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More "Farce" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as in story and film and farce and the pleasanter kinds of drama, her father would say, with kindly raillery, "Well, when you two young people get through, you'll find me in the library, where I have a pretty good BUSINESS proposition to lay before ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... up the system; but he only uses one trillionth part of a gram and imagines that the remainder is to be found in the food. Now anybody with a fair understanding can easily figure that if a patient of middle age eventually loses through disease about 200 grams of lime, it is simply a farce to claim that the above dose of 1/100,000,000,000 of a gram (which is the homeopathic dose of Schuessler), will cure or replace the lime ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... one hand to the political activity, on the other, to the thought and knowledge of the world as a whole, but at the centre Greece was 'living Greece no more,' her politics sank to the level of a dreary farce, her philosophy died down to a dull and spiritless scepticism, to an Epicureanism {211} that 'seasoned the wine-cup with the dust of death,' or to a Stoicism not undignified yet still sad and narrow and stern. The hope of the world, alike in politics and in philosophy, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... "Duncan Cameron's warrant for the arrest is perfectly legal. If Your Honor should surrender yourself, you will save Fort Douglas for the Hudson's Bay Company. Besides, the whole arrest will prove a farce. The law in Lower Canada provides no machinery for the trial of cases occurring——" Here Hamilton came to a blank and unexpected stop, for his eyes suddenly alighted on me with a look that forbade recognition, ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... young Duke could no longer keep off the constantly-recurring idea that something must be done to entertain himself. He shuddered to think where and what he should have been been, had not these gentlemen so providentially arrived. As for again repeating the farce of last year, he felt that it would no longer raise a smile. Yorkshire he shunned. Doncaster made him tremble. A week with the Duke of Burlington at Marringworth; a fortnight with the Fitz-pompeys at Malthorpe; a month with the Graftons at Cleve; ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... played nearly all of the fourth period at right end. He did very well, there, although Miter Hill was too weak in all departments of the game to afford any of her opponents a fair test. Toward the last the contest degenerated into more or less of a farce, Miter Hill tuckered and played out, and Brimfield, with a line-up of third and fourth substitutes, fumbling and mixing signals and running around like a hen with ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... bushes, and having little skirmishes with the Spanish troops that looked more like kind of tired-out feuds than anything else. The war was a joke to us, and of no interest to them. We never could see it any other way than as a howling farce-comedy that the San Augustine Rifles were actually fighting to uphold the Stars and Stripes. And the blamed little senors didn't get enough pay to make them care whether they were patriots or traitors. Now and then somebody would get killed. It seemed like a ...
— Options • O. Henry
... soul rebelled at the farce, and at McVay's irrepressible enjoyment of his own abilities. As Holland met the twinkling joy of those small blue eyes, he wondered if he would not be doing mankind a favour by putting a bullet into McVay before the dawn of another day. Unconscious of this possibility, ...
— The Burglar and the Blizzard • Alice Duer Miller
... But the Tragic and Comic Muse of the Romans, who seldom aspired beyond the imitation of Attic genius, [62] had been almost totally silent since the fall of the republic; [63] and their place was unworthily occupied by licentious farce, effeminate music, and splendid pageantry. The pantomimes, [64] who maintained their reputation from the age of Augustus to the sixth century, expressed, without the use of words, the various fables of the gods and heroes of antiquity; and the perfection of their art, which sometimes ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... I have some misgivings about Mr. HENRY ARTHUR JONES'S farce—parable, The Pacifists. Assume Market Pewbury's afflictions to have been as stated: an intolerable stalwart cad of a butcher fencing-in the best part of the common, assaulting people's grandmothers, shutting them up in coal-cellars and eating their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... struggling with adversity in the person of a jackass, and the recollection filled me with penitence. That was in my old light days, before this trouble came upon me. God knows at least that I shall never laugh again, thought I. But O, what a cruel thing is a farce to those ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... misfortune to us all. The Emperor will interfere, for this is going too far. We must hinder this farcical ceremony; his Highness cannot marry two wives! It will be Moempelgard over again! Think how absurd, Graevenitz! Cannot you see that this farce ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... Rosaura make believe to be conscience-stricken, and for a long while torment and deceive their angry bridegrooms. But at last they grow tired of teasing, they present the disguised Dolores, and they put their lovers to shame by showing that all was a farce. Of course the gentlemen humbly ask their pardon, and old Onofrio is obliged ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... imagine that your plans are not known in Sydney you are mistaken,' I cried. 'The farce you are playing at Government House is detected, and Mr. Hatteras, directly he finds I am lost, will go to Lord Amberley, and ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... so usual a circumstance in Afghanistan as scarcely to account for the events that ensued. Yet it furnished the excuse for an outbreak. Early on September 3, when assembled for what proved to be the farce of payment at Bala Hissar (the citadel), three regiments mutinied, stoned their officers, and then rushed towards the British Embassy. These regiments took part in the first onset against an unfortified building held by the Mission and a small escort. A steady musketry fire from the defenders long ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... will appear in weeds, with a train to reach across Westminster Hall, with mourning maids-of-honour to support her when she swoons at the dear Duke's name, and in a black veil to conceal her blushing or not blushing. To this farce, novel and curious as it will be, I shall not go. I think cripples have no business in crowds, but at the Pool of Bethesda; and, to be sure, this is no angel that troubles ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... her seriously or expressed the opinion that there were already in the world too many sculptors of distinguished technique and no imagination whatsoever. Her friends told her that she was a "wonder." And there were little incidents of the farce which caused her to bite ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... length the farce is played—away with those slaves whom I have forced through the difficult gates of Joy!" and she clapped her hands. But when they had borne the bodies thence she drew me to her, and ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... deception he had arranged for the public, and he appeared to be half in love with his own cleverness. She even found herself laughing at his mimicry of what this acquaintance and that would say. Her spirits rose; the play that might have been a painful drama seemed turning out an amusing farce. ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... is to the farce Better Late than Never (attributed to Miles Peter Andrews, but really, according to Reynolds (Life, vol. ii. pp. 79, 80), by himself, Topham, and Andrews), in which Pallet, an artist, is a prominent character. It was played at Drury Lane ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... afterwards found, that two theatres were more than the town chose to support; therefore that in Moor-street was set for a methodist meeting, where, it was said, though it changed its audience, it kept its primeval use, continuing the theatre of farce. ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... Missouri went across the border to vote against and perhaps to shoot Free-State men who disputed the right of the South to plant and to maintain slavery there. Under these circumstances the first election for members of the territorial legislature was a farce. Yet Reeder felt obliged to let the new assembly go on with its work of making easy the immigration of masters with their "property"; when he went East a little later he took occasion to protest in a public address ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... of him was a farce. She made him a stately courtesy for the benefit of the three faces glued against the panes, but her words were incongruous. "You wretch," said she, "don't come here. Hide about, dearest, till you see me with Father Francis. I'll raise my hand so when you are to cuddle him, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... office. All the sympathies of the Democratic party had been his antipathies, all their hates his loves, and many of their leaders spoke of him publicly with contempt. Indeed, his campaign would have been a farce had not his untimely death made it a tragedy. Ridicule killed him politically, and his political failure was the immediate cause of ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... out in a few minutes, and then he—and, terribly worse, she—would be at the mercy of these bestial savages, and this seeming farce would turn into most revolting tragedy. With this sickening conviction coming over him, Lombard cast a despairing look around the horizon to see if there were no help in their bitter extremity. Suddenly he burst forth, to the tune of "The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Orleans mentions that Sarsfield accompanied James. The battle of the Boyne had scarcely been fought when it was made the subject of a drama, the Royal Flight, or the Conquest of Ireland, a Farce, 1690. Nothing more execrable was ever written. But it deserves to be remarked that, in this wretched piece, though the Irish generally are represented as poltroons, an exception is made in favour of Sarsfield. "This fellow," says James, aside, "I will make me valiant, I think, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to conjure by in Lost Valley. Steptoe Service prated of Gov'ment. It was a farce, a synonym for juggled duty, a word to suggest the one-man law of the place, for even Courtrey, who made the sheriffs—and unmade them—did it under the grandiloquent name of Government. She looked at him keenly, and there was a sudden hardening ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... Men often more Vicious, more Covetous, more Foolish, &c. than generally they were; and this to set the People a gazing and wondering. With these sort of Characters many of our modern Comedies abound, which makes 'em too much degenerate into Farce, which seldom fail of pleasing the Mob. But our Author had not many of these; for a great part of 'em were very true and natural, and such as may stand the Test of the severest Judges. His two most remarkable Characters, are his Miser, and his Bragadocio; and that the Reader may the ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... pounced upon as the ringleader, and subjected the young Englishman to a short examination, which, however, was the merest farce, for the captain had already determined upon his fate. After a trial lasting, perhaps, five minutes, therefore, Jim was condemned to be shot before mid-day, as were nine more of his unfortunate companions. The remaining thirty Chilians were each sentenced to receive ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... needless to exhaust existing proofs in demonstration of the fact that Mazarin did not enact a farce by instituting proceedings against the conspirators, that he pursued them with sincerity and vigour, and that he was perfectly convinced that a project of assassination had been formed against him, when the existence of that ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... After the farce had been played again, and the children had stood up and sat down, and sung a hymn, and told how many twice five were, and repeated their belief in "One God the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth", the party reviewed the workshops, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... rifle having a double load. The thing was clear as the sun at noonday. Acquitted. The jury said, 'Not guilty'; and the man went quietly home. The administration of justice with a weak judge, or with a strong judge who feels a weak Government behind him, is a farce in Ireland. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... worship to God in spirit and in truth?' I should have known that I could not, and said so. Then I should have turned my attention to secular paths where secular men belong. But there's the rub! Not one of them thought of it, I suppose. What a farce it is! The minister yesterday talked of incense rising to God. It doesn't get beyond their nostrils, I think. You know that man—what's his name?—he's a stock broker, who sits down the right aisle? Well, you know there was a talk once of dismissing the quartette, and retaining ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... beforehand what the committee's decision was to be. I realized that Conroy must have had the whole plan cut and dried; that the meeting at which Moyne presided was simply a farce. However, there was nothing to be gained by ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... Birds' this play rather avoids politics than otherwise, its leading motif, over and above the pure fun and farce for their own sake of the burlesque descent into the infernal regions, being a literary one, an onslaught on Euripides the Tragedian and ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... countenance, he was never seen to smile. His whole thoughts were concentrated in the mysteries of gravies, and the magic transformation of one animal into another by the art of cookery; in this he excelled to a marvellous degree. The farce of ordering dinner was always absurd. It was something in this style: 'Cook!' (Cook answers) 'Coming, sar!' (enter cook): 'Now, cook, you make a good dinner; do you hear?' Cook: 'Yes, sar; master tell, I make.'—'Well, mulligatawny soup.' 'Yes, sar.'—'Calves' ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... the magistrate from his reverie. "Yes, a shameful farce," said he, "and one I would never have authorized, had I not been blinded by a mad longing to arrive at the truth. Such tricks only bring the sacred majesty of justice ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... up and prepared for him in the pilot-house. He only had to release a spring at the right moment, and the thing was done. He developed the picture whilst we were making our little excursion out to sea and back. Well, the whole thing was a farce; but I believe it has effectually secured us from interruption during our researches among the ruins; and if so, ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Duke's playhouse, where we saw the new play acted yesterday, "The Feign Innocence, or Sir Martin Marr-all;" a play made by my Lord Duke of Newcastle, but, as every body says, corrected by Dryden. It is the most entire piece of mirth, a complete farce from one end to the other, that certainly was ever writ. I never laughed so in all my life. I laughed till my head [ached] all the evening and night with the laughing; and at very good wit therein, not fooling. The house full, and in all ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... is the wretched outcome of the hundred years of American education in politics—making of every man not only a sovereign, but a possible candidate for President. What is it all but a roaring farce? If we could forget that this is real government coupled with all the pains and penalties which are the heritage of ignorance, and not mere child's play, then even serious intelligence might smile though commiserating the follies of grown men. Have we finally reached the condition ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... texture. This was however suffered by the acquiescence of the whole kingdom, for ages; because the evasion of the old statute of Westminster, which authorized perpetuities, had more sense and utility than the law which was evaded. But an attempt to turn the right of election into such a farce and mockery as a fictitious fine and recovery, will, I hope, have another fate; because the laws which give it are infinitely dear to us, and the evasion ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... been a play of love, to which the soul would easily become accustomed if her Beloved did not change His conduct. O poor hearts who complain of the flights of love! You do not know that this is only a farce, an attempt, a specimen of what is to follow. The hours of absence mark the days, the weeks, the months, and the years. You must learn to be generous at your own expense, to suffer your Beloved to come and go at His pleasure. I seem to see these young brides. They are at the height ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... that we were now to thread. The huge system of the trades is, for some reason, quite confounded by this multiplicity of reefs, the wind intermits, squalls are frequent from the west and south-west, hurricanes are known. The currents are, besides, inextricably intermixed; dead reckoning becomes a farce; the charts are not to be trusted; and such is the number and similarity of these islands that, even when you have picked one up, you may be none the wiser. The reputation of the place is consequently infamous; insurance offices exclude it from their field, and it was not without misgiving ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Glorious farce, isn't it? They simply cram us like Christmas turkeys. Efficiency's the war-cry, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... and observes that he did not 'show the letter'—that of Logan to Gowrie (IV). This remark of Spottiswoode, an Archbishop, a converted Presbyterian, a courtier, and an advocate for the King, has been a source of joy to all Ruthven apologists. 'Spottiswoode saw though the farce,' they say; 'there was no letter at all, and, courtier and recreant as he was, Spottiswoode had the honesty to say so in ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... side believed the day to be pregnant with battle. There would be a decent counterfeit of resistance; afterward the little English army would vanish pell-mell, and the Bruce would be master of the island. The farce was prearranged, the actors ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... some persons far less desirable took too much pains to attract notice. A satirist would find rich material in the archives of our embassies and legations abroad. I have found nowhere more elements of true comedy and even broad farce than in some of the correspondence on this subject ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Delany's "Autobiography," Hervey's "Memoirs," Colley Cibber's "Apology," and Spence's "Anecdotes"; in the works and biographies of Pope, Swift, Steele, Addison, and Aaron Hill; in contemporary publications such as "A Key to 'The What D'ye Call It,'" "A Complete Key to the New Farce 'Three Hours After Marriage,'" Joseph Gay's "The Confederates"; and in numerous works dealing with dramatic productions and dramatic literature. A bibliography is printed in the "Cambridge History of English Literature" (Vol. IX., pp. 480-481; 1912); ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... set limits to the absurdity. Had the change been from blind belief to total infidelity, it would (as in a modern instance) have been much easier, though less lasting. Men might, in a time of such excitement, have been persuaded that all religion productive of abuses such as then abounded was a farce, and that common sense called for its abolition. But when the boundaries of belief became a question; when the world was told it ought to reject some doctrines, and retain others which seemed as difficult of comprehension; when one tenet was pronounced ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... Lamb saying that she has taken to French as a recreation and has been reading Racine. The second is from Lamb, dated July 6, 1825, thanking Miss Kelly for tickets at Arnold's theatre, the Lyceum, and predicting the success of his farce "The Pawnbroker's Daughter." How many more new letters are still to come to light, who ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... surrounded by hundreds who examine not for themselves; and are easily deluded, by the fairest promises, to surrender their opinions to another's guidance: these are the supporters of quackery, and the encouragers of those needy plunderers, who would render medicine a farce, that they ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... newly-found fortune. I saw you waver, hesitate. I did not hesitate. And now I am rich, I am famous, you come to me. You offer me that worthless thing,—your love. When I was poor, struggling alone, friendless, did you even write to me? Did you by word or look recognize me? No! The farce is played out. I wonder at your coming to see me ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... said Titherington. "It's all very well you're talking like that, but this is serious. The whole election's becoming a farce. Miss Beresford——" ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... are not on the surface at all, they are fundamental. You are probably not in a position to see the ease as I do. Such a state of things would be ludicrous; we should all be playing parts in a farce. He cannot have made such a proposal to her; she would have shown him ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... a farce, of course, but underneath the fantastic affectation there was a very real sentiment, that of the intolerable tedium of captivity. Raleigh had been living a life of exaggerated activity, never a month at rest, now at sea, now in Devonshire, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... and keeps them always in good humour. A Roman catholic longs as impatiently for the festival of St. Suaire, or St. Croix, or St. Veronique, as a schoolboy in England for the representation of punch and the devil; and there is generally as much laughing at one farce as at the other. Even when the descent from the cross is acted, in the holy week, with all the circumstances that ought naturally to inspire the gravest sentiments, if you cast your eyes among the multitude that croud the place, you will ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... was met by the grave pretence that the needs of the state forbade his refusal of them, however reluctant he might be. His mother, Livia Augusta, was the object of a like sycophancy. But the world was not deceived by the solemn farce. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... superior to mere human invention. While we, with careful regard to scenery, place our conventional puppets on the stage and bid them play their old old parts in a manner as ancient, she rings up the curtain and starts a tragedy on a scene that has obviously been set by the carpenter for a farce. She deals out the parts with a fine inconsistency, and the jolly-faced little man is cast to play Romeo, while the poetic youth with lantern jaw and an impaired digestion finds no Juliet ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... smoke-stained building showed the half-torn remnant of a cinematograph picture, a fat gentleman in a bowler hat entering with a lady on either arm a gaily painted restaurant. Over this, in big letters, the word "FARCE." ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... they are mingled with longing and entangled in vexatious things. Pure pleasure would be without ideas. Many a man has found in some moment of his life an unutterable joy which made all the rest of it seem a farce, as if a corpse should play it was living. Mystics habitually look beneath the Life of Reason for the substance and infinity of happiness. In all these revulsions, and many others, there is a certain justification, inasmuch as systematic living is after all an experiment, as is ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... couple at this time set up their establishment in Goro[u]beicho[u] of Kyo[u]bashi Ku. Coming and going, often with no definite task in hand, Densuke to all appearance was an out-and-out idler. For the first time released from the trammels of her class, O'Mino could attend the theatres and farce shows of the capital. She delighted in acting this part of a tradesman's wife. Moreover she was very sure of not meeting with Matazaemon, of whom she was in great fear. Bound to the formulae of his class, her father might feel bound to cut ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... to support in luxury a host of rapacious Spaniards, and forbidden any voice in the control of her own affairs, all the treaty concessions which we could make to Spain would only serve to keep up and perpetuate the great farce. Such a treaty as is proposed would be in reality granting to Spain a subsidy of about thirty million dollars per annum! This conclusion was arrived at after consultation with three of the principal United States consuls on the island. Cuba purchases very little from us; she has not a consuming ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... asserts that he has neither directly nor indirectly pensioned Cobbett. I really think the Duke of Wellington not a little indebted to him for forcing the Whigs to declare county meetings a farce. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... impressively, magnificently. He instantaneously formed a plan by which he would snatch victory out of defeat. He would take Gordon's suggestion, and himself drive the geese up to his residence in Hillport, that lofty and aristocratic suburb. It would be an immense, an unparalleled farce; a wonder, a topic for years, the crown of ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... did not. If you will be honest with me, you will admit that. This many a year, we have been playing a common farce. You acted the true Christian head of the family and ...
— Moral • Ludwig Thoma
... original and sufficiently varied in character and sentiment to enable the reader to make up a well-rounded program in which high comedy mingles with farce and pathos in a manner suitable for all occasions. Nineteen monologues and nine short poems which are especially adapted to that particular form of entertainment called the pianologue, viz., ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... World was first published in England, with Macklin's farce Love a la Mode, by subscription, in a handsome quarto. Facing the title-page is a portrait of the author, "in his 93.^d Year," engraved by John Conde after Opie, for which the trustees of the fund paid 25 guineas. Preceding the text of the play are the list ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... and Impenitent Thieves, These PEWS and GAUNTS, each man of them with his sheaves Of humour, passion, cruelty, tyranny, life, Fit shadows for the boards; till in the strife Of dream with dream, their Slaver-Saint came true, And their Blind Pirate, their resurgent PEW (A figure of deadly farce in his new birth), Tap-tapped his way from ORCUS back to earth; And so, their Lover and his Lass made one, In their best prose ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... huge, swarthy, purple-faced, a walking wine-barrel; he was a sort of Southern Falstaff, if one can imagine Falstaff anything but English. And, indeed, there was a vital difference, typical of two nations. For while Falstaff would have been shaking with hilarity like a huge jelly, full of the broad farce of the London streets, this Frenchman was rather solemn and dignified than otherwise—as if pleasure were a kind of pagan religion. After some talk which was full of the admirable civility and equality of French civilisation, he suggested without either eagerness or embarrassment that ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... to Eleanor and the whole situation so like a farce to her maturer love-affair, that she laughed merrily. But Polly was too concerned to take offence at ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... comes the farce. [The tragedy is Kant's destructive criticism of the speculative reason.] So far Immanuel Kant has been playing the relentless philosopher; he has laid siege to heaven.' Heine goes on with some violence to describe the ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... ashamed to shed a tear at any part of a tragedy, however affecting. "The reason," says the Spectator, "is, that persons think it makes them look ridiculous, by betraying the weakness of their nature. But why may not nature show itself in tragedy, as well as in comedy or farce? We see persons not ashamed to laugh loudly at the humour of a Falstaff,—or the tricks of a harlequin; and why should not the tear be equally allowed to flow for the misfortunes of a Juliet, or the forlornness of an Ophelia?" ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... prescription sent in agony to the tomb! Pah! I have no patience with her! She and her grief and her seclusion and her sympathetic cat, indeed! It all is a tragedy of indiscretion—that shapes itself as a revolting farce!" ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... months they have been face to face with death. Their figures move through the streets. From Bocardo, the town prison, they are led to separate confinement in other parts of the city. Now to St. Mary's Church, now to the Divinity School are they taken to be examined—a miserable farce—by those who seek to curry favour with a bloody queen. At last the end. Was it this morning that the sheriff's officers came to lead Ridley from the mayor's house, where he had passed a peaceful night, and risen to write a letter ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... N. wit, humor, wittiness; sense of humor; attic wit, attic salt; atticism[obs3]; salt, esprit, point, fancy, whim, drollery, pleasantry. farce, buffoonery, fooling, tomfoolery; shenanigan [U.S.], harlequinade &c. 599[obs3]; broad farce, broad humor; fun, espieglerie[Fr]; vis comica[Lat]. jocularity; jocosity, jocoseness[obs3]; facetiousness; waggery, waggishness; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... but change, for serious plot and verse, This motley garniture of fool and farce; Nor scorn a mode, because 'tis taught at home, Which dues, like vests,[A] our gravity become; Our poet yields you should this play refuse, As tradesmen by the change of fashions lose, With some content, their fripperies of France, In hope it may ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... price. And with the growing conviction of the folly and futility of international strife must disappear the last apology for war. Nations will cease to struggle, not when they have learned that war is a tragedy but when they have discovered that it is a farce. ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... will comply with either of the conditions. This is as well and as distinctly shown in the map of Mitchell as in the map of the British commission. It would therefore appear, if, these views be correct, that the framers of the treaty of 1783 went through the solemn farce of binding their respective Governments to a boundary which they well knew did not and ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... turns, rapid recoveries of ground. He wheeled about, retracing his steps, as if he might so catch in his face at least the stirred air of some other quick revolution. It was indeed true that his fully dislocalised thought of these manoeuvres recalled to him Pantaloon, at the Christmas farce, buffeted and tricked from behind by ubiquitous Harlequin; but it left intact the influence of the conditions themselves each time he was re- exposed to them, so that in fact this association, had he suffered it to become constant, ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... conditions upon possessors—was nearer to liberty and equality than any nation has been since. If the Senate had been intelligent and just,—if, at the time of the retreat to the Mons Sacer, instead of the ridiculous farce enacted by Menenius Agrippa, a solemn renunciation of the right to acquire had been made by each citizen on attaining his share of possessions,—the republic, based upon equality of possessions and the duty of labor, would ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... mouth agape. Pederson was gazing at Beardsley with delight and admiration, seeming to visualize this little man as material for his next tele-column. Mandleco stood transfixed, a monument of agony, twisting a fist into his palm. "Beardsley, stop it! This ridiculous farce has gone far enough! I warned you about ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... head back, and was singing jubilantly at the top of her voice. The appositeness of the song had cheered her up. It seemed somehow to make her forebodings rather ridiculous, to reduce them to absurdity, to turn into farce the gathering tragedy which had ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... for days' labor performed in improving their own homesteads and putting up hay for their cattle. More cows and better farming implements have been issued in recent years, and there is a wholesome effort to make the work of the so-called agency or "district farmers" less of a farce than it has often been ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... professor, after examining him in Cicero Orations and the Greek Testament, gave him a certificate of admission before he was ten years old. "Of course," he adds, "I knew very little, and the whole thing was a form, perhaps a farce. There was no thought of my going to college then, and I did not go till I was fourteen, but I was twice examined at the college (where I went with my father and mother every summer) for advanced standing, and was finally admitted as a junior, ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... Caudron; behind him, the Fokker; behind the Fokker, the Nieuport, and I, last of all, behind the Nieuport. We exchanged shots merrily. Finally the Fokker let the Caudron go, and the Nieuport stopped chasing the Fokker. I fired my last shots at the Nieuport and went home. The whole farce lasted over an hour. We had worked hard, but without visible success. At least, the Fokker (who turned out to be Althaus) and ...
— An Aviator's Field Book - Being the field reports of Oswald Boelcke, from August 1, - 1914 to October 28, 1916 • Oswald Boelcke
... had no sooner spoken for them than the musicians, who had orders to attend, entered, and answered fully the expectations the princes had been led to entertain of their abilities. After the concerts, an excellent farce was acted, and the entertainment was concluded by ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... jarring sense of amusement struck upon Rallywood. They were playing a farce; Count Simon, with his mortal enmity, was but acting his part. The whole procedure was hollow yet he Rallywood would have to give his life to prove that all this seeming was deadly earnest—that the blustering traitor opposite was ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... you are to have a supper and music. I was there last night, but did not find the joy of it. Vauxhall is a little better; for the garden is pleasanter, and one goes by water. Our operas are almost over; there were but three-and-forty people last night in the pit and boxes. There is a little simple farce at Drury Lane, called "Miss Lucy in Town," in which Mrs. Clive mimics the Muscovita admirably, and Beard, Amorevoli tolerably. But all the run is now after Garrick, a wine-merchant, who is turned player, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... he cried, strangely exasperated: "An end to this farce! Put them away. You don't need gloves ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... For though Mrs. Lobkins was extremely fond of her protege, yet she was possessed, as her customers emphatically remarked, "of the devil's own temper;" and her native coarseness never having been softened by those pictures of gay society which had, in many a novel and comic farce, refined the temperament of the romantic Paul, her manner of venting her maternal reproaches was certainly not a little revolting to a lad of some delicacy of feeling. Indeed, it often occurred ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... zarzuela appears to have been the forerunner and origin of all musical farce and "opera comique," only naturalised in our country during the present generation. The theatres in all the provinces are always full, always popular; the pieces only run for short periods, a perpetual variety being aimed at by the managers—a thing easily ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... the other horses, and finally finished the farce by leading out the roan cream-nose, and was pleased to notice the crestfallen ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... to one of the company, and a kick under the table to another, he endeavoured to make them join in his attempt to pass off the whole as mimickry of a Colonel Hallerton. His companions supported him as he continued the farce, and the laughter recommenced. Colonel Hauton filled his glass, and said nothing; by degrees, however, he joined or pretended to join in the laugh, and left the company without Buckhurst's being able exactly to determine whether he had duped him or not. After the colonel was fairly gone,—for ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... Ages, more than any other period, are rich in instances of that intimate blending of the comic and the horrible which we call the grotesque; the witches' Sabbath, the hoofed and horned devil, the hideous figures of Dante's hell; the Scaramouches, Crispins, Harlequins of Italian farce; "grimacing silhouettes of man, quite unknown to grave antiquity"; and "all those local dragons of our legends, the gargoyle of Rouen, the Taras of Tarascon, etc. . . . The contact of deformity has given to the modern sublime something ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... ridiculous, but as he began to play I moved up to Annie, put my arm around her, and we began to glide round and round on the deck. Her face was turned away from mine, and looked over my shoulder; if our eyes had met, I am convinced I must have laughed or wept. It was half farce, half deadly earnest, and for me as near to hysterics as a sane man can go. Tubal Cain, that inspired young Plymouth Brother, was solemn as a judge. As for Annie, I would give a considerable amount, at this moment, ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... is the strongest argument and appeal that can be made, in behalf of granting them. The claim to their free enjoyment is undeniably just. Plainly such rights are inalienable, and plainly too, woman is entitled to their possession equally with man. Our whole plan of government is a hypocritical farce, if one-half the people can be governed by the other half without their consent being asked or granted. Conscience and common sense alike demand the equal rights of women. To the conscience and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... move though there was no longer violence in his hold. He spoke deeply, above her bent head. "I can't stand this farce much longer. I'm only human after all, and there is a limit to everything. I can't keep at arm's length for ever. Flesh and blood won't ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... too weak to run out, while the Frenchmen's spoons stood to attention in the thicker mess they found in the bottom. This, with other things, contributed to make bad blood between the two races. A great show was made of stirring up the mess, but it was a pure farce. ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... seen another member of the Local Education Authority—a man of some note in the larger world—and it seems that you cannot be exempted unless you convince the Authority that your knowledge is such that to give you a Council school education would be the most absurd farce." ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... conqueror in the ruins of his ambition. The messenger found Charles busy superintending the passage of the last of his cannon over the mountain of Pontremoli. This was no easy matter, seeing that there was no sort of track, and the guns had to be lifted up and lowered by main farce, and each piece needed the arms of as many as two hundred men. At last, when all the artillery had arrived without accident on the other side of the Apennines, Charles started in hot haste for Fornovd, where he arrived with all his following on the ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... occasionally, and to dress it up by the help of fancy, to my own taste. When I get in the midst of it, it is too apt to lose its charm, and then there is the trouble and ennui of being obliged to take an active part in the farce; but to be a mere spectator is amusing. I am glad, therefore, that I brought no letters to Prague. I shall leave it with a favorable idea of its society and manners, from knowing nothing accurate of either; and with a firm belief that every pretty woman I have seen ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... Elizabeth received him at the palace. The Spanish ambassador, De Silva, met him there at dinner. He talked freely of where he had been and of what he had done, only keeping back the gentle violence which he had used. He regarded this as a mere farce, since there had been no one hurt on either side. He boasted of having given the greatest satisfaction to the Spaniards who had dealt with him. De Silva could but bow, report to his master, and ask instructions ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... to inquire deeply into the nature and effects of a constitution which can hardly be regarded but as a farce and a mockery. If, however, it could be supposed that its provisions were to have any effect, it seems equally adapted to two purposes; that of giving to its founder for a time an absolute and uncontrolled ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... its microcosmal life. The story has the completeness of a tragedy; but it runs over many centuries, and it ends like a farce, though it ends with a death. One feels, indeed, almost as great satisfaction in the catastrophe as the Mantuans themselves, who terminated their national existence and parted from their last Duke with ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... presence, 'is a fortunate woman. She has all kinds of cleverness, and she has her tall son. I have only one little talent, and I have no tall son.' Now it was not in nature that she could have had a son as tall as Somers, nor was that desire in her eyes. All civilization implies a good deal of farce, but this was a poor refuge, a cheap device; I was glad when it fell away from her sincerity, when the day came on which she looked into my fire and said simply, 'An attachment like ours ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... successful course of highway robbery runs in the channel of a swift accomplishment and a rapid getaway. Yet this crew, leaving the saddle-bags uninvestigated at their feet, were solemnly playing out their farce at the expense of valuable time—time which should have stood for miles put ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... mentioned had expired, we had reached a depth of five feet, and yet no signs of any treasure became manifest. A general pause ensued, and I began to hope that the farce was at an end. Legrand, however, although evidently much disconcerted, wiped his brow thoughtfully and recommenced. We had excavated the entire circle of four feet diameter, and now we slightly enlarged the limit, and went to the farther depth of two feet. Still nothing appeared. The gold-seeker, ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... have often wondered why a man should feel gay doing violence to his entrails in this fashion. I have noticed again and again that he loses a little of his gaiety if the dinner is served slowly enough to give him time to think. The gay meal, like the farce, must be enacted quickly. The very spectacle of waiters hurrying to and fro with an air of peril to the dishes quickens the fancy, and the gastric juices flow to an anapstic measure. Who does not know what it is to sit ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... into tears when the poor minor seemed to have lost both his love and his property. But how can I touch off my feelings, when, in the fourth act; the villain was detected; and all ended as it should! And, oh! Tibbie, mommy enjoyed it nearly as much as I, though the farce at the end vastly shocked her—and, indeed, Tibbie, 't was most indelicate, and made me blush a scarlet, and all the more that Sir William whispered that he enjoyed the broad parts through my cheeks—and she says if dadda insists, we'll go again, though not to stay to the farce. We ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... and on distinct subjects, through an innovation introduced by Sophocles, if not before—the tragic poet added a fourth or satyrical drama; the characters of which were satyrs, the companions of the god Dionysus, and other historic or mythical persons exhibited in farce. He thus made up a total of four dramas, or a tetralogy, which he got up and brought forward to contend for the prize at the festival. The expense of training the chorus and actors was chiefly furnished by the choregi,—wealthy citizens, of whom one was named for each of the ten tribes, ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... Ghost by breathing on them, which she does with postures and practices that are scandalously indecent; they have likewise disposed of all their effects, and hold a community of goods, and live nearly an idle life, carrying on a great farce of pretended devotion in barns and woods, where they lodge and lie all together, and hold likewise a community of women, as it is another of their tenets that they can commit no mortal sin. I am ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... her. There is a mood in which a deprivation of high comedy may drive one to low-down farce. To-day people are even going farther. A worthy stage is dead, they say; and they patronize, somewhat willfully and contemptuously (or with a loose, slack tolerance that is worse), the moving pictures. Perhaps it was in ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... dexterity, and thus escaped the probable death-blow. But, as he was bleeding from a wound in the throat, his second interfered, and proposed a reconciliation. Neil angrily refused to listen. He declared that he "had not come to enact a farce;" and then, happening to glance at the ribbon on Hyde's breast, he swore furiously, "He would make his way through the body of any man who stood between him and ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... chose to give an entertainment in the schoolroom, and admitted the poor into the cheaper seats. Everybody knows the nature of these functions. There were readings and recitations; young ladies sang drawing-room songs or played the violin; tableaux were displayed or a polite farce was performed; a complimentary speech wound up the entertainment; and then the performers withdrew again for several months into the aloofness of their residences, while the poor got through their winter evenings as best they could, in their mean cottages ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... in daily communication with his friend. He learned that the list of prisoners was being taken, now, more in the order in which they stood. The farce of a trial had been gone through, in the case of Jean's wife, and she had of course been condemned. She stood a good deal lower on the list than his father. There was not much chance of the day of her ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... owes her much, and he has some good friends. Comte de Chassepot prevented him from playing the stupid farce of a Roman son by sacrificing his father's funeral to a discussion on the laicisation of the schools; for, seeing what he had in his mind, Comte de Chassepot simply moved an adjournment of the council. His evil genius is M. Petit, now a senator, the present mayor of Amiens. I have caught M. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... to your sense of justice," cried our prisoner impatiently. "Hasn't this farce been allowed to go far enough? Is there any reason why this fake detective should make fools out of us all and keep my wife longer in this court? I'm not disposed to let the matter drop. I wish to enter a ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... mortial poor one in real life, and I'm best out of it." She turned the knob with eager fingers and pulled the door toward her. It opened on a dumbwaiter shaft, empty and impressive. Patsy's expression would have scored a hit in farce comedy. Unfortunately there was no audience present to appreciate it here, and the prompter forgot to ring down the curtain just then, so that Patsy stood helpless, forced to go on hearing all that Marjorie and ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... quite true. I always was that sort of chap. I'm very sorry. But now that you've found that life isn't a farce, but something quite sensible and serious, what further obstacle is there ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... This searching genius of philosophy and les petites moeurs solemnly warned that if ever this man were to cast off the badge of his order, he never would resume it. About this period the masters were menaced by a sort of servile war. The famous farce of High Life below Stairs exposed with great happiness the impudence and the delinquencies of the parti-coloured clans. It roused them into the most barefaced opposition; and, as ever happens to the few who press unjust claims on the many, in ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... sharply. The interruption had started a new train of thought. Beyond the flushed face of the man opposite him, he could see the empty stalls, row after row of gaunt-ribbed and featureless spectators, watching him. The play had become a nightmare farce in which he had chosen a ludicrous, impossible part. But he ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... to do with women; he treated them all as if ignorant of their existence, with a painful timidity which he disguised under a mask of bravado. And that girl must really think him a downright fool, to bamboozle him with that story of adventure—only fit for a farce. Nevertheless, he ended by saying, 'That's enough. You had better come in out of the wet. You ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... 'Thin th' quarantine at Oporto is a farce.' An' he plunged into th' seething mass iv handwritin' experts an' ex-prisidents iv th' ...
— Mr. Dooley: In the Hearts of His Countrymen • Finley Peter Dunne
... young priests, fresh from the seminaries—I grant you, they're a nuisance! They swarm over us like locusts, ready for any bit of mischief against the Government. But the Government will win!—Italy will win! Manisty first of all takes the thing too tragically. He doesn't see the farce in it. We do. We Italians understand each other. Why, the Vatican raves and scolds—and all the while, as the Prefect of Police told me only the other day, there is a whole code of signals ready between the police headquarters and a ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... wholly in Ah Moy's power, and quite well aware of it, exacted from all of his countrymen a certain amount of deference, and was loath that his visitor should prove an exception to this gratifying rule. Ah Moy knew this, but the little farce was becoming very irksome to him; it took up too much of his always valuable time, and he intended to forego it in future. Quong Lee, thought he, was a tiresome old goat who badly needed his whiskers trimmed and his ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... called the Neto, who first enters the ring to take the commands of the Inspector, and occasionally bears the shock of the bull, to the no small diversion of the lower class of spectators. The Spanish bull-fight is too serious an affair for a buffoon: it is a tragedy, and not a farce. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 272, Saturday, September 8, 1827 • Various
... days; and our whole attitude towards education was so fundamentally wrong that the absurdities of the yearly syllabus were merely so much by-play in the evolution of a drama which was a grotesque blend of tragedy and farce. But let us of the enlightened Twentieth Century try our hands at constructing a syllabus on which all the elementary schools of England are to be prepared for a yearly examination, and see if we can improve appreciably on the work of our predecessors. Some improvement there would certainly ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... meanders takes; There motley images her fancy strike, Figures ill paired, and similes unlike. She sees a mob of metaphors advance, Pleased with the madness of the mazy dance; How Tragedy and Comedy embrace; How Farce and Epic get a jumbled race; How Time himself stands still at her command, Realms shift their place, and ocean turns to land. Here gay description Egypt glads with showers, Or gives to Zembla fruits, to Barca flowers; Glittering with ice here hoary ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... was a youth, I was reckoned a good actor. Besides Harrow speeches (in which I shone), I enacted Penruddock in the Wheel of Fortune, and Tristram Fickle in Allingham's farce of the Weathercock, for three nights (the duration of our compact), in some private theatricals at Southwell, in 1806, with great applause. The occasional prologue for our volunteer play was also of my composition. The other ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... and other great writers, so you see we were giving them bits of the best living and dead dramatists. Our native Shakespeares do the same thing nowadays in all of their original works, and that's no idle fairy tale. We sandwiched comedy, drama, tragedy, and farce, and interlarded the mixture with Victor Herbert and Oscar Hammerstein's opera comique and May Irwin coon songs. Such a presentation of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' was never before presented, and I am free to confess the chances are never will be again. We actually played ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... was given by the boys and girls, or rather by two boys and one girl, Dolly Hosmer, Craze Barlow and myself. We did Box and Cox, a short farce, produced to piece ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... time pass too rapidly on many a previous occasion. The Hour Before Dinner Series—not that this is the genuine title, but it might be, and is a suggestion—is a real "boon and a blessing" to those who, like Podgers, in JOHN HOLLINGSHEAD'S immortal farce, "only have a 'our," not for "their dinner," but for their novel-reading throughout the day. FARJEON soit beni! (Signed) The Baron ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... and his nose scarcely smaller than the rest of him together. The fellow's mouth was slit almost from ear to ear, and he showed his teeth with a grinning smile of idiot courtesy, while he overwhelmed me with bows and scrapes innumerable. The farce now becoming excessively irksome, I thanked him in the fewest words I could well use, turned about my still trembling charger, and purposed either to seek another adventure, or, should I meet with ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... added, speaking in a louder tone, we had better give our minds to the present scene of the farce, and perform the opening quadrille, as is ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... said, that to be buried by her father, she need not be carried out of England," (she was supposed to be actually the daughter of Colonel Graham.) When she found herself dying, she carried on the melancholy farce to the last. She sent for Anstis, the herald, and arranged the whole funeral ceremony with him. She was particularly anxious to see the preparations before she died. "Why," she asked, "won't they send the canopy for me to see? Let them send it, even though the tassels are not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... again a fierce fight would ensue between two good hands, and that seemed to arouse a spirit of general emulation and eagerness; the play grew more bold; bets apart from the game were laid by individual players between themselves. The putting up of the "ante" became a mere farce, for every one came in as a matter of course, even if he had to draw five cards; and already the piles of chips on the table had undergone serious diminution or augmentation—in the latter case there was a glimmer of gold among the bits of ivory. There was no visible excitement, ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... look up to Verrina as a competent savior of society, however much one may sympathize with him in his private feud. His cynical tergiversation at the end makes his previous conduct ridiculous. It seems to say that he has been participating in a tragic farce which is now ended. One might almost get the impression that the whole play is only ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Mrs. Conner and Agnes had come out, asking in much surprise who the stranger could be, and what was the cause of her illness. As if there had been a previous understanding between them, the doctor and Guy were silent with regard to the recent farce enacted there, simply saying it was possible she was in the habit of fainting; many people were. Very daintily, Agnes held up and back the skirt of her rich silk as if fearful that it might come in contact with Madeline's plain ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... so," Duvall remarked, indifferently, then turned to the doctor. "Now, monsieur, let us have done with this farce as quickly as possible. I have no ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... other stories in this book. There is that screaming farce called "The Suicides in the Rue Sombre." Now, then, you Magazine zealots, speak up and tell me truly: is there anything too difficult for you in this? If so, the psychology of what is called "public taste" becomes a subject not suited to ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... Hassan.' And since that day his hatred of the English had been a monomania, and he has never spoken a word of English. Later on, when we used to travel together, his obvious avoidance of English people was at times both awkward and embarrassing, and I have often had to go through the farce of translating into French or Arabic remarks made to him by English fellow-travellers, that is, when he condescended to notice the remarks, which was not often. From the day he learned the truth ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... like secret understanding or sympathy; perhaps, however, it was only as head and representative of the family. She looked well; but, unfortunately, a trifling carelessness in dress had nearly concluded the farce. Recollecting, however, that they were packing up for a temporary removal, to take place this very day, an apology was obvious. Having made to myself the apology, I went further, and found that there was politeness, at least, ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... me pulled off the sheets and danced a clog dance. Well, when the rest of the troop saw our make up, it nearly killed them. Most of them had seen ballet dancers, but they never saw them with different colored socks. The minister said the benefit was rapidly becoming a farce, and before we had danced half a minute Ma she recognized her socks, and she came for me with a hot box, and made me take them off, and Pa was mad and said the dancing was the only thing that was worth the price of admission, and he scolded Ma, ...
— The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy - Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, No. 2 - 1883 • George W. Peck
... resembling that of Cleveland, though disclaiming Cleveland as his model. The Boston Journal led in the exploitation of the charges, and partisans forgot decency on both sides. Nast, having formerly cartooned Blaine in the "Bloody Shirt," now turned to "A Roaring Farce—The Plumed Knight in a Clean Shirt," while others pointed out the fact that the admirer who coined the "plumed knight" epithet had been counsel for the ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... to see him; there was something in Count Mirabel's very presence which put everybody in good spirits. His lightheartedness was caught by all. Melancholy was a farce in the presence of his smile; and there was no possible combination of scrapes that could withstand his kind and brilliant raillery. At the present moment, Ferdinand was in a sufficiently good humour with his destiny, and he kept up the ball ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... Hamilton.—Can any of your readers inform me who Newburgh Hamilton was? He wrote two pieces in my library, viz. (1.) Petticoat Plotter, a farce in two acts; acted at Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, 1720, 12mo. This has been mutilated by Henry Ward, a York comedian, and actually printed by him as his own production, in the collection of plays and poems going under his name, published in 1745, 8vo., a copy ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... of undergrowth. A happy family of magpies, grey-blue above, with barred tails and yellow beaks, flitted about in restless quest, their constant cries being the only sound which broke the peaceful stillness, until the faint and distant sound of shouts and tom-toms showed that the first act of the farce ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... down; and she went herself, and stood in the garden doorway with her back to me. I obeyed. I sat down. But though I had eaten nothing since the afternoon of the day before, I could not swallow. I fumbled with my knife, and drank; and grew hot and angry at this farce; and then looked through the window at the dripping bushes, and the rain and the ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... breast, A greater than all knowledge, beat her down. And she had nursed me there from week to week: Much had she learnt in little time. In part It was ill counsel had misled the girl To vex true hearts: yet was she but a girl— 'Ah fool, and made myself a Queen of farce! When comes another such? never, I think, Till the Sun drop, dead, from the signs.' Her voice choked, and her forehead sank upon her hands, And her great heart through all the faultful Past Went sorrowing in a pause I dared ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... are all enacting a farce, which can have no final act. I vow that I cannot allow my friend Blakeney to go over to France at your bidding. Your government now will not allow my father's subjects to land on your shores without a special passport, and then only for ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Though only a trifling farce, it was written by professionals, for the benefit of the charity, and was played by the clever amateurs who had chosen such an odd name for their club. The situations in the play were screamingly funny, and Patty shook with laughter as she ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... hesitated long between medieval simplicity and modern symbolism. An illustrative crest that should be a play upon his name was out of the question; for of course it was only another of Mayboom, the farce-writer's, jokes—he had taken him into his confidence on one of his visits to Berlin—to suggest a sack of oats, gules on a field, vert. After devising a dozen crests, each of which he thought charming, only to reject it a day or two afterward as inappropriate, he finally fixed on ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... stupid phrase, derived from I do not know where—a Palais Royal farce, I believe—had once got into my head, it was impossible for me to get rid of it, and I felt bursts of wild merriment welling up to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... quiet; or perhaps you'd like to run away till the farce is over," said Madame, caressingly, for she has a penchant for the peer beside her; he is a new distraction and will amuse her until she can secure a tete-a-tete with the man who has some rare fascination for her, as Lionel Trevalyon has for ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... is of such magnitude, its leaders so completely control the active forces of the whole community, that the passive strength of Union sentiment cannot now be taken into the account. It would be a farce too absurd to be gravely considered, to treat with men who, whatever their disposition or numbers may be, are utterly helpless, unable to make any promise which they can fulfil, or to give any pledge which can bind any ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... has a right to override such prejudices, if they are popular and positive. Thus he would not have a right to make millions of Moslems vote with a cross if they had a prejudice in favor of voting with a crescent. Unless this is admitted, democracy is a farce we need scarcely keep up. If it is admitted, the Suffragists have not merely to awaken an indifferent, but to ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... ashore at the mouth of the Patapsco River while the ships sailed up to bombard Fort McHenry, where the star-spangled banner waved. To defend Baltimore by land there had been assembled more than thirteen thousand troops under command of General Samuel Smith. The tragical farce of Bladensburg, however, had taught him no lesson, and to oppose the five thousand toughened regulars of General Ross he sent out only three thousand green militia most of whom had never been under fire. They put up a wonderfully good fight and deserved praise for it, ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... thing from their flotilla. Three English frigates would sink the whole force at Boulogne in the open sea. The French seem to know this; yet, to amuse the populace, and to play upon the fears of the English Ministry, the farce is kept up, and daily reports are made by the Commandant of the state of the flotilla. There is a delightful walk on the beach, which is a flat strand of firm sand, as far as the tide reaches. In the summer evenings when the tide serves, this is the favourite ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... are introduced and told. The connecting passages are full of dramatic vivacity; in these the "Host," Master Harry Bailly, acts as a most efficient choragus, but the other pilgrims are not silent, and in the "Manciple's" Prologue, the "Cook" enacts a bit of downright farce for the amusement of the company and of stray inhabitants of "Bob-up-and-down." He is, however, homoeopathically cured of the effects of his drunkenness, so that the "Host" feels justified in offering up a thanksgiving to Bacchus for his powers of conciliation. The "Man ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the end. Another twenty minutes and the hotel would loom up before them, and the little farce, comedy, or tragedy, whichever it might be, would be finished. The curtain would fall, and the two principal ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... the stuff at some expense; but not in a day or an hour. And how—with one dose in all the world!—keep up the farce? The dose consumed, the play was at an end. An end—or, no, was he losing his wits, his courage? On the instant, in the twinkling of an eye, he shaped a ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... weary of the dull farce, and put an end to it as speedily as I conveniently could; leaving his sage lordship with the full conviction that the sudden disappearance of Henley, and his niece, could no otherwise be accounted for but ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... corresponds to the irony of his inspiration. We find his originality in a peculiar blending of serious and burlesque styles, in abrupt but always well-contrived transitions from heroical magniloquence to plebeian farce and from scurrility to poetic elevation, finally in a frequent employment of the figure which the Greeks called [Greek: para prosdokian]. His poem is a parody of the Aristophanic type. 'Like a fantastically ironical magic tree, the world-subversive ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... from steaming in what waters it pleases. If our shells fall upon New York on the day when your warships are sighted off the Californian coast, do you suppose that America could resist? With her seaboard, her fleet is contemptible. For her wealth, her army is a farce. She has neglected for a great many years to pay her national insurance. She is the one country in the world who can be bled ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... were out every day capering around in the bushes, and having little skirmishes with the Spanish troops that looked more like kind of tired-out feuds than anything else. The war was a joke to us, and of no interest to them. We never could see it any other way than as a howling farce-comedy that the San Augustine Rifles were actually fighting to uphold the Stars and Stripes. And the blamed little senors didn't get enough pay to make them care whether they were patriots or traitors. Now and then ...
— Options • O. Henry
... farce was enacted in the cemetery of St. Ouen, behind the beautifully severe monastic church so called, and which had by that day assumed its present appearance. On a scaffolding raised for the purpose sat Cardinal Winchester, the two judges, and thirty-three assessors, of whom many had their scribes ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Smith slowly said— "Let us plan to carry out the crowning farce, May it serve to charm the haughty Powhatan, As it pleases England's monarch for the time. Yes, the scarlet robe will dazzle Indian chief, An' it is your wish to make of him a clown. 'Tis a trifling matter that; more serious far Charges ...
— Pocahontas. - A Poem • Virginia Carter Castleman
... "in the poetical way", and published An Epistle to a Lady, occasioned by the arrival of her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales. But, though this brought him access to Court, and the attendance of the Prince and Princess at his farce of the What d'ye, call it? it did not bring him a place. On the accession of George II, he was offered the situation of Gentleman Usher to the Princess Louisa (her Highness being then two years old); but "by this offer", says Johnson, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was farce. Thorpe was built on the true athletic lines, broad, straight shoulders, narrow flanks, long, clean, smooth muscles. He possessed, besides, that hereditary toughness and bulk which no gymnasium training will ever quite supply. The other man, while powerful and ugly in ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... this? I have heard of your shame, of your dishonour—of the disgraceful way in which you have entrapped my poor boy. But what is this farce enacted here? How dare you enter the House of God and forge this ridiculous statement? Where is my son, whom you ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... very successful, and so was the ball. I was so anxious to hear how Eleanor had sped, that I felt quite sure that I could not go to sleep, and that it was a farce to go to bed just when she was beginning to dance. I went, however, at last, and had had half a night's sound sleep before rustling, and chattering, and the light from bed-candles woke me to hear ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... a most amusing farce some time ago which contained much interesting information concerning the worth of advertising. I forget the fabulous figure at which "The Gold Dust Twins" trade-mark is valued, but I know that it easily puts them into Charley ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... care which the lord of Belvidero bestowed upon his person, the days of decrepitude arrived. With this age of pain came cries of helplessness, cries made the more piteous by the remembrance of his impetuous youth and his ripe maturity. This man, for whom the last jest in the farce was to make others believe in the laws and principles at which he scoffed, was compelled to close his eyes at night upon an uncertainty. This model of good breeding, this duke spirited in an orgy, this ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... a short time a really appetizing breakfast was placed before the nearly famished girl. Breakfast at Sunnyside that morning had been a farce, and when Rosamund came down the meal was over. She had, therefore, not tasted food that day until now. The hot coffee, the nice fish-cakes, the delicious bread-and-butter, all had their due effect. She owned that she was hungry, and when she had finished, fresh courage and energy ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... developed for the child the mystery of work and of worship; but it is all accomplished through incidents appealing wholly to imagination, and with beautiful art. "The Little Castaways"—really a deliberate farce, "taking off," the stories of similar incident written for older folk—is yet, in itself, for the child much more than that which is thus "taken off" ever could be for the older and more romantic reader. "The Rock-Elephant" is full of humor and imaginative ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... dismissed. Three weeks after he and Lovell had been put in jail they first learned of what they were accused: Lovell of "being a Spy, and giving intelligence to the rebels," and Leach of "being a spy, and suspected of taking plans." Their examination was a farce, the witness against them not knowing them apart. They were remanded to jail, and lay there until October. Lovell fell sick, and got a little better food, but no attention from his jailers—"no Compassion toward him ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... suit. The misery of the deception, and the sufferings that he was forced to self-impose to keep it up, as he afterwards confessed, had nearly conquered him on the third day: that he was a man of the most enduring courage to brave a whole week of such martyrdom, must be conceded to him. Had the farce continued a day or two longer, he would have had the disagreeable option forced upon him, either of being seriously ill, or of returning instanter to ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... accused, asking the usual questions concerning his name, age, etc., in a courteous, kindly tone, wholly devoid of sternness, which filled Panna with vehement rage. This was not the terrible personification of the fell punishment of crime, but a smooth farce, ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... the enemy; canard; shave, sell, hum, traveler;s tale, Canterbury tale, cock and bull story, fairy tale, fake; claptrap. press agent's yarn; puff, puffery (exaggeration) 549. myth, moonshine, bosh, all my eye and Betty Martin, mare's nest, farce. irony; half truth, white lie, pious fraud; mental reservation &c (concealment) 528. pretense, pretext; false plea &c 617; subterfuge, evasion, shift, shuffle, make-believe; sham &c (deception) 545. profession, empty words; Judas kiss &c (hypocrisy) 544; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... election, under the only conditions in which secondary election is preferable to primary. Generally speaking, in an electioneering country (I mean in a country full of political life, and used to the manipulation of popular institutions), the election of candidates to elect candidates is a farce. The Electoral College of America is so. It was intended that the deputies when assembled should exercise a real discretion, and by independent choice select the President. But the primary electors take too much ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... one in real life, and I'm best out of it." She turned the knob with eager fingers and pulled the door toward her. It opened on a dumbwaiter shaft, empty and impressive. Patsy's expression would have scored a hit in farce comedy. Unfortunately there was no audience present to appreciate it here, and the prompter forgot to ring down the curtain just then, so that Patsy stood helpless, forced to go on hearing all that Marjorie and her leading man wished to improvise ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... gone to you for sisterly help and comfort, such as you gave just now, I would have frozen in the snow, and been less cold. Unless you break down the bar you put between us, I never want to see your face again,—never, living or dead! I want no sham farce of friendship between us, benefits given or received: your hand touching mine as it might touch Bone's or David Gaunt's; your voice cooing in my ear as it did just now, cool and friendly. It maddened me. Rest can scarcely come ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... moutons,"—a proverb taken from the French farce of "Pierre Patelin," edition of ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... very much, if the song refers to fashionable articles of ladies costume, or holds up to ridicule members of Congress, policemen, or dandies. It is not averse to a sentimental song, in which "Mother, dear," is frequently apostrophized. It delights in a farce from which most of the dialogue has been cut away, while all the action is retained,—in which people are continually knocked down, or run against one another with great violence. It takes much pleasure in seeing Horace Greeley play a part in a ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... sinister suggestion of a Yankee whaling-skipper. H.M.S. Alligator signalised the hoisting of the ensign with a salute of twenty-one guns. After this impressive solemnity, Mr. Busby lived at the bay for six years. His career was a prolonged burlesque—a farce without laughter, played by a dull actor in serious earnest. Personally he went through as strange an experience as has often fallen to the lot of a British official. A man of genius might possibly have managed the inhabitants ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... a theocratic government is a farce for both man or woman and, in the latter case, a pure mockery, as the Mormon woman has apparently a privilege which is denied to woman elsewhere, but this privilege is entirely out of her power to use excepting as ordered by the church that controls ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... first presentment, it challenged good writing on the part of the critics. High Comedy always does that—tickles the brain and stimulates it, drives it at a pace not usually to be had in the theatre. Is it comedy or is it farce, the critics queried? Is Mr. Mitchell sincere, and does he flay the evil he so photographically portrays? Does he treat the sacred subject of matrimony too flippantly? And should the play, in order to be effective, have ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... neighborhood, called "patrolling." They would patrol the country during Sundays, and occasionally at nights, to prevent illegal assemblies of negroes, and also to prevent them from being at large without permission of their masters. But this system had dwindled down to a farce, and was only engaged in by some of the youngsters, more in a spirit of fun and frolic than to keep order in the neighborhood. The real duties of the militia of the State consisted of an annual battalion and regimental parade, called "battalion muster" ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... The farce at Syracuse has been played out. We publish to-day the last act, in which it will be seen that the authority of the Bible, as a perfect rule of faith and practice for human beings, was voted down, and what are called the laws of nature set up instead of the Christian code. We have also a practical ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Soga clan, his mother having been a daughter of the great Umako. The throne was therefore offered to him. But since the offer followed, instead of preceding the Empress' approval of Prince Karu, Furubito recognized the farce, and knowing that, though he might rule in defiance of the Kamatari faction, he could not hope to rule with its consent, he threw away his sword and declared his intention ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... perhaps to shoot Free-State men who disputed the right of the South to plant and to maintain slavery there. Under these circumstances the first election for members of the territorial legislature was a farce. Yet Reeder felt obliged to let the new assembly go on with its work of making easy the immigration of masters with their "property"; when he went East a little later he took occasion to protest in a public address against the ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... a gaiety that was too boisterous to be quite natural. "Of course I'm sure! I never saw anything more amusing in my life. It's first-rate farce.... What a master of chaff this Arsene Lupin is!... He tricks you, but he does it so gracefully!... I wouldn't give my seat at this banquet for all the gold in the world.... Wilson, old chap, you disappoint me. Can I have been mistaken in you? Are you really deficient in that nobility of character ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... turns out to be the most uproarious farce. I've never seen a funnier one in the theatre. But there is a serious side to it, Viola. Sit down for a minute or two, and I'll tell you. Zachariah is all right. Barked his ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... intervened, and demonstrated to the offended parties, that, when Monsieur Edmond About called them stupid boobies, humbugs, tumblers, he had no intention whatever of offending them. Good gracious! far otherwise! In fine, one day the farce was played, the curtain fell upon the well-spanked critics, and all this little company (so full of talents and chivalry!) went arm-in-arm, the insulter and the insulted, to breakfast together at Monsieur About's rooms, where, between a dozen oysters and a bottle of Sauterne, he asked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... French Governor at Quebec continues his bribes—as much as eight hundred dollars a year to a man—to stir up hostility to the English and prevent the Acadian farmers taking the oath of fidelity to England. So much for the peace treaty in Acadia. It was not peace; it was farce. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... with relish at the ironical humor of the situation—the picture of the California Clarks running hungrily with outstretched hands to grab their piece of Clark's Field. And he laughed with a bitter perception of the underlying farce of human society. It was his ironic sense of the accidental element in life, especially in relation to property ownership and class distinctions, based on property possession, that made him an incipient ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... elegant school of taste, and perhaps of virtue. But the Tragic and Comic Muse of the Romans, who seldom aspired beyond the imitation of Attic genius, [62] had been almost totally silent since the fall of the republic; [63] and their place was unworthily occupied by licentious farce, effeminate music, and splendid pageantry. The pantomimes, [64] who maintained their reputation from the age of Augustus to the sixth century, expressed, without the use of words, the various fables of the gods and heroes of antiquity; and the perfection of their ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... natural wonder in existence. They pass on till out of sight, face about and "continue the motion," passing back and forth as many as five times. Wearied at length of this performance, Smith rose and said, "Come, let's end this farce," or something to that effect. We arose, left the place, and were surprised to find a moment after that they were actually ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... inner history of this scene is not a tragedy, but a farce. For two weeks or more Coronado had been watching his uncle day and night, and at last had found in his trunk a paper of powder which he suspected to be arsenic. A blunderer would have destroyed or hidden it, ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... valuable than life itself, and the story is to me one of the most pathetic I have ever heard. To the English mind there is something irresistibly comic when any one falls, morally or physically. It is the basis of English Farce. Jokes made about those who have never fallen, 'too great to appease, too high to appal,' are voted bad taste. Caricaturists of the mildest order are considered irreligious and vulgar if they burlesque, say, the Archbishop ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... full scope, and then proceeded laboriously to extract the missing articles from the side of Aunt Judith's arm-chair. This farce was rehearsed every night, nearly word for word. A pleasant recreation for an intellectual man, assuredly. The only relief to the monotony was the occasional loss of a spoon in the crevice between the arm and the ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... And it seems as if a hot walk purged you, more than of anything else, of all narrowness and pride, and left curiosity to play its part freely, as in a child or a man of science. You lay aside all your own hobbies to watch provincial humours develop themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now grave and ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... public ruin, Never once could have the power To affect me half an hour; Sooner would I write in buskins, Mournful elegies on Blueskins.[5] If I laugh at Whig and Tory; I conclude a fortiori, All your eloquence will scarce Drive me from my favourite farce. This I must insist on; for, as It is well observed by Horace,[6] Ridicule has greater power To reform the world than sour. Horses thus, let jockeys judge else, Switches better guide than cudgels. Bastings heavy, dry, obtuse, Only dulness can produce; While a little gentle jerking Sets the spirits ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... arrest the loggers were taken to the city jail which was to be the scene of an inquisition unparalleled in the history of the United States. After this, as an additional punishment, they were compelled to face the farce of a "fair ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... official report, says the "trial of a white man for the murder of a freedman in Texas would be a farce; and, in making this statement, I make it because truth compels me, and for no other reason.... Over the killing of many freedmen nothing is done." General Sheridan cites cases in which our National soldiers wearing the uniform of the Republic ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... nearly suffocated by the paint applied to his face, it was wisely announced that for the future the Deity should be covered by a cloud. These plays, carried about the country, taken up by the baser sort of people, descended through all degrees of farce to obscenity, and, in England, becoming entangled in politics, at length disappeared. It is said they linger in Italy, and are annually reproduced ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... at them. He was evidently in no mood for farce, but as evidently he adored this noisy big father who towered above his slender height like a giant, and tried to force himself to his father's humour. "Dear papa," he murmured, "it is good that you have come. I am ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... forcing him to do this?" demanded Gaylor. "No! He's forcing it on us. My God!" he exclaimed, "do you think I want this farce? You say, yourself, you told him it would kill him, and he will go on with it. Then why do you blame ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... the hour was to rob another Augustine monk, Robert de la Porte, and in this the Prior agreed to take a hand with simulated greed. Thus, in the course of two days, he had turned this wineskin of a Tabary inside out. For a while longer the farce was carried on; the Prior was introduced to Petit-Jehan, whom he describes as a little, very smart man of thirty, with a black beard and a short jacket; an appointment was made and broken in the de la Porte affair; Tabary had some breakfast at the Prior's charge ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... first words in it were a most ludicrous allusion to Rogers's cadaverous appearance. As I raised my eyes from this most absurd description of him, and saw him still absorbed in his evil delight, the whole struck me as so like a scene in a farce that I could not refrain ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... was almost a farce to sit down and write to you now, with nothing to say worth listening to; and, indeed, if it were not for two reasons, I should put off the business at least a fortnight hence. The first reason is, I want another letter from you, for your letters are interesting, they have something in ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... none But the great Regent's self alone; Who—by particular desire— For that night only, means to hire A dress from, Romeo Coates, Esquire.[1] Hail, first of Actors! best of Regents! Born for each other's fond allegiance! Both gay Lotharios—both good dressers— Of serious Farce both learned Professors— Both circled round, for use or show, With cock's ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... devotedness to republican institutions. But as the State is neither Catholic nor Protestant, it should at least act justly and impartially; it should not favor its own enemies; it should not make a lie or a farce of our glorious Constitution; it should no longer play the usurper and the robber; it should no longer continue digging its own grave; it should not tax Catholics any longer to support infidel institutions—nurseries of all kinds of crimes—and thus continue ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... who had read the classics and loved the arts. His works show how he admires them. He could paint you Bassanio or Benedick or Mercutio to the life. Everybody has noticed the predilection with which he lends such characters his own poetic spirit and charm. His lower orders are all food for comedy or farce: he ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... quite clear that he came to this conviction slowly and reluctantly; that he struggled against it with manly fortitude through three sessions; that he yielded to it at length, when there was no longer a possibility of resistance,—when to move or to divide the House, had become a wretched farce, humiliating to the country, and unworthy of his own earnest ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... and whatever I felt most I took the most care to hide from him. For there were some things—when they were laughed at I could not bear it: the world seemed like a hell to me. Is this world and all the life upon it only like a farce or a vaudeville, where you find no great meanings? Why then are there tragedies and grand operas, where men do difficult things and choose to suffer? I think it is silly to speak of all things as a joke. And I saw that his wishing me to sing the greatest music, and parts in grand ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... that all is well, when all is not well! That's exactly what women always do and always have done, and plume themselves upon it. And so this ridiculous farce is kept up, because these wretched women go smiling about the world, hugging their stupid resignation to their hearts, and pampering up their sickly virtue, at the expense of their ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... MAUGHAM, who recently intrigued and perhaps just a little scandalised the town with a most engagingly flippant and piquant farce all about an accidentally bigamous beauty, certainly shows courage in launching so serious a discussion as The Unknown. And in the silly season too. I see that in a quite unlikely interview (but then all modern interviews are unlikely) he defends his right to discuss religion quite openly on the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... "The high farce of tragedy," he thought. "Probably a mosquito will settle on Burr's nose as he fires, and my life ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... inclined for farce, if blessed chance would throw it in my way. You see, I was going to live at last, and life for ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... I; 'he's one whom I know nothing of.'—'Dame knows him, Ursul knows him,' said the little one, and put my shoes on the floor.—'Leave my things alone,' cried I.—'Make 'em clean, dust 'em, brush 'em neat,' answered the creature, and set to work at my Sunday hat.—'Is this farce never to end?' I called out to him; 'brush your own nose.'—He laught, and seemed to have no notion that I had any right to give orders in my own room. 'Art afraid, he then giggled out, of big ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... buffoonery; even of its near cousins, scuffling and fighting, only one of the three plays has more than a trace. Hence the earlier remark, that Heywood was before his time. It is not devils in bearskins and wooden-sworded vices that create true comedy; they belong to the realm of farce. Yet they continued to flourish long after Heywood had set another example, and with them the cuffing of ears and drunken gambolling which we may see, in the works of other men, trying to rescue prosy scenes from dullness. In Johan Johan is simple ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... of a sale of furniture. Once, most ironical of all, a gaping and smoke-stained building showed the half-torn remnant of a cinematograph picture, a fat gentleman in a bowler hat entering with a lady on either arm a gaily painted restaurant. Over this, in big letters, the word "FARCE." ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... same letter Charles adds his scene in the farce: "La Plessis said to Rahuel (he was the concierge) yesterday that she had been gratified at dinner to find that Madame had turned the child out of her seat and put herself in the place of honour. And Rahuel, in his Breton way: 'Nay, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... spring-lambkin ewe-born, Oh, woe! So neat and so fine in his guilelessness new-born Like snow. The flesh so delicious was chopped up to farce-meat, And later by Wergeland found for a farce meet, And gayly 't was swallowed, And all the bones ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... successful indeed; yet a man of his superiority, and with a less obtrusive policy, might, who knows? have got the length of half a crown. A man who prides himself upon persuasion should learn the persuasive faculty of silence, above all as to his own misdeeds. It is only in the farce and for dramatic purposes that Scapin enlarges on his peculiar talents to the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the bully did not have the slightest intention of helping him get out of the limestone pit. When Buck snatched the vine away, he understood plainly enough that all of his slow work in cutting the trailer had been a farce. The cunning bully had done it just to work up his old-time rival ...
— Fred Fenton on the Track - or, The Athletes of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... continued he; "wilt thou not tremble beneath the glance of those who seek the secret of thy life? Yes; study well thy part; have ready thy mask; go on bravely with thy cowardly farce! And now begone; thy nightly task is done;—beg, beg from sleep the oblivion of what thou art and of thy threatening future! Sleep! I tremble at the very thought of it! Father in ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... made light of Sir Edward, it was with a startling candor that he added, "But woman's a riddle indeed if Elizabeth would give her shoe-tie for Cecil." Lady Angleby was so amazed and shocked that she made no answer whatever. The squire went on: "The farce had better pause—or end. Elizabeth is sensitive and shrewd enough. Cecil has no heart to give her, and she will never give hers unless in fair exchange. I have observed her all along, and that is the conclusion I have come ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... near you, and you start." She laid her hand on his. "I touch you, and your eyes grow warm. Both our hearts beat more quickly. Look at the sunshine! It's brighter when we're so close together. What of life? It's soon gone—and then? What of convention that says 'no'? It's but a farce that gives the same thing we ask—at the price of a few words of mummery. Our strongest instincts of nature call for each other. Why shouldn't we obey them when we wish?" She hesitated, and her voice became tender. "We would be very ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... and sufficiently varied in character and sentiment to enable the reader to make up a well-rounded program in which high comedy mingles with farce and pathos in a manner suitable for all occasions. Nineteen monologues and nine short poems which are especially adapted to that particular form of entertainment called the pianologue, viz., reading ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... It was a broad farce, full of loud jests and nonsense, a great thwacking of sticks and tumbling about; and Nick, with his eye to the crack of the door, listened with all his ears for his cue, far too excited even to think of laughing at the rough jokes, ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... novels have, we might now have a school of American dramatists of which we should be as proud as of our school of American novelists. In dramatic composition, the equivalent of the Short-story is the one-act play, be it drama or comedy or comedietta or farce. As the novelists have learned their trade by the writing of Short-stories, so the dramatists might learn their trade, far more difficult as it is and more complicated, by the writing of one-act plays. But, while the magazines of the United States are hungry for good Short-stories, and sift ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... anywhere: but it is in them the most dangerous,[11] most rarely successful and most frequently failed-in of all motives—again as it is everywhere. Comedy in letters is good: but it should be fairly "genteel" comedy, such as this age excelled in—not roaring Farce. An "excruciatingly funny" letter runs the risk of being excruciating in a sadly literal sense. Now the men of good Queen Anne and the first three Georges were not given to excess, in these ways at any rate; and there are few better examples of the happy ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... herself. Let Dissenters, whether they be Church of England, as perhaps they may still call themselves, Methodist, or Presbyterian, presume to grumble, and there shall be bruising of lips in pulpits, tying up to whipping-posts, cutting off ears and noses—he! he! the farce of King Log has been acted long enough; the time for Queen Stork's tragedy is drawing nigh;" and the man in black sipped his gin and water ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... found, that two theatres were more than the town chose to support; therefore that in Moor-street was set for a methodist meeting, where, it was said, though it changed its audience, it kept its primeval use, continuing the theatre of farce. ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... make him hobble For half a week or so, as though, perchance, He'd strained an ancle in a leap or dance! Feeble sword-play or futile fisticuffs Might be disdained by warriors—or roughs; But to the squabbling scribe the farce has charms. Who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various
... his bluster, to close with his opponent in actual contest. It was a miniature exhibition of the beak-to-beak challenging often indulged in by two rival cocks of the farmyard. For some minutes the little farce was kept up, then one of the birds became tired of the game and darted over to the next ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... exasperated, declared that at the head of his former corps, the 9th, he would himself storm the miniature Torres Vedras. If all this is true, then Burnside is weaker headed than I had judged him to be; but I will not do him the injustice to say that he really intended to play a mere farce. What, in the name of common sense, could he do with a single corps, when ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... yarn of human life, tragedy is never far asunder from farce; and it is amusing to retrace in immediate succession to this incident of epic dignity, which has its only parallel by the way in the case of Vasco de Gama, (according to the narrative of Camoens,) when met ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... coffee-man. The empress made me think of Parthenope[245] in "The Rehearsal"; for her mother keeps an ale-house in the suburbs of Amsterdam. When the tragedy was over, they entertained us with a short farce, in which the cobbler did his part to a miracle; but upon inquiry, I found he had really been working at his own trade, and representing on the stage what he acted every day in his shop. The profits of the theatre maintain ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... said, "I am very much afraid you will never succeed as a boy. It seems to me that even an ordinarily masculine girl of your age would have been clear-headed enough to see the absurdity of your little farce. It is nothing but a farce, mere babyishness. You have been playing with yourself and with your doll. No boy could ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... a stand of weapons near him, drew it from its scabbard and kissing the hilt, held it out to De Launay who did the same—"That is understood! And for the rest, Roger my friend, take it all lightly and easily—as a farce!—as a bit of human comedy, with a great actor cast for the chief role. We are only supers, you and I, but we shall do well to stand near the wings in ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... it was not the parable of the play. They used dialogue not in the original. It had a significance which the audience were not slow to appreciate, and went far to turn "The Sunburst Trail" at this point into a comedy-farce. When this new dialogue began, O'Ryan could scarcely trust his ears, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... no opportunity to prevaricate if I once challenged him. Now, he might have the effrontery to deny what I had seen with my own eyes, and could swear to. By lying in wait for him again, and accosting him whilst he was in the very act of perpetrating his solemn farce, I should deprive him of all power of evasion and escape. And so I determined ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... accident, or perhaps from a pardonable pique at having the duty taken out of his hands), was not at his elbow to prompt him when at fault—at these times the cant phrase of the officers, taken from some farce, used to be, "York, ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... nightingale notes among the canvass groves and hollyhock gardens of Drury Lane and Covent Garden; or to sup on the frowning woes of tragedy, the intrigues of an interlude dished up as an entremet, or a melodrama for a ragout; or the wit and waggery of a farce, sweet and soft-flowing like a petit-verre, to finish the repast. They go, and between the acts try to count the wax and gas, the feet, and foot lights till they are purblind; they return home and dream of Desdemona, sing themselves to sleep with the notes of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 360 - Vol. XIII. No. 360, Saturday, March 14, 1829 • Various
... no full report of it, for I don't want to change the words he used. He said a great deal of the majesty of the gods, and how the honour ought not to be given away to every Tom, Dick, or Harry. "Once," said he, "it was a great thing to become a god; now you have made it a farce. Therefore, that you may not think I am speaking against one person instead of the general custom, I propose that from this day forward the godhead be given to none of those who eat the fruits of the earth, or whom mother earth doth nourish. After this bill has been read ...
— Apocolocyntosis • Lucius Seneca
... demolition of its fortifications and the loss of its charter. (4) In 1685 the sentiments of the place were again enthusiastically "agin the government," and Monmouth was accorded here a royal ovation and was proclaimed king in the market-place. But this coup de theatre was only an introductory farce to the grim tragedy which followed. When Monmouth's hopes of sovereignty were rudely shattered by the melee at Sedgemoor the town was handed over for pacification to the tender mercies of Kirke and the brutal justice of Jeffreys. The rebels got short shrift from both. Kirke, without preliminary ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... your mind of the fact that China is a sovereign state! She is bound hand and foot, helpless, mortgaged up to the hilt. Every foreigner in China knows it, and the Chinese know it themselves only too well. It seems such a farce to give them the courtesy title of sovereignty. I don't think you realize, never having been in this country, what a farce it really is. I am not able to write you a learned book. All I can do is to write you these letters, which are surely devoid of all legal verbiage, because I don't know ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... notwithstanding his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, he hated music with an entire sincerity. He also affected to hate the drama; but some have thought this accounted for by the fact that, early in his career, he was damned for the farce of Three Hours after Marriage, which, after the fashion of our own days, he concocted with another, the co-author in this case being a wit of no less calibre than Gay, the author of The Beggars' Opera. The astonished audience bore it as best they might till the last act, when the two ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... was as honest and manly, perhaps I may say as sympathetic with the feeling of those about him, on this occasion, as was Charles Lamb, who, sitting with his sister in the front of the pit, on the night when his farce was damned at its first representation, gave way to the common feeling, and hissed and hooted lustily with the others around him. It was what might be expected from his honest and truthful nature, sometimes too ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Church services, they contained humorous elements, such as the realistically comic figure of the merchant who sold spices and ointment to the Maries on their way to the tomb of Christ. In the later plays these interpolations developed into scenes of roaring farce. When Herod learned of the escape of the Wise Men, he would rage violently about the stage and even among {25} the spectators. Noah's wife, in the Chester play of The Deluge, refuses point-blank ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... brother Robert had sent to Nancy from Paris. You will see by this that he was not altogether a thoughtless lad. Good-by, Mr. Robert; I leave you and your guiding-star to bolt the established orbit; for after this night the world will never be the same careless, happy-go-lucky world. The farce has its tragedy, and what tragedy is free of the ludificatory? Youth must run its course, even as the gay, wild brook must riot on its way to join the ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... in a little French musical farce together at Cornelys's; he had a charming voice and sang beautifully, as ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... did not find the joy of it. Vauxhall is a little better; for the garden is pleasanter, and one goes by water. Our operas are almost over; there were but three-and-forty people last night in the pit and boxes. There is a little simple farce at Drury Lane, called "Miss Lucy in Town,"(591) in which Mrs. Clive (592) mimes the Muscovita admirably, and Beard, Amorevoli tolerably. But all the run is now after Garrick, a wine-merchant, who is turned player, at Goodman's-fields. He plays all parts, and is a very good mimic. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... I say, it is very possible that such a Piece may please the Few, and displease the Many. And as a Proof of the bad Taste of the Multitude, we find in this Nation of ours, that a vile Pantomime Piece, full of Machinery, or a lewd blasphemous Comedy, or wretched Farce, or an empty obscure low Ballad Opera, (in all which, to the scandal of our Nation and Age, we surpass all the World) shall draw together crowded Audiences, when there is full Elbow-Room at a noble ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... from all the commonplace activities of the campaign. There were two days of suspense to be outworn, and if he could have compassed it he would have been glad to efface himself completely. Since that was impossible, and since it seemed equally impossible that he should go on keeping up the farce of the modus vivendi after he had taken the step which would presently blazon his name to the world as that of his father's accuser, he bought the morning papers hurriedly at the hotel news-stand and went down the avenue to get his breakfast at the railroad restaurant, where ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... reality. . . . It's as they float towards the window that sometimes they hear the girl talking to herself. 'Don't be a fool,' she says angrily, 'you've got to face facts, my dear. And a possible.' Charming without a bean in the world isn't a fact—it's a farce. It simply can't be done. . . . And three new very smart ideas in their best glad rags make three long noses at the poor little dowdy fellows as they go fluttering away to ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... a governor; a sailor or a deserter transformed into a district magistrate, collector, or military commander of a populous province, without any other counsellor than his own crude understanding, or any other guide than his passion. Such a metamorphosis would excite laughter in a comedy or farce; but, realized in the theatre of human life, it must give rise to sensations of a very different nature. Who is there that does not feel horror-struck, and tremble for the innocent, when he sees a being of ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... ornament, or a toy, to be kept in a luxurious cage. To soil her pretty hands would be disgraceful! Even f she can't afford a maid, the modern devices of science make the care of her four-room apartment a farce. Electric dish-washer, clothes-washer, vacuum-cleaner, and the near-by delicatessen and the caterer simply rob a young wife of her housewifely heritage. If she has a baby—which happens occasionally, Carley, in spite ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... Senate, rather than a committee, should decide the conditions. But when he was outvoted, Douglas adopted the sensible course of refusing to obstruct the work of the Committee of Thirteen by any instructions. He was inclined to believe the whole project a farce: well, if it was, the sooner it was over, the better; he was not disposed to wrangle and turn the ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... looked like secret understanding or sympathy; perhaps, however, it was only as head and representative of the family. She looked well; but, unfortunately, a trifling carelessness in dress had nearly concluded the farce. Recollecting, however, that they were packing up for a temporary removal, to take place this very day, an apology was obvious. Having made to myself the apology, I went further, and found that there was politeness, at least, in receiving me, and in ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... line 2 of essay. Cockletop. In O'Keeffe's farce "Modern Antiques." This farce is no longer played, although a skilful hand might, I think, make it attractive to our audiences. Barry Cornwall in his memoir of Lamb has a passage concerning Munden as Cockletop, which helps to support ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... and, though he made light of Sir Edward, it was with a startling candor that he added, "But woman's a riddle indeed if Elizabeth would give her shoe-tie for Cecil." Lady Angleby was so amazed and shocked that she made no answer whatever. The squire went on: "The farce had better pause—or end. Elizabeth is sensitive and shrewd enough. Cecil has no heart to give her, and she will never give hers unless in fair exchange. I have observed her all along, and that is the conclusion I have come to. She saw Miss Julia Gardiner at Ryde, and fathomed that old story: she ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... pro-slavery lodges in Missouri went across the border to vote against and perhaps to shoot Free-State men who disputed the right of the South to plant and to maintain slavery there. Under these circumstances the first election for members of the territorial legislature was a farce. Yet Reeder felt obliged to let the new assembly go on with its work of making easy the immigration of masters with their "property"; when he went East a little later he took occasion to protest in a public address against the intrusion of Missouri voters. He was regretfully ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... having been a daughter of the great Umako. The throne was therefore offered to him. But since the offer followed, instead of preceding the Empress' approval of Prince Karu, Furubito recognized the farce, and knowing that, though he might rule in defiance of the Kamatari faction, he could not hope to rule with its consent, he threw away his sword and declared his intention ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... The Jacobite farce, or tragedy, was speedily brought to a close by the battle of Culloden; there did Charlie wish himself back again o'er the water, exhibiting the most unmistakable signs of pusillanimity; there were the clans cut to pieces, at least those who could be brought to the charge, and there fell ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... of the leading hotels, which seemed very splendid to her and that night she saw Franklin on the stage as one of "the three Dromios" in a farce called "Incog," a piece which made her laugh till she ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... hundreds who examine not for themselves; and are easily deluded, by the fairest promises, to surrender their opinions to another's guidance: these are the supporters of quackery, and the encouragers of those needy plunderers, who would render medicine a farce, that they might ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... some brother of the same craft, was quite ready for an affair that could only increase his popularity. Catching up his jharroo, or broom, he began to shower blows upon the unfortunate Piroo, yet never ceasing to dance round him so grotesquely that the fight was too much of a farce for any one to think of interfering. Yet the blows went home pretty hard, and as the broom was a sort of besom made of the springy ribs of the palm-leaf it stung sharply where ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... various useful branches of literature, among whom Didymus, surnamed Chalcenterus, a man celebrated for his writings on many subjects of science, deserves especial mention; who, in the six books in which he, sometimes incorrectly, attacks Cicero, imitating those malignant farce writers, is justly blamed by the learned as a puppy barking from a distance with puny voice against the mighty ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... like a subordinate who stays behind to say a silly thing in a farce. Having overrun Scotland, England, France, Palestine, and Germany, Sir Walter, in the work before us, introduces us to some of the most stirring times of Swiss story. Upon this simple intimation, the reader will anticipate all the fascinations ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 373, Supplementary Number • Various
... made but three hours' journey through The Wady Oases. We had not proceeded an hour en route, when the same farce was attempted to be played upon us as yesterday; three or four people coming galloping up to us to stop us, in order to collect the customs-dues. This they did a second time, after letting us go on once. I was determined now to show I was not a slave-dealer, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... the autumn last past but two shows had a war motive: One "General Post," a story of the fall of caste from English life during the war, telling how a tailor became a general; the other "The Better 'Ole," a farce comedy, with a few musical skits in it, staged entirely "at the front." "The Better 'Ole" could be put on in any American town and the fun would raise the roof! There is no story to it; the show is but a series of ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... of what you were, and again I do not laugh. Then what is it that the world outside must have laughed with a very self-conscious wisdom? Its laughter was nothing to us then, and to-day is to me as nothing. Is it not always ready to weep at a farce and laugh ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... or mime alone the last still vigorous product of the national literature, the Atellan farce, became engrafted with the ethological offshoots of Greek comedy, which Alexandrinism cultivated with greater poetical vigour and better success than any other branch of poetry. The mime originated out of the dances in character to the flute, which had long been usual, and which were performed ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... would put a stop to it, I say it is too much to expect of any man that he should face the prospect of being ruined and probably murdered, and his family reduced to beggary, in order to enable the Government to keep up the farce of pretending that they are trying to ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... latter, and find in it a higher and more noble happiness; but nature has been just enough to grant the common multitude, in the coarser pleasures, a more easily attainable happiness. Enjoy the moment, till the farce of life is ended! Virtue exists only in society, which restrains from evil by its laws, and incites to good by rousing the love of honor. The good man, who subordinates his own welfare to that of society, acts ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... powerful genius creating itself amidst the most adverse elements. We have the progress of that self-education which struck out an untried path of its own, from the time Moliere had not yet acquired his art to the glorious days when he gave his country a Plautus in his farce, a Terence in his composition, and a Menander in his moral truths. But the difficulties overcome, and the disappointments incurred, his modesty and his confidence, and, what was not less extraordinary, his own domestic life in perpetual conflict ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... and repeated in every direction. Great excitement was created in the university and in the whole city. By these theses it was shown that the power to grant the pardon of sin, and to remit its penalty, had never been committed to the pope or to any other man. The whole scheme was a farce,—an artifice to extort money by playing upon the superstitions of the people,—a device of Satan to destroy the souls of all who should trust to its lying pretensions. It was also clearly shown that the gospel ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... machinery of a great police department seems helpless to discover anything. The high chiefs and commissioners grant a condescending permission when Muller asks, "May I do this? ... or may I handle this case this way?" both parties knowing all the while that it is a farce, and that the department waits helpless until this humble little man saves its honour by solving some problem before which its intricate machinery has ...
— The Case of the Registered Letter • Augusta Groner
... we couldn't repeat that little farce we gave at school last June. It wouldn't be much work, for we all know our parts. Beside ours, there was only one that amounted to anything. I thought maybe Claire would take that. The other characters have so little to do that we could easily pick ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... ordonnory;" and down went Tom's fist, with a loud report, into the palm of his left hand. I burst into a shout of laughter at the comicality of Tom's melancholy face, and the smacking of his lips, as he called to mind the acidity of the wine; and R——, judge as he was, could not resist the farce. ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... looked up to learn the reason; and was astounded to find her smiling at him as lightly and gaily as if nothing had occurred to interrupt her most whimsical mood; as if the question he had put to her had not been put, or were a farce, a jest, a ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... often careless and futile: he will squander—(as in Vingt-neuf Degres a l'Ombre and l'Avare en Gants Jaunes)—an idea that rightly belongs to the domain of pure comedy on the presentation of a most uproarious farce. But he is never any falser to his vocation than this. Now and then, as in Moi and le Voyage de M. Perrichon, he is an excellent comic poet, dealing with comedy seriously as comedy should be dealt with, and incarnating ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... in the Island. The United States wishes nothing of Cuba except that it shall prosper morally and materially, and wishes nothing of the Cubans save that they shall be able to preserve order among themselves and therefore to preserve their independence. If the elections become a farce, and if the insurrectionary habit becomes confirmed in the Island, it is absolutely out of the question that the Island should continue independent; and the United States, which has assumed the sponsorship before the civilized world for Cuba's career as a nation, would again ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... "at length the farce is played—away with those slaves whom I have forced through the difficult gates of Joy!" and she clapped her hands. But when they had borne the bodies thence she drew me to ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... and observed with his usual acuteness, interrupted the farce at that moment by springing to the boat, and placing his fore paws in it, he gently seized the blanket in his mouth, and pulled it from her unresisting shoulders. A bark of pleasure succeeded this exploit, as he laid his shaggy head in her lap, ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... those broader fields of activity which now constitute church work. Women are beginning to realize that they are wasting their efforts and energies in trying to effect moral and social reforms dependent upon legislative action or law enforcement and they are asking: 'Shall we go on with the farce of attacking the constantly growing evils of intemperance, immorality and crime which menace our homes, our children and society at large, knowing that our efforts are useless and futile, or shall we take a stand ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... was a farce to get rid of Stephen Grey, who was nothing compared with his brother-in-law, but his indignation was not the less; and Mr. Hastings, when he saw the long blue coat flying up the stairs, smiled quietly, though he pitied the poor old man, who was thus kept vibrating ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... you the direction of the vortices of which you are composed, for a time, while they are on their way to join other vortices in the dance of death. The vortices do nothing but dance, spin and whirl for ever through life, the farce; through death, the tragedy and through all the eternity of the epilogue. What ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... the Dorset County Chronicle. His chief studies, however, were philological; and in 1829 he published An Etymological Glossary of English Words of Foreign Derivation. In 1832 a strolling company of actors visited Mere, and Barnes wrote a farce, The Honest Thief, which they produced, and a comedy which was played at Wincanton. Barnes also wrote a number of educational books, such as Elements of Perspective, Outlines of Geography, and in 1833 first began his poems in the Dorsetshire dialect, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... gifted, seems not to have wholly deserted him even in the serious moments when penning an acceptance to mortal combat. The terms of meeting indicated—which he as the challenged party had the right to dictate—lend color to the opinion that he regarded the affair in the light of a mere farce. His superior height and length of arm remembered, and the position of the less favored Shields, with broadsword in hand, at the opposite side of the board, and not permitted "upon forfeit of his life" to advance an inch —the picture is indeed a ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... Verena's breath away; she didn't suppose you could hear any one say such a thing as that in the nineteenth century, even the least advanced. It was of a piece with his denouncing the spread of education; he thought the spread of education a gigantic farce—people stuffing their heads with a lot of empty catchwords that prevented them from doing their work quietly and honestly. You had a right to an education only if you had an intelligence, and if you looked at the matter ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... for a play," she remarked, dryly, "but 'tis a mortial poor one in real life, and I'm best out of it." She turned the knob with eager fingers and pulled the door toward her. It opened on a dumbwaiter shaft, empty and impressive. Patsy's expression would have scored a hit in farce comedy. Unfortunately there was no audience present to appreciate it here, and the prompter forgot to ring down the curtain just then, so that Patsy stood helpless, forced to go on hearing all that Marjorie and her leading man wished to improvise ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... has been contagious. I've had to play out the farce with you. To-day I won't play. I'm too hurt, angry, wounded, sore. You have always been my bitterest foe. You brought Nan to New York to ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... life in a moment of frivolous recklessness, but you had entered into mine with another purpose, and I could not rid myself of you. Your hold upon me was strong. It grew stronger, do what I would, and the farce became ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... perpetuate babyhood, in the vain hope of preferring innocence: nor could I shelter myself by saying how little I understood of the dialect it was written in, as the action was nothing less than equivocal; and in the burletta which was tacked to it by way of farce, I saw the soprano fingers who played the women's parts, and who see more of the world than these friars, blush for shame, two or three times, while the company, most of them grave ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... the year 1839, I landed at Tarifa, from the coast of Barbary. I arrived in a small felouk laden with hides for Cadiz, to which place I was myself going. We stopped at Tarifa in order to perform quarantine, which, however, turned out a mere farce, as we were all permitted to come on shore; the master of the felouk having bribed the port captain with a few fowls. We formed a motley group. A rich Moor and his son, a child, with their Jewish servant Yusouf, and myself with my own man Hayim ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... over—the whole motley farce—and, while it lasts, nothing in it matters so very greatly, or at any rate matters enough to disturb our amusement, our good-temper, our toleration. Nothing matters so very greatly. And yet everything—each of us, as we try to make our difficult meanings clear, the meanings of our hidden souls, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... impropriety being discovered. Had they mentioned it openly in Parliament on October 11, the matter might have ended there. But they lacked the nerve: the occasion passed: and nothing remained, especially for Rufus, but evasion, shiftiness, half-truth passing as whole truth, the farce of indignant virtue—a performance which left him not a shred of dignity and ought to have made it unthinkable that he should ever again be given public office. The perfect word on the whole episode was uttered, not by either Gilbert or Cecil Chesterton or by any ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... hither and thither of the multitudes who inhabit it, tormented him incessantly. He always chafed at it, and he never seemed sure that he had a right to the enjoyment of the simplest pleasures so long as London was before him. What a farce, he would cry, is all this poetry, philosophy, art, and culture, when millions of wretched mortals are doomed to the eternal darkness and crime of the city! Here are the educated classes occupying themselves with exquisite emotions, with speculations upon the Infinite, ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... and kept in subjection an unsuspecting and unarmed population from the 19th to the 24th of April. For six days murder and treason held joint sway; and at the conclusion of their tragedy of horrid barbarities they gave the farce of holding an election for members of the house ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... intrigued and perhaps just a little scandalised the town with a most engagingly flippant and piquant farce all about an accidentally bigamous beauty, certainly shows courage in launching so serious a discussion as The Unknown. And in the silly season too. I see that in a quite unlikely interview (but then all modern interviews are unlikely) he defends ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... that the girl's Catholicism was a farce? Did I not tell Monseigneur Guerillot? This was what she aimed at all those years, with such perfect hypocrisy? It was the Palais Castagna. And she will enter there as mistress!.... She will bring there the dishonor of that pirated gold on which there are stains ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... colder than the one before the Juber Island farce. Part of the night I marched with my friends of the 53rd Sikhs, with Newitt and with Heathcote. Every one anticipated a very hard fight. We were up against a position which was reputed to be as strong ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... said, preserving his impassive bearing. "The farce was bound to end soon. And it ended in a very few minutes. And it ended well. Had she not come in, it might have ended badly. Her brother, of course, did not count. They had slipped into the house quietly some time before. The printing-cellar had an entrance of its own. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... and these books be as dead as Hugh Conway's "Called Back" in less than ten years. I am perfectly willing to admit all these mutations of taste, but there is something deeper than that. Do you know, I have a notion that the reign of cheap melodrama and farce-comedy on our stage and of the "shilling shocker" during the last two years is due largely to our financial condition. Many of you are business men, and I know how you talk. I ask you to go to see a serious play, and you say: "Well, I will tell you; I am pretty well worn out when business is ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... an attempt to corrupt the source of that justice under law which flows from trial by jury. Miss Anthony's case has passed from its gayest to its gravest character. United States courts are not stages for the enactment of comedy or farce, and the promptness and decision of their judges in sentencing to prison culprits convicted before them show that they are no respecters ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... of the United States has this farce been repeated, and in every case with the same result. It is now generally acknowledged that the attempt to regulate the price of gas by competition is unwise and harmful. Prof. E. J. James, of the University of Pennsylvania, in a monograph entitled "The Relation of ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... consulship under Nerva in the year 97. At this point he closed his public career. He had reached the goal of a politician's ambition and had become known as one of the best speakers of his time, but he seems to have realized that under the Principate politics was a dull farce, and that oratory was of little value in a time of peace and strong government. The rest of his life was to be spent in writing history. In the year of his consulship or immediately after it, he published the Agricola and Germania, short monographs in which ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... in many lynchings. In the old days they were the inseparables, the Frontier and Judge Lynch. If a white man killed a Mexican or Indian nothing was done, except perhaps to hold a farce of a trial with the killer in the end turned loose; and if a white man killed another white man there was seldom much outcry, unless the case was cold-blooded murder or the killer was already unpopular. But let a Mexican or an Indian lift one finger against ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... Calabrian boor approached the castle; the king received him at the gate, fell at his feet, and asked him for life and health. The Calabrian played his part in so ridiculous a manner, that Faustus could not avoid laughing aloud at the farce. Tristan and his myrmidons were advancing to seize him, and he would doubtlessly have paid for laughing with his life, had not the Devil rescued him from their claws, and flown away with him. When they arrived ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... daughter saw each other since Lady Ashburnham's death. They were both in tears, and I chid them for being together, and made Lady Betty go to her own chamber; then sat a while with the Duchess, and went after Lady Betty, and all was well. There is something of farce in all these mournings, let them be ever so serious. People will pretend to grieve more than they really do, and that takes off from their true grief. I then went to the Duchess of Hamilton, who never grieved, but raged, and stormed, and railed.(18) She is pretty quiet now, but has a diabolical ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... too clever for me, and so I suppose you have the right to mock me. There is no need to go on with this farce. The sight of your treasures gave me the gold-fever, I suppose, and it drove me mad, as it has driven many others mad, and I betrayed you. There is no use saying any more. I see that I have been betrayed too, and that my life is in your hands, so I need only say that I keep the right of taking ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... were just flung out there, and on we went. Every day the coast looked the same, as though we had not moved; but we passed various places—trading places—with names like Gran' Bassam Little Popo, names that seemed to belong to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister backcloth. The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform somberness of the coast, seemed ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... skirmishes with the Spanish troops that looked more like kind of tired-out feuds than anything else. The war was a joke to us, and of no interest to them. We never could see it any other way than as a howling farce-comedy that the San Augustine Rifles were actually fighting to uphold the Stars and Stripes. And the blamed little senors didn't get enough pay to make them care whether they were patriots or traitors. Now and then somebody would ...
— Options • O. Henry
... dulness a charm. In a word it was he who first opened to men the world of modern fiction. Nor does English literature owe less to him in its form. Humour has always been an English quality, but with the essayist humour for the first time severed itself from farce; it was no longer forced, riotous, extravagant; it acquired taste, gentleness, adroitness, finesse, lightness of touch, a delicate colouring of playful fancy. It preserved indeed its old sympathy with pity, with passion; but it ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... comedy, to be produced at the Bijou. The first prize went to George F. Abbott, Rochester, N.Y., for his very excellent comedy, 'The Man in the Manhole,' and the second prize to S.F. Austin, of San Antonio, Tex., for a farce, 'The Winning ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... unknown delegate hope to receive the support of the convention. It seems unreasonable, and he is on the point of writing to Martha that the effort could not help but end in a ridiculous farce, when an interruption prevents him from doing so. A card is brought to his room. ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... and distrust the Greeks, to underrate their exploits, and to declaim against their honesty. The revolution was treated as a war of words, the defence of Missolonghi as a trifle, and the naval warfare as a farce. The Greeks have since, on the mountains of Maina, and on the plain of Phthiotis, shown themselves so far superior to the Bavarians when engaged in the field, that we shall say nothing on that subject. Their honesty has been generally ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... whose name is upon the frontier a memento mori; painted to him in every evil light; now a horse-thief like those in Moyamensing; now an assassin like a New York rowdy; now a treaty-breaker like an Austrian; now a Palmer with poisoned arrows; now a judicial murderer and Jeffries, after a fierce farce of trial condemning his victim to bloody death; or a Jew with hospitable speeches cozening some fainting stranger into ambuscade, there to burk him, and account it a deed grateful to ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... "The wretched ape! Campbell, your first thought was the true one: you must not fight that cur. After all, it's a farce: you won't fire at him, and he can't hit you—so leave ill alone. Beside, for Scoutbush's sake, her sake, every one's sake, the thing must be hushed up. If the fellow chooses to duck under into the London mire, let him lie there, and ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... preserved had some story linking it with others, or with his peculiar fancies, and each one had its precise place in a sort of epos, as certainly as each of the persons in the confusion of a pantomime or a farce has his own ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... garrison of Washington was a brigade of infantry and a battery of artillery. I never doubted Mr. Johnson's sincerity in wishing to befriend me, but this was the broadest kind of a farce, or meant mischief. I therefore appealed to him by letter to allow me to remain where I was, and where I could do service, real service, and received ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... and both parties fired. No harm was done; but apologies were out of the question, and "another shot" was loudly and peremptorily called for, and the distance, eight paces was shortened to six. The farce was again repeated, when Murray, wondering at the bloodless result, espied a smile on the features of his second, which did not seem in keeping with the gravity of the occasion. His suspicions were ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... of the Leander gave a grand entertainment to the inhabitants of Halifax and officers of the fleet; a play, ball, and supper, which went off remarkably well. The Iron Chest was the play; the Wags of Windsor the farce. I did not perform being steward of the supper, but merely spoke the prologue. Our stage was very large and scenery very good, and on the whole, nothing could go off with more ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... solicit their patronage. The application succeeded, coloured coats with metal buttons came into fashion, and dandies of the first water appeared in bright snuff-coloured, pale green, and blue coats, such as are now only worn by Paul Bedford or Keeley, in broad farce. In 1836 a cheap mode of gilding, smart for a day, dull and shabby in a week, completely destroyed the character of gilt buttons, and brought up the Florentine again. This change was, no doubt, materially assisted and maintained by Bulwer's novel of "Pelham," which set ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... "I have for once made a false step, and for once you have had the wit to profit by it. The farce of the cobbler ends to-day; and I confess to you (with my compliments) that you have had the best of it. Blood will out; and you have certainly a choice idea of how to make ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... States and the federal government, including the federal judiciary, from absolute control of corporate monopoly. How to restore the voice of the citizen in the government of his country; and how to put an end to those proceedings in some of the higher courts which are farce and mockery on one side, and a criminal usurpation and oppression on ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... I.; and Sir Walter Scott thinks it "highly probable" that this "piece of phantasmagoria was conducted by means of the secret passages and recesses in the Labyrinth of Rosamond"—it must be admitted, a very convenient scene for such a farce. Sir Walter says, "I have not the book at hand"—neither have we; but we may probably allude to this curious affair on some future occasion. In the meantime, if our present reference should kindle the curiosity of the reader, and he may not be disposed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 327, August 16, 1828 • Various
... Sheridan, in an official report, says the "trial of a white man for the murder of a freedman in Texas would be a farce; and, in making this statement, I make it because truth compels me, and for no other reason.... Over the killing of many freedmen nothing is done." General Sheridan cites cases in which our National soldiers wearing the uniform of the Republic have been deliberately shot "without ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... of the best writers of our time, whether for comedy or for tragedy; and for extravaganza, too, as witness his lively farce called The Hand of Ethelberta. He can write dialogue or description. He is so excellent in either that either, as you read it, appears to make for your highest pleasure. If his characters talk, you would gladly have them talk to the end of the book. If ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... any of your readers inform me who Newburgh Hamilton was? He wrote two pieces in my library, viz. (1.) Petticoat Plotter, a farce in two acts; acted at Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, 1720, 12mo. This has been mutilated by Henry Ward, a York comedian, and actually printed by him as his own production, in the collection of plays ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... I did not hesitate. And now I am rich, I am famous, you come to me. You offer me that worthless thing,—your love. When I was poor, struggling alone, friendless, did you even write to me? Did you by word or look recognize me? No! The farce is played out. I wonder at your coming ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... effect that he made his will as follows: "I have nothing—I owe much—I leave the rest to the poor." And also that he sent a message as follows, to Cardinal du Ballay. "Tell the cardinal I am going to try the great 'perhaps'—you are a fool—draw the curtain—the farce is done." These were fictions invented by the very pious Catholics, who hated him for his ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... soft but mocking voice. "Be amiable! Let us talk. I come for peace, not for war. Let us make terms with each other. I am sick of this farce of hostility between husband and wife—let us ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... weakness when brought suddenly into the light. When the tradition is Satyric, as here, the same process produces almost an opposite effect. It is somewhat as though the main plot of a gross and jolly farce were pondered over and made more true to human character till it emerged as a refined and rather pathetic comedy. The making drunk of the Three Grey Sisters disappears; one can only just see the trace of its having once been present. ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... the right working of responsible government that parties should declare their principles clearly and stand or fall by them. If they held one set of principles out of office and another set in office they would reduce responsible government to a farce. He acknowledged the services which Hincks and Morin had rendered in fighting for responsible government; but he charged them with betraying that principle by their own conduct in office. Two systems of government, he ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... and prescribed the remedies, which consisted chiefly of rich offerings to the Fairies, who were to relieve him. He frequently received letters from the Fairy King to the same effect, written in an imperious style, suited to the occasion. The farce was carried on for several months, and the King at different times is supposed to have given the Fairy King some two lacs of rupees, which he shared liberally ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... collective bargaining. All three groups, the employer and public groups and of course the labor group, advocated collective bargaining,—but with a difference. The labor group insisted that collective bargaining is doomed to be a farce unless the employes are allowed to choose as their spokesmen representatives of the national trade union. In the absence of a powerful protector in the national union, they argued, the workers in a shop can never feel themselves on a bargaining equality with their employer, nor can they be ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... little for this silly farce," observed the Major, looking in at one of the windows, after I had gone over Marble's affair in detail. "If not, we will continue our walk, and wait for the ladies to come out. Drewett and Hardinge will take ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... the oration of an ambitious leader in a farce; he held his hearers with his eloquence, as much as he had done with the song of his grotesque and desecrating love. He vaunted his sagacity and his valour, and overwhelmed with invective all sorts of names—my own and Castro's among them. He revealed the unholy ideals of all that band of scoundrels—ideals ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... imitated from the children they doubtless never studied, and perhaps never loved. Why so? They might have chosen broken English of other sorts—that, for example, which was once thought amusing in farce, as spoken by the Frenchman conceived by the Englishman—a complication of humour fictitious enough, one might think, to please anyone; or else a fragment of negro dialect; or the style of telegrams; or the masterly adaptation of the simple savage's English devised by ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... come here to drink tea, or lemon squashes," said the duchess. "I've come to learn what this means—to put an end to this ridiculous farce?" ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... from her with horror, 'has it come to this?—Then indeed it is time that this wretched farce should end!' ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... home at once. Dick has announced his engagement to an actress—a soubrette, too, in a farce-comedy. If it had been a woman who played Shakespeare, it would have been bad enough, but a girl who sings and dances and does all sorts of things, including wearing her dresses up-side down, as it were—that is, too high at the bottom and too low at the top—well, ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... there, Lola," he said, going on as though Ferber's interruption had not occurred. "Not that I blame either Belle or myself. If anything was ever calculated to drive a man nuts, this farce was. As the only female Prime in the system, Belle should have been in automatically—she had no competition. And to anybody with three brain cells working the other place lay between you, Lola, and the other three female Ops in ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... are greying, how many of us know you? Do we know your Rue du Pont Neuf, with its silent melodrama under the dawning heavens, or do we know only the farce of your Montmartre? Do we know the drama of your Comptoir, of your Rue Montorgueil, when your skies are faintly lighting, or do we know only the burlesque of your Maxim's and your Catelans? Do we, when the week's work of your humbler people is done, see the ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... musket and other things were brought in, every one then present, or who came after, pretended to have had some hand in recovering them, and claimed a reward accordingly. But there was no one who acted this farce so well as Nuno, a man of some note, and well known to us when I was here in 1769. This man came, with all the savage fury imaginable in his countenance, and a large club in his hand, with which he beat about ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... gash upon the brow, You laid us at the altar's foot, with deep and solemn vow! "Come down!" ye cried—he trembling came—even to our bloody bed; "Uncover!" and 'twas tamely done!—(like a mean puppet led, Sank he whose life had been a farce, with fear unwonted shaken). Meanwhile his army fled the field, which, dying, we had taken! Loudly in "Jesus, thou my trust!" the anthem'd voices peal; Why did the victor-crowds forget the sterner ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... a hundred or two dollars were protected by the homestead law. The facetious deputy, Clem Tweed, with "Christmas in his bones," would have committed a misdemeanor in seriously levying upon them. He had held the affair as a capital farce—even affecting with wild, appropriating gambols to seize the baby and the cat—and fully realized that malice only had prompted the whole proceeding, to humiliate Ross Gilhooley and illustrate the completeness of the victory which Peter ...
— Who Crosses Storm Mountain? - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... a thing to know that you should have loved me for myself alone, that you were not going to marry me for my rank and position, as many another girl would have done, that I was tempted to play the farce to the end. It was folly, but the gods punish folly more surely and quickly than they punish crime. The night that you discovered I had deceived you, I had resolved to tell you the truth and beg your forgiveness. But it was too late. Most of our good resolutions come too late, Nell. ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... miserable farce the life of men and women seems to us! Time, which is so precious that even the Creator will not give a second moment until the first is gone, they throw away as though it were water. Opportunities which angels covet they fling ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... when I had almost forgotten the farce, I heard a carriage stopping at my door, and looking out of my window saw M. de la Tour d'Auvergne skipping nimbly out of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... were ever any of us very much in love with the profession. We took things easily. Of course there were some parts we liked better than others, but we played everything that came in our way—Comedy, Farce, Melodrama. My elder sisters quitted the stage before they had much time to distinguish themselves. They were each in turn, on their marriage, honoured with a paragraph in the principal dramatic papers, but no one said the ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... The inner history of this scene is not a tragedy, but a farce. For two weeks or more Coronado had been watching his uncle day and night, and at last had found in his trunk a paper of powder which he suspected to be arsenic. A blunderer would have destroyed or hidden it, thereby warning Garcia that he was being looked after, and causing him to be more careful ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... fairly successful indeed; yet a man of his superiority, and with a less obtrusive policy, might, who knows? have got the length of half a crown. A man who prides himself upon persuasion should learn the persuasive faculty of silence, above all as to his own misdeeds. It is only in the farce and for dramatic purposes that Scapin enlarges on his peculiar talents to the ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gasped, looking round while Levin reluctantly assented to the doctor's words. "No; so I can say it.... It was for her sake I went through that farce. She's so sweet; but you and I can't deceive ourselves. This is what I believe in," he said, and, squeezing the bottle in his bony hand, he began ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... they seemed to court it, and often the several doors opening into our little hall served as important a part in preventing a meeting between Whistler and the enemy as the doors in the old-fashioned farce played in the husband ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... affairs on 21st January, when Louis XVI laid his head on the block in the Place de la Revolution. The news of this tragedy reached London late in the afternoon of the 23rd; and the horror which it aroused led to a demand at the Haymarket that the farce should be put off. On the advice of the Cabinet George III now intervened. At a Court held on the morrow at the Queen's House (on the site of Buckingham Palace) an order was issued that Chauvelin, as the envoy deputed by Louis XVI, should leave the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... Cuba is strict, and prohibits the genuine article from appearing on the stage. The theatre opens four times a week, including Sunday, and the entertainment is varied every night. To-day the company rehearse a local drama, a zarzuela, and a farce called 'Un Cuarto con dos Camas' being a version of Morton's 'Double-bedded Room.' A famous actor from Spain is the star of the present season. At rehearsal he is a fallen star, being extremely old and shaky, but at night his make-up is wonderful, and he draws large ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... lines, three words: 'Good-bye; remember me; be happy.'" And then after a long pause: "It's strange a person in my state should have a wish. Why should one eat one's breakfast the day one's hanged? What a creature is man! What a farce is life! Here I lie, worn down to a mere throbbing fever-point; I breathe and nothing more, and yet I DESIRE! My desire lives. If I could see her! Help me out with it and ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... and wrathfully—"no, I will not do you the pleasure to kill you, for that would turn a wretched farce into a tragedy, and make a hero of a comedian! You are a good comedian, and you have played your part well! I can testify to that. Go and claim credit for this with my father ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... the time when Nolan's braggadocio must have broken down. At first, they said, he took a very high tone, considered his imprisonment a mere farce, affected to enjoy the voyage, and all that; but Phillips said that after he came out of his state-room he never was the same man again. He never read aloud again, unless it was the Bible or Shakespeare, or something else he was sure of. But it was not that merely. He ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... poet, the humorist, the novelist, or the playwright. If the fictionist of whatever sort had succeeded in identifying himself with the scientist, he must leave the enjoyment of divine honors to the pianist, the farce-comedian, the portrait-painter, the emotional actor, and the architect, who still ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... grotesque farce. Why should wise men turn themselves into wild animals, if it is only in sport? I never ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... "End the farce, fool," he exclaimed to himself despondently, hurrying to the quarters of the Princess. She received him "in her bath,"—a circumstance not unusual and which meant a covered foot-bath and ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... aggrieved husband had always showed to him as something laughable, and an explosion of jealousy had never appeared more vulgar than it did while he sat patiently conjecturing if such a domestic cyclone might be counted upon to shake Connie to her senses. In the end he gave it up as a farce which he felt it would be beyond the power of his gravity to sustain. "I'll do anything in reason, heaven knows," he found himself confessing, after the instant's reflection, "but I'll be hanged before I'll set out in cold ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... rang for her maid. Turning to the pier glass, she threw on the electric light and scrutinized her features narrowly. "It's going," she murmured, "fast! God, how I hate those gray hairs! Oh, what a farce life is—what a howling, mocking farce! I hate it! I hate everything—everybody! No—that little girl—if it is possible for me to ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... said slowly; "I think she is too good even for you, and you have done all that any one could have expected of you, without keeping up the farce any longer. I am glad you did not ask if I believed you—because I could scarcely have forgiven you that question. Do you think ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... rather the people, with their vainglory and empty pomp, are particularly adapted to be victimised by impostors and are easy preys to them. Some of the tricks that have been played upon them do not lack humour. Take, for instance, the pretty farce of the Compagnie generale pour l'eclairage et le chauffage en Perse, which undertook to light the city of Teheran with no less than one thousand gas lights. Machinery was really imported at great ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... constitution, or that they would have endeavoured it, if they had continued in power, I beg their pardon if I have discovered a secret; but who could imagine they ever intended it should be one, after those overt acts with which they thought fit to conclude their farce? But perhaps they now find it convenient to deny vigorously, that the question may remain; "Why was the old ministry changed?" which they urge on without ceasing, as if no occasion in the least had been ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... priestess: that point was decided against her. These instances may serve as a specimen of the trifling declamations, into which such a man as Seneca was betrayed by his own imagination. Petronius has described the literary farce of the schools. Young men, he says, were there trained up in folly, neither seeing nor hearing any thing that could be of use in the business of life. They were taught to think of nothing, but pirates loaded with fetters on the sea-shore; tyrants by ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... have been still more unpleasant to have received such a Madame de Vaudemont as our cousin would have presented to us. Only think—he was the rival of an epicier! I heard that there was some curious denouement to the farce of that establishment; but I could never get from Vaudemont the particulars. He was ashamed of ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as a sin. Italia, nurse of every softer art, Who, feigning to refine, unmans the heart; 220 Who lays the realms of Sense and Virtue waste; Who mars while she pretends to mend our taste; Italia, to complete and crown our shame, Sends us a fiend, and Legion is his name. The farce of greatness without being great, Pride without power, titles without estate, Souls without vigour, bodies without force, Hate without cause, revenge without remorse, Dark, mean revenge, murder without defence, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... heroic character; but it was badly studied, and I a novice on the stage, was forgetting my part while fascinated by a pair of blue eyes. In the intoxication of the scene, the parents seem eager to close the bargain, and the farce ends in a common mockery. And this is all! So stale, so unprofitable, and so melancholy are the revisitings of what beat once so nobly and proudly in my bosom. Mina! as I wept when I lost thee, even now ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... as if I had touched a spring—and there he was at the door himself, rushing back. He, too, had remembered. It was almost a collision, and nothing but their good Southern breeding, the way they took it, saved it from being like a rowdy farce. ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... eyes, writhing in intolerable pain, she yet had a livid smile and a gentle word for her master. You have read the wonderful history of that death-bed? How she bade him marry again, and the reply the old king blubbered out, "Non, non: j'aurai des maitresses." There never was such a ghastly farce. I watch the astonishing scene—I stand by that awful bedside, wondering at the ways in which God has ordained the lives, loves, rewards, successes, passions, actions, ends of his creatures—and can't but laugh, in the presence of death, and with the saddest heart. In that ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sung of its joys and sorrows, its brilliant phantasies and harsh realities. Philosophers have spent their lives in vain attempts to solve its mysteries; and some have held and thought that life was nothing more than a stupendous farce, a delusion of the senses. Moralists have sought to impress mankind with the truth that "life is real," and teeming with grave responsibilities. Physiologists have busied themselves in observing the phenomena of life, and learning, therefrom, its laws. ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... Henry Leek, valet, would be added to the list of adventurous scoundrels who have pretended to be their masters. But if Witt should lose—then what a complication, and what further enigmas to be solved! If Witt should lose, the national funeral of Priam Farll had been a fraudulent farce. A common valet lay under the hallowed stones of the Abbey, and Europe had mourned in vain! If Witt should lose, a gigantic and unprecedented swindle had been practised upon the nation. Then the question would ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... about the British Government's action at the time of the Raid. Chamberlain behaved very honourably then. But it was afterwards, when Rhodes was not punished, that we knew it was all a farce, and that the British Government was bent on our destruction. When the burghers knew that Rhodes was not punished they ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... the representation of plays, especially those of the scriptural kind, and their constant practice in shows, processions, and vocal music easily accounts for their address in detaining the best company which England afforded in the fourteenth century at a religious farce for more than a week." These plays were no ordinary performances, no afternoon or evening entertainment, but a protracted drama lasting from three to eight days. In the reign of Richard II, A.D. 1391, the clerks were acting ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... thrown out by the consul upon the conclusion of the Farce of the Affidavits, we were again brought before him ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... story of Pierrot married to one woman and wishing to marry another; a farce mingled with passion, which had been discovered by a vaudeville-writer, aided by a poet, among the stock-pieces of the old Italian theatre. Renee took the part of the deserted wife, this time, appearing in various disguises when her husband was love-making elsewhere. Noemi was ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... revelation, he will kill me if he can, and I take a strange interest in knowing that I risk my life thus. Here we are in the woods," said Gerfaut, as he dropped the artist's arm and ceased limping; "they can no longer see us; the farce is played out. You know what I told you to say if you join them: you left me at the foot of a tree. You are forbidden to approach the sycamores, under penalty of receiving the shot from my gun in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... reversed. He next petitioned the House of Commons for readmission; but his petition was rejected, and a new writ issued, when he was returned by an overwhelming majority. The House expelled him again, and this farce of expulsion and reelection was enacted four distinct times, until at last his election was declared null and void. He subsequently brought an action against Lord Halifax for illegal imprisonment and the seizure of his papers, and obtained L4,000 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Royal of the United Kingdom. Some dark, foggy night, about November next, will be attempted by a Strolling Company of French Vagrants, an Old Pantomimic Farce, called Harlequin's Invasion, or the ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... he is going, what he is talking about, or what he means to say. He will tell you the whole story of the Second Punic War, speaking of a sentimental comedy played at the Gymnase Theatre, and a low farce of the Palais Royal Theatre will furnish him the pretext to quote ten lines of Xenophon in the original Greek. Monsieur Jules Janin is, notwithstanding all this, an excellent fellow, and a man of great talents; but you must ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... voices, yet each afraid, in spite of his bluster, to close with his opponent in actual contest. It was a miniature exhibition of the beak-to-beak challenging often indulged in by two rival cocks of the farmyard. For some minutes the little farce was kept up, then one of the birds became tired of the game and darted over to the ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... the feeling that had sprung up in his heart when she turned to him with tears in her eyes. He was angry again, and almost shouted after the retreating girl: 'You may make a good actress, but why did you think fit to play off this farce ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... considerable sympathy for cranks, and perhaps that is why I regard Mr. ONIONS' satire as a dry, gritty business. His humour is, of course, always a delightful thing, but here I fancy that he has not drawn the true line between comedy and farce, between satire that preserves the probabilities and indiscriminate exaggeration. Of the three Mr. ONIONSES who have at different times given me pleasure—the author of Widdershins, the author of In Accordance with the Evidence, and the author of Little Devil Doubt—I greatly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... out in the middle of ambitious schemes, is tragical enough at best; but when a man has been grudging himself his own life in the meanwhile, and saving up everything for the festival that was never to be, it becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on the confines of farce. The victim is dead - and he has cunningly overreached himself: a combination of calamities none the less absurd for being grim. To husband a favourite claret until the batch turns sour, is not at all an artful stroke of policy; and how ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lungs. He went into the back room and looked at himself in the glass and began and laughed all over from the beginning again. Then he looked at me and repeated himself. That's why I asked you if you thought an Irishman had any humor. He'd been doing farce comedy from the day I saw him without knowing it; and the first time he had an idea advanced to him with any intelligence in it he acted like two twelfths of the sextet in a 'Floradora' ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... most ironical of all, a gaping and smoke-stained building showed the half-torn remnant of a cinematograph picture, a fat gentleman in a bowler hat entering with a lady on either arm a gaily painted restaurant. Over this, in big letters, the word "FARCE." ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... crowded to the last instant, it was true; but what a farce it was, after all, Margaret said to herself in all honesty, to humor her in her little favorite belief that she was a busy woman! Milliner, manicure, butler, chef, club, card-table, tea table,—these and a thousand things like them filled her day, and they might all be swept away in ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... amour—the concept of man as a lascivious monster and of woman as his shrinking victim—in brief, the Don Juan idea in fresh bib and tucker. In such bilge lie the springs of many of the most vexatious delusions of the world, and of some of its loudest farce no less. It is thus that fatuous old maids are led to look under their beds for fabulous ravishers, and to cry out that they have been stabbed with hypodermic needles in cinema theatres, and to watch furtively ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... positively the worst production I've ever been in!" complained Mr. Hadley to Blake. "Did you ever see such a farce as when the Confederates were hidden in the orchard and the Unionists stormed over the stone wall? You'd think they were a lot of boys going after apples. Bah! It ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the War Front - Or, The Hunt for the Stolen Army Films • Victor Appleton
... freedom—in the spirit of devotedness to republican institutions. But as the State is neither Catholic nor Protestant, it should at least act justly and impartially; it should not favor its own enemies; it should not make a lie or a farce of our glorious Constitution; it should no longer play the usurper and the robber; it should no longer continue digging its own grave; it should not tax Catholics any longer to support infidel institutions—nurseries of all kinds of crimes—and thus continue to violate most atrociously the ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... you to know it—I hate this enterprise even more than I hate him whose gilded tongue induced me to undertake it. I will be rank and own to you that I would never have yielded to their wishes if I had not foreseen, in this ignoble farce, a mingling of love and danger which tempted me. I cannot bear to leave this empty world without at least attempting to gather the flowers that it owes me,—whether I perish in the attempt or not. But remember, for the honor of my memory, that had ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... with smiles and the meeting of eyes. He told Martie of his college days; borrowing episodes at random from the lives of other men, men whom he admired. Martie believed it all, believed that he had written the Junior Farce, that he had been president of his class, that the various college societies had disputed for his membership. In return, she spun her own romances, flinging a veil of attractive eccentricity over her father's character, generously giving Lydia an anonymous admirer, and painting the dreary ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... have been introduced to Trotter's incredibly inappropriate fiancee (she is a niece of the same aunt and has followed under protection of a tame escort), we are prepared to launch freely and fearlessly into the rough and tumble of farce. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... is, youngster, we have played this farce long enough," Tom proceeded, in a rage. "I want you to understand that I am not to be trifled with. You may make a fool of the old man, but you can't make a fool ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... curtain, falling on the interrupted scene, hide him for ever from the audience whom he had made wondering applauding partners in his counterfeit. The last of his life was to be like the rest of it, with the same elements of tragedy and of farce, of what attracted and of what revolted, of the great and the little. It was to be like in another way too; it was to be lived alone, without any true companion for his soul, without the love that he had not asked ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... and vanity made a farce of the funeral. A big, bull-necked publican, with heavy, blotchy features, and a supremely ignorant expression, picked up the priest's straw hat and held it about two inches over the head of his reverence during the whole of the service. The father, ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... felicity upon these people. To such alarm of his poor Serenity and poor Army, that Serenity flies off homeward at once, and out of these Wars altogether; where he never had other than the reverse of business to be, and where he has played such a farce-tragedy for four years back. Eugen has been heard to speak,—theoretically, and in excited moments,—of "running such a fellow through the body," were one near him:: but it is actually Eugen in person that sends him home from these Wars: which may be counted a ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... set ashore at the mouth of the Patapsco River while the ships sailed up to bombard Fort McHenry, where the star-spangled banner waved. To defend Baltimore by land there had been assembled more than thirteen thousand troops under command of General Samuel Smith. The tragical farce of Bladensburg, however, had taught him no lesson, and to oppose the five thousand toughened regulars of General Ross he sent out only three thousand green militia most of whom had never been under fire. ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... it is soon over—the whole motley farce—and, while it lasts, nothing in it matters so very greatly, or at any rate matters enough to disturb our amusement, our good-temper, our toleration. Nothing matters so very greatly. And yet everything—each of us, as we try to make our difficult meanings clear, the meanings of our ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... had listened with surprise and attention while his lips curled slightly with a smile of such disdain and sarcasm at the sight of this farce that, had Lucas noticed it, he would have run away at top speed. "Now what do you want?" he asked, ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... here to drink tea, or lemon squashes," said the duchess. "I've come to learn what this means—to put an end to this ridiculous farce?" ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... hears the anecdote of a wag who, as alleged, stared at the lion on Northumberland House until he had collected a crowd of imitators around him, when he cried out, "By Heaven! it wags, it wags," and the rest agreed with him that the lion did wag its tail. If this farce really took place, I should be glad to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... of her influence reaction came and disruption and decay; an immense stimulus was given on the one hand to the political activity, on the other, to the thought and knowledge of the world as a whole, but at the centre Greece was 'living Greece no more,' her politics sank to the level of a dreary farce, her philosophy died down to a dull and spiritless scepticism, to an Epicureanism {211} that 'seasoned the wine-cup with the dust of death,' or to a Stoicism not undignified yet still sad and narrow and stern. The hope of the world, alike in politics and in philosophy, faded ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... ... And meanwhile Mamma Valerius lies waiting for you at home and appealing to your 'good genius!' ... Explain yourself, Christine, I beg of you! Any one might have been deceived as I was. What is this farce?" ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... its savour. The world had grown grey and anaemic, lacking passion, it seemed. Sedateness became fashionable; only dull people cared to be thought spiritual. At its best the late nineteenth century reminds one of a sentimental farce, at its worst of a heartless joke. But, as we have seen, before the turn, first in France, then throughout Europe, a new emotional movement began to manifest itself. This movement if it was not to be lost required ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... they are beautiful," she went on softly, "but, helas, they are not the Schoenbrunn. Nor is Chapultepec more than a feeble miniature of the Hofburg. Oh, the wretched farce! The wretched farce, sire, in your pretension to—to honor me! A wooer from the throne, indeed? A straw throne—no, no, I do ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... fantastic tragedy, Greco on the one hand, Goya on the other, Morales, Gallegos, a great flame of despair amid dust, rags, ulcers, human life rising in a sudden paean out of desolate abandoned dun-colored spaces. To me, Toledo expresses the supreme beauty of that tragic farce.... And the apex, the victory, the deathlessness of it is in El Greco.... How strange it is that it should be that Cypriote who lived in such Venetian state in a great house near the abandoned synagogue, scandalizing us austere Spaniards ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... of the proposal, Birkin had hurried blindly away from Beldover, in a whirl of fury. He felt he had been a complete fool, that the whole scene had been a farce of the first water. But that did not trouble him at all. He was deeply, mockingly angry that Ursula persisted always in this old cry: 'Why do you want to bully me?' and in her ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... no word to conjure by in Lost Valley. Steptoe Service prated of Gov'ment. It was a farce, a synonym for juggled duty, a word to suggest the one-man law of the place, for even Courtrey, who made the sheriffs—and unmade them—did it under the grandiloquent name of Government. She looked at him keenly, and there was a sudden hardening ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... with extreme severity, and was led in a kind of mock triumph to London. As he passed along the road, and through the streets of the city, men of all grades assembled to see the impostor, and cast ridicule upon his fallen fortunes; and the farce was ended by the publication of a confession in which Warbeck narrated his real parentage, and the chief causes of his presumption ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... know how long—perhaps a minute, perhaps a quarter of an hour. He still gazed at me; I still experienced a certain discomfort and alarm and still thought of the Frenchman. Twice I tried to say to myself, 'What nonsense! what a farce!' I tried to smile, to shrug my shoulders.... It was no use! All initiative had all at once 'frozen up' within me—I can find no other word for it. I was overcome by a sort of numbness. Suddenly ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... their scenes? Exits and entrances, the essential details of the action, Luck directed painstakingly, as always he had done. Why, then, said camera man to assistants, should he let those fellows go in and ball up the dramatic business and turn whole scenes into farce with their foolery? And why had he chosen Tracy Gray Joyce as leading man? And that eye-rolling, limp sentimentalist, Lenore Honiwell, as his leading woman? Luck was known to despise these two, personally and professionally. They could not, to save their lives, get through a dramatic ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... unexpectedly, deliverance came. In her moments of leisure she had been trying her hand upon dramatic composition; she had written some farces, and, in 1784, one of them, A Mogul Tale, was accepted, acted, and obtained a great success. This was the turning-point of her career. She followed up her farce with a series of plays, either original or adapted, which, almost without exception, were well received, so that she was soon able to retire from the stage with a comfortable competence. She had succeeded in life; she was ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... I appeal to your sense of justice," cried our prisoner impatiently. "Hasn't this farce been allowed to go far enough? Is there any reason why this fake detective should make fools out of us all and keep my wife longer in this court? I'm not disposed to let the matter drop. I wish to enter a charge against him of false arrest and malicious prosecution. I shall ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... only reasonable thing to do. Our present mode of life is a farce. We are drifting farther apart every day. Perhaps I have changed. I know you have. We are two strangers chained together. We have made a muddle of it, and the best thing we can do ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... the manuscript of a modern farce-comedy,[A] but belong to Steele's play of "The Funeral, or Grief a la Mode." If they have about them all the air of fin-de-siecle wit, so much the more eloquently do they testify to the freshness of Dick's satire. Freshness, satire, and death! Surely the three ingredients seem unmixable; ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... drinkers have only had a partial success. The only sure cure for drunkenness is to stop before you begin. Entire legal suppression of the dram shop is successful where a stiff, righteous, public sentiment thoroughly enforces it. Otherwise it may become a delusion and a farce. ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... empire, he said, presented one scene of extravagant misrule, from the gold lace and absurd paraphernalia of military decoration of the guards up to the mismanagement of the Burmese war: it was a farce, he added, to attribute the distress to the banking system. Other members defended the country banks from the imputations cast upon them; and Mr. Baring passed a high eulogy on the conduct of the directors of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... a garden is just as pious an employment as begging about the streets, though perhaps scarcely as profitable. The opinion, that, in some respects, it would be better for them to attend to this work themselves, was forced upon my mind by a little farce I happened to see enacted among their cabbages, the other day, as I was looking down out of my window. My attention was first attracted by hearing a window open from a little three-story-high loggia, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Negro pupils. If these discretionary rights are not guaranteed by our national Constitution to American citizens, then the professed abolition of slavery and of the color line in citizenship is a wretched farce. Nobody can question the intent of the proclamation of emancipation of the constitutional amendment that places the Negro on the same legal plane with the white citizen of this country. We do not doubt the supreme and binding authority of this legislature. We mistake ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 6, June 1896 • Various
... looked so earnestly as we regarded attentively the line of her open hand." (Mr. Petalengro does not say that tears were to be seen trickling down those lovely cheeks of Esmeralda while this fortune-telling, nonsensical farce was being played out.) "Then we took her step by step through some scenes of her supposed future. We did not tell all. The rest was reserved for another day. There was a serious look on her countenance ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... has become, of course, a farce, and the sooner the Government take it up the better. Several large business houses have given it up, and in the working of the telephone London, which ought to be the most favoured, is probably the most unfortunate city of any in the world. I have ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... every one else!' As the child grew, the charm vanished; the crowds that had applauded the boy fled from the man. Byron denounced him warmly. 'His figure is fat, his features flat, his voice unmanageable, his action ungraceful, and, as Diggory says (in the farce of All the World's a Stage), "I defy him to extort that d——d muffin face of his into madness!"' Happy Master Betty! Hapless ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... impropriety and improbability it might in the old days have appealed to the Criterion management; but its lack of broad humour must have negatived these advantages. In any case Sir GEORGE ALEXANDER'S house was no place for a farce so out of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... every vital instinct in his nature till he is an empty shape and nothing more, he must not flatter himself that he has accomplished a great work. Life is not for the dead, but for the living, and in crucifying our flesh we have to be quite certain that we are playing no ghost's farce, inflicting airy penalties on some handfuls of harsh dust. Robert could not feel that absorbing interest in himself which enables so many to cut themselves adrift, painfully, no doubt, from every creature and all impersonal anxieties. If he wished for fame, power, wealth, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... against the ambiance of gossip, scandal, duplicity and invidious criticism that the two brothers had created around them in the guise of an Eighteenth Century style salon. He hated the human comedy, the social farce. ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... days," he said," I have been tortured by this useless and expensive farce. If counsel for the People had been other than play-actors, they would have known in the beginning that Victor Ancona could not be convicted for murder, unless he were confronted in this court room with a living witness, who had looked into ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... safely offer the deadliest injuries and insults to everybody who says that revenge is sinful; or that he may safely intrust all his property without security to any person who says that it is wrong to steal. Such a character would be too absurd for the wildest farce. Yet the folly of James did not stop short of this incredible extent. Because the clergy had declared that resistance to oppression was in no case lawful, he conceived that he might oppress them exactly as much as he chose, without the smallest danger of resistance. He ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the short and the long," he proceeded. "All of you in Shed B are bound to know. And I want to ask you where is the common sense of keeping up this farce, and maintaining this cock-and-bull story between friends. Come, come, my good fellow, own yourself beaten, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a French farce, I hope," said Madame Valtesi. "Esme, I am quite stiff from knitting so long. Take me to the drawing-room and sing to me a song of France. Let us try to ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... paper, anyway," he groaned. "I 'll never hear the last of this till my dying day, so I may as well have a few hours' respite. It 's too late to go back, and we 've got to play the farce out. Alice is really sick with disappointment, and to let her know this now would only make her worse. Maybe he 'll leave town in a day or two, and then she 'll be in condition to stand it. Such luck is enough to disgust a man with trying to do right and live ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... silently held it before my eyes, and the very first words in it were a most ludicrous allusion to Rogers's cadaverous appearance. As I raised my eyes from this most absurd description of him, and saw him still absorbed in his evil delight, the whole struck me as so like a scene in a farce that I could not refrain from ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... And so the farce had gone on to its end with truly Indian ceremonial. But it did not come to a close until Kars had elicited from the old rascal a complete story of the murder of Allan Mowbray. To him this was of far more importance ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... letter Charles adds his scene in the farce: "La Plessis said to Rahuel (he was the concierge) yesterday that she had been gratified at dinner to find that Madame had turned the child out of her seat and put herself in the place of honour. And Rahuel, in his Breton way: 'Nay, Miss, there's no wonder. 'Tis an honour to your years, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... like these no demoralizing influence? How can parents admonish their children against novel reading after they have taken their names from novels? The giving of Christian names at the present time is indeed a ridiculous farce, an insult to christianity, and a representation of stoical infidelity before the baptismal altar. It is there an act of the Babylonish king to heathenize the child. We might almost say that the folly has become a rage. The rage for new names ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... locked him in. A trump-up from beginning to ending, and too thin to keep a draught out even. Phil, it sure would make one's stomach turn; politics, justice, protection, the whole thing would seem to be a farce from start to finish, and we are parties to it ourselves, aiding and abetting it; too weak or else too lazy to ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... shone in the plain. Four races were assembled to look on—the mess Chinaman, two black laundresses, all the whites in the place (on horse and foot, some with their hats left behind), and several hundred Indians in blankets. Duane had a thought to go away and leave this galling farce under the eye of Starr for the officers were at hand also. But his second thought bade him remain; and looking at Augustus and the howitzer, his laugh would have returned to him; but his heart ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... successful in comedy, and indeed in comedy which bordered on farce. But we are inclined to infer from some passages, both in Cecilia and Camilla, that she might have attained equal distinction in the pathetic. We have formed this judgment, less from those ambitious scenes of distress which lie near the catastrophe of each of those novels, than ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Pope in France,—even in early days, before religion had become a farce in the country. They have ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... the most characteristic thing Oscar Wilde ever wrote, a thing produced in perfect health at the topmost height of happy hours, more characteristic even than "The Importance of Being Earnest," for it has not only the humour of that delightful farce-comedy, but also more than a hint of the deeper feeling which was even then forming itself into a master-work that will form part of the inheritance of ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... This ridiculous farce was soon after followed by a scene truly tragical—the murder of the two young princes. Richard gave orders to Sir Robert Brakenbury, constable of the Tower, to put his nephews to death, but this gentleman, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... enacted Penruddock, in 'The Wheel of Fortune', and Tristram Fickle, in the farce of 'The Weathercock', for three nights, in some private theatricals at Southwell, in 1806, with great applause. The occasional prologue for our volunteer play was also of my composition."—'Diary; Life', p. 38. The prologue was written by him, ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... himself, with the exception of the consuls. After the death of Caesar, the comitia continued to be held, but was always controlled by the rulers, whose unlimited powers were ultimately complied with without resistance. Finally the comitia became a mere farce, and all legislation passed away forever, and was completely in the hands ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... January he called upon me one morning before I was up, and, on my entering the room, I recognized my old acquaintance, dressed in a rusty, full-trimmed black suit, with his pockets full of papers, which instantly reminded me of the poet in Garrick's farce of Lethe. After we had finished our breakfast he drew from his pocket part of a tragedy, which he said he had brought for my correction. In vain I pleaded inability, when he began to read; and every part on which I expressed a doubt as to the propriety was immediately blotted out. I then ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... actor was performing in the city in the farce of "Dundreary Married," wherein Lord Dundreary having, as the title indicates, taken to himself a wife, falls beneath the tyranny of a domineering mother-in-law, to whom he submits till submission becomes intolerable, when he turns upon her, ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... Taylor. Last night, a little before sundown, until after dark, we were amused by a farce enacted by the natives, apparently to keep us quiet and render us powerless, while they approached the water hole and got what water they required. They commenced at some distance off, raising a heavy ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... belongings is invariably a useless proceeding," added the man in the corner, with a shrug of the shoulders. "No one, not even a latter-day domestic, would be fool enough to keep stolen property in the house. However, the usual farce was gone through, with more or less protest on the part of Mr. Shipman's servants, ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... glad to see him; there was something in Count Mirabel's very presence which put everybody in good spirits. His lightheartedness was caught by all. Melancholy was a farce in the presence of his smile; and there was no possible combination of scrapes that could withstand his kind and brilliant raillery. At the present moment, Ferdinand was in a sufficiently good humour with his destiny, and he kept up the ball with effect; so that nearly an hour passed ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... said Mr. Travers. "The man wouldn't be above plundering the natives. . . ." He sat down heavily on the chest. "A most appropriate costume for this farce," he continued. "But do you mean to wear it in ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... alternative but to settle the matter amicably with their neighbours or to call in the Romans as arbiters. When the Achaean diet was urged by the Rhodians and Cretans to grant them the aid of the league, and seriously deliberated as to sending it (601), it was simply a political farce; the principle which the leader of the party friendly to Rome then laid down—that the Achaeans were no longer at liberty to wage war without the permission of the Romans— expressed, doubtless with disagreeable precision, the simple truth that the sovereignty of the dependent states was merely ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... advanced across the thirty miles of forest and swamp toward an antagonist prepared to vanish at contact, like a ghost at cock-crow. It was a campaign of "excursions and alarums," of reconnoissances and counter-marches, of cross-purposes and countermanded orders. For weeks the solemn farce held attention, luring distinguished civilians from fields of political ambition to see what they safely could of the horrors of war. Among these was our friend the Governor. At the headquarters of the army and in the camps of the troops from his State he was a familiar figure, attended ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... et Persius; at olim carmen quod ex variis poematibus constabat satira cocabatur, quale scripserunt Pacuvius et Ennius." This old-fashioned satura of Ennius may be considered as half-way between the early semi-dramatic farce and the classical Satire. It was a genuine medley, containing all kinds of subjects, often couched in the form of dialogue, but intended for recitation, not for action. The poem on Scipio was classed with it, but what this poem was is not by any means clear; from the fragment that ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... to appear was a farce entitled "The Boor," which he wrote in a single evening and which had a great success. This was followed by "The Demon," a failure, rewritten ten years ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... lawyer Cepeda contrived a solemn farce, the intent of which was to give a sort of legal sanction to the rebel cause in the eyes of the populace. He caused a process to be prepared against Gasca, Hinojosa, and Aldana, in which they were accused of treason against ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... his back on her and slowly placing his hat on his half-bald head. "We are indebted to Professor Kennedy for a pleasant entertainment. When he has another show equally original we trust he will not forget the first-nighters who have enjoyed this farce." ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... write poetry, and printed many of his verses in the Dorset County Chronicle. His chief studies, however, were philological; and in 1829 he published An Etymological Glossary of English Words of Foreign Derivation. In 1832 a strolling company of actors visited Mere, and Barnes wrote a farce, The Honest Thief, which they produced, and a comedy which was played at Wincanton. Barnes also wrote a number of educational books, such as Elements of Perspective, Outlines of Geography, and in 1833 first began his poems in the Dorsetshire dialect, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... amidst the most adverse elements. We have the progress of that self-education which struck out an untried path of its own, from the time Moliere had not yet acquired his art to the glorious days when he gave his country a Plautus in his farce, a Terence in his composition, and a Menander in his moral truths. But the difficulties overcome, and the disappointments incurred, his modesty and his confidence, and, what was not less extraordinary, his ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... his head wobbling a little with the emphasis he put into the words, "this is the damnedest farce in the history of ...
— If at First You Don't... • John Brudy
... we had a common topic. We related our story of the sea in alternate sentences. We ate and we talked, turn and turn about. My mother listened. To her the affair, compared with the tremendous subjects to which she was accustomed to direct her mind, was broad farce. James took it with an air of restrained ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... said to me the other day that life was like a French farce," said Mrs. Windsor—"so full ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... formed with Danton, Lebrun, and some of the Girondists. He and his family are handed over to the care of the Commune, and their correspondence is to be intercepted. A revolutionary tribunal has been constituted, when, I suppose, the farce of trying men whose only crime is loyalty to the king is ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... so understood at the time, we must lament that our countrymen should have consented to take part in what must be considered as a profane farce. ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... afford to endure it. But such is not the case. Our wives and our daughters, our sisters and our mothers, are subjected to the same insults and to the same uncivilized treatment. You may ask why we do not institute civil suits in the State courts. What a farce! Talk about instituting a civil-rights suit in the State courts of Kentucky, for instance, where decision of the judge is virtually rendered before he enters the court-house, and the verdict of the jury substantially rendered before it is impaneled. ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... like sacrilege to me, to stand before such an audience and repeat words so solemn and significant, when they will mean nothing, when the whole thing will be but a farce," Edith ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... encouragement to friendliness, or a tribute to fashion; an expression of good nature, or a bid for favour; an outgoing of generosity, or a disguise of greed; a cheerful old custom, or a futile old farce, according to the spirit which animates it and the ...
— The Spirit of Christmas • Henry Van Dyke
... her head back, and was singing jubilantly at the top of her voice. The appositeness of the song had cheered her up. It seemed somehow to make her forebodings rather ridiculous, to reduce them to absurdity, to turn into farce the gathering tragedy which had been ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... for the conclusion of the two years' farce. It has cost me a whole week's sleep to sketch a plan by which to declare my sex in the most becoming manner to ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... on my college days I must relate a little adventure which is amusing as an illustration of my reverend friend Napier's enthusiastic spontaneity. My own share in the farce is ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... was a species of farce adopted by the Romans from the Oscan town of Atella in Campania. See Livy, vii. 2, for this and the early history ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... severall tymes. The first was called Odip, who resolved the Sphinx his enigma: was so unfortunat to slay his father by ignorance, marry his mother, and to conclud al to put out his oune eyes: the fellow acted his griefe exceeding lifelylie. The farce was le Marriage du rien. A fool fellow in a scoolmasters habit wt a ugly nose, which I was angry at, a scoop hat, comes on the stage wt his daughter, who proposes to him that she apprehended furiusly that she might ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... applied to his face, it was wisely announced that for the future the Deity should be covered by a cloud. These plays, carried about the country, taken up by the baser sort of people, descended through all degrees of farce to obscenity, and, in England, becoming entangled in politics, at length disappeared. It is said they linger in Italy, and are annually ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... procuring and distributing arms, after Forrester had become too well known to the police in connection with it. Davitt, too, had a hawker's licence; and, at first, there was really no evidence to connect him with the Fenian movement. The farce was gone through of bringing Corydon to identify him—not a very difficult task in the case of a one-armed man—though this was the first time Corydon had ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... delightful sketches. The Visit to the Zoological Gardens is not just what we expected; still it is attractive. Major Beamish has accommodated military tactics to the nursery in a pleasant little sketch; and the proverb of Much Coin Much Care, by Mrs. R.S. Jameson is a little farce for the same stage. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... that a man so shameless and so vile should have been the greatest power in a state still nominally free. I shall give one extract from it. Cicero has been speaking of Antony's purchase of Pompey's confiscated property. "He was wild with joy, like a character in a farce; a beggar one day, a millionaire the next. But, as some writer says, 'Ill gotten, ill kept.' It is beyond belief, it is an absolute miracle, how he squandered this vast property—in a few months do I say?—no, in a few days. There was a great cellar of wine, a very great quantity of excellent plate, ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... rejected in the lords by a majority of forty-four, in spite of somewhat transparent assertions that it was not intended to prejudice the main issue. On April 18, 1823, an angry protest from Burdett against the "annual farce" of motions leading to nothing was followed by a quarrel between Canning and Brougham, who accused Canning, then foreign secretary, of "monstrous truckling for the purpose of obtaining office"; and when Plunket moved, as usual, for the relief of catholics, a temporary secession ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... comedy of the kind that runs for a year and costs the price of two books for a good seat. Its humor is either good horseplay or vulgar farce, and its literary quality nil. Its music is better, less banal than the words, and, sometimes, almost excellent. But its setting, the costumes, the scenic effects, the stage painting, and, most of all, the color ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... drew. Let then such critics know, my face Gives them their comeliness and grace: While every line of face does bring A line of grace to what they sing. But yet, methinks, though with disgrace Both to the picture and the face, I should name them who do rehearse The story of the picture farce; The squire, in French as hard as stone, Or strong as rock, that's all as one, On face on cards is very brisk, sirs, Because on them you play at whisk, sirs. But much I wonder, why my crany Should envied be by De-el-any: And yet much more, that half-namesake Should join a party ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... ballad-singer is a higher man, for he does two things; he repeats and he sings: there is both recitation and musick in his performance: the player only recites.' BOSWELL. 'My dear Sir! you may turn anything into ridicule. I allow, that a player of farce is not entitled to respect; he does a little thing: but he who can represent exalted characters, and touch the noblest passions, has very respectable powers; and mankind have agreed in admiring great talents for the stage. We must consider, too, that a great player does what very few are capable ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... Will's "copy" was almost without blot or erasion, the other actors were wont to boast. Really the absence of erasions and corrections is too easily explained on the theory that Will was NOT the author. Will merely copied the fair copies handed to him by the concealed poet. The farce was played for some twenty years, and was either undetected or all concerned kept the dread secret—and all the other companies and rival authors were concerned in ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... from what it was generally supposed to be: he saw the futility of popular morals and popular metaphysics; but he neither swallowed the conventions nor threw up his hands in despair, declaring the whole thing to be an idiotic farce. He knew that truth and goodness had nothing to do with law and custom; but he never doubted that there were such things; and he went beneath the surface to find them. It was Ibsen's revelation of a new world, in which moral values were real and convincing, that thrilled ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... wine with his servant. Amedee will be full of indulgence, only one must pardon him for his plebeian heart and native uncouthness; for at the moment when he shall have fathomed the emptiness and vanity of this worldly farce, he will keep all of his sympathy for those who retain something like nature. He will esteem infinitely more the poorest of the workmen—a wood-sawyer or a bell-hanger—than a politician haranguing from the mantel, or an old literary dame who sparkles like ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of parliament he cancelled the former act that had deprived her, as against all reason, conscience, and course of nature, and contrary to the laws of God and man,(57) and restored her possessions to her, this was but a farce, and like his wonted hypocrisy; for the very same year he obliged her to convey the whole estate to him, leaving her nothing but the manor of Sutton for her maintenance. Richard had married her daughter; but what claim had Henry to her inheritance? This attachment of ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... Ulysses. As if he took a delight in the black side of humanity, he loves to show the strength of false reasoning, of sophistry antagonistic to truth, and of cold expediency in opposition to the natural feelings of humanity. From a similar reason, his occasional attempts at comedy degenerate into mere farce. We question whether the scene between Death and Apollo in the "Alcestis," could be surpassed in vulgarity, even by the modern school of English dramatists, while his exaggerations in the minor characters are scarcely to be surpassed by the ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... time mentioned had expired, we had reached a depth of five feet, and yet no signs of any treasure became manifest. A general pause ensued, and I began to hope that the farce was at an end. Legrand, however, although evidently much disconcerted, wiped his brow thoughtfully and recommenced. We had excavated the entire circle of four feet diameter, and now we slightly enlarged the limit, and went to the farther depth of two feet. ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... And rail at arts he did not understand? Where made he love in Prince Nicander's vein, Or swept the dust in Psyche's humble strain? Where sold he bargains, Whip-stitch, Kiss me ——, Promis'd a play, and dwindled to a farce? When did his muse from Fletcher scenes purloin, As thou whole Eth'rege dost transfuse to thine? But so transfus'd as oil and waters flow; His always floats above, thine sinks below. This is thy province, this thy wondrous way. New humours to invent for each new play; This is that bloated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... time she writes notes to you, begging you would answer them at the earliest possible moment, and signs herself—"your attached Jenny." She takes the marriage farce of her uncle in a cold way, as trifling with a very serious subject, and looks tenderly at you. She is very much shocked when her uncle offers to kiss her; and when he proposes it to you, she is equally indignant, but—with a great ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... he in soft? No, dear reader, he is not in soft. You have forgotten the "Gurls." Critics are inclined to reproach, deride, blame and generally hammer the author of a musical comedy because his plot is not so consecutive and unbroken as the plot of a farce or a comedy. They do not realize the conditions under which he is working. It is one of the immutable laws governing musical plays that at certain intervals during the evening the audience demand to see the chorus. They may not be aware that they so demand, but it is nevertheless a fact ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... sublimities came a farce. We went to St. Ursula's church, to see the bones of the eleven thousand virgins, who, the chronicle says, were slain here because they would not break their vows of chastity. I was much amused. As we entered the church, C. remarked impressively, "It is evident that these virgins have no connection ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... knight, and P. SYRUS, a freedman, and originally a Syrian slave, both of whom were contemporaries of Julius Caesar. At Caesar's triumphal games in October, B.C. 45, P. Syrus challenged all his craft to a trial of wit in extemporaneous farce, and Caesar offered Laberius 500,000 sesterces to appear on the stage. Laberius was 60 years old, and the profession of a mimus was infamous, but the wish of the Dictator was equivalent to a command, ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... something only would happen!" exclaimed her ladyship. "A riot, a massacre—anything! It all sounds like a farce to you, Genevra, but you haven't been here for ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... all a grotesque farce. Why should wise men turn themselves into wild animals, if it is only in sport? I never enjoy such ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... From Maine to Montana; from the Adirondacks to Alaska; from the Yosemite to the Yellowstone, the trout-hog, the deer-wolf, the netter, the skin-hunter, each and all have it their own way; and the law is a farce—only to be enforced where the game has vanished forever. Perhaps the man-child is born who will live to write the moral of all this—when it is ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... up-to-date Ethel Newcome ... the stuff that tears in hardened and careless hearts are made of ... singularly perceiving, mellow, wise, charitable, humorous ... a plot as well defined as if it were a French farce."—The Times ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... pretty farce," she had said to herself; and then she sat her down to read Napoleon's letters to Josephine, and to wonder that a woman could have been faithless and vile with such a man. Her blood raced indignantly in her veins as she thought of it. She admired intellect, supremacy, the gifts of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that a road to the Ohio did not fulfill the contract. Hence the road was extended through the capitals of these States, committing the Federal Government for many years to come to one form at least of internal improvement. The farce of "advancing" the money was continued a ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... Birds, the Difference. Fowl, to dress. Ditto to farce. Fricassee of Chickens, brown. Ditto white. Fish Gravey for Soups. Flounders, pickled. Frontiniac-Wine imitated. Fruits preserv'd for Tarts. Florence-Wine imitated. Frontiniac-Wine to make. Fowls, the Sorts. Fish, to boil firm. ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... It is as clear as day that the whole object of this elaborate secrecy was to hide the fact of her death! She was infinitely more useful alive than dead, Mr. Addison; and they hoped to keep up the solemn farce until—" ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... him in every evil light; now a horse-thief like those in Moyamensing; now an assassin like a New York rowdy; now a treaty-breaker like an Austrian; now a Palmer with poisoned arrows; now a judicial murderer and Jeffries, after a fierce farce of trial condemning his victim to bloody death; or a Jew with hospitable speeches cozening some fainting stranger into ambuscade, there to burk him, and account it a deed grateful to ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... by such as you?" he exclaimed. "That is a joke. But go ahead with the farce, and let's have it over ...
— The boy Allies at Liege • Clair W. Hayes
... said, "this farce is drawing to an end. You are in my power, and for the means which I have taken to capture you, I will account to the prince. You are a traitor to him; you have attacked and slaughtered many of my friends; you are an outlaw defying ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... pleasant to know that one who has given so good a time to others had a very good time himself; that we are not, as so often happens, relishing a farce that stood for tragedy with the maker, and substituting our laughter for his tears. Barham had the cruel sorrows of personal bereavement so few escape; but in material things his career was wholly among pleasant ways. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Howett," said Harley; kindly, "please try to forgive me for this unpleasant farce with its painful memories. But I have a good reason. I think you know this. Now, as I am naturally anxious to have everything clear before Miss Abingdon returns, will you be good enough to tell me if the table is at present ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... shows about the time when Nolan's braggadocio must have broken down. At first, they said, he took a very high tone, considered his imprisonment a mere farce, affected to enjoy the voyage, and all that; but Phillips said that after he came out of his state-room he never was the same man again. He never read aloud again, unless it was the Bible or Shakespeare, or something else he was sure of. But it was not that merely. He never entered in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... Europe landed on the shores of the sixteenth century, they were a curiously assorted company. Germany was still playing the solemn farce of the Roman Empire, whose real existence had terminated a thousand years before. Spain had just driven the last armed infidel from her borders, and was preparing to use in foreign conquest the military excellence she had developed ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... with a politic generosity, on the 4th of this month performed the play of The Fair Penitent with a farce, for the benefit of the widow Eades and her family. The house was full, and it was said that she got upwards of ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... the papers may have been her mamma's doing. Very bad policy if it was, with a daughter like that. However, he said it was very near the end of the six months, and after all the whole thing was rather a farce. Besides, Gwen had played fair. So he had let her off three weeks, and she was going down to the Towers at once—which meant, of course, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the rest if you can, for I know nothing about any more. How long is this farce going to last? My father says he will let you have any stones he has found if one of you will go with me for them, but I told you when you first captured me that you would get nothing of value by keeping me a prisoner," replied Mark, ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... the 11th, Hurley, Laseron, Hunter and Correll made an innovation by presenting a small farce to an audience which had been starved of dramatic entertainment for a long time, ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... commonly said, that it requires more wit to perform the part of the fool in a farce than that of the master. Without intending any offence to the fool by the comparison, we may remark, that qualities of an elevated character are required for the support of the role of a man of fashion in the solemn farce of life. He must have invention, ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls—only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... James's and Whitehall were exempted from the operation of this statute, so long as the sovereign was actually resident within them—which last clause probably showed that the entire Draconian enactment was but a farce. It is quite certain that it was inoperative, and that it did no more than express the conscience of the legislature—in deference to PRINCIPLE, 'which nobody ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... bad usage from his saying that Prince Allicoury had paid me a visit. To enforce this idea still more, I counterfeited his buffoons, whom they called Egeums. This kind of farce so much pleased my master, that he made me repeat it as often as he found opportunity. He made use of this stratagem to divert those among them, whom he suspected as inclined to pilfer, and thus cunningly occupied their attention. No sooner ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... there were signs everywhere that the forces of reaction were gaining confidence.(See App. I, Sect. 5) At the Troitsky Farce theatre in Petrograd, for example, a burlesque called Sins of the Tsar was interrupted by a group of Monarchists, who threatened to lynch the actors for "insulting the Emperor." Certain newspapers ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... life is more or less of a farce," he went on a little bitterly. "It's a silly show. The best we can do is to hold our personality intact. It doesn't appear that integrity has much to do ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... and II. prescribed abominations not to be named. Barbarism, as bad as that of Congo or Ashantee. Traces of this barbarism linger even in the greatly improved medical science of our century. So while the solemn farce of over-drugging is going on, the world over, the harlequin pseudo-science jumps on to the stage, whip in hand, with half-a-dozen somersets, and begins laying ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... takes; There motley images her fancy strike, Figures ill paired, and similes unlike. She sees a mob of metaphors advance, Pleased with the madness of the mazy dance; How Tragedy and Comedy embrace; How Farce and Epic get a jumbled race; How Time himself stands still at her command, Realms shift their place, and ocean turns to land. Here gay description Egypt glads with showers, Or gives to Zembla fruits, to Barca flowers; Glittering with ice ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... imprudent, hot-brained rogue who had swaggered in Fools' hall, and made a farce of the affairs of the nation? His countenance seemed that of a courtier rather than a low-born scape-grace; his bearing in consonance, as, approaching the princess, he knelt near the edge of her sweeping crimson ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... her seat towards the window, as though to hide her face. My own attempt at reading was a farce. I watched her over the top of my paper. She was looking out into the darkness, and she seemed to me to be crying. Every now and then her shoulders heaved convulsively. Suddenly she faced me once more. There were traces of tears on her face; a small lace handkerchief ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... do keep quiet; or perhaps you'd like to run away till the farce is over," said Madame, caressingly, for she has a penchant for the peer beside her; he is a new distraction and will amuse her until she can secure a tete-a-tete with the man who has some rare fascination for her, as Lionel Trevalyon has for many. ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... I—I thank you. But I can't do it. In the first place, I can't rest in peace until Louise is found, or I know her fate. Secondly, I'm game to give an account for all my deeds, now that I've played the farce out, and lost. I—I really haven't the ambition, Fogerty, to make a new start in life, and try ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... without exception, the most intelligent telegraphic despatch that it was possible for one human eye to convey to another, and said more plainly than words could—"You shall see how I can humbug them all." That look opened my eyes completely to the farce that was acting before me, and entering into the spirit of the scene, I must own that I enjoyed it amazingly. The blacksmith was mesmerised by a look alone, and for half an hour went on in a ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... monstrous law is simply the complete abrogation of all law. Of all laws ever passed in the world it is the most nakedly iniquitous. Tyrants have often substituted their own will for the ordered procedure of a tribunal, but no tyrant before ever went through the atrocious farce of deliberately making a tribunal the organised negation of security for justice. Couthon laid its theoretic base in a fallacy that must always be full of seduction to shallow persons in authority: 'He who ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... the farce. [The tragedy is Kant's destructive criticism of the speculative reason.] So far Immanuel Kant has been playing the relentless philosopher; he has laid siege to heaven.' Heine goes on with some violence to describe the havoc Kant has made ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... Pere Orleans mentions that Sarsfield accompanied James. The battle of the Boyne had scarcely been fought when it was made the subject of a drama, the Royal Flight, or the Conquest of Ireland, a Farce, 1690. Nothing more execrable was ever written. But it deserves to be remarked that, in this wretched piece, though the Irish generally are represented as poltroons, an exception is made in favour of Sarsfield. "This fellow," says James, aside, "I will make me valiant, I think, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... all the tingling bodies constrained into the rigid attitudes of automatons in uniforms like this one; of all the hideous farce of making men into machines. Oh, if some gesture of his could only free them all for life and freedom and joy. The thought drowned ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... James the Second. "George Selwyn shrewdly said, that to be buried by her father, she need not be carried out of England," (she was supposed to be actually the daughter of Colonel Graham.) When she found herself dying, she carried on the melancholy farce to the last. She sent for Anstis, the herald, and arranged the whole funeral ceremony with him. She was particularly anxious to see the preparations before she died. "Why," she asked, "won't they send the canopy for me to see? Let them send it, even though ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... theater dress it might be tentatively remarked that prinking and "making up" in public are all part of an age which can not see fun in a farce without bedroom scenes and actors in pajamas, and actresses running about in negliges with their hair down. An audience which night after night watches people dressing and undressing probably gets into an unconscious habit of dressing or prinking itself. In other days it ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
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