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Updated: June 16, 2025
A practised book-maker, with entire control of her materials, would have shaped out a duodecimo volume full of eloquent and ingenious dissertation, criticisms which quite take the color and pungency out of other people's critical remarks on Shakspeare, philosophic truths which she imagined herself to have found at the roots of his conceptions, and which certainly come from no inconsiderable depth somewhere.
I do not know to this day which more interested him that very pungency of phrase, or the critical events which inspired his reflections. He had no sense of responsibility; his mind loved talent, skill, and cleverness, and though it was scathing of all usual ethics, for the crude, honest life of the poor it had sympathy.
After this the mourning ceases, except some of the women continue to be really afflicted for the loss, and in that case they will sometimes suddenly wound themselves with the shark's tooth wherever they happen to be: This perhaps will account for the passion of grief in which Terapo wounded herself at the fort; some accidental circumstance might forcibly revive the remembrance of a friend or relation whom she had lost, with a pungency of regret and tenderness which forced a vent by tears, and prompted her to a repetition of the funeral rite.
A light and playful sally acquires additional merit when uttered with gaiety; and should a bon mot even contain something calculated to pique any one present, or reflect on the absent, the mode in which it is uttered takes off from the force of the matter; whereas, on the contrary, the more grave and sententious manner peculiar to the English adds pungency to their satire.
So far as the drama itself goes, they are of no great importance except to give pungency and interest to the action. The lawyer asks an apparently good question. "I object," says the other lawyer, "on the ground that it is incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial." The judge has to rule. He may not exactly have heard the question. The stenographer reads it again.
The owner was grateful at hearing such good things said about himself, though the eulogy was flavoured with a pungency of language that was not intended for delicate ears. At last one of the crew finished, tossed his tin plate on the floor, and said: "That's a damned good dinner, boys." A second, third and fourth said the same thing.
But he was something more: he was the Welsh Martial, and wrote pieces equal in pungency to those of the great Roman epigrammatist, perhaps more than equal, for we never heard that any of Martial's epigrams killed anybody, whereas Ab Gwilym's piece of vituperation on Rhys Meigan pity that poets should be so virulent caused the Welshman to fall down dead.
Her criticism upon manners and social customs has also, to a great extent, lost its power of application. Of its liveliness and pungency we may give, however, a specimen; her description of the day's avocations of a Philadelphian lady of the first class: "This lady," she says, "shall be the wife of a senator and a lawyer in the highest repute and practice.
He was too emotional to regard them as anything but enemies, if they were not friends. He was too humane not to hate them. Charles Lamb said with his inimitable sleek pungency that he could read all the books there were; he excluded books that obviously were not books, as cookery books, chessboards bound so as to look like books, and all the works of modern historians and philosophers.
Venus shone out with mellow brilliance a little to the right of the church. The air was full of bush scents, and somewhere, not far from where I stood, dead brushwood was burning and diffusing abroad the aromatic pungency that fire draws from eucalyptus leaves.
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