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There are passages in 'The Pirates' tenderer in tone, one might almost say more pathetic, than anything Sullivan had previously written, passages which gave more than a hint of the triumphs he was later to win in that mingling of tears and laughter of which he had the secret In 'Patience' musician and librettist mutually agreed to leave the realm of farcical extravagance, and to turn to satire of a peculiarly keen-edged and delicate kind that satire which caresses while it cuts, and somehow contrives to win sympathy for its object even when it is most mordant.

The character and views of the clergy and of the ruling class among the laity of the Church of England, early in the nineteenth century, are pictured with love and humour in Trollope's novels. They form the background in many of George Eliot's books, where, in more mordant manner, both their strength and weaknesses are shown.

Yet again, he defines the subject of his mordant volume in terms which seem to exclude all bountiful theories concerning the disinterested instincts of the human soul, for he says "Amour-propre is the love of one's self and of all things for one's self; it turns men into their own idolators, and, if fortune gives them the opportunity, makes them the tyrants of others.... It exists in all states of life and in all conditions; it lives everywhere and it lives on everything; it lives on nothing."

A story deals with human nature and time. All that is truly human is interesting, however abstractly stated; but it requires the mordant of specific circumstance, involving some historical period, to make it stain permanently.

The discourse which he delivered to Parliament in 1848 was diffuse and abject, but his articles, first printed in the Correspondant and since collected into books, were mordant and discerning under the exaggerated politeness of their form. Conceived as harangues, they contained a certain strong muscular energy and were astonishing in the intolerance of their convictions.

Little Mordant made a picture of him with large ears, like a well-known domestic animal, and had his own justly boxed for the caricature. The Doctor discovered him in the fact, and was in a flaming rage, and threatened whipping at first; but in the course of the day an opportune basket of game arriving from Mordant's father, the Doctor became mollified, and has burnt the picture with the ears.

He is the very quintessence of a declaimer, but a declaimer of a most masculine sort. Boileau characterises him in two epigrammatic lines: "Juvenal eleve dans les cris de l'ecole Poussa jusqu'a l'exces son mordant hyperbole." Poet in the highest sense of the word he certainly is not. The love of beauty, which is the touchstone of the poetic soul, is absent from his works.

That deadly assumption of keen and mordant mockery, that cool, glittering, malignant lightness of manner, was consistently sustained throughout the performance, while the texture of it was made continuously entertaining by diversity of colour and inflection, sequent on changing moods; so that Richard was shown as a creature of the possible world of mankind and not as a fiction of the stage.

To judge from the reflection of Greek thought which we find in Lucretius and Cicero, none of the primitive religious beliefs escaped mordant criticism. The second great discovery of the Greek thinkers was metaphysics. They did not have the name, which originated long after in quite an absurd fashion, but they reveled in the thing.

In this our time it is not only the alien from Christendom, with his hostile eye and mordant criticism, who is helping to undermine that system of ethics which permitted the sale of the daughter to shame, the introduction of the concubine into the family and the reduction of woman, even though wife and mother, to nearly a cipher.