He had to deal with the most capricious and jealous of tyrants; cruel and unscrupulous when crossed; a man who rarely retained a friendship or remembered a service; who never forgave an injury or forgot an affront; a glutton and a sensualist; although prodigal with his gifts, social in his temper, enlightened in his government, and with very respectable abilities and very considerable theological knowledge.

The multitude could not for some time distinguish the uncertain and capricious opposition of an offended courtier from the determined resistance of a great man.

With respect to the United Provinces she was a harsh protectress and a capricious ally.

For certainly, the same responsibility, that ought to remove a minister from the helm, when he is become obnoxious to his countrymen, equally makes it improper, that he should be originally appointed by the fancy or capricious partiality of the sovereign.

We may be sure they will treat every determination as capricious, that shocks their inclination.

It appears to me, I must confess, that if you have a republican form of government in a great country, with complicated internal and external relations, you must either separate the executive and legislative departments, as in the United States, or submit to a tyranny of the majority, not the more tolerable because it is capricious and wielded by a tyrant with many heads.

de Girardin, and the exquisitely classic profile, which, enframed, as it were, by the capricious spirals of the lightest, fairest flaxen hair, resembled the outline of some antique statue of a Muse.

The bow-window stood generously open in three different places, and the heavy outer curtains as well as the lace inner ones were moving gently in the capricious breeze that came across the oval lawn.

The object of his choice inherited from her mother a constitutional malady which at first shewed itself in capricious waywardness, and at length broke out into insanity.

He was like a veteran who, after leading men through hazardous campaigns, had in his age become the tutor of a capricious, disobedient, and lazy boy.

v.; off one's balance; at a loss &c (uncertain) 475. vacillating &c v.; unsteady &c (changeable) 149; unsteadfast^, fickle, without ballast; capricious &c 608; volatile, frothy; light, lightsome, light-minded; giddy; fast and loose.

V. be capricious &c adj.; have a maggot in the brain; take it into one's head, strain at a gnat and swallow a camel; blow hot and cold; play fast and loose, play fantastic tricks; tourner casaque [Fr.].

capricious; erratic, eccentric, fitful, hysterical; full of whims &c n.; maggoty; inconsistent, fanciful, fantastic, whimsical, crotchety, kinky [U.S.], particular, humorsome^, freakish, skittish, wanton, wayward; contrary; captious; arbitrary; unconformable &c 83; penny wise and pound foolish; fickle &c (irresolute) 605; frivolous, sleeveless, giddy, volatile.

Adj. without rhyme or reason; aimless, capricious, whimsical &c (chance) 621.

Oh! it is not a mere capricious change of fate, that the exiled governor of the land whose name, four years ago, was scarcely known on your glorious shores, and which now (oh, let me have the blessings of this belief!) is dear to the generous heart of America.

But though she treated me with friendship, she was proud and capricious as ever, and a few years later married a man whom I knew and detesteda Mr. Bentley Drummle, a bully and a scoundrel.

Even if high imagination were to be identified with illusion, there would be the same sort of difference between the imperial wealth of illusion which is informed by industrious submissive observation and the trumpery stage-property illusion which depends on the ill-defined impressions gathered by capricious inclination, as there is between a good and a bad picture of the Last Judgment.

But the end can hardly be achieved by urging contradictory reproaches, and instead of labouring after discernment as a preliminary to intervention, letting our zeal burst forth according to a capricious selection, first determined accidentally and afterwards justified by personal predilection.

So capricious was he that no one could easily suit him.

It will, I think, be much readas far as one dare predict anything of the capricious taste of the daymuch admired, and much abused.

The idea of narrow means, of dependence upon the capricious generosity of a wealthy friend is not without its humiliating influence.

Here she runs no risk of being sought or won; but the mere knowledge that her hand was absolutely pledged, might excite a capricious opposition and repining such as neither I nor you would like to see; therefore be secret.

God, according to the savage conception, is vengeful, and capricious, and vindictive.

In the next place, no one can fail to see, no one in fact affects to deny, that the general result of these recent decisions, capricious as their conclusions look at first sight, has been to make the Formularies mean much less than they were supposed to mean.

And thus a stringent test has admitted what a loose but capricious test discarded, and the true notion of God has issued safe out of the crucible of modern metaphysics.