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More "Drollery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the exquisitely simple delicacy of touch, the inimitable fineness of characterisation, the constant suggestion of the tender and true, the keen sense of the pathetic in life and the humour that makes it tolerable, the lovable drollery that corrects the tendency to the sentimental, the subtle blending of the strength of a man with the naivete of the child, the ambidextrous familiarity with English and French life, the kindliness of the satire, the ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... hitherto been with heroes of romance and high comedy. The theatre-going public and his admirers—the terms are synonymous—may breathe again. ALEXANDER is surprisingly good as Dr. Bill, and the serious earnestness with which he invests the part intensifies the drollery of the complications. And to think that the adapter of this gay and festive piece should be none other than the sentimental troubadour, song-writer and composer, author of a Lyceum Tragedy and other similar trifles, Mr. HAMILTON AIDE!! "Sir," in future will HAMILTON ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... my hand sharply, by way, as well as I remember, of indignant protest; and, in the act, the packet slipped from my fingers, glanced between the railings, and fell and sunk in the river. I stood a moment petrified, and then, struck by the drollery of the incident, gave way to peals of laughter. I was still laughing when my stepmother reappeared, and the maid, who doubtless considered me insane, ran off to join her; nor had I yet recovered my gravity when I presented myself before the lawyer to solicit ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... followed, for Billy Goat was a popular person at Kowatin in the Saskatchewan country. He had an inimitable drollery, heightened by a cast in his eye, a very large mouth, and a round, good-humoured face; also he had a hand and arm like iron, and was altogether a great ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... inventive faculties, and are named, not too subtly, the Armstrong gate. This, indeed, is the American beauty of ranch humour, a flower of imperishable fragrance handed to the visitor—who does the lifting with guarded drollery or triumphant snicker, as may be. Buck Devine or Sandy Sawtelle will achieve the mot with an aloof austerity that abates no jot unto the hundredth repetition; while Lew Wee, Chinese cook of the Arrowhead, fails not to brighten it with a nervous giggle, impairing its vocal correctness, ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... and Brother Jonathan" is an allegory, conveying in a strain of fatiguing drollery the history of the relations between Great Britain and the United States previous to the war of 1812, and reflecting the popular feeling with regard to some of the English tourists who overran us after the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... alone they knew intimately. Woman was the standing butt for men to hurl their darts at, and one cannot help feeling that a good deal of the fun got its point from the knowledge that the charges were exaggerated or untrue. You find the Jewish satirists exhausting all their stores of drollery on the subject of rollicking drunkenness. They roar till their sides creak over the humor of the wine-bibber. They laugh at him and with him. They turn again and again to the subject, which shares the empire with women in the Jewish poets. Yet we know well enough that the writers of ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... vol. x. of the Vienna edition of Schiller are some ludicrous verses, almost his sole attempt in the way of drollery, bearing a title equivalent to this: 'To the Right Honourable the Board of Washers, the most humble Memorial of a downcast Tragic Poet, at Loeschwitz;' of which Doering gives the following account. 'The first part of Don Carlos being already printed, by Goeschen, in Leipzig, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... the strangest quiet way imaginable. 'You insulted Lady Featherstone at Ohlau, Mr. Wogan,' said he, 'one evening when she hid behind your curtain. It was a very delicate piece of drollery, no doubt. But I shall be glad to show you another, view of it.' It is strange how that had rankled in his thoughts. I liked him for it,—upon my soul, I did,—though it was the only thing ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... John Milton, was not to forget. "Pan's Anniversary," late in the reign of James, proclaimed that Jonson had not yet forgotten how to write exquisite lyrics, and "The Gipsies Metamorphosed" displayed the old drollery and broad humorous stroke still unimpaired and unmatchable. These, too, and the earlier years of Charles were the days of the Apollo Room of the Devil Tavern where Jonson presided, the absolute monarch of English literary Bohemia. We hear ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... appearance, to an expression of arch and coquettish benignity, I gave my lady a pat on the one cheek, and a kiss on the other, and without saying one syllable (Furies! I could not), left her astonished at my drollery, as I pirouetted out of the room ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... little fellows had enveloped themselves from head to foot in leaves and looked like walking bushes. In this costume they crept from one visitor to another. Such a boy covered with leaves and his head adorned with twigs is called a "Pfingstkonig" [Whitsuntide-King]. This drollery is customary ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... little fellow, as black as the ace of spades, and possessing to the full the mercurial temperament of the Southern negro. Full of fun and drollery, he attracted plenty of attention when he came into the village, and earned many a penny from the boys by ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... moderation, [30] form the charm of the Terentian drama. In the bolder elements of dramatic excellence it must be pronounced deficient. There is not Menander's many-sided knowledge of the world, nor the racy drollery of Plautus, nor the rich humour of Moliere, nor the sparkling wit of Sheridan,—all is toned down with a severe self-restraint, creditable to the poet's sense of propriety, but injurious to comic effect. His characters also lack variety, though powerfully conceived. They are easily ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... would say of him. I knew, of course, that he meant bete in the French sense, and not in the offensive English sense of the word. The truth was, that Gurowski had little relish for humor, and the drollery which formed so prominent a part of Lincoln's external character was unintelligible and offensive to him. At a later period, as I judge from his Diary, he understood the President better, and did full ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... sallies of Sydney Smith have been, of course, often repeated, but the fanciful fun and inexhaustible humorous drollery of his conversation among his intimates can never be adequately rendered or reproduced. He bubbled over with mirth, of which his own enjoyment formed an irresistible element, he shook, and his eyes glistened at his ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... the table, takes a glass, and at once begins talking. What is most characteristic in his manner of talking is the continually jesting tone, a sort of mixture of philosophy and drollery as in Shakespeare's gravediggers. He is always talking about serious things, but he never speaks seriously. His judgments are always harsh and railing, but, thanks to his soft, even, jesting tone, the harshness ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... altogether in a right merry vein. The humour is broad and strongly marked, and at the same time of the most diverting kind; the characters are excellent, and admirably discriminated; the comic parts of the play are written with most exquisite drollery, and the serious with great truth and feeling. Of the present piece there were seven editions, within a short period, with all of which the present reprint has been carefully collated, and is now, for the first time, divided ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... was shaped like the bill of a parrot; his face slightly pitted with the small-pox, with a dry perpetual bloom on it, like a frost-bitten leaf in autumn. He had an eye of great quickness and vivacity, with a drollery and lurking waggery of expression that was irresistible. He was evidently the wit of the family, dealing very much in sly jokes and innuendoes with the ladies, and making infinite merriment by harpings upon old themes; which, unfortunately, ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... have by an extraordinary drollery of Fortune sent off to you by this day's post a P.C. inviting you to appear in sealskin. But this had reference to the weather, and not at all, as you may have been led to fancy, to our ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the best piece of Rafael. For many a happy thought I am indebted to that picture—it is my principal source of inspiration; when my imagination flags, as of course it occasionally does, I stare upon those features, and forthwith strange ideas of fun and drollery begin to flow into my mind; these I round, amplify, or combine into goodly creations, and bring forth as I find an opportunity. It is true that I am occasionally tormented by the thought that, by doing this, I am committing ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... gentle bleats from their mothers, and come back after a frolic to meditate and switch their tails. The fleecy roll of a lamb's tail, and the dimples which seem to dint its first coat, the pinkness of its nose, and the drollery of its eye, are all worth watching under ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... antagonist with too much presumption; upon which he called to him in a loud tone, 'What is it you are contending for, if you BE contending?' And afterwards imagining that the gentleman retorted upon him with a kind of smart drollery, he said, 'Mr. ***** it does not become you to talk so to me. Besides, ridicule is not your talent; you have THERE neither intuition nor sagacity.' The gentleman protested that he had intended no improper freedom, but had the greatest ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... to the front room, where all sat down and chatted with the cheery good nature proper in such a party of young folks. Mike was at his best, and kept all laughing by his drollery. Nora's merriment filled the room with music. Michael had given his name soon after his entrance into the store, but insisted that the way to pronounce it was "Mike," ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... Drip guteti. Drive away (expel) forpeli. Drive (in carriage) veturi. Drive back (repel) repeli, repusxi. Drivel (to slaver) kracxeti. Driver (car, etc.) veturisto. Droll ridinda, sxerca. Drollery sxerco—ado. Dromedary unugxiba kamelo. Drone burdo. Droop (pine) malfortigxi. Drop guto. Dropsy akvosxvelo. Dross metala sxauxmo. Drought senpluveco. Drove (cattle) bestaro, brutaro. Drown droni. Drown (trans.) dronigi. Drowsy dorma. Drub (beat) bati. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... a certain apish drollery and humour which exhibited itself in the lad, and a liking for some of the old man's pursuits, the first of the twins was the grandfather's favourite and companion, and would laugh and talk out all his infantine heart to the old gentleman, to whom the younger had seldom ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... middle-aged. Englishmen never were uproarious in their mirth, as Froissart once reminded us. But it is true that Punch does not indulge so much as once he did in caricature—which after all, as Carlyle has pointed out, is not Humour at all, but Drollery. Caricature, one must remember, has two mortal enemies—a small and a great: artistic excellence of draughtsmanship, and national prosperity with its consequent contentment. Good harvests beget good-humour. They stifle all motive for genuine caricature, for "satire thrives only ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... was present, they could not have more civilly accepted the toast; it was a bold kind of drollery in Mr. Burney, for I was fain to drink my own health in a bumper, which he filled for me, laughing ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... medicine, and nursed him so well that he recovered. Cowper says that Puss showed his gratitude by licking his hand for a long time, a ceremony he never went through with but once in his life, before or afterward. Bess, who died young, was the funny one. He had a great fund of humor and drollery. Tiney, though very entertaining in his way, seems to have been rather a grave and surly fellow. When he died—and he lived to a good old age, some nine years, I think—Cowper buried him with honor, and wrote an ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... Zmeskall, who was court secretary. Zmeskall undertook the task of keeping the master supplied with pens, which he cut from goose-quills. Beethoven used up large quantities of them and was incessant in his demands on him. A certain drollery characterizes all his letters to him. He knew how to hit the vulnerable points in the other, and they were often made the subject of attack. Zmeskall being a member of the nobility, is often addressed by him, "Most high-born of men." He was useful to Beethoven not alone on the subject of ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... logic, in all manner of brilliant utterance and tongue-fence, I have hardly known his fellow. So ready lay his store of knowledge round him, so perfect was his ready utterance of the same,—in coruscating wit, in jocund drollery, in compact articulated clearness or high poignant emphasis, as the case required,—he was a match for any man in argument before a crowd of men. One of the most supple-wristed, dexterous, graceful and successful fencers in that ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... said as if in a dream. "Of course I'll go at once, but—why—if Miss Flora already—?" Then suddenly he recovered himself in the way Anna knew so well. "Miss Anna"—he gestured with his cap, his eyes kindling with a strange mixture of worship and drollery though his brow ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives—he called them enemies!—hidden out ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... an opportunity as is presented to us by "The Biglow Papers" to pass by without entering our earnest protest against such attempts (now, alas! too common) at demoralizing the public sentiment. Under a wretched mask of stupid drollery, slavery, war, the social glass, and, in short, all the valuable and time-honoured institutions justly dear to our common humanity and especially to republicans, are made the butt of coarse and senseless ribaldry by this low-minded scribbler. It ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... Shortreed, his companion in all these Liddesdale raids, "sic an endless fund of humour and drollery as he had then wi' him. Never ten yards but we were either laughing or roaring and singing. Wherever we stopped, how brawlie he suited himsel' to everybody! He aye did as the lave did; never made himsel' the great man or took ony airs in the company. I've seen him in a' moods in these ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... said to Frederick Montague, "that he had a vast deal of drollery, and was a most incomparable mimic;" but she had said so of him in whispers, which magnified the sound to his imagination, if not to his ear. He was a boy of much vivacity, and had considerable abilities; but his appetite for vulgar praise had not yet been surfeited. ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... actors were too good to be defeated by the authors; and the two couples—the Babes (Mr. STANLEY LUPINO as Horace and Mr. WILL EVANS as Flossie) and the Robbers (Messrs. EGBERT)—went far by their personal drollery and unflagging spirits to make up for any defect in the words. Each member of the two pairs played very loyally into the other's hands. Mr. ALBERT EGBERT indeed played into his brother's feet with equal devotion; and the good humour with which he accepted the fiercest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... full of drollery as ever it can hold; 'tis like an orange stuck with Cloves as for conceipt."—The Rehearsal, 1671, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... monument has been erected to his memory. Indefatigable in the discharge of his professional duties, Moir regularly devoted a portion of his time to the gratification of his literary tastes. A pleasant prose writer, he will be remembered for his inimitable drollery in the adventures of "Mansie Wauch." As a poet, his style is perspicuous and simple; and his characteristics are tenderness, dignity, and grace. He is occasionally humorous, but he excels in the plaintive and elegiac. Much of his poetry breathes the odour of a genuine piety. He was personally ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... The manager was not without great difficulty induced to bring this piece out. The sentimental comedy still reigned; and Goldsmith's comedies were not sentimental. The "Goodnatured Man" had been too funny to succeed; yet the mirth of the "Goodnatured Man" was sober when compared with the rich drollery of "She Stoops to Conquer," which is, in truth, an incomparable farce in five acts. On this occasion, however, genius triumphed. Pit, boxes, and galleries, were in a constant roar of laughter. If any bigoted admirer of Kelly and Cumberland ventured to hiss or groan, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... than fanaticism under his nose," became the recipient of one of the most amusing and yet most virulent attacks which even that controversial age produced. "The whole pamphlet," Mr. Collins truly says, "is inimitable. Its irony, its humour, its drollery, are delicious." ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... at the charming child, to whom Lord Petherton was talking with evident kindness and gaiety—a conjunction that evidently excited Mitchy's interest. "May WE then know her?" he asked with an effect of drollery. "May I—if HE may?" ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... objection I wearily took them, finding a desperate drollery in being regarded as a foreigner, whereas I was simply alone among foreigners; but I knew that Cousin Egbert lacked the subtlety to grasp this point of view and made no effort to lay it before him. It was clear to me then, I think, that he would forever ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... sire. I was out driving in a plain cabriolet, when I remarked the boy, who was singing, and otherwise exercising his animal spirits by hopping, dancing, and running along the road by the side of the vehicle. I was much diverted by his drollery, and finally invited him to take a drive with me. He jumped in—without awaiting a second invitation, stared wonderfully at me with his great brown eyes, and in high satisfaction kicked his feet against the dash-board, and watched the motion of the wheels. Now and then ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... and The remedy of love Englished. As also The loves of Hero and leander, amock poem: together with choice poems, and rare pieces of drollery. London, printed in ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... less than an hour we reached Mezra'ah—the journey much enlivened by the drollery and songs of Hadj 'Abdallah. Both he and Asaad had capital mares and ornamented long guns. The latter was all dressed in white—the turban, abbai, etc. His face was pale, and even ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... of Leonard's words was a thing she prized beyond count. It made Mrs. Morris nervous, drained her mind's treasury, and sent her conversational powers borrowing and begging; Isabel it awed; Arthur it tantalized; to Godfrey it was an appetizing drollery; but to Ruth it was dearer and clearer than ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable
... black, with florid face, and powdered hair, his raised and clasped hands,—rushing out of the lockup-house scene in all the fervid extasy of a father rejoicing at the escape of his son from destruction. In Crack, Dozey, Nipperkin, and other drunken characters, his drollery was irresistible. His intoxication displayed as much discrimination as his pathetic performances. Who can forget his stare in being detected in his fuddling as Dozey, and his plea for drinking to "wa-ash ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... lady is chief stage carpenter and property-man, and is married to another lady of the company. One of the under-carpenters is stepson of the chief comic who was formerly a fruit seller and is a little fellow of inexhaustible drollery with a flavour of Dan Leno in ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... seemed at a loss to understand the meaning of his companion, whose waggery and drollery cropped out at such unexpected times that no one knew when to expect it. The Indian was approaching and was already close at hand. Keen-eared, and with their senses always about them, Apaches are likely to detect the slightest disturbance. The scout ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... characterizes the works of Swift. The nature of Voltaire was, indeed, not inhuman; but he venerated nothing. Neither in the masterpieces of art nor in the purest examples of virtue, neither in the Great First Cause nor in the awful enigma of the grave, could he see anything but subjects for drollery. The more solemn and august the theme, the more monkey-like was his grimacing and chattering. The mirth of Swift is the mirth of Mephistopheles; the mirth of Voltaire is the mirth of Puck. If, as Soame Jenyns oddly imagined, a portion of the happiness of Seraphim and just ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... which he received with great pleasure; and to the people of consequence that were about him I also presented some article or other. There were great numbers of children and, as I took notice of the little ones that were in arms and gave them beads, both small and great, but with much drollery and good humour, endeavoured to benefit by the occasion. Boys of ten and twelve years old were caught up in arms and brought to me, which created much laughter; so that in a short time I got rid of all I had brought ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... strive to reverence man as man, irrespective of his birthplace. A stranger in a strange land is always to me an object of sympathy and interest. Amidst all his apparent gayety of heart and national drollery and wit, the poor Irish emigrant has sad thoughts of the "ould mother of him," sitting lonely in her solitary cabin by the bog-side; recollections of a father's blessing and a sister's farewell are haunting him; a grave mound in a distant churchyard far beyond ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... him all about it, and this was his reply. 'Our Lord made that promise long before the discovery of America and the establishment of the peculiar institutions of this country. If he had lived at this day, I reckon,' he continued with a look of drollery, 'he would have said "Ask and ye shall receive—if you aint a nigger." I can't take you into my school because you are black, but I'll send you down to the American Missionary school at Chattanooga. You can ask and receive there whether you are ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 42, No. 3, March 1888 • Various
... resumed his lark-like air, and it was perhaps the more striking from the fragility and transparency that remained about his looks; and he was full of animation, as he, with a reinforcement of boys, clustered round a merry sunny-faced girl, full of joyous drollery. ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that in the interval between the conception and the execution the boy happened to light upon a copy of the Rolliad. If such was the case, he already had too fine a sense of humour to have persevered in his original plan after reading that masterpiece of drollery. It is worthy of note that the voluminous writings of his childhood, dashed off at headlong speed in the odds and ends of leisure from school-study and nursery routine, are not only perfectly correct in spelling and grammar, but display the same lucidity of meaning, ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... entertain them most hospitably, and with increasing frequency, as his means became rapidly more ample. He was also fond of the theatres, taking special delight in comedies and farces, however broad, and even pantomimes. With what solemn drollery he would afterwards dwell on the feats of Clown and Pantaloon! I am here, however, speaking of several years ago; for latterly he said, "It was a very hard thing to find any thing to laugh at in a pantomime, however much ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... been given to sit at the feet of Alexander Campbell. Others had listened to John Smith, and had been magnetized by the inimitable wit and wisdom of that marvelous man, and their hearts had drawn heroic courage from his heart. Others still had been captivated by the boyish and unstudied drollery of Walter Scott, only to be swept away by a whirlwind of passionate appeal and terrible invective, or to be melted with the tenderness of his portrayal of the love of Jesus. And all these came to Kansas bearing a great cause in their hearts, and determined to build up here such churches ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... joke, waggery, burlesque, humor, playfulness, waggishness, drollery, jest, pleasantry, witticism. facetiousness, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Mormon experience, have been preserved, and I have some doubts if any one of his lectures, except the Mormon one, was ever fairly written out. "The Babes in the Wood," as a lecture, was a pure and unmitigated "sell." It was merely joke after joke, and drollery succeeding to drollery, without any connecting thread whatever. It was an exhibition of fireworks, owing half its brilliancy and more than half its effect to the skill of the man who grouped the fireworks together and let them off. In the ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... their work, the Irishman eyed him curiously, with indications of his native drollery and humor betraying themselves in his mirthful face; he seemed about to speak, but Jack, with set, stern features, was ready, and the work continued without a word. In that brief interim, however, Jack had fixed one of his keen, piercing glances ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... glasses, is the onely drinking: and for thy walles a pretty slight Drollery, or the Storie of the Prodigall, or the Germane hunting in Waterworke, is worth a thousand of these Bed-hangings, and these Flybitten Tapistries. Let it be tenne pound (if thou canst.) Come, if it were not for thy humors, there is not a better Wench ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... talents of Hoffmann largely contributed. In the evenings the choice spirits of Bamberg, mostly of theatrical and artistic connection, used to assemble in the "Rose," where Hoffmann was the soul of the party, his genius, wit, irony, and drollery being inexhaustible. Whilst sending out flashes of sarcastic wit or gleams of exquisite humour, he would clench a droll or clever description by quickly embodying his thoughts and words in impromptu sketches, which ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... them sometimes rose up to his mind, in the presence of the chefs-d'oeuvre on which his sister rested with so much complacency. It was a part of his quiet interior store of amusement to look at these bits of Byzantine embroidery round the room, which affected him always with a subtle sense of drollery. ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to laugh contemptuously at such abominations)—oh! reader, quit your lighter recreations; seek not for merriment in fictitious humour; it is a poor, unsatisfactory diet, weak and watery; but find substantial drollery from the fluttering of tatters—laugh, and with the crowing joy, grow sleek and lusty at the writhings and the lamentations ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... The prevailing expression was much alike in both; but there was not so much of constitutional benignity in the looks of Bentham, nor was he ever so grave and thoughtful as Franklin is generally represented in his portraitures; but he was fuller of shrewdness and playfulness,—of downright drollery, indeed,—of boyish fun,—and, above all, of a warm-hearted, unquestioning sympathy for everything alive, man or beast, that he called "virtuous," like the "virtuous deer" and the "affectionate swan": and all this you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... borrowed. In a copy of verses, entitled the Time Poets, preserved in a miscellany called Choice Drollery, 1656, are these lines: Sent by Ben Jonson, as some authors say, Broom went before, and kindly swept the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Kronstadt people on that day is not yet complete. His legs were encased in Hessian boots; his shooting-jacket was somewhat the worse for wear; and his hat, which had been eminently respectable at first starting, had acquired a sort of brigandish air; and to add to the drollery of his general appearance, the excellent little Servian horse he rode was not high enough for ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... slight pique that was apparent in the soldier's manner; but, after following the train of her own thoughts in silent enjoyment for a moment longer, she seemed to yield to their drollery, and laughed until her dark eyes flashed with merriment. Cecilia did not assume the severe gravity with which she sometimes endeavored to repress, what she thought, the unseasonable mirth of her cousin; and the wondering Griffith fancied, as ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Knox has a vein of drollery in him; which I like much, in combination with his other qualities. He has a true eye for the ridiculous. His History, with its rough earnestness, is curiously enlivened with this. When the two Prelates, entering Glasgow Cathedral, quarrel about precedence; march rapidly up, take to hustling ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... James Foster O'Neill, and Hubert O'Grady. They were impersonators of what were known as "Irish parts," and being genuine Irish Nationalists, as well as actors, did much to elevate the character of such performances. For with them, all the wit and drollery were retained, while they helped, by their example, to banish the buffoonery that used to characterise the ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... things, that I was not likely to make myself thoroughly skilled in any. As a blacksmith said once to me, when he was asked why he was not both blacksmith and whitesmith, 'The smith that will meddle with all things may go shoe the goslings;' an old proverb, which, from its mixture of drollery and good sense, became ever after a ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... romantic and salutary situation. One other flash broke from him in this retirement. His novel, called the Expedition of Humphry Clinker, which he sent to England to be printed in 1770, though abounding in portraitures of exquisite drollery, and in situations highly comical, has not the full zest and flavour of his earlier works. The story does not move on with the same impetuosity. The characters have more the appearance of being broad ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... 'given' name, as it is even now generally termed in New-England, had been intended, by his pious sponsors, humbly to express his future hopes, turned his head towards the heroic tailor, with an expression of drollery about the eye, that proved nature had not been niggardly in the gift of humour, however the quality was suppressed by the restraints of a very peculiar manner, ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... Mr. Darley for the mode of illustration he adopts, which we may add is that rendered famous by Retzsh. The series we are now noticing are quite as meritorious as that designed by the same artist to Rip Van Winkle; but the subject matter is not equally capable of such broad contrasts in drollery as that legend presents. Nevertheless, Mr. Darley has executed his task in the truest appreciation of his author; and his hero is the veritable Ichabod Crane of Irving; his love-making scene with "the peerless daughter of Van Tassel" is exquisite in its quiet humor; ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... examination. Members were always examined for admission. The strangest questions were asked by the venerable board, and often strange answers elicited,—no matter how remote from the purpose, provided there was wit or drollery. Sometimes a singularly slow person would be invited, on purpose to puzzle and tease him with questions that he could make nothing of; and he would stand in helpless imbecility, without being able to cover his retreat ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... de Tormes, or Estevanillo Gonzalez might have sat:—faces that almost make one in love with roguery, they seem so full of vivacity and enjoyment. There was all the knavery, and more than all the drollery of a Spanish picaroon in the laughing eyes of the English apprentice; and, with a little more warmth and sunniness of skin on the side of the latter, the resemblance between them would ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Colley Cibber says of this performance "That when he (Penkethman) first played Harlequin in 'The Emperor of the Moon' several gentlemen (who inadvertently judged by the rules of nature) fancied that a great deal of the drollery, and spirit of his grimace was lost by his wearing that useless, unmeaning mask, therefore insisted that the next time of his acting that part he should play without it. Their desire was accordingly complied with, but alas! in vain—Penkethman ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... "battle-doors," than to be seated among a lot of little ragged, half-starved Gipsy children, who have never known what soap, water, and comb are. It is more in harmony with our sensibilities to sit and listen to the drollery, wit, sarcasm, and fun of Punch than to the horrible tales of blood, revenge, immorality, and murder that some of the adult Gipsies delight in setting forth. It is more in accordance with our feelings to sit and admire the innocent, angelic being, the perfection of the good and beautiful, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... Alice said those last cold words, "Pray do not ask me," she released the grasp, and left the letter where it was. "I suppose he won't bite me, at any rate," she said, and she assumed that look of childish drollery which she would sometimes put on, almost with a grimace, but still with so much prettiness that no one who saw ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... were all frequently taken to the new Zoological Garden, where we were especially delighted with the drollery of the monkeys. Even then I felt a certain pity for the deer and does in confinement, and for the wild beasts in their cages, and this so grew upon me that many a visit to a zoological garden has been spoiled by it. Once in Keilhau ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... hanging about her steps, staring her down with bold, impudent eyes. She even thought, in a formless way (for she had no orderly inner life of wonder and conclusion) whether she should have taken refuge with the light-haired man who was now driving Tenney to madness, if he had not had that drollery of looking at you, like a boy really, who cared only for a boy's fitful fun. But he was not kind. The kindness had been only to lure her into trusting him, just as Tenney's had turned into a rage of abusive jealousy. Raven's kindness was different. It was not in any degree personal to her. She ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... he grew stronger and sturdier he evinced much curiosity, playfulness and drollery, and to these characteristics would have to be added, when he became partly grown, a kind of bear sense of humor ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... were not for his cruelty to the men, he is the most amusing liar I ever heard. I am often more inclined to laugh than to be angry at him; he has a vein of wit and rich humour that runs through his composition, and never quits him. There is drollery even in his malice, and, if we cannot get clear of him, we must make the best ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... forward as his antagonist with too much presumption; upon which he called to him in a loud tone, 'What is it you are contending for, if you be contending?' And afterwards imagining that the gentleman retorted upon him with a kind of smart drollery, he said, 'Mr. ——, it does not become you to talk so to me. Besides, ridicule is not your talent; you have there neither intuition nor sagacity.' The gentleman protested that he had intended no improper freedom, but had the greatest respect for Dr. Johnson. After a short ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... by any means, reclaim any of the 52nd. But the most amusing of the crowd is Trevelyan, who reminds me of an Englishman in Paris. He is clear, too. The oftener I see him the more I find to admire. He has a stock of drollery in reserve, too. Only think of the song and how received; Jove, he can sing like ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... Maybrick, Tayleure (a distinguished double bass), and Vaughan. In "Bombastes Furioso," King Artaxomines was personated by Mr. Richmond; Fusbos by Mr. Clay; General Bombastes by Mr. J. H. Parr, who elicited shouts of laughter by his drollery and admirable acting. Miss Grant, of the Theatre Royal Company, played Distaffina. The house was crowded in every part, the whole town seemed to take an interest in the matter, and every nerve was strained to command success. In fact so well did those who had undertaken the disposal of tickets ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... of country which every reminiscence of the struggle for independence calls forth. The favourite air is the so-called national one of "Hail, Columbia," although this is but second to the fantastic drollery of "Yankee Doodle;" the latter is vociferously called for at all places of amusement, and excites in the audience, at such places of resort, almost frantic sensations. This is the more remarkable, as it was originally composed by an Englishman, and, as it is so intimately connected with ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... misfortune lightly, minimized it and endeavoured to teach others to bear it lightly? His blithe humour ought surely to have been an example to Nellie! And as for the episode of the funeral march on the Pianisto, really, really, the tiresome little thing ought to have better appreciated his whimsical drollery! ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... a people have necessarily a great variety: the color and the perfume of life are in them. Listen to the mocking, railing drollery of "There cam' a young man," the sly humor of the "Laird o' Cockpen," or "Hey, Johnnie Cope!" and you may understand one side of Scottish character. The Border ballads, that go lilting along to the galloping of horses and jingling of spurs, are the interpretation of another side. The same ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... or various, being chiefly some concoction of rice and scraps of salt beef, which Francie said was a shame, eating up the poor sailors' fare; also there was potted meat, and cheese, but all the fresh bread was gone, and they praised Mrs. Griggs' construction of ham and rice with all the warmth and drollery each could contribute. Vera began to be puzzled as to who every one was, for no names except Phyl, Fly, Francie and Ivy were heard, and the merry grey-haired head of the family was "Father" or "Papa" to every one, except of course ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... other amiable family to them until the present day. What was said there in for a princess considered by the Speaker or Writer as proper or suitable to be head on my harem (a room or part for confinement of Women of Eastern monarch) [Footnote: A parenthetical drollery inspired by the dictionary.] there is no least intention occurred to me even once or in my dream indeed! I think if I do so, I ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... bed. When at last the spectral head appears at the foot-board, Facanapa vanishes with a miserable cry under the bed-clothes, and the scene closes. Intrinsically the scene is not much, but this great actor throws into it a life, a spirit, a drollery wholly irresistible. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... burst from the bushes, and the woods rang, not only with songs some shrill, some as sweet as honey, but with a grotesque yet beautiful electric merriment of birds that can only be heard in this land of wonders. The pen can give but a shadow of the drollery and devilry of the sweet, merry rogues that hailed the smiling morn. Ten thousand of them, each with half a dozen songs, besides chattering and talking and imitating the fiddle, the fife and the ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... jokes and unmerciful "guying" are the characteristic wit, and such smart tricks as bumping an unsuspecting comrade's head against the wall are applauded with shrieks of admiring laughter. The onlookers may be excused for their tacit countenance of the rudeness, since some element of drollery—that might have been wit, under better conditions—compels a smile, in spite of a dignified disapproval of the performance. A young student, unused to such scenes, standing a little apart from such a group once remarked judicially to a lady near him, "I do not care ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... went as if the domestic administration were some automatic machine, and the exquisite appointments of the board, all exercised a powerful moral influence upon him; and though they did not wholly suppress him, they toned him down, so that he really talked well. He had a fund of small wit and drollery that was sufficient, at least, for a single dinner; and, as it was quaint and fresh, the guests were not only amused, but pleased. In the first place, much could be forgiven to the man who owned Palgrave's Folly. ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... commonly acted the part of a broad, rampant jester and buffoon, full of mad pranks and mischief-making, liberally dashed with a sort of tumultuous, swaggering fun. He was arrayed in fantastic garb, with something of drollery in its appearance, so as to aid the comic effect of his action, and armed with a dagger of lath, perhaps as symbolical that his use of weapons was but to the end of provoking his own defeat. Therewithal he was vastly ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... a bluebottle, smashes all his furniture and breaks every window-pane but one—where the bluebottle is. And in all these scenes one does not know which is the most irresistible, the most inimitable—the mere drollery or the dramatic truth ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... naturally, with no small vividness, before the wistful gentlewomen, to whom, if he had but had the initiative, he might have made the most princely presents. Such was the oddity, not to say the rather tragic drollery, of the situation: that Henry's idea of a present was ten cents' worth of popcorn, or some similar homely trifle; and that when one had created for him a world of these proportions there was no honest way of inspiring him to write cheques for ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... former, 'The Flower-Girl,' as it is called, with a face as fresh and radiant as her flowers. In the National Gallery there is a large Holy Family of Murillo's, and in Dulwich Gallery there is a laughing boy, an irresistible specimen of brown-cheeked, white-teethed drollery. ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... blue coat and bright buttons, a buff cassimere waistcoat, and black trousers. Going from stall to stall, followed by a servant bearing a large basket in which purchases were carried home, he would joke with the butchers, fish-mongers, and green-grocers with a grave drollery of which his biographers, in their anxiety to deify him, have made no mention. He always liked to have a friend of two at his dinner- table, and in inviting them, sans ceremonie, he would say, in his deep, cheery voice, "Come and dine with me to-morrow. I purchased a noble saddle of ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... was but seldom she was able to speak at all. David's sudden departure, and the anxiety attending it, had been too much for her. Besides, she missed Mary Ellen. That little country-girl had, besides her innocence and her good looks, a vein of drollery, which made her a very entertaining companion. And then, being so quick-witted, and so kind-hearted, she thought of various little things to do for Emily's comfort, which never would have occurred to her mother or Miss Joey. ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... covered a period of fifty years and was a conspicuously happy one. Prof. Stowe, who seemed so much like a myth to the general public, was a man of great learning and keen intelligence, unimaginative as he says himself, but richly endowed with "a certain broad humor and drollery." His son tells us that he was "an inimitable mimic and story-teller. No small proportion of Mrs. Stowe's success as a literary woman is to be attributed to him." The Sam Lawson stories are said to be ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... immaterial to our main issue. Harwood was admitted to practice in the United States courts midway of his third year in Bassett's office. The doors of the state courts swing inward to any Hoosier citizen of good moral character who wants to practice law,—a drollery of the Hoosier constitution still tolerated. The humor of being a mere "constitutional" lawyer did not appeal to Harwood, who revered the traditions and the great names of his chosen profession, and he had first written his name on the rolls of the ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... endeavored, by serious advice and admonition, to bring him to a proper sense of his dreadful situation, he grinned, made faces at him, tried to tickle him, and played a thousand other pranks with such astonishing drollery, that the gravest countenances became cheerful, and the saddest hearts glad. The soldiers who attended at the gallows were so delighted with his merriment, which they deemed magnanimity, that the sheriffs began to apprehend a rescue, and ordered the hangman instantly to do his duty. He went ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... who professionally propelled the keels and flats of the Ohio, they were a class unto themselves—"half horse, half alligator," a contemporary styled them. Rough fellows, much given to fighting, and drunkenness, and ribaldry, with a genius for coarse drollery and stinging repartee. The river towns suffered sadly at the hands of this lawless, dissolute element. Each boat carried from thirty to forty boatmen, and a number of such boats frequently traveled in company. After the Indian ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... which inspired his address before the fight at Camperdown. He had just overtaken the Dutch fleet under Admiral de Winter. "Gentlemen," says he, "you see a severe winter approaching; I have only to advise you to keep up a good fire." Somewhat of this same spirit of adamantine drollery must have supported him in the days of the mutiny at the Nore, when he lay off the Texel with his own flagship, the VENERABLE, and only one other vessel, and kept up active signals, as though he had a powerful fleet in the ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sympathy with which we are expected to regard them. Nevertheless, the essence of what we call humour is that amusing weaknesses should be combined with an amicable humanity. Whether it be in the way of ingenuity, or oddity, or drollery, the humorous person must have an absurd side, or be placed in an absurd situation. Yet this comic aspect, at which we ought to wince, seems to endear the character all the more. This is a parallel case to that of tragedy, where ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... along in a strange way, and all eyes naturally fell upon her little feet, which were sailing about in the Dominie's slippers! Amid the general laughter, she walked up to the diffident youth, who could scarcely believe his eyes, and said with an air of irresistible drollery, by which she tried to cover her confusion: 'Here is your Christmas present, sir; do you hold to your promise of accepting it?' Of course, the lady having broken the ice, the Dominie could do no less than speak out, and, all being willing, the two ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... nor, at times, eat with him. On one occasion, his profanity was so shocking, that he ran some risk of being thrown overboard. He was a witty, comical fellow, and they would listen and laugh at his drollery; but they finally stopped his mouth from uttering things, for which he would be severely punished in England and in America; and skinned, or fried, or ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... boys, but serious bullying was uncommon, and not unfrequently a hideous retribution befell a bully through some "big fellow" resolving to wreak on him what he inflicted on others. We can recall one very bright, brilliant youth, now high in the Indian civil service, whose drollery when bullying was irresistible, even to those who knew their turn might come next. "Come here, F——," we remember his saying to a fat youth of reputed uncleanness: then dropping his voice to a tone of subdued horror and solemnity, "I was shocked to hear you use a bad word ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... world, serves but to admit additional vexations. Every few moments the steps of the passengers are heard to pause, and some well-known face appears in the free sunshine behind the iron bars, brimful of mirth and drollery, the owner whereof stands on tiptoe to tickle poor Dr. Bullivant with a stinging sarcasm. Then laugh the little boys around the prison door, and the wag goes chuckling away. The apothecary would fain ...
— Dr. Bullivant - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... politician, these intervals of relaxation occurred so rarely, that they might strengthen his influence with the vulgar, and could never expose him to contempt." It has been observed, that Philips partiality for drinking and dancing, his drollery, and a dash of scurrility in his character, endeared him especially to the Thessalians. See Jacobs' note on this passage.] he is pushed aside and accounted as nobody. The rest about him are brigands and parasites, and men of that character, ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... functions, armed with a bamboo-cane, driving his herd to the spiritual pasture. He seemed himself to be conscious of the burlesque attaching to his office,—at least he behaved very absurdly in it, and many a stroke fell rather in jest than in earnest. The drollery of the driver did not, however, enliven the dejected ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... drollery. Now I will believe That there are unicorns; that in Arabia There is one tree, the phoenix' throne; one phoenix ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... some doubts if any one of his lectures, except the Mormon one, was ever fairly written out. "The Babes in the Wood," as a lecture, was a pure and unmitigated "sell." It was merely joke after joke, and drollery succeeding to drollery, without any connecting thread whatever. It was an exhibition of fireworks, owing half its brilliancy and more than half its effect to the skill of the man who grouped the fireworks together and let them off. In the hands of any other pyrotechnist ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... is the onely drinking: and for thy walles a pretty slight Drollery, or the Storie of the Prodigall, or the Germane hunting in Waterworke, is worth a thousand of these Bed-hangings, and these Flybitten Tapistries. Let it be tenne pound (if thou canst.) Come, if it were not for thy humors, there is not a better Wench in England. Go, wash thy face, and draw ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... of the characters, a circumstance which an imaginative boy of ten, named John Milton, was not to forget. "Pan's Anniversary," late in the reign of James, proclaimed that Jonson had not yet forgotten how to write exquisite lyrics, and "The Gipsies Metamorphosed" displayed the old drollery and broad humorous stroke still unimpaired and unmatchable. These, too, and the earlier years of Charles were the days of the Apollo Room of the Devil Tavern where Jonson presided, the absolute monarch of English literary Bohemia. We hear of a room blazoned about ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... his powers of drollery to enliven the miscellaneous meal, and Flora soon retired to rest, fully determined to bear the crosses of life with more fortitude ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... mirth and the finest sense, between the puffs of her cigarette, of the drollery of things, appeared to find their conversation highly delightful. "Yes, it isn't ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... Cowper says that Puss showed his gratitude by licking his hand for a long time, a ceremony he never went through with but once in his life, before or afterward. Bess, who died young, was the funny one. He had a great fund of humor and drollery. Tiney, though very entertaining in his way, seems to have been rather a grave and surly fellow. When he died—and he lived to a good old age, some nine years, I think—Cowper buried him with honor, and wrote an epitaph ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... argument was that usual one, quae separantur distinguuntur et haec, etc.; the Lad answered by a distinction, quae separantur per se verum: per accidens, falsum; and so they went on. The lad chanced to transmit a proposition one tyme: the fellow in a drollery replied, si tu transmittas ego—revocabo. Thus have we dwelt enough on Orleans, its hy tyme for us to ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... society possessed that serenity of mood which distinguishes those whom no ennui annoys, because they expect no interest. He was generally gay, his caustic spirit caught the ridiculous rapidly and far below the surface at which it usually strikes the eye. He displayed a rich vein of drollery in pantomime. He often amused himself by reproducing the musical formulas and peculiar tricks of certain virtuosi, in the most burlesque and comic improvisations, in imitating their gestures, their movements, ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... prologue and epilogue occur in the "Covent-Garden Drollery" a publication which contains original copies of several of Dryden's fugitive pieces. They appear to have been spoken upon occasion of the male characters in "The Maiden Queen" being represented by female performers. From our author's ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... when Alice said those last cold words, "Pray do not ask me," she released the grasp, and left the letter where it was. "I suppose he won't bite me, at any rate," she said, and she assumed that look of childish drollery which she would sometimes put on, almost with a grimace, but still with so much prettiness that no one who saw her ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... "hoops," "shuttle-cocks," and "battle-doors," than to be seated among a lot of little ragged, half-starved Gipsy children, who have never known what soap, water, and comb are. It is more in harmony with our sensibilities to sit and listen to the drollery, wit, sarcasm, and fun of Punch than to the horrible tales of blood, revenge, immorality, and murder that some of the adult Gipsies delight in setting forth. It is more in accordance with our feelings to ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... levelled his drollery against Simpson, which so roused the malevolent disposition of the groom, that he had from that hour viewed Lary in the light of a bitter enemy, and vowed, the first opportunity that offered, to repay with interest the ...
— The Little Quaker - or, the Triumph of Virtue. A Tale for the Instruction of Youth • Susan Moodie
... me in the strangest quiet way imaginable. 'You insulted Lady Featherstone at Ohlau, Mr. Wogan,' said he, 'one evening when she hid behind your curtain. It was a very delicate piece of drollery, no doubt. But I shall be glad to show you another, view of it.' It is strange how that had rankled in his thoughts. I liked him for it,—upon my soul, I did,—though it was the only thing I liked ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... the Kronstadt people on that day is not yet complete. His legs were encased in Hessian boots; his shooting-jacket was somewhat the worse for wear; and his hat, which had been eminently respectable at first starting, had acquired a sort of brigandish air; and to add to the drollery of his general appearance, the excellent little Servian horse he rode was not high enough for a ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... did a General and his Chief-of-Staff, in a more unseemly state of cachinnation, ride along a picket-line. At every new phase of the subject it presented new features of the ludicrous; and though the reply at this late date may have lost much of the drollery which then it wore, it is a serio-comic document of as much vital importance in the moral history of our late contest as any that can be found in the archives under the care of Gen. E. D. Townsend. It was received late Sunday evening, and was answered very ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... indeed, not inhuman; but he venerated nothing. Neither in the masterpieces of art nor in the purest examples of virtue, neither in the Great First Cause nor in the awful enigma of the grave, could he see anything but subjects for drollery. The more solemn and august the theme, the more monkey-like was his grimacing and chattering. The mirth of Swift is the mirth of Mephistopheles; the mirth of Voltaire is the mirth of Puck. If, as Soame Jenyns oddly imagined, a portion of the happiness of Seraphim and just ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... slatternliness, suffering, shiftlessness, dirt and raggedness, were inducements to one of her charitable temperament to visit its inhabitants, having their relief and improvement in view; while her appreciation of the warm-heartedness and drollery of the Irish character afforded her genuine pleasure. Proximity to English life had not refined these Irish; their houses were just as filthy, their windows as patched and obscured with rags, their children just as neglected, and their pigs equally familiar with those children as ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... sharp tone, gave a long whispered whistle, and pretended to hide under the table. He had a certain gift of drollery which made it difficult not to laugh even at his most foolish antics, and Marian was giving way in spite of herself when she found Douglas bending over her and saying, in ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... stage carpenter and property-man, and is married to another lady of the company. One of the under-carpenters is stepson of the chief comic who was formerly a fruit seller and is a little fellow of inexhaustible drollery with a flavour of Dan Leno ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... of the American backwoodsmen, Oncle Jazon, despite years of practice among them, gave to it a creole lisp and some turns of pronunciation not to be indicated by any form of spelling. It added to his talk a peculiar soft drollery. When he spoke French it was mostly that of the COUREURS DE BOIS, a PATOIS which still lingers in ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... specimens of old Scottish humour have come down to us in ballad form, some of them made more familiar to our ears in modernised versions or paraphrases in which, along with the roughnesses, much of the force and quaint drollery of the originals has been smoothed away. Of such is The Wyf of Auchtermuchty, a Fife ballad, full of local colour and character, the production of 'Sir John Moffat,' a sixteenth century priest, who loved a merry jest, and of ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... to an expression of arch and coquettish benignity, I gave my lady a pat on the one cheek, and a kiss on the other, and without saying one syllable (Furies! I could not), left her astonished at my drollery, as I pirouetted out of the room ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... powdered hair, his raised and clasped hands,—rushing out of the lockup-house scene in all the fervid extasy of a father rejoicing at the escape of his son from destruction. In Crack, Dozey, Nipperkin, and other drunken characters, his drollery was irresistible. His intoxication displayed as much discrimination as his pathetic performances. Who can forget his stare in being detected in his fuddling as Dozey, and his plea for drinking to "wa-ash down your honour's health:" or his anti-polarity as Nipperkin, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... might do with a sister or cousin, whom one would only kiss and embrace fervently after a long absence. This seemed to be Mr Phillips' case, coming up occasionally from the provinces. Fitton then finished this drollery by charging me with not having done justice to Hutton, who he said ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... Conquer." The manager was not without great difficulty induced to bring this piece out. The sentimental comedy still reigned; and Goldsmith's comedies were not sentimental. The "Goodnatured Man" had been too funny to succeed; yet the mirth of the "Goodnatured Man" was sober when compared with the rich drollery of "She Stoops to Conquer," which is, in truth, an incomparable farce in five acts. On this occasion, however, genius triumphed. Pit, boxes, and galleries, were in a constant roar of laughter. If any bigoted ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... back from her face with a plain black ribbon. Her face was singularly intelligent, her voice clear and quick, her eyes often much too mournful for the eyes of a child, but sometimes flashing with fun, as, for instance, when Mark engaged her in some piece of drollery. Then the old spirit that she used to display when she performed her little mimicries for Mrs. Rushton's amusement would spring up in her again, and she would take great delight in seeing Mark roll about with laughing, ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... comes to us on reading Aldous Huxley's brilliant and hugely entertaining book of poems called "Leda." There is no more brilliant young poet writing to-day; his title poem is nothing less than extraordinary in pagan and pictorial beauty, but as a whole the cynical and scoffish tone of carnal drollery which gives the book its appeal to the humorously inclined makes a very dubious sandal for a poet planning a long-distance run. Please note that we are not taking sides in any argument: we ourself admire Mr. Huxley's ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... amandi, and The remedy of love Englished. As also The loves of Hero and leander, amock poem: together with choice poems, and rare pieces of drollery. London, printed in ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... at five hundred miles distance better than fanaticism under his nose," became the recipient of one of the most amusing and yet most virulent attacks which even that controversial age produced. "The whole pamphlet," Mr. Collins truly says, "is inimitable. Its irony, its humour, its drollery, are delicious." ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... disappeared, another drollery was exhibited, called the "Fool and his Five Sons," the names of the hopeful offspring of the sapient sire being Pickle Herring, Blue Hose, Pepper Hose, Ginger Hose, and Jack Allspice. The humour of this piece, though not particularly refined, seemed to ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was fond of anecdote and humour. In his youth he was keen on the turf and in field sports; he subsequently found his chief entertainment in literary avocations. As a poet, he had been better known if his efforts had been of a less fragmentary character. The general tendency of his Muse was drollery, but some of his ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... about publishing the whole of the matter abroad. He soon succeeded in inducing a number of young men and maidens to favour the joke, and to lend themselves to it. He explained the insane folly of this worthy pair with such irresistible drollery that everyone was eager to be ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... from under the bushy black eyebrows like a grizzly's from a cave. He was not a thing of beauty, but, at the back of his unflinching gaze, humor in some spritely and satanic shape was always disporting itself, and there was, as Lincoln Lang described it, "a certain built-in look of drollery in his face," which ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... cooked with any fine, savory herbs, such as Drollery, which is always in season, or Pleasant Reminiscence, which no one need be without, as it keeps for years, sealed ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... the discussion we ventured to ask His Highness for his autograph. The Prince, who has perhaps a more exquisite sense of humour than any other sovereign of Europe, declared with a laugh that he had no pen. Still roaring over this inimitable drollery, we begged the Prince to honour us ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... loop round the peg, and every time the gust struck the sail he was lifted from his seat by the crowding of the oar and the haul of the rope. His muscles swelled tense and rigid—the sweat poured from his face; but he laughed when Lincoln, with reckless drollery, began to shout a few ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... curious story of converting our emblem of death into a parti-coloured fool; and such satirical allusions to the folly of those who persisted in their notion of the skeleton were not unusual with the artists of those times; we find the figure of a fool sitting with some drollery between the legs of one of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... familiar epistles, either remonstrating with or speaking of the "Gineral," or, as the Major latterly styled the President, "the Govermint;" no less admirable for the political acumen they display than for a caustic drollery, which is enforced with shrewd Yankee humour, and in the singular phraseology current amongst 'Uncle Sam's' kindred. These letters have been collected, and are published both in America and in England; and although neither the purity of the politics or the dialect of the honest Major can be ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... into verse, for it revealed a capacity which otherwise we could hardly have guessed him to possess. The vigor and rapidity of the action, the vivid sketching of the background, the pregnant characterization, the drollery of the humor give this piece a high place among stories in verse, and lead us to conjecture that, had he followed this vein instead of devoting his later years to the service of Johnson and Thomson, he might have won a place beside the author of the Canterbury Tales. ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... of wit and drollery then animating the Irish capital has perhaps never had a parallel in any society. The House and the bar were both overflowing with it. When the dull, matter-of-fact Lord Redesdale first came over to take the position of lord chancellor, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... at that paper at your full leisure and convenience—all in good time, for you're not curious to read it, and why should you be?—what do you find it to be but a will, you see. That's the drollery of it," said Mr. Bucket with the same lively air of recalling a joke for the enjoyment of Mr. Smallweed, who still had the same crest-fallen appearance of not enjoying it at all; "what do you find it ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... country party," said the King. "I am much minded to secure the lad for an elfin page," he added aside to Killigrew. "There's a fund of excellent humour and drollery in those queer eyes of his! So, Sir Hobgoblin, if you are proof against cold steel, I know not what is to be done with you. Get you back, and devise some other mode of finding your way ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... brother of the nature of her quarrel with Mrs. Houghton, only that, even to a brother, she would not have mentioned her husband's folly. When he spoke of her crying, or laughing, or sneezing, she liked the little attempt at drollery. She liked to know that he had found her charming. Where is the woman who does not wish to charm, and is not proud to think that she has succeeded with those whom she most likes? She could not rebuke him. She could not even ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... the lower classes of subjects, we think justice is hardly done to Jan Steen, of whom, considering him even as a colourist, more should have been said, than that he "is distinguished by the drollery of his subjects, and by the most true and ingeniously simple expression of the feelings of common life." All this might be said of many others; the characteristic of Jan Steen is still wanting. So we think ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... naturally, sire. I was out driving in a plain cabriolet, when I remarked the boy, who was singing, and otherwise exercising his animal spirits by hopping, dancing, and running along the road by the side of the vehicle. I was much diverted by his drollery, and finally invited him to take a drive with me. He jumped in—without awaiting a second invitation, stared wonderfully at me with his great brown eyes, and in high satisfaction kicked his feet against the dash-board, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... that carries him quarter way 'round the track 'fore he c'n pull up." They all laughed except Miss Verjoos, whose gravity was unbroken, save that behind the dusky windows of her eyes, as she looked at John, there was for an instant a gleam of mischievous drollery. ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... that a good many members of the Bradshaw family possess a keen and rather sinister sense of the humorous, inherited doubtless from their great ancestor, the dry wag who wrote that monument of quiet drollery, Bradshaw's Railway Guide. So with the hero ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... contrast between that and the flashy passages with which it is interlarded. From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step. You laugh and are surprised that any one should turn round and travestie himself: the drollery is in the utter discontinuity of ideas and feelings. He makes virtue serve as a foil to vice; dandyism is (for want of any other) a variety of genius. A classical intoxication is followed by the splashing of soda-water, by frothy effusions of ordinary bile. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... settled Anglo-Saxon citizen, he cannot fail to appear at times to the latter as a near relation to Mephistopheles. But his "mockery" is as accidental and naif as that of Jewish Young Germany is keen and deliberate; and the former differs from the latter as the drollery of Abraham a Santa Clara differs from the ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... in with 'Little Prudy.' Compared with her, all other book-children are cold creations of literature; she alone is the real thing. All the quaintness of children, its originality, its tenderness and its teasing, its infinite uncommon drollery, the serious earnestness of its fun, the fun of its seriousness, the naturalness of its plays, and the delicious oddity of its progress, all these united for dear Little Prudy to embody ...
— Prudy Keeping House • Sophie May
... the author was present, they could not have more civilly accepted the toast; it was a bold kind of drollery in Mr. Burney, for I was fain to drink my own health in a bumper, which he filled for ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... disregarded the slight pique that was apparent in the soldier's manner; but, after following the train of her own thoughts in silent enjoyment for a moment longer, she seemed to yield to their drollery, and laughed until her dark eyes flashed with merriment. Cecilia did not assume the severe gravity with which she sometimes endeavored to repress, what she thought, the unseasonable mirth of her cousin; and the wondering Griffith fancied, ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... wedding gift to me—and for the table, a delicate rosewood stand, which was a work table of my sister Lucy's—whom you never knew, and who died long and long ago. However, I was amply repaid by Boosey's drollery afterward. He is a very witty young man, and when he got up from the floor, saturated with punch (his clothes I mean), he looked down at ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... House" do we find his humor so gently turned, so deftly put, and so ripe for the purpose of literary expression. It lies deep here, and those who desire to enjoy it as it should be enjoyed must place their ears close to the heart of human nature. The wit and the rollicking drollery that were but the surface indications of Mr. Field's genius have here given place to the ripe humor that lies as close to tears as to laughter—the humor that is a part and a large part of almost every piece of English literature that has outlived ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... a man of great drollery, and it would almost make you laugh to look at him. I never saw but one other man whose quiet, droll look excited in me the disposition to laugh, and that ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... on hand who had been let into Gilbert's scheme. The fireworks were equally successful whether they blazed splendidly or fizzled ingloriously. It was enough for the boys that Troy Gilbert was doing the act; they whooped at every figure, and whooped again at Troy's unaccustomed drollery. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... exceedingly humorous, and had a great delight in humour. Cheerfulness was habitual with her, she was very ready at a sally or a reply, and in her laugh (as I remember well) there was an unusual vivacity, enjoyment, and sense of drollery. She was perfectly unconstrained and unaffected: as modestly silent about her productions, as she was generous with their pecuniary results. She was a friend who inspired the strongest attachments; she was a finely sympathetic woman, with a great accordant heart and a sterling noble nature. ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... vexed, though her husband could not help smiling at the arch drollery of the girl's tone and manner, "do not thou learn light mockery of all ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on which his sister rested with so much complacency. It was a part of his quiet interior store of amusement to look at these bits of Byzantine embroidery round the room, which affected him always with a subtle sense of drollery. ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... at times, John had always an indefinable drollery about him that made him agreeable company to his friends, at least; and such an admiring friend he had constantly at hand in the person of Bert Haines. Both were Bohemians in natural tendency, and, though John was far in Bert's advance in point of age, he found the young man "just the kind of a ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... torn with perplexity. "I'll go, of course," he said as if in a dream. "Of course I'll go at once, but—why—if Miss Flora already—?" Then suddenly he recovered himself in the way Anna knew so well. "Miss Anna"—he gestured with his cap, his eyes kindling with a strange mixture of worship and drollery though his brow grew darker—"I'm ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... convinced the world will get tired (at least I hope so) of this eternal guffaw about all things. After all, life has something serious in it. It cannot be all a comic history of humanity. Some men would, I believe, write a Comic Sermon on the Mount. Think of a Comic History of England, the drollery of Alfred, the fun of Sir Thomas More, the farce of his daughter begging the dead head and clasping it in her coffin on her bosom. Surely the world will be sick of this blasphemy." John Sterling, in a like ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... "marchen" to Maria Saksis, a very intelligent Penobscot woman, a widow of a former governor, whom I met at North Conway, in the White Mountains, N. H. In her dialect Glooskap is invariably called Glus-gah-be. She told it with that admirable dry drollery, characteristic of a good story-teller in a race where there are no bad ones. The exquisite humor and humanity of this little legend, placed as a pendant to the stupendous successes of the giant hero, are such as to entitle its Indian author to rank as a genius. I have frequently asserted that ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... performed by the young persons of her circle—often, when the case lent itself, by the wonderful small offspring of humbler friends, children of the Venetian lower class, whose aptitude, teachability, drollery, were her constant delight. It was certainly true that an impression of Venice as humanly sweet might easily found itself on the frankness and quickness and amiability of these little people. They were at least so much to the good; for the philosophy of their patroness was as Venetian as everything ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... related of the peculiar wit, sarcasm, and drollery of this remarkable man. One more must suffice. When Newton County was first organized, it was made the duty of Dooly to hold the first court. There then lived and kept the only tavern in the new town of Covington, a man of huge proportions, named Ned Williams, usually ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... from the mountain," as the phrase, often heard in Sulaco, went, could also be seen in the drawing-room of the Casa Gould. He sat with modest assurance at some distance from the tea-table. With his knees close together, and a kindly twinkle of drollery in his deep-set eyes, he would throw his small and ironic pleasantries into the current of conversation. There was in that man a sort of sane, humorous shrewdness, and a vein of genuine humanity so often found in simple old soldiers of proved courage who have seen ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... famous for his drollery was entering the office doors at half-past ten in the morning, or exactly sixty minutes past the appointed time. By an unfortunate chance his principal met him, as, alas! he had too often done, at the same tardy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... hand of time which turns the kaleidoscope of human affairs appeared to move slowly for a few weeks, as far as the characters of my story are concerned. The two little bakers worked together daily, one abounding in mirth and drollery, and the other cheered, or rather beguiled from melancholy in spite of herself. Business grew apace, not only because two girls who evoked general sympathy were the principals of the firm, but also for the reason that they put something of their ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... friendly; we can imagine that they were attracted by the handsome eyes and quaint garb of the young Friend, and by his quick wit and homely turns of speech, all the more amusing for a rustic flavor. They tried to tease him a little, but they must have quickly found their match in drollery, while the lad was already a citizen of the commonwealth of books. No doubt the stimulus of such a social occasion brought him, as well as the strangers, into new acquaintance with his growing gifts. But presently one of the ladies, evidently the favorite ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... the sport, and laughing at the drollery of it, all at once I heard a stamping on the other side of the wagon, and, stepping quickly around the horses' heads, I saw the old doe, and a buck and doe ...
— The Nursery, No. 106, October, 1875. Vol. XVIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... friendliness and his quaint humor won him soon a sure, if quiet, social position. He was frequently invited to Mr. Webster's Saturday breakfasts, where his stories were highly relished for their originality and drollery. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... Farmer, the head of Emanuel College, Cambridge, Prebendary of Canterbury, and afterwards of St. Paul's, or Westminster, used to frequent a club in London, to which I belonged. He was at first reserved and silent: but his forte was humour and drollery. At Cambridge he neglected forms and ceremonies in his college too much: and was in all his glory when in dishabille in his study, with his cat by his side, and his Shakspeare tracts about him. He found no literature at Canterbury, and was disgusted with his brother members of the cathedral: quaint ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... vanished and she was full of animated talk. Her conversation abounded in bright, pointed sayings, in fine little touches of humor, in amusing anecdotes and incidents of her own experience, which she related with astonishing ease and fluency, sometimes also in downright girlish fun and drollery; and all was rendered doubly attractive by her low, sweet woman's voice and her merry, fitful laugh. Yet these things were but the sparkle of a very deep and serious nature. Even then her religious character was to me wonderful. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... state of life to which it HAS pleased Heaven to call one,—the horror at her tricycle, the impossibility of improvement, the predilection for farmyard odours, the adherence to tumbledown dwellings, the contempt of drinking fountains,—all had their meed of exaggeration not without drollery. ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... looking at this queer turnout, the little reddish man climbed down from in front and stood watching me. His face was a comic mixture of pleasant drollery and a sort of weather-beaten cynicism. He had a neat little russet beard and a shabby Norfolk jacket. His ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... account of a certain apish drollery and humor which exhibited itself in the lad, and a liking for some of the old man's pursuits, the first of the twins was the grandfather's favorite and companion, and would laugh and talk out all his infantine ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... a note, and Anna responded. Playing with one hand he turned on his stool to glance at her. Instinctively she had fallen into the posture of the poster, her hands behind her, her head bent slightly forward, her chin uplifted, her eyes bright with the drollery of the song. Mr. Earles closed the piano ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the beautiful Greek spirit is sobered down in him almost to sadness. Yet the fact that Stobae'us found him a fruitful source of sententious quotations, and that alphabetical anthologies were made of his proverbial sayings, ought not to obscure his fame for drollery and humor. If old men appreciated his genial or pungent worldly wisdom, boys and girls read him, we are ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... which, as it is the dress of poetry, doth, like the dress of men, establish characters (the one of the whole poem, and the other of the whole man), in vulgar opinion, beyond any of their greater excellences: but surely, a certain drollery in stile, where characters and sentiments are perfectly natural, no more constitutes the burlesque, than an empty pomp and dignity of words, where everything else is mean and low, can entitle any performance to the appellation ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... rough power and drollery of Plautus; his whole attraction lies in the subtlety of his amorous intrigues. Steele, speaking of one of the plays, "The Self-Tormentor," observes, "It is from the beginning to the end a perfect ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... from the author's having sometimes admitted it in his diction only; which as it is the dress of poetry, doth like the dress of men establish characters, (the one of the whole poem, and the other of the whole man), in vulgar opinion, beyond any of their greater excellences: but surely, a certain drollery in style, where characters and sentiments are perfectly natural, no more constitutes the burlesque, than an empty pomp and dignity of words, where everything else is mean and low, can entitle any performance to the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... creature, and her intonation reminded me of the caressing way the Swedes articulate English. I heard him read the Russian newspapers to her with evident emotion, but the only word I could make out was Kouropatkin. The herring-agents at the hotel table were full of drollery. One of them, hailing from Wick, addressed a neighbour abruptly to this effect: "I am a rather expensive man to sit beside, and to one like you especially so, for you seem to be a water-drinker. When ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... at Paris, a little fellow, who was the darling of all the wags of his acquaintance. Nature seemed, in the formation of this little man, to have amused herself, by giving loose to half a hundred of her most comical caprices. He had some wit and drollery of his own, which sometimes rendered his sallies very amusing; but, where his friends laughed with him once, they laughed at him a thousand times, for he had a fund of absurdity in himself that was more pleasant ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... money, and on the making-up, no little time and eye-sight, would lie for months in a yellow neglected heap; and at such times, it was said, Miss Galindo was more amusing than usual, more full of dry drollery and humour; just as at the times when an order came in to X. (the initial she had chosen) for a stock of well-paying things, she sat and stormed at her servant as she stitched away. She herself explained her ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... swift-budding reason, that foretold Virtues the future years would yet unfold. Thy words, thy archness, every turn and bow— How sick at heart without them am I now! Nay, little comfort, never more shall I Behold thee and thy darling drollery. What may I do but only follow on Along the path where earlier thou hast gone. And at its end do thou, with all thy charms, Cast round thy father's neck ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... O'Leary was simple. In his countenance there was a mixture of goodness, solemnity, and drollery, which fixed every eye that beheld it. No one was more generally loved or revered; no one less assuming or more pleasing in his manner. Seeing his external simplicity, persons with whom he was arguing were sometimes tempted to treat him cavalierly; but then the solemnity ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... belongings of a person whose high spirit appeared to have no taint either of fastness, as they said in England, or of subversive opinion, and whose mouth had charming lines, should not be a little more distinguished. There was an effect of drollery in her behaviour to these subjects of her zeal, whom she seemed to regard as a care, but not as an interest; it was as if they had been entrusted to her honour and she had engaged to convey them ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... almost seem as if there were a certain drollery of art which leads men who think they are doing one thing to do another and very different one. Thus, men have set up in their painted church-windows the symbolisms of virtues and graces, and the images of saints, and even of Divinity itself. Yet now, what ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... wonderful woman,' said Mrs. Edmonstone, in her quiet way; and Guy with an expression between drollery and simplicity, said, 'Then there aren't ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... optics, with an expression of mingled drollery, apprehension, and confidence in his master's ability to lead the battle. It is wonderful how much expression can be condensed into ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... personage, with a physiognomy in which good nature and malice, folly and shrewdness, were so oddly blended, that it was difficult to say which predominated. His look was cunning and sarcastic, but it was tempered by great drollery and oddity of manner, and he laughed so heartily at his own jests and jibes, that it was scarcely possible to help joining him. His attire consisted of a long loose gown of spotted crimson silk, with the royal cipher woven in front in gold; hose of blue cloth, ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
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