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More "Ludicrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unlikely that the cure of the children would, then, have proved effectual and lasting. The account given in the Memorables and the Magnalia, of the conduct of these children, under the treatment of Mather and the other Ministers, is, indeed, most ludicrous; and no one can be expected to look at it in any other light. He was forewarned that, in printing it, he would expose himself to ridicule. He tells us that the mischievous, but bright and wonderfully gifted, girl, the eldest ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... should deservedly distend both his cheeks in indignation, and declare that for the future he will not be so indulgent as to lend an ear to their prayers? But further, that I may not run over this in a laughing manner, like those [who treat] on ludicrous subjects (though what hinders one being merry, while telling the truth? as good-natured teachers at first give cakes to their boys, that they may be willing to learn their first rudiments: railery, however, apart, let us investigate serious matters). He that turns the heavy ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... displeasure if she had known that Arthur was lingering up-stairs giving his wife a ludicrous version of her adventure with ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... no scientific hypothesis up to the present accounts satisfactorily for the phenomena. Upon his saying this to me I breathed the word "suggestion"; and his answer was to laugh in my face, and to tell me, practically, that this is the most ludicrous hypothesis of all. ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... who watched them closely and made all escape impossible. Then, right out from all the others and close to the edge of the cliff, were two figures, so strange, and under other circumstances so ludicrous, that they absorbed my attention. The one was our comrade, Professor Challenger. The remains of his coat still hung in strips from his shoulders, but his shirt had been all torn out, and his great beard merged itself in the black tangle which covered his mighty chest. ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... machinery, materials, tools, provisions, animals, wagons, etc., amounted to considerably over a million dollars, but the greatest blow was the destruction of our hopes,—not so much of making money as of making a country. Of all the lonesome sounds that I remember (and it seems ludicrous now), most distinct is the crowing of cocks on the deserted ranches. The very chickens seemed to know that ...
— Building a State in Apache Land • Charles D. Poston
... this junto of adventurers. It is a singular but ludicrous fact—which, were I not scrupulous in recording the whole truth, I should almost be tempted to pass over in silence as incompatible with the gravity and dignity of history—that this worthy gentleman should likewise have been nicknamed from ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... projector, muttering that he was "overrun with these articles." This, however, was Coleridge's last attempt at canvassing. His friends at Birmingham persuaded him to leave that work to others, their advice being no doubt prompted, in part at least, by the ludicrous experience of his qualifications as a canvasser which the following incident furnished them. The same tradesman who had introduced him to the patriotic tallow-chandler entertained him at dinner, and, after the meal, invited his guest to smoke a pipe with him and "two or three other illuminati ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... apparently lasting. According to the popular legend, the Doctor made him his heir, and expressly obtained for him Auerhahn, (Heathcock,) a familiar spirit in the shape of a monkey. This was a sort of caricature of Mephistopheles, who became, through his ludicrous clumsiness, a pet-devil of the populace in the puppet-shows, particularly in Holland. Widmann calls Wagner Waiger; while in all other publications referring to him he bears his right ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... every rim a small furry reddish-buff beast sat on his hind legs, looking, so far as head went, much like a young seal. These creatures were acting as sentinels, and sunning themselves. As we passed, each gave a warning yelp, shook its tail, and, with a ludicrous flourish of its hind legs, dived into its hole. The appearance of hundreds of these creatures, each eighteen inches long, sitting like dogs begging, with their paws down and all turned sunwards, is most grotesque. The Wish-ton-Wish has few enemies, and ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... Anon appeared Mr. Laws, the judge of the court, with Madam Laws on a pillion behind him, and their negro man carrying a box containing her ladyship's cap, and bestriding a mule. The procession looked so ludicrous, that Major Danvers and Mr. Franklin espying it, laughed outright, though not so loud as to disturb his Excellency, who was asleep by this time, bade the whole of this queer rearguard move on, and leave the Commander-in-Chief and his escort of dragoons to follow ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... stimulating quality, but dangerous for her—she was past thirty with no sign of marriage on the horizon. He wondered if she really had thrown her slipper over the hedge? It wasn't important, Lee decided, if she had. How ludicrous it was to judge all women, weigh their character, by the single standard of chastity. But this much must be admitted, when that convention of morality was broken it had no more significance than the fragments of a coconut shell. The dance came to an end and they ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the evidence, a whole series of conclusive examples, in front of him, my learned visitor admitted with a good grace that his first convictions were based on a most ludicrous foundation. ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... hated, and so after the death of Sir Nicolas Hyde, he was made Lord Chief Justice in his place. "In this office," says Judge Campbell, he "exceeded public expectation by the violent, fantastical, and ludicrous manner in which he conducted himself."[18] But I will not now anticipate what I have to say of him in a subsequent part of ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... hand-organ repertoire of "Captain Jinks" and "Beautiful Spring." Their sense of humor is too keen to allow them to aid these aged wanderers in their endless migrations. It is sufficiently trying to their sense of the ludicrous to be obliged to listen with an admiring, rapt expression to some anecdote heard in childhood, and restrain the laugh until the oft-repeated crisis has been duly reached. Still, I know several women who, as brilliant raconteurs, have fully equalled the efforts ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... not been so ludicrous, one would have felt sympathy for the poor fellow; as it was, every one burst out laughing the moment he appeared. Even the doctor had to turn suddenly and walk towards ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... character surprise is impossible. There was nothing to leave. The Mehrikans possessed neither literature, art, nor music of their own. Everything was borrowed. The very clothes they wore were copied with ludicrous precision from the models of other nations. They were a sharp, restless, quick-witted, greedy race, given body and soul to the gathering of riches. Their chiefest passion was to buy and sell. Even women, both of high and low degree, spent much of their time at bargains, ...
— The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell
... to greet me, and then there was very nearly a terrible catastrophe for finale to the scene, for, as soon as she saw that I had hold of her child, the frantic mother shook off her companion, and with a mingling of the tragic and ludicrous reached out with the broom to ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... to her mother, Clara sometimes felt her a little, well, her mother was so sure of herself that she could not understand other people being—being—"as ludicrous as I am," Clara jerked out (the dog tugging her forwards). And Bowley thought she looked like a huntress and turned over in his mind which it should be—some pale virgin with a slip of the moon in her hair, which was a flight ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... the mode adopted of making his estimates, that additional knowledge may perhaps alter the conclusions drawn, but can never diminish the value of the experiments." They are not open to the objections of mistaken sensations, and honest, though ludicrous, misapprehension of fallible symptoms, to which the testing of drugs homeopathically is liable, and of which another instance has just occurred in London, in the "proving" of the new medicinal agent, gonoine. They rather resemble in accuracy a quantitative, as well as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... ethics of publishing my memoirs now, I pass over the obvious repartee that to hear a German speak of ethics borders on the ludicrous and especially the man who openly in the Reichstag announced that necessity knows no law and that the German troops were at that moment deliberately violating ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... the ability to resist him, with Agrarianism; and such Agrarians as Thiers and Cavaignac were seized in their beds, and imprisoned,—to prevent their running away with the Great Book of France, one is at liberty to suppose. There was something shockingly ludicrous in charging the hero and victor of the Days of June with designs against property; but the charge may have led Cavaignac to have doubts whether he had not himself been a little too ready to believe the charge of Agrarianism when ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... soon arrived, and was evidently more puzzled respecting his deportment than the case of his patient. Sundry "nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles," and sundry eloquent glances of his bright black eyes, were covertly bestowed upon his fair cousin; anon, with ludicrous solemnity, he felt the pulse of Perez, shook his head, and, in short, imitated with inimitable exactness all the technical airs and graces of a regular graduate of Salamanca.—"Cousin," cried he at length, with a sly look at Juana, "I pity your plight—from my soul I ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... caged—they enjoy life so intensely in the jungle, and are so amusing, swinging themselves from the branches of tall trees, leaping, flying almost, in pursuit of one another for mere fun, that it was sad to put them in prison, where they never lived long, and where they only exhibited a ludicrous and humiliating parody on the habits ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... her. Men in love are children with their mistresses—the greatest of them; their heads are under the woman's feet. What have I not done to aid him! At his instance, I went to the archbishop, to implore one of the princes of the Church for succour. I knelt to an ecclesiastic. I did a ludicrous and a shameful thing, knowing it in advance to be a barren farce. I obeyed his wish. The tale will be laughable. I obeyed him. I would not have it on my conscience that the commission of any deed ennomic, however unwonted, was refused by me to serve Alvan. You are my witness, Tresten, that for a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... made her almost hysterical to contemplate. She felt that the affair ought to have wound up in some great movement, in some dignified action or fine speech, and it had descended to the merely ludicrous, or what, in view of those fifteen years, appeared the merely ludicrous. And she had been the instigator of it, and Doctor Hilary had called it a miracle. Which ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... the first village there has been a buffaloe dance for the last three nights, which has put them all into commotion, and the description which we received from those of the party who visited the village and from other sources, is not a little ludicrous: the buffaloe dance is an institution originally intended for the benefit of the old men, and practised at their suggestion. When buffaloe becomes scarce they send a man to harangue the village, declaring that the game is far off and that a feast is necessary to ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... creatures. He has justly been described as the most subjective of neo-Hebraic poets. His blithe delight in love, exhaling from his poems, transfigured his ready humor, which instinctively pierced to the ludicrous element in every object and occurrence: age dyeing its hair, traitorous friendship, the pride of wealth, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... been in a situation, where some ludicrous circumstance has excited him to laugh; and at the same time a sense of decorum has forbid the exertion of these interrupted screams; and then the pain has become so violent, as to occasion him to use some ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... period is marked by the most violent contrasts and alterations of mood. Hours or days of seeming indifference to all interests and activities will be followed by keen excitement and enthusiasm. A fit of doubt in his own ability and worthiness will be followed by almost ludicrous self-confidence. A feverish desire for constant companionship will follow a dull and moody search for seclusion and solitude. In general it is perhaps wisest to ignore these changing moods, except where they ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... There is a ludicrous Oriental derivation of Manjanik, from the Persian: "Man chi nek"! "How good am I!" Ibn Khallikan remarks that the word must be foreign, because the letters j and k ([Arabic] and [Arabic]) never occur together in genuine Arabic words (Notes by Mr. E. Thomas, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... a correspondent-besides the deep, quaint strain of the sentiment, and the curious introduction of some ludicrous touches amidst the serious and impressive, as was doubtless intended by the author-appears to us one of the most felicitous specimens of unique rhyming which has for some time met our eye. The resources of English rhythm for varieties of melody, measure, and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... be felt only by those who are familiar not only with the poetic language, but also with all those minute local and historical circumstances, the allusions to which contribute so frequently to augment the ludicrous. ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... three rooms were in spick-and-span order, and the two judges were summoned to behold the result of the week's labor. At the first door they halted, and the President turned to his wife with a ludicrous grimace as he said, "Dora, I am afraid I've got us into trouble. How in this wide world are we going to be able to decide which is the prettiest room! And if it should be easy to decide that question, how shall we ever make our peace with the occupants of ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... national shame and dastardliness of heart are not written as legibly on every rivet of your iron armour as the strength of the right hands that forged it? Friends, I know not whether this thing be the more ludicrous or the more melancholy. It is quite unspeakably both. Suppose, instead of being now sent for by you, I had been sent for by some private gentleman, living in a suburban house, with his garden separated ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... grave, a manner more than usually curt and ungracious, an application more than ever rigorous and intense. John Ardworth was not a good-tempered man, but he was the best-natured man that ever breathed. He was, like all ambitious persons, very much occupied with self; and yet it would have been a ludicrous misapplication of words to call him selfish. Even the desire of fame which absorbed him was but a part of benevolence,—a desire to promote justice and to serve ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Penny, who had no sympathy with German, French, or any of these ludicrous languages. "Yes, sir, we had two, and ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... matter much, as things are. No; they are right; Murray Davenport is a marked name; marked for failure. You must know, Mr. Larcher, I'm not only a Jonah; I'm that other ludicrous figure in the world,—a man with a grievance; a man with a complaint of injustice. Not that I ever air it; it's long since I learned better than that. I never speak of it, except in this casual way when it comes up apropos; but people still associate me with it, and tell ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... dog, who had been much abroad with his master, was asked, upon his return, to state the most ludicrous fact he ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... As I entered the doors, it seemed to me that the face of each man or woman in the throng stood out, separate and distinct, as though an electric search-light had passed over it; and I saw one and all, frightened, satisfied, or merely ludicrous, with a vividness of perception which failed me when I remembered the ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... fat, middle-aged woman, who had 11been jerked from her seat on the box to one not quite so smooth—the top of the hedge, which, with the assistance of an old alder tree, supported the coach. Tom found it impossible to resist the violent impulse to risibility which the ludicrous appearance of the old lady excited, and as no serious injury was sustained, determined to ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... this, threw toward him a piteous look of appeal, and then approached him, in search after sympathy. The two were soon engaged in conversation, while Ashby, whom this ludicrous figure had very forcibly affected, stood aloof watching him, with a smile on his face which he was ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... Propriety of his introducing himself in so ridiculous a Plight; —Dum sudor ad imos Manaret Talos; And Demitto Auriculas, ut iniquae mentis Acellus Cum gravius dorso subiit onus. And other Representations of the same sort, seem to place Horace in a very mean and ludicrous Light; which it is probable he never apprehended in the full Course of exposing his Companion;—Besides, the Conduct of his Adversary is in several Places, excessively, and, as it may be construed, designedly, insolent and contemptuous; ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... the wished-for bed," strikes me as rather of the ludicrous, and not unlike the description of himself by Berni in his fanciful palace, where he ordered a bed, adjoining that of the French cook's, which was to be large enough to swim in—"Come ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... bow, for far was it from her wishes to wound his spirit. But the notion of this scented fop in the role of captain, ruling a handful of rough mercenaries, and directing the operations for the resistance of an assiduous siege, touched her with its ludicrous note. Yet, if she refused him this, it was more than likely he would deem himself offended, and refuse to advance their plans. It crossed her mind—in the full confidence of youth—that if he should fail her when the hour of action came, she was ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... actively so. I brought the tea to the bedroom with a glad smile. I had put two cups on the tray, which I placed on the night-table; and there were some biscuits. I sat at the foot of the bed while we drank. And the umbrella, unperceived by Diaz, lay with its handle on a pillow, ludicrous and yet accusing. ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... noticed, or read their hour and forgotten. It is these public trials that give them importance and notoriety. They would not draw an eye but for the glare thrown on them by these luminous prosecutions. These indictments (though I would not willingly be ludicrous on so serious an occasion) force into my mind the course once adopted with regard to houses of ill-fame, by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. They paid men who were fixed before the doors of such houses with huge paper lanterns, on which ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... was augmented by the whistlings of a second pteranodon which darted after the remaining ovoids, following swiftly as these retreated with ludicrous, wabbling haste. ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... its own end, and neither inference, nor moral is intended, or where at least the writer would wish it so to appear, there arises what we call drollery. The pure, unmixed, ludicrous or laughable belongs exclusively to the understanding, and must be presented under the form of the senses; it lies within the spheres of the eye and the ear, and hence is allied to the fancy. It does not appertain to the reason or the moral sense, and accordingly is alien to the imagination. I ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... Antiochus the Third, the great-great-grandson of the founder of the dynasty. He had, like Philip, begun to reign at nineteen years of age, and had displayed sufficient energy and enterprise, especially in his first campaigns in the east, to warrant his being without too ludicrous impropriety addressed in courtly style as "the Great." He had succeeded—more, however, through the negligence of his opponents and of the Egyptian Philopator in particular, than through any ability of his own—in restoring in some degree the integrity of the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... content, your Honor! We notaries are privileged to wear furred cloaks in the Palais de Justice, and black robes in the country when we can get them! Look here at my robe of dignity!" He held up the tattered tail of his gown with a ludicrous air. "The profession of notary is meat, drink, and lodging: every man's house is free to me—his bed and board I share, and there is neither wedding, christening, nor funeral, in ten parishes that can go on without me. Governors and intendants flourish and fall, but Jean Pothier dit Robin, the itinerant ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... for the time my request he gave the interview a rather ludicrous turn, I thought, by questioning me ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... were before! At the strange, ludicrous irony of that phrase she turned on her elbow and looked at him, stared at him as though she could ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... But it was ludicrous when the coffee began to boil to see those chaps elevate their noses and begin to sniff the fragrance as only wretched beings may who have long been strangers to ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... would getting Christ out of the boat help him much? The facts would remain the same. The departure of the physician does not tend to cure the disease; and thus the cry,' Go away from me because I am sinful,' was all but ludicrous if it had not been so tragical in its misapprehension of the facts of the case and the cure ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... sufficient to prevent their starving on their return home. Their leader was buried where he had fallen, and thus ended this mock engagement. Yet another battle was to be fought, which, though successful, did not terminate in quite so ludicrous a manner. ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... god; he is always next her at table; and her contempt has changed into an abject admiration. It is like a savage, falling down and quaking before the idol he has carved. I know what Academic society is, with all its foolish, ludicrous, mean little intrigues. You want to get into it! What for, I should like to know? You have the happiest life in the world. Even I, who am not set upon anything, was near envying you, when I saw you with your sister at Clos-Jallanges: a perfect house on a hill-side, ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... again. It is amusing, in view of after events, to find Mr. Hare asking what would be the result of any contrivance to re-establish party. Assuming that party representation was dead, Mr. Hare proposed to substitute personal representation. It is positively ludicrous at this interval of time to note how the electors were expected to group themselves. They were to take personal merit as the basis of representation; every vote cast was to be a spontaneous tribute to the qualities and attainments of the person for whom it was given. And in order, presumably, ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... A., ex-Governor of Virginia, invades Kanawha valley; forces of, opposing General Cox; retreats beyond Gauley; forces of, not well handled; ludicrous contrast between promise and performance; joined by General Floyd; fails to co-operate with Floyd; repulsed at Pig Creek; retreats beyond Hawk's Nest; and Big Sewell Mountain; quarrels with Floyd, ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... nevertheless, a light and ludicrous vein be not the reigning humour; but whether there was ever ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... a ludicrous waste of time and opportunity that he and this man should have been at cross-purposes like this! 'Why the deuce couldn't he have given some rational account of himself to begin with!' thought the squire irritably, forgetting, of course, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... improper treatment proposed in the work we have noticed, can afford but little hope to any but the hypochondriacal dyspeptic; he may fly to any measures, however desperate or ludicrous; for "a mind diseased no medicine can cure." Let others, however, who cannot plead a malady of the mind as an excuse for resorting to such practice, be informed, that in most of the affections arising from, or ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... of Tanjore took care to be most so. They called in the interposition of Government, and sent up such petitions and memorials as I never saw before or since; made up of lies, invectives, bragging, cant, bad grammar of the most ludicrous kind, and texts of Scripture quoted without the smallest application. I remember one passage by heart, which is really only a fair specimen of the whole: 'These missionaries, my Lord, loving only ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... the loom or at the desk, at best with the lumpish freedom of the soldier and the vulgar nimbleness of the prentice. And these men and women dressed in the dress of the Middle Ages, gorgeous perhaps in colour, but heavy, miserable, grotesque, nay, sometimes ludicrous in form; citizens in lumpish robes and long-tailed caps; ladies in stiff and foldless brocade hoops and stomachers; artizans in striped and close-adhering hose and egg-shaped padded jerkin; soldiers in lumbering armour-plates, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... once pointed out that Crane, in his search for striking effects, had been led into "frequent neglect of the time-hallowed rights of certain words," and that in his pursuit of color he "falls occasionally into almost ludicrous mishap." The smug pedantry of the quoted lines is sufficient answer to the charges, but in support of these assertions the critic quoted certain passages and phrases. He objected to cheeks "scarred" by tears, to "dauntless" statues, and to "terror-stricken" ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... curious little creature; she had a big, white spot on her nose, like all her family, and a little fringe of white hair all around her face, which looked as though she had put her collar round her face instead of her neck, and gave her a somewhat ludicrous air. ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... ground of reason and the assurance that some things simply do not happen. From this extravagant summit of horror, his fears gradually receded. Such a waking nightmare even quieted his nerves when it was past; for if a possibility presents a ludicrous side, then its horror must diminish by so much. Moreover, Henry told himself that if the threat of a disaster so absolute could really be felt by him, it was his duty to rise at once, intervene, and, if necessary, ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... tyrant, I was stationed, like other reporters and radiomen, in a captive balloon. For the utmost in discomfort and lack of dignity let me recommend this ludicrous invention. Cramped, seasickened, inconvenienced—I don't like to mention this, but provisions for answering the calls of nature were, to say the least, inadequate—I swayed and rocked in that inconsiderable basket, chilled, blinded by the dazzle of the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... outside of his own family and intimate friends, he could have done more than he has and a great deal more even. He is known to the public as a humorist, but he has much more in him that is earnest than that is humorous. He has a keen sense of the ludicrous, notices funny stories and incidents knows how to tell them, to improve upon them, and does not forget them. He has been through a great many of the funny adventures related in "Tom Sawyer" and in "Huckleberry Finn," himself and he lived among just such boys, and ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... waited on the visitors from another world, notebook in hand, plying them with careful questions intended to increase our modest store of knowledge. The replies were unsatisfactory, commonplace, sometimes ludicrous. Attempts to write a passable textbook on life in the spirit world have failed lamentably. The indignation of the sorely disappointed scientist was voiced by the late Professor Hugo Muensterberg, of Harvard, ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... simultaneously gives you a false weight, tells your fortune in utter disregard of age and sex, and plays a tune that cannot be recognised. When such a machine has registered a German matron's weight at 115 pounds and informed her that she will some day be President of the United States, it is ludicrous to have it break into a tinkle of self-appreciation, like a spaniel barking his own approval after walking across the room on ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... the miller's wife perceive my brother's inclination, than, instead of allowing it to excite her resentment, she resolved to divert herself with it. She looked at him with a smiling countenance, and my brother returned her smile, but in so ludicrous a way, that the miller's wife hastily shut her window, lest her loud laughter should make him sensible that she only ridiculed him. Poor Bacbouc interpreted her carriage to his own advantage, and flattered himself that she ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.
... and gentlemen, English, French, Spanish, and Mexican. Such varieties of dresses and languages I have seldom seen united in one room; and so many anecdotes connected with the pronunciamento as were related, some grave, some ludicrous, that would form a volume! The Baron de ——- having just left this for your part of the world, you will learn by him the last intelligence of it ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... laughed at poor Bluecher's strange hallucination, which, though ludicrous, is very sad. He fancies himself with child by a Frenchman; and deplores that such an event should have happened to him in his old age! He does not so much mind being with child, but cannot reconcile ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... was very glad, therefore, when at length his Majesty got up and retired, with a gait which was intended to be very majestic. It was to represent the step of a lion, but the outward sweep of the legs looked only like a ludicrous waddle. The king had in reality gone to eat his breakfast, as he had not broken his fast since hearing of the traveller's arrival. He quickly returned, and Speke was again invited in, with his men. He found the king standing on ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... if I were ferocious enough to think of such things I should not be childish enough to talk about them. But the deadliest weapon I know is ridicule. If you can once succeed in rendering the Jesuits ludicrous, in making people laugh at them and their claims, you have conquered ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... object in nature,—the ocean raging in its might, and man, in all his honour, and dignity, and powers of mind and body, wrestling with and commanding it: then I look within, round my little home in the cabin, and every roll of the ship causes accidents irresistibly ludicrous; and in spite of the inconveniences they bring with them, one cannot choose but laugh. Sometimes, in spite of all usual precautions, of cushions and clothes, the breakfast-table is suddenly stripped of half its load, which is lodged in the lee scuppers, whither the coal-scuttle and ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... we went to act, drove us as ignominiously away, as the House-keeper did the children in the story. "Darkie," who "slipped in last like a black shadow," and "Pax," who jumped on to Mamma's lap, "where, sitting facing the company, he opened his black mouth and yawned, with ludicrous inappropriateness," are life-like ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... really astonishing to find Dean Swift, joining issue with less religious wits, in laughing at Blackmore's works, of which he makes a ludicrous detail, since they were all written in the cause of virtue, which it was the Dean's business more immediately to support, as on this account he enjoy'd his preferment: But the Dean perhaps, was one of those characters, who chose to sacrifice his cause to his joke. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... bright eyes shining out of his dirty wrinkled body—horror of horrors!—there lay a toad. Now, even in England, toads are not looked upon with much favor, and a party of English children would have been startled by such a discovery. But with French people, the dread of toads is ludicrous in its intensity. In France toads are believed to have teeth, to bite, and to spit poison; so my hero and his young guests must be excused for taking flight at once with a cry of dismay. On the next terrace, however, they ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... veered, to avoid the blow; then, with ludicrous yet deadly swiftness, wheeled back and charged ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... was foiled at every turn; and yet that muley-cow lip came up as stubbornly as ever and he tried to tell him, Wunpost, he was wrong. And that because he was wrong and a law-breaker at heart he was therefore a coward and doomed to lose. It was ludicrous, the way Eells stood up for his "rights," when everyone knew he was a thief; and yet that purse-proud intolerance which is the hall-mark of his class made him think he was entirely right. He even had the nerve to preach ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... little thought what we were doing, and much disliked it. Why then was my delight of such sort that I did it not alone? Because none doth ordinarily laugh alone? ordinarily no one; yet laughter sometimes masters men alone and singly when on one whatever is with them, if anything very ludicrous presents itself to their senses or mind. Yet I had not done this alone; alone I had never done it. Behold my God, before Thee, the vivid remembrance of my soul; alone, I had never committed that theft ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... man who has attained this kind of indifference to the past, this kind of hope in the future, will be far enough from considering it a high degree of perfection. The very idea is to such a man ludicrous. One may eat bread without claiming the honours of an athlete; one may desire to be honest and not count himself a saint. My object in thus shadowing out what seems to me my present condition of mind, is ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... enjoyed greater popularity than fell to Mr. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat? In this book the humour sprang in no sense out of character; nor did it even spring out of situations contrived with especial skill. It consisted of a series of ludicrous impressions such as that of a man sitting on a pat of butter. Well, a man sitting on a pat of butter is a funny thing—when it happens naturally in life. But a collection of incidents, each of which might be funny ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... She only knew that the glamour of it all was gone—that there were many hours when the Movement lay like lead upon her life. Was it simply that her intelligence had revolted, that she had come to see the folly, the sheer, ludicrous folly of a "physical force" policy which opposed the pin-pricks of women to the strength of men? Or was it something else—something far more compelling—more ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he—the head of the orthodox tradition—wrote for women in childbirth, were tainted with the Sabbatian heresy. So bitter and widespread were the charges and counter-charges, that at one moment every Jewish community in Europe stood excommunicated by the Chief Rabbis of one side or the other—a ludicrous position, whereof the sole advantage was that it brought the Ban into contempt and disuse. It was not likely that a controversy so long-standing and so impassioned would fail to permeate Poland; and, indeed, among us the quarrel, introduced as it was by Baruch Yavan, who was agent to Bruhl, the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... that a person is very much addicted to tippling. "'Moistify,' a low word, generally used in a ludicrous sense ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... Sam's first attempt was brief. He was not half on when he was flung to the ground. Half a dozen attempts, quickly repeated, were scarcely better, the last one permitting him to remain on Barney's back nearly ten seconds, and culminating in a ludicrous fall over Barney's head. Sam withdrew from the ring, shaking his head dubiously and holding his side as if in pain. The other lads followed. Expert tumblers, they executed most amazing and side-splitting fails. Sam recovered and came back. Toward the last, all three ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... way, to be impatient of repetitions. The three first soon got together in a corner, and Eve fancied they were laughing at the rest of the company; whereas, in fact, they were merely laughing at a bad joke of their own; their quick perception of the ludicrous having pointed out a hundred odd combinations and absurdities, that ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... made to Mr. Lincoln when he was President were ludicrous and trifling, but he always entered into them with that humor-loving spirit that was such a relief from the grave duties of his ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... the desires, (2) through the imagination. And if the orderly people are English, they add that (1) is the inferior method, and characteristic of the South. It is inferior. Yet those who pursue it at all events know what they want; they are not puzzling to themselves or ludicrous to others; they do not take the wings of the morning and fly into the uttermost parts of the sea before walking to the registry office; they cannot breed ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... procession, Haydn undertook to play the part. Unluckily, he was so small of stature that the instrument had to be carried before him on the back of a colleague! That the colleague happened to be a hunchback only made the incident more ludicrous. But Haydn had rather a partiality for the drum—a satisfying instrument, as Mr George Meredith says, because of its rotundity—and, as we shall learn when we come to his visits to London, he could handle ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... Jarves came to read a part of your letter to us, confirmatory of doctrines he had heard from us on an earlier day. The idea of your writing the art criticisms of the 'Leader' (!) was so stupendously ludicrous, there was no need of faith in your loyalty to laugh the whole imputation, at first hearing, to uttermost scorn. I must say, in justice to Mr. Jarves, that he never did really believe one word of it, though a good deal ruffled and pained that it should have been believed by anybody. He ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... published a list of fifty-four Articles, containing instructions to the clergy of his diocess of Canterbury, some of which are too ludicrous and puerile to excite any other sentiment ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... the arguments of theologians to prove the inspiration (i.e. infallibility) of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are sometimes almost ludicrous. My lamented friend, John Sterling, has thus summed up Dr. Henderson's arguments about Mark. "Mark was probably inspired, because he was an acquaintance of Peter; and because Dr. Henderson would be reviled by other Dissenters, ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... Hobhouse's poems, and 'January and May,' and 'Paulo Purganti,' and 'Hans Carvel,' and 'Joconde.' These are laughable: it is the serious—Little's poems and Lalla Rookh—that affect seriously. Now Lust is a serious passion, and cannot be excited by the ludicrous."—[B.]—Marginal Notes ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... simply sickening. I have no sympathy with it, neither have I any sympathy with the owner of a gin-palace; but as long as China permits the growth of opium throughout the length and breadth of the land, taxes it, and pockets a large revenue from it,—sympathy with her on the subject is simply ludicrous and misplaced."—(J. W. Walker v. Malcolm, ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... look back upon it, is to me a mystery. While I always possessed a keen sense of the ludicrous, and a hearty appreciation of fun of all sorts, there was a sedate side of my nature that demonstrated itself to the older members of the family, and of which they often spoke. For half days, or whole days, at a time I remember sitting ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... and the Reliefs from Care and Attention are of one Sort in a great Spirit, and of another in an ordinary one. The Man of a great Heart and a serious Complexion, is more pleased with Instances of Generosity and Pity, than the light and ludicrous Spirit can possibly be with the highest Strains of Mirth and Laughter: It is therefore a melancholy Prospect when we see a numerous Assembly lost to all serious Entertainments, and such Incidents, as should move one sort of Concern, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... destroyed, the delicacy of the sex be violated, the dignity of halls of legislation degraded, by an attempt to introduce them there. Such duties are inconsistent with those of a mother;" and then we have ludicrous pictures of ladies in hysterics at the polls, and senate-chambers ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of a way, "fix me up a good hot whisky-punch, and do it right; and here's another sixpence toward the fortune you are bound to make. It's the last one left—not a copper more in my pockets," and he turned them inside-out, with a half-solemn, half-ludicrous air. "I send it to keep company in your till with four others that have found their way into that snug place since morning, and which will be lonesome without their ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... resembling {359} that of the American marines, and he instantly took his cue. "Rascal," he thundered back, "what do you mean, off your line? Go back to your post!" The sentry's bayonet dropped; there was momentary darkness, and the Canadian literally bolted. Then ludicrous ill luck befell all the generals. Vincent had accompanied the raiders on horseback. When the bugles sounded "retire," he gave his horse the bit, and in the pitch darkness the brute carried him pellmell along the wrong ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... of ridicule or contempt to the whole world beside? Love is divine as Heaven itself to the two people who are concerned in its ever new delights; but to us lookers-on its murmurs are but fooleries, its sighs are ludicrous, and its written words absolute imbecilities; and never a memory of our own lost lives can make the spectacle of it in others anything but an ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... was a pleasant-faced little man who stood in the shelter of a water tank and received us in a puzzled way, as though he wondered what civilians were doing in that neighbourhood anyway. Permission was readily granted for us to leave, with the ludicrous proviso that we did so "at our own risk." Then Bulle put everybody in good humour by inquiring innocently if there was any danger. Everybody burst into peals of laughter, and we were escorted to our car by the same slow-moving officer, who insisted on exchanging cards with ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... table, with his ordinary coolness of demeanor; though at times there were fleeting smiles that crossed his military aspect, which sufficiently indicated that he considered the matter of his reflection to be of a particularly ludicrous character. In the young man who sat by his side, dressed in the deep-blue jacket of a seaman, with the fine white linen of his collar contrasting strongly with the black silk handkerchief that was tied with studied negligence around his neck, and whose easy air and manner contrasted still ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Bottom; by Mr. Partridge. This is a commanding work, and extremely rich in the colouring. The Queen of the Fairies is represented reposing on a grassy bed, and near her is seated the formidable Bottom, in his ludicrous metamorphosis: he is placed in such a situation, that her majesty must see him before any other object when she awakes. At a little distance Puck is displayed laughing at the trick he has played on the queen, and seems to anticipate with delight ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... heartily, tickled at the joke. Sentiment has an exquisitely ludicrous side when one is a black-eyed wine-seller perched astride on a wall, and dispensing bandy-dashed wine to half ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... he reached the end of each verse. He sang several verses; at the time I knew how many, but am unable now to recall the exact number. He must surely have been a sound sleeper or the loud laughter which filled the room would have waked him, for the scene was ludicrous in the extreme: Terry sitting up in bed, sound asleep, at the hour of midnight, and singing with a loud voice and very earnest manner, to an audience who were unable to understand one word of the song. At the close of the last ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... whether the spears were held upright or sloped, whether they came down to the charge one after another or all together? To men absolutely unaccustomed to order of any kind, but used only to fight each in the way that suited him best, these details appeared absolutely ludicrous. ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... T. Brady made a new statement with regard to a portion of the evidence. At that time Webster was broken in health. The most beautiful passage in his speech was his tribute to woman, and at another point he indulged in a very ludicrous description of the character of the first India rubber, which was offered as a marketable article. He said: "When India rubber was first brought to this country we had only the raw material, and they made overshoes and hats of it. A present was sent to me of a complete suit of ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... latter. Lincoln described the incident with great relish, in a letter to Stuart: "Francis caught him by the hair and jammed him back against a market-cart, where the matter ended by Francis being pulled away from him. The whole affair was so ludicrous that Francis and everybody else, Douglas excepted, have been laughing about it ever since."[103] The Illinois State Register tried to save Douglas's dignity by the following account of the rencontre: "Mr. Francis had applied scurrilous language to Mr. Douglas, ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... for various purposes, into every one of the city, and to every camp meeting for miles around; and so much had he profited by these exercises, that he could mimic to perfection every minister who had any perceptible peculiarity, could caricature every species of psalm-singing, and give ludicrous imitations of every form of worship. Then he was au fait in all coffee house lore, and knew the names and qualities of every kind of beverage therein compounded; and as to smoking and chewing, the first elements of which he mastered when he was about six years old, he was now a connoisseur ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of regret was intentionally ludicrous. Had Rachel been listening, she would once more have suspected a pose. But already she was deep in the article in the two-year-old magazine, or rather ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... want to miss any opportunity to see Haig. More than ever now was she determined to solve his mystery. So Huntingdon's "surprise" was a greater shock to her than he, simple man, could possibly have foreseen or perceived. But even if she had not been moved by his rather ludicrous disappointment she would not have dared to refuse acquiescence in his programme. She had indeed expressed an ardent—oh, too ardent!—desire to go camping, and any explanation she could think of on the instant would have led her into regions ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... her lap. There was something ludicrous to Evan in this excess of grief on account of such a business; but he was tender-hearted and wrought upon to declare that, whether or not he was to blame for his mother's intrusion that afternoon, he was ready to do what he could to make up to the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... distorted, caricatured, terrible. Because the farmers had been killed at the irrigation ditch, these others, Gerard and his family, fed full. They fattened on the blood of the People, on the blood of the men who had been killed at the ditch. It was a half-ludicrous, half-horrible "dog eat dog," an unspeakable cannibalism. Harran, Annixter, and Hooven were being devoured there under his eyes. These dainty women, his cousin Beatrice and little Miss Gerard, frail, delicate; all these fine ladies with their small fingers and slender ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... Hall was scandalized at the lightness of Jonas's conversation. But the old presiding elder, with keen common-sense and an equally keen sense of the ludicrous, could not look grave with all his ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... describes the following ludicrous scene arising from a misunderstanding between the sovereign of Birmah and his ministers:—"The ministers last night reported to the king the progress of the negotiation. His majesty was highly indignant, said his confidence had been abused, and that now, for the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various
... illusions of the wedding-day till the lady died, in her sixty-fourth year. On her monument he placed an inscription, extolling the charms of her person and of her manners; and when, long after her decease, he had occasion to mention her, he exclaimed, with a tenderness half ludicrous, half pathetic, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... but with results that argued a shallower nature. Mrs. Bradshaw had the heartiest and frankest contempt for all things foreign; in Italy she deemed herself among a people so inferior to the English that even to discuss the relative merits of the two nations would have been ludicrous. Life "abroad" she could not take as a serious thing; it amused or disgusted her, as the case might be—never occasioned her a grave thought. The proposal of this excursion, when first made to her, she received with mockery; when she saw that her husband meant ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... Buren was a severe one. "An obscure painter of the Flemish school," wrote Clinton to his friend and confidant, Henry Post, "has made a very ludicrous and grotesque representation of Jonah immediately after he was ejected from the whale's belly. He is represented as having a very bewildered and dismal physiognomy, not knowing from whence he came nor to what place bound. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... apply various daubs of paint to the building. Each of these features might be good in itself. The paints might be the best of ochre, ultramarine, or paris green, but they might have no relation to the building as a whole and would be only ludicrous. These two examples illustrate the difference between landscape gardening and the scattering over the place ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... burgomasters receiving it with that reverent and silent attention which becometh an audience at a deep tragedy. Notwithstanding all this, there have not been wanting some who have represented these scenes in a ludicrous light; and Mr D—— hath been heard to say, with some concern, that he wondered a tragical and Christian nation would permit a representation on its theatre so visibly designed to ridicule and extirpate everything that is great ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... Lingard, with the wild and stealthy aspect of a lunatic longing to whisper out an insane secret—one of those misshapen, heart-rending, and ludicrous secrets; one of those thoughts that, like monsters—cruel, fantastic, and mournful, wander about terrible and unceasing in the night of madness. Lingard looked at her, astounded but unflinching. She spoke in ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... Jerusalem, is, from a certain distance, as they also call it, shellabi kabir. Extremely beautiful. Beautiful upon a mountain. El Kudz means The City, and in a certain sense it is that, to unnumbered millions of people. Ludicrous, uproarious, dignified, pious, sinful, naively confidential, secretive, altruistic, realistic. Hoary-ancient and ultra-modern. Very, very proud of its name Jerusalem, which means City of Peace. Full to the brim with the malice of certainly ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... any more time, took the lead and giving himself the benefit of a run, cleared it like a buck. But as he was in the air his eye caught some object on this side the brook, and making a little circle on the other side, he came back with ludicrous precipitancy, and jumping short, landed with one foot on shore and one in the stream. George ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... the happy-go-lucky Hicks, as the behemoth Butch and Beef seized him, swinging him aloft with ludicrous ease, "Police! Fire! Murder! Take care of my banjo, Monty. Tell all the fellows at old Bannister I died game, and plant Hair-Trigger Bill with his boots on! Oooo, Beef, Butch, have a heart, that water ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... later, by Queen Elizabeth is an event on which all English historians are fond of dwelling. The pedant, on being presented to that imperious and accomplished sovereign, deported himself with the same ludicrous arrogance which had characterised him at the Hague. His Latin oration, which had been duly drawn up for him by the Chancellor of Sweden, was quite as impertinent as his harangue to the States-General had been, and was ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... more, as he had but little chance, in such a country, of ever again enjoying the comfort of dry ones. When I arrived at his hovel he had just come down to his sitting-room, and I think I seldom recollect a more comfortless, or ludicrous scene either. Till this moment, I suppose, he who had roughed it as little as any one, was now looking pale, wretched, and emaciated, with his slender, gentlemanly figure crouched close upon the comfortless fire-place. Should ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... the respect of the thinking, but even the confidence of the unwise. Chatterton's earliest idea seems to have been how to deceive; and, were it possible to laugh at youthful fraud, there would be something irresistibly ludicrous in the lad bewildering the old pewterer, Burgum. Imagine the fair-haired rosy boy, the brightness of his extraordinary eyes increased by the covert mischief which urged him forward—fancy his presenting himself to ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... thoroughly well scoured; but the results were nil. In due course of time the tarnishing and the disappearance of the metal reduced my scepticism to a certainty: the "gold dots" were the trace of some pilgrim or soldier's copper-nailed boot. It was the first time that this ludicrous mistake arose, but not the last—our native friends were ever falling into the ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... in this uncouth specimen of humanity, in the matted hair, the soiled garments, and the straggling gait; and what gives the finishing touch to this grotesque picture is his utter unconsciousness of the ludicrous features of his situation, as they appear to other eyes. Soon, it is true, he will go through an AEson-like rejuvenation; for, in a certain cottage, there are hearts that anxiously await his return, and hands ready to fulfil their oft-repeated duties in the way of refitting him out for another ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... small cannon, the property of a certain Herr Thade von Burgk, whose acquaintance I had made before on the occasion of the anniversary of the founding of the Dresden Choral Society, when he had made a speech which was well intentioned but wearisome to the point of being ludicrous. The recollection of this speech returned to me with peculiar irony, now that his cannon were being fired from the barricade upon the enemy. I felt a still deeper impression, however, when, towards eleven o'clock, I saw the ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... He was idle, stupefied, and woebegone. With his bushy, snow-white hair and beard, his puffy cheeks, his sagging mouth, and his clumsy bulk he produced an effect half spectral and half fleshly, but quite pathetically ludicrous. His hand trembled violently as he held ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... denied, she allowed her hand to rest in his for just the barest fraction of a second. As Leslie approached, he heard Potter anxiously inquiring after her welfare, and doing the honours of his ship generally, with a ludicrous affectation of manner that amused him greatly, and even brought the ghost of a smile to the face ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... so copious a subject, that there is no end of being either serious or ludicrous upon it. It is impossible, too, to enumerate or state to you the various cases in good-breeding; they are infinite; there is no situation or relation in the world so remote or so intimate, that does not require a degree of ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... woman and a child, two Jews, myself, and a runaway slave. So that our heartfelt thankfulness to a good Providence, pitying our folly and imprudence, may be easily imagined. In the midst of our confusion while searching for the port—having only three or four hours' daylight before us—the most ludicrous scene was enacted, which might have ended in the tragic. Some of the Moors professed to know the port of Tripoli Vecchia. Hereupon each fellow gave a different description, a thing perfectly natural, as each ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... days ago I saw[813:4] the song in the third Act printed and set to music, without my name, by Mr. Carnaby, in the year 1802; likewise that the same person asserted[813:5] (as I have been assured) that the Play was rejected, because I would not submit to the alteration of one ludicrous line; and finally[813:6] in the year 1806 amused and delighted (as who was ever in his company, if I may trust the universal report, without being amused and delighted?) a large company at the house of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... nature of poetry, however poor or small, is of value inestimable to the development of the individual, ludicrous even though it may show itself, should conceit clothe it in print. The desire of fame, so vaunted, is the ruin of the small, sometimes of the great poet. The next evil to doing anything for love of money, is doing it for the love ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... is conceived in the spirit of humour, and its author must be ranked among the great humorists of all time. There is an absurdity about the mission of the chief character, which gives rise to all sorts of ludicrous situations. It takes time for each serf-owner to comprehend Chichikov's object, and he is naturally regarded with suspicion. In one community it is whispered that he is Napoleon, escaped from St. Helena, and travelling in disguise. An old woman with ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... seemed involved in, and the profound silence between two persons who had never held their tongues for a moment when together before, he broke it by a sudden fit of laughter, which increased in proportion as the other stared at him. "A merry way of waking, and ludicrous enough," said the Chevalier; "what is the matter, and whom do you laugh at!" "Faith, Chevalier," said Matta, "I am laughing at a dream I had just now, which is so natural and diverting, that I must make you laugh at it also. I was dreaming that we had ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... are in perfect sympathy and rhythm with the music. He crouches around between the dancers brandishing his ax, he deftly all but cuts off a hand here, an arm or leg there, an ear yonder. He suddenly rushes forward and grinningly feigns cutting off a man's head. He contorts himself in a ludicrous yet often fiendish manner. This dance represents the height of the dramatic as I have seen it in Igorot life. His is truly a mimetic dance. His colleague with the spear and shield, who sometimes dances on the outskirts of the circle, now charging a dancer and again retreating, ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... hollow-eyed man of fifty, with prim lips and a shrunken skin, which hung loosely over the long jerking tendons under his prominent chin. He was dressed in snuff-coloured clothes, and his legs under his knee-breeches were of a ludicrous thinness. He shook his head at me with an air of sad wisdom, and I could read little comfort in his inhuman grey eyes. But it was the man called Toussac who alarmed me most. He was a colossus; bulky rather than tall, but misshapen from his excess of muscle. His huge legs ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... grossness. In James's reign, on the contrary, the coarsest pleasures were publicly and unlimitedly indulged, since, according to Sir John Harrington, the men wallowed in beastly delights; and even ladies abandoned their delicacy and rolled about in intoxication. After a ludicrous account of a mask, in which the actors had got drunk, and behaved themselves accordingly, he adds, "I have much marvelled at these strange pageantries, and they do bring to my recollection what passed of this sort in our Queen's days, in which I was sometimes an assistant ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... recovering his presence of mind, descended the steps to the assistance of the hapless Baron, who certainly was more frightened than hurt, though covered from head to foot with flour and dough and the contents of the meat pies and fruit tarts, producing an extraordinary and ludicrous effect. ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... which made her almost hysterical to contemplate. She felt that the affair ought to have wound up in some great movement, in some dignified action or fine speech, and it had descended to the merely ludicrous, or what, in view of those fifteen years, appeared the merely ludicrous. And she had been the instigator of it, and Doctor Hilary had called it a miracle. Which ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... superiority,—"for, upon my soul, I don't know where I'd turn for a crust if I weren't." In the end the talented ladies and gentlemen usually went home by an inexpensive line as the voluntary arrangement of a public to whom plain soda was a ludicrous hardship, and native vegetables an abomination at any price. Then Llewellyn and Rosa Norton—she had a small inalienable income, and they were really married though they preferred for some inexplicable reason to be thought ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... had contained some of his most sparkling and rollicking writing—and it had not even moved her to smile! He consoled himself with the reflection that the robuster humour never does appeal to women. He had begun his third chapter with a ludicrous anecdote which, though it bordered on the profane, he had considered too good to be lost, ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... good-humored, excursive, sensible, whimsical, intelligent being that he appears in his writings. Scarcely an adventure or character is given in his works that may not be traced to his own party-colored story. Many of his most ludicrous scenes and ridiculous incidents have been drawn from his own blunders and mischances, and he seems really to have been buffeted into almost every maxim imparted by him for ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... a faint by a wheeze close in his ear. The wolf leaped lamely back, losing its footing and falling in its weakness. It was ludicrous, but he was not amused. Nor was he even afraid. He was too far gone for that. But his mind was for the moment clear, and he lay and considered. The ship was no more than four miles away. He could see it quite distinctly when he rubbed the mists out of his eyes, and he could see the white ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... any yoke. Marvel, whose talent consisted in drollery, more than in serious reasoning, took his own method of exposing those opinions. He wrote a piece called The Rehearsal Transposed, in which he very successfully ridiculed Dr. Parker. This ludicrous essay met with several answers, some serious, and others humorous; we shall not here enumerate all the Rejoinders, Replies, and Animad-versions upon it. Wood himself confesses, who was an avowed enemy to Marvel, 'that Dr. Parker judged it more prudent rather to lay down the cudgels, than to enter ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... propensities, there are positive evidences that her story of Nelson's home life was crammed with pathetic truths of domestic misery. Nelson corroborates this by a letter to Emma almost immediately after his wife's ludicrous exit. The letter is the outpouring of an embittered soul that had been freed from purgatory and was entering into a new joy. It is a sickening effusion of unrestrained love-making that would put any personage of penny-novel fame ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... tickled at the joke. Sentiment has an exquisitely ludicrous side when one is a black-eyed wine-seller perched astride on a wall, and dispensing bandy-dashed wine to half a dozen ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... upper surface of that dome, when this Syrian took it upon himself to drag me down, break my wings, and reduce me to the common level of humanity. Whisking off the seemly tragic mask I then wore, he clapped on in its place a comic one that was little short of ludicrous: his next step was to huddle me into a corner with Jest, Lampoon, Cynicism, and the comedians Eupolis and Aristophanes, persons with a horrible knack of making light of sacred things, and girding at all that is as it should be. ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... "Religion" of course in the middle ages and sixteenth century was a term almost exclusively applied to the monastic system, and the most ludicrous mistakes are often made from ignorance of this fact; "religiosi" ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... and ruddy morn His handmaiden appear! Youth claims his hour. The generously ludicrous Espouses it. But see we sons of day, Off whom Life leans for guidance in our fight, Accept the throb for lord of us; For lord, for the main central light That gives direction, not the eclipse; Or dost thou look where niggard Age, Demanding reverence for wrinkles, whips A tumbled ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... gravely extract her gloves from her pocket, and draw them on, Lancelot pretending not to know she was in the room, though he had just said, "Come in." After allowing her a minute he would look up. In the course of a week this became mechanical, so that he lost the semi-ludicrous sense of secrecy which he felt at first, as well as the little pathetic emotion inspired by her absolute unconsciousness that the performance was not intended for her own gratification. Nevertheless, ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... little conception of the extent to which Dante carries either his cruelty or his abuse. The former (of which I shall give some examples presently) shews appalling habits of personal resentment; the latter is outrageous to a pitch of the ludicrous—positively screaming. I will give some specimens of it out of Foscolo himself, who collects them for a different purpose; though, with all his idolatry of Dante, he was far from ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... party were so overcome by this ludicrous expose of Miss Sallianna's schemes, that a laugh much louder than the first rang through the garden; and when Miss Sallianna was descried sailing in dignified meditation up and down the portico, her fan gently waving, her head inclined to one ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... witnessed this strange sight that morning, must have recalled a similar sight a hundred years and more prior to that, at Moscow, when the army of the great Napoleon was scattered to the winds by the cavalry and infantry of the Russian hordes. Three hundred and more of the ludicrous two-wheeled Russian carts preceded us with the artillery, floundering, miring, and slipping in the sticky, muddy roads. Following at their rear, came the tired, worn and exhausted troops—unshaven, unkempt and with tattered clothing. They were indeed a ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... his private letters, on this and similar occasions, is very valuable as an index of character, oddly as it contrasts, in the vulgar estimate, with the supposed cynicism and savagery of the critic. In yet another year occurred the somewhat ludicrous duel, or beginning of a duel, with Moore, in which several police constables did perform the friendly office which Mr. Winkle vainly deprecated, and in which Jeffrey's, not Moore's, pistol was discovered to be leadless. There is a sentence in a letter of Jeffrey's concerning the thing ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... to the assistance of the terrible warrior of the American forest, he has, in nearly every instance, when retaliation or accident has made him the object instead of the spectator of the ruthless nature of his warfare, betrayed the most salutary, and frequently the most abject and ludicrous apprehension of the prowess of his ally. While Content therefore looked so steadily, though still seriously, at the peculiar danger in which he was placed, the four strangers seemingly saw all of its horrors without ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... Wooddeson and his assistants. Every time I have since passed over Putney Common, I have always noticed the spot where my mother, as we drove along in the coach, admonished me that I was now going into the world, and must learn to think and act for myself. The expression may appear ludicrous; yet there is not, in the course of life, a more remarkable change than the removal of a child from the luxury and freedom of a wealthy house, to the frugal diet and strict subordination of a school; from the tenderness of parents, and the obsequiousness ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... door, with strings tied to their heads to lift them into paradise; it is all so quaint, so childlike, so pathetic, so grotesque,—like a set of wooden figures from its Noah's Ark that a dying child has set out on its little bed, and that are so stiff and ludicrous, and yet which no one well can look at and be unmoved, by reason of the little cold hand that ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... began in gratitude, and at length degenerated into flattery. These facts curiously show how far the human mind can advance, when led on by customs that operate unperceivably on it, and blind us in our absurdities. One of these ceremonies was exquisitely ludicrous. When they voted a statue to a proconsul, they placed it among the statues of the gods in the festival called Lectisternium, from the ridiculous circumstances of this solemn festival. On that day the gods were invited to ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... "cow-spit," with the implied indignity to our "rural divinity," becomes singularly ludicrous when we observe not only the frequent generous display of the suds samples, thousands upon thousands in a single small meadow, but the further fact that each mass is so exactly landed upon the central stalk of grass or other plant—"spitted" ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... leather of some was unstitched, there were holes in the bottoms of the others, and the buckets emptied themselves on the way. The difference in quantity between the water which was making its way in and that which they returned to the sea was ludicrous—for a ton that entered a glassful was baled out; they did not improve their condition. It was like the expenditure of a miser, trying to exhaust a ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... with perhaps some surmises of their own. Gould threw out just enough of an outline to spur on their appetite for an orgy of spoils. Undoubtedly, Gould made a secret agreement with them by which he could repudiate the purchases of gold made in their names. Away from the Stock Exchange Fisk made a ludicrous and dissolute enough figure, with his love of tinsel, his show and braggadacio, his mock military prowess, his pompous, windy airs and his covey of harlots. But in Wall Street he was a man of affairs and power; the very assurance that in social life made him ridiculous to a degree, was ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... and turned his head; then reined up the filly and came slowly back. The van was at a standstill, the driver craning his head and staring aft in wholly ludicrous bewilderment. ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the demeanor of Mary Stuart before her judges. To Charles Lamb it seemed "an innocence-resembling boldness"; to Mr. Dyce and Canon Kingsley the innocence displayed in Lamb's estimate seemed almost ludicrous in its misconception of Webster's text. I should hesitate to agree with them that he has never once made his accused heroine speak in the natural key of innocence unjustly impeached: Mary's pleading for her life is not at all ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... slate. The village lay very still and motionless in the pelting rain. We glanced up each of its lanes as we glided by, and in each the bodies of numerous dead French soldiers lay sodden in the mud, with their red legs sticking out in attitudes of ludicrous ghastliness. A line of ammunition wagons half a mile long was parked at the side of the village street and the horses were picketed in long lines in the ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... reckless oaths, the seamen uttered frantic cries to God for mercy, mingled with strange and often ludicrous vows, to be performed should deliverance ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... characters, by introducing persons of inferiour rank, and consequently of inferiour manners, whereas the grave romance sets the highest before us; lastly in its sentiments and diction; by preserving the ludicrous instead of the sublime. In the diction I think, burlesque itself may be sometimes admitted; of which many instances will occur in this work, as in the description of the battles, and some other places not necessary to be pointed out to the classical reader; for whose ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... saddle; other good sisters and brethren cleaned shoes and peddled, while some pushed wheelbarrows in which were conveyed some very staid-looking business men. The whole church community was animated by the common desire to keep the sheriff from the church-door. Luxuries were denied, and many ludicrous situations were invented until enough money was raised to secure a postponement of ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... (Milesiae Fabulae), very wanton and ludicrous tales. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton (Lord Lytton) published six of the Lost Tales of Mil[e]tus in rhymeless verse. He pretends he borrowed them from the scattered remnants preserved by Apollodo'rus and Conon, contained in the pages of Pausa'nias and Athenaeus, or dispersed ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... blank astonishment with which these words were received would have been ludicrous but for the ominous thickening of ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... second lands and wealth. I bring him in here because he associated with Forster in one of his most grotesque moods. To Forster, however, this agreeable spirit was taboo. He had offended the great man, and as it had a ludicrous cast, and was, besides, truly Forsterian, I may here recur to it. Forster, as I have stated, had been left by Landor, the copyright of his now value unsaleable writings, and he was more pleased at the intended compliment than gratified by the legacy itself. My friend Locker, whose Lyra was ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... a lord and lady who wore ridiculous imitations of fashionable dress, and made ludicrous attempts to imitate elegant manners. Mad Moll and her husband were another pair who flourished in tawdry, gay-colored rags, and tatters, he brandishing a sweep's broom and she a ladle. Jim Crow and a fancifully bedizened ballet-dancer ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... public caning and on another he sent him to a field regiment, noted for the rigid severity of its discipline, to be enrolled as a drummer for three months, accompanying the order with the mot, "His propensity for beating shall have the fullest exercise on the drum." A ludicrous sentence of the royal despot was that which consigned him to the tender mercies of the body-guard, with strict orders for his correction. No particular mode of punishment was prescribed, so each soldier inflicted such chastisement as he considered most fitting. They began by rigging ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... Ludicrous as was the scene, the consequences might have been disastrous. Should the huge animal not be got out, the water would be spoiled; at all events, his floundering about would make it very muddy. The elephant, however, seemed in ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston
... charming in the simplicity of Joyselle's pleasure in seeing his boyhood's friends, and something almost ludicrous in his perfectly ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... in the British Medical Journal some years ago (June 9, 1894): "Most medical men of an age to beget confidence in such affairs will be able to recall instances in which an ignorance, which would have been ludicrous if it had not been so sad, has been displayed on matters regarding which every woman entering on married life ought to have been accurately informed. There can, we think, be little doubt that much unhappiness and a great deal of illness ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... from house to house, he had written to her with appellations of endearment of his own—as all lovers do; and as all lovers seem to think that no lovers have done before themselves—with appellations which are so sweet to those who write, and so musical to those who read, but which sound so ludicrous when barbarously made public in hideous law courts by brazen-browed lawyers with mercenary tongues. In this way only had he written, and each of these sweet silly songs of love had been as full of honey as words ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... from his hiding-place, presenting a very ludicrous spectacle, with his unwashed face and uncombed hair, and the dirty cotton sticking ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... A solemn experience A ludicrous experience A terrifying experience A mysterious experience The circus parade you saw in your boyhood A servant girl A dude An odd character you have known The old homestead Your boarding house A scene suggesting the intense heat of a midsummer day Night on the river The rush ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Liege to Amsterdam, and thence to London, people stopped and stared at them in their stylish array, and some laughed at them. In this instance Brother Hecker's chagrin was not overcome by his sense of the ludicrous, for he was naturally very sensitive of personal unbecomingness, and although not precisely a martinet for clerical exactness, he had strict notions ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... skilled in his profession, but had read and thought very little on matters unconnected with it. He had no idea that the marks had any particular signification, or were anything else but common and fortuitous ones. That I became at all acquainted with their nature was owing to a ludicrous circumstance which ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... communicating the suspicions. To be brief, the two went behind a hedge, and presently Israel emerged, presenting the most forlorn appearance conceivable; while the old ditcher hobbled off in an opposite direction, correspondingly improved in his aspect; though it was rather ludicrous than otherwise, owing to the immense bagginess of the sailor-trowsers flapping about his lean shanks, to say nothing of the spare voluminousness of the pea-jacket. But Israel—how deplorable, how dismal his plight! Little did he ween that these wretched rags he now wore, ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... They lie. That ludicrous person who talks of taking the long view while there are still in the world only a few superb martyrs who have dared to do it, he who is satisfied to contemplate, beyond the present misery of men, the misery of their children; and the white-haired man who was extolling slavery just now, and ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... and he could see by the distension of his throat, that he had imbibed a taste, at least, of the highly-lauded medicine. The utterance then, of the single word—"Brandy"—was productive of an effect no less ludicrous in the sight of the youth, than it was distressing to the mind of his worthy companion. The descending liquor was ejected with desperate effort from the throat which it had fairly entered—the flask flung from his hands—and with choking and gurgling accents, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... day's work, and laughed out loud as he read the stiff, formal little epistle, which, to the young man in the midst of the whirl and bustle of camps and hospitals, seemed like a voice from another world; there was something too ludicrous in the notion of a child of eleven years old being forbidden to receive letters, because she might possibly be a nun nine or ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... emperor, scratching his head with an expression of ludicrous surprise; "then we have really got back from the peach- stone to political affairs and the war-question. Now, this war- question is a hard peach-stone to crack, and the mere thought of it sets my teeth ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... those who could not read. These people, as they listened to the friendly voice that read aloud - there was always some such ready to help them - stared at the characters which meant so much with a vague awe and respect that would have been half ludicrous, if any aspect of public ignorance could ever be otherwise than threatening and full of evil. Many ears and eyes were busy with a vision of the matter of these placards, among turning spindles, rattling looms, and whirling wheels, for hours afterwards; and when ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... sacred Urim and Thummim, not that men may ask counsel of the Deity, but that they may not? What is it but cowardice, very pitiable when unmasked; and what is its child but ignorance as pitiable, which would be ludicrous were it not so injurious? If a man comes up to Nature as to a parrot or a monkey, with this prevailing thought in his head—Will it bite me?—will he not be pretty certain to make up his mind that it may bite him, and had therefore best be left alone? ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... piled on trays in front of the throne. I remember noting an incident. An old fellow with a lame leg stumbled and upset his tray, so that the contents rolled hither and thither. His attempts to recover them were ludicrous and caused the monarch on the throne to relax from his dignity and smile. I mention this to show that what we witnessed was no set scene but apparently a living piece of the past. Had it been so the absurdity of the bedizened old man ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... but to come from the sublime to the ludicrous, I would advise future travellers not to follow our example in respect of a woman-boatman. The good woman, who acted as guide to the Falls could not hold her tongue for a single moment, and her loud inharmonious tittle-tattle put us in ill-humour for the rest of the day. When you make a long ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... enjoyment to no small number of persons who might, and in all probability would, have had little to eat or drink, and, consequently, little cause for merriment, at that season. This is really a very pleasant fact to contemplate, connected though it be with a somewhat ludicrous kind of ingenuity, which must be exercised in order to bring it about. To anybody but a London shopkeeper, the attempt would appear altogether hopeless, to transform a hundred poor persons, who were never worth half-a-crown a piece from one year's end to the other, into ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... it, me—Susie." Her tone and manner were a ludicrous imitation of Smith's. She added: "I saw you all pikin' in ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... so wrapt in security as country dwellers, guarded by the rural police everywhere, that the following ludicrous incident may seem hardly worth a word; but in the good old days, when poor Jack was such a highway brigand that my nurses feared to take the children off the premises, and when burglars were not infrequent callers at remote residences, what happened long ago, on a certain dark ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... part is mythological and mirthsome. It is the original nucleus around which the other parts have gathered. Some years since, the writer was led to investigate the world-wide myth of the Man in the Moon, in its legendary and ludicrous aspects; and one study being a stepping-stone to another, the ball ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... and graceful, if that were possible, as theirs, and when he moved on into the room it was with a little halt in his step, and a big blowing out of the cheeks, in ludicrous imitation of his late lamented predecessor, that sent the girls into peals of soft laughter and put us all ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... modified and abridged what follows, being impatient of its prolixity, as well as ashamed of what is truly called the ludicrous under-estimate of the ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... engaged," said Craigie, bowing with ludicrous politeness, to poor Hannah, whose head he was supporting, "I must ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... courage failed him. He raised his hat, his lips muttered a faint: "How d'ye do?" he smiled in a ludicrous manner and passed on. The young girl who thought he was about his business bowed and went on her way. "He might have said a few words," ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... Hector had hard work not to laugh. It seemed ludicrous to him that he should be supposed to be a detective on Gregory's track, as ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger
... two even lines, reaching from the window to the rear of the room, with a narrow woollen mat between them on the marble floor, each chair being conspicuously flanked by a cuspidor. This parlor arrangement is so nearly universal as to be absolutely ludicrous. ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... charmed. They had an air of ease and kindness towards the strangers, as if they had been their familiar friends for years; and their conversation was by turns tender, sentimental and gay. Madame, though she had no taste for such conversation, and whose coarseness and selfishness sometimes exhibited a ludicrous contrast to their excessive refinement, could not remain wholly insensible to the captivations ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... Sultan, seeing that Lallakalla looked very ludicrous with her shaven poll, burst out laughing. And he came and took her by the hand, and said ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... looked at him with ludicrous surprise. "Do you wish to give me a lesson? Well, I will forgive you this time, and, as you express it, honor God's image in the owner of the Berlin porcelain factory. But hush about these hard-headed Leipsigers. They ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... read a lesson not wholly unneeded in the present day. They show how in a department in which it demanded the united life-long labors of a Kepler, Galileo, and Newton to elicit the truth, the hasty guesses of a great theologian, rashly ventured in a polemic spirit, gave form and body to but ludicrous error. It is not after a fashion so impetuous and headlong that the elaborately wrought key must be plied which unlocks the profound mysteries of nature. ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... are doing at Old Orchard and Old Point. Here, with a maid, is a pair of children who freely show one attribute of childhood not so pleasing as others,—cruelty. They have a little monkey, fastened by collar and chain, and it is pitiful and yet ludicrous to see the close watch the animal keeps on his captors' movements. He has found a slack chain his best policy, and adapts his every motion anxiously and solicitously to the leaps of the boy. But the utmost vigilance avails him little. When the child is weary with running and sudden turns, which ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... was despised he was still powerful. None dare openly insult him. And, between their fear and their scorn of him, the shifts of the rabble to give vent to their contempt were often ludicrous enough. Thus, they would call their dogs and their asses by his name, and the dogs would be the scabbiest in the streets, and the asses the laziest ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... succeeded."—Priestley's Gram., p. 93. Indeed, this pronoun does not admit of being construed after a noun, as a simple relative: none but the most illiterate ever seriously use it so. What put for who or which, is therefore a ludicrous vulgarism; as, "The aspiring youth what fired the Ephesian dome."—Jester. The word used as above, however, does not always preclude the introduction of a personal pronoun before the subsequent ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... consider his prodigality as a virtue, even when they did not themselves derive any direct advantage from it. A thousand stories were always in circulation in camp of acts on his part illustrating his reckless disregard of the value of money, some ludicrous, and all eccentric ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... well-intentioned, but entangled in formulas, slowly feels its way. The Congress is composed of better elements than is the administration, and it is ludicrous to see how the administration takes airs of hauteur with the Congress. This Congress is in an abnormal condition for the task of directing a revolution; a formula can be thrown in its face almost at every bold step. The administration is virtually irresponsible, more ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... this more, odd, or indeed absolutely ludicrous, was the circumstance that, by a species of legerdemain, a whisper had passed among the spectators so stealthily, and yet so soon, that the attorney and his companion were the only two on deck who remained ignorant of ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... and only descended to the knees, which were left open. The hinder part presented a most singular appearance. It hung down almost trailing upon the ground in a huge bag, which kept moving backwards and forwards in a ludicrous manner at every motion of the body. They wore shoes, but no stockings; and their legs were as dark as their countenances, and covered with hair. Round their waist they wore a large red sash in several folds. Their jacket was similar to ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... the men of the wilderness laugh over the serious drivel of most fiction writers who make a specialty of northern tales, nothing is so supremely ludicrous as the attempts made by the average movie director to depict northern life in Canada. Never have I seen a photoplay that truthfully illustrated ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... tell a story when he liked, and on this occasion his description of the shamefaced manner in which Winter had scrambled out of his car, and had handed over his valuables to the Motor Pirate, was so ludicrous that I was compelled to laugh at the description. When my turn came to be described, Miss Maitland and Mannering were just as much amused, but I am afraid that my attempt to participate in their ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... utter farce in thus disposing of the affairs of nations in a flat in the Rue Boissiere. He recalled the exiled potentates of the music hall review, and the bitter wit of the dramatist was now justified. It was ludicrous, too, of Stampoff to address him as ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... unable to express to others, or even to define clearly to ourselves, what it is we do feel. The natural freedom of childhood is dead within us; the conventional freedom of riper years is struggling to birth, and its efforts are sometimes ludicrous to an unsympathetic observer. In Lewis Carroll's mental attitude during this critical period there was always a calm dignity which saved him from these absurdities, an undercurrent of consciousness that what seemed so great to him was really ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... to tie the handkerchief were ludicrous in the extreme. One corner kept falling over and flicking into his eye, so that he seemed to be persistently winking at her with that eyelid, a proceeding which would certainly not have been allowed at the parties of the Ministers' Daughters' ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... being alone with her again in his life for five minutes, that would be out of the question. Could he, a musician and an artist, a man sprung from the people, even think of aspiring to the hand of a Venetian senator's niece? In those days the idea was ludicrous. And as for her, though she might be in love with him—and he felt that she was—would she entertain for a moment the idea of escaping from her uncle's house, from Venice, to join her lot with a wandering singer's? That was still greater nonsense, he thought. ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... Lope Gomez Arias," responded the valet, with most ludicrous solemnity, "but I am firmly resolved to quit your service in good earnest; for I perceive you are bent on getting into new difficulties, and I feel no inclination to go in search of fresh adventures. Lately you suddenly disappeared on some mysterious ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... ridicule. They mimicked the high stomach as they stood, as the dead man had stood, with arms aloft in rebellion against his lot, and fell back, as he had fallen, screaming, to kick and wallow on the ground. Here was plot and matter for ludicrous corroboree, the first rehearsal of which took ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... hammered away at the door. What they do in New Jersey when it rains is to let it rain; and what I did when he pounded was to let him pound. I was perfectly willing he should pound; I even hoped that he enjoyed it. In spite of the anxiety I felt for poor Kate, I could not help laughing at the ludicrous earnestness with which he swore and pounded. Like most men, my uncle was cool when he was not excited; and as there had been nothing on the present occasion to excite him, I suppose he was cool. Doubtless he stopped to dress himself before he answered the summons. Very likely the dread necessity ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... only knew that the glamour of it all was gone—that there were many hours when the Movement lay like lead upon her life. Was it simply that her intelligence had revolted, that she had come to see the folly, the sheer, ludicrous folly of a "physical force" policy which opposed the pin-pricks of women to the strength of men? Or was it something else—something ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... corpses and on pictures, and the grave itself was no asylum from its tremendous arm. The presumptuous arrogance of its decrees could only be surpassed by the inhumanity which executed them. By coupling the ludicrous with the terrible, and by amusing the eye with the strangeness of its processions, it weakened compassion by the gratification of another feeling; it drowned sympathy in derision and contempt. The delinquent was conducted with solemn pomp to the place of execution, a ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... condescended to sneak into the country, or to abandon for a moment, under any motive of caution or fear, the great metropolitan castra stativa of gigantic crime, seated for ever on the Thames. In fact, the great artist disdained a provincial reputation; and he must have felt, as a case of ludicrous disproportion, the contrast between a country town or village, on the one hand, and, on the other, a work more lasting than brass—a [Greek: chtaema es aei]—a murder such in quality as any murder that he would condescend to own for a work turned out ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... chef-d'oeuvre, the installation of masters was accompanied with extraordinary ceremonies, which no doubt originally possessed some symbolical meaning, but which, having lost their true signification, became singular, and appeared even ludicrous. Thus with the bakers, after four years' apprenticeship, the candidate on purchasing the freedom from the King, issued from his door, escorted by all the other bakers of the town, bearing a new pot filled with walnuts and wafers. On arriving before the chief ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... a situation, where some ludicrous circumstance has excited him to laugh; and at the same time a sense of decorum has forbid the exertion of these interrupted screams; and then the pain has become so violent, as to occasion him to use some other great action, as biting his ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... climbing up trees and suspending the whole weight from horizontal branches. The almost complete identity of the skeleton, however, and the close similarity of the muscles and of all the internal organs, have produced that striking and ludicrous resemblance to man, which every one recognizes in these higher apes, and, in a less degree, in the whole monkey tribe; the face and features, the motions, attitudes, and gestures being often a strange caricature of humanity. Let us, then, examine a little more closely in what ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... which an exclusive possession of the truth so commonly engenders. He was greatly in earnest; he knew he was right; but he could still see the comical side of things; he still had a sense of the ludicrous; and in that lay his salvation. For a sense of the ludicrous is the best of mental antiseptics; it, if anything, will keep our perishable human nature sweet, and save it from the madhouse. His discourse was punctuated throughout with quiet laughter. Thus, when he said, "I call it the late ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... ridden by the youth became ungovernable—he plunged, reared, and his rider being unable with his wounded arm, to manage the impatient animal, Henry Wharton found himself, in less than a minute, unwillingly riding by the side of Captain Lawton. The dragoon comprehended at a glance the ludicrous situation of his new comrade, but had only time to cry aloud, before they plunged into ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... boys. And the poor John Gilpin enjoyed the fun, too, or tried to enjoy it, as much as any of them, though he did not laugh quite so heartily; and he could well be pardoned for not doing that, certainly, until he had got to the end of his ludicrous race. ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth
... as tenderly as a mother would her infant. Some of the wretched reptiles were carefully wrapped in soft blankets, their heads and forefeet protruding,—and, mounted on the backs of the plume-bedecked pilgrims, made ludicrous but solemn caricatures of little children in the same position. While I was at supper upstairs that evening, the governor's brother-in-law came in. He was welcomed by the family as if a messenger from heaven. He bore in his tremulous fingers one of the much abused and rebellious turtles. Paint ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... his weekly medical paper, so that he has a general idea as to the advance of modern science. He always persists in looking upon it as a huge and rather ludicrous experiment. The germ theory of disease set him chuckling for a long time, and his favourite joke in the sick room was to say, "Shut the door or the germs will be getting in." As to the Darwinian theory, it struck him as being the crowning joke of the century. ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... doctrine of a future life, she strove to believe as a little child. But it was her sins of the flesh that she wanted to confess, and this argument about the Incarnation had begun to seem out of place. Suddenly it seemed to hear inexpressibly ludicrous that she should be kneeling beside the priest. She could not help wondering what Owen would think of her. She remembered his pointing out that it is stated in the Gospel that the Messiah should be descended from David. Now, Mary was not of royal blood, ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... touch of vanity in his smile, as though in memory of some old, half-ludicrous story ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... staring, absolutely confounded. For one instant she stood thus; then all was forgotten in her sense of the ludicrous. She leaned against a tree, and set up a shout of laughter ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... moment I saw him," says Mr. M———as we take our departure from the glittering room. His confidence in his knowledge of Russian character, which a moment ago had dropped down to zero, revives wonderfully upon discovering our ludicrous mistake, and, small as he is, it is all I can do to keep up with him as we follow the guide Nasr-i-Mulk has kindly sent to show us to the Russian Legation. A few minutes' walk brings us to our destination, where we find, in the person of General Melnikoff, a gentleman ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... utmost kindness, and place her near the young man. On seeing her, he became as rejoiced as if he had received all the delights of the world. That hag also clung round the neck of that angelic youth. The [ludicrous] sight appeared, in plain truth, such as when over the moon of the fourteenth night, an eclipse comes. As many people as were in the assembly began to put their fore-fingers between their teeth, [151] saying [to themselves] "How could such a hag subdue the affections of this young ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... assume the incensed and threatening look with which an ancient gallant would have laid his hand on the hilt of his sword. But some animals and men only become absurd when they try to appear formidable. It was ludicrous to see him weakly frowning at the sturdy Teuton who had already forgotten his existence as completely as he might that of a buzzing mosquito he had ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... the name of creation are you doing there, Fred?" exclaimed Tom, laughing at the ludicrous attitude ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... in his efforts to keep his composure, in a way that was irresistibly ludicrous. In the midst of his distress the poor fellow could not help being comical. Even in the suffering which was so terribly real to him he ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... fairly took Dorrimore by surprise. He stared blankly at Vane, and then apparently seized by some ludicrous idea, he burst ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... which was poured on Luther and his doings was so bitter as to be ludicrous. It was declared that his father was not his mother's husband, but an impish incubus, who had deluded her; that, after ten years' struggling with his conscience, he had become an atheist; that he denied the immortality ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... the ludicrous gravity of those court etiquettes, or punctilios, combined with political consequences, of which I am ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
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