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More "Irony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the less dignified National politicians try to cast silly aspersions on the United. The elaborately sarcastic phrase: "United boys and girls", seems to please its author, since he uses it twice. There is unconscious irony in the spectacle of a National man, once a member of the notorious old Gotham ring, preaching virtuously against the "unenviable ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... again the great soul of the hero!" put in Basset with grim irony. "If he lie abed i' th' day for a wound to his wrist, what shall he do for a stab to his feelings? You shall drive him to drown him in salt water; and that were cruelty unheard-of, for it should make his eyes smart. I tell thee what, Jack Enville—there is one ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... earnest of philosophers was by no means a melancholy man. Fully aware of the influence exercised by humour, he often put his teachings into an indirect form, and he seems to have first thus generally attracted attention. He introduced what is called irony[10]—the using expressions which literally mean exactly the opposite to what is intended. A man may be either praised or blamed in this way, but Socrates' intention was always sarcastic. He put questions to men, as if merely desiring ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... great questions of the age, social and moral, are handled with great boldness. It is neither an epic, nor an idyl, nor a tale in verse: it combines features of them all. It presents her clear convictions of life and art, and is full of philosophy, largely expressed in the language of irony and sarcasm. She is an inspired advocate of the intellectual claims of woman; and the poem is, in some degree, an autobiography: the identity of the poet and the heroine gives a great charm to the narrative. There are few finer pieces of poetical inspiration than ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... his stories is romantic, melodramatic, often almost shocking. He handled it, however, with humor, irony, or pathos. He was a realist who pictured, marvelously, the life about him as he ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... me this the next day, and I could see she thought I had been bragging of my family. So I recounted all the conversation I had had with him, as nearly as I could recollect, and set down the question to an impertinent irony. But I have since changed my mind: I now judge that he could not believe any poor person would joke about poverty. I never found one of those people who go about begging for charities believe me when I told him the simple truth that I could ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... outburst of cheering showed what a volume of feeling had found expression in his speech. Redmond came to the St. Patrick's Day banquet under the impression of that scene, and he spoke with a confidence which gives to his words a tragic irony to-day. He cited "the superb speech of Mr. Churchill" as evidence that "what is our last word is also the last ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... any more than in his Latin. His sermons regularly begin by: "This gospel tellith.... This gospel techith alle men that ..." and he continues his arguments in a clear and measured style, until he comes to one of those burning questions about which he is battling; then his irony bursts forth, he uses scathing similes; he thunders against those "emperoure bishopis," taken up with worldly cares; his speech is short and haughty; he knows how to condense his whole theory in one brief, clear-cut phrase, easy to remember, that every one will ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... rehearsal? I had got on particularly well. I told you so, didn't I? I played the little part with a certain amount of spirit, I think. I certainly threw a good deal of feeling and suppressed emotion, and also a tinge of humorous irony into my speech to Miss Vavasour. Of course, I know quite well it doesn't seem of any very great importance, but a lot hinges on that speech, and it isn't everyone who could make the very most of it, as I really believe I did. Well, I happened to be pointing out to Mitchell, yesterday ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... say," the chief resumed, heedless of the note of irony in the other's voice, "that you and Miss Kellner ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle
... would your great designer want you to invest?" she asked, with an air of one guided by mere curiosity, and with a touch of irony to boot ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... of her countrywomen seek to put a stranger at his ease at once; or the exigence of a spoiled lady waiting to be amused; or the haughtiness of a great lady, who does not care if she is amused herself and deigns no effort to amuse others. Neither did she attack him with raillery and irony, as Mrs. Benson had done on their first meeting. But she behaved as if she were used to seeing men like Ashburner every day of her life, and was willing to meet them half-way and be agreeable to them, if they were so to her, without taking any ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... The irony of chance wills it that the late Horatio Lloyd, Q.C., had been more than suspected of sexual viciousness: cfr. "Criticisms by Robert Ross" at end ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... unaccountable reason had been gradually turning toward this man. But my less easily affected companion, seeing his opportunity and possibly considering that it was this gentleman's right to know in what a doubtful light he stood before the law, remarked with as light a touch of irony as was possible: ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... death bore upon him all the signs of a martyr, so long shall we point to him as one of the witnesses who have fought for us and for the liberty of science." Verily these words from Virchow's lips sound like the bitterest irony; for was not Lorenz Oken one of the foremost and most zealous champions of that monistic doctrine of development against which Rudolf Virchow at this day is most violently striving? Did not Oken himself proceed farther in the construction of bold hypotheses and comprehensive theories than ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... began to see that the painter had intended to represent him, now in the decline of life, as stripping the clothes from the backs of three half-starved children. "Really, this puzzles me!" quoth Mr. Smith, with the irony of conscious rectitude. "Asking pardon of the painter, I pronounce him a fool as well as a scandalous knave. A man of my standing in the world to be robbing little children of ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Plymouth five days later than Drake and started for London with four pack horses carrying all he had saved from the wreck. By the irony of fate he travelled up to town in the rear of the long procession that ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... leading citizen," he observed, looking at the ceiling and rubbing his nose absently. The irony of this, if he intended any, was well hidden. William Holton, president of the First National Bank, was a business rival, and Amzi never abused his competitors. Having satisfied his curiosity as to the ceiling, he announced his complete ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... of his readers and the development of events. A man who deals in oracular utterances acquires instinctively a mode of speech which may shift its colour with every change of light. The texture of Disraeli's writings is so ingeniously shot with irony and serious sentiment that each tint may predominate by turns. It is impossible to suppose that the weaver of so cunning a web should never have intended the effects which he produces; but frequently, too, they must be the spontaneous and partly unconscious results of a peculiar intellectual ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... was naturally not aware that her remark implied the most exquisite torture for Lecoq. Ah! if it should be as she said, if he should never find the lady who had lost this costly jewel! Smarting under the marchioness's unintended irony, he would have liked to apostrophize her in angry terms; but it could not be, for it was advisable if not absolutely necessary that he should conceal his true identity. Accordingly, he contrived to smile, ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... against some "disgraceful action" and she signed too. The majority of these new people, however, though they visited Varvara Petrovna, felt themselves for some reason called upon to regard her with contempt, and with undisguised irony. Stepan Trofimovitch hinted to me at bitter moments afterwards that it was from that time she had been envious of him. She saw, of course, that she could not get on with these people, yet she received them eagerly, with all the hysterical ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... was not on the face of the globe a more contented and peace-loving folk than the Hungarians. The young lawyer, on the other hand, asserted that the existing system was all wrong; that general dissatisfaction prevailed throughout Hungary. His irony did not spare the great ones who swayed the destiny of the country. In a word, resentment against oppression, and discontent, might be read in every line ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... written in a fine vein of irony, called forth, in some degree, by the romantic school of Mrs. Radcliffe and her imitators. We doubt whether Miss Austen was not over-wise with regard to these romances. Though born after the Radcliffe era, we well remember shivering ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... presence of death, and with the saddest heart. In that often-quoted passage from Lord Hervey, in which the queen's death-bed is described, the grotesque horror of the details surpasses all satire: the dreadful humour of the scene is more terrible than Swift's blackest pages, or Fielding's fiercest irony. The man who wrote the story had something diabolical about him: the terrible verses which Pope wrote respecting Hervey, in one of his own moods of almost fiendish malignity, I fear are true. I am frightened ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was the homecoming he had dreamed of in the unfathomable reaches of space. Hilary thought bitterly. Five short years and he was already forgotten. Then the irony of it struck him, and ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... as anarchy, and as a deed looking to the overthrow of society, it interdicted to itself all appeal to insurrection whenever the Executive should violate the Constitution against it. And, indeed, the irony of history wills it that the very General, who by order of Bonaparte bombarded Rome, and thus gave the immediate occasion to the constitutional riot of June 13, that Oudinot, on December 22, 1851, is the one imploringly and vainly to be offered to the people by the party ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... into bed, who, happily, did not see the effect produced by Netta's letter on her husband. Whilst she was shedding quiet tears on her pillow, he was raging with furious passion to his son. Over and over again did he comment on every word of the letter, sometimes with keen irony, sometimes with a burst of rage, until Owen ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... credit may be given—whether to the man who conceived the idea, or to him who developed it, and whether or not Columbus intentionally appropriated the honor and glory exclusively—by the irony of fate, there stood a man at Toscanelli's elbow, as it were, when he wrote to the Genoese, who was destined to rob him of his great discovery's richest reward. This man was Amerigo Vespucci, after whom—though unsuggested by him and unknown to him—the continents of America were named, by strangers, ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... in, with an incredulous irony fain to be contradicted, "a girl in a village, poor, knowing nothing, seeing no farther"—she looked out towards Jersey—"seeing no farther than the little cottage in the little country ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... hamper the movement for securing better and more equitable conditions of labor. The talk about preserving to the misery-hunted beings who make contracts for such service their "liberty" to make them, is either to speak in a spirit of heartless irony or else to show an utter lack of knowledge of the conditions of life among the great masses of our fellow-countrymen, a lack which unfits a judge to do good service just as it would unfit any ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... and gave her merry, ringing laugh. "What delicious irony! Germany defeated by its women! When I think of your august papa, dear Gisela! That kulturistically typical, that naive yet Jovian symbol of all the arrogance and conceit, the simple creed of Kaiserism ueber ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... for the weak, for the victims of the deceptions of society, for the sufferings of the obscure. If the successful adventurer, Lesable, and the handsome Maze are the objects of his veiled irony, he maintains, or feels a sorrowful, though somewhat disdainful tenderness, for poor old Savon, the old copying clerk of the Ministry of Marine, who is the drudge of the office and whose colleagues laugh at him because his wife deceived him, ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... from Sir Philip Hoby requesting permission from the King's agent to purchase stone from the Abbey ruins for building, and there can be little doubt that this house was constructed of the same material. By the "irony of fate" this mansion, born of the spoliation of that institution, in its turn fell a prey to the destroyer, and fragments of carved stones telling of Elizabethan days may be found in these and other farm buildings within the area of ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... sparkle and nervous exaltation Sadie never lost consciousness of the gravity of the situation. If her sense of humor enabled her to see one side of its grim irony; if she experienced a wicked satisfaction in accepting the admiration and easy confidence of the high-born guests, knowing that her cousin had assisted in preparing the meal they were eating, she had never lost sight of the practical effect of the discovery she had made. And ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... in all, two thousand six hundred thalers. It was already the Saturday just previous, and his purse contained only four thalers. There was only one prospect left, and he went to a rich money lender, and in response to his request for relief in money difficulties, was met with this reply of irony and sarcasm from one who loved to indulge his enmity to the Christian faith. "You in money difficulties, or any difficulties, Mr. Loest! I cannot believe it; it is altogether impossible! you are at all times and in all places boasting that you have ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... Frenchman, much less the Army, after my positive order of March 18th, 1799." The words show what reports had already got about of the general trend of policy, on the part of the Porte and the British representatives; but the irony of the matter as regards Nelson is, that Smith disobeyed his orders, as he himself, six months before, had disobeyed Keith's; and for the same reason, that he on the spot was a better judge of local conditions and recent ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... Atterson's front hall (the young men boarders gave her that appellation in irony) the ghosts of many ancient boiled dinners met you with—if you were sensitive and unused to the odors of ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... forgotten writer published some pastorals, which Steele, with his usual rashness and fatal favouritism, commended in the "Guardian" as superior to all productions of the class, (including Pope's,) except those of Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser. Pope retorted in a style of inimitable irony, by a letter to the "Guardian," where he professedly gives the preference to Philips, but damages his claim by producing four specimens of his composition, and contrasting them with the better portions of his own. Not ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... 'im to the nirrest polissstation; or weel you go and tell the poliss yourself?" asked the Portuguese, in the same tone of mordant irony. ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... of the word "we" made it certain to Ch'ing Wen that she implied herself and Pao-y, and thus unawares more fuel was added again to her jealous notions. Giving way to several loud smiles, full of irony: "I can't make out," she insinuated, "who you may mean. But don't make me blush on your account! Even those devilish pranks of yours can't hoodwink me! How and why is it that you've started styling yourself as 'we?' Properly speaking, you haven't as yet so much as attained the designation of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... his accusation she did not understand, but she knew that, while she detained him, Clo had indeed dared the great adventure. For a moment Beverley thought of the pearls almost with distaste. That they should come to her to-day, when she cared for nothing in the world but the lost papers, was an irony of fate. She did not return to the boudoir. She forgot the mystery of the open door, and neglected to close it. She was nervously anxious to excuse herself to Sister Lake. Above all, it was her duty to defend Clo. She must confess that it was upon her errand ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... device exactly analogous to that which he afterwards practised in fiction. On both occasions he was punished for assuming a character for purposes of mystification. In the latest instance, it is seen, the pamphlet called 'What if the Pretender Comes?' was written in such obvious irony, that the mistake of his intentions must have been wilful. The other and better-known performance, 'The Shortest Way with the Dissenters,' seems really to have imposed upon some of his readers. It is difficult in these ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the poetical traditions of the Eryx. But at all events, they were making some sort of a collection—they belonged to the great confraternity—and I could not possibly make fun of them without making fun of myself. Besides, Madame Trepof had spoken of her collection with such an odd mingling of irony and enthusiasm that I could not help finding the idea a very ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... are broad and coarse; he is altogether a mannerist, and never knows where to stop. The [Greek: Paedenagan] seems quite unknown to him. His pleasantry does not proceed from keen and well-supported irony; just, but unexpected comparisons; but depends, for effect, chiefly upon strange polysyllabic epithets, and the endless enumeration of minute circumstances. In this he, no doubt, displays considerable ingenuity, and a strong sense of what is ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... of its literary academies. Tiraboschi, in his History of Italian Literature, has given a list of 171; and Jarkius, in his Specimen Historiae Academiarum Conditarum, enumerates nearly 700. Many of these, with a sort of Socratic irony, gave themselves ludicrous names, or names expressive of ignorance. Such were the Lunatici of Naples, the Estravaganti, the Fulminales, the Trapessati, the Drowsy, the Sleepers, the Anxious, the Confused, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... put in their famished stomachs. The men, in rags, covered with perspiration, are stupefied by fatigue, noise and heat; the machines, shining, strong and impassive, made by the hands of these men, are not, however, moved by steam, but by the muscles and blood of their creators—cold and cruel irony! ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... irony of fate! Leandra, despite her slovenly ways, her sour disposition and her addiction to drink, was married to a good hardworking man, while Salome, endowed with excellent gifts of industriousness and sweet temper, had wound up by going to live with an outcast who ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... the band, bawling with unconscious irony some hymn about 'When shall we see His face?' and it seemed an interminable time to me before the tide of the crowd washed along the pavement by me. Thud, thud, thud, came the drum with a vibrating resonance, and ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... very generous to his wife. Philosophers who meet the like of Nanon, of Madame Grandet, of Eugenie, have surely a right to say that irony is at the bottom ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... wisdom o' the country-side be puttin furth the noo?' asked David in a tone of good-humoured irony. 'Weel, as I hear, Mistress Comrie's been to Embro' for a week or twa, and's come hame wi' a gey queer story concernin the young laird—awa oot there whaur there's been sic a rumpus wi' the h'athen so'diers. There's word come, she says, 'at he's fa'en intil the verra glaur o' disgrace, funkin ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... saw that this person was Oliver Torrey. Anxiously his eyes roved over the wreck in quest of other survivors, but none could he discern. Irony of fate! had all ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... her hand as if to check him with a warning gesture. "Yes, dear," she said suddenly, lifting her musical voice, with a mischievous side-glance at Paul, as if to indicate her conception of the irony of a possible application, "this way. Here we are waiting for you." Her listening ear had detected Milly's step in the passage, and in another moment that cheerful young woman discreetly stopped on the threshold of the room, with every expression of ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... By an irony of fate, poor Nabendu Sekhar married the second daughter of this house. His sisters-in-law were well educated and handsome. Nabendu considered he had made a lucky bargain. But he lost no time in trying to impress on the family that it was a rare bargain ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... expressed irony qualified by enjoyment, the creditor replied: "'T is a pleasure to aid a man to whom I am ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... la Haye looked angry at the rather caustic irony with which I had sprinkled the dialogue; but he was still more vexed when, taking some gold out of my pocket, I returned to him the sum he had lent me in Vienna. A man never argues well except when his purse ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... pointed and barbed with the sharpest wit, appeared to give him pain. Great satirists, animated by a deadly personal aversion, exhausted all their strength in attacks upon him. They assailed him with keen invective; they assailed him with still keener irony; but they found that neither invective nor irony could move him to any thing but an unforced smile and a goodhumoured curse; and they at length threw down the lash, acknowledging that it was impossible to make him feel. That, with such vices, he should have played ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this stage partly the woman's love, partly the deep and passionate loyalty of the disciple. And it was possibly this very loyalty in her from which Meynell shrank. He felt toward himself and his role, in the struggle to which he was committed, a half despairing, half impatient irony, which saved him from anything like a prophetic pose. Some other fellow would do it so much better! But meanwhile ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... knave—the flatterer of the follies, and even the eager participator of the crimes, of his superior. The morality of servants has not been improved by the wonderful revelations of Swift's "Directions," where the irony is too refined, while it plainly inculcates the practice. This celebrated tract, designed for the instruction of the masters, is more frequently thumbed in the kitchen, as a manual for the profligate domestic. Servants have acknowledged that some of their ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... N. figure of speech; facon de parler [French], way of speaking, colloquialism. phrase &c. 566; figure, trope, metaphor, enallage[obs3], catachresis[obs3]; metonymy[Gram], synecdoche[Semant]; autonomasia|!, irony, figurativeness &c. adj.; image, imagery; metalepsis[obs3], type, anagoge[obs3], simile, personification, prosopopoeia[obs3], allegory, apologue[obs3], parable, fable; allusion, adumbration; application. exaggeration , hyperbole ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... comprehension of them. He had wit at will. He had humor that, when he pleased, was delicate and delightful. He had a satire that was good-natured or caustic, Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais, at his pleasure. He had talents for irony, allegory, and fable, that he could adapt with great skill to the promotion of moral and political truth. He was master of that infantine simplicity which the French call naivete, which never fails to charm, in Phaedrus and La Fontaine, from the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... HOLD. Short for 'to hold'—but it is a licentious construction, so also, in next line, 'themselves' for 'they themselves.' The stanza is on the whole the worst in the poem, its irony and essential force being much dimmed by obscure expression, and even slightly staggering continuity of thought. The Rooks may be properly supposed to have taught men to dispute, but not to write. The Swallow teaches building, literally, and the Owl moping, literally; ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... as Nicias and Laches; some statesmen, as Critias and Critobulus; some were politicians, in the worst sense of that word, as Glaucon; and some were young men of fashion, as Euthydemus and Alcibiades. These were all alike delighted with his inimitable irony, his versatility of genius, his charming modes of conversation, his adroitness of reply; and they were compelled to confess the wisdom and justness of his opinions, and to admire the purity and goodness of his life. The magic power which he wielded, even ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the importation of Africans at a high price, even though one negro did the work of four Indians, according to the popular estimate. While many admirable suggestions of Las Casas were rejected, this blamable one concerning the permission to import negroes was accepted, and thus by a singular irony of fate, this good man, whose whole life was a self-sacrificing apostolate in favour of freedom, actually came to be aspersed ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... the superior smile of the masculine creature. "I suppose," he remarked with elaborate irony, "that he's like Uncle and you; he thinks ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... a favourite theory, with the Europeans," he said, with a sort of bitter irony, "that all the animals of this hemisphere have less gifted natures than those of the other; nor is it a theory of which they are yet entirely rid. The Indian was supposed to be passionless, because ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... does not attract you (and, indeed, there are many whom it has repelled) I would offer you as an alternative that you should produce slowly, at about the rate of one in every two years, short books compact of irony, yet having running through them like a twisted thread up and down, emerging, hidden, and re-emerging in the stuff of your writing, a memory of those early certitudes and even of ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... it could not positively have been asserted that the man, in spite of his tantalizing declaration, was really in earnest. The spectators had indeed taken the proceedings throughout as a piece of mirthful irony carried to extremes; and had assumed that, being out of work, he was, as a consequence, out of temper with the world, and society, and his nearest kin. But with the demand and response of real cash the jovial frivolity of the ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... Thomas's humour was what may be called quiet, because its effect did not immediately show itself in boisterous merriment, but would undoubtedly remain long in the remembrance of those to whom it was addressed. Made with as much courtesy as irony, is it likely his keeper in the Tower would ever forget his remark? "Assure yourself I do not dislike my cheer; but whenever I do, then spare not to thrust me out of your doors." Nor did his quaint humour desert him at the scaffold: "Master Lieutenant," said he, "I pray ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... It was the irony of fate that when they had so met it was only to be parted. Mary's subjects, outraged by her conduct, rose against her. As she passed through the streets of Edinburgh the women hurled after her indecent names. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... of Lot's wife might be his if he should let himself look back too indiscreetly, he kept his eyes upon the lofty goal and pressed on upwards with a haste that now grew a trifle feverish. It began to seem to him that the irony of the eagle's changeless stare might ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... Yet we know how cruelly many Romans treated their slaves. But in truth these intense individual feelings nowhere rise to such a luxuriant height as under the most atrocious institutions. It is part of the irony of life, that the strongest feelings of devoted gratitude of which human nature seems susceptible, are called forth in human beings toward those who, having the power entirely to crush their earthly existence, voluntarily ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... announce the arrival of a messenger from Troy. Talthybius, the herald, enters as spokesman of the army and king, describing the hardships they have suffered and the joy of the triumphant issue. To him Clytemnestra announces, in words of which the irony is patent to the audience, her sufferings in the absence of her husband and her delight at the prospect of his return. He will find her, she says, as he left her, a faithful watcher of the home, her loyalty sure, her honour undefiled. Then ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... his way a gift which to some extent compensated him for the loss of his friend. He and Colonel von Falkenhein were brought together; and, by the irony of fate, at one of these ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... the islands; needless to remark, without success. The mail steamers run there from Valencia and Barcelona only, and though there are occasional orange boats passing between Soller in North Mallorca and Marseille, they aren't to be depended on. By a singular irony of fate, I did come across an old white—painted barque which had just come out of Palma in ballast; but her skipper only told what I knew full well in my own heart, that I might very likely wait three years before I found a craft ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... Oh, irony of fate! the same thing precisely happens when men of scientific eminence indulge in religious dissertations, for of course, though it is not quite so obvious to such writers, the same blunder is quite ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... as often gauged by the attitude of her lover as a man is judged from the tone of his mistress. The Baron was proud of his attachment to Valerie, and of hers to him; his smile had, to these experienced connoisseurs, a touch of irony; he was really grand to look upon; wine had not flushed him; and his eyes, with their peculiar lustre as of tarnished gold, kept the secrets of his soul. Even ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... fortune, piques himself upon living in the country, and maintaining old English hospitality — By the bye, this is a phrase very much used by the English themselves both in words and writing; but I never heard of it out of the island, except by way of irony and sarcasm. What the hospitality of our forefathers has been I should be glad to see recorded, rather in the memoirs of strangers who have visited our country, and were the proper objects and judges of such hospitality, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... 13. IRONY is expressing ourselves in a manner contrary to our thoughts; not with a view to deceive, but to add force to our remarks. We can reprove one for his negligence, by saying, "You have taken ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... the practical irony of this man was followed, soon after the death of the Tsar, by Kantemir, the first Russian author who wrote satirical verses. These verses were very much appreciated in his time. In them, he mocks with considerable ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... genuine heathen spirit, attributes the ruin of the empire to the abolition of Paganism, and almost renews the old accusation of Atheism against Christianity. He impersonates some deity, probably Discord, who summons Bellona to take arms for the destruction of Rome; and in a strain of fierce irony recommends to her other fatal measures, to extirpate the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... ironically; and, whilst affecting to load his antagonist with praises, draws into pointed relief some of his most flagrant faults. The result, however, we cannot believe. That all the wits, except Addison, were duped by the irony, is quite impossible. Could any man of sense mistake for praise the remark, that Philips had imitated "every line of Strada; "that he had introduced wolves into England, and proved himself the first of gardeners by making his flowers "blow all in the same season." Or, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... immediately, but not in time. One of her own slippers,—oh, the irony of things!—torn off and thrown by Split's impatient hand, struck her in ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... those who say that right conduct will survive though religion be surrendered. It has perhaps not been generally observed that just as the virtuous agnostic is generally the child of Christian parents, so by a seeming irony he is {179} often found to be the father of Christian children: there is hardly a genuine case on record where "free-thought," Agnosticism, Rationalism, has descended from parents to children to the third or fourth generation without a break, and the practical non-existence of ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... popularity' of Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair is referred to. 'A very remarkable book,' the reviewer continues; 'we have no remembrance of another containing such undoubted power with such horrid taste.' There is droll irony, when Charlotte Bronte's strong conservative sentiments and church environment ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... some fine thing had lit his eyes like stars at the parting. Time came when she wished she had seen him at the studio, or at her mother's house, when he called before going away.... The sharp irony of her success brought tears—and Beth Truba was rather choice of her tears. The portrait had made a stir at the Club, and the papers ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... you, reminding you that in Italy even the oldest places—S. Paolo al Orto, for instance, with its beautiful old tower that is now a dwelling—are put to some use, and are really living still like the gods who have taken service with us, perhaps in irony, to console themselves for our treachery in ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... so fell out that this patent irony was still too subtle for the mob, who took it seriously. Alcibiades also had a certain influence with them because of his relationship to Pericles, and they listened to him readily. Accordingly the whole assembly called out for Cleon, ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction, to set off the meanest things. The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity, is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The little is made great, and the great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or weep. It is the triumph of insignificance, ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... suspected irony he was angry, but as Charlie seemed, after all, to be certainly in earnest, he began to feel conscience-stricken. He was by no means a tender man, but his lately-discovered misfortune had unhinged him, and this strange, undeserved, disinterested family fealty on the part of ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... little figure as she approached the house. But to her surprise, her coming had evidently been anticipated by them, and they were actually—and unexpectedly—awaiting her behind the low whitewashed garden palings! As she neared them they burst into a shrill, discordant laugh, so full of irony, gratified malice, and mean exaltation that Cissy was for a moment startled. But only for a moment; she had her father's reckless audacity, and bore them down with a display of such pink cheeks and flashing eyes that their laughter was checked, and they remained ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... The unintentional irony of Mr. Jefferson's letter of credit now became apparent. The trading vessels that were used to making yearly visits to this part of the coast from abroad had gone away for the winter, and no white face was seen through all those weary months. Considerable comment has been passed upon the ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... "Sun Flowers"—but how comes a child of eight to prick and point with the rapier of irony? For it is nothing less than irony in "The Tower and the Falcon." Did she quite grasp its meaning herself? We may doubt it. In this poem, the subconscious is very much ...
— Poems By a Little Girl • Hilda Conkling
... by, has practically been destroyed. Only a single picture remains perfectly intact, and that is the Portrait of Philippe Egalite. Was it purposely respected by the riot or is its preservation an irony of chance? The National Guards amused, and still amuse, themselves by cutting out of the canvases that were not entirely destroyed by fire faces to ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... confusion not so much a mind as incurable dementia, a chaos of mental elements, haunted by invincible and mutually incoherent fixed ideas. This you will remember is the gist of that melancholy torso of irony, Flaubert's Bouvard ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... cultured scholarly aristocrat, a half-breed Samaritan, and a Roman of gentle birth. Acceptance seems to grow with the distance from Jerusalem. Yet everything hinged in Jerusalem. There had been the flood-light. Jerusalem was meant to be the gateway to the world. The irony of sin! The blinding of greed! The ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... moment, please. When I discovered that young Wintermill couldn't be depended upon to rescue his best friend, I stepped into the arena, so to speak," said Mr. Thorpe with fine irony. "I sensed the situation perfectly. Percy was young and strong and enduring. He would be a long time dying in the natural order of things. What Anne was looking for—now, keep your seat, my boy!—what she wanted was a husband who could be depended upon to leave her a widow before it ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... and out of shape like those of many deformed persons, turned from right to left of the face instead of dividing it down the middle. The mouth, contracted at the corners, like that of a Sardinian, was always on the qui vive of irony. His hair, thin and reddish, fell straight, and showed the skull in many places. His hands, coarse and ill-joined at the wrists to arms that were far too long, were quick-fingered and seldom clean. Goupil wore boots ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... principles, you will agree with me, that unless that custom, called "politeness," is not pushed so far as irony or treason, it is a sociable virtue to follow, and of all the relations among men, the true meaning of gallantry has more need of being concealed than that of any other social affair. How many occasions do you not find where a lover gains more by dissimulating the ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... but they only made that admission in order to emphasize the hideousness of the body when deprived of this film of loveliness, and strained all their perverse intellectual acumen, and their ferocious irony, as they eagerly pointed the finger of mockery at every detail of what seemed to them the pitiful figure of man. St. Odo of Cluny—charming saint as he was and a pioneer in his appreciation of the wild beauty ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Dr. Arbuthnot, in which every infirmity and peculiarity of Hervey are handed down in calm, cruel irony, and polished verses, to posterity. The verses are almost too disgusting to be revived in an age which disclaims scurrility. After the most personal rancorous invective, he thus ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... of the sort," replied Etta. "Of course I know that all that you say about position and work is mere irony. Paul thinks there is no one ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... controversy which for the next five years made a "very great noise" and which ended only with his death. The loudest shot in the persistent barrage was sounded by the Grounds and Reasons, and its last fusillade by the Discourse concerning Ridicule and Irony ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... and well that his early desertion of fiction is surprising. His mocking spirit has often suggested comparison with Voltaire, whom he studied and admired. He too is a skeptic and an idol-breaker; but his is a kindlier irony, a less incisive philosophy. Perhaps, however, this influence led to lack of faith in his own work, to his loss of an ideal, which Zola thinks the real secret of his sudden change from novelist to journalist. Voltaire taught him to scoff and disbelieve, to demand "a quoi bon?" and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... that frozen moment of expression, would develop the quality of tragic irony. In it Clytemnestra comes out to greet the returning Agamemnon. She has her handmaids carpet the road for him with purple tapestries; she makes her speeches of welcome; she alludes to the old sacrifice of Iphigenia; she tells him how she has waited for his return;— and all the while the audience ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... been accumulating for years fairly choked her; but after a moment she resumed, in a tone of intense irony: ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... Plant divine, of rarest virtue; Blisters on the tongue would hurt you. 'Twas but in a sort I blamed thee; None e'er prosper'd who defamed thee; Irony all, and feign'd abuse, Such as perplex'd lovers use At a need when, in despair To paint forth their fairest fair, Or in part but to express That exceeding comeliness Which their fancies doth so strike, They borrow ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... furious as a tempest, or a tornado; but his corruption is a monsoon; a trade-wind, blowing uniformly from one point of the compass, and wafting the wealth of India to the same port, in one certain direction." In his speech, however, in indulging his wit and irony, Sheridan gave vent to some sallies, which showed that he was convinced that Hastings had not received the presents for himself, but for his employers. Describing the accommodating morality of the court of directors, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... What irony lurks in blind chance that I should owe this woman my life—this woman whose home I had come to confiscate, whose friends I had arrested, who herself was now my prisoner, destined to the ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... she have been really inspired?" he queried, with grave irony, keeping his back to the room, as if entranced by the contemplation of the town's colossal forms half lost in the night. He did not even look round when he heard the mutter of the word "Providential" from the principal subordinate ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... the irony of fate," said McKnight, getting up, "that a man should kill another man for certain papers he is supposed to be carrying, find he hasn't got them after all, decide to throw suspicion on another man by changing berths and getting ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... alarming, till you chanced on those diminutive features. It was as if his growth had been terminated before it reached the expressive parts. He had an elaborate manner—a reticence, a drawl, and a chronic irony. Across half of his chest there streaked a rainbow of color; gay little ribbons of decoration, orange and ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... be tolerated in an habitual Humour, Whim, or Particularity of Behaviour, by any who do not wait upon him for Bread. Next to the peevish Fellow is the Snarler. This Gentleman deals mightily in what we call the Irony, and as those sort of People exert themselves most against these below them, you see their Humour best, in their Talk to their Servants. That is so like you, You are a fine Fellow, Thou art the quickest Head-piece, and the like. One would think the Hectoring, the Storming, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Verena Tarrant; and the gay vibration of her voice as she uttered this simple ejaculation was the last that Ransom heard of her. Miss Chancellor swept her out of the room, leaving the young man to extract a relish from the ineffable irony with which she uttered the words "even a woman." It was to be supposed, on general grounds, that she would reappear, but there was nothing in the glance she gave him, as she turned her back, that was an earnest of this. He stood ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... confessed that in this line his attempts were few and far between, and not always successful. He had seen, however, that the professor, though not exactly poking fun at him, had nevertheless intended a sly touch of irony upon his proverbially prosing character. He therefore determined to "be up to him," as the fancy have it; and having somewhere found the copy of an obsolete satirical epic which an enamored snuff-taker had once addressed ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... maiden, by words of such irony wounded, (As she esteem'd them to be) and deeply distress'd in her spirit, Stood, while a passing flush from her cheeks as far as her neck was Spreading, but she restrain'd herself, and collected her thoughts soon; Then to the old man ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... been a credible kind of a chap, that sailor," observed his father with a mild irony, which escaped his son, however; while his mother looked at him in some anxiety lest he should be going to sit there and make a fool of himself. "Well, and what ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... the pious friendship of the publisher that these opinions are bound between covers. They are the record of a stubborn, prejudiced, well-trained musician and well-read man, one who was not devoid of irony. Indeed, I believe he wrote much with his tongue in his cheek. But he was a stimulating companion, boasted a perverse funny-bone and a profound sense of the importance of being Old Fogy. And this is all I ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... public notice on the fame of Rodman, who by an irony of fate is now all but forgotten. Rodman, it may be remembered, was a promising young poet during the first decade of this century. Out of a scandalous youth whose verses made their appearance in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... sermons regularly begin by: "This gospel tellith.... This gospel techith alle men that ..." and he continues his arguments in a clear and measured style, until he comes to one of those burning questions about which he is battling; then his irony bursts forth, he uses scathing similes; he thunders against those "emperoure bishopis," taken up with worldly cares; his speech is short and haughty; he knows how to condense his whole theory in one brief, clear-cut phrase, easy to remember, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... situation for Florent, but in a very extraordinary and most mysterious fashion. He would have liked to find some employment of a dramatic character, or in which there should be a touch of bitter irony, as was suitable for an outlaw. Gavard was a man who was always in opposition. He had just completed his fiftieth year, and he boasted that he had already passed judgment on four Governments. He still contemptuously shrugged his shoulders ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the bottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the maternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self delusion. That ironical note is not only daily apparent in real life; it ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... showed the habit of her mind. Others talked of the delicacy of her sex, advised her to withdraw from perils and dangers, and had no comprehension of the feelings within her breast that made this impossible. The gentle irony of her reply to these self-constituted tutors (not one of whom showed himself her equal in conduct or reason), is as good as her indignant reproof at a later period to the general, whose ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... this whisky nowadays!" he observed absently, with quiet irony. I wanted to hear the ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... many similar subtleties of speech, seem to have fired the imagination of Chuang Tz[)u], 4th and 3rd centuries B.C., with the result that he put much time and energy into the glorification of Lao Tz[)u] and his doctrines. Possessed of a brilliant style and a master of irony, Chuang Tz[)u] attacked the schools of Confucius and Mo Ti (see below) with so much dialectic skill that the ablest scholars of the age were unable to refute his destructive criticisms. His pages abound in quaint anecdotes ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... you."—Helen paused, looking upon him, and that look had in it a delicate affinity to a caress. But the young man's manner, though faultlessly courteous, was lacking in any hint of enthusiasm. Helen could have imagined, and that angered her, something of irony in his tone. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... have mistaken the identity of the boy's father. For he stood now, holding the Master's arm; while a few paces above them was the little man, pale but determined, the expression on his face betraying his consciousness of the irony of the situation. ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... never been explained why Jefferson Davis was chosen President of the Confederacy. He did not seek the office and did not wish it. He dreamed of high military command. As a study in the irony of fate, Davis's career is made to the hand of the dramatist. An instinctive soldier, he was driven by circumstances three times to renounce the profession of arms for a less congenial civilian life. His final renunciation, which proved to be of the ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... later he transposed Hartley's advice, not without irony: "Let nothing induce [the English Whigs] to join with the Tories in supporting and continuing this wicked war against the Whigs of America, whose assistance they may hereafter want to secure their own liberties, or whose country ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... please. When I discovered that young Wintermill couldn't be depended upon to rescue his best friend, I stepped into the arena, so to speak," said Mr. Thorpe with fine irony. "I sensed the situation perfectly. Percy was young and strong and enduring. He would be a long time dying in the natural order of things. What Anne was looking for—now, keep your seat, my boy!—what she wanted was a husband who could be depended upon to leave her a widow before it was too ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... want of breath had forced him to wait and really hear it, a sensation came over him of old times when Edward Underwood had argued with him; and it was with much less heat that he returned, with an effort at irony, 'And so you take the bread out of the mouths of the others to support my fine gentleman in ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Unfortunately, at the angle of the fence stood a beautiful Madrono-tree, brilliant with its scarlet berries, and endeared to me as Consuelo's favorite haunt, under whose protecting shade I had more than once avowed my youthful passion. By the irony of fate Chu Chu caught sight of it, and with a succession of spirited bounds instantly made for it. In another moment I was beneath it, and Chu Chu shot like a rocket into the air. I had barely time to withdraw my feet from the stirrups, to throw up one arm to protect my glazed ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... mask, that frozen moment of expression, would develop the quality of tragic irony. In it Clytemnestra comes out to greet the returning Agamemnon. She has her handmaids carpet the road for him with purple tapestries; she makes her speeches of welcome; she alludes to the old sacrifice of Iphigenia; she tells him how ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... and 6 dilate with keen irony on the fate of the first half of Israel's sin—the calf. It was thought a god, but its worshippers shall be in a fright for it. 'Calves,' says Hosea, though there was but one at Beth-el; and he uses the feminine, as some think, depreciatingly. 'Beth-aven' or the 'house of vanity,' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... open eyes, eyes that were disposed to caricature the peculiarities of others. This trait, much clarified and spiritualized in later life, became a distinct, ironic note in his character. Possibly it attracted Heine, although his irony was on a ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... a veiled irony in her retort, although it was accompanied by a smile: "I don't. I have to take that chance. I have no other choice at this ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... a little by surprise at the dignity and formality of the captain, touched their hands civilly to each other, and smiled. Eve, not a little amused at the scene, watched the whole procedure; and then she too detected the sweet melancholy of the one expression and the marble-like irony of the other. It may have been this that caused her to start, though almost imperceptibly, and ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... very keen, and that he has conjectured for some time the mistrust with which he inspired me. If he wanted to mock me a little, I will pardon him; a good man unjustly suspected has a perfect right to revenge himself by a little irony. I ordered the horses to be put to my carriage to take him over to the railroad, and the abbe and I accompanied him as far as the station. There cannot be too much regard shown to honest people who have been ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... to overestimate the value of all this work in industry. The Prime Minister, speaking last year on this subject, said, "It is a strange irony, but no small compensation, that the making of weapons of destruction should afford the occasion to humanize industry. Yet such is the case. Old prejudices have vanished, new ideas are abroad; employers and workers, the ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... barbarians, sir, who live as you see us, only in a state of simplicity and nature,"—there was irony in every syllable the impudent scoundrel uttered—"we poor wretches, or rather our ancestors, made the discovery, that for the purposes of convenience, having, as you perceive, no pockets, it might be well to convert all our currency into 'promises.' Now, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... misguidedness, such a tough and stubborn race. The arrow that is to fly far must be discharged from a well distended bow: if, therefore, anything is necessary for greatness, it is a fierce and tenacious opposition, an opposition either of open contempt, or of malicious irony, or of sly silence, or of gross stupidity, an opposition regardless of the wounds it inflicts and of the precious lives it sacrifices, an opposition that nobody would dare to attack who was not prepared, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Kieran could retort, she seemed to realize the monumental irony of what she had just said, and ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... Nature was spoilt by irony and straining after effect—for example, in The Fig Tree; and although The Lotos Flower is a gem, and the North Sea Pictures shew the fine eye of a poet who, like Byron and Shelley, can create myths, his personifications as a whole are affected, and his personal feeling is forced ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... watched the terror which these formidable beings inspired, and the business-like manner in which they addressed themselves to their task, as he noticed the jaunty destroyers of his race succumbing one by one to fate, or ignominiously attempting to "get away," he would feel that the "irony of the situation" was complete. In a vague way he would grasp the fact—hitherto undreamt of in his dove's philosophy—that, if the pigeon is preyed upon by man, man in his turn is ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... far from correct, for on the very next night Vertua presented himself at the Chevalier's bank again, and staked and lost much more heavily than on the night preceding. But he preserved a calm demeanour through it all; he even smiled at times with a sort of bitter irony, as though foreseeing how soon things would be totally changed. But during each of the succeeding nights the old man's losses increased like a glacier at a greater and greater rate, till at last it was calculated that he had paid over thirty thousand Louis d'or ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... should be to keep us constantly in mind that, as Lassalle said, "the sword is never right," and to shudder with him at the fact that "the Lie is a European Power"? In no previous war have we struck that top note of keen irony, the closing of the Stock Exchange and not of the Church. The pagans were more logical: they closed the Temple of Peace when they drew the sword. We turn our Temples of Peace promptly into temples of war, and exhibit our parsons as the most pugnacious characters ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... by the contempt which every one showed her poet, paid back scorn for scorn by going to her boudoir during these performances. She was followed by the prelate. His Vicar-General had just been explaining the profound irony of the epigram into which he had been entrapped, and the Bishop wished to make amends. Mlle. de Rastignac, fascinated by the poetry, also slipped into the boudoir ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... bitterest irony. "What is a woman's honor, sir, when you or any man has patched and sewed and sought to make it whole again? I will not say the word ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... scarcely any traveller worth remarking. Mr. Kinglake, the author of Eothen, to be sure, was a host in himself. And Mr. Thackeray, in his Journey from Cheapside to Cairo, proved himself a fit companion of that gentleman. But a certain sneering humor, a certain mephistophelian irony, in these persons, prevent one from feeling entirely at ease with them, or believing, in fact, in their complete sincerity. It is not so with the author of Nile Notes, than whom a June breeze is not more bland, and moonlight not less gairish or oppressive. This conviction, indeed, strikes ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... she said, with a singular expression of irony, "that you are a poet. You must talk about the forests and moorlands with Mlle. Helouin, who also adores these things. For my part I ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... have remotely contributed to form the historian of the Roman empire. 1. From the Provincial Letters of Pascal, which almost every year I have perused with new pleasure, I learned to manage the weapon of grave and temperate irony, even on subjects of ecclesiastical solemnity. 2. The Life of Julian, by the Abbe de la Bleterie, first introduced me to the man and the times; and I should be glad to recover my first essay on the truth of the miracle which stopped the rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem. ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... "Where have you been burying yourself, Evan? Didn't I just tell you that he is the biggest man in the State? Oh, no"—with heavy irony—"he isn't identified with the machine—not at all; he merely owns it and runs it. We may think we can swing a safe majority in the legislature, and the 'antis' may be just as firmly convinced that they can. But before either side can ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... revelation of his country's predicament did not lose its effect. Writing in prose he achieved a style of his own which went as near poetry as narrative prose can do. without using the wrong music: while over his realism or his irony he cast a tinge of that mixed modern and oriental fantasy which belonged to his temperament. He suffered in youth, and suffered badly, from the romantic malady of his century, and that other malady of Russia, both expressed ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... King, her sarcasm for his courtiers. Perhaps little of this latter quality appears in the pages bequeathed to us, written, as they are, in a somewhat cold, formal style, and we may assume that her much-dreaded irony resided in her tongue rather than in her pen. Yet we are glad to possess these pages, if only as a reliable record of Court life during the brightest period of the reign of ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... and eat your dinner Christian-like, without remarks! You have never got over the spoiling you, received when you lay wounded under this roof. I shall indulge you no longer." Shaking her long forefinger at him. "Your familiarity needs to be checked." Her manner of grave and kindly irony removed all impression of rebuke from this speech, which Major Favraud received very coolly, spoiled child that he really was, rubbing his hands as he took the foot of the table. At the sight of the bouilli before him, from which a savory steam ascended to his epicurean nostrils, he said, ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... medicine, and, having set the glass upon the center table, returned to her cot, where, after a still interval, she snored faintly. Upon this, his expression became that of a man goaded out of overpowering weariness into irony. ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... I sketch an upland green, And put the figure in Of one on the spot with me? - For now that one has ceased to be seen The picture waxes akin To a wordless irony. ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... has been aptly called "a land of unrest." In the eighteen-forties the country witnessed many plans, "pronunciamientos" and revolutions, which could not escape the vigilant mind of Madame Calderon, who often refers to them with a spice of delicate satire and irony which is not unkindly. After the long period of peaceful if unexciting viceregal rule, the government of the new republic had become the prey of political groups, headed by men who coveted the presidency chiefly impelled by a "vaulting ambition" which, in ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... glass, Paul saw that this person was Oliver Torrey. Anxiously his eyes roved over the wreck in quest of other survivors, but none could he discern. Irony of fate! had all of the others ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... agape, until presently the weapon wavered and was lowered and the woman's voice, touched with irony, brought him ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... ancestor of mine," he said and his wife once more laughed, though this time his anxiety fancied there was irony in it. "All right," she said, "but wouldn't it have been quite as respectful and much more cheerful to send him on a visit to some painter who takes in dingy ancestors and ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... There was the irony in it that so puts up a boy's dander. "Dinna think," said Tommy, hotly, "that I'm fleid at you, though I have no beard—at least, I ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... Colonel to himself, "This phantom lies like an expert. Purifying this kind by fire don't work. I'll sound him a little further, give him another chance or two to work his gift." Then aloud—with deep irony— ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... she turned on him. "You think you are sure of me, don't you?" she cried. And in her tone at once were defiance and irony. ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... of you," I said, without any irony. "But I like freedom, and when you were at home it ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... easy to understand the irony with which a man who thought thus of love contemplated the business of "love-making," and the ceremonial discipline of Continental courtship. The whole unnumbered tribe of wooing and plighted lovers were for him ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... half-smile at the irony of her own position, which, until to-day, she had accepted without after-thought, and which of ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... be glossed over in the old way. In neither era, consequently, could an honest novelist freely follow his observations upon Southern life in general. The mind of the herd bore down upon him and crushed him into the accepted molds. It seems a curious irony that the Negroes who thus innocently limited the literature of their section should have been the subjects of a little body of narrative which bids fair to outlast all that local color hit upon in the South. Joel Chandler Harris is not, strictly speaking, a contemporary, ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... my faith to that, miss, if I was you," says Ryan, respectfully, but with a touch of the fine irony which is bred and born ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... long silence in the chamber. The two friends sat wrapped in thought. They had seen so much of life, they had had so many blessings of fortune, culture, position, wealth, that there was a grim irony in their sitting here helpless in the face of coming death. To their reverie, moreover, the mention of love could not but give color. No woman has ever come to speak of love entirely unmoved, though her heart may have been deadened or crushed ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... expenses, the enormous dividend requirements of heavily capitalized corporations has necessitated high prices, a large business, and the danger of overproduction, and a virtual monopoly has made it possible to lift prices to a level that pinches the consumer. By a grim irony of circumstance, these giant and often ruthless corporations have taken the name of trusts, but they do not incline to recognize that the people's rights are in their trust. Not every trust is harmful to society, and certainly trusts need not be destroyed. ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... far more highly cultivated than their brothers, whose intellects are always early absorbed in business, and too often injured by pleasure. The same, I believe, in spite of all that has been written about the frivolity of the girl of the period, holds true of that class which is, by a strange irony, called 'the ruling class.' I suspect that the average young lady already learns more worth knowing at home than her brother does at the public school. Those, moreover, who complain that girls are trained now too often merely as articles for the so-called 'marriage market,' must remember ...
— Women and Politics • Charles Kingsley
... Manuello with a sweeping bow, "the coffee I make is very soothing. It will give you a long, soft sleep." There was an undertone of subtle irony that was entirely lost upon ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... 'equal popularity' of Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair is referred to. 'A very remarkable book,' the reviewer continues; 'we have no remembrance of another containing such undoubted power with such horrid taste.' There is droll irony, when Charlotte Bronte's strong conservative sentiments and church environment are ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... restless eyes searched the other's impassive face for some trace of the irony he suspected. They were as wide asunder as the poles, these two, in their political views; and mistrusted as Andre-Louis was by all his colleagues of the Literary Chamber of Rennes, he was by none mistrusted so thoroughly as by this vigorous republican. ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... mater,' said Henry with a touch of irony, 'I must do some work to-night. Sir George has ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... Peggy had one trait more striking than another, it was her perfect, simple faith in what people said; irony was a mystery to her; lying, a myth,—something on a par with murder. She thought Kate meant so; and reaching out for the pretty wicker-flask that contained her daily ration of old Scotch whiskey, she dropped a little drop into a spoon, diluted it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... the titles of the papers which make up his collected—or more properly, selected—works (for there was much matter of evanescent interest not reprinted) sufficiently shows. Some things in his own line he has done perfectly; he has written many pages of magnificently mixed argument, irony, humour and eloquence, which, for sustained brilliancy, richness, subtle force and purity of style and effect, have simply no parallels; and he is without peer the prince of dreamers. The use of opium no doubt stimulated ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... full irony. "So long as you're aware of this, it's well and good," she said. And smiling a saturnine smile, she resumed, addressing herself to T'an Ch'un: "Miss, you know very well how busy our lady has been and how little she could afford the time to keep this tribe ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... manage the cause more discreetly, more genteelly than we do. I am ready to rest and see the salvation of the Lord." On their rounds the letters came to Martha Wright, the gentle Quaker, who commented with the fine irony of which she was master: "It strikes me favorably. It would be a fine thing for Mrs. Hooker to preside over the Washington convention, while her sister, Catharine Beecher, was inveighing against suffrage, for the benefit of Mrs. Dahlgren and others. Perhaps she is right in thinking ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... out that conclusion, and then I worked backwards, keeping well in view the idea of 'restraint.' But that quality which is little sister to restraint, and is yet far more repulsive to the public mind than vehemence, emerged to misguide my pen. Irony, in fact, played the deuce. I found myself writing that a nation which, in its ardour for beauty and its reverence for great historic associations, has lately disbursed after only a few months' hesitation L250,000 to save the Crystal Palace, where the bank holidays of millions of toilers have been ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... wants to. Are you tired of sitting in prison? Go. Are you tired of going? Sit. They robbed you? Keep still. They beat you? Bear it. They have killed you? Stay dead. That's certain. And I'll carry off Savka; I'll carry him off!" His curt, barking phrases, full of good-natured irony, perplexed the mother. But his last words aroused ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... vouchsafed no further reply. Meantime Mark, who for some minutes had been rummaging amongst a pile of books on a side-table, took the word. He spoke in a peculiarly slow, quiet voice, and with an expression of still irony in his face not easy ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... their subterranean home, as well as their counsellor, guardian, and ruler. In the capacity of ruler he was assisted by his wife, a hideous, horrible, old witch with "crooked, copper-fingers iron-pointed," with deformed head and distorted features, and uniformly spoken of in irony in the Kalevala as "hyva emanta," the good hostess; she feasted her guests on lizards, worms, toads, and writhing serpents. Tuouen Poika, "The God of the Red Cheeks," so called because of his bloodthirstiness and constant ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... likely to, no doubt!" said the policeman, in quiet irony. "What rascality are you up to now, Dirk? Can't you be ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... Sterling. "Here is a problem for you and all of us to solve. This forlorn object is representative, and stands here to-night preaching us a serious sermon. He was deserted on the Club steps—left there, perhaps, as a piece of clever irony; he might be son to some of us. ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... stationed at Rivermouth—sometimes drops in of an evening, and sometimes the rector from Stillwater; the lieutenant the oftener. He was there last night. I should not be surprised if he had an eye to the heiress; but he is not formidable. Mistress Daw carries a neat little spear of irony, and the honest lieutenant seems to have a particular facility for impaling himself on the point of it. He is not dangerous, I should say; though I have known a woman to satirize a man for years, and marry him after all. Decidedly, ...
— Marjorie Daw • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... English hearers, and the effect of his conversion was tremendous. Into the theological controversy of the next twenty years we have no mind to enter. Through it all Newman retained his serenity, and, though a master of irony and satire, kept his literary power always subordinate to his chief aim, which was to establish the truth as he saw it. Whether or not we agree with his conclusions, we must all admire the spirit of the man, which is ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... tent and the dwindling number of the Freja's survivors moving about on their hands and knees in its gloomy half-light. Their hair and beards were long, their faces black with dirt, monstrously distended and fat with the bloated irony of starvation. They were no longer men. After that unspeakable stress of misery ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... in voice or action, but there was unmistakable irony. A curious sense of coldness came upon her, as if out of the heart a distant storm-cloud an icy breath had ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... 40. IRONY is the utterance of pointed remarks, contrary to the actual thoughts of the speaker or writer—not to deceive, but to add force to the remark. Examples.—"No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you." ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... or a tone of conversation that offended her, and made her repent it. Happily, Mr. Egremont did not wish her to be otherwise. One day, when she had been betrayed into rattling and giggling, he spoke to her afterwards with a cutting irony which bitterly angered her at the moment, and which she never forgot. Each irksome duty, each privation, each disappointment, each recurrence of the sweeping sense of desolation and loneliness had had one effect—it had sent her to her knees. She had no one else to go to. She turned to her ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... some one—to hold back the battle from Paris—and incidentally from me. The relief had its bitterness, I can tell you. I had been prepared to play the whole game. I had not even had the chance to discover whether or not I could. You, who know me fairly well, will see the irony of it. I am eternally hanging round dans les coulisses, I am never in the play. I instinctively thought of Captain Simpson, who had left his brother in the trenches at Saint-Quentin, and still had in him the kindly sympathy that had helped ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... photograph you can only glimpse the soul. Words can portray the form of a speech, but the spirit, the life, are missing and we turn away disappointed. That sweet, well modulated voice, full of tender pathos, of biting sarcasm, of withering irony, of swelling rage, of glowing fervor, according as the occasion demanded, was a most faithful vehicle to Bernard; conveying fully ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... An irony was in that Latin diminutive! He spread his pale hands. "Your United States officials perhaps exaggerate. I am very doubtful if we have smugglers here ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... Bazarov. There is a story that some one recently gave him a beating; but he was avenged upon him; in an obscure little article, hidden in an obscure little journal, he has hinted that the man who beat him was a coward. He calls this irony. His father bullies him as before, while his wife regards him as a fool ... ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... erected the grand fabric of his theological system. In his most celebrated work, "The City of God," he holds up to derision the gods of antiquity, and with blended logic and irony makes them contemptible as objects of worship, since they were impotent to save the soul. In his view the grand and distinguishing feature of Christianity, in contrast with Paganism, is the gift of eternal life and happiness. It is not the morality which Christ and his ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... house and came out into the wet mist. Then, turning to the right, in the direction which Trumet, with unconscious irony, calls "downtown," they climbed the long slope where the main road mounts the outlying ridge of Cannon Hill, passed Captain Mayo's big house—the finest in Trumet, with the exception of the Daniels mansion—and descended into the hollow beyond. Here, at the corner where ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... once heard said by a genial and humane Irish officer concerning a proposal to treat with the leaders of a Zulu rebellion. 'Kill them all,' he said, 'it's the only thing they understand.' He meant that the Zulu chiefs would mistake moderation for a sign of fear. By the irony of human history this sentence has become almost true of the great German people, who built up the structure of modern metaphysics. They can be argued with only by those who have the will and the power to ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... Mr. Price's recent remark concerning the missing bookkeeper's "good start" came to Albert's mind and he smiled, slightly. "I should say not," he observed, with delicate irony. ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... doubt shrugged his shoulders, for in a tone of crushing irony and scorn, he exclaimed: "Noble ladies! whom do you call noble ladies, pray? The brainless fools who only think of displaying themselves and making themselves notorious?—the senseless idiots who pique themselves on surpassing lewd women in audacity, extravagance, and effrontery, ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... of anarchy with us when there is any talk of government transportation. The official who sold me tickets might have been training himself for a position on the municipal line, he was so civilly explanatory as to my voyage; so far from treating my inquiries with the sardonic irony which meets question in American ticket-offices, he all but caressed me aboard. He had scarcely ceased reassuring me when the boat struck out on the thin solution of dark mud which passes for water in the Thames, and scuttled ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... shows itself in our love of certain kinds of fiction. We know that some of the happy endings in the plays and in the novels are often far-fetched; but we like to have the happy endings, or the "poetic justice" endings, or the "irony of fate" endings, just the same. When the child makes up his endings to fit his sense of justice or beauty, we must not condemn him, as we are often tempted to do, by calling his fabrication a "lie," for that at once ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... and I'll let the padre know whom he has got before I take leave of him. I'll give him a souvenir that won't make him sleep any sounder to-night. Oyez, Padre Jarauta!" continued he, calling out in a tone of irony; ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... Venice of today, like a flower of that period preserved. Let us strike her off. Let us strike off, too, Madame Gorka, the truthful creature who could not even condescend to the smallest lie for a trinket which she desires. It is that which renders her so easily deceived. What irony!... Let us strike off Florent. He would allow himself to be killed, if necessary, like a Mameluke at the door of the room where his genial brother-in-law was dallying with the Countess.... Let us strike off the American himself. I have met such a case, a lover weary of ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... aspect of the case for the time being did not concern her. The death of her mother had been a stunning shock, and when she crossed over to the hotel—what irony, by the bye, to think she had been born there thirty-nine years ago, in the old inn that had preceded the twice rebuilt hotel!—when she crossed the street with Minna, it had been with blazing, tearless eyes ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... mistaken when I thought he said she was on this side of the water," I suggested, with bitter, biting irony. ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... the smart of my raw and bleeding hands. The old feeling of callousness and indifference to my fate was once more upon me, and as I gazed at the crazy-looking raft which I had constructed with such a lavish expenditure of painful toil, I smiled in grim irony of myself that I should have done so much to preserve that life which now seemed of such little worth, and which promised soon to become an unendurable burden to me. A reaction from the excitement that had ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... du Maurier go deeper into vices, virtues, habits, and motives, and are at the root of his pictorial commentaries. He has given us true pictures of the manners of his time; and those manners he has satirised with more politeness and irony, perhaps, than broad humour. He worked well with Keene in double harness, and his pictures are at once a foil and a complement of that genius's work and point de vue. He has satirised everything, and his art has been admirably adapted to the depth of the civilisation he ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... There was a certain irony in asking if one had heard of John Lavington! Even from a post of observation as obscure as that of Mrs. Culme's secretary the rumour of John Lavington's money, of his pictures, his politics, his charities and his hospitality, ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... The guests made room, and the host, rushing up, cried, "Welcome, my lord! What will your lordship please to eat?" The prince's answer was very expressive. Stretching out his foot, so that his slipper sparkled and glittered, he took his golden robe in his hand, and said with bitter irony, "Welcome, my lord coat! welcome, most excellent robe! What will your lordship please to eat? For," said he, turning to his surprised host, "I ought to ask my coat what it will eat, since the ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... coming across honest enthusiastic David with little remarks, each skillfully discordant with the rising sentiment. Was he droll, Talboys did a bit of polite gravity on him; was he warm in praise of some gallant action, chill irony trickled on him ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... man by the superficial but rather subtle qualities by which he has achieved success, it seems a sort of irony to think what he might have done and did not do for the country of his birth. What did he ever do for Canada? Before the war—nothing. He made huge fortunes here. He created mergers here. He started consolidated companies here that in time ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... ourselves unlawful words. If you are happy, Noah Webster offers to your tongue ten thousand epithets in which you may express your exhilaration; and if you are righteously indignant, there are in his dictionary whole armories of denunciation and scorn, sarcasm and irony, caricature and wrath. Utter yourself against some meanness or hypocrisy in all the blasphemies that ever smoked up from perdition, and I will go on to denounce the same meanness and hypocrisy with ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... am I, who did not wish to return this way to-night, dragging a mousme by the hand, actually carrying an extra burden in the shape of a mousko on my back. What an irony ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... heapest hoards," etc.—merely a periphrasis for man, and scarcely fitting, except in irony, to a ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... run away. Yet he would not die without the customary ceremonies of washing and burial. Shall he make a libation of the poison? In the spirit he will, but not in the letter. One request he utters in the very act of death, which has been a puzzle to after ages. With a sort of irony he remembers that a trifling religious duty is still unfulfilled, just as above he desires before he departs to compose a few verses in order to satisfy a scruple about a dream—unless, indeed, we suppose him ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... some day the bitter knowledge swept Down on my life,—bearing my treasured freight To founder on the shoals of scorn,—what Fate Smiling with awful irony had kept Till life grew sweeter,—that my god was clay, That 'neath thy ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... from those anxieties, have food in abundance and need not struggle to obtain it. Such is the Gentle, who swims blissfully in the broth of the putrefying Adder. Others—and, by a strange irony of fate, these are generally the most gifted—only manage to eat by dint of craft ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... he has done it?" said Marian, alarmed, and not quite understanding Edmund's tone of irony, "Cannot you ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... peace of mind that you aren't forced to give me credit for it," said Frederik in lifeless irony. "I'll go in now, if I may. I shall not stay long. And then for New York. It's the best place I know of for hastening one's journey through and out of the 'man-built hell' you spoke about. Oh, and I gave Lawton directions ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... immediately flashed East, and Wickersham came posting back to Denver with the worst case of monopoly fright he had ever experienced. The day after his arrival the Tribune had something to say in every department of his nefarious mission, and every reference to him bristled with biting irony and downright accusation. Never was a "good fellow and a thoroughbred" so ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... of mind is not straightforward and sincere, if he speaks with a double meaning, in irony or sarcasm, the stress is a combination of the radical and final, known as compound stress (><). This is analogous to the compound inflection. See ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... turned to Mrs. Archer. "If Louisa's health allowed her to dine out—I wish you would say to Mrs. Lovell Mingott—she and I would have been happy to—er—fill the places of the Lawrence Leffertses at her dinner." He paused to let the irony of this sink in. "As you know, this is impossible." Mrs. Archer sounded a sympathetic assent. "But Newland tells me he has read this morning's Times; therefore he has probably seen that Louisa's relative, the Duke of St. Austrey, ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... catch the irony. "Yes, it would be cheaper and simpler to put a hard-hit soldier ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... Washington on the fourth of July, while drums were beating, and standards flying. One of the captive negroes raised his hand, loaded with irons, and waving it toward the starry flag, sung with a smile of bitter irony, "Hail ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... raillery; and the Connoisseur[7], by its gay and sparkling effusions, had forwarded the advance of the public mind to that last stage of intellectual refinement, in which alone a relish exists for delicate and half latent irony. The plain and literal citizens of an earlier period, who conned over what was "so nominated in the bend," would have misapprehended that graceful playfulness of satire, elegant and fanciful as ever charmed the leisure of the literary loungers of Athens. For, in the writings ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... Roosevelt's coming into the Presidency as he did, but there was irony as well. An evil chance dropped William McKinley before an assassin's bullet; but there was a fitting irony in the fact that the man who must step into his place had been put where he was in large measure by ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... Remark the irony of fate. This affair had no sooner been settled, Mr. Gurr's claims cut at the very root, and the Treasury regulation apparently set beyond cavil, than the Chief Justice pulled himself together, and, taking his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... friends by writing to them on ruled paper, as if I had not got past pothooks and hangers. Sealing-wax I have none on my establishment; wafers of the coarsest bran supply its place. When my epistles come to be weighed with Pliny's, however superior to the Roman in delicate irony, judicious reflections, etc., his gilt post will bribe over the judges to him. All the time I was at the E. I. H. I never mended a pen; I now cut 'em to the stumps, marring rather than mending the primitive goose-quill. I cannot bear to pay for articles I used ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... religious and philosophical thought. They were also skeptical as to the sincerity and usefulness of many current practises and institutions of the Catholic and Protestant branches of the church; their wit, irony, and satire were directed, however, not against religion, but against the obnoxious externals of ecclesiasticism. This attack was provoked by the obvious fact that the reaction employed the institutional state church as a weapon with which ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... found in those passages where men are represented as being deceived and tricked by the gods. Anything so deep would be beyond humour. He very probably conceived that the gods, whom he represented as similar to men, were sometimes not above playing severe practical jokes on them. The so-called irony of Sophocles in like manner, is too ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... grave, and the sun and the moon rise and set, and the flowers and the children blossom and fade, and the endless years come and go, bringing peace, bringing war; bringing harvest, bringing famine; bringing life, bringing death; and, beholding these, still said to the multitude in its terrible irony, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... between our servants, but of an insult which Spain has received from France in the face of all Rome. Yes, all Rome has witnessed this insult, and these miserable Romans have even dared to dishonor us with irony and satire, and to mock and deride Spain, while they ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... respects even to that of Australian savages, who at least allow mothers to rear their own children. And this philosopher, the most radical enemy love has ever known—practically a champion of promiscuity—has, by a strange irony of fate, lent his name to the purest and most exalted form ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the disgust of the Duchess. And it was not the way with her Grace to hide such sorrows in the depth of her bosom. When affronted she would speak out, whether to her husband, or to another,—using irony rather than argument to support her cause and to vindicate her ways. The shafts of ridicule hurled by her against her husband in regard to his voluntary abasement had been many and sharp. They stung him, but never for a moment influenced him. ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... then, my mind running on the end of de Barral, on the irresistible pressure of imaginary griefs, crushing conscience, scruples, prudence, under their ever-expanding volume; on the sombre and venomous irony in the obsession which had ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... names had been renowned for ages, stood there to answer for the crime of possessing a distinguished name. While looking upon this group of nobles, gathered before that merciless tribunal, where judgment was almost certain condemnation, the public accuser, with cruel irony remarked, "Of what can Madame Elizabeth complain, when she sees herself at the foot of the guillotine, surrounded by her faithful nobility? She can now fancy herself back again in the gay festivities ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... facto assailants of Wakefield's theory usually assume that he wished to keep labour divorced from the soil and in a state of permanent political and industrial inferiority. That is sheer nonsense. There are few more odd examples of the irony of fate in colonial history than that the man who warred against the convict system, fought the battle of colonial self-government, was ever the enemy of the land-shark and monopolist, who denounced low wages, and whose dream it was that the thrifty, well-paid colonial ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... The tone of irony was now unmistakable. It angered the colonel, but he did not know what to say. The spirit of military subordination is not favorable to retort, nor ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... scramble into that saddle and go," retorted Bobby with a momentary return to his usual good-natured irony, "and to leave ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... knew was ironically directed against myself, I did not care. So long as I was to be with my companions and of them, irony did not matter. I caught the twinkle in his eye and laughed. He was as joyous as Narcisse. The gladness of the July morning danced in his veins. He pulled the violin and bow out of the old baize bag and fiddled as we walked. It must have ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... Gloster founded here on a magnificent scale a monastery of Austin Canons. This glory has now departed. The Reformation and the Bridges family between them made a clean sweep of everything. The abbey was used as a quarry for building the family mansion, which has by the irony of fate likewise disappeared. Monastic odds and ends may be discovered here and there worked into houses and garden walls. A gateway on the R. of lane leading to station is made up of such fragments. A heap of debris to the E. of the church indicates the whereabouts ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... of Toodlam. And at that time, still so recent, this contempt from her had been accepted as being almost reasonable. Sophia had hardly ventured to rebel against it, and Mr Whitstable himself had been always afraid to encounter the shafts of irony with which his fashionable future sister-in-law attacked him. But all that was now changed. Sophia in her pride of place had become a tyrant, and George Whitstable, petted in the house with those sweetmeats which are ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... [Footnote: We have gone some way since these words were written in our Old Age Pensions.] Here he puts his finger on the very spot where one thoughtless cruelty of bureaucratic legislation is most shown. For many faithful servants of the State come in their last extremity to this destiny. This irony of legislation shone out lately in its true colours when it was discovered that, of over a thousand survivors of the Indian Mutiny, a large proportion, who were invited to the demi-centenary celebration dinner, came ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... first wild Californian dream, his English visit, the revelation of Gray Eagle, the final collapse of his old beliefs, were whirling through his brain to the music of this clear young voice. And by some cruel irony of circumstance it seemed now to even mock his later dreams of expiation as it also called back his unhappy experience of ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... a Psalm, which she had often heard her father quote, came into her mind and repeated themselves over and over. She had smiled with a bitter irony sometimes when she had heard him speak them in a tone of utter thankfulness, while she had been quite unable to imagine how he could use them of himself. But now—now—surely they ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... Many begin by setting up proudly against God what they call the rights of reason, and by and by we see this reason, which has revolted against its Principle, vacillate, doubt of itself, and at last, losing itself in a bitter irony, wrap itself, with all beside, in the ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... what's the fact; if you don't like to hear it, you can avail yourself of the open air. You give it mouth enough, you do; but give it mouth in your own building at least,' remonstrated E. W. B. with stern irony. 'Don't give it mouth in this building, till you're called upon. You have got some building of your ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... time, however, to indulge in reflections on the irony of fortune. All through the afternoon, while the sharp-set Confederates were sweeping away the profits which the Northern sutlers had wrung from Northern soldiers, Stuart's vigilant patrols sent in ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... long ears, my man; but sure it's kind for ye,' retorted Mr. Callaghan, his eye twinkling wickedly. I fear that his subtle irony was lost upon its subject. 'Of coorse I'm not used to ye're foreign food. Our vittles at home are a dale dacenter, ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... method which Mr. White recalls in his studies of scamps and snobs; he allows them, as Thackeray allows Barry Lyndon and the rest, to tell their own stories, and in their unconsciousness of their own natures he finds play for an irony as keen and graphic as anything in fiction. He deals with the actual English world, and the pleasure he gave us was such as to make us resolve to return to Thackeray's vision of his own contemporaneous English world at the first opportunity. ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... his life the King could not tell why he refrained from again attempting to embrace her—and yet he did refrain, standing and listening while she reproved him, and to his ears there seemed to be something of irony and something of mirth in ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... sort yourself," returned Myner, with more than his usual flippancy of manner, but, as I was gratefully aware, not a trace of his occasional irony ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mid-day to-morrow," the Princess pursued, "unless, of course, Victoria refuses to accompany me." Her voice took a tinge of irony. "Possibly your wishes may persuade her, Augustin, if ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... world of men and women, and could only think of the inhumanity of man to man, and of the infinite pain silently endured by many hearts in that Purple Land. The only mystery still unsolved in that ruinous estancia was Don Hilario, who locked up the wine and was called master with bitter irony by Ramona, and who had thought it necessary to apologise to me for depriving me of his ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... over "Wisdom and Destiny," or perhaps over "The Book of Pity and of Death." On the other hand, it seemed quite natural to think of her smiling her mocking smile over a work of delicate, or even of bitter, irony, such as Anatole France's story of Pilate at the Baths of Baies, or study of the Penguins. He could not think that she cared for sentimental books, though she might perhaps have a taste for works ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... fought out by physical force—a struggle which, in the case of man, whom Franklin defines as a tool-making animal, is decided by the weapons peculiar to the species; and the decision is irrevocable. This is the well-known principle of right of might—irony, of course, like the wit of a fool, a parallel phrase. The honor of a knight may be called the ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the High Priestess said, not without irony. "And it does not appear seemly that an ordinary mortal ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... What inimitable irony in this epithet! The God of dulness raging! A stagnant pool in a passion; a canal insane; a mouton enrage, as the French says; or a snail in a tumultuous state of excitement, were but types of ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... House of Commons; his honour was proof, as we have seen, against the most insidious temptations; yet, since one man cannot have all the virtues, he was distinctly stupid. It would have been a hopeless speech anyhow; but, to make matters worse, he had, in the most important part of it, attempted irony. And at the beginning of the ironical passage even the Tariffadical word-painters had to confess that it was their own stalwarts who ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... manner, the most perfect humour and irony is generally quite unconscious. Examples of both are frequently given by men whom the world considers as deficient in humour; it is more probably true that these persons are unconscious of their own delightful power through ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... Wills left amid great celebration; in fact, it was a gala day in Melbourne, and their journey through the settled districts one triumphant march. Their purpose was to cross to Carpentaria. Fate seemed so propitious that one would think in irony she laughed, as ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... notice of the irony. He was still looking critically at the horses. The salesman glanced round him ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... live on grass?" Leander drawled with cutting irony. "Gettin' tired of the old woman's cooking? Well, she ain't ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... world knows that nothing is so useless as a general maxim. If it be very moral and very true it may serve for a copy to a charity boy." So the very moral and the very true are not for the statesman but for the charity-boy. This perhaps may be defended as irony; hardly, but even so, in such irony the character appears as plainly as in volumes of solemn rant. To us it stands out clearly as the characteristic attitude of the English Government. The English people are used to it, practise it, and will put up with it; but the Irish people ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... friar in the opposition camp to discover nearly three hundred years later a tendency in Luis de Leon to treat sensual themes in a sensual fashion.[272] To deal seriously with a belated judgement based on malignant ignorance would be a waste of time. It is the very irony of fate that the poem which has been the subject of severe censure should prove to be a translation from Cardinal Bembo.[273] The standard of the twentieth century is not the standard of the sixteenth, and it is certain that Luis de Leon has not the unfettered liberty of a godless layman. ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... was typically beautiful. His characters are less heroic, and nearer to common humanity than those of Aeschylus. He appeals more to pity. His art is more subtle, especially in the treatment, for which he is famous, of the irony of fate. In politics, social sentiment, and religion, while he is more of the generation of Pericles than Aeschylus, he is still conservative and orthodox. If he belongs to democracy, it is a democracy still kept within moral bounds, and owning a master in its great chief, with whom he seems to ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... he, turning to Rhoda, with angry irony, "pray what is all this fuss about? You are a very ill used young lady, I dare aver. Pray what cruelties does Mademoiselle de Barras propose inflicting upon you, that you need to appeal thus to your mother ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... young Guardsmen; but what, Paul reflected with a qualm, would the kind lady say if she learned the real state of his present fortunes? He thought of the guinea that lay between him and starvation, and was amused by the irony of her proposition. Miss Winwood evidently took it for granted that he was in easy circumstances, living on the patrimony administered during his boyhood by a careless guardian. He shrank from undeceiving her. His dream was beginning to ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... fairly lay claim to the three requisites of an adviser—capacity to advise rightly, honesty to advise truly, and courtesy to advise decently. Now the Saturday Review has neither this, that, nor the other qualification. Indeed his words read like subtle and lurking irony by the light of those phenomenal and portentous vagaries which ever and anon illuminate his opaque pages. What correctness can we expect from a journal whose tomahawk-man, when scalping the corpse of Matthew Arnold, deliberately applies ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Marise's hand drop and with it, evidently, whatever intention she might have had of saying something difficult to express. Instead, she advanced with her fastidious, delicate note of irony, "I don't deny the happiness, if that sort of happiness is what one is after. But I think my appetite for it . . . that sort . . . is perhaps not quite robust enough to ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... in the matter of religious and philosophical thought. They were also skeptical as to the sincerity and usefulness of many current practises and institutions of the Catholic and Protestant branches of the church; their wit, irony, and satire were directed, however, not against religion, but against the obnoxious externals of ecclesiasticism. This attack was provoked by the obvious fact that the reaction employed the institutional state church as a weapon with which ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... account of their most memorable exploits in France. One cannot help wondering if a copy of this extraordinary book has ever been stolen from a book-collector, and of the remorse which must have overtaken the thief when he discovered the character of his prize. That indeed would be a strange irony! ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... a hint of irony in Blensop's employment of that style? Lanyard half fancied there was, but did not linger to analyse the impression. Already the secretary ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... was exceedingly glad that Adamson had to stay in town to play for the South against the North, or Fred would not have come. On that tour I played very badly and Fred very well, which is what some people would call the irony of fate. But I must say in excuse for myself that more difficult people to get hold of than those Swansea, Newport and Cardiff three-quarters I cannot conceive, and I had no end of chances of trying to collar them. How many of those chances I took can be guessed by any one who is curious ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... There was fine irony in the Prince's tone but no trace of offensiveness. Nevertheless, Mr. Blithers turned a shade more purple than before, and not from the violence of exercise. He was having some difficulty in controlling his temper. ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... men than himself, and so much the better to all men, as less to himself;[78] for no quality sets a man off like this, and commends him more against his will: and he can put up any injury sooner than this (as he calls it) your irony. You shall hear him confute his commenders, and giving reasons how much they are mistaken, and is angry almost if they do not believe him. Nothing threatens him so much as great expectation, which he thinks ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... The indignant and bitter irony with which Talma delivers this speech, when he finds that resentment at Pyrrhus, and not affection for himself, has made her thus anxious to rivet the chains which her former cruelty had hardly weakened, is most striking, and he seems at once to regain ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... does not affect Livy, indeed, for he copied only what others had written before him; but he did not allow his own conviction to appear as he generally does, for he treats the whole of the early history with a sort of irony, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... absent from his native state of Loo for fourteen years, and the time had come when he was to return to it. But, by the irony of fate, the accomplishment of his long-felt desire was due, not to his reputation for political or ethical wisdom, but to his knowledge of military tactics, which he heartily despised. It happened that at this time Yen Yew, a disciple of the Sage, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... doesn't it? But he isn't." And then more slowly, "Shad's all right. He's just a plain woodsman, but he doesn't know anything about making the trees grow," she put in with prim irony. "You'll be his boss, I guess. He ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... with palsy, regretted that she had let slip, out of pure childlike joy, in irony, the manner in which she had obtained the poppy-notion, but in a quarrel regrets are useless, and ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... understand them better because you are engaged to this man!" said Miss Petrie, with well-pronounced irony. "You have found generally that when the sun shines in your eyes your sight is improved by it! You think that the love-talk of a few weeks gives clearer instruction than the laborious reading of many volumes and thoughtful converse with thinking persons! I hope that you may find it so, ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... Joseph: "Pharaoh! although I am a descendant of Jacob, whose sons sold their brother Joseph into Egypt, I do not deserve your irony. We are poor people, but the child is our ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... womanly,' said the Egyptian, in a tone too grave for irony. 'Yet more, fair maiden; wilt thou confide to me the name of thy lover? Can he be Pompeian, and despise wealth, even ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... be in vain to describe the manner in which Mr. Darrell vented this or similar remarks of mocking irony or sarcastic spleen. It was not bitter nor sneering, but in his usual mellifluous level ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rebelled, we were punished by being rusticated or sent into the country to board. I went to Professor Dodd to receive my sentence, and in a grave voice, in which was a faint ring as of irony, and with the lurking devil which always played in his great marvellous mysterious black eyes, he said, "If you were any other student, I would not send you to the city, and so reward your rebellion with a holiday. But as I know perfectly ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... that there's truth in your irony—as I remember him, however, he was not as you all ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... boy the echo of the objectionable sire. Perhaps the long dead mother, who was never a lawful wife, had, by some retributive turn of justice, endowed him wholly with her own qualities. Gard could almost find it in his breast to like the big, large-hearted, gentle boy, but for a final irony of fate—the son's blind adoration of his father, and that father's obvious but helpless dislike of the impending romance. Every element of contradiction seemed to be present in the tangle and to bind the older ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... expresses inadequately enough the genius of an art like his, enormously alive rather than fundamentally like life, and no less charged with purpose and idea than the work of the great Russians, though under cover of reticences and irony little known to them. The great series of prose dramas—from 1867 (The League of Youth) onwards—with their experimental prelude Love's Comedy (1863)—were to be for all Europe the most considerable literary event of the fourth ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... measure of scepticism to the assurances of those who say that right conduct will survive though religion be surrendered. It has perhaps not been generally observed that just as the virtuous agnostic is generally the child of Christian parents, so by a seeming irony he is {179} often found to be the father of Christian children: there is hardly a genuine case on record where "free-thought," Agnosticism, Rationalism, has descended from parents to children to the third or fourth generation without a break, and the practical ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... under the obvious irony of the interrogation, but either the "creaming foam" had rendered him desperate, or he was to some extent steeled against the satire by the awful self-respect which had invaded him since Mrs. Merillia's accident. In any case he ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... Irony is not a weapon much in use among working people; their wits in general are too slow. With Sidney, however, it had always been a habit of speech in indignant criticism, and sympathy made him aware that nothing would sting Clara more acutely. He ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... self-restraint, for steady moral and mental discipline, for manliness at once and virtue, for delighting in ancient lore, and promoting its free circulation far and wide with the sole purpose and intent of sowing virtue and discountenancing vice. Such an effusion would have savoured rather of irony and bitter sarcasm, than of a desire to write what would be acceptable to the individual addressed. Lydgate's is the testimony, we confess, of a poet and a friend, but it is the testimony of a contemporary; of one who saw Henry in his daily walks, conversed with him often, had a personal knowledge ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... about, not to be concerned with us, for most of them were terribly wounded. The one I sat beside leaned his head against my good shoulder and sobbed as he breathed. I could not help but think of the irony of war that had brought us together. For all I knew, he may have been the machine gunner who had been the means of ripping my shoulder to pieces—and it may have been a bullet from my rifle which had torn its way along his leg which now hung useless. Even so, there was no hard ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... novel which had achieved the distinction of being widely discussed. The reviewers called him "promising," and Lydia now accused herself of having too long interfered with the fulfilment of his promise. There was a special irony in the fact, since his passionate assurances that only the stimulus of her companionship could bring out his latent faculty had almost given the dignity of a "vocation" to her course: there had been moments when she had felt unable to assume, before posterity, ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... the host, rushing up, cried, "Welcome, my lord! What will your lordship please to eat?" The prince's answer was very expressive. Stretching out his foot, so that his slipper sparkled and glittered, he took his golden robe in his hand, and said with bitter irony, "Welcome, my lord coat! welcome, most excellent robe! What will your lordship please to eat? For," said he, turning to his surprised host, "I ought to ask my coat what it will eat, since the welcome was ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... he said without the slightest irony or bitterness, but added with conviction: "That shows you what life ashore is. Much better ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... known him quite so serious. Generally there was a touch of irony in his talk, a suggestion of aloofness ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... finished for him, a sudden, swift irony in her voice. "A poor product out of the melting-pot, Captain Rifle. I am ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... of the aesthetic in the manner in which this writer treats his subjects. In external forms he is indeed varied enough, but throughout he makes too much use of direct irony; namely, in praising the blameworthy and blaming the praiseworthy, whereas this figure of speech should be used but extremely seldom; for, in the long run, it becomes annoying to clear-sighted men, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... "inheritance!" What if our American slaves were all placed in just such a condition! Alas, for that soft, melodious circumlocution, "Our PECULIAR species of property!" Truly, emphasis is cadence, and euphony and irony have met together! ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... and momentary chill. It would certainly be the irony of fate if on his great quest he were smitten down by a missile from his own army. But no others struck near them, although the intermittent battle of artillery in the ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... small and, as he felt, harmless spark of irony in his question; which, however, she answered very simply, not noticing the insinuation. "Yes, he says England hasn't been touched—not considering all there is," she went on eagerly. "He's so interesting ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... stages of this toilet are minutely described, and all the mistakes the poor countrified Backfisch makes the first morning. She actually gets out of bed before she puts on her clothes, and has to be driven behind the bed curtains by her aunt's irony. This is an incident that is either out of date or due to the genius and imagination of the author, for I have never seen bed curtains in Germany. However, Gretchen is taught to perform the early stages of her toilet behind them, and then to wash for the first time in her life in a basin ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... with great irony; "oh, no! of course not! I should rather think not! Do you suppose that you are kept here that parties may have the chance of hollering out their lungs for you? Don't answer me, sir! but get some hot water, and some more glasses; and ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... The laconic irony, and manner of the speaker, afforded me a tolerably good display of the nature of the blessings conferred upon the french, by their ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... murmured to himself, "you'll be sorry for this, very sorry indeed." And in his mind's eye he transferred the fantastic figure, posturing and grimacing before Louis, to the end of a long rope hanging from a high gallows. Master Franois, ignorant of the immediate irony of existence, wafted a kiss airily from the tips of his fingers to his patron. "You are a very obliging old ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... laughed at the irony of the whole sight. It was because of him that this movement was being made. At great risk to himself he had obtained the information that had led to the sudden change in the Russian plans, of which the great movement he saw was a part. He should be receiving thanks and honors instead ...
— The Boy Scouts In Russia • John Blaine
... quickly. He seemed to be quite unconscious of any irony in his remark, and continued grimly, ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... will be made clear to you, by a savage irony, that Play has yet spared you something, since your property is returned. For all that, if you bring a new hat with you, you will have to pay for the knowledge that a special costume is ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... him, with a sense of the irony of the position, that when he entered this house it had been with the deliberate intention of getting himself discovered by the inmates, believing that to show himself to them in the character of a burglar might gain ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... march and return of Maurice, in Theophylact, l. v. c. 16 l. vi. c. 1, 2, 3. If he were a writer of taste or genius, we might suspect him of an elegant irony: but Theophylact is ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... least felicitous of all his poems, although its picture of Pomposo (Dr Johnson) is exceedingly clever. The "Dedication to Warburton" is a strain of terrible irony, but fails to damage the Atlantean Bishop. "The Journey" is not only interesting as his last production, but contains some affecting personal allusions, intermingled with its stinging scorn—like pale passion-flowers blended with nettles ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... approached Michael, who, feeling him coming, drew himself up. Ivan drew from his pocket the Imperial letter, he opened it, and with supreme irony he held it up before the sightless eyes of the Czar's courier, saying, "Read, now, Michael Strogoff, read, and go and repeat at Irkutsk what you have read. The true Courier of the Czar is ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... resignation,—when news came of the doings of another John Brown at Harper's Ferry. The resignation was instantly recalled, with the remark that it was not a time for Browns to seem to be backward on the question of slavery. Such is the irony of ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... Consolation to beg a peace from those he had provoked to war by the most outrageous insolence; and he had the glory to espouse Mrs. Maintenon in her old age, the widow of the buffoon Scarron. Without all doubt, it was from irony he ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... recalls in his studies of scamps and snobs; he allows them, as Thackeray allows Barry Lyndon and the rest, to tell their own stories, and in their unconsciousness of their own natures he finds play for an irony as keen and graphic as anything in fiction. He deals with the actual English world, and the pleasure he gave us was such as to make us resolve to return to Thackeray's vision of his own contemporaneous English world at the first ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... The fine irony of affiliating with a people who worship a Jew as their Savior, but who have legislated against, and despised the Jew—this attracted Disraeli. With them he bowed the knee in an adoration they did not feel, and while his lips said ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... was creeping into all his veins, poisoning and crippling all his vitalities, he was still independent enough of it to be able to handle it with the irony it deserved. For it was almost as ludicrous as it was pitiable. He did not want any man of the world, any Harding ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a peculiar irony of fate that the very originator of the new trend in Greek thought was charged with and sentenced for impiety. We have already mentioned the singular prelude to the indictment afforded by the comedy of Aristophanes. We have also remarked upon the futility of looking therein for ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... grips our nation. Abortion is either the taking of a human life or it isn't. And if it is—and medical technology is increasingly showing it is—it must be stopped. It is a terrible irony that while some turn to abortion, so many others who cannot become parents cry out for children to adopt. We have room for these children. We can fill the cradles of those who want a child to love. And tonight ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan
... vice. "It may be expected," he writes, "that the Editor should convey to his readers the intellectual impressions which the execution of his task has produced on his mind. He confesses that they are mournful." Sir Richard was either a master of irony, or ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... counted from the day of inauguration. The fact that no specific date is mentioned has repeatedly proved a matter of convenience to successful revolutionists. The designation of a presidential term of office in the various constitutions has thus far been something of an irony, for of the 43 executives who have come to the fore in the 70 years of national life, but three presidents have completed terms of office for which they were elected: Baez one term, Merino one and Heureaux four, nor was the distinction of these three due to ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... Retrogression—for such it may be fairly termed—was swifter than that of the Reformation had been. "Facilis descensus Averni,"—this is the usual course. High mass was restored in Saint Paul's Cathedral, and in very few London churches were Gospel sermons yet preached. With bitter irony, liberty was granted to Bishop Ridley— to hear mass in the Tower Chapel. Liberty to commit idolatry was not likely to be used by Nicholas Ridley. The French Protestants were driven out, except a few named by the Ambassador; Cranmer, Latimer, Hooper, Coverdale, were cited before the Council; ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... very irony of fate could not have devised a more trying and awkward position for any man. To say he felt himself on the brink of a volcano conveys but a faint idea of ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... speaks more than half in irony, but there is a certain truth in his account of etymological analysis and its dependence on individual tastes and ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... certainly recommend intending historians to lay in these three volumes as an epitome in a brilliant shorthand of the facts and moods of the war—packed with shrewd comment and happy strokes of irony.... As a literary and dramatic tour de force I should judge it to ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... With superb irony, among his letters next morning which he had wired to be forwarded to Heronac, there came one from his lawyer, informing him that he had received a guarded communication from his wife's representative, Mr. Parsons—with what practically amounted to a request that he, Mr. Arranstoun, ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... own teacher from first to last. His appointed teachers did not perceive that a new source of culture was within their hands. Homo vagus et inconstans!—one of them pedantically reports of the future pilgrim to Rome, unaware on which side his irony was whetted. When professional education confers nothing but irritation on a Schiller, no one ought to be surprised; for Schiller, and such as he, are primarily spiritual adventurers. But that Winckelmann, the votary of the gravest of intellectual traditions, should ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... relation, Monsieur Duplessis, have mostly disappeared. I have a hundred thousand livres at my disposal,—that is to say, at yours,—and in a month at latest I shall be able to pay off my debt. You ask me to be sincere," he continued, with a tinge of reproachful irony; "be sincere in your turn, madame, and acknowledge that you and your husband have both felt uneasy, and that the delays I have been obliged to ask for have not seemed very encouraging ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... that this person was Oliver Torrey. Anxiously his eyes roved over the wreck in quest of other survivors, but none could he discern. Irony of fate! had all of ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... for use has made me quite at home in the—ah—divided skirt! How many lovely girls have I danced with through the rosy hours who will never more smile on me as they were wont to smile! How many flowers of rhetoric have been wasted on me by the irony of fate! How many billets-doux, so perfumed and pretty, lie in my desk addressed to my nether garment! And how many mammas have encouraged Mr. Christopher, who will forever taboo Miss Bloggs! And then the parties and the picnics! Ah, my dear Orphea, what do I not sacrifice on the altar of my ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... dance!" she said, in a deliberate sweet voice that seemed to clothe her words in a diaphanous garment of impalpable irony. "A new idea—in the troubadour line, I suppose. I—used to know the gentleman who sent you, so I think it will hardly be necessary to call the police. You may execute your song and dance, but do not sing too loudly. It is a little early yet for ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... Marian, taking up his bantering tone with a sharper irony, "Delaroche's martyr shewed a fine sense of the necessity of having her wrists gracefully tied. I am about to follow her example by wearing these bracelets, which I can never fasten. Be good enough to assist me, ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... once said that he remembered Baron Volterra as a pawn-broking dealer in antiquities, in Florence, thirty years earlier; there was probably no truth in the story, but after Volterra was elected a Senator of the Kingdom, a member of the opposition had alluded to it with piquant irony and the result had been the exchange of several bullets at forty paces, whereby honour was satisfied without bloodshed. The seconds, who were well disposed to both parties, alone knew how much or how little powder there was in the pistols, and they were discreet ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... daughter, who at the time of his decease might be about ten years old, both mother and daughter being then living. The sixth and last was no less celebrated as Mrs. or Madam Wild, than he was remarkable by the style of Wild the Thief-catcher, or, by way of irony, of Benefit Jonathan. Before her first marriage this remarkable damsel was known by the name of Mary Brown, afterwards by that of Mrs. Dean, being wife to Skull Dean who was executed about the year 1716 or 1717 for housebreaking. Some malicious people have ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... great deal, I remember, but everybody in the Convent was kind, and when, of my own choice, I returned to the girls at recreation, the sinister sense of dignity which by some strange irony of fate comes to all children when the Angel of Death is hovering over them, came to me also—poor, helpless innocent—and I felt a certain distinction ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... d'ivoire, set proudly on his shoulders, his stiff hair of dark blonde thrown back from the forehead without a parting, and cut in a straight line, his aplomb, his magnificent and courtly bearing, his ready tongue, his flashing wit and fine irony, his genial bonhomie and irresistibly winning smile; and Chopin, also, with dark blonde hair, but soft as silk, parted on one side, to use Liszt's own words, "An angel of fair countenance, with brown eyes from which intellect beamed rather than burned; ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... Later, the irony of it struck him so grimly that he laughed; and Sylvia, beside him, looked up, dismayed to see the ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... and withers like the Second Mrs. Tanqueray so soon as you bring it to the shelter of a decent home, is made the symbol of Repose. One might almost think Aime Martin and the other great authorities on this subject wrote in a mood of irony. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... scene, both before and after the entrance of Portia, is a masterpiece of dramatic skill. The legal acuteness, the passionate declamations, the sound maxims of jurisprudence, the wit and irony interspersed in it, the fluctuations of hope and fear in the different persons, and the completeness and suddenness of the catastrophe, cannot be surpassed. Shylock, who is his own counsel, defends himself well, and is triumphant on all ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... recourse was had to an arm which scholars often wield rather clumsily. They joked about these free ions in solution, and they asked to see this chlorine and this sodium which swam about the water in a state of liberty. But in science, as elsewhere, irony is not argument, and it soon had to be acknowledged that the hypothesis of M. Arrhenius showed itself singularly fertile and had to be regarded, at all events, as a very expressive image, if not, indeed, entirely ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... kind of manner that I remark in you to-day very strongly. I am the essence of discretion, and ask no awkward questions; but when a customer cannot look me in the eye, he has to pay for it.' The dealer once more chuckled; and then, changing to his usual business voice, though still with a note of irony, 'You can give, as usual, a clear account of how you came into the possession of the object?' he continued. 'Still your uncle's cabinet? ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an irony of its own. The man who caught the most fish was the man who couldn't fish at all. The official photographer, who had gone solely to take snapshots, also took the maximum of fish out of the river. Indeed, he was so much of an amateur that the first fish he caught placed him ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... in Theodore Roosevelt's coming into the Presidency as he did, but there was irony as well. An evil chance dropped William McKinley before an assassin's bullet; but there was a fitting irony in the fact that the man who must step into his place had been put where he was in large measure by the very men who would least like to ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... began to like this. A young man must find pleasure in sitting alone near a pretty young girl, and talking with her about herself and himself, no matter how plain and dull her speech is; and Staniford, though he found Lydia as blankly unresponsive as might be to the flattering irony of his habit, amused himself in realizing that here suddenly he was almost upon the terms of window-seat flirtation with a girl whom lately he had treated with perfect indifference, and just now with fatherly ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... words of strange and solemn irony: "In the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and forty-four and in the sixty-eighth year of the ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... volume of Lafcadio Hearn's exquisite studies of Japan happens, by a delicate irony, to fall in the very month when the world is waiting with tense expectation for news of the latest exploits of Japanese battleships. Whatever the outcome of the present struggle between Russia and Japan, its significance lies in the fact that a nation of the East, equipped with Western weapons ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... bits of paper round a glass tube, drawing them off as the edges are gummed together, and laying them in a prettily arranged pile before her. She is Vjera, the shell-maker, invariably spoken of as "poor Vjera." Vjera, being interpreted from the Russian, means "Faith." There is an odd and pathetic irony in the name borne by the sickly girl. Faith—faith in what? In shell-making? In Christian Fischelowitz? In Johann Schmidt, the Cossack tobacco-cutter, whose real name is lost in the gloom of many dim wanderings? In life? In death? Who knows? ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... celebrated Castione TERREMARE near Parma. At the meeting of the Prehistoric Congress in Paris in 1869, Pereira da Costa mentioned a femora converted into a sceptre or staff of office, and to conclude this melancholy list, Longperier mentions a human bone pierced with regular openings, which, by a strange irony of death, served as a flute to delight the ears ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... him so easily, he has, my father thinks, too little self-approval for ultimate success. He is apt, in truth, to fall out too hastily with himself and what he produces. Yet here also there is the "golden mean." Yes! I could fancy myself offended by a sort of irony which sometimes crosses the half-melancholy sweetness of manner habitual with him; only that as I can see, he treats himself ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... their attention to sturgeon fishing. The roe they prepared and shipped abroad for the Russians' piquant table delicacy. The grim irony of it—half ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... By the irony of fate it was Dort—the possessor of Terween's carving of the Triumph of Charles V. (a pendant to the Triumph of the Church and the Eucharist)—that, in 1572, only a few years after the carving was made, held the Congress which virtually decided the fate of Spain in the Netherlands. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... help me. My cousin was wounded also, but his was only a flesh wound from which he quickly recovered and of which he thought nothing. I doubt if any one here in Leauvite ever heard of it, but it's the irony of fate that he was more badly scarred by it than I. He was struck by a spent bullet that tore the flesh only, while the one that hit me went cleanly to the bone, and splintered it. Mine laid me up for a year before I could ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... eighteen-forties the country witnessed many plans, "pronunciamientos" and revolutions, which could not escape the vigilant mind of Madame Calderon, who often refers to them with a spice of delicate satire and irony which is not unkindly. After the long period of peaceful if unexciting viceregal rule, the government of the new republic had become the prey of political groups, headed by men who coveted the presidency chiefly impelled by a "vaulting ambition" which, in ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... would have afforded a rare and curious meeting-point with the other 'Reminiscences,' so like and yet so unlike. It is not possible to transfer the impression of a character; we can only suggest it by means of some resemblance; and it is a singular illustration of that irony which checks or directs our sympathies, that in trying to give some notion of the man whom, among those who were not his kindred, Carlyle appears to have most loved, I can say nothing more descriptive than that he seems to me to ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... pretends to believe in devils, diabolical possession, and exorcism, but the exorcist, to be respectable, must be Protestant. Probably Wierus was not so credulous as he assumes to be, and a point of irony frequently peeps out. The story as told by Sleidan differs from that in the official record. In this document Adam Fumee counsellor of the king, announces that the Franciscans of Orleans have informed the king that they are vexed ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... Mildred was not even trying to conceal her vexation and amazement, and that Belle had stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth to prevent laughter, a spark of anger glittered in his eyes. His first thought was that Mr. Jocelyn was indulging in unexpected irony at his expense, and the ready youth whose social habits had inured him to much chaffing was able to reply, although a little stiffly and awkwardly, "I suppose most young men have ambitious hopes of doing something in the world, and yet that does not prevent mine from seeming ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... to see Cecil Barker's expressive face during this exposition of the great detective. Anger, amazement, consternation, and indecision swept over it in turn. Finally he took refuge in a somewhat acrid irony. ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to laugh at the irony of this surprising turn of things of which she brought him news; for he had neither knowledge nor suspicion of the machinations of his friend Trenchard, to which these events were due. But noting and respecting her anxiety for her brother, ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... persecution. All the more noteworthy is it that he had the courage to address the queen in behalf of his faith. He laments plaintively that despite his sixty years he has not been able to eradicate all traces of his descent (reato de su origen), and turns his irony ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... the business-like manner in which they addressed themselves to their task, as he noticed the jaunty destroyers of his race succumbing one by one to fate, or ignominiously attempting to "get away," he would feel that the "irony of the situation" was complete. In a vague way he would grasp the fact—hitherto undreamt of in his dove's philosophy—that, if the pigeon is preyed upon by man, man in his turn is preyed ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... fruit of faith—a proof of love to him that hath redeemed us, but not to recommend us to his favour. The picture of such a feast drawn by John Bunyan must make upon every reader a deep, a lasting, an indelible impression. How bitter and how true is the irony, when the Pharisee is represented as saying, "I came to thy feast out of civility, but for thy dainties I need them not, I have enough of my own; I thank thee for thy kindness, but I am not as those that stand in need of thy provisions, nor ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... whiteness of Lynda's face did not stay Truedale's hard words; he was not thinking of her—even of himself; he was thinking of the irony of fate in ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
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