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More "Buffoon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ourselves, —the courage created by desperate emergencies. Suppled by long slavery, softened by mixture of blood, the black man seems to pass at one bound, as women do, from cowering pusillanimity to the topmost height of daring. The giddy laugh vanishes, the idle chatter is hushed, and the buffoon becomes a hero. Nothing in history surpasses the bravery of the Maroons of Surinam, as described by Stedman, or of those of Jamaica, as delineated by Dallas. Agents of the "Underground Railroad" report that the incidents which daily come to their knowledge are beyond all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... same language is equally characterized. Tacitus has been sometimes represented as a very Diogenes, for carping and sarcasm—a very Aristophanes, to blacken character with ridicule and reproach. But he is as far removed from the cynic or the buffoon, as from the panegyrist or the flatterer. He is not the indiscriminate admirer that Plutarch was. Nor is he such a universal hater as Sallust. It is the fault of the times that he is obliged to deal so much ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... luxury, pride and pleasure, he is a master of art and learning, though affecting to despise it. Those who can think that the proud huntsman and noble housekeeper, Chaucer's Monk, is intended for a buffoon or burlesque character, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts and nothing long; But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon; Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking, Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking. Blest madman, who could every hour employ With something new to wish or to enjoy! Railing and praising were ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... railing rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon; coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure, but always vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his clerical character. His Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng is a study of very low life, reminding ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... O World! in thine insanity Thou sinkest Soul into a poor buffoon, Garbed in tinsel and false ornament To play its antics on the stage of life, A thing for fools to laugh at in their mirth. Thou sat'st thy lust upon the sapless husks That strew the highways of this pilgrimage, ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... staff of aides-de-camp, and why he has two grooms, are things which no one seems to know. He patronises generals and admirals, doctors and commissariat officers, and they submit to be patronised by him. Half-priest, half-buffoon, something of a Friar Tuck and something of a Louis XV. abbe, he is a sort of privileged person, who by the mere force of impudence has made his way in the world. Most English girls in their teens fall in love with a curate and a ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... the King's will and pleasure. Deputies were accordingly sent immediately, for whose return the bulk of the members stayed in the Great Chamber. I was informed that this was one trick among others concerted to ruin me, and, telling the Duc d'Orleans of it, he said that if the old buffoon, the Keeper of the Seals, was concerned in such a complication of folly and knavery, he deserved to be hanged by the side of Mazarin. But the sequel showed that I was ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... throwing the burning stump of his cigar over the gunwale, "that the experiences of the past year have not been all an excursion into the 'Arabian Nights'? If it were not for that fine marble relief in my trunk which I bought of that miserable buffoon in the Via Sistina, I should easily persuade myself that the actual world were bounded on the east by the Atlantic and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. I was just considering whether I should try to smuggle it through the custom-house, ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... see that I am lying! For in order to please women, one must exhibit the thoughtlessness of a buffoon or all the wild passion of tragedy! They only laugh at us when we simply tell them that we love them! For my part, I consider those hyperbolical phrases which tickle their fancy a profanation of true love, so that it is no longer possible to give expression ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... north-east of the metropolis. In London he loved to frequent those streets where the old bookshops were, Wardour Street, Princes Street, Seven Dials (where the shop has been long closed): he loved also Gray's Inn, in the garden of which he met Dodd, just before his death ("with his buffoon mask taken off"); and the Temple, into which you pass from the noise and crowd of Fleet Street,—into the quiet and "ample squares and green recesses," where the old Dial," the garden god of Christian gardens," then told of Time, and where the still living ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... Congressional service became an auditor, and was known as "the Watch Dog of the Treasury." Tom Corwin, of the same State, with a portly figure, swarthy complexion, and wonderful facial expression, and an inexhaustible flow of wit, who was not a buffoon, but a gentleman whose humor was natural, racy, and chaste. Gulian C. Verplanck and Thomas J. Oakley, two members of the New York bar, who represented that city, were statesmen rather than politicians. John Chambers, of Kentucky, a gigantic economist, was ever ready to reform small expenditures ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... feast Bricriu. engages in conversation with Fergus, reproaching him for his broken promises to the Ulstermen who had joined him, and for his dalliance with Queen Maev. Bricriu, who in other romances is a mere buffoon, here appears as a distinguished poet, and a chief ollave; his satire remains bitter, but by no means scurrilous, and the verses put into his mouth, although far beneath the standard of the verses given to Deirdre in the ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... made a buffoon for drunkards. The feasts of heathenism were wild orgies, very unlike the pure joy of the sacrificial meals in Jehovah's worship. Dagon's temple was filled with a drunken crowd, whose mirth would be made more boisterous by a spice of cruelty. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Puritan. He is as full of gross words and sensual facts as a sermon of the seventeenth century. Up to this point of his life indeed hardly anyone would have dreamed of calling him a Puritan; he was called sometimes an anarchist, sometimes a buffoon, sometimes (by the more discerning stupid people) a prig. His attitude towards current problems was felt to be arresting and even indecent; I do not think that anyone thought of connecting it with the old Calvinistic morality. But Shaw, who ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... any better usage for the unfortunate judge, whose health was suffering severely under his privations. Ivan, however, had recommended himself in the same way as Leo, by his perfections as a cook, and moreover he was a capital buffoon. His fetters were sometimes taken off that he might divert the villagers by his dances and strange antics while his master played the guitar. Sometimes they sang Russian songs together to the instrument, ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... then be freed of you. I would condole with her. She is readily comforted, impatient of sorrow, incapable of it, I dare say. She would have married me. . . . Why must I tell you this? Oh, I am Fate's buffoon! For I have won, I have won! and there is that in me which will not accept the stake I ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... person as you find him here, who was indeed for his senseless humour of designing to govern—us'd no otherwise than as the Buffoon of the Family—takes upon him to call Don Quixot (whom the Authour imbellishes, with all manner of learning and good sense, bating his whimsical Chimaera of Knight Errantry,) Goodman Dulpate and Don Coxcomb. Well, however the Switcher here has escap'd for his usage of a Gentleman in or ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... glanced at him. 'Ah, I see you're as soft as silk! Your wife will have an easy time of it with you. That buffoon,' she went on, pointing with her fan towards the howling actor (he was acting the part of a tutor), 'reminded me of my young days; I, too, was in love with a teacher. It was my first ... no, my second passion. The first time I ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... Oh! a private buffoon is a light-hearted loon, If you listen to popular rumour; From morning to night he's so joyous and bright, And he bubbles with wit and good humour! He's so quaint and so terse, both in prose and in verse; Yet though ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... wiseacres took our royal buffoon too seriously. Stylistically he was translated to the skies. [Sidenote: Cicero] Cicero[5] imputes to him "iocandi genus, ... elegans, urbanum, ingeniosum, facetum." [Sidenote: Aelius Stilo] Quintilian[6] quotes: ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... clink glasses with Viktor, and continued drinking and laughing with him, though his story was by no means to our liking, nor was his society a source of any great satisfaction to us either. He began being very affable, playing the buffoon, unbending, in fact, and was more loathsome than ever. Viktor noticed at last the impression he was making on us, and began to get sulky; his remarks became more disconnected and his looks gloomier. He began yawning, announced that he was sleepy, and after swearing with his ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... animals as well; they invented piebald horses. Turenne rode a piebald horse. In our own days do they not dye dogs blue and green? Nature is our canvas. Man has always wished to add something to God's work. Man retouches creation, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The Court buffoon was nothing but an attempt to lead back man to the monkey. It was a progress the wrong way. A masterpiece in retrogression. At the same time they tried to make a man of the monkey. Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland and Countess of Southampton, had a marmoset for a page. Frances Sutton, Baroness ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... in his service the Hula, who, like the buffoon or jester of the French kings, must amuse his majesty by mimicry or dancing. The Kahu alii, or Kaukaualii, as they are now styled, are attendants or followers of the high chiefs by right of birth. ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... Swan; the Soul of Ajax, which was all Wrath and Fierceness, into a Lion; the Soul of Agamemnon, that was rapacious and imperial, into an Eagle; and the Soul of Thersites, who was a Mimick and a Buffoon, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... see, but to see and to forgive, and at length to justify. And so it is in Polonius, who is the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage. Shakspeare never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon; for although it was natural that Hamlet,—a young man of fire and genius, detesting formality, and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imagining that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation,—should express himself satirically,—yet this must not be taken as exactly the poet's conception ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... supporters: Glencairn who raised his standard in 1653; Rothes, a humorous and not a cruel voluptuary; and, as Secretary for Scotland in London, Lauderdale, who had urged him to take the Covenant, and who for twenty years was to be his buffoon, his favourite, and his wavering and unscrupulous adviser. Among these greedy and treacherous profligates there would, had he survived, have ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... that my popularity was on the wane, and that I could not hope to maintain it against the attractions of a French waiting-maid, a monkey, a parrot, a poodle, and a little Dwarfish boy-attendant that was half fiddler and half buffoon. So my consequence faded and faded, and I was sneered at and flouted as a young Savage and a young Irish by the English lacqueys about the House, and I sank from my Lady's keeping-room to the antechamber, and thence to the servant's hall, and thence, after ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... utter disgust being excited by his drinking bouts at all hours, his wild expenses, his gross amours, the day spent in sleeping or walking off his debauches, and the night in banquets and at theaters, and in celebrating the nuptials of some comedian or buffoon. It is related that, drinking all night at the wedding of Hippias, the comedian, on the morning, having to harangue the people, he came forward, overcharged as he was, and vomited before them all, one of his friends holding his gown for him. Sergius, the player, was one of ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... tragedian, buffoon—all in one. There was no shade of human emotion which he did not seem ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... I," said Mr. Fielding. "If it were possible to treat such a buffoon as you seriously, she wouldn't. I hope you are none the worse ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... buffoon, can't he?" said the stout lady in the corner to her companion, as she yawned again. She had scarcely tried to lower her voice. Her remark was, at any rate, quite audible to her next-door neighbor, who again threw her a swift, ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... spoke of my knowledge of Indian tongues, and added apocryphal tales of my feats of wit and daring. My image loomed large, and it was no wonder that they did not connect this mythical Colossus with the swaggering royster who played buffoon for their mirth. I wondered that Pemaou had not told them, but I reflected that there is a mutual distrust among Indians that takes the place of reticence, and that that had saved me. I had escaped for the moment, ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... "Lane is the merest buffoon," he replied quietly. "You are an artist. There is no comparison possible, Miss Norvell. The play itself is utterly unworthy of your talent, yet you succeed in dignifying it in a way I can never ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... their shoulders. Jonathas, opening wide his little eyes, gave a forced, buffoon-like laugh. Nothing could be more absurd, said he, than the idea that a human body could have eternal life; and he declaimed, for the benefit of the proconsul, this line from ...
— Herodias • Gustave Flaubert
... phrase—to come forth into the sun and air. I admire the writer of that letter from my heart; he was a man of thought on the most important subjects. But, indeed, had I lived in the Middle Ages (I am heartily glad that I did not) I should have been an eremite myself—if I had not been a professed buffoon, that is. These were the only philosophical lives yet open: laughter or prayer; sneers, we might say, and tears. Until the sun of the Positive arose, the wise man had to make his choice between ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a buffoon; formerly director of the playhouse. [He had been a manager of Drury Lane Theatre, and was the author of several dramatic pieces. He resided in Italy for several years, and, on his return, was appointed keeper of the King's Mews. He died in 1754, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... began to play the part of a clown or buffoon, acting in a very silly and stupid manner, while the others looked on laughing and pointing their fingers at ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... a most clear conscience, affirm that I have ever trembled to think toward the least profaneness.' Though—he says—he cannot wholly escape 'from some the imputation of sharpness,' he does not feel guilty of having offered insult to anyone, 'except to a mimic, cheater, bawd, or buffoon.' But—'I would ask of these supercilious politics, what nation, society, or general order of state I have provoked? ... What public person? Whether I have not, in all these, preserved their dignity, as mine own person, safe? ... Where have I ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... there is in them even occasional coarseness; but that the devil for instance should always be represented as a baffled fool, and made to play the buffoon sometimes after a disgusting fashion, was to them only the treatment he deserved: it was their notion of "poetic justice;" while most of them were too childish to be shocked at the discord thus introduced, and ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... who could write that was in many ways a mere buffoon, who praised his wares with the vulgar glibness of a quack. He was vain and ostentatious, ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... Applause which ought to be measured out with scrupulous justice, correctness and precision, has been by admiring ignorance, poured forth in a torrent roar of uncouth and obstreperous glee on the buffoon, "the clown that says more than is set down for him," and on "the robustious perriwig-pated fellow, who tears a passion all to rags," while chaste merit and propriety have often gone unrewarded by ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... cursed and swore at meeting with some one who regarded him as a hero. To Count Gregory Erdey she extended a smiling salutation from afar, which he requited by saluting her with his hat in one hand and his wig in another, which provoked a roar of Homeric laughter from the assembled guests. The young buffoon had had his head clean shaved in order that his hair might grow all the stronger, so that his bald pate quite scared the weak-nerved members of the company. The young housewife curtsied low in humble silence before the Foispan Count Sarosdy and his wife, ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... some critics as a grave moral censor, veiling his high purpose behind the grinning mask of comedy; by others as a buffoon of genius, whose only object was to raise a laugh. Both sides of the question are ingeniously and copiously argued in Browning's 'Aristophanes' Apology'; and there is a judicious summing up of the case of Aristophanes ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... no better test of the popular opinion of a man than the character assigned to him on the stage; and till the close of the sixteenth century Sir John Oldcastle remained the profligate buffoon of English comedy. Whether in life he bore the character so assigned to him, I am unable to say. The popularity of Henry V., and the splendour of his French wars, served no doubt to colour all who had opposed him with a blacker shade than they deserved: but it is almost certain that ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... surrounded by lamps,—as indeed can be done with a well-built house; but here the most wretched and ill-formed of all facades was thus quite incredibly placed in the clearest light. Did one amuse one's self with this as with the jests of the /pagliasso/, [Footnote: A sort of buffoon.] though not without scruple, since everybody must recognize something intentional in it,— just as people had before glossed on the previous external deportment of Von Plotho, so much prized in other respects, and, when once inclined towards him, had admired him as ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... made merry over the ivory, apes, and peacocks of existence. He seems less French than he is in his self-mockery, yet he is a true son of his time and of his country. This young Hamlet, who doubted the constancy of his mother the moon, was a very buffoon; I am the new buffoon of dusty eternities, might have been his declaration; a buffoon making subtle somersaults in the metaphysical blue. He was a metaphysician complicated by a poet. Von Hartmann it was who extorted his homage. "All is relative," was his war-cry on schools ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... of the guard-room at the end of the place, under the wing of the shaking and rattling signboard which serves as advertisement of the village, [note 3] a conversation is set up on the subject of this wandering buffoon. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... within the Hippodrome I, a buffoon in absurd clothes, Strive to make the thousands laugh; And when my act is done There comes the tread of camels' feet, Followed by Slayman Ali and his Arab troupe, Who tumble, jump and build pyramids Before a canvas ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... been of the same profession himself; a reply at once, sensible and witty. Mr. Wood, however, seems to be of opinion, that he was too much given to bantering, and that if he had thrown less of the buffoon or mimic into his conversation, his wit would have been very agreeable. He is charged by Wood with a higher failing, which ought indeed rather to be construed one of the blackest crimes, that is, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... internal satisfaction at the hut, Wolsey bade Patch dismount, and ascertain whether Mabel was within. The buffoon obeyed, tried the door, and finding it fastened, knocked, but to ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... tempted to suppose that a gentleman must everywhere be first, even aboard a rover; but my birth is every whit as good as any Scottish lord's, and I am not ashamed to confess that I stayed Crowding Pat until the end, and was not much better than the crew's buffoon. Indeed, it was no scene to bring out my merits. My health suffered from a variety of reasons; I was more at home to the last on a horse's back than a ship's deck; and, to be ingenuous, the fear of the sea was constantly in my mind, battling with the fear of my ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... unpleasing spectacle) the sight of sick persons and of a man full of ulcers, and yet are delighted to be spectators of the Philoctetes of Aristophon and the Jocasta of Silanion, wherein such wasting and dying persons are well acted; so must the young scholar, when he reads in a poem of Thersites the buffoon or Sisyphus the whoremaster or Batrachus the bawd speaking or doing anything, so praise the artificial managery of the poet, adapting the expressions to the persons, as withal to look on the discourses and actions so expressed ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... His every production is bathed in humour. This must never be, though it often has been, forgotten. He is not to be taken literally. He is always a humourist, not unfrequently a writer of burlesque, and occasionally a buffoon. ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... like a buffoon, with the parrot on his wrist,—for what purpose is he introduced into ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... the war, predicated upon a private letter of General Scott, the possession of which he did not satisfactorily account for. The Tribune, referring to his campaign as "a rhetorical spree," called him a "buffoon," a "political harlequin," a "repeater of mouldy jokes,"[852] and in bitter terms denounced his "low comedy performance at Tammany," his "double-shuffle dancing at Mozart Hall," his possession of a letter "by dishonourable means for a dishonourable purpose," and his ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... ferret out his antecedents, that the new actor had already attained middle age,—that he had been vegetating for years in that obscurest and most miserable of all dramatic positions, the low comedian of a country-theatre,—that he had come timidly to London and accepted at a low salary the post of buffoon at a half-theatre half-saloon in the City Road, called indifferently the "Grecian" and the "Eagle," where he had danced and tumbled, and sung comic songs, and delivered the dismal waggeries set down for him, without any marked success, and almost without notice. He ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... had curried favour with Nero. Polyclitus was sent to inquire into Suetonius Paulinus' administration of Britain after the revolt of Boadicea in A.D. 61. Vatinius was a deformed cobbler from Beneventum who became a sort of court buffoon, and acquired great wealth and ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... had been made plain to her, uttered only a single word of approval, which, on subsequently consulting a book of interpretations, this person found to indicate: "A person of weak intellect; one without an adequate sense of the proportion and fitness of things; a buffoon; a jester; a compound of gooseberries scalded and crushed with cream"; but although each of these definitions may in a way be regarded as applicable, he is still unable to decide which was the ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... himself. For some reason he had come to the conclusion that the less the settlers knew of pleasure the better, and therefore he laid down the law that all strolling popular entertainers should be forbidden to enter the holy city. No public buffoon ever cracked his jokes at Herrnhut. No tight-rope dancer poised on giddy height. No barrel-dancer rolled his empty barrel. No tout for lotteries swindled the simple. No juggler mystified the children. No cheap-jack ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... was imprisoned. He was one of the court that tried King Charles, and his signature is upon the king's death-warrant. He was a spendthrift, and afterwards had a quarrel with Cromwell, who denounced him as an unbeliever, and even as a buffoon. When Charles II. made the proclamation of amnesty, Marten surrendered, but he was tried and condemned to death. He plead that he came in under the proffer of mercy, and the sentence was commuted to a life imprisonment; and after a short confinement in the Tower of London ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... by the kindness of Caesar's friends, was appointed his master of the horse. Then he thought that he could live with Hippia[17] by virtue of his office, and that he might give horses which were the property of the state to Sergius the buffoon. At that time he had selected for himself to live in, not the house which he now dishonours, but that of Marcus Piso. Why need I mention his decrees, his robberies, the possessions of inheritances which were given him, and those too which ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... to shock us except among neighbours, or at most fellow-countrymen. Without knowing it, Jean found a fund of amusement in the witticisms and harangues of his old teacher, who united in himself the contradictory attributes of high-priest and buffoon. He was great at telling a story, and though his tales were beyond the child's intelligence, they did not fail to leave behind a confused impression of recklessness, irony, and cynicism. Mademoiselle Servien alone never relaxed her attitude of uncompromising ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... Another of Michelangelo's buffoon friends was a Florentine celebrity, Piloto, the goldsmith. We know that he took this man with him when he went to Venice in 1530; but Vasari tells no characteristic stories concerning their friendship. It may be remarked ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... supposed to be themselves conjurers. He becomes a formidable opponent to Theodorick and his chivalry; but as he attempted by treachery to attain the victory, he is, when overcome, condemned to fill the dishonourable yet appropriate office of buffoon and juggler at the ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... further proof of the urgent need for conscientious inquiry, call it by what name you please. The science of common sense is all-sufficient. The seemingly intelligent individual who can only find material for ribaldry in this connection is a more serious buffoon than he imagines. It is apparent that our methods are wrong. Any constructive effort to correct them is commendable. When it is stated that 20 per cent. of the American women are unable to bear children, and that 25 per cent. of all the others are unwilling to assume the burden and responsibility ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... "Buffoon!... And I believed in you! And I yielded myself to you, believing you to be a hero, believing your offer of sacrifice to ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... dance, having then the diversion of the spectator, in the way of laughing, for its object, should preserve a moderately buffoon simplicity, and the dancer, aided by a natural genius, but especially by throwing as much nature as possible into his execution, may promise himself to amuse and please the spectator; even though he should not be very ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... well as the priest; it may have the mountebank selling his potions, and playing his tricks, as well as the sacrificer with his axe—unless the ambition of the bloated performer should prefer to combine the offices, and be at once the butcher and the buffoon." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... is a woman who rises to eminence by crime, as an unfaithful wife, the murderess of her husband, and an impudent defier of justice. Her brother, Flamineo, becomes under Webster's treatment one of those worst human infamies—a court dependent; ruffian, buffoon, pimp, murderer by turns. Furthermore, and without any adequate object beyond that of completing this study of a type he loved, Webster makes him murder his own brother Marcello by treason. The part assigned to Marcello, it should be said, is a genial and happy one; and Cornelia, the mother ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... what Figure it will make in the Minds of those they leave behind them: Whether it was worth coming into the World for; whether it be suitable to a reasonable Being; in short, whether it appears Graceful in this Life, or will turn to an Advantage in the next. Let the Sycophant, or Buffoon, the Satyrist, or the Good Companion, consider with himself, when his Body shall be laid in the Grave, and his Soul pass into another State of Existence, how much it will redound to his Praise to have it said of him, that no Man in England ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... power, and crossed and misdirected it, and the casuist came in and manoeuvred the limelight—all too like the old devil of the mediaeval drama, who was made only to be laughed at and taken lightly, a buffoon and a laughing-stock indeed. And while he could unveil villainy, as is the case pre-eminently in Huish in the Ebb-Tide, he shrank from inflicting the punishments for which untutored human nature looks, and thus he lost one great aid to crude dramatic ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... manufactured and consumed throughout the provinces almost exceed belief. The societies had regular constitutions. Their presiding officers were called kings, princes, captains, archdeacons, or rejoiced in similar high-sounding names. Each chamber had its treasurer, its buffoon, and its standard-bearer for public processions. Each had its peculiar title or blazon, as the Lily, the Marigold, or the Violet, with an appropriate motto. By the year 1493, the associations had become so important, that Philip the Fair summoned ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... language not only to those who were then living, as Apollodorus, Syllus, and the rest, but he called Socrates, who was the father of philosophy, the Attic buffoon, using the Latin word Scurra. He never called Chrysippus by any name but Chesippus. And you yourself a little before, when you were numbering up a senate, as we may call them, of philosophers, scrupled not to say that the most ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... too, was a great success, but I could not bear Hamlet. And the grave-digger in Italian was a mere buffoon. The whole scene was farcical to me because of the Italian, 'Questo cranio, Signore—'And Enrico, dainty fellow, took the skull in a corner of his black cloak. As an Italian, he would not willingly touch it. It was unclean. But he looked a fool, hulking himself in ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... exhibition of love—or, at least, not necessarily so. You might exhibit sensibility before a famous poet, or a gallant soldier, or a celebrated traveler—or, for that matter, before a remarkable buffoon, like Cagliostro, or a freak, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... the house to check them over. To the joyful surprise of the visitors, there among them was little Eva—supposed to be eaten, and she even retained her right hand. Thus another newspaper libel upon the poor old black bear—the buffoon of the forest—was shown to be devoid of truth; yet that story was published in the Toronto papers, and, no doubt, was copied all over the ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... there was something eminently unkingly."[1] It seemed too bad that "royalty should be exhibited to the world stammering, slobbering, shedding unmanly tears, trembling at the drawn sword, and talking in the style alternately of a buffoon and of a pedagogue." That is truly not an attractive picture. But there is something on the other side. John Richard Green puts both sides: "His big head, his slobbering tongue, his quilted clothes, his rickety legs stood out in ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... lurid storm of Vesuvius. He was entitled the "Band in the Wreath of the Gods," because with his fate that of all the rest was bound up. His death, ominously foretold from eldest antiquity, would be the signal for the ruin of the universe. Asa Loki was the Momus Satan or Devil Buffoon of the Scandinavian mythology, the half amusing, half horrible embodiment of wit, treachery, and evil; now residing with the gods in heaven, now accompanying Thor on his frequent adventures, now visiting and plotting with his own kith and kin in frosty Jotunheim, beyond the earth ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... be as full of quibbling as a cock of dirt. Thou stinkest heavy with filth, and reekest of nought but sin. There is no need to lengthen the plea against a buffoon, whose strength is in ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... and nothing more. The truth was that in the Washington of the 'forties, neither the inner nor the outer Lincoln could by itself find lodgment. Neither the lonely mystical thinker nor the captivating buffoon could do more than ripple its surface. As superficial as Springfield, it lacked Springfield's impulsive generosity. To the long record of its obtuseness it had added another item. The gods had sent it a ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... is true, had got on well according to his lights, and was on more than friendly terms with Evans, the school slow bowler. But he was not much liked by his equals. Rudd was looked on quite rightly as an absolute buffoon; Collins got on fairly well, but was generally admitted to be a bit eccentric. Gordon was, without doubt, the pick of the crew. His position in form was a great help. Mansell's friends thought him a cheerful, amusing and respectable-looking ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... ... son follow'd, of congenial quill, As near the dirt and no less prone to ill. Walcot, of English heart, had English pen, Buffoon he might be, but for hire was none; Nor plumed and mounted in Professor's chair Offer'd to grin for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... cloisters, parks, temples, pools, and fountains, and he should be mad enough to commit such a crime—and for a mere trifle? [Wrathfully.] You offspring of a loose wench, you brother-in-law of the king, Sansthanaka, you libertine, you slanderer, you buffoon, you gilded monkey, say it before me! This friend of mine does n't even draw a flowering jasmine creeper to himself, to gather the blossoms, for fear that a twig might perhaps be injured. How should he commit a crime like this, which heaven and earth call accursed? Just wait, you ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... at her. Underground politician that he was, he knew that Mirabelle had utterly destroyed the half of his ambition. She had made him a laughing-stock, a buffoon, a political joke. To think that his name was connected with a crusade against short-skirts and dancing—Ugh! Not even the average run of church-goers would swallow it. "Mayor!" he thought bitterly. "President of Council! I couldn't get ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... the same time. We did not know that the theory of evolution was one that had been quietly but steadily gaining ground during the last hundred years. Buffon we knew by name, but he sounded too like "buffoon" for any good to come from him. We had heard also of Lamarck, and held him to be a kind of French Lord Monboddo; but we knew nothing of his doctrine save through the caricatures promulgated by his opponents, ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... he executed accordingly, exclaiming as he departed—"Oh, city and court! you by whom the expectations of the bold pretender are fulfilled, while the hopes of the modest labourer are destroyed; you who abundantly sustain the shameless Buffoon, while the worthy sage is left to die of hunger; I bid you farewell." That said, he proceeded to Flanders, where he finished in arms the life which he might have rendered immortal by letters, and died in the company of his friend ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the fourth and most malicious personage, his name will be enough—it was Bixiou! Not (alas!) the Bixiou of 1825, but the Bixiou of 1836, a misanthropic buffoon, acknowledged supreme, by reason of his energetic and caustic wit; a very fiend let loose now that he saw how he had squandered his intellect in pure waste; a Bixiou vexed by the thought that he had not come by his share of the wreckage ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... bold enough to utter a truth which she fully believes all competent people know, but which none has heretofore been brave enough to utter.) You see, the thing that gravels her is that I am so persistently glorified as a mere buffoon, as if that entirely covered my case—which ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... three-fourths at least. The Jesuits have the Cure there, with a fine habitation and a mill; in digging the foundation of which last, a quarry of orbicular flat stones was found, about two inches in diameter, of the shape of a buffoon's cap, with six sides, whose groove was set with small buttons of the size of the head of a minikin or small pin. Some of these stones were bigger, some smaller; between the stones which could not be joined, ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... be anything but compliant. Lie, cheat, make every word a snare, and every act a forgery; but never contradict. Agree with people, and they make a couch for you in their hearts. You know the story of Dante and the buffoon. Both were entertained at the court of the vain pedant, who called himself Prince Scaliger,—the former poorly, the latter sumptuously. 'How comes it,' said the buffoon to the poet, 'that I am so rich and ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... illustrious body he had on all occasions deliberately treated with contumely and hatred,—but to the private revenge of an insulted soldier. The weak thin voice of Cassius Chaereas, tribune of the praetorian cohort, had marked him out for the coarse and calumnious banter of the imperial buffoon; and he determined to avenge himself, and at the same time rid the world of a monster. He engaged several accomplices in the conspiracy, which was nearly frustrated by their want of resolution. For four whole days they hesitated, ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... proclaimed the names and styles—it seems that the wrestlers have a fancy to be known by the names of mountains and rivers—in a fashion which recalled the tournament. There was also another personage, with a Dan Leno-like face and an extraordinary gift of contorting his legs, who played the buffoon, and gyrated round the dignified M.C., who remained unmoved while the audience laughed. It was evidently the right thing for the prizes—they were awarded at the end of each bout—to be presented as comically as possible; and some of the Shakespearean humours which appealed so powerfully ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... published in a pagan or popish nation, who are justly impatient of all indignity offered to the established religion of their country, no doubt but the author would have received the punishment he deserved. But the fate of this impious buffoon is very different, for in a Protestant kingdom, zealous of their civil and religious immunities, he has not only escaped affronts and the effects of public resentment, but has been caressed and patronised by persons of great figure, and of all denominations. Violent party-men, who differed in ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... recompensed: and why? Because Taste (GOUT, inclination) sets no limits to its recompenses. The King of Prussia overloads men of talent with his benefits for precisely the reasons which induce a little German Prince to overload with benefits a buffoon or a dwarf." [—OEuvres de Voltaire,—xxvii. 220 n.] Could there be a phenomenon ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... beast, seeing that no animal ever yet lost his senses through blighted love, which proves abundantly that animals have no souls. The employment of a lover is that of a mountebank, of a soldier, of a quack, of a buffoon, of a prince, of a ninny, of a king, of an idler, of a monk, of a dupe, of a blackguard, of a liar, of a braggart, of a sycophant, of a numskull, of a frivolous fool, of a blockhead, of a know-nothing, of a knave. An employment from which ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... streets!—and was shown up by a young eunuch into the hareem, and found my old friend very poorly, but spent a pleasant evening with him, his young wife—a Georgian slave whom he had married,—his daughter by a former wife—whom he had married when he was fourteen, and the female dwarf buffoon of the Valideh Pasha (Ismail's mother) whose heart I won by rising to her, because she was so old and deformed. The other women laughed, but the little old dwarf liked it. She was a Circassian, and seemed clever. You see how the 'Thousand and One Nights' are quite true and real; how great Beys ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... Shallow-minded people fancy Puritanism to be prosaic, because the laces and ruffles of the Cavaliers are a more picturesque costume at a masked ball than the dress of the Roundheads. The Puritan has become a grim and ugly scarecrow, on whom every buffoon may break his jest. But the genuine old Puritan spirit ceases to be picturesque only because of its sublimity: its poetry is sublimed into religion. The great poet of the Puritans fails, as far as he fails, when he tries to transcend ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... uttering a wild scream, and beginning to caper as if he were a madman. I was much alarmed as well as surprised at this course of conduct; for although my friend was an inveterate joker, he was the very reverse of what is termed a buffoon, and never indulged in personally grotesque actions with a view to make people laugh—such as making faces, a practice which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, causes the face-makers to look idiotical rather than funny, and induces ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... table. Such a picture satisfied the tastes of the public of his time, and that public found nothing incongruous in a return to the scene immediately afterward of all the characters save the reprobate, who had gone to his reward, to hear a description of the catastrophe from the buffoon under the table, and platitudinously to moralize that the perfidious wretch, having been stored away safely in the realm of Pluto and Proserpine, nothing remained for them to do except to raise their voices in the words ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... said, 'He is not a good mimick.' One of the company added, 'A merry Andrew, a buffoon.' JOHNSON. 'But he has wit too, and is not deficient in ideas, or in fertility and variety of imagery, and not empty of reading; he has knowledge enough to fill up his part. One species of wit he has ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... Paris, factotum and confidant, passes his life in executing her commissions. To him she talks, rather than writes, as she talks to her intimates, in overwhelming voluble fashion, gossiping, punning, often playing the buffoon, as she does with that little set of hers at her retreat of the "Hermitage." Persons, even places, have their nicknames. St. Petersburg is the "Duck-pond"; Grimm himself the "Fag," "Souffredouleur," George ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... is, in his own conceit, the only shake-scene in the country." Another contemporaneous critic said of the scene between Brutus and Cassius in "Julius Caesar": "They are put there to play the bully and the buffoon, to show their activity of face and muscles. They are to play a prize, a trial of skill and hugging and swaggering, like two drunken Hectors, for a two-penny reckoning." Shakespeare's contemporaries—or, at least, many of them—sought to belittle his work in ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... that rose up among the assembled people to question the divine right of kings to do wrong. We may be sure the real Thersites, from whom the poet drew his picture, was a very different and a far more serious power in debate than the misshapen buffoon of the Iliad. But the king who had been thwarted and exposed by him in the day would, over his cups in the evening, enjoy the poet's travesty, and long for the good old times when he could put down all impertinent criticism by the stroke of his knotty sceptre. The ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... false from the real? who can penetrate under this lying mask, to say, this smile conceals a black despair? no one, happily, no one! Stay, yes, love could never be mistaken; no, its instinct would enlighten it. But I hear my wife—my wife! Come to your post, inauspicious buffoon." ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... self-consciousness that comes when I try to force myself. But the really awful days aren't when I think I can't write. They're when I wonder whether any writing is worth while at all—I mean whether I'm not a sort of glorified buffoon." ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of children, he called them all out of the house to check them over. To the joyful surprise of the visitors, there among them was little Eva—supposed to be eaten, and she even retained her right hand. Thus another newspaper libel upon the poor old black bear—the buffoon of the forest—was shown to be devoid of truth; yet that story was published in the Toronto papers, and, no doubt, was copied all over ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... courage!" continued the young detective. "Ah! there's no denying it, his system of defense—of absolute denial—is a masterpiece. It is perfect. How well he played that difficult part of buffoon! At times I could scarcely restrain my admiration. What is a famous comedian beside that fellow? The greatest actors need the adjunct of stage scenery to support the illusion, whereas this man, entirely unaided, almost convinced ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... the Russians, who have greater facility—if properly cultivated—and are more capable of learning languages to perfection than the English. I am not referring to every shameless holiday tripper on the Continent who makes himself a buffoon by using misapplied, mispronounced, self-mistaught French or Italian or German sentences, but I mean the rare observant Englishman who studies ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... then, this bookworm—this remnant of old heathen philosophy, who hardly believes, so God save me, the truth of the Christian creed, has topp'd his part so well that he forces his Emperor to dissemble in his presence. Beginning by being the buffoon of the court, he has wormed himself into all its secrets, made himself master of all its intrigues, conspired with my own son-in-law against me, debauched my guards,—indeed so woven his web of deceit, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... of Lombardy and Romagna, and found themselves much better rewarded than at home, where their talent was cheap and plentiful. The better type of these people is the amusing man (l'uomo piacevole), the worse is the buffoon and the vulgar parasite who presents himself at weddings and banquets with the argument, 'If I am not invited, the fault is not mine.' Now and then the latter combine to pluck a young spendthrift, but in general they are treated and despised as parasites, while wits of higher position ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... to be called the Quarterly Review. The project was a daring one, in view of Constable's great ability and resources; to make it foolhardy to madness Scott selected to manage the new business a brother of James Ballantyne, a dissipated little buffoon, with about as much business ability and general caliber of character as is connoted by the name which Scott coined for him, "Rigdumfunnidos." The selection of such a man for such a place betrays in Scott's eminently sane and balanced ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... boy was with the bleeding nose?" and "why were halberdiers admitted?" Veronese replied that they were the sort of servants a rich and magnificent host would have about him. He was then asked why he had introduced the buffoon with a parrot on his hand. He replied that he really thought only Christ and His Apostles were present, but that when he had a little space over, he adorned it with imaginary figures. This defence of the vast and crowded canvas did not commend itself, and he was asked ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... Byzantine people: and Theodora, after following Comito on the stage, in the dress of a slave, with a stool on her head, was at length permitted to exercise her independent talents. She neither danced, nor sung, nor played on the flute; her skill was confined to the pantomime arts; she excelled in buffoon characters, and as often as the comedian swelled her cheeks, and complained with a ridiculous tone and gesture of the blows that were inflicted, the whole theatre of Constantinople resounded with laughter and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... universal actor—comedian, tragedian, buffoon—all in one. There was no shade of human emotion which he did not seem capable of giving ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... proceeding from their corner of the house announced that business was over, and that chaff and fun, so dear to the heart of every Kanowit, was being carried on with great gusto. As we arrived and stood by the group, one of their number (evidently a privileged buffoon) begged to be allowed to speak to the Resident. "You remember that gun, Resident," said he, "you gave me?" (This was an old muzzle-loader for which Mr. H. had had no further use.) "Oh yes," was the reply; "what luck have you had with it?" "Oh, wonderful," ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... here, in order to explain the success of Croustillac, that at sea the hours seem very long; the slightest distractions are precious, and one is very glad to have always at one's beck and call a species of buffoon endowed with imperturbable good humor. As to the chevalier, he hid under a laughing and careless mask, a sad preoccupation; the end of his journey drew near; the words of Father Griffen had been too ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... with some one who regarded him as a hero. To Count Gregory Erdey she extended a smiling salutation from afar, which he requited by saluting her with his hat in one hand and his wig in another, which provoked a roar of Homeric laughter from the assembled guests. The young buffoon had had his head clean shaved in order that his hair might grow all the stronger, so that his bald pate quite scared the weak-nerved members of the company. The young housewife curtsied low in humble silence before the Foispan ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... Pippo, as he had been the most difficult to restrain during the day, was the first to steal from his lair, now that the Argus-like eyes of Baptiste permitted the freedom, and the exhilarating, coolness of the sunset invited action. His success emboldened others, and, ere long, the buffoon had an admiring audience around him, that was well-disposed to laugh at his witticisms, and to applaud all his practical jokes. Gaining courage as he proceeded, the buffoon gradually went from liberty to liberty, until he was at length triumphantly ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... procure any better usage for the unfortunate judge, whose health was suffering severely under his privations. Ivan, however, had recommended himself in the same way as Leo, by his perfections as a cook, and moreover he was a capital buffoon. His fetters were sometimes taken off that he might divert the villagers by his dances and strange antics while his master played the guitar. Sometimes they sang Russian songs together to the instrument, and on these occasions ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wishes are my law, and until these clouds have rolled from the blue heaven of your life I will be as silent as the watching moon. And, by the way," he added rather nervously, "perhaps you will be silent also—about our talk, I mean, as we do not want that buffoon, Foy, thrusting his street-boy ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... Puritan. He is as indecent as a Puritan. He is as full of gross words and sensual facts as a sermon of the seventeenth century. Up to this point of his life indeed hardly anyone would have dreamed of calling him a Puritan; he was called sometimes an anarchist, sometimes a buffoon, sometimes (by the more discerning stupid people) a prig. His attitude towards current problems was felt to be arresting and even indecent; I do not think that anyone thought of connecting it with the old Calvinistic morality. But Shaw, who knew better than the Shavians, ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... unlike themselves, by losing that peculiar and distinctive Character in which they excel. This is most palpable in those Authors, whose Character consists in Humour. Let any one read Terence, as he is translated by Mr. Echard, and he will take him to have been a Buffoon: Whereas Terence never dealt in such a Kind of low Mirth. His true Character is, to have afforded to his Spectators and Readers the gravest, and, at the same Time, the most agreeable, most polite Entertainment of any antient Author now extant. This is, in some Measure, ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... had been a wild and frolicsome youth in his Hampshire home, the effect of being a professional buffoon had actually made it a relaxation of effort to him to be grave, quiet, and slow in movement; and this was perhaps a more effectual disguise than the dark garments, and the false brown hair, beard, and moustache, with which he concealed the shorn and shaven condition required ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... player, proclaimed the names and styles—it seems that the wrestlers have a fancy to be known by the names of mountains and rivers—in a fashion which recalled the tournament. There was also another personage, with a Dan Leno-like face and an extraordinary gift of contorting his legs, who played the buffoon, and gyrated round the dignified M.C., who remained unmoved while the audience laughed. It was evidently the right thing for the prizes—they were awarded at the end of each bout—to be presented ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... The Count was as Puritanic as Oliver Cromwell himself. For some reason he had come to the conclusion that the less the settlers knew of pleasure the better, and therefore he laid down the law that all strolling popular entertainers should be forbidden to enter the holy city. No public buffoon ever cracked his jokes at Herrnhut. No tight-rope dancer poised on giddy height. No barrel-dancer rolled his empty barrel. No tout for lotteries swindled the simple. No juggler mystified the children. ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... knights-errant just as much as valour. However, he said they might give the shirt to Sancho; and shutting himself in with him in a room where there was a sumptuous bed, he undressed and put on the shirt; and then, finding himself alone with Sancho, he said to him, "Tell me, thou new-fledged buffoon and old booby, dost thou think it right to offend and insult a duenna so deserving of reverence and respect as that one just now? Was that a time to bethink thee of thy Dapple, or are these noble personages likely to let the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... by reason of its own gravitating power. He courted notoriety in a way that would have made him, if a poorer man, the toadying Boswell of some other Johnson giant, and, if very poor, the welcome buffoon of some gossiping journal, who would never weary of contortions, and who would brutify himself at the death, to kindle ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... girl was only imprudent: at all events, she repents her folly too late. She has now no friend upon earth but Mrs. Freke, who is, in fact, her worst enemy, and who tyrannizes over her without mercy. Imagine what it is to be the butt of a buffoon!" ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... London. Doth the post dabble into our letters? Whatever agreement you make with Murray, if satisfactory to you, must be so to me. There need be no scruple, because, though I used sometimes to buffoon to myself, loving a quibble as well as the barbarian himself (Shakspeare, to wit)—'that, like a Spartan, I would sell my life as dearly as possible'—it never was my intention to turn it to personal, pecuniary account, but to bequeath it to a friend—yourself—in ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... the ivory, apes, and peacocks of existence. He seems less French than he is in his self-mockery, yet he is a true son of his time and of his country. This young Hamlet, who doubted the constancy of his mother the moon, was a very buffoon; I am the new buffoon of dusty eternities, might have been his declaration; a buffoon making subtle somersaults in the metaphysical blue. He was a metaphysician complicated by a poet. Von Hartmann it was ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... as an angel, a saint, and a demigod; he has been caricatured as a self-indulgent sensualist, a vulgar Lothario, a buffoon, a joker of ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... leading Buffoon of the Party). I wonder if she's got any money. If she 'as, I'll ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 20, 1893 • Various
... art anything, but what thou shouldst be; prithee, Major, leave off being an old Buffoon, that is, a Lover turn'd ridiculous by Age, consider thy self a mere rouling Tun of Nantz,—a walking Chimney, ever smoaking with nasty Mundungus, and then thou hast a Countenance like an ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... ears, in print would seem coarse. He was a mirth-loving man, and perhaps that accounted not a little for his successful amours; since women, for the most part frivolous creatures, are excessively bored by the seriousness with which men treat them, and they can seldom resist the buffoon who makes them laugh. Their sense of humour is crude. Diana of Ephesus is always prepared to fling prudence to the winds for the red-nosed comedian who sits on his hat. I realised that Captain Butler had charm. If I had not known the tragic story of the shipwreck ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... a different class and character. Nature had intended Lucian Gay for a scholar and a wit; necessity had made him a scribbler and a buffoon. He had distinguished himself at the University; but he had no patrimony, nor those powers of perseverance which success in any learned profession requires. He was good-looking, had great animal spirits, and a keen sense of enjoyment, and could ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... quivered with an almost passionate disdain. She was suddenly aware of an intense burning misery that seemed to gnaw into her very soul. Why had she come out with this buffoon, she wondered? Why had she come to the masquerade at all? She was utterly out of sympathy with its festive gaiety. A great and overmastering desire for solitude descended upon her. She turned almost angrily ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... "Oh, you Neka" (buffoon), she groaned, "didn't you swear to separate from Nalini, and have you not taken all your meals with him ever since? Is that the action of a ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... the dresses are conformable to the ancient costume of China. There are others, however, that represent the Tartar conquest, but none built on historical events subsequent to that period. But the ancient drama is preferred by the critics. They have also comic pieces, in which there is always a buffoon, whose grimaces and low jests, like those of the buffoons in our own theatres, obtain from the audience the greatest share of applause. The dialogue in all their dramas, whether serious or comic, is conducted in a kind of monotonous recitative, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... been a buffoon, and his dress still bore many tokens of his former profession. His big head swayed upon his thin neck; his droll, though emaciated features constantly changed their expression, and even when he was not coughing, his mouth ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... first meet with Macbeth's, he is spellbound. That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fascination. These witches can hurt the body; those have power over the soul. Hecate in Middleton has a son, a low buffoon: the hags of Shakspeare have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, so they seem to be without human relations. ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... in the wrong— Was everything by starts, but nothing long; Who in the course of one revolving moon Was chemist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon. Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking: Besides a thousand ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... strict silence was observed. Each man had, therefore, time to commune with the spirits of those nine thousand miles away. It was not a time for the buffoon; they were faced with all the ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... and that occupation could not absorb me. I begin to understand Lady Charlotte and her liking for Mr. Powys better. He is ready to play or be serious, as you please; but in either case 'Merthyr is never a buffoon nor a parson'—Lady C. remarked this morning; and that describes him, if it were not for the detestable fling at the clergy, which she never misses. It seems in her blood to think that all priests are hypocrites. What a little boat to be in on ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and self, never in tune; Sad for the most part, then in such a flow Of spirits, I seem now hero, now buffoon." ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... half an inch below his ear. "A very common sort of individual," he said of himself, as he looked in the glass when Mary Lawrie had been already twelve months in the house; "but then a man ought to be common. A man who is uncommon is either a dandy or a buffoon." ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... old men; one was a model, a native of Frascati, with the face of a venerable apostle; the other, for contrast, looked like a buffoon and was the possessor of a grotesque nose, long, thin at the end and ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... of proper mammas, who teach their children to behave "pretty"—thinking good and quiet synonymous. Somehow, the little fellows, unfortunately, take the Lark for Mr. Spohf, who has hitherto done the funny in a refined style, scarcely to be imagined—an elegant, amiable, fun,—a mixture of the buffoon and gentleman, the sublime and the ridiculous, quite marvellous to behold,—making our little friend (who you are aware was moulded in one of Nature's odd freaks) appear, to tender imaginations, almost supernatural. The mistake and ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... "Lutrin,"[1] replete with excellent poetry, wit, humour, and satire, he certainly was not obliged to the ancients. Excepting Horace, how little idea had either Greeks or Romans of wit and humour! Aristophanes and Lucian, compared with moderns, were, the one a blackguard, and the other a buffoon. In my eyes, the "Lutrin," the "Dispensary," and the "Rape of the Lock," are standards of grace and elegance, not to be paralleled by antiquity; and eternal reproaches to Voltaire, whose indelicacy in the "Pucelle" ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... performance. Such a monstrous Pandarus would have been blackballed at the Pimp. Thersites—Shakspeare's Thersites—for Homer's was another Thersites quite—finely called by Coleridge, "the Caliban of demagogic life"—loses all individuality, and is but a brutal buffoon grossly caricatured. The scene between Ulysses and Achilles, with its wondrous wisdomful speech, is omitted! of itself, worth all the poetry written between the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... Cromwell, with equal patience on matters more important. We all have our sufferings: why increase one another's wantonly? Be the blood Scotch or English, French or Italian, a drummer's or a buffoon's, it carries a soul upon its stream; and every soul has many places to touch at, and much business to perform, before it reaches its ultimate destination. Abolish the power of Charles; extinguish not his virtues. Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy to be preserved. A wise and dispassionate ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... From the moment that their eyes first meet with Macbeth's, he is spellbound. That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fascination. These Witches can hurt the body: those have power over the soul. Hecate in Middleton has a Son, a low buffoon: the hags of Shakspeare have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul Anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... about on a fiery horse, why he has a staff of aides-de-camp, and why he has two grooms, are things which no one seems to know. He patronises generals and admirals, doctors and commissariat officers, and they submit to be patronised by him. Half-priest, half-buffoon, something of a Friar Tuck and something of a Louis XV. abbe, he is a sort of privileged person, who by the mere force of impudence has made his way in the world. Most English girls in their teens fall in love with a curate and a cavalry officer. Monseigneur ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... him. As for himself, he never concealed anything, and when it came to mystery, he had a vague idea of something shameful, if not criminal. Doctor Gordon's incomprehensible changes of mood, of almost more than mood, of character even, disturbed him. Why a man should be one hour a country buffoon, the next an absorbed gentleman, he could not understand. And he could not understand also why Clemency had never left the house since he had met her on the day of his arrival. She evidently was herself angry and sulky ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... sneering; "to be liked, it is not necessary to be anything but compliant. Lie, cheat, make every word a snare, and every act a forgery; but never contradict. Agree with people, and they make a couch for you in their hearts. You know the story of Dante and the buffoon. Both were entertained at the court of the vain pedant, who called himself Prince Scaliger,—the former poorly, the latter sumptuously. 'How comes it,' said the buffoon to the poet, 'that I am so ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... would be the climax: that I should show my long beard and white hairs amid that throng of women and lunatics; and clap and yell in unseemly rapture over the vile contortions of an abandoned buffoon. ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... of course neglected by the fiddling, gambling, wenching, royal buffoon, who succeeded the royal martyr, and whose necessities he had supplied, when an outcast pauper exile in a foreign land, from the proceeds of those very estates which he had so nearly lost in fighting for ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... fat, freckled boy with chubby cheeks, who took half a dozen boys' story-papers and was always being kept in for reading detective stories behind his desk. There was Tip Smith, destined by his freckles and red hair to be the buffoon in all our games, though he walked like a timid little old man and had a funny, cracked laugh. Tip worked hard in his father's grocery store every afternoon, and swept it out before school in the morning. Even his recreations were laborious. ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... I knew it. I told you. I'm silly. I'm a buffoon.—But haven't we had a great afternoon?" he added, with ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... his misery like a Caesar's toga, compared by this young buffoon to a kid who had been spanked! She had not noticed it. Ye Gods! ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... you to say? What explanation have you to offer for your conduct? You have behaved like a buffoon, ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... of the Sons of Usnach, as told in the earlier part of the manuscript. At this feast Bricriu. engages in conversation with Fergus, reproaching him for his broken promises to the Ulstermen who had joined him, and for his dalliance with Queen Maev. Bricriu, who in other romances is a mere buffoon, here appears as a distinguished poet, and a chief ollave; his satire remains bitter, but by no means scurrilous, and the verses put into his mouth, although far beneath the standard of the verses given to Deirdre in the earlier part of the manuscript, show a certain amount ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... good speaker; and, having made some allusion to O'Connell in rather strong terms in the House of Lords, the latter very coarsely and unjustly denounced him, in a speech he made in the House of Commons, as a bloated buffoon. Alvanley thereupon called out the Liberator, who would not meet him, but excused himself by saying, "There is blood already on this hand"—alluding to his fatal duel ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... rightly guide and bear with her weakness; was no prop to the "child," and believes himself absolved by this severe castigation. Qu'est-ce qu'il me chante? Has the letter undergone transformation in the Christian climate of Reinfeld, or did it leave the hand of this once shallow buffoon in its present form? He asserts, moreover, that he lives in a never dreamed of happiness with his present wife, whose acquaintance he made a week before the engagement, and whom he married six weeks after the same event: ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... good nature, smartness, and animal spirits; hence arose a vivacity and fluency that were often amusing, and passed for very clever. Reserve she had none; would talk about strangers, or friends, herself, her mother, her God, and the last buffoon-singer, in a breath. At a hint from Rosa, she told her who the lady in the pink dress was, and the lady in the violet velvet, and so on; for each lady was defined by her dress, and, more or less, quizzed by this show-woman, not exactly out of malice, but because it is smarter ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... nature to derive consolation from such scenes; from theatres, whose buffoon laughter and discordant mirth awakened distempered sympathy, or where fictitious tears and wailings mocked the heart-felt grief within; from festival or crowded meeting, where hilarity sprung from the worst feelings of our nature, or such enthralment of the better ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... the course of one revolving moon, Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon; Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking, Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking, * * * * * * * He laughed himself from Court, then sought relief By forming parties, but ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... gently aside as if asleep; but when one of his slaves came up to the table and stole some wine, his eyes were wide open enough, and he said, 'Villain, don't you know that I am asleep only for Maecenas?'[107] But this is not perhaps so strange, considering Galba was a buffoon. But at Argos Nicostratus and Phayllus were great political rivals: so when King Philip visited that city, Phayllus thought if he prostituted his wife, who was very handsome, to the King, he would get from him some important office or place. And Nicostratus getting wind ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... other than the man who intoxicated his soldiers, not with glory, like the first Napoleon, but with wine; he will never be other than the pygmy tyrant of a great people. Grandeur, even in infamy, is utterly inconsistent with the calibre of the man. As dictator, he is a buffoon; let him make himself emperor, he will be grotesque. That will finish him. His destiny is to make mankind shrug their shoulders. Will he be less severely punished for that reason? Not at all. Contempt does not, in his case, mitigate anger; he will be hideous, and he will remain ridiculous. ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... As pet buffoon of the tories about town, Mountfort was followed, at a considerable distance of time, by Estcourt—an actor who united wit and fine humor with irresistible powers of mimicry; and who contrived to acquire the respect and affectionate ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... rude railing rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon; coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure, but always vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his clerical character. His Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng is a study of very low life, reminding one slightly of Burns's ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... then the diversion of the spectator, in the way of laughing, for its object, should preserve a moderately buffoon simplicity, and the dancer, aided by a natural genius, but especially by throwing as much nature as possible into his execution, may promise himself to amuse and please the spectator; even though he ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... pell-mell with all the fancies and furies that happened at the moment to be whisking about in his head, were the consternation of Ministers. He was one part blackguard, people said, and three parts buffoon; but those who knew him better could not help liking him—he meant well; and he was really good-humoured and kind-hearted, if you took him the right way. If you took him the wrong way, however, you must look out for squalls, as ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... much internal satisfaction at the hut, Wolsey bade Patch dismount, and ascertain whether Mabel was within. The buffoon obeyed, tried the door, and finding it fastened, knocked, ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... ever'one here believes that yarn. It fits tew pat, not tew be true. So me an' Spike are th' true murderers, be we? Wal, this is sum unexpected an' s'prisin', ain't it Spike?" and he turned to his comrade, grinning and glaring like a huge buffoon; but a close observer might have noticed that his skin had ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... play the part of a clown or buffoon, acting in a very silly and stupid manner, while the others looked on laughing and pointing their fingers at ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... unspoken, before the dark, humorous eyes, that seemed almost too tolerant of his grievance. He had been to levees, and his heart had sunk equally before the vulgar crowd, who seemed to regard this man as their own buffoon, and the pompousness of position, learning and dignity, which he seemed to delight to shake ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... brought to Europe by Dr. Antommarchi, had been moulded in bronze and sold by subscription for the first time in 1833, under Louis Philippe, and had then inspired surprise and mistrust. People suspected the Italian chemist, who was a sort of buffoon, always talkative and famished, of having tried to make fun of people. Disciples of Dr. Gall, whose system was then in favor, regarded the mask as suspicious. They did not find in it the bumps of genius; and the forehead, examined in accordance with the master's theories, presented nothing ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Each circle of them was set around another to hear the tidings—the chiefs of the reavers being in the very centre of the circles. There were Fer ger and Fer gel and Fer rogel and Fer rogain and Lomna the Buffoon, and Ingcel the One-eyed—six in the centre of the circles. And Fer rogain went to ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... coincidence that Maitland should within a few years have had two sovereigns as passengers,—one the central figure of modern European history, the other the good-natured elderly buffoon who in this country is chiefly remembered as the husband of the friend of Lady Hamilton. Maitland thus records ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... I declare that this buffoon was an indefatigable student, a proficient in all the learned languages, an elegant poet, and, withal, a wit of no inferior class. It remains to discover why "the ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... station, where he could get a train back to the City in a few moments. To his own amazement, he was quite happy, he was even more than happy. A species of exaltation possessed him. Even the thought of himself, Arthur Carroll, posing nightly as a buffoon before the City crowds, did not daunt him. He realized a kind of joyful acquiescence with even that. He felt a happy patience when he considered the time that might elapse before he could see his family ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... will wander from house to house, like that wretched buffoon Philippus (Xenophon; Convivium.), and beg everybody who has asked a supper-party to be so kind as to feed you and laugh at you; or you will turn sycophant; you will get a bunch of grapes, or a pair of shoes, now and then, by frightening some rich coward with a mock ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... pagan or popish nation, who are justly impatient of all indignity offered to the established religion of their country, no doubt but the author would have received the punishment he deserved. But the fate of this impious buffoon is very different; for in a protestant kingdom, zealous of their civil and religious immunities, he has not only escaped affronts, and the effects of publick resentment, but has been caressed and patronised by persons of great figure, and of all denominations. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... supple in the movements of his joints as any clown on the stage. He imitated every movement we made, and burlesqued them to a very high degree, causing great laughter to his companions and us. He seems to be the buffoon of the tribe. The other natives delighted in making sport of him, by ridiculing the shortness of his stature and laughing at him behind ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... why? Because Taste (GOUT, inclination) sets no limits to its recompenses. The King of Prussia overloads men of talent with his benefits for precisely the reasons which induce a little German Prince to overload with benefits a buffoon or a dwarf." [—OEuvres de Voltaire,—xxvii. 220 n.] Could there be a phenomenon more indisputably ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... expressed here, noblesse, have been recalled from the army, and replaced by officers chosen by the soldiers themselves, [Under the rank of field-officers.] whose affections are often conciliated by qualities not essentially military, though sometimes professional. A buffoon, or a pot-companion, is, of course, often more popular than a disciplinarian; and the brightest talents lose their influence when put in competition with a head that can bear a ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... the whole family is confirmed by the general term, which includes them all; for our Zany, in Italian Zanni, comes direct from Sannio, a buffoon: and a passage in Cicero, De Oratore, paints Harlequin and his brother gesticulators after the life; the perpetual trembling motion of their limbs, their ludicrous and flexible gestures, and all the mimicry of their faces:—Quid ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... hurriedly down the hills toward the city. The colloquy had occupied some moments, but when Renwick came to a straight reach of road which led toward the tobacco factory buildings he was surprised to find that Herr Linke was nowhere in sight. The man was an enigma, a curious mixture of desperado and buffoon, but his sudden disappearance without a word of thanks, apology or explanation, gave Renwick something to puzzle over as he made his way to the bridge. Its possible significance escaped him until he had reached the river, when, a thought suddenly ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... sole attendant is a female. I allow no male servants within this house. Even when his Royal Highness honours me with his presence he is unattended. I desire that I am immediately released from the presence of this buffoon." ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... escape their fate (for Rupilius was already moving) fell on each others swords. But Eunus could not face this death. He took refuge in a cave, from which he was dragged with the last poor relics of his splendid court—his cook, his baker, his bath attendant and his buffoon. The Romans for some reason spared his life, or at least did not doom him to immediate death. He was kept a prisoner at Morgantia, where he died shortly afterwards ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... visited Paris first in 1570. He was clothed in white and wore big buttons. Later, he wore a suit of bedtick, with white and blue checks, the coarse mattress cloth of the period. Hence his name. The word that meant straw was afterward used for mattress which was stuffed with straw and then for the buffoon, who wore the mattress cloth suit. In France the Paillasse, as I have said, was the same as Pagliaccio. Sometimes he wore a red checked suit, but the genuine one was known by the colors, white and blue. He wore blue ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... in this Interlude call for notice. The practice of introducing lyrics was in vogue long before the playwrights of Shakespeare's time displayed their use so perfectly. From this point onwards the drama rings with the rough drinking songs, pious hymns, and sweet lyrics of the buffoon, the preacher, and the lover. Thus, turning haphazard to The Trial of Treasure, the Interlude immediately preceding Like Will to Like in the volume of Dodsley's Old English Plays, we find no less than eight songs. Like Will to Like has also eight. ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... him. He would smooth over a rough place in his official intercourse with a funny story fitting the case in point, and they called him a trifler. He would round off a logical argument with a familiar example, hitting the nail squarely on the head and driving it home, and they called him a buffoon. Big wigs and little wigs were agreed that he lowered the dignity of debate; as if debates were intended to mystify, and not to clarify truth. Yet he went on and on, and never backward, until his time was come, ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... of the imperial school, Dumay, whose Breton blood had boiled all the way to Paris, considered a poet to be a poor stick of a fellow, of no consequence whatever,—a buffoon addicted to choruses, living in a garret, dressed in black clothes that were white at every seam, wearing boots that were occasionally without soles, and linen that was unmentionable, and whose fingers knew more about ink than soap; in short, one who looked always as if he ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... Hieragonisticon, or Corah's Doom, being an Answer to, etc., 1672; An Answer to two Letters of T.B., etc., 1673. The occasional references to it in the theological literature of these times are indeed innumerable. Many affected to treat him as a mere buffoon—the concoctor, as one bitterly put it, of 'a pretty fardle of tales bundled together, and they have had the hap to fall into such hands as had rather lose a friend, not to say their country, than a jest.' Anthony Wood, writing at the time of its appearance, classes it with 'the ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... with a wife and daughter: his wife's name was Francisquine; his daughter married the celebrated buffoon Gaultier Garguille. The story goes that when he left Mondor he bought a small country-place near Paris, where he passed his latter days comfortably on his earnings. There are two traditions current as to the manner of his death: according to one, he was killed by some noblemen in a hunting quarrel; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... would make suitable mistresses for him, who make a man noted, and have the effect of some rare and beautiful flower pinned into his buttonhole. He is the confidant of his intrigues, his guest when he gives small, special entertainments, his daily familiar table companion, and the buffoon whose sly humor one stimulates, and whose ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... replied mechanically. And then, avoiding the eye of the grand old saint, and hating myself as a buffoon, I continued, "My own conjecture is that something must have occurred to irritate the dramatist whilst he was writing that passage, and the expression ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... They took strong hold upon me and gave me a higher idea of a man's best work in life. That was the bloom period of the old popular lecture. It was the time when lectures were expected to build character and increase knowledge; the sensation and buffoon business which destroyed the system had not yet come in. I feel to this hour the good influence of lectures then heard, in the old City Hall at Syracuse, from such men as President Mark Hopkins, Bishop Alonzo Potter, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... crime, as an unfaithful wife, the murderess of her husband, and an impudent defier of justice. Her brother, Flamineo, becomes under Webster's treatment one of those worst human infamies—a court dependent; ruffian, buffoon, pimp, murderer by turns. Furthermore, and without any adequate object beyond that of completing this study of a type he loved, Webster makes him murder his own brother Marcello by treason. The part assigned to Marcello, it should be said, is a genial and happy one; and Cornelia, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... he said to my mother: 'Your brother is dying.' She grew very pale. My uncle was scarcely ever mentioned in the house, and I did not know him at all; all I knew from public talk was, that he had led, and was still leading, the life of a buffoon. After having spent his fortune with an incalculable number of women, he had only retained two mistresses, with whom he was living in small apartments in the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... attained middle age,—that he had been vegetating for years in that obscurest and most miserable of all dramatic positions, the low comedian of a country-theatre,—that he had come timidly to London and accepted at a low salary the post of buffoon at a half-theatre half-saloon in the City Road, called indifferently the "Grecian" and the "Eagle," where he had danced and tumbled, and sung comic songs, and delivered the dismal waggeries set down for him, without any marked success, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... library after dinner, and Lawrence Cardiff was smoking. He took the slender stem of his pipe from his lips and pressed down the tobacco in the bowl with a, caressing thumb, looking appreciatively, as he did it, at the mocking buffoon's face that was ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... on excellent terms with the priests, that he visited church, and on feast days actually went to confession! He a heretic? He was a chatterbox, a boastful coward, nothing more! But the day of reckoning was at hand, and soon there would be nothing left of the great philosopher but a quill-driving buffoon. ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... well have been said that the gaiety of nations was eclipsed; but to his contemporaries Rabelais appeared less as the enormous humourist, the buffoon Homer, than as a great scholar and man of science, whose bright temper and mirthful conversation were in no way inconsistent with good sense, sound judgment, and even a habit of moderation. It is thus that he should still be regarded. Below his laughter lay wisdom; below his orgy of grossness ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... may become worthy the perusal of the greatest of men: but when no moral, no lesson, no instruction, is conveyed to the reader, where the whole design of the composition is no more than to make us laugh, the writer comes very near to the character of a buffoon; and his admirers, if an old Latin proverb be true, deserve no great compliments to ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... Quinquart! Who could eclipse Robichon if his performance of the part equalled his conception of it? At the theatre that evening Quinquart followed Suzanne about the wings pathetically. He was garbed like a buffoon, but he felt like Romeo. The throng that applauded his capers were far from suspecting the romantic longings under his magenta wig. For the first time in his life he was thankful that the author hadn't ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... sir, choose to make a buffoon of yourself," he said sharply, with a slight trembling of the lower jaw, "I can't prevent your doing so; but I warn you that if you dare to play the fool in my presence, I will ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... amusement of the spectators. This byplay is also a reminiscence of the habits of the early comediens italiens, who indulged to excess in lazzi, which originally meant, not witticisms, but tricks more or less buffoon in their nature, such as circus clowns still indulge in. We know that Marivaux objected to any liberty being taken with the roles by the actors. It may well be questioned whether the above-mentioned gesture would have met his approval. In ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... vices of King John were the salvation of England." Cranmer was peculiarly fitted to organise the Church of England by being "unscrupulous, indifferent, a coward, and a time-server." James I. was given to "stammering, slobbering, shedding unmanly tears," alternating between the buffoon and the pedagogue. James II. "amused himself with hearing Covenanters shriek"; he was "a libertine, singularly slow and narrow in understanding, obstinate, harsh, and unforgiving." The country gentleman of that ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... strokes, they, the rabble, will trample on him, like the Lilliputians on Gulliver, incapable of estimating his stature, and eternity and history will speedily bury him, not like a despot, in Egyptian porphyry, but like a buffoon. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... everything else that was in him; the larger circle ruthlessly put him in his place as a good fellow and nothing more. The truth was that in the Washington of the 'forties, neither the inner nor the outer Lincoln could by itself find lodgment. Neither the lonely mystical thinker nor the captivating buffoon could do more than ripple its surface. As superficial as Springfield, it lacked Springfield's impulsive generosity. To the long record of its obtuseness it had added another item. The gods had sent it a great man and it had ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... studied a buffoon this morning, I think," was the punning sneer with which M. de Lesdiguieres replied. But that he conceived himself witty, it is probable he would not have condescended to reply at all. "I ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... Posthumius placed an accent wrong, his hearers burst into a laugh. When he remonstrated, they hooted him, and called him barbarian; and at length hissed him off the stage as if he had been a bad actor. As the grave Roman retired, a buffoon, who, from his constant drunkenness, was nicknamed the Pint-pot, came up with gestures of the grossest indecency, and bespattered the senatorial gown with filth. Posthumius turned round to the multitude, and held up the gown, as if appealing to the universal law of nations. The sight only ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... life's decline, Caesar persuades, submission must be mine; Him I obey, whom heaven itself obeys, Hopeless of pleasing, yet inclin'd to please. Here then at once, I welcome every shame, 15 And cancel at threescore a life of fame; No more my titles shall my children tell, The old buffoon will fit my name as well; This day beyond its term my fate extends, For life is ended ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... came to town, he has, by his convivial powers, his good stories, good songs, and knack of mimicry, made himself so famous, that he has more invitations to dinner than he can accept. He has wit and talents fit for more than being the buffoon or mocking-bird of a good dinner and a pleasant party; but he seems so well contented with this reputation de salon, that I am afraid his ambition will not rise to any thing higher. After leading this idle life, and enjoying this cheap-earned praise, he will never submit to the seclusion and ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... gracioso or buffoon, according to Lord Holland, held an intermediate character between a spectator and a character in the play; interrupting with his remarks, at one time, the performance, of which he forms an essential, but very defective part in another. His part was, I presume, partly ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... with a band of companions, and was finally pursued and captured in Lady Wood, outside the village. In the Ascensiontide sports the Earl wears a grotesque costume: a mask, and a smock padded with straw, and round his neck a chain of biscuits. He has with him a hobby-horse and buffoon covered with fantastic trappings, and carrying a small article called a "mapper" (which is conjectured to be a misreading for "snapper"), and representing the teeth and jaws of a horse. The Earl has also a donkey, decorated with flowers and with a necklace of biscuit, and the hunters ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... his soul. Of all injured vanities, that of the reproved buffoon is the most savage; and when grave issues are involved, these petty stabs become unbearable. But Gondremark was a man of iron; he showed nothing; he did not even, like the common trickster, retreat because he had presumed, but held to his point bravely. "Madam," he said, "if, as you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... natural buffoon, acknowledged this encomium with a very low obeisance—his eyes cast down, his hand on his heart—and with such an irresistibly comical affectation of modesty and embarrassment that they all burst into a hearty laugh, which did them much good after the ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... Longbow, as we called him; I suppose as a term of endearment, for there was no Young Longbow. He was an Irishman, and the established wit, buffoon, and jester of the school. Innumerable stories are still told of his youthful escapades, of his audacity and skill in cribbing, of his dexterity in getting out of scrapes, of his repartees to masters and persons in authority. He it was who took up the same exercise in algebra ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... armed. In advocacy of all these things and many more, then unheard of but now common, I was in advance of the age; and in some degree my private notions conduced to very wholesome public changes." Again: "When Rabelais is diffuse, or a buffoon, or worse, it may be to throw disputers off the scent as to his real mark of satire or philosophy. Perhaps, like Liguori, AEsop has written a book for the sake of a sentence, and veils his true intent in a designed mist of ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... this important trust. Applause which ought to be measured out with scrupulous justice, correctness and precision, has been by admiring ignorance, poured forth in a torrent roar of uncouth and obstreperous glee on the buffoon, "the clown that says more than is set down for him," and on "the robustious perriwig-pated fellow, who tears a passion all to rags," while chaste merit and propriety have often gone ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... book's displayed in all The shops and cumbers every stall. The price is low—the dealers say 'tis— And the rich are treated to it gratis. Engraven on its foremost page These title-words the eye engage: "The Life of Muley Ben Maroon, Of Astrabad—Rogue, Thief, Buffoon And Miser—Liver by the Sweat Of Better Men: A Lamponette Composed in Rhyme and Written all ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... grand old commonwealth. In the first place, that exalted position would never be filled by one who, for lack of serious argument, constantly appeals to the risibilities of his audience; never by a wit, a mere joker, a story-teller; in other words—if you will pardon me, my fellow-citizens—by a mere buffoon. On the contrary, the incumbent of the exalted position of chief executive of this grand old commonwealth should be a gentleman of character, of ability, the worthy successor of Shelby, of Morehead, of Crittenden; he should be a gentleman of scholastic attainments and of ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... stage player, strolling player; stager, performer; mime, mimer^; artists; comedian, tragedian; tragedienne, Roscius; star, movie star, star of stage and screen, superstar, idol, sex symbol; supporting actor, supporting cast; ham, hamfatter [Slang]; masker^. pantomimist, clown harlequin, buffo^, buffoon, farceur, grimacer, pantaloon, columbine; punchinello^; pulcinello^, pulcinella^; extra, bit- player, walk-on role, cameo appearance; mute, figurante^, general utility; super, supernumerary. company; first tragedian, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... is no better test of the popular opinion of a man than the character assigned to him on the stage; and till the close of the sixteenth century Sir John Oldcastle remained the profligate buffoon of English comedy. Whether in life he bore the character so assigned to him, I am unable to say. The popularity of Henry V., and the splendour of his French wars, served no doubt to colour all who had opposed him with a blacker shade than they deserved: but it is almost certain ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... us; but originally, after the catastrophe the persons of the play, all but the reprobate whom divine justice has visited, returned to the scene to hear a description of the awful happenings he had witnessed from the buffoon who had hidden under the table, to dispose their plans for the future (for Ottavio and Anna, marriage in a year; for Masetto and Zerlina, a wedding instanter; for Elvira, a nunnery), and platitudinously to moralize that, the perfidious wretch having been carried to the realm of Pluto and Proserpine, ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Vincent, throwing the burning stump of his cigar over the gunwale, "that the experiences of the past year have not been all an excursion into the 'Arabian Nights'? If it were not for that fine marble relief in my trunk which I bought of that miserable buffoon in the Via Sistina, I should easily persuade myself that the actual world were bounded on the east by the Atlantic and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. I was just considering whether I should try to smuggle it through the custom-house, or whether, perhaps, it would be wiser ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Carlyle's, though I admit that the quality of the ore is not of the finest. His every production is bathed in humour. This must never be, though it often has been, forgotten. He is not to be taken literally. He is always a humourist, not unfrequently a writer of burlesque, and occasionally a buffoon. ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... more modern times have Menot and Maillard found an imitator in little Father Andre, as well as others. His character has been variously drawn. He is by some represented as a kind of buffoon in the pulpit; but others more judiciously observe, that he only indulged his natural genius, and uttered humorous and lively things, as the good Father observes himself, to keep the attention of his audience awake. He was not always laughing. "He told ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... hesitate?" said Boileau, charged by the Academicians with the negotiation. "A point of honor," replied Moliere. "Now," answered his friend, "what honor can lie in blacking your face with mustachios and assuming the burlesque disguise of a buffoon, in order to be cudgelled on a public stage?" "The point of honor," answered Moliere, "consists in my not deserting more than a hundred persons, whom my personal exertions are necessary to support." The Academy afterward did honor to themselves and justice to Moliere ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... at least might haply desire the intervention of a beadle's hand as heavy and a sceptral cudgel as knotty as ever the son of Laertes applied to the shoulders of the first of the type or the tribe of Thersites. For this brutal and brutish buffoon—I am speaking of Shakespeare's Thersites—has no touch of humour in all his currish composition: Shakespeare had none as nature has none to spare for such dirty dogs as those of his kind or generation. There ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... "light," and I rather fancy that he would regard Aristophanes as heavy. If one were to suggest, on his proposing to place the Irving Shakspere on the shelves of a free library, that the poet is often foolish, often a buffoon of a low type, often a mere quibbler, and often ribald, he might perhaps have a fit, or he might inquire if the speaker were mad—assuredly he would do something impressive; but he would not scruple to deliver an oration of the ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... springy soil of low meadows, and damp hollows beside the road; but moisture it must have to fill its nectary and to soften the ground for the easier transit of its creeping rootstock. Imaginative eyes see what appears to them the gaping (ringens) face of a little ape or buffoon (mimulus) in this common flower whose drolleries, such as they are, call forth the only applause desired - the buzz of insects that become pollen-laden ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... have Samson made a buffoon for drunkards. The feasts of heathenism were wild orgies, very unlike the pure joy of the sacrificial meals in Jehovah's worship. Dagon's temple was filled with a drunken crowd, whose mirth would be made more boisterous ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... without taking part in it; without sharing in the general absurdity that such a situation creates. It is unpardonable conceit not to laugh at your own jokes. Joking is undignified; that is why it is so good for one's soul. Do not fancy you can be a detached wit and avoid being a buffoon; you cannot. If you are the Court Jester you must be ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... NOBLEMAN once opened the theaters without charge to the people, and gave a public notice that he would handsomely reward any person who invented a new amusement for the occasion. Various public performers contended for the prize. Among them came a Buffoon well known among the populace for his jokes, and said that he had a kind of entertainment which had never been brought out on any stage before. This report being spread about made a great stir, and the theater was crowded ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... laughter proceeding from their corner of the house announced that business was over, and that chaff and fun, so dear to the heart of every Kanowit, was being carried on with great gusto. As we arrived and stood by the group, one of their number (evidently a privileged buffoon) begged to be allowed to speak to the Resident. "You remember that gun, Resident," said he, "you gave me?" (This was an old muzzle-loader for which Mr. H. had had no further use.) "Oh yes," was the reply; "what luck have you had with it?" "Oh, wonderful," said the Kanowit, "I killed fourteen ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... Michelangelo's buffoon friends was a Florentine celebrity, Piloto, the goldsmith. We know that he took this man with him when he went to Venice in 1530; but Vasari tells no characteristic stories concerning their friendship. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... at the hut, Wolsey bade Patch dismount, and ascertain whether Mabel was within. The buffoon obeyed, tried the door, and finding it fastened, knocked, but ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... that the SPRUCH-SPRECHER often condescended to follow up the jester's witticisms with an explanation, to render them more obvious to the capacity of the audience, so that his wisdom became a sort of commentary on the buffoon's folly. And sometimes, in requital, the HOFF-NARR, with a pithy jest, wound up the conclusion of the ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... melancholy, and a Woman-hater, entered into a Swan; the Soul of Ajax, which was all Wrath and Fierceness, into a Lion; the Soul of Agamemnon, that was rapacious and imperial, into an Eagle; and the Soul of Thersites, who was a Mimick and a Buffoon, into ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... enjoying a farce I could not see. He, like the mahu, was one of those mishaps of nature assigned to play an absurd and sorry part in the tragicomedy of life in which all must act the roles assigned by the great author-manager until death puts us out of the cast. In that scene I myself was the buffoon ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Another time a buffoon appears on the stage with head shaved close. "Why is the clown mourning?" "Because oil is so dear." "Why is oil dear?" "On account of the Jews. On the Sabbath day they consume everything they earn during ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... argued that this is all deliberate—is an effect of premeditation: that Rabelais had certain home-truths to deliver to his generation, and delivered them in such terms as kept him from the fagot and the rope by bedaubing him with the renown of a common buffoon. But the argument is none of the soundest in itself, and may fairly be set aside as a piece of desperate special pleading, the work of counsel at their wits' end for matter of defence. For Rabelais clean is not Rabelais at all. His grossness ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... haste, it being the hour of the Corso, and I must go and buffoon with the rest. My daughter Allegra is just gone with the Countess G. in Count G.'s coach and six. Our old Cardinal is dead, and the new one not appointed yet—but the masquing goes on the same.' (Letter to Murray, 355th in Moore, dated Ravenna, Feb. 7, 1828.) ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... by officers chosen by the soldiers themselves, [Under the rank of field-officers.] whose affections are often conciliated by qualities not essentially military, though sometimes professional. A buffoon, or a pot-companion, is, of course, often more popular than a disciplinarian; and the brightest talents lose their influence when put in competition with a head that can bear a greater ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... conversation he could not substantiate, and into an acrimonious attack upon Lincoln's conduct of the war, predicated upon a private letter of General Scott, the possession of which he did not satisfactorily account for. The Tribune, referring to his campaign as "a rhetorical spree," called him a "buffoon," a "political harlequin," a "repeater of mouldy jokes,"[852] and in bitter terms denounced his "low comedy performance at Tammany," his "double-shuffle dancing at Mozart Hall," his possession of a letter "by dishonourable means for a dishonourable purpose," and his wide-sweeping statements ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... that Maitland should within a few years have had two sovereigns as passengers,—one the central figure of modern European history, the other the good-natured elderly buffoon who in this country is chiefly remembered as the husband of the friend of Lady Hamilton. Maitland thus records ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... nation, who are justly impatient of all indignity offered to the established religion of their country, no doubt but the author would have received the punishment he deserved. But the fate of this impious buffoon is very different; for in a protestant kingdom, zealous of their civil and religious immunities, he has not only escaped affronts, and the effects of publick resentment, but has been caressed and patronised by persons ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... but, in regard to the fourth, to my mind, the very highest degree of humility consists in loving and cherishing contempt, and in being glad to be despised. David so acted, when he showed himself pleased to be despised as a buffoon by his own wife Michol. St. Paul, too, gloried in having been scourged, stoned, and looked upon as a fool, the off-scouring and very refuse of the world. The Apostles came forth rejoicing from the presence of the Councils in which, for the love of Jesus, they had been loaded with opprobrium, contumely, ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... were. Each circle of them was set around another to hear the tidings—the chiefs of the reavers being in the very centre of the circles. There were Fer ger and Fer gel and Fer rogel and Fer rogain and Lomna the Buffoon, and Ingcel the One-eyed—six in the centre of the circles. And Fer rogain ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... be the climax: that I should show my long beard and white hairs amid that throng of women and lunatics; and clap and yell in unseemly rapture over the vile contortions of an abandoned buffoon. ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... protestation of his pretended persuasion. But once or twice before sundown he permitted himself to ask natural questions concerning the old country, and to indulge in those genial gibes which the Englishman in the bush learns to expect from the indigenous buffoon. ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... came to an end. For the rest of his life, indeed, he never lost his interest in England; he was never tired of reading English books, of being polite to English travellers, and of doing his best, in the intervals of more serious labours, to destroy the reputation of that deplorable English buffoon, whom, unfortunately, he himself had been so foolish as first to introduce to the attention of his countrymen. But it is curious to notice how, as time went on, the force of Voltaire's nature inevitably carried him further and further away from the central ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... own building, and which was governed by laws framed by himself. Aristippus and Epicurus were in the highest esteem here as the most polite, benevolent, and convivial of men. Even AEsop the Phrygian was here, whom they made use of by way of buffoon. Diogenes of Sinope had so wonderfully changed his manners in this place, that he married Lais the harlot, danced and sang, got drunk, and played a thousand freaks. Not one Stoic did I see amongst them; ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... which might have been so happy. Laughter and singing in particular seemed to her like a blasphemy, in face of her sorrow. Without any need of self-restraint, no wish to coquet ever entered her head. She said and felt at that time that no man was more to her than Nastasya Ivanovna, the buffoon. Something stood sentinel within her and forbade her every joy. Besides, she had lost all the old interests of her carefree girlish life that had been so full of hope. The previous autumn, the hunting, "Uncle," and the Christmas holidays spent with Nicholas at Otradnoe ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... appear to be remarkable for the number of their dramatis personae. In most there is a prince, a confidant, a buffoon or two, and a due proportion of female characters, represented by boys dressed in female attire. The dresses are handsome; and in one which I attended, the dialogue appeared to be lively and well supported, as far ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... sank his voice into a whisper; "he is the sublimest buffoon that ever existed. I will tell you an instance—Do you like these Hungary wines, by the by?—On the 9th of last June, the Czar carried me, and half-a-dozen more of the foreign ministers, to his pleasure-house (Peterhoff). Dinner, as usual, all drunk with Tokay, and finished by ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... at this day; but the Canadians make three-fourths at least. The Jesuits have the Cure there, with a fine habitation and a mill; in digging the foundation of which last, a quarry of orbicular flat stones was found, about two inches in diameter, of the shape of a buffoon's cap, with six sides, whose groove was set with small buttons of the size of the head of a minikin or small pin. Some of these stones were bigger, some smaller; between the stones which could not be joined, there ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... being excited by his drinking bouts at all hours, his wild expenses, his gross amours, the day spent in sleeping or walking off his debauches, and the night in banquets and at theaters, and in celebrating the nuptials of some comedian or buffoon. It is related that, drinking all night at the wedding of Hippias, the comedian, on the morning, having to harangue the people, he came forward, overcharged as he was, and vomited before them all, one of his friends holding his gown for him. Sergius, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... attempt to put on dandy airs when pulling up the corners of his cravat he would say, "Well, Madame, is there anything new to-day? Citizen, what say they of Bonaparte? Your shop appears to be well supplied. You surely have a great deal of custom. What do people say of that buffoon; Bonaparte?" He was made quite happy one day when we were obliged to retire hastily from a shop to avoid the attacks drawn upon us by the irreverent tone in which Bonaparte spoke ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... people to question the divine right of kings to do wrong. We may be sure the real Thersites, from whom the poet drew his picture, was a very different and a far more serious power in debate than the misshapen buffoon of the Iliad. But the king who had been thwarted and exposed by him in the day would, over his cups in the evening, enjoy the poet's travesty, and long for the good old times when he could put down ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... or buffoon-bird, is never found north of 46 deg. N. latitude in the summer. This bird pours forth all sorts of notes in a short space of time, without any apparent order. The thrush, the wren, the jay, and the robin are imitated in as short a time as it takes ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... only the Mark Twain of the latter years, with his deep, underlying seriousness, his grim irony, and his passion for justice and truth, find difficulty in realizing that, in his earlier days, the joker and the buffoon were almost solely in evidence. In answer to a query of mine as to the reason for the serious spirit that crept into and gave carrying power to his humour, Mr. Clemens frankly replied: "I never wrote a serious word until after I married Mrs. Clemens. She is solely responsible—to ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... a popular name among the Dutch for a buffoon; a corruption of pickle-h[:a]rin ("a hairy sprite"), answering ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... would set a just value upon themselves, they would think no man's acquaintance whatsoever a condescension, nor accept it from the greatest upon unworthy or ignominious terms. I know a certain lord that has often invited a set of people, and proposed for their diversion a buffoon player, and an eminent poet, to be of the party; and which was yet worse, thought them both sufficiently recompensed by the dinner, and the honour of his company. This kind of insolence is risen to such a height, that ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... appear, has been so well acted, that had it not been the afternoon you set for your third appearance, I should have never known you. I think you make a better Quaker boy than you did a crazy man last time, or buffoon and tumbler the first one. But what have you been able to ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... calculate the number of gulls and gannets we see; but I am not so old as Sir T., and that occupation could not absorb me. I begin to understand Lady Charlotte and her liking for Mr. Powys better. He is ready to play or be serious, as you please; but in either case 'Merthyr is never a buffoon nor a parson'—Lady C. remarked this morning; and that describes him, if it were not for the detestable fling at the clergy, which she never misses. It seems in her blood to think that all priests are hypocrites. What a little boat to be in on a stormy sea, Bella! She appears ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... many days, that my popularity was on the wane, and that I could not hope to maintain it against the attractions of a French waiting-maid, a monkey, a parrot, a poodle, and a little Dwarfish boy-attendant that was half fiddler and half buffoon. So my consequence faded and faded, and I was sneered at and flouted as a young Savage and a young Irish by the English lacqueys about the House, and I sank from my Lady's keeping-room to the antechamber, and thence to the servant's hall, and thence, after a very brief lapse, to the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... and knocking furniture about for months. The fact is that nobody understands the complaint, nor can detect the cause that makes the ghost of a man who was perfectly rational in life behave like an uneducated buffoon afterwards. The real reason, as I have tried to explain to you, is a solution of continuity between subjective thought and will on the side of the spectre, and objective ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... having then the diversion of the spectator, in the way of laughing, for its object, should preserve a moderately buffoon simplicity, and the dancer, aided by a natural genius, but especially by throwing as much nature as possible into his execution, may promise himself to amuse and please the spectator; even though he should not be very deep in ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... two or three of his works preserve even the feeblest image. In their midst Galiani, secretary of the Neapolitan Embassy, a clever dwarf; a genius, "a sort of Plato or Machiavelli with the spirit and action of a harlequin," inexhaustible in stories, an admirable buffoon, and an accomplished skeptic, "having no faith in anything, on anything or about anything,"[4206] not even in the new philosophy, braves the atheists of the drawing-room, beats down their dithyrambs with puns, and, with his perruque in his hand, sitting cross-legged ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... comes when I try to force myself. But the really awful days aren't when I think I can't write. They're when I wonder whether any writing is worth while at all—I mean whether I'm not a sort of glorified buffoon." ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... known by the names of mountains and rivers—in a fashion which recalled the tournament. There was also another personage, with a Dan Leno-like face and an extraordinary gift of contorting his legs, who played the buffoon, and gyrated round the dignified M.C., who remained unmoved while the audience laughed. It was evidently the right thing for the prizes—they were awarded at the end of each bout—to be presented as comically as possible; and some of the Shakespearean humours which ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... number of individuals at the same time. We did not know that the theory of evolution was one that had been quietly but steadily gaining ground during the last hundred years. Buffon we knew by name, but he sounded too like "buffoon" for any good to come from him. We had heard also of Lamarck, and held him to be a kind of French Lord Monboddo; but we knew nothing of his doctrine save through the caricatures promulgated by his opponents, or the misrepresentations ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... than the extra tumbler; those who are delicate need not read it; those who are indelicate won't be the worse of it."—"But," persists Conshy—"I have other hairs in your neck, Master Tommy—you are growing a bit of a buffoon on us, and sorry am I to say it, sometimes not altogether, as a man with a rank imagination may construe you, a very decent one. Now, my good boy, I would have you to remember that what you write ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... as he had a lot of children, he called them all out of the house to check them over. To the joyful surprise of the visitors, there among them was little Eva—supposed to be eaten, and she even retained her right hand. Thus another newspaper libel upon the poor old black bear—the buffoon of the forest—was shown to be devoid of truth; yet that story was published in the Toronto papers, and, no doubt, was copied all ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... scurrility and vulgar humour. Being, by those arts, raised above himself, he became the declared enemy of all good men, and acted a distinguished part among the vilest instruments of that pernicious court. See his character, Annals xv. s. 34. When an illiberal and low buffoon basks in the sunshine of a court, and enjoys exorbitant power, the cause of literature can have nothing to expect. The liberal arts must, by consequence, be degraded by a corrupt taste, and learning will be left to run wild and ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... merry fellow, and a merry fellow was never yet a respectable man. Indiscriminate familiarity either offends your superiors, or else dubs you their dependent and led captain. It gives your inferiors just, but troublesome and improper claims to equality. A joker is near a-kin to a buffoon; and neither of them is ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... and the Gauls, with their descendants, fairly matched the old conquerors. The frightful old Paris of Francois Villon, with all its bleak show of famine and death, had its constant changes of slang. "Tousjours vieil synge est desplaisant," says the burglar-poet, and he means that the old buffoon is tiresome; the young man with the newest phases of city slang at his tongue's end is most acceptable in merry company. Very few people can read Villon's longer poems at all, for they are almost entirely written in cant language, and the glossary must be in constant requisition. The rascal is a ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... what thou shouldst be; prithee, Major, leave off being an old Buffoon, that is, a Lover turn'd ridiculous by Age, consider thy self a mere rouling Tun of Nantz,—a walking Chimney, ever smoaking with nasty Mundungus, and then thou hast a Countenance ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... He had been a buffoon, and his dress still bore many tokens of his former profession. His big head swayed upon his thin neck; his droll, though emaciated features constantly changed their expression, and even when he was not coughing, his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... there was nothing of gladness in the worship of God—that it consisted simply of a chronic case of the snuffles. Jones has simply gone to the opposite extreme and transformed the Temple of the Deity into a variety dive. Nero fiddled while Rome burned; but Jones indulges in the levity of the buffoon while consigning millions of human beings to Hell. Alas, that so few preachers understand the pity which permeates all ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... surprise when I declare that this buffoon was an indefatigable student, a proficient in all the learned languages, an elegant poet, and, withal, a wit of no inferior class. It remains to discover why "the ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Flemish poetry annually manufactured and consumed throughout the provinces almost exceed belief. The societies had regular constitutions. Their presiding officers were called kings, princes, captains, archdeacons, or rejoiced in similar high-sounding names. Each chamber had its treasurer, its buffoon, and its standard-bearer for public processions. Each had its peculiar title or blazon, as the Lily, the Marigold, or the Violet, with an appropriate motto. By the year 1493, the associations had become so important, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Neka" (buffoon), she groaned, "didn't you swear to separate from Nalini, and have you not taken all your meals with him ever since? Is that the action of a ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... allowed in the City. Thus early sprang up the prejudice against actors. Probably this was of old standing, and first belonged to the time when the minstrel and the tumbler, the musician and the dancing girl, the buffoon and the contortionist, wandered about the country free of rule and discipline, leading ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... in particular, nearly all simple folks, had a desire to laugh, even when they were worn out with fatigue, which made a pretext of the slightest thing, and notably of danger. One of them, called Tailleur, a buffoon with the airs of an executioner's assistant, would call out at the first explosions of a hurricane ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... gifted with an agreeable countenance and a tolerably good voice. He had played in the provincial theatres; but, in order to overcome every obstacle which might be opposed to his debut, he became a pupil of DUGAZON, an actor of comedy, and what is more singular, of one more frequently a buffoon than a comedian. The latter, however, is said to possess a knowledge of the style of playing of the actors who, thirty years ago, graced the French stage, and consequently may be capable of giving ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... Mackenzie speak of his wife, and it turned out to be the last; but from that moment the older man had something of dignity in the eyes of this younger man, who had merely judged of him by his little foibles and eccentricities, and would have been ready to dismiss him contemptuously as a buffoon. There was something, then, behind that powerful face, with its deep-cut lines, its heavy eyebrows and piercing and sometimes sad eyes, besides a mere liking for tricks of childish diplomacy. Lavender began to have some respect for Sheila's father, and made a resolution to guard against the impertinence ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... Horace was the son of an emancipated slave. The Roman leech and chirurgeon were often slaves; so, too, the preceptor and the pedagogue, the reader and the player, the clerk and the amanuensis, the singer, the dancer, the wrestler, and the buffoon, the architect, the smith, the weaver, and the shoemaker; even the armiger or squire was a slave. Educated slaves exercised their talents and pursued their callings for the emolument of their masters; and thus it is to-day in Siam. Mutato nomine, de ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... The third is still serving in the army, and, according to common report, is one of the best gentlemen in the world. My son does not like him so well as his good-for-nothing brother, because he is too serious, and would not become his buffoon. My son excuses himself by saying that when he quits business he wants something to make him laugh, and that young Broglie is not old enough for this; that if he had a confidential business, or a warlike expedition to perform, he would prefer him; but that for ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... believes himself absolved by this severe castigation. Qu'est-ce qu'il me chante? Has the letter undergone transformation in the Christian climate of Reinfeld, or did it leave the hand of this once shallow buffoon in its present form? He asserts, moreover, that he lives in a never dreamed of happiness with his present wife, whose acquaintance he made a week before the engagement, and whom he married six weeks after the same event: a happiness which his first marriage has taught him rightly ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... always at a disadvantage except on the stage. The hum-drum is the style for Englishmen. Bishop Burnet calls Marvell "a droll," Parker, who was to be a bishop, calls him "a buffoon." Marvell is occasionally humorous and not infrequently carries a jest beyond the limits of becoming mirth; but he is more often grave. Yet when he is, his gravity was treated either as one of his feebler jokes or as an impertinence. But as it is ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... him. 'Ah, I see you're as soft as silk! Your wife will have an easy time of it with you. That buffoon,' she went on, pointing with her fan towards the howling actor (he was acting the part of a tutor), 'reminded me of my young days; I, too, was in love with a teacher. It was my first ... no, my second passion. The first time I fell in love with a ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... sleighs come galloping down, with a jangle of bells, full of laughing, singing young people, returning from some excursion far up in the hills, where there had been feasting and dancing. Here a young lawyer—newly married and something of a privileged buffoon—was sitting on the lap of somebody else's wife, playing a concertina, and singing at the top of his voice. "Some of that Loreng man's doings again," people would say. "The place has never been the same since he came here." And they would get back to bed again, shaking ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... capers about on a fiery horse, why he has a staff of aides-de-camp, and why he has two grooms, are things which no one seems to know. He patronises generals and admirals, doctors and commissariat officers, and they submit to be patronised by him. Half-priest, half-buffoon, something of a Friar Tuck and something of a Louis XV. abbe, he is a sort of privileged person, who by the mere force of impudence has made his way in the world. Most English girls in their teens fall in love with a curate and a cavalry officer. Monseigneur Bauer, who combines in himself the ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... his own mind would never have found by reason of its own gravitating power. He courted notoriety in a way that would have made him, if a poorer man, the toadying Boswell of some other Johnson giant, and, if very poor, the welcome buffoon of some gossiping journal, who would never weary of contortions, and who would brutify himself at the death, to kindle an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... many tragic and comic poets before Thespis; but as they had made no alterations in the original rude form of this poem, and as Thespis was the first that made any improvement in it, he was generally esteemed its inventor. Before him, tragedy was no more than a jumble of buffoon tales in the comic style, intermixed with the singing of a chorus in praise of Bacchus; for it is to the feasts of that god, celebrated at the time of the vintage, that tragedy owes ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... who wheadles as much as the other boasts, and plays the Knave as much as the other does the Fool. For the Reader's Satisfaction, here follows a Translation of the first Act of the Miles Gloriosus, which begins between that Blockhead and his Buffoon. ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... have Menot and Maillard found an imitator in little Father Andre, as well as others. His character has been variously drawn. He is by some represented as a kind of buffoon in the pulpit; but others more judiciously observe, that he only indulged his natural genius, and uttered humorous and lively things, as the good Father observes himself, to keep the attention of his audience awake. He ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... themselves, by losing that peculiar and distinctive Character in which they excel. This is most palpable in those Authors, whose Character consists in Humour. Let any one read Terence, as he is translated by Mr. Echard, and he will take him to have been a Buffoon: Whereas Terence never dealt in such a Kind of low Mirth. His true Character is, to have afforded to his Spectators and Readers the gravest, and, at the same Time, the most agreeable, most polite Entertainment of any ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... of persons seldom supposed to be themselves conjurers. He becomes a formidable opponent to Theodorick and his chivalry; but as he attempted by treachery to attain the victory, he is, when overcome, condemned to fill the dishonourable yet appropriate office of buffoon and juggler at the Court ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... brother is dying.' She grew very pale. My uncle was scarcely ever mentioned in the house, and I did not know him at all; all I knew from public talk was, that he had led, and was still leading, the life of a buffoon. After having spent his fortune with an incalculable number of women, he had only retained two mistresses, with whom he was living in small apartments ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... politely—"McTurk"—the Irishman scowled—"and, of course, the unspeakable Beetle, our friend Gigadibs." Abanazar, the Emperor, and Aladdin had more or less of characters, and King passed them over. "Come forth, my inky buffoon, from behind yonder instrument of music! You supply, I presume, the doggerel for this entertainment. Esteem yourself to be, ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... been idealized as an angel, a saint, and a demigod; he has been caricatured as a self-indulgent sensualist, a vulgar Lothario, a buffoon, a ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... order to explain the success of Croustillac, that at sea the hours seem very long; the slightest distractions are precious, and one is very glad to have always at one's beck and call a species of buffoon endowed with imperturbable good humor. As to the chevalier, he hid under a laughing and careless mask, a sad preoccupation; the end of his journey drew near; the words of Father Griffen had been too sensible, too sincere, too just not to ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... course of one revolving moon, Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon; Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking, Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking, * * * * * * * He laughed himself from Court, then sought relief By forming parties, but could ne'er ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... dressed like a Pope with triple crown, and attended by his court of angels. They sing and toss up censers till he lifts his hand and speaks. In a long Latin speech he unfolds the order of creation and his will concerning man. At the end of it up leaps an ugly buffoon, in goatskin, with rams' horns upon his head. Some children begin to cry; but the older people laugh, for this is the Devil, the clown and comic character, who talks their common tongue, and has no reverence before the very throne of Heaven. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... will make in the Minds of those they leave behind them: Whether it was worth coming into the World for; whether it be suitable to a reasonable Being; in short, whether it appears Graceful in this Life, or will turn to an Advantage in the next. Let the Sycophant, or Buffoon, the Satyrist, or the Good Companion, consider with himself, when his Body shall be laid in the Grave, and his Soul pass into another State of Existence, how much it will redound to his Praise to have ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... fortune, education, opinion, interest? How hold sway over a body of spectators, who were at the same time judges? To succeed in the task he was bound to be master of all styles of diction—at one and the same time a dainty poet and a diverting buffoon. It is just this universality of genius, this combination of the most eminent and various qualities, that has won Aristophanes a place apart among satirists; and if it be true to say that well-written works never die, the style alone of his Comedies ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... executed accordingly, exclaiming as he departed—"Oh, city and court! you by whom the expectations of the bold pretender are fulfilled, while the hopes of the modest labourer are destroyed; you who abundantly sustain the shameless Buffoon, while the worthy sage is left to die of hunger; I bid you farewell." That said, he proceeded to Flanders, where he finished in arms the life which he might have rendered immortal by letters, and died in the company ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... man who intoxicated his soldiers, not with glory, like the first Napoleon, but with wine; he will never be other than the pygmy tyrant of a great people. Grandeur, even in infamy, is utterly inconsistent with the calibre of the man. As dictator, he is a buffoon; let him make himself emperor, he will be grotesque. That will finish him. His destiny is to make mankind shrug their shoulders. Will he be less severely punished for that reason? Not at all. Contempt does not, in his case, mitigate anger; he will be hideous, and he will ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... so various, that he seem'd to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome; Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts, and nothing long; But in the course of one revolving moon Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.[268-4] ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... have that mood. But Conrad, he's given to brooding. And his habit at night when he stands staring up at the stars is to see (or conjure up rather) a dumb buffoon Fate, primeval, unfriendly and stupid, whom Man must defy. And Conrad defies it, but wearily, for he feels sick at heart,—because of his surety that Fate is ignoble, ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... I am jesting," continued Porphyrius, more and more at his ease, without ceasing to indulge in his little laugh, whilst continuing his perambulation about the room. "You may be right. God has given me a face which only arouses comical thoughts in others. I'm a buffoon. But excuse an old man's cackle. You, Rodion Romanovitch, you are in your prime, and, like all young people, you appreciate, above all things, human intelligence. Intellectual smartness and abstract rational ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... spectacle) the sight of sick persons and of a man full of ulcers, and yet are delighted to be spectators of the Philoctetes of Aristophon and the Jocasta of Silanion, wherein such wasting and dying persons are well acted; so must the young scholar, when he reads in a poem of Thersites the buffoon or Sisyphus the whoremaster or Batrachus the bawd speaking or doing anything, so praise the artificial managery of the poet, adapting the expressions to the persons, as withal to look on the discourses and actions so expressed as odious and abominable. For the goodness of things themselves ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... out the intrigues of the Grecian chiefs, and limiting the interest to the amours of Troilus and Cressida. But he could not be insensible to the merit of this scene, though he has supplied it by one far inferior, in which Ulysses is introduced, using gross flattery to the buffoon Thersites. In the latter part of the play, Dryden has successfully exerted his own inventive powers. The quarrelling scene between Hector and Troilus is very impressive, and no bad imitation of that betwixt Brutus and Cassius, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... In thine innocence secure, Heed not what men say of thee, The buffoon and his jest impure! Nor care if thy name, young martyr, Be the star of thy country's story:— Mid the white-robed host of the heavens Thou hast more ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... to the court of Louis Philippe, he replied: "I am not a court buffoon." When a generous compensation was hinted at, he answered: "I do not sell my loves." When it was urged that the occasion was a birth-day fete to be given his father by the Duke of Orleans, he accepted the invitation upon three conditions, thus ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... raise a PUBLIC PURSE, which was as stimulating a bait to the independent candidates for Garrat, as it is to the independent candidates for a certain assembly; the borough of Garrat has since remained vacant, and the populace have been without a professed political buffoon. ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... was puzzled, as if this laughter disclosed something that he had never suspected in her. But then Cassandra's face caught his eye, gazing with astonishment at the buffoon, not laughing, too deeply intent and surprised to laugh at what she saw, and for some moments he watched her as if she ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... disdain to be copied by such hands! I dare answer for him, he would be more uneasy in their company, than he was with Crispinus, their forefather, in the Holy Way; and would no more have allowed them a place amongst the critics, than he would Demetrius the mimic, and Tigellius the buffoon; ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... years exposed, the paintings on the walls and the vases are remarkably well preserved. This tomb contains the ashes of the dependents of Tiberius, the contemporary of our Lord. One pigeon-hole is filled with the calcined bones of the court buffoon, a poor deaf and dumb slave who had wonderful powers of mimicry, and used to amuse his morose master by imitating the gesticulations of the advocates pleading in the Forum. Another pigeon-hole contains the remains of the keeper of the library ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... repeated, caused Poinsinet to be fully convinced of his ugliness; he used to go about in companies, and take every opportunity of inveighing against himself; he made verses and epigrams against himself; he talked about "that dwarf, Poinsinet;" "that buffoon, Poinsinet;" "that conceited, hump-backed Poinsinet;" and he would spend hours before the glass, abusing his own face as he saw it reflected there, and vowing that he grew handsomer at every fresh epithet that ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... low person like Thersites opens a debate in an assembly called by the Over-Lord; this could not possibly pass unchallenged among listeners living in the feudal age. When a prince called an assembly, he himself opened the debate, as Achilles does in Book I. 54-67. That a lewd fellow, the buffoon and grumbler of the host, of "the people," nameless and silent throughout the Epic, should rush in and open debate in an assembly convoked by the Over-Lord, would have been regarded by feudal hearers, or by any hearers with feudal traditions, as ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... yellow, wrinkled cheeks. He was visibly punished by his journey; the sweat streamed from his leather and under his puckered eyelids his eyes flamed imprecations. His grotesque body was enveloped in yet more grotesque apparel—the piebald of the buffoon, the mottled livery of the chartered mountebank. There was a slender collar of gold about his neck, on which those that were near enough to him and had quick sight might read in plain terms that he was a royal fool, one of those jesters whom the great loved to tend to ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... had always in his service the Hula, who, like the buffoon or jester of the French kings, must amuse his majesty by mimicry or dancing. The Kahu alii, or Kaukaualii, as they are now styled, are attendants or followers of the high chiefs by right of birth. They accompany their masters everywhere, ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... compliant. Lie, cheat, make every word a snare, and every act a forgery; but never contradict. Agree with people, and they make a couch for you in their hearts. You know the story of Dante and the buffoon. Both were entertained at the court of the vain pedant, who called himself Prince Scaliger,—the former poorly, the latter sumptuously. 'How comes it,' said the buffoon to the poet, 'that I am so rich and you so poor?' 'I shall be as rich as you,' was the ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... concern, and a rival magazine, to be called the Quarterly Review. The project was a daring one, in view of Constable's great ability and resources; to make it foolhardy to madness Scott selected to manage the new business a brother of James Ballantyne, a dissipated little buffoon, with about as much business ability and general caliber of character as is connoted by the name which Scott coined for him, "Rigdumfunnidos." The selection of such a man for such a place betrays in Scott's ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... himself absolved by this severe castigation. Qu'est-ce qu'il me chante? Has the letter undergone transformation in the Christian climate of Reinfeld, or did it leave the hand of this once shallow buffoon in its present form? He asserts, moreover, that he lives in a never dreamed of happiness with his present wife, whose acquaintance he made a week before the engagement, and whom he married six weeks after the same event: a happiness which his first marriage ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... choose to make a buffoon of yourself," he said sharply, with a slight trembling of the lower jaw, "I can't prevent your doing so; but I warn you that if you dare to play the fool in my presence, I will teach you to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... fact that magnetism is by no means confined to those who have finely trained intellects or who have achieved great reputations. Some vaudeville buffoon or some gypsy fiddler may have more attractive power than the virtuoso who had spent years in developing his mind and his technic. The average virtuoso thinks far more of his "geist," his "talent" ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... if unexposed, sufficiently fruitful of evil, to be legitimate subjects of investigation, and he who under such circumstances is so careful of his dignity as to disregard the subject altogether, is as much mistaken as the gravest buffoon of the circus. We reviewed a week or two ago "The Phantom World," just republished by Mr. Hart; the Appletons have recently printed an original work which we believe has considerable merit, entitled "Credulity and Superstition;" and Mr. Redfield has in ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... railing," he repeated, with glistening eyes, "you have forgotten the iron railing. Without his protection the poor Goose Man is to be sure your buffoon, ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... shabby little town, they sprang off the car before a small inn, and ere their feet were on the ground were appropriated by one of a shoal of guides, in dress and speech an ultra Irishman, exaggerating his part as a sort of buffoon for the travellers. Rashe was diverted by his humours; Cilla thought them in bad taste, and would fain have escaped from his brogue and his antics, with some perception that the scene ought to be left to make ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Portmanteaus full of pamphlets and broadsides were sent down from London. Every freeholder in the county had several tracts left at his door. In every market place, on the market day, papers about the brazen forehead, the viperous tongue, and the white liver of Jack Howe, the French King's buffoon, flew about like flakes in a snow storm. Clowns from the Cotswold Hills and the forest of Dean, who had votes, but who did not know their letters, were invited to hear these satires read, and were asked ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to God that Fanfulla is not here to hear you, or they had been your last words for pretty though he be, Messer Fanfulla is a very monster of bloodthirstiness. With me it is different. I am a man of very gentle ways, as you may have heard, Messer Buffoon. But see that you forget at once my station and my name, or you may realise how little they need buffoons ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... always a Brahman, and therefore of a caste superior to the king himself; yet his business is to excite mirth by being ridiculous in person, age, and attire. He is sometimes represented as grey-haired, hump-backed, lame, and ugly. In fact, he is a species of buffoon, who is allowed full liberty of speech, being himself a universal butt. His attempts at wit, which are rarely very successful, and his allusions to the pleasures of the table, of which he is a confessed votary, are absurdly ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... desert and the marshes, fishing, inspection of agricultural works, military exercises, games, songs, dancing, doubtless the recital of long stories, and exhibitions of magic, even down to the contortions of the court buffoon and the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... so-called victim of the bottle. But Mackay was miles from publishing his weakness to the world; laid the blame of his failure on corrupt masters and a corrupt State policy; and after he had been one night overtaken and had played the buffoon in his cups, sternly, though not without tact, suppressed all reference to his escapade. It was a treat to see him manage this: the various jesters withered under his gaze, and you were forced to recognise in him a certain steely force, and a gift ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... them all out of the house to check them over. To the joyful surprise of the visitors, there among them was little Eva—supposed to be eaten, and she even retained her right hand. Thus another newspaper libel upon the poor old black bear—the buffoon of the forest—was shown to be devoid of truth; yet that story was published in the Toronto papers, and, no doubt, was copied all over the ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... traditions. Compare them with the men of to-day, with your Rafael Molina, who allows himself to be gored, playing with a heifer; with your frivolous boys like Frascuelo. I have seen the ring convulsed with laughter as that buffoon strutted across the arena, flirting his muleta as a manola does her skirts, the bewildered bull not knowing what to make of it. It was enough to make Illo turn in his ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... passed the Francais without the least compunction, with les Horaces or Andromaque on the bills, and a crowd at the door, to commit ourselves, a few paces farther, to the friendly arms of a stall at the Palais Royal, and the mirth-inspiring influence of Tousez and Levassor, the most comical buffoon and admirable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... entitled, a Tale of a Tub. Had this writing been published in a pagan or popish nation, who are justly impatient of all indignity offered to the established religion of their country, no doubt but the author would have received the punishment he deserved. But the fate of this impious buffoon is very different; for in a protestant kingdom, zealous of their civil and religious immunities, he has not only escaped affronts, and the effects of publick resentment, but has been caressed and patronised by persons of great figure, and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Foster, it is true, had got on well according to his lights, and was on more than friendly terms with Evans, the school slow bowler. But he was not much liked by his equals. Rudd was looked on quite rightly as an absolute buffoon; Collins got on fairly well, but was generally admitted to be a bit eccentric. Gordon was, without doubt, the pick of the crew. His position in form was a great help. Mansell's friends thought him a cheerful, amusing ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... the greatest haste, it being the hour of the Corso, and I must go and buffoon with the rest. My daughter Allegra is just gone with the Countess G. in Count G.'s coach and six. Our old Cardinal is dead, and the new one not appointed yet—but the masquing goes on the same." (Letter to Murray, 355th in Moore, dated Ravenna, Feb. 7, 1820.) "A dreadfully moral place, for you ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... more bold; with generous Rage enflam'd, Against the old ensnaring Test declaim'd. Beside, he bore a most peculiar Hate To sleeping Pilots, all Earth-clods of State. None more abhorr'd the Sycophant Buffoon, And Parasite, th'excrescence of a Throne; Creatures who their creating Sun disgrace, A Brood more abject than Niles Slime-born Race. Such was the Brave Achitophel; a Mind, (If but the Heart and Face were of ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... smile—"your disguise is so perfect, or rather, the new character, in which you this time appear, has been so well acted, that had it not been the afternoon you set for your third appearance, I should have never known you. I think you make a better Quaker boy than you did a crazy man last time, or buffoon and tumbler the first one. But what have you been able ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... curious spectators in the church at Ars was a highly educated freethinker, a mocker at religion, of the Voltaire stamp. To please his wife he had accompanied her to Ars, in order, as he expressed it, to have a look at "the old buffoon." With a scornful air he surveyed the crowd praying devoutly in the little church. Suddenly the cure stepped out of the confessional, advanced towards the new arrival, and, with an imposing movement of the hand, requested him to ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous
... to play the part of a clown or buffoon, acting in a very silly and stupid manner, while the others looked on laughing and pointing their fingers at him ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... many gewgaws and playthings, and I found, after not many days, that my popularity was on the wane, and that I could not hope to maintain it against the attractions of a French waiting-maid, a monkey, a parrot, a poodle, and a little Dwarfish boy-attendant that was half fiddler and half buffoon. So my consequence faded and faded, and I was sneered at and flouted as a young Savage and a young Irish by the English lacqueys about the House, and I sank from my Lady's keeping-room to the antechamber, and ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... strolling player; stager, performer; mime, mimer[obs3]; artists; comedian, tragedian; tragedienne, Roscius; star, movie star, star of stage and screen, superstar, idol, sex symbol; supporting actor, supporting cast; ham, hamfatter *[obs3]; masker[obs3]. pantomimist, clown harlequin, buffo[obs3], buffoon, farceur, grimacer, pantaloon, columbine; punchinello[obs3]; pulcinello[obs3], pulcinella[obs3]; extra, bit-player, walk-on role, cameo appearance; mute, figurante[obs3], general utility; super, supernumerary. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... these did Zimri stand; A man so various, that he seem'd to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong; Was everything by starts, and nothing long; But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon: 550 Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking, Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking. Blest madman, who could every hour employ, With something new to wish, or to enjoy! Railing and ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... took their acting copies. These volumes, then, that catch my firelight hold the very plays that the crowds of 1774 looked upon. Herein is the Romeo, word for word, that Lydia Languish sniffled over. Herein is Shylock, not yet with pathos on him, but a buffoon still, ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... Gods," because with his fate that of all the rest was bound up. His death, ominously foretold from eldest antiquity, would be the signal for the ruin of the universe. Asa Loki was the Momus Satan or Devil Buffoon of the Scandinavian mythology, the half amusing, half horrible embodiment of wit, treachery, and evil; now residing with the gods in heaven, now accompanying Thor on his frequent adventures, now visiting and plotting with his own kith and kin in frosty Jotunheim, beyond the earth ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Miss Woodley?" he replied, with astonishment, "Do you imagine I would play the buffoon ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... the thing was, it was English and it was individual. Lewis Carroll gave mathematics a holiday: he carried logic into the wild lands of illogicality. Edward Lear, a richer, more romantic and therefore more truly Victorian buffoon, improved the experiment. But the more we study it, the more we shall, I think, conclude that it reposed on something more real and profound in the Victorians than even their just and exquisite appreciation of children. ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... managers of that excellent institution, that a more worthy, modest, sober, and loyal man does not exist in his majesty's dominions than this distinguished poet, whom some of his waggish friends have taken up the absurd fancy of exhibiting in print as a sort of boozing buffoon; and who is now, instead of revelling in the license of tavern-suppers and party politics, bearing up, as he may, against severe and unmerited misfortunes, in as dreary a solitude as ever nursed the melancholy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... fiery horse, why he has a staff of aides-de-camp, and why he has two grooms, are things which no one seems to know. He patronises generals and admirals, doctors and commissariat officers, and they submit to be patronised by him. Half-priest, half-buffoon, something of a Friar Tuck and something of a Louis XV. abbe, he is a sort of privileged person, who by the mere force of impudence has made his way in the world. Most English girls in their teens fall in ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... smartness, and animal spirits; hence arose a vivacity and fluency that were often amusing, and passed for very clever. Reserve she had none; would talk about strangers, or friends, herself, her mother, her God, and the last buffoon-singer, in a breath. At a hint from Rosa, she told her who the lady in the pink dress was, and the lady in the violet velvet, and so on; for each lady was defined by her dress, and, more or less, quizzed by this show-woman, not exactly out of malice, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... he is as ugly as a Puritan. He is as indecent as a Puritan. He is as full of gross words and sensual facts as a sermon of the seventeenth century. Up to this point of his life indeed hardly anyone would have dreamed of calling him a Puritan; he was called sometimes an anarchist, sometimes a buffoon, sometimes (by the more discerning stupid people) a prig. His attitude towards current problems was felt to be arresting and even indecent; I do not think that anyone thought of connecting it with the old Calvinistic morality. But Shaw, who knew better ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the assaults upon the governing classes generally stirred his wrath. The satire upon individuals may be all very well in its place, but a man, he said, has no business to set up as the 'regenerator of society' because he is its most 'distinguished buffoon.' He was not picking his words, and 'buffoon' is certainly an injudicious phrase; but the sentiment which it expressed was so characteristic and deeply rooted that I must dwell a little upon its ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... amusement. To be sure the creature was such a fool that it was not fair to think of him save as a buffoon. So unfortunately she chose amusement. "Oh, I vow, Sir George, your ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... city. The colloquy had occupied some moments, but when Renwick came to a straight reach of road which led toward the tobacco factory buildings he was surprised to find that Herr Linke was nowhere in sight. The man was an enigma, a curious mixture of desperado and buffoon, but his sudden disappearance without a word of thanks, apology or explanation, gave Renwick something to puzzle over as he made his way to the bridge. Its possible significance escaped him until he had reached the river, when, a thought suddenly occurring to ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... brilliant and romantic grace, A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace Of passion and impudence and energy. Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, Most vain, most generous, sternly critical, Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist: A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, And ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... replaced by officers chosen by the soldiers themselves, [Under the rank of field-officers.] whose affections are often conciliated by qualities not essentially military, though sometimes professional. A buffoon, or a pot-companion, is, of course, often more popular than a disciplinarian; and the brightest talents lose their influence when put in competition with a head that can bear ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... way, his eyes abstracted from Joseph, fixed on the darkness of the room. While listening to him Joseph had often asked himself if there were a real inspiration behind that lean face, carven like a marble, with prominent nose and fading chin, or if he were a mere buffoon. ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... Fillamour a letter from herself, signed under her own name, making an appointment for that night; but at the same time Galliard, claiming a former promise, drags his friend off to visit Euphemia. The intrigue is complicated by the ridiculous amours of two foolish travellers, Sir Signal Buffoon and Mr. Tickletext, a puritan divine, his tutor. These, unknown to each other, make assignations with the two bona robas by means of Petro, who dupes them thoroughly by his clever tricks, and pockets their money. Whilst Galliard and Sir Harry are serenading the ladies, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... The name of John Fastolfe, Esq. occurs in the muster rolls of Henry on his first expedition to France. But it must be remembered that not Falstaff, but Sir John Oldcastle, was made the buffoon on the stage at first, and continued so for many years, till the offence which it gave led to the substitution of Falstaff. "Stage poets," says Fuller, "have themselves been very bold with, and others ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... night-shirts, would see sleighs come galloping down, with a jangle of bells, full of laughing, singing young people, returning from some excursion far up in the hills, where there had been feasting and dancing. Here a young lawyer—newly married and something of a privileged buffoon—was sitting on the lap of somebody else's wife, playing a concertina, and singing at the top of his voice. "Some of that Loreng man's doings again," people would say. "The place has never been the same since he came here." And they would get back to bed again, shaking their heads and wondering ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... effect of premeditation: that Rabelais had certain home-truths to deliver to his generation, and delivered them in such terms as kept him from the fagot and the rope by bedaubing him with the renown of a common buffoon. But the argument is none of the soundest in itself, and may fairly be set aside as a piece of desperate special pleading, the work of counsel at their wits' end for matter of defence. For Rabelais clean is not Rabelais at ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... in the middle of the room, a straying sparkle of light, that threw itself over and over like a tumbler, tittering, at the same time, like a human being. Swanhilda for a while kept herself quiet; but as the luminous antic ceased not practising his harlequinade, she peevishly exclaimed—'What buffoon is carrying on his fooleries here? I desire to be left in peace.' The light vanished instantly, and Swanhilda already had congratulated herself upon gaining her point, when suddenly a loud shrilly sound was heard—the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... better test of the popular opinion of a man than the character assigned to him on the stage; and till the close of the sixteenth century Sir John Oldcastle remained the profligate buffoon of English comedy. Whether in life he bore the character so assigned to him, I am unable to say. The popularity of Henry V., and the splendour of his French wars, served no doubt to colour all who had opposed him with a blacker shade than they deserved: ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... wife, and it turned out to be the last; but from that moment the older man had something of dignity in the eyes of this younger man, who had merely judged of him by his little foibles and eccentricities, and would have been ready to dismiss him contemptuously as a buffoon. There was something, then, behind that powerful face, with its deep-cut lines, its heavy eyebrows and piercing and sometimes sad eyes, besides a mere liking for tricks of childish diplomacy. Lavender began to have some respect for Sheila's father, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... some reward from the personage for whom the entertainment was prepared, and, at the conclusion of the piece, Grimaldi waited upon the Mussulman for the usual present. If the Turk had concealed the expression of his anger at the accident, it was not however extinct, for on the appearance of the buffoon, he directed him to be seized by his attendants, and transported in his theatrical costume, to his residence, where, after undergoing a severe bastinado, the hapless actor was thrust into the street, with only his pedal honour for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 282, November 10, 1827 • Various
... persuasion. But once or twice before sundown he permitted himself to ask natural questions concerning the old country, and to indulge in those genial gibes which the Englishman in the bush learns to expect from the indigenous buffoon. ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... was never any so well recompensed: and why? Because Taste (GOUT, inclination) sets no limits to its recompenses. The King of Prussia overloads men of talent with his benefits for precisely the reasons which induce a little German Prince to overload with benefits a buffoon or a dwarf." [—OEuvres de Voltaire,—xxvii. 220 n.] Could there be a phenomenon more ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... the diversion of the spectator, in the way of laughing, for its object, should preserve a moderately buffoon simplicity, and the dancer, aided by a natural genius, but especially by throwing as much nature as possible into his execution, may promise himself to amuse and please the spectator; even though he should not be very deep in the ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... savages as well as civilised peoples. Why do we laugh when a man on the stage searches everywhere for his hat, which is all the time on his head? Why do we laugh when a pompous gentleman slips on a piece of orange-peel and falls to the ground, or when one buffoon unexpectedly hits another on the head, and, before he has time to recover, with equal unexpectedness hooks his legs with a stick and brings him heavily to the ground? Why did we laugh at the adventures of Mr. ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... Caesar; and if he had read Horace "Ad Pisones," he would have made a better Achilles. He complains that he makes the good and the bad perish promiscuously; and that in "Coriolanus"—a play which Dennis "improved" for the new stage—he represents Menenius as a buffoon and introduces the rabble in a most undignified fashion.[14] Gildon, again, says that Shakspere must have read Sidney's "Defence of Posey" and therefore, ought to have known the rules and that his neglect of them was owing to laziness. "Money seems to have been ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... live, and that my sole attendant is a female. I allow no male servants within this house. Even when his Royal Highness honours me with his presence he is unattended. I desire that I am immediately released from the presence of this buffoon." ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... a rude railing rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon; coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure, but always vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his clerical character. His Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the front entrance, where swung the marvelous bronze doors which had stirred the imaginations of two continents, streamed the favored of the fashionable world. Among them Carmen saw many whom she recognized. The buffoon, Larry Beers, was there, swinging jauntily along with the bejeweled wife of Samson, the multimillionaire packer. Kane and his wife, and Weston followed. Outside the gates there was incessant chugging of automobiles, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... refined modification of sympathy, may be the motive of good and great actions; but it cannot be trusted as a moral principle. Nero's love of sympathy, made him anxious to be applauded on the stage as a fiddler and a buffoon. Tiberius banished one of his philosophic courtiers, and persecuted him till the unfortunate man laid violent hands upon himself, merely because he had discovered that the emperour read books in the morning to prepare himself with questions for his literary society at ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... (buffoon), she groaned, "didn't you swear to separate from Nalini, and have you not taken all your meals with him ever since? Is that the ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... Brutal bruta. Brute bruto. Buccaneer marrabisto. Bucket sitelo. Buckle buko. Buckler sxildo. Buckwheat poligono. Bud burgxono. Budget (finance) budgxeto. Buffalo bubalo. Buffer sxtopilo. Buffet frapi. Buffet (restaurant) bufedo. Buffoon sxercemulo. Bug cimo. Build konstrui. Building, a konstruajxo. Bulb bulbo. Bulgarian Bulgaro. Bulk dikeco. Bulky multdika. Bull bovoviro. Bullet kuglo. Bulletin noto, karteto. Bullfinch pirolo. Bullion ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... when it came to mystery, he had a vague idea of something shameful, if not criminal. Doctor Gordon's incomprehensible changes of mood, of almost more than mood, of character even, disturbed him. Why a man should be one hour a country buffoon, the next an absorbed gentleman, he could not understand. And he could not understand also why Clemency had never left the house since he had met her on the day of his arrival. She evidently was herself angry and sulky at being ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... Shakspere is decidedly "light," and I rather fancy that he would regard Aristophanes as heavy. If one were to suggest, on his proposing to place the Irving Shakspere on the shelves of a free library, that the poet is often foolish, often a buffoon of a low type, often a mere quibbler, and often ribald, he might perhaps have a fit, or he might inquire if the speaker were mad—assuredly he would do something impressive; but he would not scruple ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... called Ciacco,[435] as great a glutton as ever lived. His means sufficing him not to support the expense that his gluttony required and he being, for the rest, a very well-mannered man and full of goodly and pleasant sayings, he addressed himself to be, not altogether a buffoon, but a spunger[436] and to company with those who were rich and delighted to eat of good things; and with these he went often to dine and sup, albeit he was not always bidden. There was likewise at Florence, in those days, a man called Biondello, a little dapper fellow of his person, very quaint ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... loss for a meal of victuals; ever itching to try his arts magic on great beasts and often meeting ludicrous failures therein; envious of the powers of others, and constantly striving to outdo them in what they do best; in short, little more than a malicious buffoon delighting in practical jokes, and abusing his superhuman powers for selfish and ignoble ends. But this is a low, modern, and corrupt version of the character of Michabo, bearing no more resemblance to his real and ancient one than the language and acts of our ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... no more than an hour or two. She is a good traveler. My servant will secure horses for you and meet you just before sunrise, near the gate. Maddalena will come there with her, and you must not ride so fast as to arouse curiosity. I have to play the buffoon at a banquet to-night, and there is but ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... my iron word. When the buffoon-witted Ning rises from his congenial slough this shall be his lot: for sixty thousand ages he shall fail to find the path of his return, but shall, instead, thread an aimless flight among the frozen ambits of ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... odious and despicable folly, to be cast out with loathing, to be trodden under foot with contempt. If a man offends in this sort, to please himself, 'tis scurvy malignity; if to delight others, 'tis base servility and flattery: upon the first score he is a buffoon to himself; upon the last, a fool to others. And well in common speech are such practisers so termed, the grounds of that practice being so vain, and the effect so unhappy. The heart of fools, saith the wise man, is in the house of mirth; meaning, it seems, especially ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... writer of that letter from my heart; he was a man of thought on the most important subjects. But, indeed, had I lived in the Middle Ages (I am heartily glad that I did not) I should have been an eremite myself—if I had not been a professed buffoon, that is. These were the only philosophical lives yet open: laughter or prayer; sneers, we might say, and tears. Until the sun of the Positive arose, the wise man had to make his ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... respect of what is pleasant in the way of relaxation or amusement: The mean state shall be called Easy-pleasantry, and the character accordingly a man of Easy-pleasantry; the excess Buffoonery, and the man a Buffoon; the man deficient herein a Clown, and ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... her. She shrugged. "Still around, though I hope not for long, the buffoon! Who could ever put up with a show-off small boy like that for more than ten minutes? Besides, he's wasting himself. Why should he pick me for a bad ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... Deputies were accordingly sent immediately, for whose return the bulk of the members stayed in the Great Chamber. I was informed that this was one trick among others concerted to ruin me, and, telling the Duc d'Orleans of it, he said that if the old buffoon, the Keeper of the Seals, was concerned in such a complication of folly and knavery, he deserved to be hanged by the side of Mazarin. But the sequel showed that I was not out ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... no man's acquaintance whatsoever a condescension, nor accept it from the greatest upon unworthy or ignominious terms. I know a certain lord that has often invited a set of people, and proposed for their diversion a buffoon player, and an eminent poet, to be of the party; and which was yet worse, thought them both sufficiently recompensed by the dinner, and the honour of his company. This kind of insolence is risen to such a height, that I my self was the other day sent to ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... into circles three half pikes in demonstration of the thing that would occur to them if they tempted me overmuch. And I have sung them all the bloody and lascivious songs that ever I knew in my unregenerate days. I have played the bravo and buffoon until they gaped for wonder. I have damned myself to all eternity, I fear, but there'll be no mutiny this fair day. It may ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... curried favour with Nero. Polyclitus was sent to inquire into Suetonius Paulinus' administration of Britain after the revolt of Boadicea in A.D. 61. Vatinius was a deformed cobbler from Beneventum who became a sort of court buffoon, and acquired great wealth and ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... Tacitus has been sometimes represented as a very Diogenes, for carping and sarcasm—a very Aristophanes, to blacken character with ridicule and reproach. But he is as far removed from the cynic or the buffoon, as from the panegyrist or the flatterer. He is not the indiscriminate admirer that Plutarch was. Nor is he such a universal hater as Sallust. It is the fault of the times that he is obliged to deal so much in censure. If there ever were perfect ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... Every part is adapted to every other, and, in the key, the whole is harmonious. Hermann, for instance, the basso, who sang Mephistopheles, would have been quite perfect if he had only remembered this. But he forgot that Mephisto is a sly and subtle devil. He caricatured him. He made him a buffoon and repulsive. Such extravagance could not have imposed upon Faust or Martha; yet we all agreed that it was very fine, and amiably applauded what no opera-goer of sense could ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... outbreak of pleasure and vice, after the Restoration, the actors, long starved and crestfallen, brushed up their plumes and burnished their tinsel. Killigrew, that clever buffoon of the Court, opened a new theatre in Drury Lane in 1663, with a play of Beaumont and Fletcher's; and Davenant (supposed to be Shakespeare's illegitimate son) opened the little theatre, long disused, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... with Lady Rachel Cavendish, third daughter of the Duke of Devonshire: the victim does not dislike it! my uncle makes great settlements; and the Duke is to get a peerage for Pigwiggin upon the foot that the father cannot be spared out of the House of Commons! Can you bear this old buffoon making himself of consequence, and ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... his intrigue with Jane Disome was already notorious, as is proved by this extract, under date 1515, from the Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris: "About this time whilst the King was in Paris, there was a priest called Mons. Cruche, a great buffoon, who a little time before with several others had publicly performed in certain entertainments and novelties' (sic) on scaffolds upon the Place Maubert, there being in turn jest, sermon, morality and farce; and in the morality appeared several ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... and beginning to caper as if he were a madman. I was much alarmed as well as surprised at this course of conduct; for although my friend was an inveterate joker, he was the very reverse of what is termed a buffoon, and never indulged in personally grotesque actions with a view to make people laugh—such as making faces, a practice which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, causes the face-makers to look idiotical rather than funny, ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... unqualified fool," said the king, laughing, "and if it was not against my conscience, and unworthy of human nature, to engage a man as a perpetual buffoon, I would promote you to the office of court fool. You might, at least, serve as an example to my cavaliers, by teaching them ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... 'Not finished!'—Oons! how is this?—these 'flaws and starts' must be 'authorised by your grandam,' and are unbecoming of any other author. I was sorry to hear of your discrepancy with the * *s, or rather your abjuration of agreement. I don't want to be impertinent, or buffoon on a serious subject, and am therefore at a loss ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... response from Cibber. But they were reprinted in a rambling production issued from "Curll's chaste press" in 1740, and entitled the Tryal of Colley Cibber, Comedian, &c. At the end of this there is a short address to "the Self-dubb'd Captain Hercules Vinegar, alias Buffoon," to the effect that "the malevolent Flings exhibited by him and his Man Ralph," have been faithfully reproduced. Then comes the following curious and not ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... said the Abbot, looking round and speaking with a vehemence which secured him a tranquil audience for some time,—"will you suffer a profane buffoon, within the very church of God, to insult his ministers? Many of you—all of you, perhaps—have lived under my holy predecessors, who were called upon to rule in this church where I am called upon to suffer. If you have ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... from the beast, seeing that no animal ever yet lost his senses through blighted love, which proves abundantly that animals have no souls. The employment of a lover is that of a mountebank, of a soldier, of a quack, of a buffoon, of a prince, of a ninny, of a king, of an idler, of a monk, of a dupe, of a blackguard, of a liar, of a braggart, of a sycophant, of a numskull, of a frivolous fool, of a blockhead, of a know-nothing, of a knave. An employment from which Jesus abstained, in imitation ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... few paces, Dom Claude placed his back against a pillar, and gazed intently at Gringoire. The gaze was not the one which Gringoire feared, ashamed as he was of having been caught by a grave and learned person in the costume of a buffoon. There was nothing mocking or ironical in the priest's glance, it was serious, tranquil, piercing. The archdeacon was the first ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... You don't know her! I was a fool to think she would confide to a mere buffoon," cried poor Allen, in his misery. "Yet if they were ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the railing," he repeated, with glistening eyes, "you have forgotten the iron railing. Without his protection the poor Goose Man is to be sure your buffoon, your zany, your clown." ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... between disgust and amusement. To be sure the creature was such a fool that it was not fair to think of him save as a buffoon. So unfortunately she chose amusement. "Oh, I vow, Sir George, your delicacy ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... the group. Being only thirty-three years exposed, the paintings on the walls and the vases are remarkably well preserved. This tomb contains the ashes of the dependents of Tiberius, the contemporary of our Lord. One pigeon-hole is filled with the calcined bones of the court buffoon, a poor deaf and dumb slave who had wonderful powers of mimicry, and used to amuse his morose master by imitating the gesticulations of the advocates pleading in the Forum. Another pigeon-hole contains the remains of the ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... guide and bear with her weakness; was no prop to the "child," and believes himself absolved by this severe castigation. Qu'est-ce qu'il me chante? Has the letter undergone transformation in the Christian climate of Reinfeld, or did it leave the hand of this once shallow buffoon in its present form? He asserts, moreover, that he lives in a never dreamed of happiness with his present wife, whose acquaintance he made a week before the engagement, and whom he married six weeks after the same ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... 135. I have softened some of the most improbable circumstances of this wretched biographer. From his ill-worded narration, it should seem that the prince's buffoon having accidentally entered the tent, and awakened the slumbering monarch, the fear of punishment urged him to persuade the disaffected soldiers ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... the dark, humorous eyes, that seemed almost too tolerant of his grievance. He had been to levees, and his heart had sunk equally before the vulgar crowd, who seemed to regard this man as their own buffoon, and the pompousness of position, learning and dignity, which he seemed to ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... doubt to remain as to their talking. Then there is superabundant proof of the relish with which men enjoyed, in the Middle Ages, silly, teazing or puzzling answers; the questioner remaining at the end rolled up in the repartees, gasping as a fly caught in a spider's web. The Court fool or buffoon had for his principal merit his clever knack of returning witty or confusing answers; the best of them were preserved; itinerant minstrels remembered and repeated them; clerks turned them into Latin, and gave them place in their collections of exempla. They afforded amusement ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... that would be the climax: that I should show my long beard and white hairs amid that throng of women and lunatics; and clap and yell in unseemly rapture over the vile contortions of an abandoned buffoon. ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... there is no better way of seeing the New World—that is, if you do not disdain the company of strolling players. You gain in knowledge what you lose in time. If you are a philosopher, you can study human nature through the buffoon and the mummer. If you are a naturalist, here are grand forests to contemplate. If you are not a recluse, here is free, ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... at the end of my list of military anecdotes. I have just spoken of a general's promotion, and will close with the story of a simple drummer, but a drummer renowned throughout the army as a perfect buffoon, in fact, the famous Rata, to whom General Gros, as we shall see; was ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... hated Tigellius, the flattering musical buffoon so well described by Horace, thus lashes his country in a letter to Fabius Gallus: ‘Id ego in lucris pono non ferre hominem pestilentiorem putriâ suâ.’ Again, writing to his brother: ‘Remember,’ says he, ‘though in perfect health, you are in Sardinia.’ And Pausanias, Cornelius Nepos, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... absent, the language of the men would have been no coarser. These fat and middle-aged women, married, doubtless, and highly respectable after their fashion, when struck by each gust of humour, such as might issue from the mouth of a foul-minded buffoon at a fair, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... adjoining the castle, is the famed Tun of Heidelberg, constructed by one of the electors at the suggestion of his buffoon, whose statue is placed near this enormous tun, which can contain 326,000 bottles. We were told that the jester (some will not allow him to be called the fool) assisted his master in drinking eighteen bottles of the best Rhenish wine daily. The table where they sat, near the tun, is still shewn. ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... for conscientious inquiry, call it by what name you please. The science of common sense is all-sufficient. The seemingly intelligent individual who can only find material for ribaldry in this connection is a more serious buffoon than he imagines. It is apparent that our methods are wrong. Any constructive effort to correct them is commendable. When it is stated that 20 per cent. of the American women are unable to bear children, and that 25 per cent. ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... absolute Johannes factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only shake-scene in the country." Another contemporaneous critic said of the scene between Brutus and Cassius in "Julius Caesar": "They are put there to play the bully and the buffoon, to show their activity of face and muscles. They are to play a prize, a trial of skill and hugging and swaggering, like two drunken Hectors, for a two-penny reckoning." Shakespeare's contemporaries—or, at least, many of them—sought to belittle ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... hitherto by coition, came now to beset me. The persons of these dreams were (and still are) invariably women, with this one remembered exception: I dreamed that Oscar Wilde, one of my photographs of him incarnate, approached me with a buffoon languishment and perpetrated fellatio, an act verbally expounded shortly before by my oracle. For a month or more, recalling this ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... merest buffoon," he replied quietly. "You are an artist. There is no comparison possible, Miss Norvell. The play itself is utterly unworthy of your talent, yet you succeed in dignifying it in a way I can never ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... serious old men; one was a model, a native of Frascati, with the face of a venerable apostle; the other, for contrast, looked like a buffoon and was the possessor of a grotesque nose, long, thin at the end and adorned with ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... old heathen philosophy, who hardly believes, so God save me, the truth of the Christian creed, has topp'd his part so well that he forces his Emperor to dissemble in his presence. Beginning by being the buffoon of the court, he has wormed himself into all its secrets, made himself master of all its intrigues, conspired with my own son-in-law against me, debauched my guards,—indeed so woven his web of deceit, that my life is ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... modern celebrated clubs are founded upon eating and drinking, which are points wherein most men agree, and in which the learned and illiterate, the dull and the airy, the philosopher and the buffoon, can all of them bear a part. The Kit-Cat itself is said to have taken its original from a mutton pie. The Beef-Steak and October clubs are neither of them averse to eating and drinking, if we may form a judgment of them from their ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... therefore to signify (1) a Venetian, (2) a garment worn by Venetians and consisting of breeches and stockings in one. The second sense is preserved, substantially, in our term pantaloons. The first sense led to the use of the word (in the mouths of the Venetians' enemies) for "buffoon" and then (in early Italian comedy) for "a lean and foolish old man." It is this stock figure of the stage that Shakespeare evokes. In line 22 hose means the covering for a man's body from his waist to his nether-stock. (Compare the present ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... than Voltaire; there was never any so well recompensed: and why? Because Taste (GOUT, inclination) sets no limits to its recompenses. The King of Prussia overloads men of talent with his benefits for precisely the reasons which induce a little German Prince to overload with benefits a buffoon or a dwarf." [—OEuvres de Voltaire,—xxvii. 220 n.] Could there be a phenomenon ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... were accordingly sent immediately, for whose return the bulk of the members stayed in the Great Chamber. I was informed that this was one trick among others concerted to ruin me, and, telling the Duc d'Orleans of it, he said that if the old buffoon, the Keeper of the Seals, was concerned in such a complication of folly and knavery, he deserved to be hanged by the side of Mazarin. But the sequel showed that I was not out ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... and it was real testimony to the solid worth of a Forsyte that she should always thus be a 'little thing'—the little thing was bored. Why shouldn't she amuse herself? Soames was rather tiring; and as to Mr. Bosinney—only that buffoon George would have called him the Buccaneer—she maintained that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... pleasant!' cried the obsequious Sampson. 'His acquaintance with Natural History too is surprising. Quite a Buffoon, quite!' ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... having failed to raise a PUBLIC PURSE, which was as stimulating a bait to the independent candidates for Garrat, as it is to the independent candidates for a certain assembly; the borough of Garrat has since remained vacant, and the populace have been without a professed political buffoon. ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... syl.), a popular name among the Dutch for a buffoon; a corruption of pickle-h[:a]rin ("a hairy sprite"), ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Mistakes in the Characters which he has drawn from History, against the Equality and Conveniency of Manners of his Dramatical Persons. Witness Menenius in the following Tragedy, whom he has made an errant Buffoon, which is a great Absurdity. For he might as well have imagin'd a grave majestick Jack-Pudding, as a Buffoon in a Roman Senator. Aufidius the General of the Volscians is shewn a base and a profligate Villain. He has offended against the Equality of the Manners ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... the metropolis. In London he loved to frequent those streets where the old bookshops were, Wardour Street, Princes Street, Seven Dials (where the shop has been long closed): he loved also Gray's Inn, in the garden of which he met Dodd, just before his death ("with his buffoon mask taken off"); and the Temple, into which you pass from the noise and crowd of Fleet Street,—into the quiet and "ample squares and green recesses," where the old Dial," the garden god of Christian gardens," then told of Time, and where the still living fountain ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... in his soul. Of all injured vanities, that of the reproved buffoon is the most savage; and when grave issues are involved, these petty stabs become unbearable. But Gondremark was a man of iron; he showed nothing; he did not even, like the common trickster, retreat because ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... society. In either case we moderns at least might haply desire the intervention of a beadle's hand as heavy and a sceptral cudgel as knotty as ever the son of Laertes applied to the shoulders of the first of the type or the tribe of Thersites. For this brutal and brutish buffoon—I am speaking of Shakespeare's Thersites—has no touch of humour in all his currish composition: Shakespeare had none as nature has none to spare for such dirty dogs as those of his kind or generation. There ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... [751] A buffoon, so the Scholiasts inform us, who was in the habit of visiting the public places of the city in order to make a little money by amusing the crowd with ridiculous stories. Others say he was a statesman of the period, ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... conformable to the ancient costume of China. There are others, however, that represent the Tartar conquest, but none built on historical events subsequent to that period. But the ancient drama is preferred by the critics. They have also comic pieces, in which there is always a buffoon, whose grimaces and low jests, like those of the buffoons in our own theatres, obtain from the audience the greatest share of applause. The dialogue in all their dramas, whether serious or comic, is conducted in a kind of monotonous recitative, sometimes however rising or sinking ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... and at length to justify. And so it is in Polonius, who is the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage. Shakspeare never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon; for although it was natural that Hamlet,—a young man of fire and genius, detesting formality, and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imagining that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation,—should ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... gewgaws and playthings, and I found, after not many days, that my popularity was on the wane, and that I could not hope to maintain it against the attractions of a French waiting-maid, a monkey, a parrot, a poodle, and a little Dwarfish boy-attendant that was half fiddler and half buffoon. So my consequence faded and faded, and I was sneered at and flouted as a young Savage and a young Irish by the English lacqueys about the House, and I sank from my Lady's keeping-room to the antechamber, and thence to the servant's hall, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... opinion—always in the wrong— Was everything by starts, but nothing long; Who in the course of one revolving moon Was chemist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon. Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking: Besides a thousand freaks ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... as we called him; I suppose as a term of endearment, for there was no Young Longbow. He was an Irishman, and the established wit, buffoon, and jester of the school. Innumerable stories are still told of his youthful escapades, of his audacity and skill in cribbing, of his dexterity in getting out of scrapes, of his repartees to masters and persons in authority. He it was who took ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... intituled "A Tale of a Tub." Had this writing been published in a pagan or popish nation, who are justly impatient of all indignity offered to the established religion of their country, no doubt but the author would have received the punishment he deserved.—But the fate of this impious buffoon is very different; for in a protestant kingdom, zealous of their civil and religious immunities, he has not only escaped affronts and the effects of publick resentment, but has been caressed and patronised by persons of ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... considerably, but the process is easy to follow. From meaning simply ancient it acquired the sense of quaint or odd, and was applied to grotesque[102] work in art or to a fantastic disguise. Then it came to mean buffoon, in which sense Shakespeare ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... he has, by his convivial powers, his good stories, good songs, and knack of mimicry, made himself so famous, that he has more invitations to dinner than he can accept. He has wit and talents fit for more than being the buffoon or mocking-bird of a good dinner and a pleasant party; but he seems so well contented with this reputation de salon, that I am afraid his ambition will not rise to any thing higher. After leading this idle life, and enjoying this cheap-earned praise, he will ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... foolish hope was this! I realised too soon The special form of Nemesis That waits on the buffoon: The joke I found concerned the gloom ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... you find him here, who was indeed for his senseless humour of designing to govern—us'd no otherwise than as the Buffoon of the Family—takes upon him to call Don Quixot (whom the Authour imbellishes, with all manner of learning and good sense, bating his whimsical Chimaera of Knight Errantry,) Goodman Dulpate and Don ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... might well have been said that the gaiety of nations was eclipsed; but to his contemporaries Rabelais appeared less as the enormous humourist, the buffoon Homer, than as a great scholar and man of science, whose bright temper and mirthful conversation were in no way inconsistent with good sense, sound judgment, and even a habit of moderation. It is thus that he should still be regarded. Below his laughter lay wisdom; below his orgy ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... seria; but all the more of playfulness and merriment. I am not responsible for the fact that there is a desire also to hear comic music in an opera seria; the difference is sharply drawn here. I find that the buffoon has not been banished from music, and in this respect the ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... "Indeed I am a dead man and 'tis the intention of this woman to peach upon me." Presently her husband asked her, "What be these four histories?" and answered she, "I saw four men each and every of whom was an antic fellow, a droll, a buffoon; furthermore, O my lord, one and all of them were garbed in gaberdine and bonnet."—And Shahrazad was surprised by the dawn of day and fell silent and ceased saying her permitted say. Then quoth her sister Dunyazad, "How sweet and tasteful is ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... obey, whom heaven itself obeys, Hopeless of pleasing, yet inclin'd to please. Here then at once, I welcome every shame, 15 And cancel at threescore a life of fame; No more my titles shall my children tell, The old buffoon will fit my name as well; This day beyond its term my fate extends, For life is ended when our ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... and Covent Garden and took their acting copies. These volumes, then, that catch my firelight hold the very plays that the crowds of 1774 looked upon. Herein is the Romeo, word for word, that Lydia Languish sniffled over. Herein is Shylock, not yet with pathos on him, but a buffoon still, to ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... "you have certainly made me laugh, but I doubt if you could make me cry. It is easy enough to be a buffoon; it is more difficult to ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... but no other right, human or divine, to exist at all; and when one of us does succeed in asserting his personality, he usually only makes himself odd and ridiculous. He rushes into polygamous Mormonism, or buffoon revivalism, or shallow-minded atheism; nay, he will even become an anarchist, because a few men have too much money and too little soul. What we need is neither the absence of individuality nor a morbid individuality, but high ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... success, or in the pleasure we feel in superiority. The desire for this refined modification of sympathy, may be the motive of good and great actions; but it cannot be trusted as a moral principle. Nero's love of sympathy, made him anxious to be applauded on the stage as a fiddler and a buffoon. Tiberius banished one of his philosophic courtiers, and persecuted him till the unfortunate man laid violent hands upon himself, merely because he had discovered that the emperour read books in the morning to prepare himself with questions for his literary ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... truth. Disguised as a clown, he attended the fancy-dress ball, and in the character of a mountebank collected a group of ladies and gentlemen around him while he related with the inimitable skill of a buffoon a romantic narrative. To most of the people present it was simply an amusing story, but to the count and Lagors and Madame Fauvel, who were among the listeners, it seemed something much more, for Lecoq dressed out his theory of the robbery in the trappings ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... natural guardians of the public taste and morals, seem to have deserted this important trust. Applause which ought to be measured out with scrupulous justice, correctness and precision, has been by admiring ignorance, poured forth in a torrent roar of uncouth and obstreperous glee on the buffoon, "the clown that says more than is set down for him," and on "the robustious perriwig-pated fellow, who tears a passion all to rags," while chaste merit and propriety have often gone unrewarded ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... enough to utter a truth which she fully believes all competent people know, but which none has heretofore been brave enough to utter.) You see, the thing that gravels her is that I am so persistently glorified as a mere buffoon, as if that entirely covered my case—which ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... report to the family of the memorable evening; and the hubbub over it, with the epithets applied to Alvan, intimated how he would have been received on a visit to demand her in marriage. There was no chance of her being allowed to enter houses where this 'rageing demagogue and popular buffoon' was a guest; his name was banished from her hearing, so she was compelled to have recourse to Marko. Unable to take such services without rewarding him, she fondled: it pained her to see him suffer. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... always in the wrong, Was every thing by starts, and nothing long, But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon. ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... conduct of the war, predicated upon a private letter of General Scott, the possession of which he did not satisfactorily account for. The Tribune, referring to his campaign as "a rhetorical spree," called him a "buffoon," a "political harlequin," a "repeater of mouldy jokes,"[852] and in bitter terms denounced his "low comedy performance at Tammany," his "double-shuffle dancing at Mozart Hall," his possession of a letter "by dishonourable means ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... came to meet us with several of his head men. He was an extraordinary-looking man, about fifty-eight or sixty years of age; but, far from possessing the dignity usually belonging to a grey head, he acted the buffoon for our amusement, and might have been a ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... small, strong, weak, deft, agile, clumsy, beautiful, ugly, deformed, birthmarked, keen and precocious, defective in sense, mind, and speech, nervous, clean, dainty, dirty, orderly, obedient, disobedient, disorderly, teasing, buoyant, buffoon, cruel, selfish, generous, sympathetic, inquisitive, lying, ill-tempered, silent, dignified, frank, loquacious, courageous, timid, whining, spoiled, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Review. The project was a daring one, in view of Constable's great ability and resources; to make it foolhardy to madness Scott selected to manage the new business a brother of James Ballantyne, a dissipated little buffoon, with about as much business ability and general caliber of character as is connoted by the name which Scott coined for him, "Rigdumfunnidos." The selection of such a man for such a place betrays in Scott's eminently sane ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... words and sensual facts as a sermon of the seventeenth century. Up to this point of his life indeed hardly anyone would have dreamed of calling him a Puritan; he was called sometimes an anarchist, sometimes a buffoon, sometimes (by the more discerning stupid people) a prig. His attitude towards current problems was felt to be arresting and even indecent; I do not think that anyone thought of connecting it with the old ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... a point when he ceases to be a buffoon and becomes a madman. I beg you to remember your own expression: 'Do you know how powerful a single man may be?' Please don't laugh about it, he's quite capable of pulling a trigger. They are convinced that I am a spy too. As ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the priest, in his alb and chasuble, dispensing of the blessings of the Pope; the judge, in his wig and bombazine, endeavouring to reconcile divine justice with the law's mundane majesty; the college doctor, in cap and gown, anointing the young princes of knowledge; the buffoon, in his cap and bells, dancing to the god of laughter; mylady of the pink-tea circle, in her huffing, puffing gasoline-car, fleeing the monster of ennui; the bride and bridegroom at the altar or before the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... impossible to doubt that they meant well, these soldiers of France greeting their comrades of England. One man behaved like a buffoon, or as though he had lost his wits. Grasping the hand of a young engineer he danced round him, shouting "Camarade! camarade!" in a joyous sing-song which was ridiculous, and yet touching in its simplicity and faith. It was no wonder, I thought, that the ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... scripsit quendam falsum, seditiosum, libellosum, factiosum et irreligiosum librum," is so remarkable that the attention of the most careless reader is at once arrested. Who was that old man, wasted with disease and ghastly with the pallor of imprisonment, upon whom the foul- mouthed buffoon in ermine exhausted his vocabulary of abuse and ridicule? Who was ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... came to be natural to them as soon as they passed the Volga. We are all so in a minor degree. In each house, to each of our friends, we are unconsciously different in some particular. One man holds us in awe, and we unconsciously instil that feeling. Another considers us a buffoon, and, ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... the Mark Twain of the latter years, with his deep, underlying seriousness, his grim irony, and his passion for justice and truth, find difficulty in realizing that, in his earlier days, the joker and the buffoon were almost solely in evidence. In answer to a query of mine as to the reason for the serious spirit that crept into and gave carrying power to his humour, Mr. Clemens frankly replied: "I never wrote ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... called services, in the narrower sense of the term ( 3), the grave and important ones of the statesman, clergyman and physician, as well as the "frivolous" ones of the opera singer, ballet-dancer and buffoon, unproductive. The labor of none of these can be fixed or incorporated in any particular object.(322)(323) But how strange it is that the labor of a violin-maker is called productive, while that of the violin-player is called unproductive; although the product of the former has ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... hero. To Count Gregory Erdey she extended a smiling salutation from afar, which he requited by saluting her with his hat in one hand and his wig in another, which provoked a roar of Homeric laughter from the assembled guests. The young buffoon had had his head clean shaved in order that his hair might grow all the stronger, so that his bald pate quite scared the weak-nerved members of the company. The young housewife curtsied low in humble silence before the Foispan Count Sarosdy and his wife, whereby she greatly pleased ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... sometimes needful to learn again the forgotten. The antics of fools make the current follies more palpable, as fashions are shown to be absurd by caricatures, which so lead to their extirpation. The buffoon and the zany are useful in their places. The ingenious artificer and craftsman, like Solomon, searches the earth for his materials, and transforms the misshapen matter into glorious workmanship. The world is conquered by the head even more than by the hands. Nor will any assembly talk forever. After ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... it said, was an immoral buffoon. Yes, among other things, he was that also; and we are by no means disposed to justify the man who, with such great talents, could yet sink so very low, whether it was to gratify his own coarse propensities, or from a supposed necessity ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... acquaintance whatsoever a condescension, nor accept it from the greatest upon unworthy or ignominious terms. I know a certain lord that has often invited a set of people, and proposed for their diversion a buffoon player, and an eminent poet, to be of the party; and which was yet worse, thought them both sufficiently recompensed by the dinner, and the honour of his company. This kind of insolence is risen to such a height, that I my self was the other ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... the hills toward the city. The colloquy had occupied some moments, but when Renwick came to a straight reach of road which led toward the tobacco factory buildings he was surprised to find that Herr Linke was nowhere in sight. The man was an enigma, a curious mixture of desperado and buffoon, but his sudden disappearance without a word of thanks, apology or explanation, gave Renwick something to puzzle over as he made his way to the bridge. Its possible significance escaped him until he had reached the river, when, a thought suddenly occurring to him, he put his hand into the breast ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... like an Irish terrier. He worried infinity as if it was a bone. Gnashing his teeth, he tried to carry the eternal subtleties by violence. As a man he often bored her, for he was always saying and doing the same things. But as a philosopher he really was a joy for ever, an inexhaustible buffoon. Taking up her pen, she began to caricature him. She drew a rabbit-warren where rabbits were at play in four dimensions. Before she had introduced the principal figure, she was interrupted by the footman. He had come up from the house to answer the bell. On seeing ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... additions to the Appendix to General Preface. I am in the sentiments towards the public that the buffoon player expresses towards ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... riddles, and I don't understand you. I don't know either of you, but it's clear that if Gangnet is a poet, you're a buffoon. Must you go on talking? I want ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... concerning Florio, from which we may derive any idea of his personal appearance and manner, suggest a very singular individuality. There was evidently something peculiar about his face; he was undoubtedly witty and worldly-wise, a braggart, a sycophant, and somewhat of a buffoon. He was imbued with an exaggerated idea of his own importance, and possessed of most unblushing assurance. In 1591 he signed his address "To the Reader," prefixed to his Second Fruites, "Resolute John Florio," a prefix which he persisted thereafter in ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... And then, avoiding the eye of the grand old saint, and hating myself as a buffoon, I continued, "My own conjecture is that something must have occurred to irritate the dramatist whilst he was writing that passage, and the expression slipped from his ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... every one of his absurdest characters, his microscopic imagination, his vein of seriousness, his contrasts of pathos, his bursts of indignant plain speaking about certain national errors, make Mark Twain an author of the highest merit, and far remote from the mere buffoon. Say the "Jumping Frog" is buffoonery; perhaps it is, but Louis Quinze could not have classed the author among the people he did not love, les buffons qui ne me font rire. The man is not to be envied who does not laugh ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... preacher, and as such had many friends among the reformers, chief among whom was Calvin. His intimacy with Calvin led the more radical reformers to be suspicious of him, and not without reason. Walter Besant tells us that, "One hears he is a buffoon—he is always mocking and always laughing. That is perfectly true. He laughs at the pretensions of pope, cardinal, bishop, and priest; he laughs at monkery and monks; he mocks at the perpetual iteration of litanies; he laughs at the ignorance and superstition which ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... Coventry and Worcester the Roman Catholic worship was violently interrupted. [106] At Bristol the rabble, countenanced, it was said, by the magistrates, exhibited a profane and indecent pageant, in which the Virgin Mary was represented by a buffoon, and in which a mock host was carried in procession. The garrison was called out to disperse the mob. The mob, then and ever since one of the fiercest in the kingdom, resisted. Blows were exchanged, and serious hurts inflicted. [107] The agitation was great in the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of the fact that he is pitted with small-pox—laughs at all those things that prevented him from pleasing the woman he loved, and makes the public laugh—and his heart is broken. Poor red queue! What eternal and incurable sorrows there be in the gaiety of a buffoon! What a lugubrious ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... consistency. Every part is adapted to every other, and, in the key, the whole is harmonious. Hermann, for instance, the basso, who sang Mephistopheles, would have been quite perfect if he had only remembered this. But he forgot that Mephisto is a sly and subtle devil. He caricatured him. He made him a buffoon and repulsive. Such extravagance could not have imposed upon Faust or Martha; yet we all agreed that it was very fine, and amiably applauded what no opera-goer of sense could ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... old and honoured jest that Eve—type of eternal womanhood—sacrificed the peace of Eden for the pleasures of dress. We see this jest reflected in the satire of the Middle Ages, in the bitter gibes of mummer and buffoon. We can hear its echoes in the invectives of the reformer,—"I doubt," said a good fifteenth-century bishop to the ladies of England in their horned caps,—"I doubt the Devil sit not between those horns." We find it illustrated with admirable naivete in the ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... Macbeth's, he is spellbound. That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fascination. These Witches can hurt the body; those have power over the soul.—Hecate in Middleton has a son, a low buffoon: the hags of Shakespeare have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, so they seem to be without human relations. ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... which led to the rear. Up the winding steps to the front entrance, where swung the marvelous bronze doors which had stirred the imaginations of two continents, streamed the favored of the fashionable world. Among them Carmen saw many whom she recognized. The buffoon, Larry Beers, was there, swinging jauntily along with the bejeweled wife of Samson, the multimillionaire packer. Kane and his wife, and Weston followed. Outside the gates there was incessant chugging of automobiles, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the day, the games of chance, the wine, the music, the movements of the degraded dancing-girl, and the tricks of the buffoon and the jester, amused the late hours and varied the festive scenes ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... bother her. She shrugged. "Still around, though I hope not for long, the buffoon! Who could ever put up with a show-off small boy like that for more than ten minutes? Besides, he's wasting himself. Why should he pick me for a bad influence...? Now, ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... their corner of the house announced that business was over, and that chaff and fun, so dear to the heart of every Kanowit, was being carried on with great gusto. As we arrived and stood by the group, one of their number (evidently a privileged buffoon) begged to be allowed to speak to the Resident. "You remember that gun, Resident," said he, "you gave me?" (This was an old muzzle-loader for which Mr. H. had had no further use.) "Oh yes," was the reply; "what luck have you ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... lasted long. During these the Mahdi threw his arms and legs about like a buffoon or raised his eyes in rapture, repeating "Lo! It is he!" "Lo! It is he!" and the sun began to decline towards the west, when he rose and left for his home. The children now could be convinced with what reverence the dervishes ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... was of course neglected by the fiddling, gambling, wenching, royal buffoon, who succeeded the royal martyr, and whose necessities he had supplied, when an outcast pauper exile in a foreign land, from the proceeds of those very estates which he had so nearly lost in fighting for ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... over their cups! They are pleased to welcome me at their board, because the Roman doctors call me learned, and because Nature gave me a wild wit, which to them is pleasanter than the stale jests of a hired buffoon. Yes, they would advance my fortunes—but how? by some place in the public offices, which would fill a dishonoured coffer, by wringing, yet more sternly, the hard-earned coins from our famishing citizens! If there be a vile thing in the world, it is a plebeian, advanced ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... blessed with a wife and daughter: his wife's name was Francisquine; his daughter married the celebrated buffoon Gaultier Garguille. The story goes that when he left Mondor he bought a small country-place near Paris, where he passed his latter days comfortably on his earnings. There are two traditions current as to the manner ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... meadows, and damp hollows beside the road; but moisture it must have to fill its nectary and to soften the ground for the easier transit of its creeping rootstock. Imaginative eyes see what appears to them the gaping (ringens) face of a little ape or buffoon (mimulus) in this common flower whose drolleries, such as they are, call forth the only applause desired - the buzz of insects that become ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... had good nature, smartness, and animal spirits; hence arose a vivacity and fluency that were often amusing, and passed for very clever. Reserve she had none; would talk about strangers, or friends, herself, her mother, her God, and the last buffoon-singer, in a breath. At a hint from Rosa, she told her who the lady in the pink dress was, and the lady in the violet velvet, and so on; for each lady was defined by her dress, and, more or less, quizzed by this show-woman, not exactly out of malice, but because ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... qualities—the faith of the Jew, the firmness of the Roman, and the homespun simplicity of the Englishman of his own age—in purpose and in powers "an armed angel on a battle-day;" in manners a plain blunt corporal; and in language always a stammerer, and sometimes a buffoon; the middle-class man of his time, with the merits and the defects of his order, but touched with an inspiration as from heaven, lifting him far above all the aristocracy, and all the royalty, and all the literature of his period; who found his one great faculty—inflamed ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... son, such a portrait was the very antipode to his majestic lineaments, nor was it reasonable to suppose that he would allow his counterfeit presentment to be depicted in the undignified garbage of a buffoon! ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... I owe Hamdi Effendi an apology; for it is well that, in the midst of this buffoon tragedy I find myself playing, I should observe occasionally the decencies of conduct. But, on the other hand, was he not amply repaid for moral injury by the pure joy he must have felt while torturing me with his banter? For all the deeper suffering, I am conscious ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... From the moment that their eyes first meet with Macbeth's, he is spell-bound. That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fascination. These Witches can hurt the body; those have power over the soul.—Hecate in Middleton has a son, a low buffoon: the hags of Shakspeare have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, so they seem to be without human ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... then he said to my mother: 'Your brother is dying.' She grew very pale. My uncle was scarcely ever mentioned in the house, and I did not know him at all; all I knew from public talk was, that he had led, and was still leading, the life of a buffoon. After having spent his fortune with an incalculable number of women, he had only retained two mistresses, with whom he was living in small apartments ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... He was one of the court that tried King Charles, and his signature is upon the king's death-warrant. He was a spendthrift, and afterwards had a quarrel with Cromwell, who denounced him as an unbeliever, and even as a buffoon. When Charles II. made the proclamation of amnesty, Marten surrendered, but he was tried and condemned to death. He plead that he came in under the proffer of mercy, and the sentence was commuted to a life imprisonment; and after a short confinement in the Tower of London he was removed to Chepstow, ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... convinced of his ugliness; he used to go about in companies, and take every opportunity of inveighing against himself; he made verses and epigrams against himself; he talked about "that dwarf, Poinsinet;" "that buffoon, Poinsinet;" "that conceited, hump-backed Poinsinet;" and he would spend hours before the glass, abusing his own face as he saw it reflected there, and vowing that he grew handsomer at every fresh epithet ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... present identity, than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light, and vain, and humorsome; a notorious ***; addicted to ****: averse from counsel, neither taking it, nor offering it;—*** besides; a stammering buffoon; what you will; lay it on, and spare not; I subscribe to it all, and much more, than thou canst be willing to lay at his door—but for the child Elia—that "other me," there, in the back-ground—I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master—with as little reference, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... hired buffoon, A monthly scribbler of some low lampoon. Condemned to drudge, the meanest of the mean, And furbish falsehoods for a magazine. English Bards ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... God that Fanfulla is not here to hear you, or they had been your last words for pretty though he be, Messer Fanfulla is a very monster of bloodthirstiness. With me it is different. I am a man of very gentle ways, as you may have heard, Messer Buffoon. But see that you forget at once my station and my name, or you may realise how little they need buffoons in the ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... on in this fashion But his incapacity for doing anything as well as his impassiveness eventually exasperated his relatives, and he became a laughing-stock, a sort of martyred buffoon, a prey given over to native ferocity, to the savage gaiety of the ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... from that moment the older man had something of dignity in the eyes of this younger man, who had merely judged of him by his little foibles and eccentricities, and would have been ready to dismiss him contemptuously as a buffoon. There was something, then, behind that powerful face, with its deep-cut lines, its heavy eyebrows and piercing and sometimes sad eyes, besides a mere liking for tricks of childish diplomacy. Lavender began to have some ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... persons seldom supposed to be themselves conjurers. He becomes a formidable opponent to Theodorick and his chivalry; but as he attempted by treachery to attain the victory, he is, when overcome, condemned to fill the dishonourable yet appropriate office of buffoon and juggler at the Court ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... and brought to Europe by Dr. Antommarchi, had been moulded in bronze and sold by subscription for the first time in 1833, under Louis Philippe, and had then inspired surprise and mistrust. People suspected the Italian chemist, who was a sort of buffoon, always talkative and famished, of having tried to make fun of people. Disciples of Dr. Gall, whose system was then in favor, regarded the mask as suspicious. They did not find in it the bumps of genius; and the forehead, examined in accordance ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... a tone of indifference which almost amounted to contempt. "Signor Formica! In what way can that buffoon help me?" ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... all his reading,' his mind muttered, as it were, to itself, 'is no better than an old woman; and that knave and buffoon, Mr. Apothecary Toole, looked queer, the spiteful dog, just to disquiet me. I wonder at Dr. Walsingham though. A sensible man would have laughed me into spirits. On my soul, I think he believes in dreams.' And Sturk laughed within himself scornfully. It was all affectation, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... they seemed on such good terms, and so accustomed to support each other's play, that the SPRUCH-SPRECHER often condescended to follow up the jester's witticisms with an explanation, to render them more obvious to the capacity of the audience, so that his wisdom became a sort of commentary on the buffoon's folly. And sometimes, in requital, the HOFF-NARR, with a pithy jest, wound up the conclusion of the ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... right; To deceive an old madman Is not very hard. But for my part, I don't want 350 To play at buffoon. For how many years Have I stood on the threshold And bowed to the Barin? Enough for my pleasure! I said, 'If the commune Is pleased to be ruled By a crazy Pomyeshchick To ease his last moments I don't disagree, ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... already moving) fell on each others swords. But Eunus could not face this death. He took refuge in a cave, from which he was dragged with the last poor relics of his splendid court—his cook, his baker, his bath attendant and his buffoon. The Romans for some reason spared his life, or at least did not doom him to immediate death. He was kept a prisoner at Morgantia, where he died shortly afterwards ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... propensity to flippancy and impertinence. When Posthumius placed an accent wrong, his hearers burst into a laugh. When he remonstrated, they hooted him, and called him barbarian; and at length hissed him off the stage as if he had been a bad actor. As the grave Roman retired, a buffoon, who, from his constant drunkenness, was nicknamed the Pint-pot, came up with gestures of the grossest indecency, and bespattered the senatorial gown with filth. Posthumius turned round to the multitude, and held up ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... began in a menacing tone, "it is high time this nonsense was ended. I am tired of being made a buffoon of for your party. For your gratification I have spent a sleepless night in those cold, damp woods; and I warn you that practical joking can be carried too far. I will not go to Canada, and I insist that you ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... jests, which are found in the comedies of our time, and which are their meat rather than the spice, are the reasons why he who says 'Comedy' seems to speak of a buffoon's pastime. They wrong themselves who give to such gracious poesy a sense so unworthy. True comedy, properly regarded, has for its object the representation in divers personages of almost all the actions of familiar life. To hold the mirror up to ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... Freedmen who had curried favour with Nero. Polyclitus was sent to inquire into Suetonius Paulinus' administration of Britain after the revolt of Boadicea in A.D. 61. Vatinius was a deformed cobbler from Beneventum who became a sort of court buffoon, and acquired great ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... on all occasions deliberately treated with contumely and hatred,—but to the private revenge of an insulted soldier. The weak thin voice of Cassius Chaereas, tribune of the praetorian cohort, had marked him out for the coarse and calumnious banter of the imperial buffoon; and he determined to avenge himself, and at the same time rid the world of a monster. He engaged several accomplices in the conspiracy, which was nearly frustrated by their want of resolution. For four whole days they hesitated, while day after day, ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... smiled politely—"McTurk"—the Irishman scowled—"and, of course, the unspeakable Beetle, our friend Gigadibs." Abanazar, the Emperor, and Aladdin had more or less of characters, and King passed them over. "Come forth, my inky buffoon, from behind yonder instrument of music! You supply, I presume, the doggerel for this entertainment. Esteem yourself to be, as it ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... way from him, there was a sort of play going on—a clown and a knowing one, like Widdicombe and the clown with us,—the buffoon answering with blundering responses, which made all the audience shout with laughter; but the only joke which was translated to me would make you do anything but laugh, and shall therefore never be revealed by these lips. All their humour, my ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
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