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More "Comic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... driven out of everyone. His concerts, in which he took a leading part, became celebrated in the district, deputations called to beg for another, and once in these words, 'Wull 'ee gie we a concert over our way when the comic young gentleman ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... at the latter, though never to the excess common at London. An ill-judged and unsuccessful attempt was made to establish the Italian Opera, which existed but with scarcely any life for this one winter; of course they could rise no higher than a comic one. La Buona Figliuola, La Frascatana, and Il Geloso in Cimento, were repeatedly performed, or rather murdered, except the parts of Sestini. The house was generally empty, and miserably cold. So much knowledge of the ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... 'Edinburgh' articles are of a very slight texture, though the reader is rewarded by an occasional turn of characteristic quaintness. The criticism is of the most simple-minded kind; but here and there crops up a comment which is irresistibly comic. Here, for example, is a quaint passage from a ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... perfectly satisfied with his work. Like his own 'Village Blacksmith,' he retires every night with the feeling that something has been attempted, and something done.' There is a subtle analysis of the style of that first of comic poets, HOLMES, for which we shall endeavor to find space hereafter. Of the writings of the late lamented WILLIS GAYLORD CLARK, the reviewer remarks, that they 'are all distinguished for a graceful ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... carefully with the original will have little doubt that it is a concoction from Shelton and the French of Filleau de Saint Martin, eked out by borrowings from Phillips, whose mode of treatment it adopts. It is, to be sure, more decent and decorous, but it treats "Don Quixote" in the same fashion as a comic book that ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the spring. He sat there, smoking and declaiming, his eyes blazing, one hand playing with Watson's favourite dog, an Aberdeen terrier who was softly smelling and pushing against him. All that litany of mockery and bitterness, which the Comic Spirit kindles afresh on the lips of each rising generation, only to quench it again on the lips of those who 'arrive,' flowed from him copiously. He was the age indeed for 'arrival,' when, as so often happens, the man of middle life, appeased by success, ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the dramatic art in America. Origin of the serious and comic dramas. The Qquichua drama of Ollanta. The Kiche drama of Rabinal Achi. The Comic Ballet of the Gueegueence. The Logas of Central America. Dramas ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... sinking; and I should certainly have sunk with my cargo, had it not been most opportunely taken out by one of the spare boats. All was high glee on shore and on the lake, and the scene was now and then still diversified by comic accidents, causing the more mirth, as there ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... considerable amount of indelicacy in the episodes in "Tom Jones," and also of hostility, which is exhibited in the rough form of pugilistic encounters, so as almost to remind us of the old comic stage. He seems especially fond of settling quarrels in this way, and wishes that no other was ever used, and that "iron should dig no bowels but those of the earth." The character of Deborah Wilkins, the old maid who is shocked at the frivolity of Jenny Jones; of Thwackum, the schoolmaster, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... through th' whole play, so they have considerably lessened th' time between th' creation an' th' flood an' have made Adam an English nobleman with a shady past an' th' Divvle a Fr-rinch count in love with Eve. They're rescued be Noah, th' faithful boatman who has a comic naygur son." ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... saying, my boy. As for my part—why, I don't bother much about a blue tin heaven or a comic-supplement hell, but I'm right smart interested in right here and now. It's a right nice little old world, take it by and large, and I like to help out at whatever comes my way, if it takes fourteen innings. But, so long as you feel that way about it, maybe you'll believe ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... well as the new historic folk literature will, with its corresponding comic element, as I think, be a great gain to the stage, and will preserve its connection with the people where this has not already been lost—so that it be no longer a mere institution for amusement, and that only to a single class. Unless we take this view of our stage, it will lose its right ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... mere sake of resenting an imputation which no rational man in his senses could possibly have regarded as of any consequence to the Duke's public or private character. The whole incident seems to us now one more properly belonging to comic opera than to serious political life. We can hardly conceive the possibility of the Marquis of Salisbury insisting on fighting a duel with some hot-headed member of the House of Lords who had chosen to describe him as a conspirator against the Constitution and the Church of England. The Duke ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... contradiction to his other self. The objects of veneration and the objects of sensuous delight are externally so unlike and so incongruous, that he who follows both in their turns is as one playing the part of an ironical chorus in the tragi-comic drama of his own life. You may perceive these two to be mere imperfect or illusory opposites, when you confront a man like Rousseau with the true opposite of his own type; with those who are from their birth analysts and critics, keen, restless, urgent, inexorably ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... ran away, downstairs, really crying. It was excessively comic, but he had better not follow her, lest he might ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... certainly no Doctrinaire, nor yet, I think, a Fauve, but who has been influenced by Cezanne, I shall here do myself the honour of pronouncing the name. Aristide Maillol is so obviously the best sculptor alive that to people familiar with his work there is something comic about those discussions in which are canvassed the claims of Mestrovic and Epstein, Archipenko and Bourdelle. These have their merits; but Maillol is a great artist. He works in the classical tradition, modified ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... things cheerful here," Al'mah said almost gaily. "Sometimes I have four or five convalescents in here, and they like a little gaiety. I sing them things from comic operas—Offenbach, Sullivan, and the rest; and if they are very sentimentally inclined I sing them good old-fashioned love-songs full of the musician's tricks. How people adore illusions! I've had here an old Natal sergeant, over sixty, and he was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... how stupid I was. Let's see—you go after dark and hang the baskets on the door knob, then ring the bell and run—isn't that the way? That's the way we used to do with our comic valentines." ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... reason to feel called upon to talk about anything more serious to a stranger at a house party. But it was the manner of the man, his whole personality. For Freddie was a man of fashion, with all the exaggerated and farcical mannerisms of the dandy of the comic papers. He wore a conspicuous and foppish costume, and posed with a little cane; he cultivated a waving pompadour, and his silky moustache and beard were carefully trimmed to points, and kept sharp by his active fingers. His conversation was full of French phrases ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... boy watched him for a moment, then grinned uncertainly; presently he lolled back in the stern-sheets, personating dignity. A white man was doing his work—it was splendid, as it should be, and comic in the extreme. He threw back his head and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... another with astonishing celerity; or have got into my Old-hock humour and fallen a-raving about princes and lords, knights and geniuses, ladies of quality and harpsichords; you, with a peculiar comic smile, have gently reminded me of the importance of a man to himself, and slily left the room with the witty Dean lying open at—P.P. clerk of this parish. [Swift's Works, ed. 1803, xxiii. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... why mine should attract attention, or why these men, whose thoughts were all with the chase, should give any heed to me. The idea that a French officer might be riding with them was too absurd to enter their minds. I laughed as I rode, for, indeed, amid all the danger, there was something of comic ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... moment; for the inclination to act was awakened, and in no one more strongly than in him who was now master of the house; and who, having so much leisure as to make almost any novelty a certain good, had likewise such a degree of lively talents and comic taste, as were exactly adapted to the novelty of acting. The thought returned again and again. "Oh for the Ecclesford theatre and scenery to try something with." Each sister could echo the wish; and Henry Crawford, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... passionate Piedmontese. A gentle, grave, and quiet man, he had loved the magnanimity and independence so curiously mingled with mere vanity and egotism in Alfieri's nature; he had never tired of hearing his friend's plans for the future, had never smiled at his almost comic certainty of supreme greatness, he had never lost patience with the self-meritorious egotism which made all Alfieri's actions seem the one interest of the world in Alfieri's own eyes. To Francesco Gori, therefore, Alfieri went for advice: ought ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... that peculiar manner of an illuminated comic perception: for the moment he was all falcon; and he surprised himself more than Clara, who was not in the mood to take surprises. It was the sight of her which had animated him to strike his game; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... despatched. The agent was an honest creature, but of tame habits, sent for the sake of his imperfect lungs to this otherwise inappropriate air. He had lived chiefly in mid-West towns, a serious reader of our comic weeklies; hence the apparition of Wiggin and the Virginian had reminded him sickeningly of bandits. He had express money in the safe, he explained to them, and this was a hard old country, wasn't it? and did they like ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... RIGHT TO USE AN OLD PUN IN MAKING A NEW JOKE? This was a question which arose in the Quidnuncs coterie the other evening, after Muggins had sent in the following, for the comic column of a weekly paper, the editor of which had returned it gratefully but firmly, on the score of superannuation: 'If Truth lie at the bottom of a well, why should we be surprised that so many kick the bucket before they are able ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... lay in imitation, and in variants of a certain well-known saw. "Have you ever been abroad?" one would say to the other, for instance. "No," the one interrogated would reply, "but my brother plays the fiddle." Such perfection had the pair attained in this species of comic absurdity that they could answer any question by its means, while they would also endeavour to unite two absolutely unconnected matters without a previous question having been asked at all, yet say everything with a perfectly ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... and a great deal more, with tipsy profundity and a serio-comic air, and keeping his eye all the time on Mrs Sliderskew, who was unable to hear one word, Mr Squeers concluded by helping himself and passing the bottle: to which Peg ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... took his friend to the theatre, where a comic piece was being performed. In his young days Warren had been very partial to plays of that kind, and his joyous peals of laughter on such occasions still rang in the ears of his friend. But the attempt was a complete failure. Warren ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... sir, I hear," said the man, touching his cap with a comic expression, which didn't at all tend to enliven the future pupil. "That's the door," he continued, "and you'll have to give him the Doctor's note," and, pointing to a door at the end of the ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... This is that which throws him into natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur: he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass, the tragic and the comic indifferently and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point, finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the scrutiny of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... of her anger, there was something so comic in the groans of the porter that Zobeida could not refrain from laughing. But putting him aside she addressed the others a second time, saying, "Answer me; who are you? Unless you tell me truly you have ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.
... convulsively twitching. Around him, but a long way off, the dancers rocked and circled with long raucous cries dominated by the sobbing booming music, and in the sunlit space between dancers and holy man, two or three impish children bobbed about with fixed eyes and a grimace of comic ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... he knew enough to do so; thence to Montreal, and Joliette; and a Fur Post near Saipasou (or, "Nobody-knows-Where," for Zotique asserts the region has that name); then was a veracious steamboat guide for tourists to the Gulf; edited a comic weekly at Quebec, "illustrated" it, itself cheerfully and truly confessed, "with execrable wood-engravings;" as Papal Zouave, he embarked for Rome to gallant in voluminous trousers on four sous a day; fought wildly, for the fun of ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... tax a good horse to keep up with. The first bullock-cart was driven by Hans, who sat upon the top of a heap of baggage, his head covered with a very old and battered Panama hat, through several broad holes in which his red hair bristled out in a most comic fashion, and over his blue flannel shirt a large red beard flowed almost to his waist. Terence was walking by the side of the second cart in corduroy breeches and gaiters and blue coat, with a high black hat, battered and bruised out of all shape, ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... fifty pleasantly written and delightfully printed pages to readers who like to muse quietly on the elementary principles of love and life without risking the surprise of startling or revolutionary lines of thought. There is nothing peculiarly good or bad in the many comic illustrations ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... enacting such a delightfully comic scene. But do not look so angry; your bright eyes are on fire, and they make a man's heart boil over. Answer my question, and I restore you to freedom. Why do you shun me, and why do you never ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... point of the gamp. Try to remember this when you feel inclined to administer a castigation to man or beast, and bear in mind that a comic scene may ensue, when, hot and angry, you stand with your best umbrella broken and half open, with the silk torn and the ribs sticking out in ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... do not expect the readers of some previous notes of my sketching escapades[1] to believe this. It is almost too wonderful that a chronicler of travels in desperate need of some comic relief to save his book from dulness would be so lucky as to pick up such excellent copy as Brown, without previous intrigue. Nevertheless I do solemnly state that I had not the slightest idea where Brown was doing his bit in the war. I had last heard of him ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... colors are splashed on with a barbaric, almost a theatrical, touch. It's a regular backdrop of a country; its scenery looks as though it belonged on a stage—as though it should be painted on a curtain. You almost expect to see a chorus of comic-opera brigands or a bevy of stage milkmaids come trooping out of the wings any minute. Who was the libelous wretch who said that the flowers of California had no perfume and the birds there had no song? Where we passed through tangled woods the odors distilled from the wild flowers ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... not to squander and discredit the solemnity of that emblem which was all he had to be a defence to his own consulate. And Knappe himself, in his despatch of March 21st, 1889, castigates the practice with much sense. But this was after the tragi-comic culmination had been reached, and the burnt rags of one of these too-frequently mendacious signals gone on a progress to Washington, like Caesar's body, arousing indignation where it came. To such results are nations conducted ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the servants' boots and the discomfort to her own knees. These two facts had always hindered her religious devotions, and they hindered them now. There had always been to her something irresistibly comic in those upturned heels, the dull flat surfaces of these cheap shoes. In the kitchen-maid's there were the signs of wear; Martha's were new and shining; the house-maid's were smart and probably creaked abominably. The bodies above ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... was a remarkably good actor, both in tragic and comic pieces, and was hardly twelve years old when he began to write verses of singular spirit for one so young. At fourteen, he produced a long Irish poem, which he never permitted anyone but his mother and brother ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... his arm till one of the strings snapped. That gave the pitch, and we had a laughing chorus. All joined in, except Israel and Sarah. She pouted, and I do believe he grit his teeth." Here Aunt Clara gave herself up to the comic reminiscence, till her eyes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... far out into the darkness as though sucking in the air when the sash was raised and the thing which had been only a dim babel of wordless sounds a moment before, became now the riotous laughter and the ribald comments of men upon the verses of a comic song which one of their number ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... think he read Browning's "Ride from Ghent to Aix" better than anything of his own, except, perhaps, "The Northern Farmer." He used to preserve the monotonous rhythm of the galloping horses in Browning's poem, and made the words come out sharply like hoofs upon a road. It was a little comic until one got used to it, but that fault lay in the ear of the hearer. It was the right way and the fine way to read this particular poem, and I have never ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... us was any better than most fifty-cent table-d'hote dinners, but the place was quaint and redolent of strange smells of cooking as well as of a true bohemian atmosphere. Those were the days when the Broadway Theatre was given over to the comic operas in which Francis Wilson and De Wolfe Hopper were the stars, and as both of the comedians were firm friends of Richard, we invariably ended our evening at the Broadway. Sometimes we occupied a box as the guests of the management, and at other times we went behind the scenes and ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... really rather comic. Romer's mother, who was going to a dinner-party in the same street, could not forgo the pleasure of calling unexpectedly on them at half-past seven, vaguely hoping that it might be inconvenient ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... "She came and told me all about it. The boy is dead, as you know. Yes, terrible, isn't it?" And she looked at him. His face was almost comic, so wrinkled up ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... had abandoned to his revenge him who had put out his eyes, took him home, and the punishment he inflicted upon him was sedulous instructions to virtue." Yet this truly comic paper does not probably know that it is comic, any more than the kleptomaniac knows that he steals, or than John Milton knew he was a humorist when he wrote a hymn upon the circumcision, and spent his honeymoon in composing a treatise on divorce. No more again ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... to realize her situation? Or was it that tragedy had put on its comic mask, and laughed at death? The truth is simple. Her faith had triumphed over what seemed to be insuperable obstacles; and she was with Philip, for better or for worse. A miracle had been wrought; and miracles are not meaningless, or idle, or without purpose. ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... by his charming manner. Dorfling put Schrotter on his right hand, and Wilhelm and Paul on his left; near Schrotter was Barinskoi and a friend of Dorfling's, named Mayboorn. This man was, like Dorfling, a Rhinelander, he combined a successful career as a writer of comic verses with a confirmed pessimism. When he had written one of his merriest couplets, he would stop his work and sigh with Dorfling over the tragedy of life. The papers treated his farces as rubbish, but the public ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... and untiring artist who knew his end and the means to attain it; but there is still a trace of infantile criticism to be found in Aristotle—i.e., in the naive concession he made to the public opinion that considered Homer as the author of the original of all comic epics, the Margites. If we go still further backwards from Aristotle, the inability to create a personality is seen to increase; more and more poems are attributed to Homer; and every period lets us see its degree of criticism by how much and what it considers as Homeric. In this backward examination, ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... they picked flowers, hunted for wintergreen, and decked the horse and wagon with ferns and wreaths of laurel,—only simple country pleasures, it is true, but they at least had the charm of newness for two of the party. That evening they sang all sorts of songs, from gospel hymns to comic operas, and Blanch showed in so many ways that she admired her new-found friend that ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... Pickwick like Falstaff was to him a source of perennial delight. He loved and honoured Dickens for his rich and tender humanity, the passion of pity that suffused his soul, the lively play of his comic fancy. Endowed with a keen sense of humour, he read Mark Twain and W. W. Jacobs with gusto. As a relaxation from historical studies he would sometimes devour a bluggy story, and as he read would shout with laughter at its grotesque out-topping of probabilities. He tried his ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... together, let no man set asunder," said he, bombastically, and even the surly milkman, and Rosenstein under his manipulating razor, when a laugh was dangerous, laughed. John Flynn, when he waxed didactic, and made use of large words and phrases, was the comic column of Banbridge. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... think you are ever weak," she said, caressing him. "If there were a thing to be done you would do it at once. But I'll open it if you like." Then he tore off the envelope with an air of comic importance and stood for a few ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... novel, once much in vogue, called 'The Fool of Quality,' than for his elaborate poem entitled 'Universal Beauty,' which formed a prototype of Darwin's 'Botanic Garden,' but did not enjoy that poem's fame;—George Alexander Stevens, a comic actor, lecturer on 'heads,' and writer of some poems, novels, and Bacchanalian songs:—and, in fine, Mrs Greville, whose 'Prayer for Indifference' displays considerable ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the Princesse de Lamballe, "now play the comic part you acted between your servant and Gamin:" which I did, as well as I could recollect it, and the royal audience were so much amused, that I had the honour to remain in the room and see them play at cards. At length, however, there came three gentle taps at ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... followed. We fairly reveled in seed catalogues, and our garden flourished. Our neighbors, instead of borrowing our loose property, as we had been led to expect by the comic papers, literally overwhelmed us with garden tools and good advice. We needed both, certainly, and were ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... turned out in a body after mass to see their own military section drilled in the Place of the Hotel de Ville, one bored valetudinarian welcomed them heartily. The military section had got down uniforms from one of the Brussels theatres,—busbies and helmets, and the gloriously comic hats of the garde civile,—dragoon tunics, hussar jackets, infantry shell-jackets, cavalry stable-jackets, foresters' boots, dragoon jack-boots, stage piratical boots with wide tops to fit the thigh that drooped about the ankles,—trousers ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... and a little less impertinence, bambino," said Laura, holding out her plate with a comic gesture. ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... editorship of the "New Monthly Magazine." The change arose thus. When Mr. Colburn and Mr. Bentley had dissolved partnership, and each had his own establishment, much jealousy, approaching hostility, existed between them. Mr. Bentley had announced a comic miscellany,—or rather, a magazine of which humor was to be the leading feature. Mr. Colburn immediately conceived the idea of a rival in that line, and applied to Hook to be its editor. Hook readily complied. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... the mystery of birth and death, and the unknown forces, and God, and all things. In half a dozen questions she would drive him into a corner, obliging him each time to acknowledge his fatal ignorance; and when he no longer knew what to answer her, when he would get rid of her with a gesture of comic fury, she would give a gay laugh of triumph, and go to lose herself again in her dreams, in the limitless vision of all that we do not know, and all that we may believe. Often she astounded him by her explanations. Her mind, nourished on science, started from proved truths, but with such ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... party to a contract, it is always the Stipulator, the person who asks the question, who is primarily alluded to. But the serviceableness of the stipulation is most vividly illustrated by referring to the actual examples in the pages of the Latin comic dramatists. If the entire scenes are read down in which these passages occur (ex. gra. Plautus, Pseudolus, Act I. sc. i; Act IV. sc. 6; Trinummus, Act V. sc. 2), it will be perceived how effectually the attention of the person meditating the promise must have been ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... procedure was followed at the next halt and at the next; so that when the Prussians reached the Frenchward end of Vaudere there were twenty-three Prussians and ten Frenchmen in the file. To Fevrier's thinking it was sufficiently comic. There was something ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... performance, which was shared by his neighbours in the most intense and hearty fashion. The women sobbed at the pathetic parts, while the men set their teeth and turned white when the villain temporarily got the best of it, and both sexes roared with delight over the comic scenes. Likewise, all sucked oranges; therefore Kavanagh purchased and sucked an orange, and ingratiated himself with his female neighbours by politely ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... the trip alone, but they insisted upon his company. "I am really touched," he wrote afterward to the parents of two of the visiting boys, "at the way in which your children as well as my own treat me as a friend and playmate. It has its comic side. They were all bent upon having me take them; they obviously felt that my presence was needed to give zest to the entertainment. I do not think that one of them saw anything incongruous in the President's getting as bedaubed with mud as they got, or in my wiggling and clambering ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... Tartary admired the wit of Moliere, and discovered the Tartuffe in the Crimea; and had this ingenious sovereign survived the translation which he ordered, the immortal labour of the comic satirist of France might have laid the foundation of good taste even among the Turks and the Tartars. We see the Italian Pignotti referring to the opinion of an English critic, Lord Bolingbroke, for decisive authority on the peculiar characteristics ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... ear. It was then, also, that her father took the part of "Mercutio," for the first time. It is recorded that he earned by it thirteen rounds of applause. Nor was its merit overrated. It was then, and continued to be, a wonderful impersonation of the poetic-comic ideal. On the 21st of the same month of October, the performers of Covent Garden presented to Miss Kemble a gold bracelet as a testimony of the services which she had rendered to the company by her performance of "Juliet." It was ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... with a desire to laugh at the stilted way in which he was talking, and, from the suppression of the desire, to laugh wildly at everything in the scene, and not least at the comic death of Will Starling, even at the corpse itself lying with a broken neck at his feet. By an effort of will he regained control of his muscles, and the tension of the last half hour finding no relief ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... learns her part, and appears in the character and costume of a peasant girl. Her genius excites much admiration, and, intoxicated with this new pleasure, she repeats the entertainment, and alike excels in all characters, whether comic or tragic. The number of spectators is gradually increased. Louis is not exactly pleased to see his queen transformed into an actress, even in the presence only of the most intimate friends of the court. Half jocosely, half seriously, amid the rounds of applause with which the royal actress ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... horses to rest, Julianillo started up, and beginning to sing a well-known comic air, sauntered out of the inn towards the stables. Don Francisco waited till he supposed his companion was on the road, and then, paying his reckoning to the landlord, begged that his horse might be brought round. Just as he ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... the existence of a sort of comic spirit in these works which relieves the tragedy of the situations. In spite of their dark pessimism, the actors in these little dramas have an appearance of gaiety which deceives. It is by this popular humor that Gorky is the continuator ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... and no English writer, save Shakespeare, has drawn so many and so varied characters. It would be as absurd to interpret all of these as caricatures as to deny Dickens his great and varied powers of creation. Dickens exaggerated many of his comic and satirical characters, as was his right, for caricature and satire are very closely related, while exaggeration is the very essence of comedy. But there remains a host of characters marked by humour and pathos. Yet the ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... loose end of rope, left over from a knot, and with this he proceeded to lead the enraged German to the automobile. It looked for all the world as if he were leading a dog, and for a moment Dick doubled up in helpless laughter. The whole episode had its comic side, but ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... Westminster election, when General Stanhope was opposed by a brewer named Thomas Cross. "The Whig Examiner" was written by Addison. Five numbers only were issued (September 14th to October 12th, 1710). "The light and comic style of Addison's parody," notes Scott, may be compared "with the fierce, stern, and vindictive tone of Swift's philippic against the Earl of Wharton, under ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... into the long, quavering, and shrill yell that denotes rejoicing. I watched them as they retreated over the plain to their deserted homes, and I took a coldly polite farewell of the Koordi. The looks of astonishment of the Koordi's troops as I passed through their camp were almost comic. I shall report this affair to the Khedive direct; but I feel sure that the exposure of the governor of Fashoda will not add to the popularity of the expedition among ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... the Usui pass is got over by a horse railroad! Somehow, the mere idea seemed comic. A horse railroad in the heart of Japan over a pass a mile high! To have suddenly come upon the entire Comedie Francaise giving performances in a teahouse at the top could hardly have been more surprising. ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... comic postcards at Llanfairfeehan, North Wales, are to be asked by the Town Council to cover them up on Sundays. We understand that comic postcards may be differentiated from others by the word "Comic" plainly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... observed that Mr Seagrove had a great deal of comic talent; he was an excellent mimic, and could alter his voice almost as he pleased. It was a custom of his to act a scene as between other people, and he performed it remarkably well. Whenever he said that anything he was going to narrate was "as good as a comedy," it was generally understood ...
— The Three Cutters • Captain Frederick Marryat
... was a young fellow I tell you I enjoyed myself. I mixed with fine decent fellows. Everyone of us could do something. One fellow had a good voice, another fellow was a good actor, another could sing a good comic song, another was a good oarsman or a good racket player, another could tell a good story and so on. We kept the ball rolling anyhow and enjoyed ourselves and saw a bit of life and we were none the worse of it either. ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... her heart in vain; But, when the slave was threaten'd to be laid Dead by her side, her love of fame obey'd. In meaner minds ambition works alone; But with such art puts virtue's aspect on, That not more like in feature and in mien, (19)The god and mortal in the comic scene. False Julius, ambush'd in this fair disguise, Soon made the Roman liberties his prize. No mask in basest minds ambition wears, But in full light pricks up her ass's ears: All I have sung are instances of this, And prove my theme unfolded not amiss. Ye vain! desist from your erroneous ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... will be as good a pattern for orders as I can think on. A little thin flowery border, round, neat, not gaudy, and the Drury Lane Apollo, with the harp at the top. Or shall I have no Apollo,—simply nothing? Or perhaps the Comic Muse? ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... always be a laughable side, even to the grimmest events, the comic element was supplied in this case by our professors of languages, drawing, and so forth, who had not dared to go back into Paris after leaving it on the 28th, on account of the fighting. When they had made up their minds to return on the 29th, we ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... moreover, although you are but the half of Menander, Lover of diction pure, with the first have a place—and with reason. Would that vigor as well to your gentle writing were added. So your comic force would in equal glory have rivaled Even the Greeks themselves, though now you ignobly are vanquished. Truly I sorrow and grieve that you lack ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... for Mr. Robert to do but promise, and while he don't do it with any great enthusiasm, Mr. Hamilton don't seem a bit discouraged. In fact, just before he goes he has a chucklin' fit like he'd been struck by some amazin' comic thought. ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... of the Chinese lantern, she looked, nearly heart-broken, at the little fat man lying on his back, whose round stomach raised up the bed-clothes like a balloon filled with gas. He snored with the noise of a wheezy organ pipe, with prolonged snorts and comic chokings. His few hairs profited by his sleep, to stand up in a very strange way, as if they were tired of having been fastened for so long to that pate, whose bareness they were trying to cover, and a small stream of saliva was running out ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Town Clark:—"If I was invisible, no one would see me." (a comic song) Two or three times a week people would gather in one house or another and sing, and the remarkable thing is that the songs were always the same. No matter for how long they had been singing them, the people of Tarascon had no desire to change them. ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... said, in a neutral tone which concealed perfectly her relief—or her disappointment. Then after a pause she added: "It's going to be a comic story." ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... light-haired, ungainly youth, of about twenty, with a reputation for singing a comic song. It was understood that the Admiral designed him for College and Holy Orders, but meanwhile time was passing, and Sam sat "with idle hands at home," or more frequently, in the bar of ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... married a year or so ago to Annette Oakleigh, a Broadway comic opera singer, who was his second wife. By his first marriage he had had two children, a son, Warner, and ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... other exclamations like them made such a babel of sound that the boys clapped their hands over their ears and looked at one another in comic dismay. This lasted so long that the boys had to pick up their caps and start for the door, before the girls consented to ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... and, after having given a paper to a creditor authorizing him to keep the son as a security for his claim, ran away, leaving poor Phil a bond slave. The story involves a great many unexpected incidents, some of which are painful, and some comic. Phil manfully works for a year, cancelling his father's debt, and then escapes. The characters are strongly drawn, and the story is ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... little romance which draws the reader along with it by every line in every page, yet its power is derived from the resources of caricature: it is rather the hollow side of a comic mask than a true expression of pathos. Scientific and stupid, Professor Babolain enters the world of Paris armed with his innocence, his uncle's legacy, his deep learning and his utter ignorance. A couple of adventuresses, mother and daughter, swoop down upon him as a lawful prey, and he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... of our resting-place arrested her for an instant, and perhaps a touch of comic pity for things of such diminutive size as to see nothing but knees where a man stood. Our heads ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "He's a comic-opera sailor, all right; but Lordy! what a man he'll make with his feet on dry earth! Let go my anchor, hey? By Godfrey, he can let go the forestay when we're going about, and I'll forgive him ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... I?" said the young man, leaning his elbow on the window-seat and looking at her with an air of comic determined frankness, which yet had in it such wholesome honesty that it was scarcely possible to be angry. "The fact is, Mary," he added, with a sudden earnest darkening of the face, "I won't stand this nonsense ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... worth confiscating except a couple of Spanish newspapers hanging against the right-hand wall on a nail. One was "El Imparcial," a sheet as large as the New York "Sun"; and the other, "La Saeta," an illustrated comic paper about the size of "Punch." They had no intrinsic value, of course, and as "relics" they were not particularly characteristic; but "newspapers from a bastion in Morro Castle" would be interesting, I thought, to some of my journalistic friends at home, so I decided to take them. ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... "breathed and burned" long enough, and ought to "come." What part of her did come was first-class. How the woods did ring with song! There were patriotic songs, romantic and love songs, sarcastic, comic, and war songs, pirates' glees, plantation melodies, lullabies, good old hymn tunes, anthems, Sunday-school songs, and everything but vulgar and obscene songs; these were scarcely ever heard, and were nowhere in the army well ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... character on the stage. He played chivalrous parts that BOUCICAULT would not have attempted. There are historical Irish types still to be represented; and when Irish melodrama, with its secret plots, murders, wicked land-agents, jovial muscular-christian priests, comic male peasants, and pretty and virtuous female ditto, shall have taken a rest for a while, Irish Comedy may yet have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... Acts. "The occasional publication of a play by Henry Arthur Jones is a matter for congratulation.... In 'The Manoeuvres of Jane' we see Mr. Jones in his most sprightly mood and at the height of his ingenuity; ... its plot is plausible and comic, and ...
— Her Own Way - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... undoubted works of Titian,—and, most precious of all, a picture, formerly in the Ludovisi collection, painted jointly by Giovanni Bellini and Titian. It is the Descent of the Gods to taste the Fruits of the Earth, half-comic in conception, but remarkable for the grace of some of its figures; the landscape is by Titian, and Dr. Waagen says, justly, that "it is, without comparison, the finest that up to that period had ever been painted,"—and we would add, few ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... at the foundation of the Greek drama. It turned upon parodies, in which the adventures of the gods are introduced by way of sport, like the appetite of Hercules, or the cowardice of Bacchus. Then the comic authors entertained spectators by fantastic and gross displays; by the exhibition of buffoons and pantomimes. But the taste of the Athenians was too severe to relish such entertainments, and comedy passed into ridicule of public men and measures, and of the fashions of ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... disciples. But twice, in this volume, a richer and fuller music sounds. In the great poem of Ixion, human illusions are still the preoccupying thought; but they appear as fetters, not as specious masks, and instead of the serio-comic exposure of humanity we see its tragic and heroic deliverance. Ixion is Browning's Prometheus. The song that breaks from his lips as he whirls upon the penal wheel of Zeus is a great liberating cry of defiance to the phantom-god—man's ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... from Sandhurst started to shout a comic song, Owen shut the door hastily and wished ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... I remember well. This was a round piece of cardboard fastened by a screw to a wooden stand, with a sort of comic picture of a lady and a hairdresser glued to the cardboard. Karl was very clever at fixing pieces of cardboard together, and had devised this contrivance for shielding his weak eyes from ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... longer than she anticipated, for she found that "El Diablo Cojuelo" had left his stronghold. Failing to make herself understood, Dolores fetched an old man who looked like a comic opera pirate and who ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... Accordingly he quitted his apartment, threw a ghastly smile into his countenance, and then came quickly upon his clerks, humming a few cheerful notes, with about as much spirit and energy as a man might have if forced to sing a comic song just before his execution. Thoroughly persuaded that the officials had not obtained an inkling of what had transpired in his sanctum, and that he left them without a suspicion of evil upon their minds, he started upon his errand, and waited not for breath until ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... trouble, thered be no drama) and plays for sympathy all the time as hard as she can. Her good old pious mother turns on her cruel father when hes going to put her out of the house, and says she'll go too. Then theres the comic relief: the comic shopkeeper, the comic shopkeeper's wife, the comic footman who turns out to be a duke in disguise, and the young scapegrace who gives the author his excuse for dragging in a fast young ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... to Mauleon (seventy-two kilometres) via Oloron, straight across Bearn, where the peasants are still of that picturesque mien which one so seldom sees out of the comic-opera chorus. One reads that the Bearnais are ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... are too prone, after your trials; to view its tragic rather than its comic side. Forgive me if I am smitten only with the ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... dragoon laughed. The idea of packing up ammunition for the croppies in the temporary barrack of a squadron of dragoons, and using His Majesty's straw to stuff the sacks, appealed to him as extremely comic. Hope and Neal shouldered their ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... it as long as she would, or rather until to vary the thing she increased the comic beyond the line he fixed. When midday found him grudgingly laughing at her cackling, it seemed improbable certainly that midnight had seen him sleeping in her arms. But underlying their laughter was a consciousness in each that day of a ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... Who can say? She can tell. She can put an end to it all. She has but to say a word, and I will devote my life to her. But that word must be spoken." As he said this, he dashed his hand upon the-table, and looked up with an air that would have been comic with its assumed magnificence had it not been for the true tragedy ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... They are of various speech and race, preoccupied with divers interests and cares. Necessity and the waiter drive them all to a sepulchral syssition, whereof the cook too frequently deserves that old Greek comic epithet—hadou mageiros—cook of the Inferno. And just as we are told that in Charon's boat we shall not be allowed to pick our society, so here we must accept what fellowship the fates provide. An English spinster retailing paradoxes culled to-day from Ruskin's handbooks; ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... since I am only dealing here with the superficial experience of the streets, especially in the snow. But it will be well to safeguard it by saying that this unpolitical carelessness and comprehensiveness of the indiscriminate Turk had its tragic as well as its comic side. It was by no means everybody that escaped hanging; and there was a tree growing outside the Jaffa Gate at which men might still shudder as they pass it in the sunlight. It was what a modern revolutionary poet has called bitterly the Tree of Man's Making; ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... severely old fashioned, the houses large and comfortable, and the resident population almost entirely native New-Yorkers in moderate circumstances. A village, then, with its shops and school-houses and churches; it is as provincial in its way as the Lonelyville of the comic weeklies. The grocery is the village club, at least for the respectable part of the male population, the men who would not be seen in a corner saloon. There were half a dozen of the regulars now in the shop, ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... houses a play, still another a goblin dance, to which everybody carried jack-o'- lanterns, and the rest celebrated the holiday in other characteristic and amusing ways. The campus resembled a cross between the midway at a World's Fair and the grand finale of a comic opera; for ghosts consorted there with ballet dancers and Egyptian princesses, spooks and goblins linked arms with pirates in top-boots and rosy farmers' daughters in calico, and nuns and Puritan maidens chatted familiarly with villainous and fascinating gentlemen, who twirled black mustaches ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... (fearful of being late, or I should have come on foot), and found myself in a large crowd of people who, I am happy to state, were put into excellent spirits by my arrival. Having nothing to look at but the mud and the closed doors, they looked at me, and highly enjoyed the comic spectacle. My modesty inducing me to draw off, some hundreds of yards, into a dark corner, they at once forgot me, and applied themselves to their former occupation of looking at the mud and looking in at the closed doors: which, being of grated ironwork, allowed the ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... appeared interested only in machinery, ores, etc., but his trained eyes made a topographical map of surroundings, and everything centred about Bute's shanty. In the evening, he amply returned his host's hospitality by comic and tragic stories of criminal life. The next day he began to lay his plans carefully, and disappeared soon after breakfast with the ostensible purpose of climbing a height at some distance for the sake of the prospect. He soon doubled round, noting every covert approach to Bute's lodgings. ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... in addition, either introduce Anti-Semitism where it does not exist, or intensify it where it does. The "assimilated" give expression to this secret grievance in "philanthropic" undertakings. They organize emigration societies for wandering Jews. There is a reverse to the picture which would be comic, if it did not deal with human beings. For some of these charitable institutions are created not for, but against, persecuted Jews; they are created to despatch these poor creatures just as fast and far as possible. And thus, many an apparent friend of the ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... favourite saying, when the exact expression he wanted did not at once occur. In these "Traditions" his great creative power is conspicuous; about two hundred different characters are introduced, no one of which reminds the reader of another, while there is abundant diversity of both heroic and comic incident and adventure. A gentleman, after reading the "Traditions," remarked that for invention he scarcely knew Mr Roby's equal. All these characters, it should be stated, are creations: not one is an idealised portrait. The short vivid descriptions ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... aloud to us Byron's splendid, stirring "Isles of Greece," and portions of "Childe Harold." Reading poetry is quite an accomplishment of papa's, and although he is very happy in sentimental and heroic verse, he has also a keen sense of humor, and his reading of comic and dialect poems, especially those of Hans Breitmann, have been much complimented; indeed, in "our circle" he is the reader par excellence of Bret Harte, John Hay, and ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... MURIEL'S, and they ascend the steps and go away together. SOPHY comes to the stone bench on the left, upon which she deposits her bag. She opens the bag, produces a little mirror and a comb, and puts her "fringe" in order—humming as she does so an air from the latest comic opera. Then she returns the comb and mirror to the bag and—bag in hand—prepares to depart. While this is going on QUEX returns, above the low hedge. He ascends the steps and looks off into the distance, watching the retreating figure of the DUCHESS. After a moment or ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... bouncer!" cried a voice from behind the boatswain's back. He turned sharply round, but did not discover the speaker. He shook his fist in that direction, however, with a comic ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... he remarked. "Now listen attentively to me. The skipper has one overpowering weakness, and that is a fondness for a comic song. Let him be ever so exasperated, a comic song—a good comic song, mind you—never fails to soothe him. Therefore, if he should happen to-night, by any chance, to refer to your unfortunate lapse of duty yesterday, listen patiently and respectfully to all that he has to say, and when ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... Every pore poured forth perspiration, and my hair seemed to stand on end like quills upon the back of the fretful porcupine. I thought of the experience of the first sermon by a theological student which I had recently read in a comic paper, and I trembled lest history was to ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... been so familiar to her as to have become like remembered music, an habitual thought without conscious reference to anything under the sun.... And as her sense of the beauty of the play grew more living to her, so she saw the apparatus that kept it in motion as more and more comic.... Mr Gillies had a thousand and one points on which he consulted his chief with the most ruthless disregard of the work going forward on the stage. Lady Butcher would come bustling in, take Sir Henry aside and whisper to him, and words like Bracebridge—Sir ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... One of the most serio-comic affairs that occurred during my service, may be worth the narration. Shortly after reaching Randolph, one of our sergeants named Brown imported his better-half from Memphis, and for some days they agreed remarkably well; but the sergeant obtaining ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... Jonathan Wild, such a figure being hardly admissible among the dignified personages who usually push all others out from the possession of the historical page; but a chapter of that gentleman's memoirs, as they are recorded in that exemplary recueil—the "Newgate Calendar;" nay, a canto of the great comic epic (involving many fables, and containing much exaggeration, but still having the seeds of truth) which the satirical poet of those days wrote in celebration of him—we mean Fielding's "History of Jonathan Wild the Great"—does seem to us to give a more curious picture ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the poop, Willis carefully scanned the horizon as the boat rose upon the summit of the waves; but seeing nothing, he at last leapt down again with an expression of rage that, under other circumstances, would have been irresistibly comic. Abandoning the direction of the pinnace, he went and sat down on a bulk-head, and covered his face with his hands, in an attitude of ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... again, and to make them keen and alert. As they had been dehumanized by war, so he rehumanized them by natural means. He had a farm, with flowers and vegetables, pigs, poultry, and queer beasts. A tame bear named Flanagan was the comic character of the camp. Colonel Campbell found a thousand qualities of character in this animal, and brought laughter back to gloomy boys by his description of them. He had names for many of his pets—the game-cocks and the mother-hens; and he taught the men to know each one, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... something Christian by an infusion of the tenderest loving-kindness and humanity, remaining still recognizable notwithstanding that all its bitterness was gone, such was the expression of Miss Letty's mouth, It was always half puckered as if in resistance to a comic smile, which showed itself at the windows of the keen gray eyes, however the mouth might be able to keep it within doors. She was neatly dressed in black silk, with a lace collar. Her hands ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... that "you are merely amusing us by your clever wit" by asserting that he means to be extremely serious. He then proceeds about his business with a most solemn face, which is as amusing in literature as it is in comic representations on ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... This brings him to The Evening World, the half-tone engraving, which was the first glimpse I had of him, and the dawn of his subsequent triumphs. For four years he supplied the evening edition and The Sunday World with a comic feature, to say nothing of a comic opera, written to order in five days. The absence of a guillotine in New York State accounts for his escape for this latter offence. Nevertheless, in all else his standard of excellence ascended. He reported the Thaw ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... part, and appears in the character and costume of a peasant girl. Her genius excites much admiration, and, intoxicated with this new pleasure, she repeats the entertainment, and alike excels in all characters, whether comic or tragic. The number of spectators is gradually increased. Louis is not exactly pleased to see his queen transformed into an actress, even in the presence only of the most intimate friends of the court. Half jocosely, half seriously, amid the rounds of applause with ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... she's got a kind o' trouble in her breest, doctor: wull ye tak' a look at it?" We walked into the consulting-room, all four, Rab grim and comic, willing to be happy and confidential if cause could be shown, willing also to be the reverse on the same terms. Ailie sat down, undid her open gown and her lawn handkerchief round her neck, and, without a word, showed me her right ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.
... and the extraordinary lightness which had become the physical property of every object in the new planet made the dancers bound to a height of thirty feet or more into the air, considerably above the tops of the trees. What followed was irresistibly comic. Four sturdy majos had dragged along with them an old man incapable of resistance, and compelled him, nolens volens, to join in the dance; and as they all kept appearing and disappearing above the bank of foliage, their grotesque ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... the title-page being decorated in colours with views of the Temple, Stratford-on-Avon, and Albury House! If I ventured to quote the Preface, it would beat even this as the climax of fulsome flattery, and I think that my friends of the Comic Press who have done me so much service by keeping up my shuttlecock with their battledores, and so much honour by placing me prominently among the defamed worthies of the world, would in their charity (for they have some) pity the victim of such excruciating praise, if ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... highest rows are now visible, the rest being concealed by an accumulation of soil, the removal of which would probably bring to light the whole shell of the theatre. Plato affirms it was capable of containing thirty thousand persons. It contained statues of all the great tragic and comic poets, the most conspicuous of which were naturally those of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, among the former, and those of Aristophanes and Menander among the latter. On the southwest side of the Acropolis is ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... monarch Pluto. Welcome to Mlle. BAUERMEISTER as the Meister of Cupid's Bower, Cupid himself. Cavalleria Rusticana to follow, with Madame CALVE'S grand impersonation of the simple and sad Santuzza. Notably good is VIGNAS as the Rustic Swell, with the comic-chorus name of Turiddu. Beautiful intermezzo heartily encored. The thanks of Signors BEVIGNANI and MANCINELLI again due to the dexterous assistance rendered to them by the Duke of TECK, who is evidently well up in the Teck-nique of the musical ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... golden yellow, national flags, bunting, and decorations that laugh in the glint of the Midas sun. The streets are a crush of jesters and maskers, Jim Crows and clowns, ballet girls and Mephistos, Indians and monkeys; of wild and sudden flashes of music, of glittering pageants and comic ones, of befeathered and belled horses; a dream of colour and melody and fantasy gone wild in an effervescent bubble of beauty that shifts and changes and passes kaleidoscope-like before the ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... rise; While, ever varying as they pass, To some Contempt applies her glass: With these the white-robed maids combine; 45 And those the laughing satyrs join! But who is he whom now she views, In robe of wild contending hues? Thou by the Passions nursed, I greet The comic sock that binds thy feet! 50 O Humour, thou whose name is known To Britain's favour'd isle alone: Me too amidst thy band admit; There where the young-eyed healthful Wit, (Whose jewels in his crisped hair 55 Are placed each other's beams to ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... ourselves in the ordinary course of things, and it will appear difficult to see in this discordancy a sufficient cause for a rupture between two superior men. The Unforeseen Wager and The Unconscious Philosopher, considerably balanced the, then very light, weight of Maury. The comic poet had already reached his sixty-sixth year; the Abbe was young. The high character, the irreproachable conduct of Sedaine, might, without disparagement, be put in comparison with what the public knew ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... you fraud?" she said, with comic indignation. "You deny that since we met up at the Hermitage you have been taking all your walks in this neighborhood? Dios mio! What a monster of falsehood have we here? And ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... person, to the onlooker, the helplessness of the woman who is at the head of the home, her inability to cope with her domestic difficulties, is often comic, sometimes pathetic, sometimes almost tragic. The publications of the day have caricatured the situation until it has become an outworn jest. The present system of housekeeping can no longer stand. One of two things must occur. Either the housewife must adopt business principles in ruling ...
— Wanted, a Young Woman to Do Housework • C. Helene Barker
... who contributed to Punch and other organs; wrote the "Comic Blackstone" and comic histories of England and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... curiosity to inquire the name of the guest), the slender form and comely features of Lord Mauleverer. The earl approached with the same grace which had in his earlier youth rendered him almost irresistible, but which now, from the contrast of years with manner, contained a slight mixture of the comic. He paid his compliments, and in paying them declared that he must leave it to his friend, Sir William, to explain all the danger he had dared, for the sake of satisfying himself that Miss Brandon was no less lovely than when he had last ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... scene of the play, however, is the scene between Dolly and her husband. The whole scene is delightful, worked out with the finest sense of dramatic rhythm: a truly great comic scene, of which Mr. Jones ...
— Dolly Reforming Herself - A Comedy in Four Acts • Henry Arthur Jones
... proved its worth by its long history and the variety of its uses. The English borrowed it from the French octosyllabic verse, and employed it chiefly for long narrative poems. Chaucer used it in his earlier work, the Book of the Duchess, and the House of Fame; Butler in the serio-comic Hudibras; Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, and Morris in their Romantic narrative verse. For lyric purposes it was used by Shakespeare and other dramatists, by Milton in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, and ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... learned to act, and tenors who are able to act no longer have any voices; because, as a rule, they either have studied too little, or have studied erroneously. Unless the voice has received a correct and fine culture, the German comic operas lead immediately to destruction of the voice, especially of the sensitive, ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... smoked his pipe leisurely, listening to this letter. "Kind of a comic, hey?" he said. "I reckon ye'd like to hev 'em come. Hain't never ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... dark?—carrying a scarf or veil, with which she can make any sort of headdress if only she is a little clever, and shod in a pair of felt-soled slippers, is shut up in a cabinet or placed behind a screen, and the lights are turned down or out—" Adele broke off with a comic shrug of the shoulders. "Bah! It ought not ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... you, not for me—I am not the one that thinks so, except so far as the tunes are concerned," she said with a laugh. "I confess so far as that Lady Mariamne is fond of a comic song. I don't think she goes any further. I shall be good enough for them ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... artists is unreadable; and a book about artists regarded as lovers, husbands, dipsomaniacs, heroes, and the like is really not worth writing again. Jean-Christophe is the stock artist of literature, just as Professor Radium of 'Comic Cuts' is its stock man ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... house-boy, was very clumsy in all his ways, and Guy, looking on, seemed to derive considerable amusement from his performance. "I always did like Joe," he remarked. "There's something about his mechanism that is irresistibly comic. Oh, do leave him alone, Sylvia! Let him arrange the thing upside down if ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... Paint a man or a woman with the damned "pleasing expression," or even the "charmingly spontaneous" so dear to the "photographic artist," and you see at once that the thing is a mask, as silly as the old tragic and comic mask. The only expression allowable in great portraiture is the expression of character and moral quality, not of anything temporary, fleeting, and accidental. Apart from portraiture you don't want even so much, or very seldom: in fact, you only want ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... She was the first hog that father bought to stock the farm, and we boys regarded her as a very wonderful beast. In a few weeks she had a lot of pigs, and of all the queer, funny, animal children we had yet seen, none amused us more. They were so comic in size and shape, in their gait and gestures, their merry sham fights, and the false alarms they got up for the fun of scampering back to their mother and begging her in most persuasive little squeals to lie down ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... The other comic incident I remember was of a different kind. The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Trench, on behalf of his fellow-prelates, made a long speech against the Bill. Dr. Trench was a man of very high character and fine talent, ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... his seat, whereat a bulky Italian immediately sank into it; and as livery of seizin he appropriated the comic section of Mr. Kamin's Sunday paper, which had fallen to the floor of the car, and spread it wide open in ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... right; I'm agreeable, I'm sure. Stop a bit, though—I must have a brandy-and-soda first. I am as dry as a lime-kiln, and so would you be if you had to sing comic songs at a music hall for a living. There, that's better," and she put down the empty glass and threw herself on to the sofa. "Now then, tune up as much as you like. How much tin have ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... much magic about The Magic Ring at the Prince of Wales's until the Second Act, in which the extravagantly comic "business" of Messrs. MONKHOUSE and KAYE, the burlesque acting of Miss SUSIE VAUGHAN, and the comic trio dance between the two low comedians and the sprightly soprano, Miss MARIE HALTON, are worth the whole of Act I. When is burlesque not burlesque? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, May 6, 1893 • Various
... Colonel Feray considered such petty resistance unworthy of them, and answered to the calling out of their names. This drew the others after them. Everybody answered. Amongst the Legitimists some serio-comic scenes were enacted. They who alone were not threatened insisted on believing that they were in danger. They would not let one of their orators go. They embraced him, and held him back, almost with tears, crying out, "Do not ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... a rapid, sweet melody, heard best after twilight; but has many comic songs of whatever ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... were all frankly discussed. Many were the questions raised, and many the inaccurate explanations accepted as to the reason of our being; but though my companion came in for some inevitable discussion, I was relieved to find that my panache and a comic peculiarity of gait, which I thought it as well from time to time to ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... the dust arose from under the teeth of the harrow and flew so thickly that my face was not only coated with it but tears of rebellious rage stained my cheeks with comic lines. At such times it seemed unprofitable to be the twelve-year-old ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... that flowed through these docks, that contained everything that could please or disgust a whole world at once, the crowd, the clerks, the carpets, the linen, the crowding, the heaping,—all seemed strange and comic to her, novel and not Parisian, but American ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... speak affectionately of some person of English birth. The chief result of this civility, conjoined with the ferocity of his political statements, was that his English friends invariably spoke of him as "a typical Irishman." They looked upon him as so much comic relief to the more serious things of their own lives, and seemed constantly to expect him to perform some amusing antic, some innately Celtic act of comic folly. At such times, Mr. Quinn felt as if ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... want of taste which often prevails in his productions, and which gives way only by intervals to the irradiations of genius. A great and fertile genius he certainly possessed, and one enriched equally with a tragic and comic vein; but he ought to be cited as a proof, how dangerous it is to rely on these advantages alone for attaining an excellence in the finer arts.[*] And there may even remain a suspicion, that we overrate, if possible, the greatness ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... in the midst of flames, pushing the blazing faggots from her, whilst she yelled in agony. Fresh faggots were piled around her, but a considerable time elapsed before her torments ended. She suffered on the 3rd of November, 1726. This tragedy forms the subject of a comic ballad ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... all in one. The saving of life that gets into the newspapers and wins applause is done, of necessity, largely from the outside, but is none the less perilous for that. Sometimes, though rarely, it has in its intense gravity almost a comic tinge, as at one of the infrequent fires in the Mulberry Bend some years ago. The Italians believe, with reason, that there is bad luck in fire, therefore do not insure, and have few fires. Of this one the Romolo family shrine was the cause. The lamp upon it ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... Gay. The little man spread his hands in a gesture of comic despair. All the tavern-sites seemed to be held by some religious house that owned the land, or some nobleman who allowed the innkeeper to use ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... himself to the study of philosophies, which though they be not the most mature, yet ought, as kindred of the Muses, to precede them. Besides which, being drawn on one side by the tragic Melpomene, with more matter than spirit, and on the other side by the comic Thalia, with more spirit than matter, it came to pass that, oscillating between the two, he remained neutral and inactive, rather than operative. Finally, the dictum of the censors, who, restraining him from that which was high and worthy, and towards which he was naturally inclined, sought ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... opened to him, not by the old man with whom he had exchanged amenities on the previous night, but by a short, thick fellow, who looked exactly like a picture of a loafer from the pages of a comic journal. He eyed Fenn with what might have been meant for an inquiring look. To Fenn it ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... and highlows of that happy period of my existence, as the revolving curls of pale smoke exhibited to me, with marvellous fidelity, many quaint successive tableaux of the old familiar scenes of home,—sentimental, some of them,—comic, others,—like the domestic incidents revealed with exaggerations on the hazy field of a magic-lantern. I thought of my poor mother, and of the excellent parting advice she gave me,—but more particularly of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... of broth, for fear (as they were always getting into trouble) they should get splashed and scalded. When the broth came tumbling out, steaming beautifully, and smelling like a nosegay good to eat, they clapped their hands. That made the baby clap his hands; and that, and his looking as if he had a comic toothache, made all the princes and princesses laugh. So the Princess Alicia said, 'Laugh and be good; and after dinner we will make him a nest on the floor in a corner, and he shall sit in his nest and see a dance of eighteen cooks.' ...
— Holiday Romance • Charles Dickens
... Italian dialects. Often the place of wit is taken by mere insolence, clumsy trickery, blasphemy, and obscenity; one or two jokes told of Condottieri are among the most brutal and malicious which are recorded. Many of the 'burle' are thoroughly comic, but many are only real or supposed evidence of personal superiority, of triumph over another. How much people were willing to put up with, how often the victim was satisfied with getting the laugh on his side by a retaliatory trick, cannot ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... standards. The first was dated Cincinnati, November 14, 1856, and was certainly not promising literature. It was written in the ridiculous dialect which was once thought to be the dress of humor; and while here and there is a comic flash, there is in it little promise of the future Mark Twain. One ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... away; Adieu, ye happy silvan bowers, Where pleasure's sprightly throng await! Ye domes, where regal grandeur towers In purple ornaments of state! Ye scenes where virtue's sacred strain Bids the tragic Muse complain! Where satire treads the comic stage, To scourge and mend a venal age; 10 Where music pours the soft, melodious lay, And melting symphonies congenial play: Ye silken sons of ease, who dwell In flowery vales of peace, farewell! In vain the goddess of the myrtle grove Her charms ineffable displays; In vain she calls to happier ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... have been impediments to a different nature were to his means of free and spontaneous action. And not only does he represent the ideas of his age, but he depicted its types and manners. In this respect he is the link between the comic dramatists and the novelists, between Congreve and Fielding. The wits, the beaux, the fine ladies, the Grub Street drudges of the reign of Anne, whatever be the fidelity or other merits of the portraitures, are more familiar to us in the satires of Pope than as reflected ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... may think that "nakedly" is not a good rhyme for "sea." Nor is it. If you do that kind of thing in comic poetry no editor will give you money. But in serious poetry it is quite legitimate; in fact it is rather encouraged. That is why serious poetry is so much easier than comic poetry. In my next lecture I shall deal with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... Harry was stealthily watching on his face, was called up by the remembrance of the admiration which his daughter had evidently called forth. Harry watched the smile, and in his heart called the new partner "lucky," and "cute," and looked at Charlie's discontented face with a comic astonishment that would have excited some grave astonishment to their host, if by any chance he had looked up to see. Though why Charlie should look discontented about it, Harry could ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... We sat around a big room lit with wax candles, and held improving conversation, or some one sang one or two of Mrs. Hemans' songs, like 'Passing Away' or 'He Never Smiled Again.' Perhaps there was a comic recitation, at which no one laughed, and finally we had wine and hot water—they called it 'port negus'—and tongue sandwiches and caraway cakes. My dear Ethel, I yawn now when I think of those dreary evenings. What must Dora have felt, right out of the maelstrom of New York's ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... run over the persons of a single drama: that one bounded inclosure, how rich in variety and intensity, and truth of feeling! And when you shall have thus cursorily sent your mind through each and all, tragic, comic, historic, lyric, you will have traversed in thought, accompanied by hundreds of infinitely diversified characters, wide provinces of human sorrow and joy. Why are these pictures of passion so uniquely prized, passed on from generation to generation, the most precious heir-loom of the English ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... into the miller's house, and the miller's daughter happened, of course entirely by chance, to be coming through that way. A very pretty girl she was too, and I never in my life saw anything more intensely comic than the looks of intelligence that passed between her and the young friar when he presented us. It was decidedly contrary to good monastic discipline it is true, and we ought to have been shocked, but it was so intolerably laughable that my companion bolted into ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... that wicked Haman," she said, once, in a serio-comic voice, "and as if he were my Mordecai. I shall never think we have achieved perfect success until I have forced him to shake hands with me." But Nan, who cared very little about such ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... darker and more profound were his cogitations, the droller and more whimsical became the apparitions. They buzzed about him thick as flies, flapping at him, flouting him, hooting in his ear, yet with such comic appendages, that what at first was his bane became at length his solace; and he desired no better society than that of his merry phantasmata. We shall presently find in what way this remarkable phenomenon influenced ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... that's rich! Satire? Why, it's a manifesto. Gad, sir, it's a creed. I believe in my duty to my senses and the effectuation of me for ever and ever, Amen. The modern jargon! Topsy Turvydom! Run the world on the comic opera principle, but be flaming serious about it. Satire, ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... that the same anecdote which formed the Induction to the original "Taming of a Shrew", and which, from a comic point of view, Shakespeare so wonderfully developed in his own comedy, Calderon invested with such solemn and sublime dignity in "La Vida es Sueno". He found it, as Senor Hartzenbusch points out in the edition of 1872 already quoted, in the very amusing "Viage Entretenido" ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... of patriotism—even attended the party primaries in which candidates were named. The majority went to the polls and cast their vote on election day, if it did not rain or snow. For a young man of Roosevelt's position to desire to take up politics seemed to his friends almost comic. Politics were low and corrupt; politics were not for "gentlemen"; they were the business and pastime of liquor-dealers, and of the degenerates and loafers who frequented the saloons, of horse-car conductors, and of many others whose ties ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... example of my betters in literature, to give you a slight glimpse of the immense extent of my learning. Secondly, I wished to lead you through the various stages of literary treatment of the ass, from the comic to the pathetic, and finally to-the religious, in order that you might approach in a proper frame of mind the consideration of Balaam's ass, who is the most remarkable of all the four-legged asses mentioned in ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... acquittal! Ah! there is no form of flattery that is not addressed to the heliast! Some groan over their poverty and they exaggerate the truth in order to make their troubles equal to my own. Others tell us anecdotes or some comic story from Aesop. Others, again, cut jokes; they fancy I shall be appeased if I laugh. If we are not even then won over, why, then they drag forward their young children by the hand, both boys and girls, who prostrate themselves and whine with one accord, ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... course I won't laugh, unless they're supposed to be comic," said Hamilton. And, to do him justice, he did not so much as twitch a lip, though Bones watched his ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... in keeping with life generally," he answered. "In a comic opera one thing is not more idiotic than another. Yes, Monsieur Laripet, we will give them Funiculi, Funicula. I once drove in coffin nails to that tune in Verona. Now we will set people eating to it ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... please ma'am, tell me what to do about Mis' Tutt!" Eliza exclaimed with anxiety spread all over her little face, which was given a comic cast by a row of red flannel rags around her head over which were rolled prospective curls, due to float out for the festivities. "She says she won't go to the wedding 'cause it's prayer meeting night, ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... if he were a banker racking his brains to get rid of ten million francs' worth of shares in some dubious investment. As for this Law of the Faubourg, this Nucingen of caps, do you know what he did? He went to find a pothouse dandy, one of those comic men that drive police sergeants to despair at open-air dancing saloons at the barriers; him he engaged to play the part of an American captain staying at Meurice's and buying for export trade. He was to go ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... then by a clause with ut (uti; that is, ut—uterer). Secundum ea, 'next to,' or 'next after this,' according to the etymology of secundum from sequor. [83] In manu fuit, an expression not uncommon in the comic poets; in manu alicujus est, 'it is in a person's power.' [84] 'At a time when the good fortune of the Romans did not render it so desirable to enter into connection with them as their fidelity and trustworthiness.' [85] 'Do not allow me in vain to pray for your assistance.' ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... in all that bitter tragi-comic record of human frailty which we call History a sadder story than this of the Princess Anne, the natural daughter of the splendid Don John of Austria, natural son of the Emperor Charles V. and, so, half-brother to the bowelless King Philip ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... 'funny business' wasted," cried Sandy. "No Indian came to read my comic letter, after all. I suppose the mice and crickets must have found some amusement in it; I saw any number of them scampering away when I opened the door; but I guess they are the only living things that have been here ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... unpleasantly obvious. We have got beyond it and want some more refined analysis and more complex psychology. Take, for example, Pope's epistle to Bathurst, which was in hand for two years, and is just 400 lines in length. The simplicity of the remarks is almost comic. Nobody wants to be told now that bribery is facilitated by ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... monopoly of patriotic enthusiasm and good faith. Englishmen return thanks to Providence for not being born anything but an Englishman, in churches and ale-houses as well as in comic operas. The Frenchman cherishes and proclaims the idea that France is the most civilized modern country and satisfies best the needs of a man of high social intelligence. The Russian, whose political and social ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... a preposterous baby. The curs were preposterous curs. Nora had always been afflicted with a surplus amount of laughter—laughter which had difficulty in attaching itself to anything, owing to the lack of the really comic in the surroundings of the poor. But with a red-headed and freckled baby boy and two trick dogs in the house, she found a good and sufficient excuse for her hilarity, and would have torn the cave where echo lies with her mirth, had that cave not been at such an ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... did see! Then, another thing was the records. The phonygraft in here is full of light opery and poplar music like that. Not a smell o' fugues and classic stuff. An' in at Schuyler's, as we seen to-night, there's no gay songs, no comic operas, ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... comfort, as of a cool breeze blowing over the face of clear water, came to her. She knew that the man understood. She knew that she had his fullest sympathy. She saw also a comrade in the toils of comic tragedy, for Sydney Lord was in the same case. He was a mountain of flesh. As a matter of fact, had he not been known in Greenhill and respected as a man of weight of character as well as of body, and of an old family, he would have rivaled Margaret. ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... us to Nieuport, most lamentable of the victim towns. It is not empty as Ypres is empty: troops are quartered in the cellars, and at the approach of our motor knots of cheerful zouaves came swarming out of the ground like ants. But Ypres is majestic in death, poor Nieuport gruesomely comic. About its splendid nucleus of mediaeval architecture a modern town had grown up; and nothing stranger can be pictured than the contrast between the streets of flimsy houses, twisted like curl-papers, and the ruins of the Gothic ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... Mr. Perker came out wonderfully, told various comic stories, and sang a serious song which was almost as funny as the anecdotes. Arabella was very charming, Mr. Wardle very jovial, Mr. Pickwick very harmonious, Mr. Ben Allen very uproarious, the lovers very silent, Mr. Winkle ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... more comic manifestations and the chilling of generous enthusiasm come subtler, darker deeds. Everything considered, the title to the universe claimed by White Folk is faulty. It ought, at least, to look plausible. ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... been comic from another point of view than mine. To me it was like unto the frown of Jove. There was a little pause before she spoke. "Was there ever such another man?" she said. "If it was anyone but you, Page, I would tell that girl the truth at once. Mr. Stoughton ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... early period. One of the Turin papyri chronicles the courtship of a shaven priest and a songstress of Amen in a series of spirited vignettes; while on the back of the same sheet are sketched various serio-comic scenes, in which animals parody the pursuits of civilised man. An ass, a lion, a crocodile, and an ape are represented in the act of giving a vocal and instrumental concert; a lion and a gazelle play at draughts; the Pharaoh of all the rats, ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... He assumed a comic expression. 'Unhappily, not a thief,' he objected. 'This young lady prevented me from appropriating your diamonds. Convey, the wise call it. I wanted to take your jewel-case—and she put me off with a sandwich-tin. I wanted to make an honest penny out of Mrs. Evelegh; and—she confronts ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... pointed to him as a model clergyman; many of them who had not read a passage of Scripture for years, having shaken the dust off their Bibles, turned to the verses to which he referred, and when in the taverns, so intoxicated as to be scarcely able to stand, they, with maudlin utterances, and serio-comic grimaces, would unctiously quote these hackneyed texts in the pauses which intervened ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... uncontrollable fit of laughter. "Boys! boys!" said the Dominie, starting up, "thou hast awakened me, by thy boisterous mirth, from a sweet musing created by the harmony of friend Dux's voice. Neither do I discover the source of thy cachinnation, seeing that the song is amatory and not comic. Still, it may not be supposed, at thy early age, that thou canst be affected with what thou art too young to feel. Pr'ythee continue, friend Dux, and, ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... legitimate sporting pursuit governed by certain rules. The players were respectively the burglar and the householder, of whom the latter staked his property and the former a certain period of personal liberty; and the rules of the game were equally binding on both. It was a conception worthy of comic opera; and yet, incredible as it may seem, it is the very view of crime that is today accepted and ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... familiar, styled "treasures of knowledge:"—thus, he injected into the brain of his neophytes dates by the dozen and proper names—geographical ones in particular—by the score, impressing them on stubborn memories through the aid of some easily-learnt rhyme, or comic association, that made even the dullest comprehension retentive ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... are a pleasant relief from the fixed jingle of the perfect rhyme; whereas his false ear-rhymes ask to have their slight but indispensable differences obliterated in the reading, and thus they expose their defect, which is of a disagree- able and vulgar or even comic quality. He did not escape full criticism and ample ridicule for such things in his lifetime; and in '83 he wrote: 'Some of my rhymes I regret, but they are past changing, grubs in amber: there are only a few of these; others are unassailable; ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... the theory developed by the Ministry of Reconstruction's Sub-Committee on Organisation and Conditions of Domestic Service, that "the attitude adopted by the Press and the Stage is usually an unfortunate one, as servants are frequently represented as comic or flippant characters, and are held up to ridicule," a meeting of our leading dramatists was hastily convened last evening by Lady HEADFORT (who, it will be remembered, is all for calling her maids "Home-birds") to engage ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... made his old comic entrance, tripping his right toe over his left heel, and turning to shake his fist at an imaginary enemy. The boys, determined to be ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... Xenophon, which he intends to make the nucleus of an Exhibition during the present town season. The King has graciously lent Mr. Haydon the Mock Election picture; (for an Engraving of which see Mirror, vol. xi. p. 193,) for the above purpose. There will be other pictures, of comic and domestic interest by the same artist; among which will be Waiting for the Times, (purchased by the Marquess of Stafford;) The First Child, very like papa about the eyes, and mamma about the nose; Reading the Scriptures; Falstaff and Pistol; Achilles playing the Lyre; and others, which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... often talk about the difficulty of finding an actress for a Fanny Brough part, which, of course, is quite distinct from what may be considered specifically a soubrette character. Complaints are uttered about the difficulty of finding a player to represent the comic mother-in-law; indeed, playwrights are sometimes affected in their work by the fear that if they write broad comedy for feminine parts the difficulty of ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... exchange became the favorite resort of fashionable customers of both sexes: much money was squandered here, and, if we are to trust the representations of satirists and comic writers, many reputations lost. The building was destroyed in the fire of London; and the divines of that day, according to their custom, pronounced this catastrophe a judgement on the avarice and unfair dealing of the merchants and shopkeepers, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Epicrates was sent as ambassador to Persia early in the fourth century, and received large presents. According to Plutarch he escaped condemnation; but he may have been tried more than once. The comic poets make ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... boiling in rows of immense pots. It is doubtful (considering the droll aspect of heavenly bliss as figured in the one small saint and the large patriarch) whether the artist intended the condition of his sinners to be so horribly comic as it is; but the effect is just as great, for all that, and the slowest conscience might well take alarm from the spectacle of fate so grotesque and ludicrous; for, wittingly or unwittingly, the artist here punishes, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... without number, But they all were plunged in slumber, The prince's ear delighting By uniting In a snore. The prince remarked: "This must be Philadelphia, Pennsylvania!" (And so was born the jest that's still The comic journal's mania!) ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... Johnson's parting words had imprinted on her heart. But in the Girl's character there was an element too prosaic, and too practical, to permit her thoughts to dwell long in a region lifted far above the earth. It was inevitable, therefore, that the notion should presently strike her as supremely comic and, quickly leaping to the floor, she let out the one word which, however adequately it may have expressed her conflicting emotions, is never by any chance to be found in the vocabulary ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... strange that a large portion of a people, whose patriotism, exhibited, often in a heroic, and sometimes in a comic form, has long been proverbial, should have been willing, nay impatient, to surrender an independence which had been, through many ages, dearly prized and manfully defended. The truth is that the stubborn spirit which ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... changed. From a stately march it galloped into the air of a comic song that he had always hated. The Pope, as he marched by, stopped in front of him and cursed him for a Protestant. And now, beneath the jewelled tiara, Pats recognized the drunken old sailor with the ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... ever lived in Wapello, Iowa, or its equivalent, remembers the old opera house on the corner of Main and Elm, with Schroeder's drug store occupying the first floor. Opera never came within three hundred miles of Wapello, unless it was the so-called comic kind. It was before the day of the ubiquitous moving-picture theatre that has since been the undoing of the one-night stand and the ten-twenty-thirty stock company. The old red-brick opera house furnished unlimited thrills ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... When one desires above all things to have a glimpse into his mind, to be reassured as to his seriousness and piety, it is ten to one that the Professor will, so to speak, pick up his skirts, and execute a series of clumsy, if comic, gambols and caracoles in front of you. A sense of humour is a very valuable thing, especially in a professor of theology; but it should be of a seemly and pungent type, not the humour of a Merry Andrew. And one has the painful sense, especially in the most familiar letters of this collection, that ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... above his fellows. That name has been a dead weight on my intellectual energies. In the catalogue of illustrious Englishmen there is, I think, no immortal Sir Peter, except Sir Peter Teazle, and he only exists on the comic stage." ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... own particular bright way; and so it happens that the earliest scenes, which are less crowded, are the best for fun, though in the latter, and specially in the one just preceding the transformation, there is some capital comic business, and "LITTLE TICH" is at his best in his burlesque of the Skirt Dance. We wonder that this clever diminutive person has never appeared as "the Claimant par excellence." But perhaps his name is not "TICH" at all, and so, on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... naturally from absurdity to beauty, and in which all the figures could be harmonious and yet distinct, and that is the Chinese world as we know it in Chinese art. For in that there is something fantastic yet spiritual, something comic but beautiful, a mixture of the childish and the sacred, which might say to the eye what Mozart's music says to the ear. Only in Chinese art could Papageno be a saint; only in that world, which ranges from ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... reflection, so comic that it woke me up. After trying in vain to find a way of stoking that stove, for it was a cold night, I got up and walked about the room. There were portraits of two decent old fellows, probably Gaudian's parents. There were enlarged photographs, ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... our day, was as incongruous a figure as was the American at the Court of King Arthur; he was as unhappily out of the picture as would be Cyrano de Bergerac on the floor of the Board of Trade. Judged, as at the time he was judged, by writers of comic paragraphs, by presidents of railroads, by amateur "statesmen" at Washington, Harden-Hickey was a joke. To the vacant mind of the village idiot, Rip Van Winkle returning to Falling Water also was ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... in the habit of conversing together both night and morning, for a considerable time; and, in spite of what I considered the comic part of his character, he appeared to be of a good disposition, frank, affable, and interested in the virtue and happiness of mankind. More than once I was on the point of saying, "Pardon me; I wish I could believe you were Louis ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... Gardens. All Americans went there in those days, as they go to Madame Tussaud's in these times. There were fireworks and an exhibition of polar scenery. "Mr. Collins, the English PAGANINI," treated us to music on his violin. A comic singer gave us a song, of which I remember ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... their instruments with surprising skill; but the presence of an audience composed entirely of white people, and including many of the highest officers in the Department, evidently caused great embarrassment to performers so unaccustomed to the stage. Not a single song which could be called comic was included in the programme; and, with the exception of a few patriotic airs, the songs were of the 'Lily Dale,' half-mournful sort. Between the pieces there was the customary telling of anecdotes and cracking of jokes, some of which were ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... said in praise of Suzette gave his love for her unconscious approval; but at the same time it created a sort of comedy situation, and Matt was as far from the comic as he hoped he was from the romantic, in his mood. When he thought of going direct to her, he hated to be going, like the hero of a novel, to offer himself to the heroine at the moment her fortunes were darkest; but ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... chiefly as a comic poet, and a minute observer of manners and circumstances, that Chaucer excels. In serious and moral poetry he is frequently languid and diffuse, but he springs like Antaeus from the earth when his subject changes to coarse satire or merry narrative' (Hallam, ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... on the President, he met with a hearty reception, and Mr. Lincoln, taking him into a private room, repeated to him a story from a comic article by Orpheus C. Kerr, satirically criticising the conduct of the war. It was a story about Captain Bob Shorty and the Mackerel Brigade and the Anaconda Policy— something about generals in the field being hampered by a flood ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... the long, quavering, and shrill yell that denotes rejoicing. I watched them as they retreated over the plain to their deserted homes, and I took a coldly polite farewell of the Koordi. The looks of astonishment of the Koordi's troops as I passed through their camp were almost comic. I shall report this affair to the Khedive direct; but I feel sure that the exposure of the governor of Fashoda will not add to the popularity of the expedition among ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... laughed so often and so heartily. He had that rare thing, a rich, ringing laugh. Gertrude Coppard had watched him, fascinated. He was so full of colour and animation, his voice ran so easily into comic grotesque, he was so ready and so pleasant with everybody. Her own father had a rich fund of humour, but it was satiric. This man's was different: soft, non-intellectual, warm, a kind ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... co-operation, she left him to be helplessly funny by himself. The tradition of the troupe required the comedian to be attired in a loud check suit, green necktie and white felt bowler hat. On the podgy form of Lackaday's predecessor it produced its comic effect. On the lank Lackaday it was characterless. In consequence of all this, he had been nervous, he had missed cues, he had fumbled when he ought to have been clear, and been clear when he ought comically to ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... her that he had fully purposed following his sisters, but that on the way he had unluckily fallen in with Archie Tritton and a friend, who had driven in to hear a man from London singing comic songs at the King's Head, and they had persuaded him to come in. He had been uneasy and tried to get away, but the dread of being laughed at about his grandmother's tea had prevailed, and he had been supping on oysters and porter, and trying to believe himself a fast man, till Archie, who had ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... watching the antics of crazed minds, and made up parties to go to Bedlams and tease the insane. Indeed, some of the scenes in Shakespeare's plays, in which madness is depicted, and which seem tragic to us, probably had a comic value for the groundlings before whom the plays were ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... came. One was a soldier, the other a Turk. They took the oath to speak the truth and nothing but the truth. They were both of them stupid and comic, confused and contradictory, and made the audience laugh, and when one of them admitted that he had been bribed, Annas in his rage gobbled like ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... defying the law (if she didnt get into trouble, thered be no drama) and plays for sympathy all the time as hard as she can. Her good old pious mother turns on her cruel father when hes going to put her out of the house, and says she'll go too. Then theres the comic relief: the comic shopkeeper, the comic shopkeeper's wife, the comic footman who turns out to be a duke in disguise, and the young scapegrace who gives the author his excuse for dragging in a fast young ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... He sang many comic songs to cheer us up during that night of dolor, filling the intervals between the ditties with anathemas against his South African luck and realistic stories of his Australian experiences. He had lived, he told us, for several years by earning pennies in the Melbourne streets. Outside the ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... been for young Paterson, Rickman would have smiled too, even if he had been unable to sit still; for his vision of Fulcher pocketing the carefully selected praise intended for Paterson was purely and supremely comic; so delightful in fact, that he could have embraced Jewdwine for providing it. But Paterson, who had looked to him as to the giver of life or death, Paterson on his death-bed taking Fulcher's paragraph to himself and wondering whether it were indeed Rickman who had done this thing, ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... meantime had quitted the place, and now, to amuse the Ghent citizens, a couple of little boys came to the cafe and set up a small concert: one played ill on the guitar, but sang, very sweetly, plaintive French ballads; the other was the comic singer; he carried about with him a queer, long, damp-looking, mouldy white hat, with no brim. "Ecoutez," said the waiter to me, "il va faire l'Anglais; c'est tres drole!" The little rogue mounted his immense brimless hat, and, thrusting his thumbs into the armholes ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... President sighed wearily. His surroundings faded from view. Instead, he saw the awful carnage of a battlefield. In his ears sounded the thunder of guns; the cheers of the victors; and the moans of the dying. With an effort, he put such thoughts from him. "And yet those days had their comic side, Doctor; even tragedy grins occasionally. I recollect that a regiment, who wore the uniform of Highlanders, reached here after the battle of Bull Run utterly demoralized. Like thousands of other soldiers, they threw away ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... spectator may smile at the vain, yet frantically serious efforts of the hermit to coax his flabby rear into a shell obviously a flattering misfit. But it is not a smiling matter to him. Not until he has exhausted a programme of ingenious attitudes and comic contortions is the attempt to stow away a No. 8 tail into a No. 5 shell abandoned. When a shell of respectable dimensions is presented, and the grateful hermit backs in, settles comfortably, arrays all his weapons against intruders, and peers out with an expression of ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... With that mantle of the tragic art which Forrest used to wear! My soul is warped with bitterness to think that you and I— Co-heirs to immortality in seasons long gone by— Now draw a paltry stipend from a Boston comic show, We, who were Roman soldiers with ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... soothe the savage beast, an' he'd no doubt we all felt soothed with what we had heard. He had now the pleasure to call for something of a more elevating nature still. The next reading would be a comic song. "Up in a ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... little soldier boy of France who did the work, and the sight of him put the American into a friendly humor. He was everywhere, the little pantalon rouge, streaming the walks, dotting the cafes with red, and every wee piou-piou under the great big epaulettes of a great big comic opera generalissimo. His huge military coat fitted him awkwardly, and the crimson pompon cocked on his little fighting kepi was more often awry, and he could not by any effort achieve a strut. He was only bon enfant, this unconquered soldier lad; so he gave over trying to be martial, and left ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... wreathed smiles," As some tame landscape desolately bare Is charmed by sunshine into seeming fair; So, gentle friends, if you your smiles bestow, That which is tame in us will not seem so. Our play is a charade. We split the word, Each syllable an act, the whole a third; My first we show you by a comic play, Old, but not less the welcome, I dare say. My second will be brought upon the stage From lisping childhood down to palsied age. Last, but not least, our country's joy and pride, A British Jury will my whole decide; But what's the word you'll ask me, what's the word? ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... years we find Shelley in Florence, in 1819, and it was here that his son was born, receiving the names Percy Florence. Here he wrote, as I have said, his "Ode to the West Wind" and that grimly comic ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... the Huckleberry Finn book illustrated after his own ideas. He looked through the various comic papers to see if he could find the work of some new man that appealed to his fancy. In the pages of Life he discovered some comic pictures illustrating the possibility of applying electrical burners to messenger ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... then by acting plays; notably, that famous one which Rabelais wrote for them in 1531: "The moral comedy of the man who had a dumb wife;" which "joyous patelinage" remains unto this day in the shape of a well-known comic song. That comedy young Rondelet must have seen acted. The son of a druggist, spicer, and grocer—the three trades were then combined—in Montpellier, and born in 1507, he had been destined for the cloister, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... their part; we can't understand a word they say, but their humorous faces and comic gestures are irresistibly funny. Suddenly Golden-Jacket puts down her cigar, springs to her feet, and gets across the shaking boards with marvellous serpentine movements in a skirt tighter even than a modern one, literally a tube wound around her legs. Then, waving her ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... amusing; but the same gentleman on his head is worth an orchestra-chair. When a man wears his trousers where other men wear their coats, people are bound to turn around. It is not a new trick. Mystes, the Argive comic poet, and the White Queen, taught this author the value of substituting 'is' for 'is not,' until, from standing so long inverted, he himself forgets what he means, and at this point the eminent brothers Rogers take up the ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... addicted to private theatricals. This reproduction of a forgotten play, with its characters attired in the costume of the period in which the play was placed, had had great success, a success due largely to the excellence of the costumes. In the comic parts the dressing had been purposely exaggerated, but Madame de Nailles, who played the part of a great coquette, would not have been dressed in character had she not tried to make ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... at from two to five dollars an evening. He grew in popularity until he was in demand at five hundred dollars a lecture, and no one before or since more successfully used all the arts of the platform, from the comic that drew the very rabble of the streets, to flights of eloquence that captured college culture. It has been well said: "While Gough was a great preacher of righteousness, he was a whole theatre in dramatic delivery." Lecturers, like preachers, are fishers ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... manifestations have appeared of recent years in various quarters of the world, each of which is treated by the press in a more or less comic vein, with a conviction apparently that the use of the word "spook" discredits the incident and brings discussion to an end. It is remarkable that each is treated as an entirely isolated phenomenon, and thus the ordinary reader gets no idea of the strength ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dangerous experiment, as you may be personal without intending it. An English lady of rank, speaking of an evening party, says: "At an evening party, given expressly in honor of a distinguished lady of color, we heard a thoughtless amateur dash into the broadly comic, but terribly inappropriate' nigger' song of' 'Sally, Come Up.' Before he had got through the first verse, he had perceived his mistake, and was so overwhelmed with shame that he could scarcely preserve sufficient presence of mind to carry ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... that little of him which seemed to square with their shallow mechanical taste. The old fairy superstition, the old legends and ballads, the old chronicles of feudal war and chivalry, the earlier moralities and mysteries, and tragi-comic attempts—these were the roots of his poetic tree—they must be the roots of any literary education which can teach us to appreciate him. These fed Shakespeare's youth; why should they not feed our children's? Why indeed? That inborn delight ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... have been asked out to tea at rare intervals, and the mothers have apologised for the ordinary conversation, and laboriously switched it on to books. I didn't want to talk books. I wanted to discuss hats and dresses, and fashionable intelligence, and sing comic songs, and play puss-in-the-corner, and be generally giddy and riotous; but my presence cast a wet blanket over the whole party, and we discussed Science and Art. Now I'm old and resigned, but it's hard on the new hands. I think it was rather brutal of your mother to let you come to London ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... scarcely sound. The least movement increased her torments; but what troubled her even more than the pain, was that, when the latter began to subside, one of her cheeks commenced to swell. She was anxious to look her very best before her lover: her lopsided face gave her a serio-comic expression. The swelling had diminished a little before she set out on the bleak December afternoon to meet her lover. Before she went, she looked long and anxiously in the glass. Apart from the disfigurement caused by the swelling, ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... spectator a tacit consent that no truth is to be expected in the piece. In a farce we exempt the poet from all faithfulness in his pictures; he has a kind of privilege to tell us untruths. Here, in fact, all the comic consists exactly in its contrast with the truth, and so ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... 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 was a quiet, unassuming little man, this Robson, seemingly without vanity and without ambition. He had a wife and family to maintain, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... shoulders resting on the top bar of it, and which he sometimes accompanied with the peculiar jerk of his right arm habitual to him in preaching. A snell remark of his brother William suggesting some new and comic association with a philosophic term dropped in the course of the discussion, would bring him back with a roar of laughter to the actual world and to more sublunary themes. When the young men rose to leave he always ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... solo dances, upon which we shall not touch further, the Morris is performed by six men; the records show that women have occasionally, but rarely, figured as performers. A musician is of course indispensable; also, as it seems, a fool, to supply comic relief and give the dancers breathing-time. The fool often goes by the name of "Squire," sometimes of "Rodney." These are practically invariable; but beyond and beside these, other characters have accompanied the dancers. The ...
— The Morris Book • Cecil J. Sharp
... were a stalwart gang.... Their talk was as muscular as their arms. When these laughed, as only men fresh and hearty and in the open air can laugh, the world became mainly grotesque: it seemed at once a comic thing to live,—a subject for chuckling, that we were bipeds, with noses,—a thing to roar at, that we had all met there from the wide world, to hobnob by a frolicsome fire with tin pots of coffee, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... sensible fellow," said Barnstable, with an air half comic, half serious. "But we must be moving; the sun is just touching those clouds to seaward, and God keep us from riding out this night at anchor in ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the romantic movement occurs the name of Jens Baggesen (q.v.; 1764-1826), a man of great genius, whose work was entirely independent of the influences around him. Jens Baggesen is the greatest comic poet that Denmark has produced; and as a satirist and witty lyrist he has no rival among the Danes. In his hands the difficulties of the language disappear; he performs with the utmost ease extraordinary tours de force of style. His astonishing talents were wasted on trifling themes and in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... moved away from her, and began telling an irresistibly comic story about a call he had made on a poor woman that afternoon (he could not for the life of him help seeing the ludicrous side of every thing), and from one subject they passed to another, and when Soeur Angelique summoned them to tea, she found her reverend brother standing in the middle of the ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... The second volume suffers the fate of all sequels in endeavouring to revive after a lapse of years the pranks and passions of the poet Tricotrin. The first five stories in the volume, while they do not attain the excellence of "The Tragedy of a Comic Song," are worthy stories in the same kind. The other seven stories are frankly mawkish in content, although redeemed by ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... turning to Captain Wharton, and contemplating his figure for a moment until the anxiety of his countenance gave place to a lurking smile. He approached the youth with an air of comic gravity, and with a low bow, continued, "I am sorry for the severe cold you ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... laughter from men, women, and children; in which even the animals seemed to join—more especially the maherry, who stood with its uncouth head craned over its dismounted rider, and looking uncontrollably comic! ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... true, you fraud?" she said, with comic indignation. "You deny that since we met up at the Hermitage you have been taking all your walks in this neighborhood? Dios mio! What a monster of falsehood have we here? ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a comic poet, and a minute observer of manners and circumstances, that Chaucer excels. In serious and moral poetry he is frequently languid and diffuse, but he springs like Antaeus from the earth when his subject changes to coarse ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... consequence, if they unhappily choose or are compelled to take part in politics, are exposed to those strange paroxysms of giddiness, of which the history of Napoleon's marshals supplies so many tragi-comic examples. He may probably have held himself entitled to rank alongside of Caesar as the second chief of the democracy; and the rejection of this claim of his may have sent him over to the camp of his opponents. His case rendered for the first time apparent the whole ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... standing off to survey his prisoner. "I believe you're harmless enough to have the use of your legs and mouth." With a comic bow the little doctor added, "M'sieur, I'm going to ask you to drive us back to Fort Smith, and if you so much as look the wrong way out of your eyes I'll blow off your head. You and your friend are to answer for the killing of Pierre Thoreau and for the attempted murder ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... it went on to tell us about things he had seen, not dull pictures and beastly old buildings, but amusing incidents of comic nature. The Italians must be extreme Jugginses for the kind of things he described to be of such everyday occurring. Indeed, Oswald could hardly believe about the soda-water label that the Italian translated for the English traveller so that it ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... number, But they all were plunged in slumber, The prince's ear delighting By uniting In a snore. The prince remarked: "This must be Philadelphia, Pennsylvania!" (And so was born the jest that's still The comic journal's mania!) ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... that night, a new comic singer of great promise having been announced, and oh! it was sad to see the youths of both sexes, little more than big boys and girls, who went there to smoke, and drink, and enjoy ribald songs and ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... first time it dawned upon me that I had a liking for the strange, simple-hearted Chinaman, who had always shown himself to be frank, honest, and brave in our service. He had been comic and peculiar, but always devoted to me as a faithful servant; and now, just too as I was joining in the mirth against him, instead of being indignant on behalf of one who had been insulted by the men's horseplay, he was as it were ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... thread-bare coat and pigtail; his stooping gait, not the decrepitude of age, but as though it sprang from the abasement of his fortune; his endurance of injury to a certain point, when patience suddenly forsook him, and his, to us, irresistibly comic rage and exasperation! What would that generous seaman Pipes have thought a defenceless Frenchman fit for, but as the object of spirited and well-conducted pranks? Nothing cruel or revengeful, but only to show our own superior ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various
... spring time, and after harvest, it was the custom of these musicians to make a progress through a particular district of the country. The music and the tale repaid their lodging, and they were usually gratified with a donation of seed corn[63]. This order of minstrels is alluded to in the comic song of Maggy Lauder, who thus addresses ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... Good Heavens! would he stay four weeks at Ludwigsburg? She smiled; even in her despair there was something humorous in her being which no sadness could dull, and she found her own dismay at the honoured guest's possible procrastination a trifle comic. ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... had assumed the habitual look of servitude—he was no longer a partner, but a mere retainer, with a half-comic resignation in ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... young man from Sandhurst started to shout a comic song, Owen shut the door hastily and wished the boy ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... equal to the fine and excellent Uncle Braesig, who, in the opinion of competent critics, is the most successful humorous figure in all German literature. Braesig is certainly a masterpiece of psychology; as remote from any mere comic effect, despite his idiosyncrasies, as from maudlin sentimentality; an impersonation of sturdy manhood and a victor in life's battles, no less than his creator, who, although he had lost seven of the most precious years of his life in unjust imprisonment and even had been ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... actually see at present stage-scenery painted like sentimental mood-pictures, trees in the foreground, for example, on whose deformed greenish-brown foliage an elegiac late-autumnal tinge rests? And these are shoved into position regularly each evening for every dialogue scene, and every light comic situation—a satire on the inner eye of our time. In a German metropolis of art one can even see sign-boards of sausage manufacturers on which sausages, hams, salted spare-ribs and swards are appetizingly ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... nibble at experience, old Time's fruit, hateful to the palate of youth! for which season only hath it any nourishment! Experience! You know Coleridge's capital simile?—Mournful you call it? Well! all wisdom is mournful. 'Tis therefore, coz, that the wise do love the Comic Muse. Their own high food would kill them. You shall find great poets, rare philosophers, night after night on the broad grin before a row of yellow lights and mouthing masks. Why? Because all's dark at home. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... end of rope, left over from a knot, and with this he proceeded to lead the enraged German to the automobile. It looked for all the world as if he were leading a dog, and for a moment Dick doubled up in helpless laughter. The whole episode had its comic side, ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... to prevent her, she burst out with the first verse of a stupid comic song. Spared by his deafness from this infliction of vulgarity, our host filled a tumbler from the water in the claret jug, and ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... at the service of all conspiracies. Mormoro, a printer, intoxicated with philosophy. Dubuisson, an obscure writer, whom the hisses of the theatre had forced to take refuge in intrigue. Fabre d'Eglantine, a comic poet, ambitious of another field for his powers. Chabot, a capuchin monk, embittered by the cloister, and eager to avenge himself on the superstition which had imprisoned him. Lareynie, a soldier-priest. Gonchon, Duquesnois, friends of Robespierre. Carra, a Girondist journalist. An Italian, named ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... of Peter, where his inner self was crouching, it was as if a sudden douche of ice-cold water were let down on him. "Marry!" Who had said anything about marrying? Peter's reaction fitted the stock-phrase of the comic papers: ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... Little Mr. Perker came out wonderfully, told various comic stories, and sang a serious song which was almost as funny as the anecdotes. Arabella was very charming, Mr. Wardle very jovial, Mr. Pickwick very harmonious, Mr. Ben Allen very uproarious, the lovers very silent, Mr. Winkle very talkative, and ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... rather hurriedly in my working clothes, went inside, and spread myself dramatically on the old cane lounge and covered my face with my oldest hat, to show that it was comic and I took it that way. But my landlady was so full of sympathy, condolence, and self-reproach (because she failed to draw my attention to the gurgling) that she let the coffee and ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... demand. Take the Education Act. It was devised and carried simply for the reason indicated by Egremont's friend Dalmaine; a more intelligent type of workmen is demanded that our manufacturers may keep pace with those of other countries. Well, there is a demand for comic illustrations of the Bible, and the demand is met; the paper exists because it pays. An organ of culture for the people who enjoy burlesquing the Bible couldn't possibly be ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... statements of one or two men as to their tribal God idea has added to the gayety of nations. But when any view is laughed at, it is doomed. From the very moment that the doctrine of election, that made God love a few aristocrats and pass the non-elect by, became a matter of joke in the comic papers, that theory was dead. Not otherwise is it with this idea of a tribal God. When Barry Paine ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... to earn, and when he was fourteen he was apprenticed to his uncle that he might learn to become a sculptor. Before long, while polishing a marble tablet he pressed on it too heavily and broke it. His uncle thrashed him. Lucian's spirit rebelled, and he went home giving the comic reason that his uncle beat him because jealous of the extraordinary power he showed ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... existence—D'Artagnan, we repeat, had absolutely nothing whatever to do, amidst these brilliant butterflies of fashion. After following the king during two whole days at Fontainebleau, and critically observing the various pastoral fancies and heroi-comic transformations of his sovereign, the musketeer felt that he needed something more than this to satisfy the cravings of his nature. At every moment assailed by people asking him, "How do you think this costume suits me, Monsieur d'Artagnan?" he would reply to them in quiet, ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Office; but had been told quite cavalierly that they had no need of him. As he persisted, he had been asked—in the hope that it might get rid of him—to go over to the United States in company with a writer of comic stories, a retired actor and a music-hall singer, and lecture on the causes of the War in the hope of bringing America in. This he had declined to do, and being rich and happening to know personally General Armstrong (Honoria's husband) he had been allowed to accompany him to the ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... had never been a patient man, and the feelings which that wild girl had awakened in his heart were all too earnest for such trifling. He rose to leave her. Then she gave him a side glance, half comic, half repentant. ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... no condition to see the comic side of the affair. Nor was Miss Vantweekle. She was on my wife's bed ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... in the character and costume of a peasant girl. Her genius excites much admiration, and, intoxicated with this new pleasure, she repeats the entertainment, and alike excels in all characters, whether comic or tragic. The number of spectators is gradually increased. Louis is not exactly pleased to see his queen transformed into an actress, even in the presence only of the most intimate friends of the court. Half jocosely, half seriously, ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... the more plausible, from the fact that there was a pronounced ironic and comic vein in Chopin's character. The accounts of his melancholy, in fact, like those of his ill-health, have been too much exaggerated. He was often in a cheerful mood. Sometimes he would amuse himself for a whole evening ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... foreigners the show is at first shocking and then tedious; to the good people of Madrid it is a sermon, full of absolute truth and vivid reality. The class of persons who attend these spectacles is very different from that which you find at the Royal Theatre or the Comic Opera. They are sober, serious bourgeois, who mind their shops and go to mass regularly, and who come to the theatre only in Lent, when the gay world stays away. They would not dream of such an indiscretion as reading ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... clergyman; many of them who had not read a passage of Scripture for years, having shaken the dust off their Bibles, turned to the verses to which he referred, and when in the taverns, so intoxicated as to be scarcely able to stand, they, with maudlin utterances, and serio-comic grimaces, would unctiously quote these hackneyed texts in the pauses which intervened ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... however, passed off without any inconvenience to us, as in those first days of the war the regulations of international law were still to some extent respected. We had already made all preparations to throw the Treasury notes overboard, in case we were searched. As a curiosity I mention a comic interlude that occurred after we had left Dover Harbor. A friendly German-American from a Western State, who did not know who I was, but had recognized me as a German, accosted me with the remark: "Take care that you don't expose ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... when he heard them. Many persons, not being able to take into the mind and analyze a character like Courtlandt's, sought the line of least resistance for their understanding, and built some precious exploits which included dusky island-princesses, diaphanous dancers, and comic-opera stars. ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... got a kind o' trouble in her breest, doctor: wull ye tak' a look at it?" We walked into the consulting-room, all four, Rab grim and comic, willing to be happy and confidential if cause could be shown, willing also to be the reverse on the same terms. Ailie sat down, undid her open gown and her lawn handkerchief round her neck, and, without a word, showed me her right breast. I looked at and examined it carefully,—she ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.
... mended." Later in 1701 she brought out at Drury Lane her only comedy, Love at a Loss, dedicated in most enthusiastic terms to Lady Piers, to whom "I owe the greatest Blessing of my Fate," the privilege of a share in her friendship. Love at a Loss was made up of the comic scenes introduced into an old tragedy which the author had failed to get acted. This is not a fortunate method of construction, and the town showed no favour to Love at a Loss. The first and only ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... wealthy of the original thirteen, which, as colonies, separated from Great Britain after the War of Independence. In the days of his childhood, before the Civil War actually broke out, his surroundings were those of the cabin standing amid the squalor of slavery. All the sad, as well as the comic, phases of life on the Southern plantations, as they then existed, are vividly remembered by Booker Washington. Of course, to the slaves themselves very much depended on the disposition of their owners, or on the character of the overseers which those planters ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... saying that Bacon had invited his corps to an entertainment at Greenwich. When Bungay engaged your celebrated friend Mr. Wagg to edit the 'Londoner,' Bacon straightway rushed off and secured Mr. Grindle to give his name to the 'Westminster Magazine.' When Bacon brought out his comic Irish novel of 'Barney Brallaghan,' off went Bungay to Dublin, and produced his rollicking Hibernian story of 'Looney MacTwolter.' When Doctor Hicks brought out his 'Wanderings in Mesopotamia' under Bacon's auspices, Bungay produced Professor ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... up into the whimsically comic face of Charlie Murray, famous in film farces—with funny features and gruff ways, but a heart as soft as a mother's. With no idea to whom he was speaking, John ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... the following ultimate resource. Two large-boned horses, usually taken from the plough, were harnessed on as leaders. By main force they hauled our wicked wheelers into the right direction, and forced them, by pure physical superiority, into working. We furnished a joyous and comic spectacle to every town and village through which we passed. The whole community, men and children, came out to assist at our departure; and all alike were diverted, but not the less irritated, by the demoniac obstinacy ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... comical little work, by merely running over a few of the head and tail pieces of the several pages. We think with Mr. Hood, that "In the Christmas Holidays, or rather, Holly Days, according to one of the emblems of the season, we naturally look for mirth. Christmas is strictly a Comic Annual, and its specific gaiety is even implied in the specific gravity of its oxen." So much for the design, which is far more congenial to our feelings than the thousand and one sonnets, pointless epigrams, laments, and monodies, which are usually showered ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... child, the old General, with comic twitchings of his eyebrows and nostrils, felt a strong desire ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... very clothes, she was there. Robust and pleasant, with a practical eye on her promising future, she had arrived, the fulfilment of despair. Dr Drummond looked at her with acquiescence, half-cowed, half-comic, wondering at his own folly in dreaming of anything else. Miss Cameron brought the situation, as it were, with her; it had to be faced, and Dr Drummond faced it like a philosopher. She was the material necessity, the fact in the case, the substantiation of her own legend; and Dr Drummond ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... noxious vegetation, and swarming with deer and tigers"—do, what does any one suppose, perform what forlorn part in the economy of the world? Why, they "supply the cultivated districts with abundance of salt." It is as comic as— ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... piquet round the stove, and that row of doors on which I had read "Public Health," "Burials," "Deaths," "Expropriations," etc. I should have been aggrieved at this dealer in iron bedsteads touching on my cherished dreams if the comic side of the situation had not absorbed my whole attention, and if a mad wish to laugh outright had not ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... fragmentary drearinesses that people endure because they are fashionable; tours de force on the piano, and fragments from operas, which have no meaning without the setting, with weary pauses of waiting between; there is the comic basso who is so amusing and on such familiar terms with the audience, and always sings the Barber; the attitudinizing tenor, with his languishing "Oh, Summer Night;" the soprano with her "Batti Batti," who warbles and trills and runs ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the habit of excepting, it sounds as though they were hiccoughing. "Overruled"; "I except"; "Allowed"; "I except"; "Denied"; "I except"; "Granted"; "I except." It becomes a custom as constant as the refrain in a comic opera. ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... idea was that all the communities should be knit together very loosely for specific purposes, such as the war against the Germans, of which he was still heartily in favor. Later dispatches, if true, would indicate that the real instigator of this comic-opera scene was a woman, possibly in the pay of the German Government, since she was the companion of Robert Grimm, a Swiss Socialist, later expelled from Russia by the Socialists themselves on account of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... reader, we can more easily excuse, than that want of taste which often prevails in his productions, and which gives way only by intervals to the irradiations of genius. A great and fertile genius he certainly possessed, and one enriched equally with a tragic and comic vein; but he ought to be cited as a proof, how dangerous it is to rely on these advantages alone for attaining an excellence in the finer arts.[*] And there may even remain a suspicion, that we overrate, if possible, the greatness of his genius; in the same manner as bodies often appear ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... I had expected), and cast secret looks of almost comic appeal at their brother, but he pretended not to see them, being disposed for some reason to grant my request. Taking advantage of the momentary hesitation that ensued, I made them all three my most conciliatory bow, and said as I retreated ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... Christopher Benson and the school which has acquired celebrity by holding the mirror up to its own nature. The wonder was that Mr. Benson did not, following his precedent, write to the papers to say that Mr. Whitten was no gentleman. In the days before the Academy blended the characteristics of a comic paper with those of a journal of dogmatic theology, before it took to disowning its own reviewers, Mr. Whitten was the solid foundation of that paper's staff. He furnished the substance, which was embroidered by the dark grace of the personality of Mr. Lewis Hind, whose new volume of divagations ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... Ghent to Aix" better than anything of his own, except, perhaps, "The Northern Farmer." He used to preserve the monotonous rhythm of the galloping horses in Browning's poem, and made the words come out sharply like hoofs upon a road. It was a little comic until one got used to it, but that fault lay in the ear of the hearer. It was the right way and the fine way to read this particular poem, and I have never ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in the one object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic to those who do not share the philosopher's perception of identity. To him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws. Though he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... to this serio-comic strife of the sparrow and the moth, is he pigeon hawk's pursuit of the sparrow or the goldfinch. It is a race of surprising speed and agility. It is a test of wing and wind. Every muscle is taxed, and every ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... know not whence, upon her lips, invented by I know not what confused and mysterious travail of soul. She said: "That woman is a demoniac." This phrase, culled by that austere and sentimental creature, seemed to me irresistibly comic. I myself, never called her now anything else, but "the demoniac," exercising a singular pleasure in pronouncing aloud ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... they looked at one another in comic dismay; but would certainly have gone to No. 5, and taken a look at the modern Sairy, if the woman hadn't called out as ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... the wheezes they essayed And where the smiles they made to flow? Where's Caron's seltzer siphon laid, A squirt from which laid Herbert low? Where's Charlie Case's comic woe And Georgie Cohan's nasal drawl? The afterpiece? The olio? Into the night go one ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... Hermann took his friend to the theatre, where a comic piece was being performed. In his young days Warren had been very partial to plays of that kind, and his joyous peals of laughter on such occasions still rang in the ears of his friend. But the attempt was a complete failure. Warren ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... Comic and tragic were so jumbled up in this startling series of adventures, that Jack scarce knew whether ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... the people to come to the window; and their delight and rapture in seeing their monarch at table, with the evident hungry feeling it occasioned, made a contrast of admiration and deprivation, truly comic. They crowded, however, so excessively, that this can be permitted them no more. They broke down all the paling, and much of the hedges, and some of the windows, and all by eagerness and multitude, for they were perfectly civil and well-behaved. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... begun dancing their national fandango, and the extraordinary lightness which had become the physical property of every object in the new planet made the dancers bound to a height of thirty feet or more into the air, considerably above the tops of the trees. What followed was irresistibly comic. Four sturdy majos had dragged along with them an old man incapable of resistance, and compelled him, nolens volens, to join in the dance; and as they all kept appearing and disappearing above the bank of foliage, their ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... infliction of summary punishment on impure, mischievous, or offensive pieces. They had the power to punish with whipping, and were authorised to bestow great rewards for merit. Thus, Sophocles was awarded a dignified and lucrative government for one of his pieces, and an unfortunate comic poet of the name of Evangelus was publicly whipped. This circulated a spirit of correctness, and a chaste and delicate taste through the people, as was evidenced in the case already mentioned, of one of the tragedies of Euripides, which was instantly censured for the introduction ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... silent for a moment and then he continued: "If you will stay for the last act you will find in your room a little supper, a bottle of wine, and a box of cigars, which you may consume while you are waiting." In sooth when Campanari entered his dressing room after the first act of Wagner's comic opera he found that his director had kept his word.... The baritone ate the supper, drank the wine, put the cigars in his ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... the performance always draws screams of laughter from the spectators. The whole ends with a vivid but very comic representation of the avid consumption of the honey ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... wholly of this world: the beautifully cut mouth had a proud and somewhat sarcastic expression, while an air of free-and-easy superiority sat not ungracefully in every turn and movement of his fine form. He was listening with a good-humoured, negligent air, half comic, half contemptuous, to Haley, who was very volubly expatiating on the quality of the article for which ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... all you are to see of the tragedy they and their house might be remaining at Ecloo in leisure and perfect hospitality and peace. Only, as they see us pouring in over their threshold a hovering twinkle in their kind eyes shows that they are not blind to the comic aspect of retreats. ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... softly, shaking a slender white finger very close to Rand's nose, "have you forgot it is the gala night of our good host, the Papa Francais? That you don't care for trouble to-night? Mama mia! You are a comic—no?" ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... murderers for nephews. When a mere child this HENRY WILKINS was compelled to go to the Sunday-school. He carried no Sunday-school book. The teacher told him to go home and bring one. He went and returned with a comic song- ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 2 • Charles Farrar Browne
... his father a rich, strong, musical, and sympathetic voice, which made him a pleasant speaker and afterward a successful public reader. He very naturally excelled in conversation at table and in getting up little comic almanacs, satirizing the boys, but always in good-humor, never descending to anything bitter or vulgar. Indeed, in all his fun, he showed ever a certain purity and nobility ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... account that he treated me with systematic unfairness and set himself the unnecessary task of making me ridiculous in the eyes of the other boys. One night I was wandering in the playground and heard him playing the violin in his study. My taste in music was barbarian; I liked comic songs, which I used to sing to myself in a lugubrious voice, and in London the plaintive clamour of the street-organs had helped to make my sorrows rhythmical. But now, perhaps for the first time, I became aware of the illimitable melancholy that lies at the heart of all great music. It seemed ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... married a man beneath her in station. To punish her in Webster's extravagant fashion every other character, with the whole story of the play, has to be dehumanised. To me—as I penetrate the Fourth Act—the whole business becomes ludicrous: not sanely comic, or even quite sanely absurd: but bizarre, and ridiculously bizarre at that. It has no "idea" at all, no relation to the Universal in the shape of any moral order, "law," fate, doom, destiny. It is just a box of tricks, of raw heads and bloody bones, left with the lid open. That ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Dancing to the 14th Century. Dancing in Churches and Religious Dancing. The Gleemen's Dance. Military Dances. The Hornpipe. Tumbling and Jest Dances. Illustrations of Gleemen's Dance, Hornpipe, Sword Dances, Tumbling and Various Comic Dances. ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... sobs. There was the fall of a foot on the stairs which she heard long before it reached him, and, in a moment, she was in her chair. He looked at her, and there was no trace of a tear. "It's Houghton," she said, putting her finger up to her mouth with almost a comic gesture. There was a smile in her eyes, and a little mockery of fear in the trembling of her hand and the motion of her lips. To him it seemed to be tragic enough. He had to assume to this gentleman whom he had been injuring a cordial friendly manner,—and thus to lie to him. He had to make pretences, ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... was opened to him, not by the old man with whom he had exchanged amenities on the previous night, but by a short, thick fellow, who looked exactly like a picture of a loafer from the pages of a comic journal. He eyed Fenn with what might have been meant for an inquiring look. To Fenn ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... Wayne, with incredible violence. "Crucifixion is comic. It is exquisitely diverting. It was an absurd and obscene kind of impaling reserved for people who were made to be laughed at—for slaves and provincials, for dentists and small tradesmen, as ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the only Scot who has lost his kilt in the war. One of the Royal Engineers gives a comic picture of a Highlander who appears to have lost nearly every article of clothing he left home in. When last seen by this letter writer he was resplendent in a Guardsman's tunic, the red breeches of a Frenchman, a pair of Belgian infantry boots, and his own Glengarry! "And when ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... charming gift of singing little French and English ditties, comic or touching, with his delightful fresh young pipe, and accompanying himself quite nicely on either piano or guitar without really knowing a note of music. Then he could draw caricatures that we boys thought inimitable, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... cruelly avenged." The old and the new generation of Frenchmen clamour that as much as may be of the stigma that rests upon them shall be removed, threatening reprisals if it be not quickly done. The British Government diplomatically, and with almost comic celerity, gravely drop "the General Bonaparte" and style their dead captive ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... heat, I guess. Some say he's cold as ice. His ice is the kind that freezes to what he likes. Mort's a gentleman if we have one in Fraser County. If you think you're chasin' one of these blue jeans politicians you read about in comic papers you're hitting the wrong trail, son. Mort can eat with a fork without appearin' self-conscious. Good Lord, boy, if you can say these other fellows in Indiana politics have brains, you got to say that Mort Bassett has intellect. Which is different, ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... the Pratts!" Hester said to herself, watching the grotesque gambols and nudgings of the dwindling humorists. "It must be very fatiguing to be so comic." ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... of himself were not so profoundly sad, when we think of the high place he occupies and the great man he succeeded in it, nothing could well be so comic as some of the incidents of Mr. Johnson's tour. No satirist could have conceived anything so bewitchingly absurd as the cheers which greeted the name of Simeon at the dinner in New York, whether we suppose the audience to have thought him ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... a Pulcinella," the Moon told me. "The public applaud vociferously directly they see him. Every one of his movements is comic, and is sure to throw the house into convulsions of laughter; and yet there is no art in it all—it is complete nature. When he was yet a little boy, playing about with other boys, he was already Punch. ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... when we bore down on them. As we neared they began to paddle frantically, as though fearful we should be snatched away from them at the last moment. The crew were mostly Arabs and Lascars, and the first mate, a typical comic magazine Irishman, delivered himself of the following: "Sure, toward the last some o' thim haythen gits down on their knees and starts calling on Allah: but I sez, sez I, 'Git up afore I swat ye wid the ax handle, ye benighted haythen; sure if this boat gits saved 't will be the Holy Virgin does ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... this period the Doctor and his two men appeared on the brow of the hill, looking down in a most complacent manner upon the serio-comic scene that the little basin wherein we were encamped presented. For, indeed, despite the serious aspect of it, there was much that was comical blended with it—in a naked young man who—perfectly drunk, barely able to stand on his feet—was beating the ground with his only loin-cloth, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Teufelsdrockh and the rather odd name of Sartor Resartus—the Tailor Patched—which the present Editor has affixed to his pretended commentary, seems to look the same way. But though there is a good deal of remark throughout the work in a half-serious, half-comic style upon dress, it seems to be in reality a treatise upon the great science of Things in General, which Teufelsdrockh, is supposed to have professed at the university of Nobody-knows-where. Now, without intending to adopt a too rigid standard of morals, we own that we doubt a little the propriety ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... of married life. Many other poets have indeed complained of their married lives, and Chaucer (if the view to be advanced below be correct) as emphatically as any. But though such occasional exclamations of impatience or regret—more especially when in a comic vein—may receive pardon, or even provoke amusement, yet a serious and sustained poetic version of Sterne's "sum multum fatigatus de uxore mea" would be unbearable in any writer of self-respect, and wholly ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... gondolas passing at the time, there was one at some distance, in which sat two gentlemen, who had the appearance of being English; and, observing them to look our way, Lord Byron putting his arms a-kimbo, said with a sort of comic swagger, "Ah! if you, John Bulls, knew who the two fellows are, now standing up here, I think you would stare!"—I risk mentioning these things, though aware how they may be turned against myself, for the sake of the otherwise indescribable traits of manner and character ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... a good deal of pleasure in poking fun at woman's use of dress and ornaments as bait for entrapping lovers, and many a squib expressing this theory appeared in the newspapers. These cynical notes no more represented the general opinion of the people than do similar satires in the comic sheets of to-day; but they are interesting at least, as showing a long prevailing weakness among men. The following sarcastic advertisement, for instance, was written by ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... table was general and very interesting. Mr. Airy says, 'The best of a good dinner is the amount of talk.' He talked of the great 'Leviathan' which he and Struve had just visited, then anecdotes were told by others, then they went on to comic poetry. Mr. Airy repeated 'The Lost Heir,' by Hood. General Sabine told droll anecdotes, and the point was often lost upon me, because of the local allusions. One of his anecdotes was this: 'Archbishop ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... learned to arrange flowers, our meanest labourer to offer his salutation to the rocks and waters. In our common parlance we speak of the man "with no tea" in him, when he is insusceptible to the serio-comic interests of the personal drama. Again we stigmatise the untamed aesthete who, regardless of the mundane tragedy, runs riot in the springtide of emancipated emotions, as one "with too ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... first bullock-cart was driven by Hans, who sat upon the top of a heap of baggage, his head covered with a very old and battered Panama hat, through several broad holes in which his red hair bristled out in a most comic fashion, and over his blue flannel shirt a large red beard flowed almost to his waist. Terence was walking by the side of the second cart in corduroy breeches and gaiters and blue coat, with a high ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... Stratford. I could never pick up any certain Intelligence, when He relinquish'd the Stage. I know, it has been mistakenly thought by some, that Spenser's Thalia, in his Tears of his Muses, where she laments the Loss of her Willy in the Comic Scene, has been apply'd to our Author's quitting the Stage. But Spenser himself, 'tis well known, quitted the Stage of Life in the Year 1598; and, five Years after this, we find Shakespeare's Name among the Actors in Ben Jonson's Sejanus, which first made its ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... be unfair to leave the subject without a passing reference to its effect on the imagination. We are all familiar with comic paper mosquito stories, and some of them are very good. But until actual experience takes you by the hand and leads you into the realm of pure fancy, you will never know of what improvisation the ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... Sir Arthur Currie, who in 1914 locked his real estate desk in Victoria, B.C., and in 1919 came back to Canada admittedly one of the ablest commanders in a war which made the exploits of Wellington seem like comic ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... not here omit to relate something which may serve to give a notion of the size of this great work, and is at the same time highly comic. It must first be mentioned that I had forbidden all the men who lived at my cost to bring light women into my house or anywhere within the castle precincts. Upon this point of discipline I was extremely strict. Now may lad Ascanio loved a very ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... and song and dance! Our purpose is an essay in romance: An old-world story where such old-world facts As hate and love and death, through four swift acts— Not without gleams and glances, hints and cues, From the dear bright eyes of the Comic Muse!— So shine and sound that, as we fondly deem, They may persuade you to accept our dream: Our own invention, mainly—though we take, Somewhat for art but most for interest's sake One for our hero who goes wandering still In the long shadow of PARNASSUS ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... living by comic sketches, and all but lost it again by tragic poems. So he was just the man to be chosen king of the fairies, for in ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... and kissed him. "Do it again," said he, "and let us see who will tire first." He kept her on his knee some time while he and she drank tea. He was now like a buck indeed. All the company were much entertained to find him so easy and pleasant. To me it was highly comic to see the grave philosopher—the Rambler—toying with a Highland beauty! But what could he do? He must have been surly, and weak too, had he not behaved as he did. He would have been laughed at, and not more respected, ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... of modern everyday existence in China which may fairly be quoted to show that Chinese civilisation is not, after all, that comic condition of topsy-turvey-dom which the term usually seems ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... feet—you'd make an adorable Alice in Wonderland, with ankle- strap slippers, and a comb, and a dear little pinny over a blue frock! And your friend can be the Mad Hatter. Look well, wouldn't she, with a hat on one side? There are only the girls to see you, and the more comic you can make yourself the better they'll be pleased. You are about to be introduced to a new side of Newnham life, and will see how mad the students can be when they let themselves go. You'll laugh yourself ill before the evening's ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... nonsense!" said Rosa, deliberately tearing the bold "geant" to pieces down to the bare stem, "unless he meant to be comic, and intimate that the gazer was so rash as to come too near the bush, and ran a ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... pointed out, "that every comic opera had one act on a tropical island. Then some fellow discovered Holland, and now all comic operas run to blonde girls in patched breeches and wooden shoes, and the back drops are 'Rotterdam, Amsterdam, any damn place at all.' But this town combines both the ancient and modern ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... school his teasing comrades gave him many comic names, And he became the victim of all sorts of naughty games; Nor did the master like him, for he felt that such a face, Mid a row of ruddy youngsters, was extremely ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... the stern realities of war, Lincoln was keenly appreciative of anything that disclosed the comic or grotesque side of men or happenings,—largely, doubtless, for the relief afforded him. At the beginning of Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania, in June, 1863, when the Union forces under Colonel Milroy were driven out of Harper's Ferry by the Confederates, great consternation and alarm ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... him from me that his father is a wretch. Is there a wife? I think someone said there was—well, she probably doesn't know all I know." The old woman pulled down her mouth in comic disapproval. ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... "regretted that Shakspere did not know or rarely observed the Aristotelian laws of the three unities," but was good enough to express his surprise at the powerful effect of his plays. "He is many times flat, insipid, his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling, ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... of the poet, where the king of the pygmies is measured by the same standard. We have all read in Milton of the spear that was like "the mast of some tall admiral", but these images are surely likely to come to the comic poet originally. The subject is before him. He is turning it in a thousand ways. He is full of it. The figure suggests itself naturally to him, and comes out of his subject, as in that wonderful passage, when Gulliver's box having been dropped ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... manage it somehow! Surely one lame old woman, and a torpid machine for knitting and writing notes like Miss Smeardon, can't want to be out of doors all day. Hang that boy, though! He'll come anywhere." Here he stopped and sat down suddenly at the dressing-table, covering his face with his hands in comic despair. "Mrs. Loring can't like it! She must be doing it on purpose, avoiding being alone with me because she sees I admire her," he sighed. "After all why should I ever suppose that I interest her as much ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... farce is a relief from these profane absurdities. "An uncommonly droll piece with an original comic idea in it has been in course of representation here. It is called Les Cheveux de ma Femme. A man who is dotingly fond of his wife, and who wishes to know whether she loved anybody else before they were married, cuts off a lock of her hair by stealth, and takes it to a great mesmeriser, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... didactic, and slowly Isidore Diamantstein came to forsake the paths of evil and to spend long afternoons in the serene and admiring companionship of Morris Mogilewsky, Patrick Brennan and Nathan Spiderwitz. But when, early in December, he found a stranded comic valentine and presented it, blushingly, to Eva Gonorowsky, Miss Bailey found that ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... sustained, his sense of humour is highly capricious. It is impossible for even his most intimate friends to guess beforehand what will amuse him and what will not; and he has a most disconcerting habit of taking a comic story in grim earnest, and arguing some farcical fantasy as if it was a serious proposition of law or logic. Nothing funnier can be imagined than the discomfiture of a story-teller who has fondly thought to tickle the great man's fancy by an anecdote which depends for its point ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... vagabond of a plumber doing a fine part on his head, as is his way nowadays. But the thing is so good that it is perhaps ungracious to remind him he could make it better. Mr. SIDNEY PAXTON'S triumph with Poulder was his admirable restraint—rarest of accomplishments among comic stage butlers. The effect of everything was heightened by this excellent economy. It was a lesson in artistic reticence. An even more notable feat in the same kind was The Press of Mr. LAWRENCE HANRAY. Obviously he could have collected a good deal more of the laughter of the house if he had ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... say in my own defense except at the other man's expense—which would have been in questionable taste and would have been deemed the resort of a weakling. So I kept my counsel and brooded. The ignorance of the guards made the tragedy comic. It was very humiliating. I gritted my teeth and swore that I at any rate should go again in spite of their incredulous jeers. But it was all terribly discouraging and made ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... suggest that psychological analysis with an example so absurd provokes the sense of the comic, but it is not quite that. It is not Heinesque irony, the concealment of an insult, nor Wilde's paradox, the burlesque of a truth. It is merely comic: a humorous facility in the use of words, though not barren as such things are apt to be, but quite common and human. The philosophical ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... amusing instance of that fact, and of the way in which things used to be done in Tuscany. Most of the Italian provinces—or larger cities, rather—have been from time immemorial personated in the popular fancy by certain comic types, supposed to represent with more or less accuracy the special characteristics of each district. Venice, as all the world knows, has, and still more had, her "Pantaloon," Naples her "Pulcinello," etc. The specialties of the Florentine character ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... and in it they shut up the remains the combustion had spared. The manikin was then clothed with the royal vestments—we know that those clothes are not worth much—and they did not forget to ornament it with Cousin Benedict's famous spectacles. There was something terribly comic in ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... Navy Department plotted to advertise the navy and encourage recruiting. In moving pictures, in the form of a story, with love interest, villain, comic relief, and thrills, it would show the life of American bluejackets afloat and ashore, at home and abroad. They would be seen at Yokohama playing baseball with Tokio University; in the courtyard of the Vatican ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... of the comic papers displayed one selfsame and highly complacent person, first as "Our Grocer," then as "Our Mayor," then as "The Gentleman who elects our Mayor," "The Gentleman who disposes of our Public Trusts," "The Gentleman who benefits by our Public ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... I see it quite often, The pictures are simply inane; The verses and jokes—they would soften An average Vassar girl's brain. Of course they are killingly comic; I laugh, but I feel like a loon!" And thus, with a fierceness atomic, She censures the ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... of these notes to retail the accounts of others. I must therefore refer the reader, for whatever concerns the history of the satiric, as I have hitherto done of the tragic and comic drama, to the numerous dissertators on the ancient stage; and, above all, so the case before us, to the learned Casaubon; from whom all that hath been said to any purpose, by modern writers, hath been taken. Only it will be proper to observe one ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... Oscar Wilde won the gold medal for Greek. The subject of the year was "The Fragments of the Greek Comic Poets, as edited by Meineke." In this year, too, he won a classical scholarship—a demyship of the annual value of L95, which was tenable for five years, which enabled him to go to Oxford without throwing an undue strain on his ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... bodies at every conceivable angle, and they appeared as if suddenly transformed into monstrous porcupines or hedgehogs. There was something almost ludicrous in this, but the magnitude and aspect of the animals were too terrible, and our danger was too imminent, to permit anything like comic ideas to enter our brains. I observed, too, that the natives were perfectly wild with excitement. Their black faces worked convulsively, and their white eyes and teeth glittered as they leaped and darted about in a state of almost perfect nudity, ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... the dark beauty, fixing her large eyes, from which not light, but, as it were, a rich shadow fell softly on her companion. It was the first time she had made any such confession. Rachel returned her look as frankly, with an amused smile, and then said, with a comic ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... lane and by-path of circumstance that leads nowhere and matters not the least in their story. Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Shakespeare, and many other writers have seized upon such characters and made use of them for their comic effect. James, in illustrating this mental type, has quoted the following from Miss ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... suffocated in her fat, broke through the crowd and hurried to the wagon, crying aloud. Being heavy and unable to climb into it, she seized her son's feet, with sobbing words of love, with such sharp broken cries and such a terribly comic expression of grief, that all the bystanders shuddered ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... were intended for comic, Dr Johnson has said, "they are such as that age did not probably commend, and as the present would not endure." Dryden has remarked, with self-complacency, the art with which they are made to depend upon the serious business. This has not, however, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... bear's work is, of course, evident to the most unpracticed eye; and in no way can one get a better idea of the brute's power than by watching it busily working for its breakfast, shattering big logs and upsetting boulders by sheer strength. There is always a touch of the comic, as well as a touch of the strong and terrible, in a bear's look and actions. It will tug and pull, now with one paw, now with two, now on all fours, now on its hind legs, in the effort to turn over a large ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... which he will generally at least endeavour to imitate. On Sunday, the inhabitants of Wahu make their appearance at church in full dress to be admired; and if the spectacle on these occasions is not so thoroughly laughable as at O Tahaiti, it is certainly sufficiently comic. ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... impressed upon the spectators. To see a respectable old gentleman of sixty, weighing some fifteen stone, suddenly forget a third of his weight and two-thirds of his years, and attempt to caper like a boy, is indeed a startling phenomenon. To the thoughtless, it may be simply comic; but, without being a Jaques, one may contrive also to suck some ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... silence. Within two minutes after, there was a special stir and movement on the pier, a corresponding stir and movement on board the trim craft, a swishing of great ropes, and a tooting of whistles. White foam churned astern of her. A comic-supplement-looking pelican on a buoy off to port flapped her a fantastic farewell. The blockade-defying yacht Polly was off for blue waters and the ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... brought us to Nieuport, most lamentable of the victim towns. It is not empty as Ypres is empty: troops are quartered in the cellars, and at the approach of our motor knots of cheerful zouaves came swarming out of the ground like ants. But Ypres is majestic in death, poor Nieuport gruesomely comic. About its splendid nucleus of mediaeval architecture a modern town had grown up; and nothing stranger can be pictured than the contrast between the streets of flimsy houses, twisted like curl-papers, and the ruins of the Gothic Cathedral ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... the queerest creature I ever saw," she said; "I can't set eyes on him without laughing; he is too comic." ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity for suffering which makes man August in the eyes of men) have their source in weaknesses which must be ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... Dick flung himself into a corner of his compartment, with a face of comic despair. "Merciful heavens," ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... figure at Court whose presence planted a deep seed of resentment between Charles and his Queen. Lady Castlemaine had hitherto been the prime favourite in the King's seraglio. She was none of the comic actresses or flower girls from Covent Garden, whose lavishly distributed favours had won the fancy of the King, or made him the complacent follower of their former lovers. Barbara Villiers could rank high amongst the ladies of the aristocracy, as the daughter of Lord Grandison, ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... mistake, and then the humour of the situation overrules every other consideration. That poor people resenting what they imagine to be tyranny should shoot one of their own class instead of the hated agent is a fact so irresistibly comic as to provoke a quantity of hilarious comment. As laughter dies away, however, another expression of feeling takes place, and the slackness of the master in not being ready with his pistol, and his want of presence of mind ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... piece had begun. It was one of those impossibly amusing Paris farces, on the borderland of all convention but so intensely comic that none could help their mirth, and Tristram shook with laughter and forgot for the time that he was a most miserable young man. And even Zara laughed. But it did not melt things between them. Tristram's feelings had been too wounded for any ordinary circumstances ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... from the granary into the miller's house, and the miller's daughter happened, of course entirely by chance, to be coming through that way. A very pretty girl she was too, and I never in my life saw anything more intensely comic than the looks of intelligence that passed between her and the young friar when he presented us. It was decidedly contrary to good monastic discipline it is true, and we ought to have been shocked, but it was so intolerably laughable that my companion bolted into the granary ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... McQuinch, when her turn came, played worse than before, and the audience, longing for another negro melody, paid little attention to her. Marian sang a religious song, which was received with the respect usually accorded to a dull sermon. The clergyman read a comic essay of his own composition, and Mrs. Fairfax recited an ode to Mazzini. The concertinists played an arrangement of a quartet by Onslow. The working men and women of Wandsworth gaped, and those who sat near the door began to slip out. Even Miss McQuinch ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... "Plautus, the great comic Latin poet, was once a miller's lad. Machiavelli wrote The Prince at night, and by day was a common working-man like any one else; and more than all, the great Cervantes, who lost an arm at the battle of Lepanto, and helped to win that famous day, was called a 'base-born, handless dotard' ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... stir. The name advertised was well known in the highest circles. Some were amused, others amazed at the comic announcement. A couple of wits belonging to the opposition complimented Abellino in front of the green table in the name of suffering humanity. As for Abellino, he strutted up and down the town all day on the offchance of calling some one ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... Syme; "always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do? I wish this language of yours had a wider scope. I suppose we could not extend it from the fingers to the toes? That would involve pulling off our boots and socks during the ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... The comic portrait of the overseer was by this time finished, and a short, stout wench burst into a fit of uproarious and unquenchable laughter before any of the rest. It came so naturally, too, from the very depths of her plump little body that Paula, who had certainly not come hither ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... which nothing seemed to wear out. Thinking his real, or affected mistake about her name a good joke, and having myself the strongest relish and admiration for his school-boy wit, I had told Nurse Bundle of his various versions of her name; and had tried to convey to her the comic nature of the scenes when my hat was pickled, and when Leo condemned ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... rather a graver character than usually associated with comic opera is naturally afforded by Mr. HAYDYN COFFIN. Miss PHYLLIS BROUGHTON is introduced not only to sing but to dance, and performs the latter accomplishment with a grace not to be surpassed, and only ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... white pennons fluttering from their long lances. Then came lines of members of Friendly Societies, in gay scarfs, accompanied by banners. Then a good band of music. The Talbot 42nd Sectional Lancers next turn the corner of the street, gorgeous in scarlet and white. Then comes something comic—a Welsh lady and gentleman riding a pony barebacked. These are followed by an Irish couple, also mounted. Then comes a Highlandman, in a vehicle such as the Highlands never saw, discoursing music from his bagpipes. A large open boat follows, mounted ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... refuse. I don't know what to do about the matter, for I never could work up another man's ideas. Even your vivid imagination could hardly conjecture anything more ghastly than the dying man, lying by an open window overlooking the English channel, relating in a sepulchral whisper the comic situations of his humorous hero so that I might take up the thread of ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... upon the latter. All these little speeches have been written for them by their priest or some religious friend, been committed to memory, and practised with the appropriate gestures over and over again at home. Their little piping voices are sometimes guilty of such comic breaks and changes, that the crowd about them rustles into a murmurous laughter. Sometimes also one of the very little preachers has a dispitto, pouts, shakes her shoulders, and refuses to go on with her part;—another, however, always stands ready on the platform to supply ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... life again, and to make them keen and alert. As they had been dehumanized by war, so he rehumanized them by natural means. He had a farm, with flowers and vegetables, pigs, poultry, and queer beasts. A tame bear named Flanagan was the comic character of the camp. Colonel Campbell found a thousand qualities of character in this animal, and brought laughter back to gloomy boys by his description of them. He had names for many of his pets—the game-cocks and the mother-hens; and he taught the men to know each one, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... hearty good-will into the scheme for weekly penny readings, and delivered an address at the preliminary meeting, in which he alluded with a sly touch of humour to the capabilities of Mr. Binks, the saddler, who was reputed to sing a famous comic song, and of Raspall, the baker, who had once tried his hand at an original Christmas carol. He even called upon the ladies—and we were all of us rather shocked at the time—to bring their music; and as a piano had actually been hired from somewhere, and stood on the platform, ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... them open, the same illusions operated. The darker and more profound were his cogitations, the droller and more whimsical became the apparitions. They buzzed about him thick as flies, flapping at him, flouting him, hooting in his ear, yet with such comic appendages, that what at first was his bane became at length his solace; and he desired no better society than that of his merry phantasmata. We shall presently find in what way this remarkable phenomenon influenced ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... ironical expression of the parrot tribe, their green coats, their red caps, their yellow boots, and finally, the hoarse, mocking words which they generally utter, give them a strange and repulsive aspect, half serious, half-comic. There is in their air an indescribable something of the stiffness of diplomats. At times they remind one of buffoons, and they always resemble those absurdly conceited people who, in their desire to appear very superior, ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... price of a ticket, a cigar, and a glass of beer, purchase the flattering delusion that they are "seeing life," and "going it with a perfect looseness." The performances consist of Ethiopian minstrelsy, comic songs, farces, and the dancing of "beauteous Terpsichorean nymphs"; and these succeed one another with not a minute's intermission for three or four hours. At St. Louis, where gentlemen connected with navigation are numerous, the Varieties Theatre is large, highly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... your pardon, sir," my curate said, deferentially, "I am following you with great attention. Do I understand you to say that each mirror is prepared to fight for its own view to the bitter end? I have seen something like that in a comic picture—" ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... babies in their arms; consumptive men and ancients waved their sauce-pans and grotesque bundles of umbrellas. The sight was damnable. It was a burlesque. It pierced the heart. What right had the Boche to leave these people so comic after he had squeezed ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... of Bremen is a good type of humorous tale. It shows all the elements of true humor. Its philosophy is healthy; it views life as a whole and escapes tragedy by seeing the comic situation in the midst of trouble. It is full of the social good-comradeship which is a condition of humor. It possesses a suspense that is unusual, and is a series of surprises with one grand surprise to the robbers at ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... carried Christianity into a hundred nooks and corners. Most of them were honest enthusiasts. Two faced certain death in the endeavour to carry the Gospel to the Taupo heathen, and met their fate with cheerful courage. Comic as Maori sectarianism became, it was not more ridiculous than British. It is true that rival tribes gloried in belonging to different denominations, and in slighting converts belonging to other churches. On ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... that silly old woman allude to her contemplated marriage to Lord Ventnor, retailing the gossip of Hong Kong with such malicious emphasis? For an instant Iris tried to shake the railing in comic anger. She hated Lord Ventnor. She did not want to marry him, or anybody else, just yet. Of course her father had hinted approval of his lordship's obvious intentions. Countess of Ventnor! Yes, it was a nice title. ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... erroneous opinions of the moderns on this subject, and the same prosaical mode of viewing it, in Plutarch's parallel between Aristophanes and Menander.], an idea which many, from the unbridled licentiousness of the old comic writers, have been led to entertain. On the contrary the former is the genuine poetic species; but the New Comedy, as I shall show in due course, is its decline ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... to her so irresistibly comic that she laughed until she was fairly obliged to seat herself upon the floor and give way to her enjoyment. She then owned that it was for one of the boys that she wanted the little mirror. When her Father had given it to her, she found that she ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... artist who knew his end and the means to attain it; but there is still a trace of infantile criticism to be found in Aristotle—i.e., in the naive concession he made to the public opinion that considered Homer as the author of the original of all comic epics, the Margites. If we go still further backwards from Aristotle, the inability to create a personality is seen to increase; more and more poems are attributed to Homer; and every period ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... horses, usually taken from the plough, were harnessed on as leaders. By main force they hauled our wicked wheelers into the right direction, and forced them, by pure physical superiority, into working. We furnished a joyous and comic spectacle to every town and village through which we passed. The whole community, men and children, came out to assist at our departure; and all alike were diverted, but not the less irritated, by the demoniac obstinacy of the brutes, who seemed under the immediate inspiration ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... poetry and verse, there is also verse and verse. Poetry may be said to be a fixed quality; but that is not so with the inferior article. There are many different sorts of verse. There is that which is strongly sentimental, there is that which is broadly comic, and there is that which is something between the two—neither over-sentimental nor over-comic, but altogether light in tone, and marked in the main by wit and humour. Now, to this last class of verse has been given, in general, the name of ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... afternoon I spent a couple of hours in a cinema hall. A continuous performance was provided, and people came and went as they chose, but throughout the program the place was well filled. The films shown had no relation to the war. They were of the ordinary dramatic or comic types, and I fancy they were of pre-war manufacture. Nothing of topical ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... any of his successors in Punch and elsewhere. For he was not merely a light humorist and a genial caricaturist; he dealt also in pathos and terror, in tragic passion and sorrow and crime; he often strikes chords of too deep a tone for the pages of a comic periodical. ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... the wife of a Sir Everard Marshall, a comic scientist in perpetual flight from his overwhelming spouse, is one of the sort that finds a new religion every few months and is now in the first fast furious throes of her latest, which is some form of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... remarked. "Now listen attentively to me. The skipper has one overpowering weakness, and that is a fondness for a comic song. Let him be ever so exasperated, a comic song—a good comic song, mind you—never fails to soothe him. Therefore, if he should happen to-night, by any chance, to refer to your unfortunate lapse of duty yesterday, listen patiently and ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... other, and his pony wheeled at the word. "I'll give you one month—no: you're such a good, thorough little chap, it will take longer—two months, to change your mind. Only"—he looked down at Rudolph with a comic, elderly air—"let me observe, our yellow people have that rather neat proverb. A hen's head, dear chap,—not with a battle-axe! No. Hot weather's coming, too. No sorrows of Werther, now, over such"—He laughed again. "Don't scowl, I'll be good. I won't say it. ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... Hans Sacks beatified, both in character and style), which we wish there was any possibility of translating.' The reader will be aware that Hans Sachs was the celebrated Minstrel- Cobbler of Nuremberg, who Wrote 208 plays, 1700 comic tales, and between 4000 and 5000 lyric poems. He flourished throughout almost the whole of ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... carriages and never risk their golden voices in this careless if romantic fashion. And in New York nobody took the trouble to serenade anybody else, unless paid in advance and armed with a police permit. As for being a comic-opera star, he refused to admit the possibility; and he relegated this well-satisfied constellation to the darks of limbo. He had heard ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... soul who understood her own. She met the eyes of the man, and a wonderful comfort, as of a cool breeze blowing over the face of clear water, came to her. She knew that the man understood. She knew that she had his fullest sympathy. She saw also a comrade in the toils of comic tragedy, for Sydney Lord was in the same case. He was a mountain of flesh. As a matter of fact, had he not been known in Greenhill and respected as a man of weight of character as well as of body, and of an old ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... bird that could star it with the English lark, and win any admiration at a popular concert by its side, is our favourite comic singer, the Bobolink. I have thought often, when listening to British birds at their morning rehearsals, what a sensation would ensue if Master Bob, in his odd-fashioned bib and tucker, should swagger into ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... for their inclination to scoff at robed and crowned authority, and, far from being awed by the dignity of the hotel-keeper, they were delighted with it. It was something with which to sport. With immeasurable impudence, they copied his attitude, and, standing before him, made comic speeches, always alluding with blinding vividness to his beard. His exit disappointed them. He had not remained long under fire. They felt that they could have interested themselves with him an entire evening. " Come back, Whiskers! Oh, come back! " Out in the main hall he made a ges. ture of ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... with his mother (he had no father) not to let him return. He told me that almost nightly, and especially when new fellows came, the youths in his dormitory (eleven in number) would waylay him, hold him down, and rub his parts to the tune of some comic song or dance-music. The boy who could choose the fastest time had the privilege of performing the operation, and most had to be the victim in turn unless new boys entered, when they would sometimes be subjected to this for a week. This ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the public. In this interval of suspense, nearly a twelvemonth, I returned by a natural impulse to the Greek authors of antiquity; I read with new pleasure the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, a large portion of the tragic and comic theatre of Athens, and many interesting dialogues of the Socratic school. Yet in the luxury of freedom I began to wish for the daily task, the active pursuit, which gave a value to every book, and an object to every inquiry; the preface of a new edition announced ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... some classy little contrivance?" he asked, proudly. "Not that I take any credit to myself, though. Far be it! I got the idea out of the comic supplement. But it works all right, and the beauty of it is that you can use the nail over and over again. ...
— Andy at Yale - The Great Quadrangle Mystery • Roy Eliot Stokes
... quite wrong about Mrs. Stimpson," Daphne told herself reproachfully, after she had slipped the letter containing bill and cheque into the letter-box in the hall. "She can be kind sometimes, and I've been a little beast to see only the comic side of her! I daresay she won't ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... fourteenth century the brotherhood of jugglers divided itself into two distinct classes, the jugglers proper and the tumblers. The former continued to recite serious or amusing poetry, to sing love-songs, to play comic interludes, either singly or in concert, in the streets or in the houses, accompanying themselves or being accompanied by all sorts of musical instruments. The tumblers, on the other hand, devoted themselves ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... the story of a planet that could have been another proud and majestic sun with a solar system of its own; it ended up, instead, in the comic ...
— Mars Confidential • Jack Lait
... suitable to all races and to all circumstances. It was this obvious truth that Jefferson tore to shreds before the eyes of his compatriots. He persuaded them to accept his vague generalities as a sober statement of philosophic truth, and he aroused a hatred of kingship in America which was comic in expression and disastrous in result. It was due to his influence that plain citizens hymned the glories of "Guillotina, the Tenth Muse," and fell down in worship before a Phrygian cap. It was due to ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... complete failures. 'Greece was a charming country—Greece was the parent of any civilisation we boasted. She gave us those ideas of architecture with which we raised that glorious temple at Kensington, and that taste for sculpture which we exhibited near Apsley House. Aristophanes gave us our comic drama, and only the defaults of our language made it difficult to show why the member for Cork did not more often ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... no reason to feel called upon to talk about anything more serious to a stranger at a house party. But it was the manner of the man, his whole personality. For Freddie was a man of fashion, with all the exaggerated and farcical mannerisms of the dandy of the comic papers. He wore a conspicuous and foppish costume, and posed with a little cane; he cultivated a waving pompadour, and his silky moustache and beard were carefully trimmed to points, and kept sharp by his active fingers. His conversation was full of French phrases and ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... English student; many terms, indeed, being wrongly interpreted in all editions of that work. Take, for example, the word "tricesima," the explanation of which is truly ridiculous; under "berefellarii," the commentary is positively comic; and many other instances might be cited. At the same time, it would be presumptuous to speak otherwise than in terms of the highest respect and admiration of Du Cange and his labours. The errors to which I allude were the natural ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.15 • Various
... just as depressing as usual but he could always get a lift from the comic section. He even had a favorite strip, a fact that he scarcely dared mention to himself. "Rattly Robot," a dull-witted mechanical clod who was continually falling over himself and getting into trouble. It was a repellent caricature, but could still be very funny. Jon was just starting ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... heard long before it reached him, and, in a moment, she was in her chair. He looked at her, and there was no trace of a tear. "It's Houghton," she said, putting her finger up to her mouth with almost a comic gesture. There was a smile in her eyes, and a little mockery of fear in the trembling of her hand and the motion of her lips. To him it seemed to be tragic enough. He had to assume to this gentleman whom he had been injuring a cordial friendly manner,—and thus to lie to him. He had to ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... know all about that. You have matter enough on hand to run the paper for the next fifteen years. If this is a comic story, you are buying only serious stuff. If this be tragic, humour is what you need. Of course, the up-and-down truth is that you are short of money, and can't pay my price. The Sponge is failing—everybody knows ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... had an impulse to rise up and cry out—almost anything to shock these people into opening their eyes upon real life. Indeed, though I hesitate about setting it down here, I was filled for some time with the liveliest imaginings of the following serio-comic enterprise: ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... one thing, set his face steadily against comic songs; and Mr Clifford in his inmost heart had an ungratified ambition to sing a certain song, called 'The Three Little Pigs,' with which Mr Wilson in the next parish simply brought down the house on several occasions; though Mr Clifford felt he by no means did full justice ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker
... are wrong," said Wayne, with incredible violence. "Crucifixion is comic. It is exquisitely diverting. It was an absurd and obscene kind of impaling reserved for people who were made to be laughed at—for slaves and provincials, for dentists and small tradesmen, as you would say. I have seen the grotesque gallows-shape, which the little Roman ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... followed by Henry at the head of his cavalry, and lively skirmishes were of frequent occurrence. In a military point of view none of these affairs were of consequence, but there was one which partook at once of the comic and the pathetic. For it chanced that in a cavalry action of more than common vivacity the Count Chaligny found himself engaged in a hand to hand conflict with a very dashing swordsman, who, after dealing and receiving many severe ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... step? Has ravening aspiration any compunction; any contrite visitings of nature? What did the player expect; that he would violate precedence; overthrow the fashionable maxims of good George IV; become a slave to a tragi-comic performer and cast his high destiny to the winds? Had ever a gentleman entertained such a project? Vows? Witness the agreeable perjuries of lovers; the pleasing pastime of fond hearts! Every titled rascallion lied to his mistress; every noble blackguard professed to ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... news. They go to the dazzling levels of society, to scandal and crime, to sports, pictures, actresses, advice to the lovelorn, highschool notes, women's pages, buyer's pages, cooking receipts, chess, whist, gardening, comic strips, thundering partisanship, not because publishers and editors are interested in everything but news, but because they have to find some way of holding on to that alleged host of passionately interested ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... more in harness than in bows and yokes, but the expense of harness and the constant disorder into which it gets, render it cheaper to use more bullocks in the simpler tackle. Each bullock has its name, and knows it as well as a dog does his. There is generally a tinge of the comic in the names given to them. Many stations have a small mob of cattle from whence to draw their working bullocks, so that a few more or a few less makes little or no difference. They are not fed with corn at accommodation-houses, as horses are; when their work is done, they ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... not be satirical. Gentle, modest maiden! And surely it becomes the tutored brother to imitate this kind forbearance. My faculties were always lively? And I must pardon you if you expect too much?—Upon my soul, this is highly comic! Expect too much! And there is danger then that I should not equal your expectations?—Prithee, my good girl, jingle the keys of your harpsichord, and be quiet. Pore over your fine folio receipt book, and appease your thirst after knowledge. Satisfy your ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... Schroeder's house threatened to hide him from view, he would stop, drop the sample case, wave his hand just once, pick up the sample case and go on, proceeding backward for a step or two until Schroeder's house made good its threat. It was a comic scene in the eyes of the onlooker, perhaps because a chubby Romeo offends the sense of fitness. The neighbors, lurking behind their parlor curtains, had laughed at first. But after a while they learned to look for that little scene, and to take it unto themselves, as if it were a personal thing. ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... Poets. Prose Writers. Philosophers and Historians. Lyric Poets, Dramatic Poets. Comic Poets. ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... would never do anything to injure the family prestige. And now, so to speak, "Lo, Ben Adhem's name led all the rest." In other words, Percy was the worst of the lot. Whatever indiscretions the rest had committed, at least they had never got the family into the comic columns of the evening papers. Lord Marshmoreton might wear corduroy trousers and refuse to entertain the County at garden parties and go to bed with a book when it was his duty to act as host at a formal ball; Maud might give her heart to an impossible ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... cool-headed wit and ability, So I wonder you've not had the gumption to guess There's method in our imbecility; Read on, and your premature chiding deplore, For our merciful mission, in brief, Is to brighten the tragical drama of war By providing the comic relief. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... little time to find everything, and when I got back to Dennis another song had begun. A young sailor I did not know was singing it, and the less said about it the better, except that it very nearly led to a row. It was by way of being a comic song, but except for one line which was rather witty as well as very nasty, there was nothing humorous about it, unless that it was funny that any one could have been indecent enough to write it, and any one else unblushing enough to sing it. I am ashamed to say I had heard some compositions ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Knight's Song. Mr. Lang has made a few selections from Lockhart's scattered verse in Blackwood as further illustrations of his poetic gift,—a number of admirable stanzas (in the character of Wastle) in the ottava rima of Whistlecraft and Beppo (1819); the best known of his comic poems, Captain Paton's Lament; and some lines from a translation in hexameters of the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad, that appeared as late as 1843, which must have sent more than one reader to the magazine, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... for some vaguely foreshadowed end. But there are two or three facts which stand out certain and have to be taken account of in any image we may be tempted to form of him. In the first place, his was no forbidding figure at the time to those who knew him; a queer and a comic figure evidently, but liked, trusted, and by some loved; reputed for honest dealing and for kindly and gentle dealing; remarked too by some at that time, as before and ever after, for the melancholy of his face in repose; known by us beyond doubt to have gone through great pain; known lastly ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... a falling out about an omelette. I fancy it was a sort of comic opera climax. So Mark got a treasure ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... pulled out into the snow that the mules might pass, and the soldiers said no word, for they knew just how we felt, until the last soldier leading the last mule was going by, and he turned round and said: "And her name was Maud!" It was in the height of Opper's popularity, his "comic supplements" the chief dependence of the road-houses for wall-paper. The reference was so apposite that we burst into laughter, but there was nothing funny about the devastation that had been wrought. That good trail was all gone—the ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... reader explain, if he can, the comic effect of that startling irrelevance; we cannot, ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... light radiates from a lantern. He, pausing before the sleeping Barndale, blushed not, but poked him in the ribs with the end of his walking-stick, and regarded him with an eye of waggish joy, as who should say that to poke a sleeping man in the ribs was a stroke of comic genius whereof the world had never beheld the like. He sat on his stick, cocked Mr. Barndale's hat on one side, and awaited that gentleman's waking. Mr. Barndale, languidly stretching himself, arose, adjusted his hat, took a great ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... altogether much improved. The glitter and colour of these various entertainments reflected themselves upon the surface of that deep flood of meditation, hook-armed wooden-legged pirates, intelligent elephants, ingenious but extremely expensive toys, flickering processions, comic turns, snatches of popular music and George Edmund's way of eating an orange, pictured themselves on his mind confusedly without in any way deflecting its course. Then on the fourth day he roused himself, gave George Edmund ten shillings to get himself a cutlet at the Cafe Royal and do the cinematographs ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... coolness, and paid close attention during this strange and almost comic interview. He thought he understood that a man from the Rito, probably called Topanashka, had been murdered by the Dinnes on the trail leading to the Puye from the south. He also thought that the Queres were on the war-path ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... was enjoying the good food which was before me, the small house in which I was seated became filled with young girls, who gazed at me with a curiosity which was really comic. When I had finished my meal the conversation with my host began to weary me, and I stretched myself on a mat, which on that occasion I regarded as an excellent substitute ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... Lit. Anec. viii. 548, 9, Dr. Barnard is thus described:—'In powers of conversation I never yet knew his equal. He saw infinite variety of characters, and like Shakespeare adopted them all by turns for comic effect. He carried me to London in a hired chaise; we rose from our seat, and put our heads out of the windows, while the postboy removed something under us. He supposed himself in the pillory, and addressed the populace against the government with all the cant ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... to a gloomy gas-lit chamber. They are of various speech and race, preoccupied with divers interests and cares. Necessity and the waiter drive them all to a sepulchral syssition, whereof the cook too frequently deserves that old Greek comic epithet—hadou mageiros—cook of the Inferno. And just as we are told that in Charon's boat we shall not be allowed to pick our society, so here we must accept what fellowship the fates provide. An English spinster retailing ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... furnish the following goods at a lower rate than any other advertiser in the county," followed by the usual price list of the merchant's wares. There was an unprecedented demand for that issue. The reputation of the "Clarion," both as a shrewd advertising medium and a comic paper, was established at once. For a few days the editor waited with some apprehension for a remonstrance from the absent Dimmidge, but none came. Whether Mr. Dimmidge recognized that this new advertisement gave extra publicity to his own, or that he was already on the ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... he made was more like the squeaking of a pencil on a slate; it set one's teeth on edge; the violin itself seemed to squeal with pain. And while he fiddled, and the young man hammered at his zither, the old woman and girl slowly revolved in a waltz. It may sound comic to hear about, but if you could have seen! ... It fairly plucked at one's heart. I do not think that I have ever in my life witnessed anything quite so sad. The little crowd outside, negroes, mind you, laughing at the troupe, passing from one to ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... never put a curb on her tongue, or greatly on her actions, except that, though a hundred men quarrelled openly, or in their own minds, about her, no one had ever had any right to quarrel about her. With a tongue which made men gasp with laughter, with as comic a gift as ever woman had, and as equally comic a face, she had been a good-natured little tyrant in her way. She had given a kiss here and there, and had taken one, but always there had been before her mind the picture of a careworn woman who struggled to bring up her three ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... from the window, feeling, for an instant, faint and sick. In a few moments I returned, and looked out again. Both the fallen ones had regained their feet, and passed out of sight, and Biddy, who had witnessed the last scene in this half comic, half tragic performance, was giving the pavement a plentiful coating ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... the drawing-room stopped. Having sung songs of Araby and tales of far Cashmere, Mr Roscoe Sherriff was refreshing himself with a comic paper. But Lady Wetherby, seated at the piano, still touched the keys softly, and the sound increased the richness of the mixture which choked Dudley Pickering's spiritual carburettor. It is not fair that a rather stout manufacturer should be called upon to sit in the moonlight while a beautiful ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... a world of insects—Chatsworth could not beat these (indeed, is no doubt sadly lacking in them)—beautiful, interesting, comic, grotesque, and terrible; from the proud humble-bee to the earwig and his cousin, the devil's coach-horse; and all those rampant, many footed things that pullulate in damp and darkness under big flat stones. To think that I have been friends ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... Anthology as I saunter in the fields: a pretty collection of Greek aphorisms in verse and prose. The bits of Menander and the comic poets are very acceptable. And this is really all I have ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... drunken leer in this beast's eye, an inebriate roll in all his movements, that lead one mechanically to peer into the darkness of his den with the view of seeing what the Bar fixings are like. It would be a rare freak to treat the huge fellow to a cask of rum and sugar, and then stand by with a comic artist, and take down for PUNCHINELLO the traits of BRUIN the Grizzly on a "bender," and with all his repressed nature brought ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... characters of your friends. You must excuse me, but it seems to me odd that Miss Minerva Tattle, who used to treat serious things so lightly, should now be treating light things so seriously. You ought to frequent the comic opera more, and dine with Mrs. Potiphar once a week. If your good humor can't digest such a hors d'oeuvre as little Mrs. Vite, what will you do with such a piece de resistance as ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... Uncle EPHRAM in cold blood. A sad warning to all uncles havin' murderers for nephews. When a mere child this HENRY WILKINS was compelled to go to the Sunday-school. He carried no Sunday-school book. The teacher told him to go home and bring one. He went and returned with a comic song- ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 2 • Charles Farrar Browne
... and, in troth, Judy dear, What I myself meant, doesn'tseem mighty clear; But the truth is, tho' still for the Owld Light a stickler, I was just then too shtarved to be over partic'lar:— And, God knows, between us, a comic'ler pair Of twin Protestants couldn't ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... "Just Kids" Safety Club idea was originated by Ad Carter, the Evening Journal's famous cartoonist and creator of the daily comic strip entitled ...
— What's in the New York Evening Journal - America's Greatest Evening Newspaper • New York Evening Journal
... way at the Tragic and Comic Theatres, and at length reached the Amphitheatre itself. This edifice is by far the largest in the city, and is better preserved than any. It is built of large blocks of a dark volcanic stone, and constructed in that massive style which the Romans lived, and of which they have left the best ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... hardly help laughing, though he had seldom felt less merry. But that the tiny Lady MacGregor should refer to tall Josette, who was nearly twice her height, as a "little beast," struck him as somewhat funny. Besides, her toy-terrier snappishness was comic. ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... acute in the observation of anything that appears to them absurd or ludicrous, the white man often becomes the object of their jests or quizzing. I have heard songs of this kind sung at the dances in a kind of comic medley, where different speakers take up parts during the breaks in the song, and where a sentence or two of English is aptly introduced, or a quotation made from some native dialect, other than that of the performers. ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... and their natural spirits rose. In January Lance was allowed to bring his friend Harewood to a concert of the choral society; and on the following evening Alice Knevett came to tea, and there was a series of wonderful charades, chiefly got up by Clement and Robina, and of comic songs by Lance and Bill Harewood—all with such success, that Alice declared that she had never seen anything so delightful in all her experience ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... between good and evil, advantage and disaster; and it cannot dispense with a moral interpretation of the universe. Socrates, who spoke initially for common sense, even thought the moral interpretation of existence the whole of philosophy. He would not have seen anything comic in the satire of Moliere making his chorus of young doctors chant in unison that opium causes sleep because it has a dormitive virtue. The virtues or moral uses of things, according to Socrates, were ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... accepted the hospitality of Colonel Feray considered such petty resistance unworthy of them, and answered to the calling out of their names. This drew the others after them. Everybody answered. Amongst the Legitimists some serio-comic scenes were enacted. They who alone were not threatened insisted on believing that they were in danger. They would not let one of their orators go. They embraced him, and held him back, almost with tears, crying ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... an expression of grave and touching sadness. Their large, mild eyes of limpid azure, which always had a dreamy character, were now never bathed in those joyous tears, with which a burst of frank and hearty laughter used of old to adorn their silky lashes, when the comic coolness of Dagobert, or some funny trick of Spoil-sport, cheered them in the course of ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... in every mood. Pickwick like Falstaff was to him a source of perennial delight. He loved and honoured Dickens for his rich and tender humanity, the passion of pity that suffused his soul, the lively play of his comic fancy. Endowed with a keen sense of humour, he read Mark Twain and W. W. Jacobs with gusto. As a relaxation from historical studies he would sometimes devour a bluggy story, and as he read would shout with laughter at its grotesque out-topping of probabilities. He tried ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... preferred to the "terrible graces" of her elder sister by the gentle and refined Plutarch, or the critic who has usurped his name in the 'Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander.' The old Attic Comedy has been variously compared to Charivari, Punch, the comic opera of Offenbach, and a Parisian 'revue de fin d'annee.' There is no good modern analogue. It is not our comedy of manners, plot, and situation; nor yet is it mere buffoonery. It is a peculiar mixture of broad political, social, and literary satire, and polemical discussion of large ideas, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... rhetoric that has fixed itself in conversation in all Latin languages—rhetoric that has ceased to have allusions, either majestic or comic. To the ear somewhat unused to French this proffers a frequent comedy that the well-accustomed ear, even of an Englishman, no longer detects. A guard on a French railway, who advised two travellers to take a certain train for fear they should be obliged to ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... as the matter. Poor Traddles—I never think of that boy but with a strange disposition to laugh, and with tears in my eyes—was a sort of chorus, in general; and affected to be convulsed with mirth at the comic parts, and to be overcome with fear when there was any passage of an alarming character in the narrative. This rather put me out, very often. It was a great jest of his, I recollect, to pretend that he couldn't keep his teeth from chattering, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... Lord Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, John Bunyan, Bishop Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, John Locke, Hobbes, Dean Swift, Defoe, and Addison; the chief poets, Shakespeare and Jonson (mentioned under the preceding period), Milton, Dryden, Pope, Butler, and Beaumont and Fletcher, with a class of writers known as the "Comic Dramatists of the Restoration," whose works, though not lacking in genius, exhibit many of the worst features of the licentious age in which they were produced. Three other great writers were born in the latter part of this period,— Fielding, the novelist, Hume, the historian, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... was brought up on a tray by the waiter, and some for Martha also, and the two ate in silence, until Stella suddenly burst into a merry peal of laughter, it was so grotesquely comic! A grown up English girl in these days locked in her room with a ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... bulk of mediaeval Latin literature. Excepted divisions. Comic Latin literature. Examples of its verbal influence. The value of burlesque. Hymns. The Dies Irae. The rhythm of Bernard. Literary perfection of the Hymns. Scholastic Philosophy. Its influence on phrase and method. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... for all I know. Anyhow, they were real proud of it.—I admit, I laughed to myself over the business. When something like that is discovered it always has a comic effect. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... most cruelly and wickedly. He took the gold, and killed the poor man for fear that he should tell it to the others. It is said that ever afterwards the descendants of Kallias were jeered at by the comic poets, as being of the family of the man who found the gold in ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... the history of the artist's career is but the history of his works, of his innumerable illustrations to books, and the sketchbooks, comic panoramas, and humorous cartoons he published on his own account. Besides, I am not writing a life of George Cruikshank, and all this time I have been keeping him on the threshold of the city of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... cried, in a tone of comic astonishment, "a fire in the parlor? What a luxury!" and he drew a long breath. In fact, the new-comer was in the habit of drawing long breaths at the end of each sentence, a habit he had acquired in singing; ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... first purely religious, rapidly developed a comic side, which by degrees became their central theme. The moral purpose of the performance was forgotten; and the Church disowned its evil changeling. To none of these early plays can the term "drama" be accurately applied; for each and all of them lack plot. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... on consideration I think if I wished to do anything in the "comic water-tournament line," I could make better terms with Mr. SANGER than ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... humor in the statements of one or two men as to their tribal God idea has added to the gayety of nations. But when any view is laughed at, it is doomed. From the very moment that the doctrine of election, that made God love a few aristocrats and pass the non-elect by, became a matter of joke in the comic papers, that theory was dead. Not otherwise is it with this idea of a tribal God. When Barry Paine ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... hundred," said he to the banker, "and look out for everything, Charlie. I'm going out for a stroll in the glen before the moonlight fades from the brow of the cliff. If anybody finds the roof in their way there's $60,000 wrapped in a comic supplement in the upper left-hand corner of the safe. Be bold; everywhere be bold, but be not bowled ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... shoulders. "Naturally it would be. Won't you sit down? You look so uncomfortable. Those French tragedy scenes with the hero hat in one hand and gloves in the other always seem to me so comic." ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... this volume we have spoken of the way in which the action progresses in the twelve- to sixteen-scene comic pictures in the comic supplements to the Sunday newspapers. Take for example the well-known "Bringing Up Father" series of "comics." Commencing with the basic situation, the action moves progressively to a logical conclusion, the climax ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... if his son was to be made an actor. "Would to God," replied the grandfather, "he were as good an actor as Monrose." The words struck young Moliere, he took a disgust to his tapestry trade, and it is to this circumstance France owes her greatest comic writer. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Oedipus, Andria, Act I, Scene II. The quotation, transposed by Martyr from the singular into the plural number, is from Terrence, Davus being a comic character in ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... few days after the article appeared, in fact, as soon as a copy of the paper reached Germany, a thunderstorm of shells broke on the brewery. Out of it poured a helter-skelter stream of stark-naked men, who ran wherever they could for cover. From one point of view it was vastly comic. In the meanwhile the building containing all their clothes, and all the spare clothing for a brigade, was being scientifically destroyed. That was more comic still. The bather cut off from his garments is a world-wide joke. The German battery, having got the exact range, were having ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... comfortable with a heap of sacks and an old tarpaulin. The curtain was looped up, and the brothers were left alone. They matured their plan in whispers. Outside, the merry-go-round blared out its comic tunes, screaming now and then to attract ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... produced a comedy called The Brothers. It acts well, but reads ill; though I can distinguish strokes of Mr. Bentley in it. Very few of the characters are marked, and the serious ones have little nature, and the comic ones are rather too much marked; however, the three middle acts ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... pleasure in poking fun at woman's use of dress and ornaments as bait for entrapping lovers, and many a squib expressing this theory appeared in the newspapers. These cynical notes no more represented the general opinion of the people than do similar satires in the comic sheets of to-day; but they are interesting at least, as showing a long prevailing weakness among men. The following sarcastic advertisement, for instance, was written by ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... full that night, a new comic singer of great promise having been announced, and oh! it was sad to see the youths of both sexes, little more than big boys and girls, who went there to smoke, and drink, and enjoy ribald ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... they arranged them for the dance. Wilhelm was called upon to play, and the dance commenced; a partner, however, was wanting. Just then a quiet citizen passed by. The gentleman who had no partner approached the citizen with comic respect, and besought him to ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... Paris, where he will stay some time. Cornelius is working at a comic opera [This would be the Barber of Baghdad.—Translator's note.] in the Bernhard's-Hutle. Raff is to finish his "Samson" for Darmstadt. Tausig is giving concerts in Warsaw. Pruckner will spend the winter in Vienna and appear at several concerts. Damrosch ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... Bankside; and his plays are replete with evidences of the influence upon him of the actors whom he had in charge. It is patent, for example, that the same comedian must have created Launce in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Launcelot Gobbo in the Merchant of Venice; the low comic hit of one production was bodily repeated in the next. It is almost as obvious that the parts of Mercutio and Gratiano must have been intrusted to the same performer; both characters seem made to fit the same histrionic temperament. If Hamlet were the hero of a novel, we should all, ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... them. He noticed that she was no longer shabby, but wore a smart new dress and hat, with a huge boa of ostrich feathers half covering her thin, bare neck. There was a glint of jewels about her as she moved. The man with the young, weak voice gazed at her admiringly, with a half-pitiful, half-comic air of pride in being seen with ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the serio-comic game went forward merrily: the women playing in desperate earnest; the men making broad farce out of ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... lady, whose fortune at her marriage had been of that ample sort which was measured in Southern parlance as "a hundred negroes," herself told me, with a mixture of tearful pathos and recognition of the comic side of it, of her own first efforts to make a batch of soda biscuit for her husband and children after she got possession of her kitchen. She knew all about the rule, but in new practice the rule didn't work. The ingredients got wrongly mixed; the fire was too hot or not hot enough; some biscuits ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... machine-guns rattled out ceaselessly.... Whimsically I recalled quieter days on the Somme, when our machine-gunners used to loose off seven rounds in such a way as to give a very passable imitation of that popular comic-song tag, "Umtiddy-om-pom—Pom-pom!" After three attempts we had given up trying to keep telephone touch with the batteries, and I had detailed mounted orderlies to be in readiness. One line I kept going, though, between the hut where the infantry brigadier and his brigade-major and the colonel ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... never having been so spoken to before, at least since her arrival in England, there was something comic in the surprise of her large eyes, as well as something tragic in the dignity of her offended mien. "It is very naughty of you, Miss," continued Leonard in a milder tone, for he was both softened by the eyes and awed by the mien, "and I ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... excitement. "Do you know, Ivan Andreievitch, I am continually surprised at myself: 'Here you are, Andrey Vassilievitch, here, at the war. What do you make of it?? I say to myself. Just consider.... No, but seriously, Ivan Andreievitch, of course I must seem to all of you something of a comic figure. When my wife was alive—how I wish that you could have known her! Such a remarkable woman; every one who met her was struck by her fine character—when my wife was alive I had my position to ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... returned, two years later, to America, and got himself admitted to the bar. Why he should have gone to this trouble is a mystery, for he never really seriously tried to practise law. Instead, he was occupying himself with a serio-comic history of New York, which grew under his pen into as successful an example of true and sustained humor as our literature possesses. The subject was one exactly suited to Irving's genius, and he allowed ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... come to my aunt Rosine's, who was then living at 6 Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin. He was on friendly terms with Rossini, who lived at No. 4 in the same street. He often brought him in, and Rossini made me laugh with his clever stories and comic grimaces. ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... Prussia, but the industry was not a success until Napoleon took it up and in 1810 offered a prize of a million francs for a practical process. How the French did make fun of him for this crazy notion! In a comic paper of that day you will find a cartoon of Napoleon in the nursery beside the cradle of his son and heir, the King of Rome—known to the readers of Rostand as l'Aiglon. The Emperor is squeezing the ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... de Tarascon was, however, an exception to this rule, for the author wrote it for Messrs. Guillaume, the well-known art publishers, who, wishing to popularise an improved style of illustration, offered M. Daudet 150,000 francs (L6,000) to write them a serio-comic story. Tartarin, which obtained an instant popularity, proved the author's versatility, but won him the hatred of the good people of Provence, who have never forgiven him for having made fun of their foibles. On one occasion a bagman, passing through Tarascon, put, by way of a jest, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... add to the illusion. There used to be a saying that cross-eyed people could not be honest. Similarly, perhaps, Newman thought the appearance of bow-legs would increase the villainy of his pirate. Certainly, no such blood-curdling ruffian has been seen out of comic opera. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... advantages of Roman rule, which no Antiochene denied, although their comic actors and the slaves who sang at private entertainments mocked the Romans and invented accusations of injustice and extortion that were even more outrageous than the truth. Not since the days when Antioch inherited the luxury and vices ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... the exchange became the favorite resort of fashionable customers of both sexes: much money was squandered here, and, if we are to trust the representations of satirists and comic writers, many reputations lost. The building was destroyed in the fire of London; and the divines of that day, according to their custom, pronounced this catastrophe a judgement on the avarice and unfair dealing of the merchants and shopkeepers, and the pride, prodigality ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... your suggestion, signora, that we should issue satirical pamphlets, or attempt to run a comic paper? That last, I am sure, ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... It might have seemed comic communicated in that matter-of-fact tone, but somehow it struck me as tragic. That this vain, self-contained, and reticent man should confess to the frailty of humanity to a man he disliked was the measure of ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... bell and the door flew open. Sounds of laughter and comic songs issued from the abode and in a second they were in the crowded drawing room. It was packed with all the Elite and a stout duchess with a good natured face was singing a lively song and causing much merriment. The earl strode forward at sight of two ...
— The Young Visiters or, Mr. Salteena's Plan • Daisy Ashford
... People," was written in conjunction with J.H. Reynolds, his brother-in-law. This was followed by "Whims and Oddities," in prose and verse; "National Tales," and "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," a book full of imaginative verse. Hood's rich sense of humor found scope in his "Comic Annual," appearing through ten successive years, and his collection of "Whimsicalities." Among his minor poems, "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... her a moment in comic dismay. Really this country girl was growing too much for him ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... disliked. Then other names were suggested, and, after listening to this one and that one, Field finally said: "You can christen her whatever you please, but I shall call her Trotty." "Pinney" was named from the comic opera "Pinafore," which was in vogue at the time he was born; and "Daisy" got his name from the song, popular when he was born: "Oh My! A'int ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... this he was as hypochondriacal as a comic actor and took no part in the life of the household. He stirred only when he saw his master pick up his hat and stick. Zamore died of brain fever, brought on, no doubt, by overwork in trying to learn the schottische, ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... except a stupid young soldier servant to speak to. But he was not anxious for the opportunities of which his severe arrest deprived him. He would have been uncommunicative from dread of ridicule. He was aware that the episode, so grave professionally, had its comic side. When reflecting upon it he still felt that he would like to wring Lieutenant Feraud's neck for him. But this formula was figurative rather than precise, and expressed more a state of mind than ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... is a peremptory little body, with a great deal of human nature in her, who wins our hearts by her comic speeches and funny ways. She complains of being bewitched by people, and the wind 'blows her out,' and she thinks if her comrade dies in the snow-storm she will be 'dreadfully 'shamed of it,' and has rather ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... three shillings and four-pence, Jack the Rover; but, I fear me, thou hast not wherewithal to satisfy the law, even in a small thing, until thou offerest thy neck unto the halter as a sacrifice. But did Hugh Dalton ever bring you, or any man, into trouble yet?" continued Robin, composing his comic features into a grave ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... written by his admirers, describing more or less rhetorically his qualities as a man and an artist. There is one bit of verse by Goldsmith (1770), in a comic vein, and in the form of an epitaph, which delineates very cleverly the real character ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... "to inform men in the best reason of living."[423] Himself a writer for the theatre, Jonson is naturally more concerned with comedy and tragedy than he is with any narrative forms of poetry. And to him the office of the comic poet is "to imitate justice and instruct to life—or stirre up gentle affections."[424] In Timber he iterates the same praise of poetry as being no less effective than philosophy in instructing men to good life, and informing their manners, but as even more effective in that it persuades men ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
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