with some asperity, "I would have asked you to do so. As it is, I asked you to ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... will not prove the testament to be a forgery. The signing and witnessing were done in my presence," said my uncle. He rose from his chair, instinctively locked up his bureau; and, if such stern features could assume an aspect of still greater asperity, it was when the interrogator thus continued:—"You were, as you observe, Mr S——, an eye-witness to the due subscription of this deed. If I am to clear myself from the imputation of unjustifiable curiosity, I must beg leave to examine yourself and the surviving witness apart, merely ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... to leave us here in rags and beggary, while you are amusing yourself in London?" replied Mrs Rainscourt, with asperity. "With your altered circumstances, you will have no want of society, either male or female," continued the lady, with an emphasis upon the last word—"and a wife will ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... here in Paris," said Mrs. Newell, with a note of asperity which seemed to imply that her friend might have taken the trouble to post ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... conscious that you are naturally rough and austere, that disappointments have soured, or prosperity has elated you, or that habits of command have rendered you quick in expression, and impatient of contradiction; or if, from whatever other cause, you have contracted an unhappy peevishness of temper, or asperity of manners, or harshness and severity of language, (remember that these defects are by no means incompatible with an aptness to perform services of substantial kindness); if nature has been confirmed by habit till ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... the poor soul stranded among the relics of the past cut to his heart, and he was filled with pity. But he spoke with a bitter asperity and seemed to scold, to ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... being acquainted with celebrated men of every description, had made me, much about the same time, obtain an introduction to Dr. Samuel Johnson and to John Wilkes, Esq. Two men more different could perhaps not be selected out of all mankind. They had even attacked one another with some asperity[187] in their writings; yet I lived in habits of friendship with both[188]. I could fully relish the excellence of each; for I have ever delighted in that intellectual chymistry, which can separate good qualities from evil in the ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... M'Combie anticipated a fatal result, and the old gentleman appeared to have no illusion as to his own state. He repeatedly assured me it was 'by' with him now; 'and high time too,' he once added with characteristic asperity. He was not in the least changed on the approach of death: only (what I am sure must be very grateful to your feelings) he seemed to think and speak even more kindly than usual of yourself, referring to you as 'Jeannie's yin,' with strong expressions ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... frivolous tale. She was satisfied with anything that ended happily and had nothing in it that was unpleasant, or difficult, demanding thought. She exalted her preferences into high canons. A novel ought to conform to her requirements. A novelist (she thought of him with some asperity) had no right to be obscure, or depressing, or to add needless unpleasantness to the unpleasantness that had to be. The Great Men didn't ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... have expected His Royal Highness to do—I mean 'Lord Denton?'" "Karlbeck" corrected himself hastily. Edestone set his glass down, and looked at the man for a moment. When he finally spoke it was with a touch of asperity. With a ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... ex-President of the United States, then residing in New Hampshire; and another to ex-Attorney-General Cushing, a resident of Massachusetts. He appeared much surprised, and remarked with a sigh, but without the slightest tone of asperity, 'I will have these letters enclosed in official envelopes, and sent to these parties.' When he had finished examining the addresses, he tied up all those addressed to private individuals, saying, 'I won't bother with them; but these look like official letters; I guess I'll go through them now.' ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... out. It hung on the edge of his lips. A moment longer he hugged it deliciously. He loved these little conversations with his wife. Never a shade of asperity entered into them. And this one in particular afforded ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... I have not been entirely deprived of my senses!" Miss Phoebe spoke with some asperity. "Of course we cannot refuse, and of course we must do our utmost for our brother's motherless child; but none the less, it is calamitous, I repeat; and I am positive that Doctor Strong will ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... say it was quite empty?" Miss Bride asked, with some asperity. "To be sure, there are always people. But she'll miss the best of it. She ought to be there for the Patrick's Ball and the command nights at the theatre. The last time I was at the Theatre Royal I was in the Viceregal box. She was a sweet, pretty creature, ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... the "Leyden Gazette," instead of English papers; but it soon became the vehicle of calumny against the funding and banking systems; against the duty on home-made spirits, which was denominated an excuse, and against the men who had proposed and supported those measures. With, perhaps, equal asperity, the papers attached to the party which had defended these systems, assailed the motives of the ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... said Melinda with some asperity. "That thing's kept Harry Junior quiet all day. I bought it in good faith, and it's not my fault—say, have you ...
— Teething Ring • James Causey
... that?" Evelyn inquired with a trace of asperity. Though she was not prepared to pose as Vane's advocate, she was conscious of a growing ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... since you have thought it necessary to tell me so, we part." "Very well, sir," said Washington, "if it be your choice," or something to that effect, and the friends separated. Washington immediately opened the way for the Secretary's continuance at his post, but, without any feeling of asperity, the overture was declined. Hamilton, however, proffered his services and counsel. With no other man than Washington, indeed, could the subordinate relation have continued so long, and Hamilton had often thought of renouncing it; but he saw in Washington the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... half over and then pay just the same——" But the woman appreciated this cordiality at its true worth and was unresponsive. "So you've got the job. They'd be sorry to part with Maggie." Then pursing her lips, she placed her season ticket in her purse, and said with condescending asperity: "I want to go ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... the desperate form of a breathless, day-to-day struggle for bare existence it need only exist among railway companies where lines have been built in excess of the needs of the population. With the increase in population and the growth of trade the asperity of the conditions necessarily becomes mitigated, until at last, when the traffic has assumed proportions which will afford all competitors alike a reasonable profit on their shares, the management ceases to be exposed ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... disappointment. His own was slightly marked with annoyance, and, suddenly ceasing to arrange some folded law papers that he held in his hands, and had gathered up from the table at which he was standing, he exclaimed in tones of mingled surprise and asperity: "Still at the old song! still harping, harping, harping! Peace, no more of it. Heaven would be insufferable with but one hymn, hell thrice horrible with but one howl, earth uninhabitable with but one evil. Oh, variety, what ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... not been quite so strong, quite so full of unexpressed power, he would have rebelled at the assertion that he had stuck Porter; but he answered, and his voice struggled between asperity and deprecation, "There ain't no call for me to give that stable any pointers; Porter put it to me pretty straight that ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... Mr. Adams said," retorted Mrs. Adams, with some asperity, "and I told him that I would rather the dozen policemen were in evidence before I was shot and robbed than after. I had on all my rings, and ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... getting at my character at last," observed Brook with some asperity. "You've discovered my vanity, now. By-and-by we shall find out ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... wrong? It has gone wrong in the brain. What, is he 'wrong in the head'? Most assuredly, most strictly. He knows—none better—that when his wife employs a particular tone containing ten grains of asperity, and he replies in a particular tone containing eleven grains, the consequences will be explosive. He knows, on the other hand, that if he replies in a tone containing only one little drop of honey, the consequences may not be unworthy of two reasonable beings. He knows this. His brain is fully ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... applaud that strict and conscientious devotion to the interests of his employer, and to what he considered the true objects of the enterprise in which he was engaged. He certainly was to blame occasionally for the asperity of his manners, and the arbitrary nature of his measures, yet much that is exceptionable in this part of his conduct may be traced to rigid notions of duty acquired in that tyrannical school, a ship of war, and to the construction ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... 2. That how much asperity of feeling, and how much bitter controversy might be prevented, if those most concerned would converse privately with each other before they entered into the arena of ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... about it?" James answered her with asperity. "It's a pretty mess at this time of night, too!" He lapsed into silence, and his wife and son, as if hypnotised, waited for him to say: 'I can't tell—I don't know; I knew how it would be!' But he did not. The grey eyes ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of the President, this is the first, the very first duty which the Constitution gravely enjoins upon him. And now, Sir, in no language of taunt or reproach, in no language of party attack, in terms of no asperity or exaggeration, but called upon by the necessity of defending my own vote upon the subject, as a public man, as a member of Congress here in my place, and as a citizen who feels as warm an attachment to the Constitution of the country as any other ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... say," cut in Miss Doolittle with some asperity, "is that Mr. Thomas Faulkenstone Demilt is her brother." She did not add, as extreme candour would have urged, "And I have some hope—remote, alas! but there—of becoming sister to Miss ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... if I were the young gentleman who shared his post chaise. But, without allowing time for an answer, and striking his boot impatiently with a riding whip, he hoped I was ready. "Not until he has gone up to my mistress," replied my old protectress, in a tone of some asperity. Thither I ascended. What counsels and directions I might happen to receive at the maternal toilet, naturally I have forgotten. The most memorable circumstance to me was, that I, who had never till that time possessed the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... were already Christians have remained without instruction, which I consider a great disadvantage. But, knowing that God moves the hearts of men (a matter that we cannot understand), I will overlook that. The governor took this with more asperity than I wished, for he sent after them, and the person who went thither treated them very rudely; but finally God ordained that they should arrive at this island. The governor ordered a proclamation to be made (its contents ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... bar Mr. Paine has always held the friendliest relations, and he has enjoyed their highest esteem. To none, even the humblest of his fellow advocates, has he ever manifested any of the haughtiness of a Pinkney, or any of that ruggedness and asperity which gained for the morose and sullen Thurlow the nickname of the tiger. Amid the fiercest janglings and hottest contentions of the bar, he has never forgotten that courtesy which should mark the collision, not less than the friendly intercourse, of cultivated ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... undiscoverable. Was he performing a series of parts, or was it the ordinary changes of a man's true temperament that you beheld in him? Commonly smooth, quiet, attentive, flattering in social intercourse, he was known in the senate and courts of law for a cold asperity, and a caustic venom,—scarcely rivalled even in those arenas of contention. It seemed as if the bitterer feelings he checked in private life, he delighted to indulge in public. Yet even there he gave not way ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have asserted with some show of asperity that he was nothing if not American; but Bridge was quick to see a possible loophole for escape for his friend in Pesita's belief that Billy was no gringo, and warned the latter to silence by a ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... found himself embarrassed with the duties of smoothing a deathbed, and all he had meant was to express a sincere desire that the Sergeant were happily rid of doubt and suffering. A little shocked, therefore, at the interpretation that had been put on his words, he rejoined with some of the asperity of the man, though rebuked by a consciousness of not having done his own wishes justice. "You are too old and too sensible a person, Pathfinder," said he, "to fetch a man up with a surge, when he is paying out his ideas in distress, as it might be. Sergeant Dunham is both my brother-in-law ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... smile softened the asperity of this interruption. "The man has yet to be caught and identified. Till that is done I cannot enjoy any one's congratulations. And you will see that all this may not be so easy. If no one happened to meet the desperate ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... about a dish of tea. She wanted to force the boy to drink it according to her own receipt. He said he did not like it, and that it absolutely made him ill. After a good deal of sparring she took up the birch-rod and began to whip him with an uncommon degree of asperity. When the poor lad found that he must either drink the nauseous dish of tea or be flogged to death, he turned upon her in self-defence, showed her to the outside of the nursery- door, and never more allowed her to meddle ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... what you're drivin' at," Bert said with asperity. "An' all I can tell you is, livin' or dead, in a job or out, no matter what happens to me, if you will lead that way, you will, an' there's nothin' else ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... forgetting his own rules that nations act from adequate motives relative to their interests, and not from metaphysical speculation; that we cannot draw an indictment against a whole people; that there is a species of hostile justice which no asperity of war wholly extinguishes in the minds of a civilised people. "Steady independent minds," he had once said, "when they have an object of so serious a concern to mankind as government under their contemplation, ...
— Burke • John Morley
... contradicted Burnet more frequently or with more asperity than Dartmouth. Yet Dartmouth wrote, "I do not think he designedly published anything he believed to be false." At a later period Dartmouth, provoked by some remarks on himself in the second volume of the Bishop's history, retracted ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... nap, and the bagman proposed a game of cards. I remembered in time that I was an elder in the Nethergate U.F. Church and refused with some asperity. After that I shut my eyes again, for I wanted to ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... not different from that of the balance of the district in which it is situated, and, although some days in winter are severely cold and some in summer hot, its dry atmosphere softens the asperity of its cold, and its generous crop yields are full compensation for the heat of the summer's sun. Its mean temperature ranges from 30 degrees to 40 degrees in winter and from 50 to 74 degrees in ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
... I said with asperity; for I am not a person to inaugurate a dinner hour one day and change it the next. Bates wished to make conversation,—the sure sign of a guilty conscience in a servant,—and I was not disposed to ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... notion than you how long it is to last," Holmes answered with some asperity. "If criminals would always schedule their movements like railway trains, it would certainly be more convenient for all of us. As to what it is we—Well, that's what we ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to say, Miss De Haro," returned the Senator, rising with some asperity, "that you seem to have been unfortunate in your selection of acquaintances, and still more so in your ideas of the derivations of the English tongue. The—er—the—er—expressions you have quoted are not common to Boston, but emanate, I believe, ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... witty thing in his whole life, for only one has been recorded. It was ingeniously said of VAUCANSON, that he was as much an automaton as any which he made. HOGARTH and SWIFT, who looked on the circles of society with eyes of inspiration, were absent in company; but their grossness and asperity did not prevent the one from being the greatest of comic painters, nor the other as much a creator of manners in his way. Genius, even in society, is pursuing its own operations, and it would cease to be itself were it always ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... to sink into oblivion by its own weight, with original essays on the most interesting subjects of the time, religious, or political; in which the titles of the books or pamphlets prefixed furnish only the name and occasion of the disquisition. I do not arraign the keenness, or asperity of its damnatory style, in and for itself, as long as the author is addressed or treated as the mere impersonation of the work then under trial. I have no quarrel with them on this account, as long as no personal allusions ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Diabelli, he remarked: "Strange that so great a man should have been born in so poor a home!" Beethoven's relations with Haydn, as we shall see later on, were at one time somewhat strained; but the years had softened his asperity, and this indirect tribute to his brother composer may readily be accepted as a set-off to some things that the biographer of the ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... Rolleston's annoyance to the culminating point. She thought the faithless damsel had come to announce her engagement, and demand sympathy and congratulations. So, with a view to arrest any aggressive gush, she said, with some asperity,—"I am glad you have come, for I wanted to tell you, Cecil, how bad it looked your walking off in that way ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... Sketches; some of my friends have told me that they evince an asperity of sentiment towards the English people which I ought not to feel, and which it is highly inexpedient to express. The charge surprises me, because, if it be true, I have written from a shallower mood than I supposed. I seldom came into personal relations with an Englishman ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... last, and only husband," she replied, with a touch of asperity, yet not as if she meant it ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... a distant part of the State, was present to give it his personal supervision. In the course of Mr. D.'s argument, he let fall some profane language, for which he was promptly checked and reprimanded by the Judge. Mr. D., accustomed to unrestrained license of tongue, retorted with great asperity, ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... that that's such an awful faux pas," Blue Bonnet said with asperity. "They always have afternoon tea at Oxford. Alec Trent has a friend there and he told ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... of that four-eyed teacher, anyway," declared the old lady, with some asperity. "I'm going to see about it. Your father would just let you be driven from pillar to post—he's got no spunk. What you Lockwoods need in this town is a woman ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison
... the value of it to a penny," replied his father, with equal asperity, "and I intend it shall belong solely and wholly ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... with unabated ardour. But his career was embittered by broils and controversies; while the frequent acts of kindness, and the general warmth of heart, evinced in his conduct, hardly sufficed to soften the asperity, or to mitigate the wrath, of a host of enemies—which assailed him to the very last. But Cadmus-like, he sowed the seeds from which these combatants sprung. Whatever were his defects, as a public character, he is said to have been, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... and Romulus stood in respect to each other, and the feelings which were naturally awakened in their hearts by the circumstances in which they found themselves placed, were such as did not tend to allay any rising asperity which accident might occasion, but rather to irritate and inflame it. In the first place, they were both ardent, impulsive, and imperious. Each was conscious of his strength, and eager to exercise ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... have," I interrupted with some asperity, "but I don't belong in that category. Far from persecuting, I have always believed in tolerance. Live and let live, I always say. People can't help the color of their skins or the race ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... grave with fiddlestick!" Mrs. Milliken said with some asperity. "And, as we are going to part, mamma, and as Horace has paid EVERYTHING on the journey as yet, and we have only brought a VERY few circular notes with us, perhaps you will have the kindness to give him your share of the travelling ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to hear the qualifications of such a celebrated actor in England treated with such freedom and disrespect, answered, with some asperity, that the chevalier was a true critic, more industrious in observing the blemishes than in acknowledging the excellence of those ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Ronald sat reading in his own rooms, he was much surprised at hearing a well-known voice at the door, inquiring with some asperity whether Mr. Le Breton was at home. He listened to the voice in intense astonishment. It was ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... one more instance of her insolent asperity, which produced an admirable reply of the famous Lady Mary -Wortley Montague. Lady Sundon had received a pair of diamond ear-rings as a bribe for procuring a considerable post in Queen Caroline's family for a certain peer; and, decked with those jewels, paid a visit to the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... Hal, until the conclusion of the war, would accept no higher rank, believing that in command of a regiment he could be more useful than in charge of a division. Madam Fanny, I say, came back, and it was remarkable after her return how her old asperity towards my mother seemed to be removed, and what an affection she showed for her and all the property. She was great friends with the Governor and some of the most influential gentlemen of the new Assembly:—Madam Esmond was harmless, and for ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... told that he was perfectly acquainted with the French, Italian, Latin, Dutch and Spanish languages. And it is related of him, that by endeavouring to correct the vices of the times with too much asperity, he exposed himself to the resentment of those in power, who signified their displeasure, to the mortification and trouble of the author. Our poet gained more reputation by the translation of Du Bartas, than by any of his own compositions. Besides his Weeks and Works, he translated ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... child!" answered her mother, with an asperity that she had never permitted to herself before. "Do not tease me; else I shall shut thee into ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the fair Bella, with just a soupcon of asperity in her tone,—as much as she ever allows herself when in the society of men. She makes up for this abstinence by bestowing a liberal share of it upon ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... Mrs. Sprague continues, with a smile, and in a tone that has none of the asperity the words might imply. "No reverence, no waiting for the elders, as we ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... driven so near it against one's will, and yet succeed in getting past without touching it," said the curate, with a flavor of asperity. His wife gently pinched his ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... son came at last to the chateau: for the Count de Bassompierre that night accompanied Dr. Bretton. I know not which of our trio heard the horses first; the asperity, the violence of the weather warranted our running down into the hall to meet and greet the two riders as they came in; but they warned us to keep our distance: both were white—two mountains of snow; and indeed Mrs. Bretton, seeing their condition, ordered ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... gourdful of water from the pail in the sink, and carried it carefully over to the table. "Horses are the exception," he returned, with dignified asperity. "There always are exceptions. What I was comin' at was—I'd been kind of wrong in my reasonin'. That is, I 'ain't reasoned far enough. I was right so ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... many of the bitters of life, and taste but few of its sweets, would naturally feel attachment and respect for that code of morality, which, regarding the many hardships of their station, strove to alleviate its rigours, and endeavoured to soften its asperity. ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... orator. Q. Capio too had a great deal of spirit, and was a brave citizen: but the unlucky chance of war was imputed to him as a crime, and the general odium of the people proved his ruin. C. and L. Memmius were likewise indifferent orators, and distinguished by the bitterness and asperity of their accusations: for they prosecuted many, but seldom spoke for the defendant. Sp. Torius, on the other hand, was distinguished by his popular way of speaking; the very same man, who, by his corrupt and frivolous law, diminished ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... were alone (the rest having gone on with Fraeulein Schwartze), and there was silence for a moment, during which the lady turned toward her well-appointed carriage; then Margot spoke, with some asperity, though I heard the tears in her ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... not of an undeserved asperity!" I returned, "D'ye think the Marchioness, her flighty head crammed with scraps of idiotic romance, would elope without regard for the canons of romance? Not so; depend upon it, a letter was left upon her pin-cushion announcing her removal with you, and in the most approved ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... be a difficult matter to do that," responds the good wife, with some asperity in look and tone. "It seems hard and old; some lean cow you have killed, to save her from dying of ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... it. You may as well as think it!" snapped Mollie, with some asperity. "You were going to say you hadn't ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... my dear, I think you ought to realize the responsibility you assume." Mrs. Peyton's voice had acquired an edge of righteous asperity. "If Denis has a fault it is that he is too gentle, too yielding, too readily influenced by those he cares for. Your influence is paramount with him now—but if you turn from him just when he needs your help, who can say ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... for Mrs. Minchin, tooth and nail indeed, yet perhaps with more asperity than conviction, and certainly at times upon points which were hardly worth the fighting. Yet, on the Friday afternoon, when her counsel at last played his masterstroke, and, taking advantage of the then new Act, put the prisoner herself in the witness-box, ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... subject was interrupted by the entrance of Mr. Arnold, who looked rather annoyed at finding Hugh in the drawing-room, and ordered Harry off to bed, with some little asperity of tone. The boy rose at once, rang the bell, bade them all good night, and went. A servant met him at the door with ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... retire, my lord," observed the elder Miss Ossulton, with great asperity: "I have been trying to catch the eye of Mrs Lascelles for ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... Milton was peculiarly distinguished by loftiness of spirit; that of Dante by intensity of feeling. In every line of the Divine Comedy we discern the asperity which is produced by pride struggling with misery. There is perhaps no work in the world so deeply and uniformly sorrowful. The melancholy of Dante was no fantastic caprice. It was not, as far as at this distance of time can be judged, the effect of external circumstances. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... and he then kissed him tenderly. This and the marks of undisguised pleasure which he evinced surprised me, and I looked at Madame de Lamotte, who then remarked with some asperity— ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... sentence, with its opprobrious epithet (coined on the spot), was addressed with sudden asperity to the driver of the clumsy vehicle, who was seated on his box, with mouth expanded ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... the field of battle shows him to have been a man of fearless spirit; and he was universally allowed to be an accomplished disciplinarian. His melancholy end, too, disarms censure of its asperity. Whatever may have been his faults and errors, he, in a manner, expiated them by the hardest lot that can befall a brave soldier, ambitious of renown—an unhonored grave in a strange land; a memory clouded by misfortune, and a name for ever coupled ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... by answering with asperity, prompted by a second attack on this subject, 'I can't help it. I could not put her off,—what objection ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with a startled look. Neenah looked intently into the unsteady, blue-grey eyes and then bent over to kiss the hand of the Princess. The latter laughed almost aloud in her confusion. She caught herself up quickly and said with some asperity: "You foolish child, I am to become a prince's wife. How can I love your sahib? What nonsense! I am to marry a prince and he is not to pay ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
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