benignant

Definition

Kind; gracious; favorable.

Etymology

From benign + -ant, on the model of malignant.

Example Sentences

• "Here Nature appears in her richest attire, and Art, dressed with the modestest simplicity, attends her benignant mistress."
• "And in the silence of the midnight trance, In snowy robe she comes to cheer my sight; So holy, so benignant is her glance, Her brow so placid,—and her eye so bright,..."
• "The most idiotic medicaster, when he had named, or, as they term it, diagnosticated a typhoid fever, found himself upon a level with the medical celebrities of the epoch. […] If the patient died, that was perfectly simple: he had a typhoid fever to which he was inevitably doomed to succumb! If he recovered, what a noble triumph for the medicaster, even when he had perhaps arbitrarily imposed the name of typhoid upon a simple and benignant fever, as is constantly done!"