What is "distempered"

Usage examples of "distempered".

As to poor Jones, the only relief to his distempered mind was an unwelcome piece of news, which, as it opens a scene of different nature from those in which the reader hath lately been conversant, will be communicated to him in the next chapter.

I might have done it, too, if she hadn't taken a distempered freak into her head.

When it comes to flying into distempered freaks, damme if there's a penny to choose between you and Mama!

The imagination, and even the senses, were deceived by the illusions of distempered fanaticism.

If it were not a melancholy truth, that the first and most cruel sufferings must be the lot of the innocent and helpless, history might exult in the misery of the conquerors, who, in the midst of riches, were left destitute of bread or wine, reduced to drink the waters of the Po, and to feed on the flesh of distempered cattle.

This light, the production of a distempered fancy, the creature of an empty stomach and an empty brain, was adored by the Quietists as the pure and perfect essence of God himself.

It could hardly be otherwise, for I suppose that no man wants a son who has to be kept in cotton, or - or who surfers from distempered freaks.

I thought he was in - in one of his distempered freaks, before he went down to dinner, but then he seemed to recover, and I did hope— But when Dr Delabole came into the drawing-room, I saw his eyes change - you know how they do?

The poor distempered man all this while, being as well diseased in his brain as in his body, stood still like one amazed.

But the physicians being sent to inspect the bodies, they assured the people that it was neither more or less than the plague, with all its terrifying particulars, and that it threatened an universal infection, so many people having already conversed with the sick or distempered, and having, as might be supposed, received infection from them, that it would be impossible to put a stop to it.

As for women that do not think they own safety worth their though, that, impatient of their perfect state, resolve, as they call it, to take the first good Christian that comes, that run into matrimony as a horse rushes into the battle, I can say nothing to them but this, that they are a sort of ladies that are to be prayed for among the rest of distempered people, and to me they look like people that venture their whole estates in a lottery where there is a hundred thousand blanks to one prize.

I understood by him, and by others of him, that he had a wife, but that the lady was distempered in her head, and was under the conduct of her own relations, which he consented to, to avoid any reflections that might (as was not unusual in such cases) be cast on him for mismanaging her cure.

I began to think he had been in the condition of my late lover, and that his wife had been distempered or lunatic, or some such thing.

It was a species of small hall, somewhat resembling a chapel, with distempered walls, a platform, and benches for the public, rather well filled that morning--testimony to the stir the little affair had made.

The next moment he caught sight of Derek and Sheila, screwed sideways against one of the distempered walls, looking, with their frowning faces, for all the world like two young devils just turned out of hell.