Neighbour, sharpen the edge-tool of your wits upon the whetstone of indiscretion, that your words may shine like the razors of Palermo: [to POPPEY] you have learning with ignorance, therefore speak my tale.

Such arguments are but edge-tools at the safest, but more often they may rather be likened to the two-edged blade of Parysatis's knife, the one of which was poisoned.

The chief articles are sharp instruments, as knives, scissors, razors, saws, and edge-tools of various kinds, and to these may be added, files and plated goods to a great extent, besides stove-grates and fenders of exquisite beauty.

He is very clever with the edge-tools in his surgeon's-case; he whips you out an excrescence before you are quite aware that he meditated an operation, and you find that he had chloroformed you with a shrewd writer's best anaesthetic, a humorous and genial temper.

The tailor's shears, the mason's trowel, and the carpenter's edge-tools are evening everything in Christendom to one dead level of uniformity.