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More "Comic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a year or so ago to Annette Oakleigh, a Broadway comic opera singer, who was his second wife. By his first marriage he had had two children, a son, Warner, and ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... forgive Thee, Milton, those thy comic-dreadful wars Where, armed with gross and inconclusive steel, Immortals smite immortals mortalwise And fill ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... [Footnote 67: The famous comic poet and dramatist, author of the "Frogs," "Clouds," "Birds," and many other works, of which only eleven are now extant; born about 451 B.C., ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... comic songs to cheer us up during that night of dolor, filling the intervals between the ditties with anathemas against his South African luck and realistic stories of his Australian experiences. He had lived, he told us, for several years by earning pennies in ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... Casaubon,[2] theorizes that the character evolved out of Greek Old Comedy. The Augustans saw a close connection between drama and character-writing. Congreve (Dedication to The Way of the World, 1700) thought that the comic dramatist Menander formed his characters on "the observations of Theophrastus, of whom he was a disciple," and Budgell, who termed Theophrastus the father of modern comedy, believed that if some of Theophrastus's characters "were well worked up, and brought upon the British theatre, they could ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... to wait longer than she anticipated, for she found that "El Diablo Cojuelo" had left his stronghold. Failing to make herself understood, Dolores fetched an old man who looked like a comic opera pirate and who could speak a ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... "Theer's sothin' comic about them theer goanners," said the old man at last. "I've seed swarms of grasshoppers an' big mobs of kangaroos, but dang me if ever I seed a ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... lower type, not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the Ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... attune myself to him I know not. If I wear a grim face, I am a sour fellow, scarcely to be endured. If I assume my most cheerful expression, my smiles arouse his contempt and disgust. As well attempt to act a comic part in the mask of tragedy! And what is the end of it all? My present life has been another's: do I look to have a new life ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... shots and the possibility of retrieving lost balls had raised a tremor of excitement as well as our hasty descent into the realms of Bacchus, in common words—the wine cellar. By the thin rays of a candle the scene was comic; there we were, fourteen of us huddled together in a twelve by twenty foot vault, earthen floor and stone walls. Expecting at any moment an onslaught of we did not know what, each one was bracing himself for the blow, in different attitudes of mind and body. Madame X. was pale, her daughter ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... lovers go in fours, Master and mistress, man and maid; Where people listen at the doors Or 'neath a table's friendly shade, And comic Irishmen in scores Roam o'er the ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... 13 vols. Green's History fo the English People. Stanhope's History of England. Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century. Macaulay's Essays (Milton, Mackintosh's History, War of the Spanish Succession, and The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration). Creighton's Life of Marlborough. Guizot's History of Civilization (Chapter XIII). Morris's Age of Anne.[1] Hale's Fall of the Stuarts.[1] Cordery's Struggle against Absolute Monarchy.[1] Scott's Peveril of the Peak ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... of circles, sittings, and "seances"—good Lord, how he hated that word!—were almost comic, and yet to think of Viola and her gracious mother concerned with these meetings, even as spectators, filled him with ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... its peculiar and diversified circumstances. Taking a particular view of things in general, we may say of life that it is composed of diverse and miscellaneous materials—the grave and the gay; the sad and the comic; the extraordinary and the commonplace; the flat and the piquant; the heavy and the light; the religious and the profane; the bright and the dark; the shadow and the sunshine. All these, and a great deal more, similar ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... innocent rate-payers are fleeced by barefaced robbers, but the catalogue would be only wearisome. Let any man of probity venture to force his way into one of these dens of thieves and see how he will fare! It is a comic thing that the gangs of jobbers consider that they have a prescriptive right to plunder at large, and their air of aggrieved virtue when they are challenged by a person whom they call an "interloper" is among the most droll and humiliating farces that may be seen ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... to realize that in very truth History has been one vast stupendous drama, world-embracing in its splendor, majestic, awful, irresistible in the insistence of its pointing finger of fate. It has indeed its comic interludes, a Prussian king befuddling ambassadors in his "Tobacco Parliament"; its pauses of intense and cumulative suspense, Queen Louise pleading to Napoleon for her country's life; but it has also its magnificent pageants, its gorgeous ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... outcast. Nor have we here the infernal courtliness of the scene as represented at Chartres, the doubtful consideration of an evil spirit gently driving in a nun; it is brutality in all its horror, the lowest violence; the sometimes comic side of these struggles is not to be seen here. At Bourges the myrmidons of the deep work and hit with a will. A devil with a wild beast's muzzle and a drunkard's face in the middle of his fat stomach, is hammering the skull of a wretch ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... known about the life of Aristophanes. He was born about 444 B.C., and devoted himself to comic poetry. He wrote fifty-four plays, of which eleven ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Life is either comic or tragic, according to the point of view from which we regard it. The observer will be impelled to laugh or to weep over it, as he shall fix his attention on men's follies or their sufferings. So of the Great Exhibition, and more especially its Royal Inauguration, which I have just ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... better class attended; nine-tenths of the people resort to these crude, wayside performances. They look on with seeming indifference; there is never a sign of approval, much less an outburst of applause. They seem to have no place in their souls for the ludicrous, the comic, or the joyous. They were shocked by my smiles and peals of laughter. They have a strange preference for the minor key in music, for the dirge. No wonder when our bands would play lively music that they were quite ready to take up the catchy airs, ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... you'd like me to fill the role of comic relief," she said sweetly. "Thanks a thousand times for ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... revelry should run high and the fun grow fast and furious, while the fire blazed and crackled on the hearth, while the streets swarmed with festive crowds, and through the clear frosty air, far away to the north, Soracte showed his coronal of snow. When we compare this comic monarch of the gay, the civilised metropolis with his grim counterpart of the rude camp on the Danube, and when we remember the long array of similar figures, ludicrous yet tragic, who in other ages and in other lands, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the photograph of an honest fellow deceased, whom she had never seen. The family was indignant because she had not given him the exact colors of his eyes and hair. It was necessary to do it all over again. Since she was disposed rather to look at the comic side of her misadventures, she laughed courageously about it. But Pierre did ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... four hours' rowing, and with a large leather bag well filled at starting but empty on its return; and instead of its contents we bring back in our memory a whole series of tales, characters, and incidents of water-craft life, some tragic, others comic, many 'hum-drum' enough, but still instructive, suggestive, branching out into hidden lives one would like to draw forth, and telling sorrows that are softened by being told. Of the French crews I began with here, not one of the first ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... the sun enters the four cardinal points of the heavens, that is, when he enters Cancer, Libra, Capricorn, and Aries. On these occasions they have very learned, splendid, and as it were comic performances. They celebrate also every full and every new moon with a festival, as also they do the anniversaries of the founding of the city, and of the days when they have won victories or done any other great achievement. The celebrations take place with the music of female voices, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... Puss, with a comic grin; "The words of truth you have spoken; A name for ourselves we must strive to win At once, now the ice is broken; For one or two doses of catnip tea Have had ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... wrote miserable comedies: Let it be no disgrace to Murphy that he has written an indifferent tragedy. By the merit of his comic scenes, his tragic ones are perhaps judged, and in the ...
— The Grecian Daughter • Arthur Murphy
... with a curt announcement that he would have to think the matter over. If I had not known the essential justice and common sense under his dry and irascible exterior, I might have been alarmed. The lobbyist's concern was almost comic. As soon as we were out of hearing of the Senator's apartment, shaking both fists frantically at me, he cried: "You've ruined everything! We had him. We had him—all right—until you came down here and let the cat out of the bag! You knew what we'd been telling him. Why ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... great festivities when the sun enters the four cardinal points of the heavens, that is, when he enters Cancer, Libra, Capricorn, and Aries. On these occasions they have very learned, splendid, and, as it were, comic performances. They celebrate also every full and every new moon with a festival, as also they do the anniversaries of the founding of the city, and of the days when they have won victories or done any other great achievement. ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... bandages, and had something the appearance of a relic of the Fourth of July, as our comic weeklies depict Young America the day after that glorious occasion. But, except for one thing which he had on his mind, the Coloradoan was as ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... said that no proposition ever had so many adherents; there was no question of hesitations, doubts, or anxieties. As to the jokes, caricatures, and comic songs that would have welcomed in Europe, and, above all, in France, the idea of sending a projectile to the moon, they would have been turned against their author; all the "life-preservers" in the ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... without tools,' he says. 'And what's more,' he says, 'the worthy delicatessener is engaged at this present moment in locking up and going away from here. In about a half an hour,' he says, 'he'll be setting in his happy German-American home picking his teeth after supper, and reading comic jokes to his little son August out of the Fleagetty Bladder. And shortly thereafter,' he says, 'what'll you and me be doing? We'll be there, in that vittles emporium, in the midst of plenty,' he says, 'filling ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... Of course not! I am only forced by circumstance—and an oblique sense of the comic—to make a convenience of him. And by the Lord Harry, it's up to ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... laugh at his way of putting it; impossible, too, not to feel that behind his strange manner, his brutal speeches and his serio-comic rage there was the character of a man who would keep his word and who expected others to do the same. There might even be lurking somewhere in ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... the most crafty sovereign of his time, he was fond of low life, and, being himself a man of wit, enjoyed the jests and repartees of social conversation more than could have been expected from other points of his character. He even mingled in the comic adventures of obscure intrigue, with a freedom little consistent with the habitual and guarded jealousy of his character, and he was so fond of this species of humble gallantry, that he caused a number of its gay and licentious anecdotes to be enrolled in a ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... horse to keep up with. The first bullock-cart was driven by Hans, who sat upon the top of a heap of baggage, his head covered with a very old and battered Panama hat, through several broad holes in which his red hair bristled out in a most comic fashion, and over his blue flannel shirt a large red beard flowed almost to his waist. Terence was walking by the side of the second cart in corduroy breeches and gaiters and blue coat, with a high black ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... invent after dinner, invent on Sundays. See with what ardour they rush home of a night! See how they seize a half-holiday, like hungry dogs a bone! They don't want golf, bridge, limericks, novels, illustrated magazines, clubs, whisky, starting-prices, hints about neckties, political meetings, yarns, comic songs, anturic salts, nor the smiles that are situate between a gay corsage and a picture hat. They never wonder, at a loss, what they will do next. Their evenings never drag—are always too short. You may, indeed, catch them at twelve o'clock at night ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... approaching it, and after a strain which it had endured for no less than ten days; but the capture of Reading was not effected entirely without bloodshed; certainly fifty men were killed (counting both sides), possibly a few more; and the whole episode is a grotesque little foot-note to the comic opera upon which rose the curtain of the Civil Wars. It was not till the appearance of Cromwell, with his highly paid and disciplined force, that the ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... a prolonged council of war. This meant that Scott called Bowers, and perhaps Oates, into our tent after supper was finished in the morning. Somehow these conferences were always rather serio-comic. On this occasion, as was usually the case, the question was ponies. It was decided to wait here one day and rest them, as there was ample food. The main discussion centred round the amount of forage to be taken on from here, while the state ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... frantically serious efforts of the hermit to coax his flabby rear into a shell obviously a flattering misfit. But it is not a smiling matter to him. Not until he has exhausted a programme of ingenious attitudes and comic contortions is the attempt to stow away a No. 8 tail into a No. 5 shell abandoned. When a shell of respectable dimensions is presented, and the grateful hermit backs in, settles comfortably, arrays all his ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... Paris. They flatter themselves that somebody will say, in M. de Choiseul's drawing-room, "How passionately M. de —— loves his sister; he would certainly die if he had the misfortune to lose her." Madame related this to her brother, in my presence, adding, that she could not give it in the Duke's comic manner. M. de Marigny said, "I have had the start of them all, without making so much noise; and my dear little sister knows that I loved her tenderly before Madame de Grammont left her convent. The Duc d'Ayen, however, is not very wrong; he has made the most of it in his lively ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... I think it amused them to see Wilfred sitting underneath. They simply roared every time he pushed up the keys. It was as good as a comic song. It really is tiresome, though, to have a piano like that at the school. John Crosby, the stonemason's little boy, sings very nicely, and I went so wrong in playing his accompaniment, through losing so many ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... here from day to day in a businesslike and orderly fashion, the comic relief being supplied by a temporary, very temporary, man from overseas, who has operated for a while at our telephone exchange. Most people, myself included, are overawed by the dignity and significance of our environment ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... his sons whom I have to mention, Don Giovanni, married a dissolute woman of low birth called Livia, and disgraced the name of Medici by the unprincely follies of his life. Eleonora de'Medici, third of his daughters, introduces a comic element into these funereal records. She was affianced to Vincenzo Gonzaga, heir of the Duchy of Mantua. But suspicions, arising out of the circumstances of his divorce from a former wife, obliged him to prove his marital capacity before the completion ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... white posters which seemed to me robust and considerably lively. At any rate, Mr. Holliday exhibited drawings on Fifth avenue and had illustrative work published by Scribner's Magazine. He did commercial designs and comic pictures for juvenile readers. At this time he lived in a rural community of artists in Connecticut, and did his own cooking. Also, he is proud of having lived in a garret on Broome street. This phase of his ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... Duke is equally merciless in the description of George II.'s funeral in the Abbey, in which the "burlesque Duke" is introduced as comic relief into the ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Comic poets reproach Socrates with teaching how to make a bad cause good, and Plato represents Lysias and Gorgias boasting the same thing. To these may be added several examples of Greeks and Romans, and a long list of orators whose eloquence was not only ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... the hill, and I saw the river in the distance once more. How different all this was from my girlhood visions of romance. That has been characteristic of my life all along—it has been full of homely, workaday happenings, and often rather comic in spite of my best resolves to be highbrow and serious. All the same I was something near to tears as I thought of the tragic wreck at Willdon and the grief-laden hearts that must be mourning. I wondered whether the Governor was now returning from ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... philosophic ken, there is no such thing as a trifle; the ridiculous is but skin-deep, papillae on the surface of society; cut a little deeper, you will find the veins and arteries of wisdom. Therefore will a sober man not deride the notion that comic almanacs, comic Latin grammars, comic hand-books of sciences and arts, and the great prevalence of comicality in popular views taken of life and of death, of incident and of character, of evil and of good, are, in reality, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... left, moreover, there was a pitiable ashen portrait of a general; on the right a colossal nymph in a moonlit landscape, the bloodless corpse of a murdered woman rotting away on some grass; and everywhere around there were mournful violet-shaded things, mixed up with a comic scene of some bibulous monks, and an 'Opening of the Chamber of Deputies,' with a whole page of writing on a gilded cartouch, bearing the heads of the better-known deputies, drawn in outline, together with their names. And high ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... Man's Destiny Love's Incongruities Retribution Love's Mutability A Mother's Advice Sunrise in the Country Faith in Love Unrequited Affection The Poet's Troubles Echoes from the City Love's Wiles Hazard in Love A Mother's Love "The Shadow of the Cross" Curates and Colliers: on reading in a Comic Paper absurd comparisons between the wages of Curates and Colliers Wanted—a Wife: a Voice from the Ladies Sympathy A Fragment Law versus Theology: on an Eminent County Court Judge The Broken Model Impromptu: on an Inveterate ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... generous to the philosopher in the gifts of soul, was unkind to him in the matter of his person. His face was ugly as a satyr's, and he had an awkward, shambling walk, so that he invited the shafts of the comic poets of his time. He loved to gather a little circle about him in the Agora or in the streets, and then to draw out his listeners by a series of ingenious questions. His method was so peculiar to himself that it has received the designation of the "Socratic dialogue." He ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... grotesque to me, and I could not forget that dozen of soldiers playing piquet round the stove, and that row of doors on which I had read "Public Health," "Burials," "Deaths," "Expropriations," etc. I should have been aggrieved at this dealer in iron bedsteads touching on my cherished dreams if the comic side of the situation had not absorbed my whole attention, and if a mad wish to laugh outright had not ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... burning of the Theatre Royal in Sydney, we were favoured with the presence in our midst of artists who rarely, if ever before, had quitted the metropolitan stage. But our "jeune premier" in one sense has eclipsed every darling of the tragic or the comic muse. ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... already told you," replied the fat man. "I am a clown—a musical clown.... I interpret comic romances.... I dress up as a negro, I play the banjo!" This jovial individual began humming an air which was the rage of ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... he saw some boys looking at him, they thinking that his despair heightened his comic appearance, he began ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... To hear comic songs in dreams, foretells you will disregard opportunity to advance your affairs and enjoy the companionship of the pleasure loving. To sing one, proves you will enjoy much pleasure for a time, but difficulties will ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... skirt. "There's God, ain't there?" she said, inquiringly, and getting no answer she flopped upon her knees, to say a babyish prayer that would sound comic to anybody except to Him to ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... expression fear no colours was "probably at first a military expression, to fear no enemy. So Shakespeare derives it [Twelfth Night, i. 5], and, though the passage is comic, it is likely ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... specimens recently discovered in his country-walks between Broadstairs and Ramsgate, he thoroughly explored the ballad literature of Seven-Dials, and took to singing himself, with an effect that justified his reputation for comic singing in his childhood, not a few of these wonderful productions. His last successful labor of the year was the reconciliation of two friends; and his motive, as well as the principle that guided him, as they are described by himself, I think worth preserving. For the first: "In the midst ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... in the matter of the Middle Ages that the popular histories trample upon the popular traditions. In this respect there is an almost comic contrast between the general information provided about England in the last two or three centuries, in which its present industrial system was being built up, and the general information given about ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... to Mrs Ffolliot, asking that it might be put with Mary's other presents on her plate that morning. And she had written to thank him for it, but he did not answer the letter. He had always been by way of writing to her from time to time; letters, generally embellished with comic sketches and full of chaff and nonsense, which were shared by the family. Lately he had not felt in the mood to write such letters. He wanted to see her with an unceasing ache of longing intense and persistent; ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... note. This letter was written in reply to a long one from W.H. Harvey, dated August 24th, 1860. Harvey had already published a serio-comic squib and a review, to which references are given in the "Life and Letters," II., pages 314 and 375; but apparently he had not before this time completed ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... shore, the men jumped out to haul the alligator up on the dry land, and began to pull away vigorously. It was a comic scene to witness. They expected to have some difficulty in performing their task; but suddenly they found the rope slacken, and looking round beheld the alligator walking up after them of his own accord, faster than was pleasant. In their haste, endeavouring to keep ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... characterized the picture, he still retained the same elevated beauty—the same deep, quiet expression of intellectual power. At a short distance, with his arm resting on the couch, stood his nephew Alcibiades, deservedly called the handsomest man in Athens. He was laughing with Hermippus, the comic writer, whose shrewd, sarcastic and mischievous face was expressive of his calling. Phidias slowly paced the room, talking of the current news with the Persian Artaphernes. Anaxagoras reclined near the statue of Aphrodite, listening and occasionally speaking ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... gave Nick such a beautiful trouncing the other night, so I was told. It was hard luck that I could only catch a word now and then, for some of the boys were calling out to each other; and that silly clown, Claude Hastings, had begun to sing one of his comic songs, while he capered around like a baboon. But I did hear Nick say the words: 'Get even,' 'show him who's who in this burgh,' and 'Belgian hares.' Do they put you ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... in fine order, and was painted like all the king's miniature fleet—white outside, and bright salmon inside. One glance at his boat's crew showed me that they were all armed—in a flashy melodramatic style, like the Red Indians of a comic opera, each naked native having a brace of revolvers buckled to a broad leather belt around his waist, from which also hung a French navy cutlass in a leather sheath. They were all big, stalwart fellows, though no one of ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke
... from seventy to one hundred and fifty years old, gray, knock-kneed, bent in the back, and goes to sleep standing up—and stays asleep. He is the exact duplicate of the tramp in the comic opera of "Miss Hook of Holland"—except that the actor-sleeper occasionally topples over and has to be braced up. Bob is past-master of the art and goes it alone, without propping of any kind. He is the only man in Dordrecht, or Papendrecht, or the country round about, who ...
— The Parthenon By Way Of Papendrecht - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... his capers and noise; and woe to the gray squirrel or chipmunk that ventures to set foot on his favorite tree! No matter how slyly they trace the furrows of the bark, they are speedily discovered, and kicked down-stairs with comic vehemence, while a torrent of angry notes comes rushing from his whiskered lips that sounds remarkably like swearing. He will even attempt at times to drive away dogs and men, especially if he has had no previous knowledge of them. Seeing a man for the first time, he approaches ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... heroine of Offenbach's comic opera (opera bouffe) of that name. She was originally a street-singer of Lima, the capital of Peru, but became the mistress of the viceroy. She was not a native of Lima and offended the Creole ladies by calling them, in her bad Spanish, pericholas, "flaunting, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... and passes through many phases when it bears an old figure to the grave. The last phase of a world historical figure is its comedy. The gods of Greece, once tragically wounded to death in the chained Prometheus of AEschylus, were fated to die a comic death in Lucian's dialogues. Why does history take this course? In order that mankind may break away in a jolly ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... interviews, that they have been very few, and far between, indeed. Today, there has been a fracas of some kind. I have no doubt that Marston, poor devil, is jealous. His situation is really pitiably comic—with an intriguing mistress, a saintly wife, and a devil of a jealous temper of his own. I shall meet Mary on reaching town. Has Clavering (shabby dog!) paid his I.O.U. yet? Tell the little opera woman she had better ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... pointed out, "that every comic opera had one act on a tropical island. Then some fellow discovered Holland, and now all comic operas run to blonde girls in patched breeches and wooden shoes, and the back drops are 'Rotterdam, Amsterdam, any damn place at all.' But this town combines both the ancient and modern schools. Its ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... of Aheer. The Aheer comedian then caricatured all the Touaricks together, by shaking his hands and body as if a tremor was passing through his limbs; he then fell at full length on the floor, as if dead. In this way the comic camel-driver ridiculed the poverty and pusillanimity of Ghat Touaricks. He convulsed all the Moors and Arabs with laughter. In fact, he hit off the objects of his satire as well as some of our best comedians. And from what I can learn in town, it would ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... in over the feet to add to the illusion. There used to be a saying that cross-eyed people could not be honest. Similarly, perhaps, Newman thought the appearance of bow-legs would increase the villainy of his pirate. Certainly, no such blood-curdling ruffian has been seen out of comic opera. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... nibble at experience, old Time's fruit, hateful to the palate of youth! for which season only hath it any nourishment! Experience! You know Coleridge's capital simile?—Mournful you call it? Well! all wisdom is mournful. 'Tis therefore, coz, that the wise do love the Comic Muse. Their own high food would kill them. You shall find great poets, rare philosophers, night after night on the broad grin before a row of yellow lights and mouthing masks. Why? Because all's dark at home. The stage is the pastime of great minds. That's how it comes that the stage is ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... work is, of course, evident to the most unpracticed eye; and in no way can one get a better idea of the brute's power than by watching it busily working for its breakfast, shattering big logs and upsetting boulders by sheer strength. There is always a touch of the comic, as well as a touch of the strong and terrible, in a bear's look and actions. It will tug and pull, now with one paw, now with two, now on all fours, now on its hind legs, in the effort to turn over a large log or stone; and when it succeeds it jumps round to thrust ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... I have a great esteem for Plautus; And think your boys may gather there-hence More wit and humour than from Terence; But as to comic Aristophanes, The rogue too vicious and too profane is. I went in vain to look for Eupolis Down in the Strand,[1] just where the New Pole[2] is; For I can tell you one thing, that I can, You will not find it in the Vatican. He and Cratinus used, as Horace says, To take his greatest grandees for ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... to his advantage to compete with the actors in a fashion of his own. He was the inventor of the modern English form of pantomime, with a serious part that he took from Ovid's Metamorphosis or any fabulous history, and a comic addition of the courtship of harlequin and columbine, with surprising tricks and transformations. He introduced the old Italian characters of pantomime under changed conditions, and beginning with 'Harlequin Sorcerer' in 1717, continued to produce these entertainments ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... be hard pushed afore I shot that feller," he said. "Ain't the black bear a comic chap when he tries to be. I declare I hev a real feller feelin' fur him. I couldn't ever feel that way toward a panther. They always look mean an' they always are mean, but I could hobnob right along with a ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... years of pruning. Under the lens his strange personality becomes manifest, and we wonder whether the old Danish zoologist had in mind the slender toe-tips which support him, or in a chuckling mood made him a namesake of C. Quintius Atta. A close-up shows a very comic little being, encased in a prickly, chestnut-colored armor, which should make him fearless in a den of a hundred anteaters. The front view of his head is a bit mephistophelian, for it is drawn upward into two horny spines; ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... disquieting; there is that embarrassing atmosphere about them which suggests nobility in durance vile. As for me, I prefer Kentucky, where every man is a colonel, and you never make a mistake. And these kingdoms!" He indulged in subdued laughter. "They are always like comic operas. I find myself looking around every moment for the merry villagers so happy and so gay (at fifteen dollars the week), the eternal innkeeper and the perennial soubrette his daughter, the low comedian and the self-conscious ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... football with all the desired bullishness. He had hammered ragtime on the piano like the best ordinary man in the University. With his father he rode to hounds hell for leather, and he wrote comic stuff in a Yale magazine which made him admiringly regarded as a sort of junior George Ade. It was only in secret, and then with a sneaking sense of shame, that he allowed his idealistic side to feed on Browning and Ruskin, Maeterlinck ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... him. A door led from the granary into the miller's house, and the miller's daughter happened, of course entirely by chance, to be coming through that way. A very pretty girl she was too, and I never in my life saw anything more intensely comic than the looks of intelligence that passed between her and the young friar when he presented us. It was decidedly contrary to good monastic discipline it is true, and we ought to have been shocked, but it was so intolerably laughable ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... converted into something Christian by an infusion of the tenderest loving-kindness and humanity, remaining still recognizable notwithstanding that all its bitterness was gone, such was the expression of Miss Letty's mouth, It was always half puckered as if in resistance to a comic smile, which showed itself at the windows of the keen gray eyes, however the mouth might be able to keep it within doors. She was neatly dressed in black silk, with a lace collar. Her hands were small ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... demanded of us when we find the simplicity and moral dignity of the Vicar meeting and beating the jeers and taunts of the abandoned wretches in the prison. This is really a remarkable episode. The author was under the obvious temptation to make much comic material out of the situation; while another temptation, towards the goody-goody side, was not far off. But the Vicar undertakes the duty of reclaiming these castaways with a modest patience and earnestness in every way in keeping with ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... never tried it, had forgotten it. Then, turning with an air half comic, but with something of earnestness, he said, naming me by way of start: "You have been holding a sort of autopsy over me ever since I tumbled over at Atlantic City. I exposed myself there too long both in the water and in the sun, but it was ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... husbands, paste diamonds, and figures no better than your own (madam) if they weren't padded. Chorus girls are inseparable from peroxide, Panhards and Pittsburg. All shows walk back to New York on tan oxford and railroad ties. Irreproachable actresses reserve the comic-landlady part for their mothers on Broadway and their step-aunts on the road. Kyrle Bellew's real name is Boyle O'Kelley. The ravings of John McCullough in the phonograph were stolen from the first sale of the Ellen Terry memoirs. Joe ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... I have designedly omitted all special treatment of the lyric metres of Horace and Catullus, as well as of the measures of the comic poets. Our standard editions of these authors all give such thorough consideration to versification that repetition in a ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... it would be baseness in a voluntary soldier; in the Germans it means only that the war is not their own war; that they are fighting as slaves, not as free men. The idea that we could ever live under the rule of these people is merely comic. To do them justice, they do not now entertain the idea, though they have dallied with it in ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... speaking to his secretary, who, if the fact deserve to be recorded, was an abbe named Fleuriel. This personage, who was an extraordinary specimen of impertinence and self-conceit, would have been an admirable study for a comic poet. He had all the dignity belonging to the great secretary of a great Minister, and, with an air of indifference, he told me that the Count was not there; but M. de Blacas was there, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... to withdraw in silence, casting a half sorrowful half comic glance at Roland Graeme, which seemed to say—"You see to what your untimely visit has exposed me," when, suddenly changing her mind, she came forward to the page, and extended her hand as she bid him good evening. ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... story of a planet that could have been another proud and majestic sun with a solar system of its own; it ended up, instead, in the comic ...
— Mars Confidential • Jack Lait
... a few days later up the Putney Hill to have his first interview with Felix Pender, the humorous writer who was the victim of some mysterious malady in his "psychical region" that had obliterated his sense of the comic and threatened to wreck his life and destroy his talent. And his desire to help was probably of equal strength with his desire to know ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... moment Dick Stone had lighted his pipe, and as he gave two or three tremendous puffs he screwed his face into a profoundly serio- comic expression and winked his right ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... executed a picturesque Indian dance, the manager would strongly recommend the people to "Come forward, ladies and gentlemen, the show's just a-going to begin." The performance consisted of a short play, a comic song by "Billy," and a portion of the pantomime, "Jack and the Beanstalk," the whole lasting under half-an-hour. We gave about a score performances a day: it was very hard work, and, what was more, hot weather. I don't want to figure in these pages as a champion ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... acted with a Stage Curate, rather weak and a little comic; obviously such a man could be no match for Sladder. Hippanthigh should be of stronger stuff than that: he is defeated because that particular evil is, as I have said, defeating its enemies at present. Nor could there be any ...
— Plays of Near & Far • Lord Dunsany
... young people roamed the hills together, or took their share in the household duties, and the whole picture seems to breathe forth an air of reality and truth which far removes it from that atmosphere of comic-opera love and passion which seemed to fill the Midi. When the winter came, the hardship of this mountain life commenced; the winds grew too keen, and the young girl soon began to show the effects of the want and misery to which she was exposed. ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... error that it is, it leaped forth, after a long period of travail, full-fledged and panoplied, and on its lips were these words: "What fools these mortals be!" Dame Eddy gets good returns from the sacrilegio-comic tour of her progeny around the country. Intellectual Boston is at her feet, and Boston pays well for ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... rich grain, and gave a very amusing study of the hero's old nurse. Miss JEAN GADELL, that clever specialist in dour unpleasant stage women, made a properly repulsive thing out of the matron of the orphanage. Mr. HYLTON ALLEN scored his points as a comic lover with droll effect. If the distinctly clever children of the home (Judy excepted) had been effectively put on the contraband list I should not have worried. They were unduly noisy (for art, not for life perhaps), and they overdid their parts, being not only rowdy in the absence, and abject ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... exaggerated Roosevelt's traits, and created a false idea about him. This is true. But it is also true that there was a great deal of real and honest fun poked at him throughout his life, and that it added to the public enjoyment of his career. The writers of comic rhymes, the cartoonists, and the writers of political satire had a chance which no other President has ever given them. Many of our Presidents—wise and good men—and many Senators, Governors, Cabinet officers and others, have gone about ...
— Theodore Roosevelt • Edmund Lester Pearson
... about to defend himself it suddenly rushed over him what a comic figure he would make, accusing a girl of abducting him. He closed his mouth and blushed crimson. Big Jack and his pals smiled ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... at this period of his celebrity, the inimitable comic actor, Poitier, in a farce called "Les Danaides" that was making a furor—a burlesque upon a magnificent mythological ballet, produced with extraordinary splendor of decoration, at the Academie Royale de Musique, and of which this travesty ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... was a comic actor of high reputation. Like Tarlton, whom he succeeded "as wel in the fauour of her Maiesty as in the opinion and good thoughts of the generall audience,"[v:1] he usually played the Clown, and was ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... mother died, he never failed in his kindness towards her, and the old dame was wont to express a kind of comic surprise at the womanish demeanour of her son. He caught fish for his living, but a cramped piece of reasoning forced him to the conclusion that it would be wrong for him to shoot any more birds. He said, "The birds was made by God, and God's been ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... red-brick villas which have been termed an Englishman's castle and his home. After all, every new system has its ridiculous side, and strangely enough, it is this ridiculous side which is most apparent at the outset. Only after you have delved below the "comic froth" do you begin to realise that there is a very vital truth hidden beneath. Well, a sense of humour blows away that froth in time, and then—as for example after the Suffragette antics—the real argument behind the capers and the words becomes known. Thus in England all revolutions ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... the solo sung, by way of novelty, behind the Curtain, by TURIDDU,—(what a name! like the commencement of a comic nonsensical chorus! TURIDDU ought to have been in love with Tulla Lieti and have behaved badly to Tralala. "But this is another story.")—the choruses, and most of the concerted pieces are charming; and, above all, the intermezzo, which, were the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... composure increased the old woman's fury, and her lips were just parting to utter a torrent of angry words, when Jason stepped as lightly as a boy between her and the betrothed lovers, cast a delighted glance at his favorites, and bowing with comic dignity to Semestre ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... as good a pattern for orders as I can think on. A little thin flowery border, round, neat, not gaudy, and the Drury Lane Apollo, with the harp at the top. Or shall I have no Apollo,—simply nothing? Or perhaps the Comic Muse? ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... was made for him—by Clara. It had become one of his chief pleasures to give her lunch in the Aquarium, as she called it, and to laugh with her over her vivid and comic impressions of London, and insensibly he had fallen in love with her, not as was his habit theatrically and superficially, but with an old man's passion for youth. It hurt him, plagued him, tortured him, because she never gave him an opening ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... containing humorous articles on the social life of New York. This became so popular that twenty numbers were issued. Having found so much of interest in the life of his native city, Irving next wrote a comic History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, dealing with the early period when the city was ruled by the Dutch. The novel way in which this work was announced would do credit to the most clever advertiser. About six weeks before the book was ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... intelligence to business, they sought no intellectual pleasures. The theatre, which had formerly been very flourishing among them, was now reduced to pantomimes and comic dances. Even the pieces in which women acted were given up; the taste for pretty forms and brilliant toilettes had been lost; the somersaults of clowns and the music of negroes were preferred above them, and what roused enthusiasm was the sight of women upon the stage whose necks were bedizened ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... hem-stitched bands, poured in upon him. He burned with angry blushes when his mother, smiling meaningly, passed them over to him. "Put them away, mother; I don't want them," he would growl out, in a distress that was half comic and half pathetic. He would never taste of the tempting viands which were brought to him. "How you act, Thomas!" his mother would say. She was secretly elated by these feminine libations upon the altar of her son. They did not grate upon her sensibilities, which were not delicate. ...
— Evelina's Garden • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... a colossal threat, a threat which warrants Pope's numerous echoes of Paradise Lost. Harte's Essay, in fact, contains several echoes of the same poem. Though, like most of Pope's, these Miltonic echoes are given a comic turn which indicates a wide gap between the real satanic host and its London auxiliary, there is little doubt that Harte grasped the underlying seriousness of his mentor's ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... amusement to me, because every one knew that under his veil of imperturbability was hidden, not very successfully, a flourishing crop of failings. Whenever his chief failing overpowered him his gravity increased, until he became one of the most indescribably comic people ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... saw Betty. She was standing in front of a booth talking to a group of clowns, comic policemen and ringmasters. She was dressed in the costume of an Egyptian snake charmer, a costume carried out to the smallest detail. Her tawny hair was braided and drawn through brass rings, the effect crowned with a glittering Oriental tiara. Her fair face was stained to a warm olive glow ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... He would take no chances. The party carried along a small cannon. Lieutenant Mayne could not take his cruiser the Plumper higher than Langley; and there the forces were transferred to Tom Wright's stern-wheeler, the Enterprise. But, when they arrived at Hope, the whole affair looked like semi-comic vaudeville. Yale, too, was as quiet as a church prayer-meeting; and Colonel Moody preached a sermon on Sunday to a congregation of forty in the court-house—the first church service ever held on the mainland of ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... who discovered that there were faults in Mozart's operas, Haydn, when appealed to, replied—"All I know is, that Mozart is the greatest composer now existing." When applied to in 1787, to write a comic opera, Haydn thought a new subject, or libretto, would ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... have things cheerful here," Al'mah said almost gaily. "Sometimes I have four or five convalescents in here, and they like a little gaiety. I sing them things from comic operas—Offenbach, Sullivan, and the rest; and if they are very sentimentally inclined I sing them good old-fashioned love-songs full of the musician's tricks. How people adore illusions! I've had here ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... common ancestors of the various dramatic tribes, source and origin of many sorts of plays, the Mysteries, which had contributed to the formation of the tragical, romantic, allegorical, pastoral, and comic drama, were still in existence. Reformation had come, the people had adopted the new belief, but they could not give up the Mysteries. They continued to like Herod, Noah and his wife, and the tumultuous troup of ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... resorted to music to celebrate coffee. Brittany has its own songs in praise of coffee, as have other French provinces. There are many epics, rhapsodies, and cantatas—and even a comic opera by Meilhat, music by Deffes, bearing the title, Le Cafe du Roi, produced at the Theatre Lyrique, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... frequent in the next century—in the unlikely Mrs. Davys (preface, Works, 1725); in Joseph Andrews of course, where the rules of the serious epic and of the heroic romance are to aid the author in copying the ancient but, as it happens, nonexistent comic epic; and in Fielding's preface to his sister's David Simple (1744). Both Richardson and Fielding were attacked on epic grounds.[4] Dr. Johnson's interesting and unfriendly essay on recent prose fiction (Rambler No. 4) adopted ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... Post (Mr. Bryant himself, we have no doubt), writes: "It is esteemed a mark of a vulgar mind, to divert one's self at the expense of a drunken man; yet we allow ourselves to be amused with representations of drunkenness on the stage and in comic narratives. Nobody is ashamed to laugh at Cassio in the play of Othello, when he has put an enemy into his mouth to steal away his brains. The personation which the elder Wallack used to give us some years ago, of Dick Dashall, very drunk, but very gentlemanly, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... as a comic poet, and a minute observer of manners and circumstances, that Chaucer excels. In serious and moral poetry he is frequently languid and diffuse, but he springs like Antaeus from the earth when his subject ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... to inform the inhabitants of Great Britain, Ireland, and the Isle of Dogs, that he has just opened on an entirely new line, an Universal Comic Railroad, and Cosmopolitan Pleasure Van for the transmission of bon mots, puns, witticisms, humorous passengers, and queer figures, to every part of the world. The engines have been constructed on the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... of drama, the worshippers of Shaw, the playgoers who supported the societies of which the Independent Theatre was the first and regarded the Court Theatre for a while as a kind of Mecca, are not always judicious when talking about musical comedy and comic opera, and some of them have been very narrow-minded. They have refused to admit the merit of any comic operas, except those of Gilbert and Sullivan, they have lavished indiscriminating abuse upon almost all others, have looked upon Daly's Theatre and the Gaiety ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... Carriage People (June, 1847, Godey's Lady's Book). One of her chief collections of stories is Pencil Sketches (1833-1837). "Miss Leslie," wrote Edgar Allan Poe, "is celebrated for the homely naturalness of her stories and for the broad satire of her comic style." She was the editor of The Gift one of the best annuals of the time, and in that position perhaps exerted her chief influence on American literature When one has read three or four representative stories by these seven authors one ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... by many lame and halt of her acquaintance. Having bought my boat (I come, in time, to be willing to sell it again for half its cost to me), I require a menial to clean it now and then, and Giovanna first calls me a youthful Gobbo for the work,—a festive hunchback, a bright-hearted whistler of comic opera. Whether this blithe humor is not considered decent, I do not know, but though the Gobbo serves me faithfully, I find him one day replaced by a venerable old man, whom—from his personal resemblance to Time—I ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... to a paper he held in his hand, "and one of these is a comic, a second a trip through the island of Ceylon, showing things just as if a fellow was there on the spot, while the third and last seems to be a series of pictures showing just how a company of players go about when engaged in making ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... this unexpected reply, they looked at one another in comic dismay; but would certainly have gone to No. 5, and taken a look at the modern Sairy, if the woman hadn't called out as they ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... Judge Roane, "he must necessarily have been very rusty; yet I considered him as a good lawyer.... It was as a criminal lawyer that his eloquence had the finest scope.... He was a perfect master of the passions of his auditory, whether in the tragic or the comic line. The tones of his voice, to say nothing of his matter and gesture, were insinuated into the feelings of his hearers, in a manner that baffled all description. It seemed to operate by mere sympathy, and by his tones alone it seemed to me that he could ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... and incapable infant. His doings are watched with interest, to see what new eccentricities he will develop; and shouts of laughter are raised at every fresh tale of some new-chum's inexperienced attempts and failures. Half the stories that circulate in conversation have a new-chum as the comic man of the piece; and if any unheard of undertaking is noised about, "Oh, he's a ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... this play is not known; probably the King was satirized in a comic scene foisted upon an otherwise innocent piece. Mr. Wallace, in The Century Magazine (September, 1910, p. 747), says: "From a document I have found in France the Blackfriars boys now satirized the King's efforts to raise money, made local jokes on the recent discovery ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... century. Excellent, however, as is the idea of the present volume, it has been as judiciously carried out as happily conceived. Mr. Tayler's designs exhibit a refined humour perfectly congenial with his subject, and free from that tendency to caricature which is the prevailing fault of too many of the comic illustrators of the present day; while the pleasant gossiping notes of Mr. Wills furnish an abundance of chatty illustration of the scenes in which Sir Roger is placed, and the localities he visited, and so enable us to realise to ourselves, in every respect, Addison's admirable picture of ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... offence. He thought that the smallest evidence of levity, the least unbending to human instinct, might be seized by those around him as evidence of inconsistency, and might lead the weaker brethren into offence. The incident of the carpenters and the comic song is typical of a condition of mind which now possessed my Father, in which act after act became taboo, not because each was sinful in itself, but because it might lead others ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... character can never be a refined judge; never what the comic poet calls elegans formarum spectator. The excellence and force of a composition must always he imperfectly estimated from its effect on the minds of any, except we know the temper and character of those minds. The most powerful effects of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... crafty face of the official, in its attempt to assume a menacing air, puffed and grew round and purple, while the brows scowled, the eyes rolled, and the effect was very comic. ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... English birth. The chief result of this civility, conjoined with the ferocity of his political statements, was that his English friends invariably spoke of him as "a typical Irishman." They looked upon him as so much comic relief to the more serious things of their own lives, and seemed constantly to expect him to perform some amusing antic, some innately Celtic act of comic folly. At such times, Mr. Quinn felt as if ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... developed by the Ministry of Reconstruction's Sub-Committee on Organisation and Conditions of Domestic Service, that "the attitude adopted by the Press and the Stage is usually an unfortunate one, as servants are frequently represented as comic or flippant characters, and are held up to ridicule," a meeting of our leading dramatists was hastily convened last evening by Lady HEADFORT (who, it will be remembered, is all for calling her maids "Home-birds") ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... he was once the soul of fun and gaiety—used to sing comic songs so capitally. I suppose it is a poor thing for a man to do, but it was very nice, especially at Christmas time. There are so few people who can do anything to help one over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Brian was good at everything—charades, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... following Casaubon,[2] theorizes that the character evolved out of Greek Old Comedy. The Augustans saw a close connection between drama and character-writing. Congreve (Dedication to The Way of the World, 1700) thought that the comic dramatist Menander formed his characters on "the observations of Theophrastus, of whom he was a disciple," and Budgell, who termed Theophrastus the father of modern comedy, believed that if some of Theophrastus's characters "were well worked up, and brought upon the British theatre, ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... Cobler and his Scolding Wife. Little Nancy, or the Punishment of Greediness. The Brother and Sister, or Reward of Benevolence. Little Emma and her Father, a lesson for proud children. The Deserted Boy, or the Cruel Parents. The Comic Adventures of old Dame Trudge & her Parrot. Continuation of ditto. Errors of Youth. Peter Prim's profitable present for good Boys and Girls. Peter Pry's Puppet Show, part 1st. Ditto, part 2d. Pug's Visit to ...
— The Entertaining History of Jobson & Nell • Anonymous
... Frog, Harper & Bros., 1903, p. 64.]—It contains a basic idea which is essentially ludicrous, and the quaint simplicity of its telling is convincing and full of charm. It appeared in print at a time when American humor was chaotic, the public taste unformed. We had a vast appreciation for what was comic, with no great number of opportunities for showing it. We were so ready to laugh that when a real opportunity came along we improved it and kept on laughing and repeating the cause of our merriment, directing the attention of our friends to it. Whether the story of "Jim ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... dollars, borne the charges of the schooner, and paid fancy interest on money; and if things went well with us, we might realise fifteen per cent of the first outlay. We were not merely bankrupt, we were comic bankrupts: a fair butt for jeering in the streets. I hope I bore the blow with a good countenance; indeed, my mind had long been quite made up, and since the day we found the opium I had known the result. But the thought ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... personal deficiencies as an actor on his first visit to Court; he was to come supported by actors of the highest eminence in their generation. Directions were given that the greatest of the tragic actors of the day, Richard Burbage, and the greatest of the comic actors, William Kemp, were to bear the young actor-dramatist company. With neither of these was Shakespeare's histrionic position then or at any time comparable. For years they were leaders of the ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... prestige. And now, so to speak, "Lo, Ben Adhem's name led all the rest." In other words, Percy was the worst of the lot. Whatever indiscretions the rest had committed, at least they had never got the family into the comic columns of the evening papers. Lord Marshmoreton might wear corduroy trousers and refuse to entertain the County at garden parties and go to bed with a book when it was his duty to act as host at ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... her, they would not fit; her individuality passes between epithets. The reading of a sentence of panegyric (commonly a thing of extension) deadened her countenance, if it failed to quicken the corners of her lips; the distended truth in it exhibited the comic shadow on the wall behind. That haunting demon of human eulogy is quashed by the manner she adopted, from instinct and training. Of her it was known to all intimate with her that she could not speak falsely in praise, nor unkindly in depreciation, ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... later, every man of the President's following chose. We shall see presently the relative strength of the three groups into which that following broke and what strange courses sometimes tragic, sometimes comic—two of the three pursued. For the moment our concern is how the division manifested itself among the heads ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... who generally resides at Berlin, has just added a new romance, or rather the beginning of one, to his previous publications. It bears the promising, if not pretentious title, of The German Gil Blas (published at Bremen), and claims to be comic, as a matter of course. As a whole, the book is a failure. Though there are passages here and there which may be read with satisfaction, there is not enough unity and connection between the different parts, and the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... was this obvious truth that Jefferson tore to shreds before the eyes of his compatriots. He persuaded them to accept his vague generalities as a sober statement of philosophic truth, and he aroused a hatred of kingship in America which was comic in expression and disastrous in result. It was due to his influence that plain citizens hymned the glories of "Guillotina, the Tenth Muse," and fell down in worship before a Phrygian cap. It was due to his influence that in 1793 the death of Louis XVI. ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... 1845, however, that he made definite use of this material, and began the sketch for his only comic opera. The first outline was drawn during a sojourn in the Bohemian mountains, when he felt in an unusually light and festive mood. But the work was soon set aside, and was not resumed until 1862, when it was finished in Paris. ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... the risk of seeming an imaginative alarmist I would like to point out the reasons these things disclose for hurrying this war to a decision and doing our utmost to arrange the world's affairs so as to make another war improbable. Already these serio-comic Tanks, weighing something over twenty tons or so, have gone slithering around and sliding over dead and wounded men. That is not an incident for sensitive minds to dwell upon, but it is a mere little child's play anticipation of what the big land ironclads that are bound to come if there ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... of God. The little minister pouring himself out in prayer in a humble room, with awed people around him who knew much more of the world than he, his voice at times thick and again a squeal, and his hands clasped not gracefully, may have been only a comic figure, but we were old- fashioned, and he seemed to make us better men. If I only knew the way, I would draw him as he was, and not fear to make him too mean a man for you to read about. He had not been long in Thrums before he knew that we talked much of his prayers, and that ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... removed by poison in 1561.[222] The last of his sons whom I have to mention, Don Giovanni, married a dissolute woman of low birth called Livia, and disgraced the name of Medici by the unprincely follies of his life. Eleonora de'Medici, third of his daughters, introduces a comic element into these funereal records. She was affianced to Vincenzo Gonzaga, heir of the Duchy of Mantua. But suspicions, arising out of the circumstances of his divorce from a former wife, obliged him to prove his marital capacity before the completion of the contract. This he did ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... that on the dresser shine; Flagons to foam with Flemish beer, Or sparkle with the Rhenish wine, And pilgrim flasks with fleurs-de-lis, And ships upon a rolling sea, And tankards pewter topped, and queer With comic mask and musketeer! Each hospitable chimney smiles A welcome from its painted tiles; The parlor walls, the chamber floors, The stairways and the corridors, The borders of the garden walks, Are beautiful with fadeless flowers, That never ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Some comic films were made, and in a few of these Mr. Sneed and Mr. Towne had to do "stunts" such as falling in the mud and water, or toppling down hills head over heels. But Mr. Pertell was careful to warn them not ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... horse with braced steps, the girl talking soothingly to the frightened animal the while. The naturally docile filly responded to the voice she had heard from earliest colthood and soon let Elizabeth approach close enough to put her hand on the bit. The seriousness of the affair gave way to the comic when the horse began to snatch bits of grass ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... should be poured upon the head (or handle) of the devoted Umbrella, it is hard to say. What is there comic in an Umbrella? Plain, useful, and unpretending, if any of man's inventions ever deserved sincere regard, the Umbrella is, we maintain, that invention. Only a few years back those who carried Umbrellas were held to be legitimate butts. They were old fogies, careful of their ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... at his aunt, and laughed aloud.... The figure of the good old lady in her nightcap and dressing-jacket, with her long face and scared expression, was certainly very comic. All the mystery surrounding him, oppressing him—everything ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... should be compelled, on pain of being instantly garroted, to surrender their valuables, and even their invaluables, to the Property Clerk, Comic Headquarters, PUNCHINELLO Office, who should be held strictly irresponsible and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... saturnine and Machiavellian Italian. He was a son of the Bourbon Charles III. of Spain. His character was that of a jovial, rather stupid farmer, whom a freak of fortune had made a king from infancy. A sort of grotesque comic element runs through his life, and through every picture drawn by persons in actual intercourse with him. The following, from one of Bentinck's despatches of 1814 (when Ferdinand had just heard that Austria had promised to ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... first he ventured on a considerable poetical enterprise, he spoke his thoughts, not in his own name, nor as his contemporaries ten years later did, through the mouth of characters in a tragic or comic drama, but through imaginary rustics, to whom every one else in the world was a rustic, and lived among the sheep-folds, with a background of downs or vales or fields, and the open sky above. His shepherds and goatherds bear ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... part, The gaudy effort of luxuriant art, In all imagination's glitter drest; What from her lips fantastic Montfort caught, And almost moved the thing the poet thought. These scenes, the glory of a comic age, (It decency could blanch each sullied page) Peruse, admire, and give unto the stage; Or thou, or beauteous Woffington, display What Dryden's self, with pleasure, might survey. Even he, before whose visionary eyes, Melantha, robed ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... of those halfpenny weeklies which—with a nerve which is the only creditable thing about them—call themselves comic. He did not see the Bishop until a shadow falling across his paper ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... vindictiveness, and twisted her brows in comic apology for the unfeminine sentiment, as she ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... reading of Miss Hallie Q. Brown was very fine. From grave to gay, from tragic to comic, with a great variation of themes and humors, she seemed to succeed in all, and her renderings were the spice of the night's ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... was complete silence in the room, which was broken in a rather unusual manner. A deep voice, more like a growl, although it had a queer strain of comic good-nature in it, began the proceedings with the remark: "Well now, say, what do you want of ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... cried the judge, laughing. He cocked his head on one side and surveyed Hannibal Wayne Hazard with a glance of comic seriousness. "A small child and in God's name what do you call yourself now? To hear you talk one would think you had dabbled ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... had brought into the world. Three days before her death, he writes in his diary of "her heart beating its funeral march," and diverts his mind from the awful finale by an accurate description of his two children playing a serio-comic game of doctor and patient, in ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... o'clock. He was pale and dejected, stained with dust, and exhausted with hunger and fatigue. A cold supper was ready upon the table, and when his needs were satisfied and his pipe alight he was ready to take that half comic and wholly philosophic view which was natural to him when his affairs were going awry. The sound of carriage wheels caused him to rise and glance out of the window. A brougham and pair of grays, under the glare of a gas-lamp, stood before the ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... resembled that renowned personification, the ridicule was legitimate and unavoidable when the poet had espoused his cause, and espoused it too from the purest motive—a detestation of political and fanatical hypocrisy.[311] Comic satirists, whatever they may allege to the contrary, will always draw largely and most truly from their own circle. After all, it does not appear that Sir Samuel sat for Sir Hudibras; although from ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... drama, passes from the provincial market-place to Bankside, and the rude mechanicals of the trade-guilds yield place to the Lord Chamberlain's players. In the dramas of Shakespeare the popular note is still audible, but only as an undertone, furnishing comic relief to the romantic amours of courtly lovers or the tragic fall of Princes; with Beaumont and Fletcher, and still more with Dryden and the Restoration dramatists, the popular element in the drama passes away, and the triumph of the ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... Mitchell, who stood firmly by the scientific method; but these appear generally to have been overwhelmed by a chorus of churchmen and dissenters, whose mixtures of theology and science, sometimes tragic in their results and sometimes comic, are among the most instructive things in ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... proposals did Charlotte good. But it was not marriage that she wanted. She found it (for a year) happiness enough to be at Haworth, to watch the long comedy of the curates as it unrolled itself before her. She saw most things that summer (her twenty-fifth) with the ironic eyes of the comic spirit, even Branwell. She wrote to Miss Nussey: "A distant relation of mine, one Patrick Boanerges, has set off to seek his fortune in the wild, wandering, knight-errant-like capacity of clerk on the Leeds ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... company of reformers. As for Diderot, he valued the author's laurel so cheaply, as we have seen, that with a gigantic heedlessness and Saturnian weariness of the plaudits or hisses of the audience, while supremely interested in the deeper movements of the tragi-comic drama of the world, he left some of his masterpieces lying unknown in forgotten chests. Again, in the case of the Encyclopaedia, as we have also seen, Turgot as well as less eminent men bargained that their names should not be made public. Wherever ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... host; how they went out to the barn afterwards to look at the stock; what Greeley said to him and what he said to Greeley,—it was a perfect bit of word-sketching, spontaneous, realistic, homely, unpretentious, irresistibly comic because of the quaintness of the dialogue as reported, and because of the mental image which we formed of this large-headed, round-bellied, precocious youth, who at the age of sixteen was able for three consecutive hours to ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... by his name, to remind our readers of his existence—D'Artagnan, we repeat, had absolutely nothing whatever to do, amidst these brilliant butterflies of fashion. After following the king during two whole days at Fontainebleau, and critically observing the various pastoral fancies and heroi-comic transformations of his sovereign, the musketeer felt that he needed something more than this to satisfy the cravings of his nature. At every moment assailed by people asking him, "How do you think this costume suits me, Monsieur d'Artagnan?" ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a troika, with Selifan the coachman as a sort of Russian Sancho Panza, gives Gogol a magnificent opportunity to reveal his genius as a painter of Russian panorama, peopled with characteristic native types commonplace enough but drawn in comic relief. "The comic," explained the author yet at the beginning of his career, "is hidden everywhere, only living in the midst of it we are not conscious of it; but if the artist brings it into his art, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... moved away, overcome by sudden amusement at her own attitude, which she perceived risked being slightly comic. Heroics were, to her thinking, unsuitable articles for home consumption. Yet her purpose held none the less strongly and steadily because excitement lessened. She refastened her tea gown, tied the streaming azure ribbons of it, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... and a part of a red cloak; "Old Nib" in his greasy smock-frock, little Gamaliel in mended leather breeches, and he of the one arm who gave no end of trouble by stealing down to the "Red Lion" to beg of the passengers on the coaches—a limping, shambling, half-serious, half-comic, procession, worthy of a Frith! But what were the Cambs. officials to do? They had no promised land, no house in which to accommodate the immigrants! I think it is doubtful whether they accepted them, and whether that momentous event of ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... general not allowing it oftener, because he believes indulgence in meat to be criminal in the present straitened condition of the country. His ordinary dinner consists of a head of cabbage, boiled in salt water, and a pone of corn bread. In this connection rather a comic story is told. Having invited a number of gentlemen to dine with him, Gen. Lee, in a fit of extravagance, ordered a sumptuous repast of cabbage and middling. The dinner was served: and, behold, a great pile of cabbage and a bit of middling about four inches ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... in that case his comedies might well have been spared, though they must have cost us some regret. Racine, it is said, might have rivalled Moliere in comedy; but he gave up the cultivation of his comic talents to devote himself wholly to the tragic Muse. If, as the French tell us, he in consequence attained to the perfection of tragic composition, this was better than writing comedies as well as Moliere and tragedies ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... are the publications which have attracted most public attention, both here and overseas, and in particular the type of comic known as the 'crime' or 'horror' comic has come in for a great deal of severe criticism. It is true that reading of a mildly bloodthirsty nature directed at the juvenile market is no new thing. The comic books of today, however, ...
— Report of the Juvenile Delinquency Committee • Ronald Macmillan Algie
... read at the present day, is a degree of honour, which, perhaps, not one comic dramatist can wholly boast, except Shakspeare. Exclusive of his, scarcely any of the very best comedies of the best of former bards will now attract an audience: yet the genius of ancient writers was assisted by various tales, for plots, ...
— The Dramatist; or Stop Him Who Can! - A Comedy, in Five Acts • Frederick Reynolds
... her so irresistibly comic that she laughed until she was fairly obliged to seat herself upon the floor and give way to her enjoyment. She then owned that it was for one of the boys that she wanted the little mirror. When her ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... ground that it would be shortened into Frankie, which he disliked. Then other names were suggested, and, after listening to this one and that one, Field finally said: "You can christen her whatever you please, but I shall call her Trotty." "Pinney" was named from the comic opera "Pinafore," which was in vogue at the time he was born; and "Daisy" got his name from the song, popular when he was born: "Oh My! A'int He ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... bow, then ascends her throne and sits down. ZELIMA stands at her right, ADELMA at her left. CALAF, who had bowed when the PRINCESS entered, now stands erect, sunk in admiration of her beauty. TRUFFALDINO, after performing various ceremonies in his comic way, takes the dish with the sealed leaves out of ZELIMA'S hand; he distributes these among the doctors, and then, with various ceremonies and obeisances, withdraws to his place. Music plays until TRUFFALDINO leaves the Divan. Then deep ...
— Turandot, Princess of China - A Chinoiserie in Three Acts • Karl Gustav Vollmoeller
... The Innocent Adultery long kept the stage.[5] On 2 December, 1757, Garrick's version, which omitting the comic relief weakens and considerably shortens the play, was produced at Drury Lane with himself as Biron and Mrs. Cibber as Isabella. The actual name of the tragedy, however, was not changed to Isabella till some years after. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... and Spanish theatres does not consist merely in the bold neglect of the Unities of Place and Time, or in the commixture of comic and tragic elements; that they were unwilling or unable to comply with the rules and with right reason (in the meaning of certain critics these terms are equivalent), may be considered as an evidence of merely negative properties. The ground of the resemblance lies ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... are to see of the tragedy they and their house might be remaining at Ecloo in leisure and perfect hospitality and peace. Only, as they see us pouring in over their threshold a hovering twinkle in their kind eyes shows that they are not blind to the comic aspect of retreats. ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... stood immovable, gazing at one another with a grim, half-angry, half-comic expression, and ere they could speak, three maidens disguised as warriors stood meekly one before each brave, a horse's tail in one hand, and the other trophies in the other. The friends tried their utmost to look angry; but the countenances ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... less fair, tries her slim baby feet, Or a new has lisped, to the pride of us all, Smiling, we cry, "was aught ever so sweet?" Even wee BERTHA, turning her eyes, Searching and slow from one face to another— Wrinkling her brow in a comic surprise, And winking so soberly at her pale mother, For a baby, is wondrously ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... about money matters and altogether much improved. The glitter and colour of these various entertainments reflected themselves upon the surface of that deep flood of meditation, hook-armed wooden-legged pirates, intelligent elephants, ingenious but extremely expensive toys, flickering processions, comic turns, snatches of popular music and George Edmund's way of eating an orange, pictured themselves on his mind confusedly without in any way deflecting its course. Then on the fourth day he roused himself, gave George Edmund ten shillings to get himself a cutlet at the ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... miserable mistake, of Miss Sinnet, faintly returned to him as he swiftly mounted the steps to his porch. Poor old lady. He would make amends for his discourtesy when he was quite himself again. She should some day hear, perhaps, his infinitely tragic, infinitely comic experience from his own lips. He would take her some flowers, some old keepsake of his mother's. What would he not do when the old moods and brains of the stupid Arthur Lawford, whom he had appreciated so little and so superficially, came back ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... Prince making passes in the air, tierce and thrust with his cane at an imaginary foe] I say, dear Prince, tell me the worst—I think I can bear it. [Helene is almost amused by the sight of the semi-comic opera-bouffe prince] ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... Insall's comic spirit, betrayed by his expressions, by the quizzical intonations of his voice, never failed to fill Janet with joy, while it was somehow suggestive, too, of the vast fund of his resource. Mrs. Maturin was right, he could have solved many of her ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the religious purposes which were at the foundation of the Greek drama. It turned upon parodies, in which the adventures of the gods are introduced by way of sport, like the appetite of Hercules, or the cowardice of Bacchus. Then the comic authors entertained spectators by fantastic and gross displays; by the exhibition of buffoons and pantomimes. But the taste of the Athenians was too severe to relish such entertainments, and comedy passed into ridicule of public men and measures, and of the fashions ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... to apply to it what one of the comic writers said of Megalopolitae, in Arcadia, 'The great city is a great desert.'"—"Geography," book ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... come in, afoot, to fight out "round the sixth, and last." There is refreshing novelty in Mr. COPLAND's impersonation of Isaac of York, who might be taken for Shylock's younger brother who has been experimenting on his beard with some curious kind of hair-dye. This comic little Isaac will no doubt grow older during the run of the piece, but on the first night he neither looked nor behaved like Rebecca's aged and venerable sire, nor did Miss MACINTYRE—who, by the way, is charming as Rebecca, and who is so nimble ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... our hero, and who is the idol of the stalls. Mr. O'Malley, our comic man. Mr. Whistler, who does heavy father parts, wig and all. Mr. Jimmy Rolls, who dances on light toes and who prompts when nothing else is doing. The ladies, honey, take their names on trust, you will find ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... second followed it in a few days, and within two months the bereaved mother was stricken with a fatal inflammation of the brain. In the midst of all these misfortunes, Verdi was kept at work by a commission for "Un Giorno di Regno," which was to be a comic opera! Little wonder that the wit oozed out of the occasion, and the performance proved a failure. The despondent Verdi resolved to give up his career altogether, and only by the insistence of the manager, Merelli, was he ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... physical property of every object in the new planet made the dancers bound to a height of thirty feet or more into the air, considerably above the tops of the trees. What followed was irresistibly comic. Four sturdy majos had dragged along with them an old man incapable of resistance, and compelled him, nolens volens, to join in the dance; and as they all kept appearing and disappearing above the bank of foliage, their grotesque attitudes, combined with the pitiable ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... It was beautiful. If Carrie had been in better voice, I don't think professionals could have sung it better. After supper we made them sing it again. I never liked Mr. Stillbrook since the walk that Sunday to the "Cow and Hedge," but I must say he sings comic-songs well. His song: "We don't Want the old men now," made us shriek with laughter, especially the verse referring to Mr. Gladstone; but there was one verse I think he might have omitted, and I said so, but Gowing thought it was ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... would be well, but there are rumours that he intends to prosecute Dr. Mortimer for opening a grave without the consent of the next-of-kin, because he dug up the Neolithic skull in the barrow on Long Down. He helps to keep our lives from being monotonous and gives a little comic relief ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... early to see Allan off Just at the last moment Carrie came down in her pretty white wrapper to bid him good-by. Allan was strapping up his portmanteau in the hall, and shook his head at her in comic disapproval. "Fie, what pale cheeks, Miss Carrie! One would think you had been burning the midnight oil." I wonder if Allan's jesting words approached the truth, for Carrie's face flushed suddenly, ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... no literature is there to be found a piece of writing in any sense comparable to this "Modest Proposal." Written, apparently, in a light and comic vein, it might deceive the casual reader into the belief that Swift had achieved a joke. It has the air of a smiling and indifferent raconteur amusing an after-dinner table. In truth, however, this piece of writing is a terrible indictment made by an advocate ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... poetry may be tragic or comic, I will not scruple to say it may be likewise either in verse or prose: for tho' it wants one particular, which the critic enumerates in the constituent parts of an epic poem, namely, metre; yet, when any kind of writing contains all its ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... getting too big for Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt's room, my education under that preposterous female terminated. Not, however, until Biddy had imparted to me everything she knew, from the little catalogue of prices, to a comic song she had once bought for a half-penny. Although the only coherent part of the latter piece of literature were the ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... black under the eyes as if you had been fighting with a collier. You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Look at me; do all I can I can't get up an interesting pallor like you, and I've fretted enough over those conic sections (comic sections Jim always calls them). Never mind! Wait till I get you ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... but, as it were, a rich shadow fell softly on her companion. It was the first time she had made any such confession. Rachel returned her look as frankly, with an amused smile, and then said, with a comic little toss ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... a voice from behind the boatswain's back. He turned sharply round, but did not discover the speaker. He shook his fist in that direction, however, with a comic ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... Sir, I hear," said the man, touching his cap with a comic expression, which didn't at all tend to enliven the future pupil. "That's the door," he continued, "and you'll have to give him the doctor's note;" and, pointing to a door at the end of the passage, ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... and officers of justice by the suits and contentions of men: nay, even the honour and office of divines are derived from our death and vices. A physician takes no pleasure in the health even of his friends, says the ancient Greek comic writer, nor a soldier in the peace of his country, and so of the rest. And, which is yet worse, let every one but dive into his own bosom, and he will find his private wishes spring and his secret hopes ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... to be supplied, and beneficia deberi), and then by a clause with ut (uti; that is, ut—uterer). Secundum ea, 'next to,' or 'next after this,' according to the etymology of secundum from sequor. [83] In manu fuit, an expression not uncommon in the comic poets; in manu alicujus est, 'it is in a person's power.' [84] 'At a time when the good fortune of the Romans did not render it so desirable to enter into connection with them as their fidelity and trustworthiness.' [85] 'Do not allow me in vain to pray for your assistance.' Me in this sentence ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... but as an authentic record of the manners of the Day; particularly of the state of female society at the present time; which we think has never been so thoroughly examined, and so attractively depicted. It is, in the true sense of the word—a lady's book. Some of the comic personifications would not disgrace the author of ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... of you have been to his church?" he cried. "Not one male bach or one female fach. Go there the next Sabbath, and the black muless will not say to you: 'Welcome you are, persons Capel. But there's glad am I to see you.' A comic sermon you will hear. A sermon got with half-a-crown postal order. Ask Postman. Laugh highly you will and stamp on the floor. Funny is the Parson in the white frock. Ach y fy, why for he doesn't have a coat preacher like Respecteds? Ask me that. From where ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... back farther than Mr. Shakspeare, who, as you will all agree, does not understand the elegant and pathetic as well as the moderns. Has he ever approached Belvidera, or Monimia, or Jane Shore; or can you find in his comic female characters the elegance of Congreve?" and the Templar offered snuff ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the writer, Bartholomew, says that he is sending back some books borrowed from Pancratius, including a Sidonius which he has had on loan for three years. At this point there is a transformation. Sidonius is personified and becomes the centre of a series of semi-comic incidents, which afford an opportunity for introducing various words for the common objects of everyday life; and a glossary explains many of these with precision. There is a long and vivid account of the waking of Sidonius from his three years' slumber. The door ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... news. They go to the dazzling levels of society, to scandal and crime, to sports, pictures, actresses, advice to the lovelorn, highschool notes, women's pages, buyer's pages, cooking receipts, chess, whist, gardening, comic strips, thundering partisanship, not because publishers and editors are interested in everything but news, but because they have to find some way of holding on to that alleged host of passionately interested readers, who are supposed ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... duties of the store were over, Dennis wrote to his mother a warm, bright, filial letter, portraying the scene of the day in its comic light, making all manner of fun of himself, that he might hide the fact that he had suffered. But he did not hide it, as a return letter proved, for it was full of sympathy and indignation that her son should be so treated, but also full of praise for his ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... beat myself into the more enviable position of snare drummer. Then I wanted to travel with a circus, and dangle my legs before admiring thousands over the back seat of a Golden Chariot. In a dearth of comic songs for the banjo and guitar, I had written two or three myself, and the idea took possession of me that I might be a clown, introduced as a character-song-man and the composer of ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... and commercial demand for it, this traction has been increased to nearly twice its length. Villages of less than 1,300 inhabitants have been linked up with double-track lines. For example, Pelm is 2-3/4 miles from Gerolstein, a town principally of comic-opera fame, and yet over this short distance, between the two villages, there are laid down six parallel lines of rail, besides numerous additional sidings.... Few of these lines, it is to be noted, cross the frontier. Three of them, as late as last May (this ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... kept in fine order, and was painted like all the king's miniature fleet—white outside, and bright salmon inside. One glance at his boat's crew showed me that they were all armed—in a flashy melodramatic style, like the Red Indians of a comic opera, each naked native having a brace of revolvers buckled to a broad leather belt around his waist, from which also hung a French navy cutlass in a leather sheath. They were all big, stalwart fellows, though no one of them was as tough a customer to deal with as our Tepi, who eyed them with ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke
... the city so gay, Where he walked through the streets in his comic array; But think of his horror, oh! think of his dread, When, hanging immediately over his head, In the first butcher's shop that he chanced to discover, Were the mortal remains of poor Bobby, his brother, "'Tis sad," sighed our Jack, ...
— Surprising Stories about the Mouse and Her Sons, and the Funny Pigs. - With Laughable Colored Engravings • Unknown
... fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries; we are therefore to ascribe their extravagant mixture of grave admonition with facetious illustration, comic tales which have been occasionally adopted by the most licentious writers, and minute and lively descriptions, to the great simplicity of the times, when the grossest indecency was never concealed under a gentle periphrasis, but everything was called by its name. All this was enforced ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... child, he was a remarkably good actor, both in tragic and comic pieces, and was hardly twelve years old when he began to write verses of singular spirit for one so young. At fourteen, he produced a long Irish poem, which he never permitted anyone but his mother and brother to read. To that brother, Mr. William Le Fanu, Commissioner ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... instant all the comic sensations awakened by my singular cousin's eccentricities vanished, and I was thrilled with awe. I was about to see in the flesh—faded, broken, aged, but still identical—that being who had been the vision and the problem of so many years of ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... descants in a kind of lyric measure on the profligacy of the age, and in this situation is found by Perseverance and Contemplation, who set him at liberty, and advise him to go in search of the delinquents. As soon as he is gone, Freewill appears again, and after relating in a very comic manner some of his rogueries and escapes from justice, is rebuked by the two holy men who, after a long altercation, at length convert him and his libertine companion, Imagination, from their vicious course of life, and then the play ends with a few verses ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... have been more esteemed in England than in France. Many English writers, from Dean Swift to Samuel Butler, the author of "Erewhon," have been inspired by his "Voyage to the Moon," the English equivalent of the original title being, "Comic History of the States and Empires of the Moon and the Sun." This entertaining satire is as fresh as it was on the day it was written: flying machines and gramophones, for instance, are curiously modern. His inimitable inventiveness makes him the most delightful ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... walls of latrines and the other to be cut in glass by a diamond is part of what Johnson would have called the "Hieroglyphic" significance of this collection. In Johnson's plays, there is the odd mixture of vulgarity and sublimity, the comic and the serious, the satirical and the nonsensical. If his dramas bear a resemblance to Jarry's Ubu Roi, so The Merry-Thought resembles the kind of anthology that Jarry might have put together to illustrate the absurd anarchy of the human spirit. Johnson, on the ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... as book-keeper or commis to a draper at Paita, does she not justify the character that I myself gave her, just before dismissing her from St. Sebastian's, of being a 'handy' girl? Mr. Urquiza's instructions were short, easy to be understood, but rather comic; and yet, which is odd, they led to tragic results. There were two debtors of the shop, (many, it is to be hoped, but two meriting his affectionate notice,) with respect to whom he left the most opposite directions. The one was a very ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... more I became convinced that much of the poison infused into the mind of a child begins at a very early age. As soon as a child takes interest in pictures the taste begins to be formed. Give him only common comic or sensational ones, and he will seize them and look no higher. On the other hand, give him finely-wrought sketches and paintings, tell him to be very careful how he handles them, and he will despise the trash of the present day. Place in his hand clear print, and he will never ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... moment after this impulsive entrance, and the governess turned toward Mrs. Foss a face that, benign and enlightened though it was, called up the memory of faces seen in good-humored German comic papers. The expression of her smile said to the company that she was guiltless in the matter of this invasion. Could one use severity toward a little girl who suffered from asthma ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... went on. The hard and ironical expression of the parrot tribe, their green coats, their red caps, their yellow boots, and finally, the hoarse, mocking words which they generally utter, give them a strange and repulsive aspect, half serious, half-comic. There is in their air an indescribable something of the stiffness of diplomats. At times they remind one of buffoons, and they always resemble those absurdly conceited people who, in their desire to appear very ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... it up," she hurriedly said. "You know, it's in her blood. Off she goes! And they make a fuss of her. She mimics everybody, and they laugh at it—they think it's funny to mimic people who can't help themselves—if they are a bit comic. So she goes; and when she does come home Pa's so glad to see a fresh face that he makes a fuss of her, too. And she stuffs him up with all sorts of tales—things that never happened—to keep him quiet. She says it gives him something to think about.... Well, ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... in the Tottenham Court Road; her little person assumed an air of importance; if, after practice, some artiste passed her in the street and gave her a smile, she believed that he was waiting for her; a "comic quartet," the Out-of-Tune Musicals, happening to come out of a bar and blow a kiss to her, were there on her account, she thought—four lovers ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... Buchan says that Smith had no ear for music, but there are few things he seems to have nevertheless enjoyed better than the opera, both serious and comic. He thought the "sprightly airs" of the comic opera, though a more "temperate joy" than "the scenes of the common comedy," were still a "most delicious" one.'[177] "They do not make us laugh so loud, but they make us smile more frequently." ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... Then followed the usual serio-comic scene, during which Dalrymple stood turned away from the open door, asking questions of the sick woman, and listening attentively for her low-spoken answers. To tell the truth, he judged of her condition ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... one of the first men we now have as an author, and he is a very worthy man, too." At another time he said: "As a writer he was of the most distinguished abilities. Whatever he composed he did it better than any other man could, and whether we consider him as a poet, as a comic writer, or as a historian, so far as regards his power of composition he was one of the finest writers of his time, and will ever stand in the foremost class." These words were uttered shortly after Goldsmith's ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... write short stories all of which potray negro characters but no burlesque can also write poems, have a gift for cartooning but have never learned the technicalities of comic drawing, these things will never profit me anything here in Natchez. Would like to know if you could use one or two of my short stories in serial form in your great paper they are very interesting and would furnish good reading matter. By this means I could probably leave here in short and thus ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... ... a look of stupefied incredulity, when he saw all the men drawn up to receive him. From a straggled lock of hair that fell over one eye hung several long hay-wisps. His face looked stupid and moon-fat. He rolled his big, brown eyes in a despairful manner that was unconsciously comic. For he was, instinctively, as I was not, instantly and fully aware of the seriousness of what might come upon us for ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... only on our own continent, but in England. It was in a sense the English who "discovered" Mark Twain; I mean it was they who first clearly recognised him as a man of letters of the foremost rank, at a time when academic Boston still tried to explain him away as a mere comic man of the West. In the same way Artemus Ward is still held in affectionate remembrance in London, and, of the later generation, Mr. Dooley at ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... to have things cheerful here," Al'mah said almost gaily. "Sometimes I have four or five convalescents in here, and they like a little gaiety. I sing them things from comic operas—Offenbach, Sullivan, and the rest; and if they are very sentimentally inclined I sing them good old-fashioned love-songs full of the musician's tricks. How people adore illusions! I've had here an old Natal ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and a dark young man, like a tutor, a recalcitrant house-painter, who sang and acted not amiss. The mother was the genius of the party, so far as genius can be spoken of with regard to such a pack of incompetent humbugs; and her husband could not find words to express his admiration for her comic countryman. "You should see my old woman," said he, and nodded his beery countenance. One night they performed in the stable-yard, with flaring lamps—a wretched exhibition, coldly looked upon by a village audience. Next night, as soon as the lamps were lighted, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... alive!" The woman threw up her hands, staring at Sara with an almost comic expression, halting midway between bewilderment and horror. "If that isn't just the way of them," she went on indignantly, "never mentioning that 'twas to-day you were coming—and no sheets aired to your bed and all! The master, he never so much as named it to me, nor Miss Molly neither. But please ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... was produced at Drury Lane. Oroonoko was created by Verbruggen, Powell acted Aboan, and the beautiful Mrs. Rogers Imoinda. The play has some magnificent passages, and long kept the stage. Southerne had further added an excellent comic underplot, full of humour and the truest vis comica. It is perhaps worth noting that the intrigues of Lucy and Charlotte and the Lackitt menage were dished up as a short slap-bang farce by themselves with, curiously enough, two or three scenes in extenso ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... and, in troth, Judy dear, What I myself meant, doesn'tseem mighty clear; But the truth is, tho' still for the Owld Light a stickler, I was just then too shtarved to be over partic'lar:— And, God knows, between us, a comic'ler pair Of twin Protestants couldn't ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... to him, not by the old man with whom he had exchanged amenities on the previous night, but by a short, thick fellow, who looked exactly like a picture of a loafer from the pages of a comic journal. He eyed Fenn with what might have been meant for an inquiring look. To Fenn ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... for us, so Miriam played on the piano, and sang with me on the guitar half a dozen songs, and then the other commenced. I don't know when I have been more amused. There was an odd, piney-woods dash about him that was exceedingly diverting, and he went through comic, sentimental, and original songs with an air that showed his whole heart was in it. Judging from the number of youth too timid to venture in, who peeped at us from the windows, I should say that young ladies are curiosities just now ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... her exuberant chatter attracted attention. She looked at everything with her mocking eyes and made no effort to conceal her impressions. She chuckled at the dressmakers' shops, and at the picture post-card shops in which sentimental scenes, comic and obscene drawings, the town prostitutes, the imperial family, the Emperor as a sea-dog holding the wheel of the Germania and defying the heavens, were all thrown together higgledy-piggledy. She giggled at a dinner-service decoration with Wagner's cross-grained face, or at a hair dresser's ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... agog to learn the Spanish dances, and I cannot easily forget how, after much coaxing and wheedling on her part, she at length persuaded Don Sanchez to show her a fandango; for, surely, nothing in the world was ever more comic than this stately Don, without any music, and in the middle of the high road, cutting capers, with a countenance as solemn as any person at a burying. No one could be more quick to observe the ludicrous than he, nor more careful to ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... at the Tragic and Comic Theatres, and at length reached the Amphitheatre itself. This edifice is by far the largest in the city, and is better preserved than any. It is built of large blocks of a dark volcanic stone, and constructed in that massive style which the Romans lived, and of which they have ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... thoroughly conventional in nature, is omitted here. In it Gally, following Casaubon,[2] theorizes that the character evolved out of Greek Old Comedy. The Augustans saw a close connection between drama and character-writing. Congreve (Dedication to The Way of the World, 1700) thought that the comic dramatist Menander formed his characters on "the observations of Theophrastus, of whom he was a disciple," and Budgell, who termed Theophrastus the father of modern comedy, believed that if some of Theophrastus's characters "were well worked ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... he played "jacks" with her and cut pictures out of the comic supplements. By the end of the month he was thinner and more "peaked," if anything, than she. Unshaven, unshorn, unpressed was he, but he was too full of joy to give heed to his own ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... both hands at his skinny but very straight neck, a dressing-gown of light silk with violet dots, in which he had enveloped himself like a bonbon in its paper wrapper. The most salient feature in that heroi-comic countenance was a great arched nose shining with cold cream, and a keen, piercing eye, too youthful, too clear for the heavy, wrinkled lid that covered it. All of Jenkins' patients had that ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... opportunity of knowing what true comedy was. It had had farces in abundance, not only of home growth, but imported, and from Italy in particular. When Moliere came before the public with his homogeneous and well-trained company, and his repertory of excellent character-sketches and comic situations, the prevailing sentiment was expressed by a member of the audience which listened to the first production of his Precieuses Ridicules: "Courage, Moliere; this ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... was persuaded to confess the humble little role for which the eminent actors who had consented to be his colleagues had cast him. He was to be the comic boy of a pastry-cook's man, and his distinguished part in the action of the piece was to come in at a certain moment with the pie that had been ordered, and, as he delivered it, he was to remark, "That's a pie as is a pie, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... Ivanitch as he read this article. Afterwards he learned that a daughter had been born to him; two months later he received a notification from his steward that Varvara Pavlovna had asked for the first quarter's allowance. Then worse and worse rumors began to reach him; at last, a tragic-comic story was reported with acclamations in all the papers. His wife played an unenviable part in it. It was the finishing stroke; Varvara Pavlovna had become ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... see blackguards; but these men were something worse. There is a comic side, more or less appreciable, in all blackguardism: here there was nothing but tragedy—mute, weird tragedy. The quiet in the room was horrible. The thin, haggard, long-haired young man, whose sunken ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... the others realised to the untiring and selfless zeal of the Irish mother, a plucky, practical woman, and a noble one if ever such existed on this earth. The way she contrived would fill a book; her economies, so clever they hardly betrayed themselves, would supply a comic annual with material for years, though their comedy involved a pathos of self-denial and sleepless nights that only those similarly placed could have divined. Herself a silent, even inarticulate, woman, she never spoke of them, least of all to her husband, whose mind ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... only falls into a continual watching of him, and the consciousness that he is watched destroys in him all elasticity of spirit, all confidence, all originality. The police shadow of control obscures all independence and systematically accustoms him to dependence. As the tragi-comic story of Peter Schlemihl shows, one cannot lose his own shadow without falling into the saddest fatalities; but the shadow of a constant companion, as in the pedagogical system of the Jesuits, undermines all naturalness. And if one endeavors too strictly to guard against that which is evil and forbidden, ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... are intended for comic interlocutions. In March, 1502—3, Elizabeth of York, consort of Henry VII, made an oblation of six shillings and eightpence to "oure lady of Walsingham" (Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York, edited by Nicolas, p. 3). This offering may not appear very large, but ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... torment was the "trapper-boys," and other youngsters with whom he came into contact. He was a newcomer, and so they hazed him; moreover, he had an inferior job—there seemed to their minds to be something humiliating and comic about the task of tending mules. These urchins came from a score of nations of Southern Europe and Asia; there were flat-faced Tartars and swarthy Greeks and shrewd-eyed little Japanese. They spoke a compromise language, consisting mainly of English curse words and obscenities; ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... Deathshead, and lost no time in securing this acquisition; but on Diggory's arrival, Mr Glowry was horror-struck by the sight of a round ruddy face, and a pair of laughing eyes. Deathshead was always grinning,—not a ghastly smile, but the grin of a comic mask; and disturbed the echoes of the hall with so much unhallowed laughter, that Mr Glowry gave him his discharge. Diggory, however, had staid long enough to make conquests of all the old gentleman's maids, and left him a flourishing colony of young Deathsheads to join chorus ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... malice lurked on Charles's lips. This discomfiture of the truculent Rufus supplied for him the comic element of his entertainment, and came just in the nick of time to prevent its heroics and ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of perception; always they show the play of the seeing eye, the ruling sense of reality which shaped his life; it is this visible actuality that best marks them off from the non-Shaksperean figures around them. And in the wonderful figures of Falstaff and his group we have a roundness of comic reality to which nothing else in modern literature thus far could be compared. But still this, the most remarkable of all, remains comic reality; and, what is more, it is a comic reality of which, as in the rest of ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... a pair of low shoes, Kartaphalos? A pair of 'socks'? [Footnote: a low-heeled shoe worn by comic actors.] You have plenty of cothurns, I see, but the 'sock' has ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... the feet to add to the illusion. There used to be a saying that cross-eyed people could not be honest. Similarly, perhaps, Newman thought the appearance of bow-legs would increase the villainy of his pirate. Certainly, no such blood-curdling ruffian has been seen out of comic opera. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... Doggett, an excellent comic actor, who was for many years joint-manager with Wilkes and Cibber, died in 1721, and bequeathed the Coat and Badge that are rowed for by Thames Watermen every first of August, from ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... me of a picture I saw once in one of the comic papers. An old feller from the backwoods somewheres—good deal like me, he was, and just about as green—was pictured standin' along with his city nephew in the gallery of the Exchange. And the nephew says, 'Uncle,' says he, 'do you realize that a seat down there's wuth seventy-five ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... used to make animals out of heather roots. Wherever he could find four legs, he was pretty sure to find a head and a tail. His beasts were a most comic menagerie, and right fruitful of laughter. But they were not so grotesque and extravagant as Lina and her followers. One of them, for instance, was like a boa constrictor walking on four little stumpy legs near its tail. About the same distance from its head were two little wings, which it was forever ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... with comic fervor. Henry laughed. But Jael only stared, rather stupidly. By-and-by she said she must ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... of the most grimy comic scenes I have ever taken part in—the concoction of a big, written lie, bolstered with evidence, to soothe The Boy's people at Home. I began the rough draft of a letter, the Major throwing in hints here and there while he gathered up all the stuff that The Boy had written and burnt it in ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... expected; but I confess I was a little shocked when Hamlet's mother became Pantaloon, and was instantly knocked down by Clown Claudius. Grimaldi is getting a little old now, but for real humour there are few clowns like him. Mr Shuter, as the gravedigger, was chaste and comic, as he always is, and the ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... said Rosa, deliberately tearing the bold "geant" to pieces down to the bare stem, "unless he meant to be comic, and intimate that the gazer was so rash as to come too near the bush, and ran a ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... invent on Sundays. See with what ardour they rush home of a night! See how they seize a half-holiday, like hungry dogs a bone! They don't want golf, bridge, limericks, novels, illustrated magazines, clubs, whisky, starting-prices, hints about neckties, political meetings, yarns, comic songs, anturic salts, nor the smiles that are situate between a gay corsage and a picture hat. They never wonder, at a loss, what they will do next. Their evenings never drag—are always too short. You may, indeed, catch them at twelve ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... much as usual. It is a strange little world in itself. The comic and the tragic are blended weirdly together, and nature is unimaginably beautiful. I wish you could see this snow. It has an attraction for me, and I am sure it would have for you. I think you understand more about the meaning of beauty than I do. When I see a magnificent landscape, I want ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... the last I see of J. Bayard he was driftin' through the door, gazin' absentminded at the envelope, like he was figurin' on how much he could grab off at the first swipe. I gazes after him thoughtful until the comic side of it ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... of the Gracchi must have been something such a woman!" he said with an indescribable grave comic mien;—"and the other Roman mother that saved Rome and lost her son! Or that lady of Sparta who made the affectionate request to her son about coming home from the battle on his shield! I thought ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... Mrs. Piper, says in amicable conversation with that excellent woman. The coroner is to sit in the first-floor room at the Sol's Arms, where the Harmonic Meetings take place twice a week and where the chair is filled by a gentleman of professional celebrity, faced by Little Swills, the comic vocalist, who hopes (according to the bill in the window) that his friends will rally round him and support first-rate talent. The Sol's Arms does a brisk stroke of business all the morning. Even children so require sustaining under the general excitement ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... vol. ii. p. 69. There is a curious account in the Quarterly Journal of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, July, 1862, p. 165, of a comic playbill, issued for a Kilkenny theatre, in May, 1793. The value of the tickets was to be taken, if required, in candles, bacon, soap, butter, and cheese, and no one was to be admitted into the boxes without shoes and stockings; which leads one to conclude that the form of ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... The good-humour of the poet upon occasion of this parody has been noticed in the Preface. "It's all very well for once," said he afterwards, in comic confidence, at his villa at Petersham, "but don't do it again. I had been almost forgotten when you revived me; and now all the newspapers and reviews ring with this fashionable, trashy author.'" The sand ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... or the domestic ballad; from the strains that enliven the harvest-home and festival, to the love- ditties which the country lass warbles, or the comic song with which the rustic sets the village hostel in a roar. In our collection are several pieces exceedingly scarce, and hitherto to be met with only in broadsides and chap-books of the utmost rarity; in addition to which we have given several others never before in print, and obtained by the ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... concert is a failure. If it were not a failure, Madame Foa would not be so sympathetic. She is more subtle even than Madame Piriac. I shall never be subtle like that. I wish I could be. I wish I was at Moze. I am too Essex for all this. And Winnie here is too comic ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... old Poet)—Ver. 7. He alludes to Luscus Lanuvinus, or Lavinius, a Comic Poet of his time, but considerably his senior. He is mentioned by Terence in all his Prologues except that to the Hecyra, and seems to have made it the business of his life to run down his productions ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... Russia in a troika, with Selifan the coachman as a sort of Russian Sancho Panza, gives Gogol a magnificent opportunity to reveal his genius as a painter of Russian panorama, peopled with characteristic native types commonplace enough but drawn in comic relief. "The comic," explained the author yet at the beginning of his career, "is hidden everywhere, only living in the midst of it we are not conscious of it; but if the artist brings it into his art, on the stage say, we shall roll about with laughter and only wonder we ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... once occur. In these "Traditions" his great creative power is conspicuous; about two hundred different characters are introduced, no one of which reminds the reader of another, while there is abundant diversity of both heroic and comic incident and adventure. A gentleman, after reading the "Traditions," remarked that for invention he scarcely knew Mr Roby's equal. All these characters, it should be stated, are creations: not one is an idealised portrait. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... in the habit of excepting, it sounds as though they were hiccoughing. "Overruled"; "I except"; "Allowed"; "I except"; "Denied"; "I except"; "Granted"; "I except." It becomes a custom as constant as the refrain in a comic opera. ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... Gawler and all, and how happy Mrs. Crump was! She kissed her daughter between all the acts, she nodded to all her friends on the stage, in the slips, or in the real water; she introduced her daughter, Mrs. Captain Walker, to the box-opener; and Melvil Delamere (the first comic), Canterfield (the tyrant), and Jonesini (the celebrated Fontarabian Statuesque), were all on the steps, and shouted for Mrs. Captain Walker's carriage, and waved their hats, and bowed as the little pony-phaeton drove away. Walker, in his ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Lloyd was called the dancing man (practically the Chief's handsome son) of Vailima; he was also, in his character I suppose of overseer, compared to a policeman - Belle had that day been the almoner in a semi-comic distribution of wedding rings and thimbles (bought cheap at an auction) to the whole plantation company, fitting a ring on every man's finger, and a ring and a thimble on both the women's. This was very much in character with her native name TEUILA, ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... something—of any description whatever—asks them in turn, "What is my thought like?" Not having the faintest idea what the thought is they reply at random. One may say, "Like a dog"; another, "Like a saucepan"; a third, "Like a wet day"; a fourth, "Like a comic opera." After collecting all the answers the player announces what the thought was, and then goes along the row again calling upon the players to explain why it is like the thing named by them. The merit of the game lies in these explanations. Thus, perhaps the thing ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... to come to my aunt Rosine's, who was then living at 6 Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin. He was on friendly terms with Rossini, who lived at No. 4 in the same street. He often brought him in, and Rossini made me laugh with his clever stories and comic grimaces. ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... conditions, do, however, make an immense superficial difference between the humour even of Mr. Bret Harte and that of English writers. His fun is derived from the vagaries of huge, rough people, with the comic cruelty of the old Danes, and with the unexpected tenderness of a sentimental time. The characters of the great Texan and Californian drama are like our hackneyed friends, the Vikings, with a touch, if we may use the term, of spooniness. Their humour is often nothing more than a disdainful ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... says that all the labels have been mixed up now. And what are all the Russian enthusiasms worth? The war has wearied us, Bulgaria has wearied us till we can only be ironical about it. Zucchi has wearied us and so has the comic opera. ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... out "round the sixth, and last." There is refreshing novelty in Mr. COPLAND's impersonation of Isaac of York, who might be taken for Shylock's younger brother who has been experimenting on his beard with some curious kind of hair-dye. This comic little Isaac will no doubt grow older during the run of the piece, but on the first night he neither looked nor behaved like Rebecca's aged and venerable sire, nor did Miss MACINTYRE—who, by the way, is charming as Rebecca, and who is so nimble in skipping about the stage when avoiding ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... to show how hard up we are for comic stuff in the Corrugated Trust these days when we can squeeze a laugh out of such a serious-minded party as Hartley. But you know how it is. I expect some of them green-eyed clerks on the tall stools started callin' him that when the ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... de Blacas did not receive me, and I only had the honour of speaking to his secretary, who, if the fact deserve to be recorded, was an abbe named Fleuriel. This personage, who was an extraordinary specimen of impertinence and self-conceit, would have been an admirable study for a comic poet. He had all the dignity belonging to the great secretary of a great Minister, and, with an air of indifference, he told me that the Count was not there; but M. de Blacas was ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... had executed a picturesque Indian dance, the manager would strongly recommend the people to "Come forward, ladies and gentlemen, the show's just a-going to begin." The performance consisted of a short play, a comic song by "Billy," and a portion of the pantomime, "Jack and the Beanstalk," the whole lasting under half-an-hour. We gave about a score performances a day: it was very hard work, and, what was more, hot weather. I don't want to figure in these pages ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... was as lean as her mistress was stout. Her hair was magnificent in quality and quantity, but, alas! was of the unpopular tint called red; not auburn, or copper hued, or the famous Titian color, but a blazing, fiery red, which made it look like a comic wig. Her face was pale and freckled, her eyes black—in strange contrast to her hair, and her mouth large, but garnished with an excellent set ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... triumphs; it is to his delineations, from the moralist's point of view, of vulgarity and vice,—of the "rank life of towns," with all its squalid tragedy and comedy. Here he finds his strongest ground, and possibly, notwithstanding his powers as a comic artist and caricaturist, ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... death of Fionn's father Cumal, are Fionn, his son Oisin, his grandson Oscar, his nephew Diarmaid with his ball-seire, or "beauty-spot," which no woman could resist; Fergus famed for wisdom and eloquence; Caoilte mac Ronan, the swift; Conan, the comic character of the saga; Goll mac Morna, the slayer of Cumal, but later the devoted friend of Fionn, besides a host of less important personages. Their doings, like those of the heroes of saga and epos everywhere, are mainly hunting, fighting, and love-making. They embody much ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... in a roar of laughter at his jokes and the stories he told of the genuine Yankees whom he had seen in New England, and the Johnny Bulls he had encountered in England, and whose peculiarities of voice and expression he imitated perfectly. Then he recited poetry, comic and tragic and descriptive; and was so entertaining and brilliant, and so very courteous and gentlemanly in all he did and said, that Bessie was enraptured and showed it in her speaking face, which Neil knew always told the truth, and when ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... - piethe of comic infant bithnith,' said Sleary. 'There'th a property-houthe, you thee, for Jack to hide in; there'th my Clown with a thauthepan-lid and a thpit, for Jack'th thervant; there'th little Jack himthelf in a thplendid thoot of armour; there'th two comic black thervanth ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... proceeds; always in a tone of comic good-temper, but pointing to a very real grievance and point of dispute; and helping the reader to realise the long friction which went on, and finally resulted in the unanimity with which publishers and editors ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... (ii. 449) gives a tradition of the Prophet, "Whoso is in love, and acteth chastely, and concealeth (his passion) and dieth, dieth a martyr." Sakar is No. 5 Hell for Magi Guebres, Parsis, etc., it is used in the comic Persian curse, "Fi'n-nari wa Sakar al-jadd w'al-pidar"ln Hell and Sakar his grandfather and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... than put us in rising spirits. It convinced the Armenians! That foolish jargon, picked up from comic papers and the penny dreadfuls, convince more firmly than any written proof the products of the mission schools, whose one ambition was to be American themselves, and whose one pathetic peak of humor was the occasional ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... such a labourer worthy of his hire?" replied his employer with enthusiasm, and producing from his pocket the purse which Lysbeth had given Adrian, with a smile of peculiar satisfaction, for really the thing had a comic side, he counted a handsome sum into the hand ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... this oppressive feeling may have weighed upon you in watching this old-fashioned family life on the banks of the Floss, which even sorrow hardly suffices to lift above the level of the tragi-comic. It is a sordid life, you say, this of the Tullivers and Dodsons, irradiated by no sublime principles, no romantic visions, no active, self-renouncing faith; moved by none of those wild, uncontrollable ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... not forbear saying, that she rejoyced in the Tears he had shed for Clarissa. And, Sir, (continued she) 'I am convinced, that those whose Eyes melt not at Scenes of well-wrought Distress, cannot properly be said to laugh, from a liberal and chearful Spirit, at the true Scenes of comic Humour.' ...
— Remarks on Clarissa (1749) • Sarah Fielding
... you a chronic disinclination to take me seriously, Louis. It is really—to an Englishman—almost painful. Is there something inherently comic about me or the ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... dress-suit at the Wallacetown "movies" was comic to the last degree, but the merciless Austin jumped ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... Home," whenever he lectured upon any special subject. In relating a case, he was seen at times to be quite fatigued with the contortions into which he threw his body and limbs; and the stories he would tell of his consultations, with the dialogue between his patient and himself, were theatrical and comic ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... occasion when it would have been boorish in me to refuse to meet them halfway. I even told them an excellent wheeze I had long known, which I thought they might not, have heard. It runs: "Why is Charing Cross? Because the Strand runs into it." I mean to say, this is comic providing one enters wholly into the spirit of it, as there is required a certain nimbleness of mind to get the point, as one might say. In the present instance some needed element was lacking, for they actually drew aloof from me and conversed in low tones among themselves, ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... who nourishes his mighty soul on the blood of his fellow-men, and undertakes to right a private wrong by running amuck against society in another part of the world, is a figure upon which we decline to waste our sympathy. We have no place for him in our scheme of art unless it be in comic opera or in the penny dreadful. Emotionally we have lost touch with him as we have with Byron's Corsair. When he stalks across the serious stage and rages and fumes and wipes his bloody sword, we are inclined to smile or to yawn. As for the villain Franz, with his abysmal depravity, and Amalia, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... beautiful piece (a very Hans Sacks beatified, both in character and style), which we wish there was any possibility of translating.' The reader will be aware that Hans Sachs was the celebrated Minstrel- Cobbler of Nuremberg, who Wrote 208 plays, 1700 comic tales, and between 4000 and 5000 lyric poems. He flourished throughout almost the whole of ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... followed at the next halt and at the next; so that when the Prussians reached the Frenchward end of Vaudere there were twenty-three Prussians and ten Frenchmen in the file. To Fevrier's thinking it was sufficiently comic. There was ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... power and glory of Pericles were at their height that he formed that memorable attachment to Aspasia, a Milesian woman, which furnished a fruitful subject for the attacks of the comic poets. She was the most brilliant and intellectual woman of the age, and her house was the resort of the literary men and philosophers and artists of Athens until the death of Pericles. He formed as close a union with her as the law allowed, and her influence ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... music to celebrate coffee. Brittany has its own songs in praise of coffee, as have other French provinces. There are many epics, rhapsodies, and cantatas—and even a comic opera by Meilhat, music by Deffes, bearing the title, Le Cafe du Roi, produced at the Theatre Lyrique, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... they insisted upon his company. "I am really touched," he wrote afterward to the parents of two of the visiting boys, "at the way in which your children as well as my own treat me as a friend and playmate. It has its comic side. They were all bent upon having me take them; they obviously felt that my presence was needed to give zest to the entertainment. I do not think that one of them saw anything incongruous in the President's getting as bedaubed with ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... worn 'em, Miss Faith—and I can't keep this!" said Sam surveying the cake with a very serio-comic face. ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... book—that which Mr. Merrick calls "The Tragedy of a Comic Song"—is in my view the funniest story of this century: but I don't ask or expect the Magazine Enthusiast to share this view or to endorse that judgment. "The Tragedy of a Comic Song" is essentially one ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... The Italian influence remained strikingly visible. Blasius Darxich, Sigismund Menze, Mauro Vetranich, and Stephen Gozze (ob. 1576), are mentioned as the first Dalmatian poets. The latter wrote a comic epic, the Dervishiade, which met with great success. A poem of the same kind is Jegyupka, the Gipsy, by Andreas Giubronavich, printed at Venice 1559. Dominic Zlatarich (ob. 1608) translated Tasso and the Electra of Sophocles, and was himself a ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... sides of a small fire, with only a table between them, the Abbe keeping his eyes constantly fixed on Monsieur St. Gille all the time. Half an hour had passed, during which that gentleman diverted the Abbe with a relation of many comic scenes which he had given occasion to by this talent of his; when, all on a sudden, the Abbe heard himself called by his name and title, in a voice that seemed to come from the roof of a house at a distance. He ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... and made shapely through contact with Latin drama, passes from the provincial market-place to Bankside, and the rude mechanicals of the trade-guilds yield place to the Lord Chamberlain's players. In the dramas of Shakespeare the popular note is still audible, but only as an undertone, furnishing comic relief to the romantic amours of courtly lovers or the tragic fall of Princes; with Beaumont and Fletcher, and still more with Dryden and the Restoration dramatists, the popular element in the drama passes away, ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... came we went to our seats under the whispering, sighing fir trees. It was a beautiful night—clear, windless, frosty. Some one galloped down the road on horseback, lustily singing a comic song. How dared he? We felt that it was an insult to our wretchedness. If Peter were going to—going to—well, if anything happened to Peter, we felt so miserably sure that the music of life would be stilled for us for ever. How could ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... at woman's use of dress and ornaments as bait for entrapping lovers, and many a squib expressing this theory appeared in the newspapers. These cynical notes no more represented the general opinion of the people than do similar satires in the comic sheets of to-day; but they are interesting at least, as showing a long prevailing weakness among men. The following sarcastic advertisement, for instance, was written by ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... jumped with joy at the phrase. From that moment Cennick was known as "Swaddling John";120 and his name was introduced into comic songs at the music-halls. As he walked through the streets he had now to be guarded by an escort of friendly soldiers; and the mob, ten or fifteen thousand in number, pelted him with dirt, stones and bricks. At one service, says the local diary, "near ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... a subtle seducer of women, who, however, escaped detection by a smooth, conventional bearing. He was interested in such girls as Georgia Timberlake, Irma Ottley, a rosy, aggressive maiden who essayed comic roles, and Stephanie Platow. These, with another girl, Ethel Tuckerman, very emotional and romantic, who could dance charmingly and sing, made up a group of friends which became very close. Presently intimacies sprang up, only in ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... agreed to be the dupes of anything preposterous; and the respect which these mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which details of high life are read, betray the universality of the love of cultivated manners. I know that a comic disparity would be felt, if we should enter the acknowledged 'first circles,' and apply these terrific standards of justice, beauty, and benefit, to the individuals actually found there. Monarchs ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Bishop Clayton and John Mitchell, who stood firmly by the scientific method; but these appear generally to have been overwhelmed by a chorus of churchmen and dissenters, whose mixtures of theology and science, sometimes tragic in their results and sometimes comic, are among the most instructive ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... said Maxwell, "except as it's stupid, and loves anything that makes it laugh. It loves a comic lover, and in the same way it loves a droll ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... face to another along the miserable line of his captives. In a harsh, imperious voice he said something which brought Mansoor, the dragoman, to the front, with bent back and outstretched supplicating palms. To his employers there had always seemed to be something comic in that flapping skirt and short cover-coat above it; but now, under the glare of the mid-day sun, with those faces gathered round them, it appeared rather to add a grotesque horror to the scene. The dragoman salaamed and salaamed like some ungainly automatic doll, and then, as the ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... magnificence of their surroundings. There is a type of butler employed in the comparatively modest homes of small country gentlemen who is practically a man and a brother; who hobnobs with the local tradesmen, sings a good comic song at the village inn, and in times of crisis will even turn to and work the pump when the ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... passed with no other casualty than might seem comic to the inhumane. Yet we looked round on serious faces and—a fact that spoke volumes—Tom was putting up the shutters on the bar. Custom might go elsewhere, Mr. Williams might profit as he pleased, but Tom had had enough ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hilarity when she seemed to carry all before her. Her sisters could not help laughing every time Betty opened her lips, and it was the same during recess. When many girls clustered round her with their gay jokes, they became convulsed with laughter at her comic replies. ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... voice of the lawyer or the orator; but these attractions were occasional and the constant throng that any day might witness was drawn thither by the enticements supplied by the spirit of adventure, the thirst for news and the strain of business life. The comic poet has drawn for us a picture of the shifting crowd and its chief elements, good and bad, honest and dishonest. He has shown us the man who mingles pleasure with his business, lingering under the Basilica in extremely doubtful ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... laughter, and has been rewarded by commendation for his services to morality and condemnation for his buffoonery. The majority of Plautine critics have evinced too serious an attitude of mind in dealing with a comic poet. However portentous and profound his scholarship, no one deficient in a sense of humor should venture to approach a comic poet in a spirit of criticism. For criticism ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... follow—he did up the genteel comedy; he kept on hand a supply of "little jokes" gleaned from Joe Miller, current comic literature, dinner tables, clubs, etc.—"little jokes" of which every point in his discourse continually reminded him, though his hearers could not always perceive the association of ideas. This ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... follows: "I defy you to lay a Hand on me. I am the Stand-By of the Comic Artist and the Star Attraction of the Colored Supplement. When I pull the Step-Ladder from under some Honest Workingman, causing him to break his Leg, or hit a Stout Lady in the Eye with a Brick, please remember that I am bringing Sunshine into thousands of Homes. As ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... the scene—this is the country which the greatest English statesman tells us must be governed as we govern the Antipodes." And he emphasized the last word with a downward sweep of his right hand, which in a commonplace speaker would have been frankly comic, but in this great master of oratory was a ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... council of war. This meant that Scott called Bowers, and perhaps Oates, into our tent after supper was finished in the morning. Somehow these conferences were always rather serio-comic. On this occasion, as was usually the case, the question was ponies. It was decided to wait here one day and rest them, as there was ample food. The main discussion centred round the amount of forage to be taken on from here, ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... about fifteen years of age, with such a development of under-lip and such a want of development elsewhere, that his head looked like a scoop. There was an infinite fund of humor in Billy, an uncontrollable sense of the comic, that would break out in spite of his grave endeavors to put himself under guard. It exhibited itself in his motions and gestures, in the flourish of his hands as he buckled up the pony, in the looseness of his gait, the swing of his head, and the roll of his eyes. His very ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... Marshall, the wife of a Sir Everard Marshall, a comic scientist in perpetual flight from his overwhelming spouse, is one of the sort that finds a new religion every few months and is now in the first fast furious throes of her latest, which is some form of psychomania, whereof the high priest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... nine o'clock. He was pale and dejected, stained with dust, and exhausted with hunger and fatigue. A cold supper was ready upon the table, and when his needs were satisfied and his pipe alight he was ready to take that half comic and wholly philosophic view which was natural to him when his affairs were going awry. The sound of carriage wheels caused him to rise and glance out of the window. A brougham and pair of greys under the glare of a gas-lamp ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... wonder that some, hearing this dread sentence, go half crazy in a frenzied effort to clutch at what remains, run amok, so to say, in their despairing determination to have, if need be, a last "good time" and die. Their efforts are apt to be either distasteful or pathetically comic, and the world is apt to be cynically contemptuous of the "romantic" outbursts of aging people. For myself, I always feel for them a deep and tender sympathy. I know that they have heard that last fearful call to the dining-car of life—and, poor souls, they have ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... expected to crack jokes about the crockery and lighten up the granite ware with persiflage. I was second bookkeeper, and if I failed to show up a balance sheet without something comic about the footings or could find no cause for laughter in an invoice of plows, the other clerks were disappointed. By degrees my fame spread, and I became a local "character." Our town was small enough to ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... the churchyard is crowded, but is by no means distinguished for that artistic character—which it might have received as covering the remains of so great an artist. A small slab, in relief, takes from it, however, the charge of insipidity; it contains a comic mask, an oak branch, pencils and mahl-stick, a book and a scroll, and the palette, marked with the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... with gentlemen. When I was a young fellow I tell you I enjoyed myself. I mixed with fine decent fellows. Everyone of us could do something. One fellow had a good voice, another fellow was a good actor, another could sing a good comic song, another was a good oarsman or a good racket player, another could tell a good story and so on. We kept the ball rolling anyhow and enjoyed ourselves and saw a bit of life and we were none the worse of it either. ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... in the Soudan. A soldier had been nearly hacked in two by a broad-bladed Arab spear. For one instant the man felt no pain. Looking down, he saw that his life-blood was going from him. The stupid bewilderment on his face was so intensely comic that both Dick and Torpenhow, still panting and unstrung from a fight for life, had roared with laughter, in which the man seemed as if he would join, but, as his lips parted in a sheepish grin, the agony of death came upon him, and he pitched grunting at their feet. Dick laughed ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... inexhaustible Paisiello, charmed with her performance of his "Nel cor piu non me sento," and his "Io son Lindoro," will produce some new masterpiece to introduce the debutante. Others insist upon it that her forte is the comic, and that Cimarosa is hard at work at another "Matrimonia Segreto." But in the meanwhile there is a check in the diplomacy somewhere. The Cardinal is observed to be out of humour. He has said publicly,—and the words are portentous,—"The silly girl is as mad as her father; ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... not very explicable on any principles, as a detail not visible without search was sought and verified, and that by a habitual mocker at anything out of the common way. For example, Hone published a comic explanation, correct or not, of the ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... during the process of its withdrawal, and grievously lacerating the bowels. Sometimes an enormous radish was substituted for the mullet. According to an epigram quoted by Vossius from the Anthologia, Alcaeus, the comic writer, died under this ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... of this building, it was by no means destined to revive the earlier prosperity of the tragic and comic drama. Even at the opening of it the signs of degeneracy are apparent. Luckily for us Cicero was in Rome at the time, and in a letter to a friend in the country he congratulates him on being too unwell to come to Rome and see the spoiling of old tragedies by over-display.[511] "The ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... romanticism, all his poetry, all his joy. Its abundance of life bears one along like a fast-flowing river. And it is not without humour, a calm, detached humour, which, as the critic Bolinsky puts it, is not there merely "because Gogol has a tendency to see the comic in everything, but because it ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in the one object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic to those who do not share the philosopher's perception of identity. To him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws. Though ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... closely followed by Henry at the head of his cavalry, and lively skirmishes were of frequent occurrence. In a military point of view none of these affairs were of consequence, but there was one which partook at once of the comic and the pathetic. For it chanced that in a cavalry action of more than common vivacity the Count Chaligny found himself engaged in a hand to hand conflict with a very dashing swordsman, who, after dealing and receiving many severe blows, at last succeeded in disarming the count ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... daytime things there were two very good theatres, at one of which I saw Mr. Barrie's Little Mary given better than in New York (that was easy), and at the other a comic opera, with a bit of comedy or tragedy in a stage-box, not announced in the bills. The audience was otherwise decorous enough to be composed of Welsh Baptist elders and their visiting friends, but in this box there were two young men in evening dress, scuffling ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... of light and amusing incidents; it exhibits the foibles of individuals, the manners of society, and the humorous phases of life. The name tragi-comedy is applied to a drama in which tragic and comic scenes are intermingled. A farce is a short comedy distinguished by its slight thought and ridiculous caricature or extravagance. A melodrama is a drama with a romantic story or plot, and sensational situations and ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... no novelty, and was fortunately regarded by the gallant electors present as a form of comic relief. I adopted my usual plan ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... was a horrid man, and deserved to be done away with," said Daisy. The idea struck them both as so very comic that they began to ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... for Fan's general inquiries produced only provokingly unsatisfactory replies from Tom, who sang the praises of "the beautiful Miss Bailey," and professed to be consumed by a hopeless passion for somebody, in such half-comic, half-tragic terms, that the girls could not decide whether it was "all that boy's mischief," or only a cloak ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... has shewn me one of the most strange, eccentric, and perhaps comic letters, from honest Aby, that I think I ever read. I am glad it is not quite so intelligible to Sir Arthur as it is to me; for I see no good that could result, were he to understand its true sense. The old—! I can find no epithet for him that pleases me—Well then—Honest Aby ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... in virile march, reveals the man himself, his physical glamour, his intoxication that caused him to see in every woman the Venus, and that in the end made him the victim as well as the hero of the sexual life. It is Till Eulenspiegel himself, the scurvy, comic rascal, the eternal dirty little boy with his witty and obscene gestures, who leers out of every measure of the tone-poem named for him, and twirls his fingers at his nose's end at all the decorous and respectable world. Here, for once, orchestral music is really wonderfully rascally ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... evident to the most unpracticed eye; and in no way can one get a better idea of the brute's power than by watching it busily working for its breakfast, shattering big logs and upsetting boulders by sheer strength. There is always a touch of the comic, as well as a touch of the strong and terrible, in a bear's look and actions. It will tug and pull, now with one paw, now with two, now on all fours, now on its hind legs, in the effort to turn over a ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... never been a patient man, and the feelings which that wild girl had awakened in his heart were all too earnest for such trifling. He rose to leave her. Then she gave him a side glance, half comic, half repentant. ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... informed us gravely that "Thunder and Lightning" was just then in such an especially surly state of temper as to render it quite unsafe for me to think of painting him. I looked inquiringly at Mr. Garthwaite, who smiled with an air of comic resignation, and said, "Very well, then, we have nothing for it but to wait till to-morrow. What do you say to a morning's fishing, Mr. Kerby, now that my bull's bad temper has given us ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... sense, with genius fraught, Canst thou to Fashion's tyranny submit, Secure in native, independent wit? Or yield to Sentiment's insipid rule, By Taste, by Fancy, chac'd through Scandal's school? Ah no—be Sheridan's the comic page, Or let me fly with Garrick from the stage. Haste then, my friend, (for let me boast that name,) Haste to the opening path of genuine fame; Or, if thy muse a gentler theme pursue, Ah, 'tis to love and thy Eliza due! For, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... to publish Salmagundi, a magazine containing humorous articles on the social life of New York. This became so popular that twenty numbers were issued. Having found so much of interest in the life of his native city, Irving next wrote a comic History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, dealing with the early period when the city was ruled by the Dutch. The novel way in which this work was announced would do credit to the most clever advertiser. About six weeks before the book ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... much-loved staff, dear to him by many a fond recollection of riot repressed, and evildoer apprehended, and away it went, floating with the tide, far, far astern. His unmitigated horror at this event was comic in the extreme, and the keeper of the king's peace could not have evinced more unsophisticated sorrow than did the late keeper of his conscience at the loss of the Seals, the more especially as the magistrate's clerk refused to permit the boat to go in pursuit of it, not wishing ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... anti-geologist resides,—describes in a recent work, with the enthusiasm of the poet, the noble mountains which rise around it. I know not, however, whether my admiration of the passage was not in some degree dashed by a few comic notions suggestive of an "imaginary conversation," in the style of Landor, between this popular author and his anti-geologic townsman, on the merits of hills in general, and in especial on the claims of those which encircle Comrie ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... plays our hero, and who is the idol of the stalls. Mr. O'Malley, our comic man. Mr. Whistler, who does heavy father parts, wig and all. Mr. Jimmy Rolls, who dances on light toes and who prompts when nothing else is doing. The ladies, honey, take their names on trust, you will find them ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... gazing at one another with a grim, half-angry, half-comic expression, and ere they could speak, three maidens disguised as warriors stood meekly one before each brave, a horse's tail in one hand, and the other trophies in the other. The friends tried their utmost to look angry; but the countenances of the girls were so meek, and yet so malicious, ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... himself, except that little of him which seemed to square with their shallow mechanical taste. The old fairy superstition, the old legends and ballads, the old chronicles of feudal war and chivalry, the earlier moralities and mysteries, and tragi-comic attempts—these were the roots of his poetic tree—they must be the roots of any literary education which can teach us to appreciate him. These fed Shakespeare's youth; why should they not feed our children's? Why indeed? That inborn delight ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... went out to fight,"' hummed the student rather derisively, but he did not proceed further than the first line of the old song. Some of the others laughed, and all smiled at the allusion to the comic battle. ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... presented itself with an aspect which he might have found comic if it had been another's destiny. Mr. Hubbell brought March's removal, softened in the guise of a promotion. The management at New York, it appeared, had acted upon a suggestion of Mr. Hubbell's, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... degradation, But would oblige the crown and nation Next to your wise negotiation. 70 If you pretend, as well you may, Your high degree, your friends will say, The Duke St Aignon made a play. If Gallic wit convince you scarce, His Grace of Bucks has made a farce, And you, whose comic wit is terse all, Can hardly fall below rehearsal. Then finish what you have began; But scribble faster, if you can: For yet no George, to our discerning, 80 Has writ without a ten ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... go to ruin, they may let it; and if the two little birds—there was a cock and hen—didn't bring up twelve of the rummiest little, tiny young uns I ever did see. There they was, all a-sitting in a row along the gun, and it seemed to me so comic for 'em to be there that I bust ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... assumption of the name of Robinson had been misunderstood and severely commented upon by the judge. A sympathetic jury had awarded thumping damages, and for the next six months the family title would be a peg on which music-hall singers and comic journalists would hang their ribald jokes. Lord C—- read the letter, flushed, and dutifully handed it back to his mother. She made pretence to read it as for the first time, and counselled him to accord ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... human exhibit, stripped of all the chimera of romance with which Little Rivers had clothed his personality. If he had not happened to meet her on the pass, the townspeople would have regarded this stranger as an invasion of real life by a character out of a comic opera. She viewed the specimen under a magnifying glass in all angles, turning it around as if it were a bronze ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... the critic touches but the thing whereby he relates this author to his following and to the world. The young man John, Colonel Sprowle with his 'social entertainment,' the Landlady and her daughter, and the Poor Relation, almost make up the sum of the comic personages, and fifty per cent. of the things they say—no more—are good enough to remain after the bloom of their vulgarity has worn off. But that half is excellent, keen, jolly, temperate; and because of that temperance—the most stimulating and fecundating of qualities—the humour of it has ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... loosens our hold on it, is the only pain that is really tragic. That which attaches to particular objects is a will that is broken, but not resigned; it exhibits the struggle and inner contradiction of the will and of life itself; and it is comic, be it never so violent. It is like the pain of the miser at the loss of his hoard. Even though pain of the tragic kind proceeds from a single definite object, it does not remain there; it takes the separate affliction only as a symbol of life ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... and few thanks. He brought Lancelot his breakfast before hunting, described the run to him when he returned, read him to sleep, told him stories of grizzly bear and buffalo-hunts, made him laugh in spite of himself at extempore comic medleys, kept his tables covered with flowers from the conservatory, warmed his chocolate, and even his bed. Nothing came amiss to him, and he to nothing. Lancelot longed at first every hour to be rid of him, and eyed him about the room as a bulldog ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... Christopher Benson and the school which has acquired celebrity by holding the mirror up to its own nature. The wonder was that Mr. Benson did not, following his precedent, write to the papers to say that Mr. Whitten was no gentleman. In the days before the Academy blended the characteristics of a comic paper with those of a journal of dogmatic theology, before it took to disowning its own reviewers, Mr. Whitten was the solid foundation of that paper's staff. He furnished the substance, which was embroidered by the dark grace of the personality ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... The man gaped in comic dismay as Bud pounced on him and pinned him to the ground. Moments later, the two police officers rushed ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... hour my canoe was full to sinking; and I should certainly have sunk with my cargo, had it not been most opportunely taken out by one of the spare boats. All was high glee on shore and on the lake, and the scene was now and then still diversified by comic accidents, causing the more mirth, as there was no possibility ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... and the sight of him put the American into a friendly humor. He was everywhere, the little pantalon rouge, streaming the walks, dotting the cafes with red, and every wee piou-piou under the great big epaulettes of a great big comic opera generalissimo. His huge military coat fitted him awkwardly, and the crimson pompon cocked on his little fighting kepi was more often awry, and he could not by any effort achieve a strut. He was only bon enfant, this unconquered soldier ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... Schroeder's house threatened to hide him from view, he would stop, drop the sample case, wave his hand just once, pick up the sample case and go on, proceeding backward for a step or two until Schroeder's house made good its threat. It was a comic scene in the eyes of the onlooker, perhaps because a chubby Romeo offends the sense of fitness. The neighbors, lurking behind their parlor curtains, had laughed at first. But after a while they learned to look for that little scene, and to take it ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... for a human dogfish like Bat Reeves," he grunted, his heart full of righteous bitterness against a proclaimed enemy, "but as first selectman of this town I don't stand for makin' a comic joke-book out of this cemetery." He climbed over the fence, secured the offending board and split it across his broad toe. Then with the pieces under his arm he trudged on toward the town office, having it in his mind to use the board for kindling ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... "Exceedingly comic," said the Phoenix severely. "I am quite overcome with mirth and merriment. But perhaps—perhaps—I shall let you off lightly if you tell us ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... approval not later than the 10th December the details of their songs and dances. Comedians will also submit their "gags" and comic scenes for blue-pencilling. This is merely a matter of form and the strictest secrecy as to their real intentions will be preserved in order that the principle of "springing it on one another" ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... Bob; but I think it quite as sensible as many of the criticisms of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,—as that one of his, for instance, upon "Measure for Measure," which I never read without a feeling of personal injury. I should like to know if it is writing criticism to write,—"Of this play, the light or comic part is very natural and pleasing; but the grave scenes, if a few passages be excepted, have more labor than elegance." Now, if old Boltcourt had written instead, as he might have done, if the fit had been on him,—"Of this play, the heavy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Bungay, are chaotic enough, but they are of the chaos that precedes cosmic development. The almost insane bombast that marks the whole school has (as has been noticed) the character of the shrieks and gesticulations of healthy childhood, and the insensibility to the really comic which also marks them is of a similar kind. Every one knows how natural it is to childhood to appreciate bad jokes, how seldom a child sees a good one. Marlowe and his crew, too (the comparison has no doubt often been used before), were of the brood of Otus ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... tame ending which actually came about—namely, the High Commissioner's intervention coupled with President Kruger's moderation and wisdom in allowing England to punish her own irregular soldiers. The more one heard of the whole affair, the more it seemed to resemble a scene out of a comic opera. The only people at Johannesburg who had derived any advantage from the confusion were several hitherto unknown military commanders, who had proudly acquired the title of Colonel, and had promptly named a body ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... of the Meeting over the way for a barrack, Aunt Gainor." Now this was idly rumoured, but how could one resist to feed an occasion so comic? ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... this lady? Had she lived in the days of Juvenal, it might have been supposed that he had her in his eye, when he drew, in his sixth satire, the picture of the "greatest of all plagues"—had her existence been cast in the time of the prince of French comic writers, she would undoubtedly have been presumed to be the prototype of the heroine in one of his most exquisite comedies; we need hardly say, therefore, that she is, in the words of Boileau, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... very prosperous and clean comic opera gypsies, Mrs. Nesbit," said Hippy Wingate, who had come up just in time to ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... I must answer that your accusations are at once both true and false. I have been foolish, but it was not in despising the constrictions and falsity of the academic world. I have flouted authority, but it was not the authority of the movingpicture heroes, whose comic errors are perpetuated for generations, like those of Pasteur, or so quietly repudiated their repudiation passes unnoticed, like those of Lister, in order to protect a vested interest. The authority I have flouted, in my arrogance as you call it, is that authority all scientists recognized ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... incidents of this "relief" were pathetic, and some were comic. One day the banker and his staff, which was composed of his wife and their friends, were startled by the apparition in the front office of a group of American plains Indians, Blackfeet and Sioux, all in the most Fenimore Cooperish of full Indian dress, feathers and skins, ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... solo sung, by way of novelty, behind the Curtain, by TURIDDU,—(what a name! like the commencement of a comic nonsensical chorus! TURIDDU ought to have been in love with Tulla Lieti and have behaved badly to Tralala. "But this is another story.")—the choruses, and most of the concerted pieces are charming; and, above all, the intermezzo, which, were the piece ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... He assumed a comic expression. 'Unhappily, not a thief,' he objected. 'This young lady prevented me from appropriating your diamonds. Convey, the wise call it. I wanted to take your jewel-case—and she put me off with a sandwich-tin. I wanted to make an honest penny out of Mrs. Evelegh; and—she confronts me ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... morning I rose early to see Allan off Just at the last moment Carrie came down in her pretty white wrapper to bid him good-by. Allan was strapping up his portmanteau in the hall, and shook his head at her in comic disapproval. "Fie, what pale cheeks, Miss Carrie! One would think you had been burning the midnight oil." I wonder if Allan's jesting words approached the truth, for Carrie's face flushed suddenly, and she did ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... me?" said Ned, swaying himself to and fro as he endeavoured to look steadily in the face of his friend; "fire away, shen. I'm sh' man f'r conv'shash'n, grave or gay, comic—'r—shublime, 's all the shame ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... inebriate roll in all his movements, that lead one mechanically to peer into the darkness of his den with the view of seeing what the Bar fixings are like. It would be a rare freak to treat the huge fellow to a cask of rum and sugar, and then stand by with a comic artist, and take down for PUNCHINELLO the traits of BRUIN the Grizzly on a "bender," and with all his repressed nature brought out by ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... the comic weekly press, not much falls to be said. It may be separated into three divisions. First, Punch (threepence), which for several decades has stood, and still stands, quite alone. It is usual to say that Punch has of late years been steadily losing its reputation, ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... speech- adaptation, and to many ears are a pleasant relief from the fixed jingle of the perfect rhyme; whereas his false ear-rhymes ask to have their slight but indispensable differences obliterated in the reading, and thus they expose their defect, which is of a disagree- able and vulgar or even comic quality. He did not escape full criticism and ample ridicule for such things in his lifetime; and in '83 he wrote: 'Some of my rhymes I regret, but they are past changing, grubs in amber: there are only a few of these; others are unassailable; ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... various voyages she "did not receive him kindly;" but, contrariwise, sometimes received him on the side of "a poker," on the end of "a dirk" or at the muzzle of "pistol." Moreover—and this is dolefully comic—"she repeatedly left this deponent imprisoned in the house for hours under lock and key!" What a situation for a foaming mariner, accustomed to roam the vastness of the majestic, the free, the uncontrollable ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... final quarter of the nineteenth century an American adaptation of a French comic opera, 'La Mascotte', was for two or three seasons very popular. The heroine of its story was believed to have the gift of bringing luck. So it is that Americans now call any animal which has been adopted by a racing crew or by an athletic team (or even ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... Elegiac and Lyric Poets. Prose Writers. Philosophers and Historians. Lyric Poets, Dramatic Poets. Comic Poets. ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... Vere just then that he could hardly have explained, master though he was of explanation of the feelings of man. It seemed to him that all the purity, and the beauty, and the whimsical unselfconsciousness, and the touchingness of youth that is divine, appeared in that little, almost comic action of the girl. He loved her for the action, because she was able to perform it just like that. And something in him, suddenly adored youth in a way that ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... were probably wreathed with golden vines and bunches of grapes made of amethysts, as we know of a Persian tent so adorned, and the whole idea of the erection was evidently fresh from the East.[448] A frieze eight cubits high was composed of niches containing groups of tragic, comic, and Satyric figures "in their natural garb;" and nymphs and golden tripods from Delphi. The tent was separated from the outer peristyle by scarlet hangings, covered with choice skins of wild beasts. Upon these were hung the celebrated Sikyonian pictures, the heritage of the Ptolemaic dynasty, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... mended." Later in 1701 she brought out at Drury Lane her only comedy, Love at a Loss, dedicated in most enthusiastic terms to Lady Piers, to whom "I owe the greatest Blessing of my Fate," the privilege of a share in her friendship. Love at a Loss was made up of the comic scenes introduced into an old tragedy which the author had failed to get acted. This is not a fortunate method of construction, and the town showed no favour to Love at a Loss. The first and only public ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... &c. The good-humour of the poet upon occasion of this parody has been noticed in the Preface. "It's all very well for once," said he afterwards, in comic confidence, at his villa at Petersham, "but don't do it again. I had been almost forgotten when you revived me; and now all the newspapers and reviews ring with this fashionable, trashy author.'" The sand and "filings of glass," mentioned in the ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... turning round, and making a comic threatening gesture with her floury fingers; 'you ought not to have come till we were fixed. Go and sit in your chair ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 'Old Mooney' in him, but it must be driven out of everyone. His concerts, in which he took a leading part, became celebrated in the district, deputations called to beg for another, and once in these words, 'Wull 'ee gie we a concert over our way when the comic young gentleman ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... Miss McQuinch, when her turn came, played worse than before, and the audience, longing for another negro melody, paid little attention to her. Marian sang a religious song, which was received with the respect usually accorded to a dull sermon. The clergyman read a comic essay of his own composition, and Mrs. Fairfax recited an ode to Mazzini. The concertinists played an arrangement of a quartet by Onslow. The working men and women of Wandsworth gaped, and those who sat near the door began ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... been certainly guilty of forgery. But to get up at once and leave his seat because Melmotte had placed himself by his side, did not suit the turn of his mind. He looked round to his neighbour on the right with a half-comic look of misery, and then prepared himself to bear his punishment, whatever ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... little soldiers. Behind them followed a tiny little creature not higher than one's knee, with his mother's wooden shoes on his feet, and wearing a paper cap on his head. The whole band was in high spirits, and sang with a ringing voice a national air, according to the comic version which was in ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... in well doing, and for the last few days Hooker's Bend had switched from its intellectual staple of conversation to consider the comedy of Tump Pack's undoing. The incident held undeniably comic elements. For Tump to start out carrying a forty-four, meaning to blow a rival out of his path, and to wind up hard at work, picking cotton at nothing a day for a man whose offer of three dollars a day he had just refused, certainly held ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... thought drift over the details of her home-coming. Li Ho had been so surprised. His consternation at seeing her had been comic. But he had asked no questions, and had given her breakfast in hospitable haste. In the cottage nothing was altered. It was as if she had been away overnight. And against this changelessness she knew herself changed. She was outside of it now. ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... strengthen them for the return journey. Ron's knowledge of the native dialect was so slight that he fell back upon the more stately phraseology of the early English poets, introducing a strange Scotch term now and again with irresistibly comic effect. ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Gomez was not a whit confused, and merely touched his face with comic gestures, feigning a dumb submission, which made the others laugh. Amalia, seeing the conversation was getting dangerous, ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... which in a year or two leaves them cracked and awful. This widespread lack of voice preservation is the result of a want of public musical training. With all the training in Paris, Dawn would never have been a Dolores or Calve, but with other ability she had sufficient voice to make a success in comic opera or in concerts as second fiddle ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... marrow. Her cooking surprised me. I had warned young Bute that it might be necessary to regard this dinner rather as a joke than as an evening meal, and was prepared myself to extract amusement from it rather than nourishment. My disappointment was agreeable. One can always imagine a comic dinner. ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... the cruel carelessness of childhood, shared the contempt of his father and grandfather for the little peddler. He made fun of him, and treated him as a comic figure; he worried him with stupid teasing, which his uncle bore with his unshakable phlegm. But Jean-Christophe loved him, without quite knowing why. He loved him first of all as a plaything with which he did what he liked. He loved him also because he always gave him something ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... not a child's story, nor a comic view of household life,—as some might think from its title—but a domestic novel, full of the delights of home, of pure thoughts, and gentle virtues. It has also sufficient complications to keep the thread of ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... 'Edinburgh' articles are of a very slight texture, though the reader is rewarded by an occasional turn of characteristic quaintness. The criticism is of the most simple-minded kind; but here and there crops up a comment which is irresistibly comic. Here, for example, is a quaint passage from a ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... question. We felt light-hearted on Saturday, and profoundly satisfied, that we were too intrepid for the enemy. Our patrols kept vainly seeking to provoke a quarrel. At the camps the "Death of Nelson," and "comic" melodies not less doleful, were rendered with much feeling. At the hospital, the wounded were doing well, and one man was quite himself again. They were extremely well tended, and thanks to public solicitude, ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... brass-band selections, comic songs, and variety items, blared out with ceaseless reiteration; and as the men-folk smoked and talked cattle, and the wee baby—a bonnie fair child—toddled about, smiling and contented, the women-folk spoke of their life "out-back," and listening, ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... a part of my own: it is a budget of Venetian nobodies who wished to be somebodies; but paradox is not the only means employed. It is of a serio-comic character, gives genuine portraits in copperplate, and grave lists of works; but satirical accounts. The astrologer Andrew Argoli[185] is there, and his son; both of whom, with some of the others, have place in modern works ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... interesting as studies of manners, and for the pictures they afford of the priesthood of modern Ireland in the pleasantest light. If the stories of Miss Somerville and "Martin Ross" are related to the comic stories of the old novelists of the gentry, those of Canon Sheehan must be associated with the work of the older novelists who wrote more or less in the spirit of the peasantry, that is, with Gerald Griffin, the ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... "The Cornwalliad, an Heroic Comic Poem," was begun in March, 1779, and was continued through several numbers. It described various incidents in the British retreat to New York after the battles ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... annum. He expends it principally in beautifying his delightful summer residence in Mackerelville. It has been his misfortune to pass many years of his life in a lunatic asylum, the unhappy result of organizing plans for American Comic Papers. All is joy and peace with him now, however; he looks hopefully forward to the time when PUNCHINELLO shall have attained to his legitimate rank of the Foremost Journal in the Nation. Meanwhile he lunches ...
— Punchinello Vol. II., No. 30, October 22, 1870 • Various
... glint of the Midas sun. The streets are a crush of jesters and maskers, Jim Crows and clowns, ballet girls and Mephistos, Indians and monkeys; of wild and sudden flashes of music, of glittering pageants and comic ones, of befeathered and belled horses; a dream of colour and melody and fantasy gone wild in an effervescent bubble of beauty that shifts and changes and passes kaleidoscope-like before ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... from Cork is Blarney Castle—a noble ruin, towering above a beautiful little lake, all surrounded by delightful, though neglected grounds—made famous by an old comic song, called ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... places them below the rest of their species. The unconcealed hostility with which they regard us is a marvellous contrast to the natural or purchasable civility or servility which prevails on British steamers. It has its comic side too, and we are content to laugh at it, and at all the other oddities of ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... Leipzig student, and afterwards a friend of Luther, was there. Duke George of Saxony frequently attended the proceedings, and listened attentively. His court jester is said to have appeared with him, and a comic scene is mentioned as having occurred between him and Eck, to the great diversion of the meeting. Frederick the Wise was represented by one of his counsellors, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... gentleman did not say at the time that he would, or would not, attempt such an exploit. Moved by Ellen's serio-comic lamentations over her losses, Gram also insinuated that she knew of places in the house in which she could make a hoard that would be hard for us to find; but the girls declared that they would like to see her try to hide a hoard away ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... a part, go through a part, perform a part; rehearse, spout, gag, rant; "strut and fret one's hour upon a stage"; tread the boards, tread the stage; come out; star it. Adj. dramatic; theatric, theatrical; scenic, histrionic, comic, tragic, buskined[obs3], farcical, tragicomic, melodramatic, operatic; stagy. Adv. on the stage, on the boards; on film; before the floats, before an audience; behind the scenes. Phr. fere totus mundus ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Although strong and deep, it was very sweet and tender in its tones, and eminently suited for pathetic and sentimental songs. Indeed Jarwin's nature was so earnest, that although he had a great deal of quiet humour about him, and could enjoy comic songs very much, he never himself sang anything humorous. Now, it chanced that the Big Chief had a good ear for music, and soon became so fond of the songs which his slave was wont to hum when at work, that he used to make him sit down beside him frequently and sing for hours at a time! Fortunately, ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne
... he was continually supplying himself with better editions of his favorites. In current, playful conversation with friends he quoted right and left, in brief and at length, from the classics, ancient and modern, and from the drama, tragic and comic. In his speeches, on the contrary, he quoted but little, and only when he seemed to run upon a thought already expressed by some one else with singular force and appositeness. He was the best scholar I ever met for his years and active life, and was surpassed by very few, excepting mere ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... to his revenge him who had put out his eyes, took him home, and the punishment he inflicted upon him was sedulous instructions to virtue." Yet this truly comic paper does not probably know that it is comic, any more than the kleptomaniac knows that he steals, or than John Milton knew he was a humorist when he wrote a hymn upon the circumcision, and spent his honeymoon in composing a treatise on divorce. No more again did Goethe ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... little piece of verse intended to be comic, which, on the contrary, is really serious and philosophical, if you understand it. Learn it by heart, and apply it to all kinds and conditions of things, and see if it does not help you ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... Comedy stands in a different position. The tricks played by chance often form a principal part of the comic action.] ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... to make a Rogers' "Italy" for himself, just as he tried to make a "Harry and Lucy" or a "Dictionary of Minerals." On every place they passed he would write verses and prose sketches, to give respectively the romance and the reality or ridicule; for he saw the comic side of it all, keenly; and he would illustrate the series with Turneresque vignettes, drawn with the finest crowquill pen, to imitate the delicate engravings. By this he learnt more drawing in two or ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... exhaustion, that is, stage-playing will be of most use to us where the mind requires help and inspiration to grasp and revel in lofty moral or imaginative conceptions, or where it needs aid and sharpening to appreciate and follow the niceties of repartee, or the delicacies of comic fancy. Secondly, it follows that if this is so with the intellectual few, it must be infinitely more so with the unimaginative many of all ranks. They are not inaccessible to passion and poetry and refinement, but their minds do not go forth, as it were, to seek ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... Lit. Anec. viii. 548, 9, Dr. Barnard is thus described:—'In powers of conversation I never yet knew his equal. He saw infinite variety of characters, and like Shakespeare adopted them all by turns for comic effect. He carried me to London in a hired chaise; we rose from our seat, and put our heads out of the windows, while the postboy removed something under us. He supposed himself in the pillory, and addressed the populace against the government ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... only by a hair's-breadth. But they appeared anxious to make much of James, and in his absence had explained who he was to the remaining visitors, and these beheld him now with an awe which the hero found rather comic. ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... returned to town towards the end of 1840 he thoroughly explored the ballad literature of Seven Dials,[4] and would occasionally sing not a few of these wonderful discoveries with an effect that justified his reputation for comic singing in his childhood. We get a glimpse of his investigations in Out of the Season, where he tells us about that 'wonderful mystery, the music-shop,' with its assortment of polkas with coloured frontispieces, ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... common mind, and, if born in any other epoch, he would probably have done valuable (though never first rate) work; but by glancing (it will be impossible for you to do more than glance) at his illustrations of Balzac's "Contes Drolatiques," you will see further how this "drolatique," or semi-comic mask is, in the truth of it, the mask of a skull, and how the tendency to burlesque jest is both in France and England only an effervescence from the cloaca maxima of the putrid instincts which fasten themselves on national sin, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... there be scenes of distress and scenes of humor, they must either be in a double or single plot. If there be a double plot, there are in fact two. If they be in checkered scenes of serious and comic, you are obliged continually to break both the thread of the story and the continuity of the passion,—if in the same scene, as Mrs. V. seems to recommend, it is needless to observe how absurd the mixture must be, and how little adapted to answer the genuine end of any passion. It is odd to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Immediately following the comic picture, all the lights in the theater were turned on and a gentleman stepped on the stage ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)
... statesmen, and who in consequence, if they unhappily choose or are compelled to take part in politics, are exposed to those strange paroxysms of giddiness, of which the history of Napoleon's marshals supplies so many tragi-comic examples. He may probably have held himself entitled to rank alongside of Caesar as the second chief of the democracy; and the rejection of this claim of his may have sent him over to the camp of his opponents. His ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... darker and more profound were his cogitations, the droller and more whimsical became the apparitions. They buzzed about him thick as flies, flapping at him, flouting him, hooting in his ear, yet with such comic appendages, that what at first was his bane became at length his solace; and he desired no better society than that of his merry phantasmata. We shall presently find in what way this remarkable phenomenon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... to be," Roddy pointed out, "that every comic opera had one act on a tropical island. Then some fellow discovered Holland, and now all comic operas run to blonde girls in patched breeches and wooden shoes, and the back drops are 'Rotterdam, Amsterdam, any damn place at all.' But this town combines both the ancient ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... confided the fact of his college training to her, and he was really thinking just then that he would like to give them a serio-comic song, for which he had been famous with his class. He borrowed the violin of a Kanuck, and, sitting down, strummed upon it banjo-wise. The song was one of those which is partly spoken and acted; he really did it very well; but the Willett and Witherby ladies did not seem to ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... conscious, as she had been since she was a tiny child, of two things—the upturned heels of the servants' boots and the discomfort to her own knees. These two facts had always hindered her religious devotions, and they hindered them now. There had always been to her something irresistibly comic in those upturned heels, the dull flat surfaces of these cheap shoes. In the kitchen-maid's there were the signs of wear; Martha's were new and shining; the house-maid's were smart and probably creaked abominably. The bodies above them sniffed and rustled and sighed. The vacant, stupid faces ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... the bully and braggart is more in evidence in Kentucky and Texas than in other Commonwealths of the Union, except that each is by the space writers made the favorite arena of his exploits and adopted as the scene of the comic stories told at his expense. The son-of-a-gun from Bitter Creek, like the "elegant gentleman" from the Dark and Bloody Ground, represents a certain type to be found more or less developed in each and every State of the Union. He is not always a coward. Driven, as it were, to ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... used to come to my aunt Rosine's, who was then living at 6 Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin. He was on friendly terms with Rossini, who lived at No. 4 in the same street. He often brought him in, and Rossini made me laugh with his clever stories and comic grimaces. ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... sight of him put the American into a friendly humor. He was everywhere, the little pantalon rouge, streaming the walks, dotting the cafes with red, and every wee piou-piou under the great big epaulettes of a great big comic opera generalissimo. His huge military coat fitted him awkwardly, and the crimson pompon cocked on his little fighting kepi was more often awry, and he could not by any effort achieve a strut. He was ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... suggest that psychological analysis with an example so absurd provokes the sense of the comic, but it is not quite that. It is not Heinesque irony, the concealment of an insult, nor Wilde's paradox, the burlesque of a truth. It is merely comic: a humorous facility in the use of words, though not barren as such things are apt to be, but quite common and human. The philosophical rules of ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... least, she had always felt, would never do anything to injure the family prestige. And now, so to speak, "Lo, Ben Adhem's name led all the rest." In other words, Percy was the worst of the lot. Whatever indiscretions the rest had committed, at least they had never got the family into the comic columns of the evening papers. Lord Marshmoreton might wear corduroy trousers and refuse to entertain the County at garden parties and go to bed with a book when it was his duty to act as host at a formal ball; Maud might give her heart to an impossible ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... ready an ear; and, being a man as well as a dyspeptic, it may be that as he poured his grievances into it he was not insensible to its rosy symmetry. At any rate he engaged Lily so long that the sweets were being handed when she caught a phrase on her other side, where Miss Corby, the comic woman of the company, was bantering Jack Stepney on his approaching engagement. Miss Corby's role was jocularity: she always entered the conversation with ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... been clearly proved guilty. Smarting under a sense of shame which was entirely unmerited, every boy sought eagerly for some object on which to vent his indignation; it became necessary, to use the words of the comic opera, that "a victim should be found," and suspicion fell on Kennedy and Jacobs. The result of Diggory's trap seemed to show that the various thefts had been committed at night. It was agreed that the two occupants of the "Main-top" had special opportunity for getting out of the house if so minded; ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... The comic portrait of the overseer was by this time finished, and a short, stout wench burst into a fit of uproarious and unquenchable laughter before any of the rest. It came so naturally, too, from the very ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... figures eight feet high, are said to be under the chissel, one of Thalia, and the other of Melpomene, the comic and the tragic muses; the value one hundred and sixty guineas. Places are reserved for their reception, to augment the beauty of the front, and shew ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... Germany, who generally resides at Berlin, has just added a new romance, or rather the beginning of one, to his previous publications. It bears the promising, if not pretentious title, of The German Gil Blas (published at Bremen), and claims to be comic, as a matter of course. As a whole, the book is a failure. Though there are passages here and there which may be read with satisfaction, there is not enough unity and connection between the different parts, and the humor is ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... Rinkelmann made his living by comic sketches, and all but lost it again by tragic poems. So he was just the man to be chosen king of the fairies, for in Fairyland the ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... Irish spirits would permit. Scotty had just a moment before forcibly rescued him from a row with some idle, poker-playing Tommies, and the wild Irishman felt small gratitude towards his preserver. He rolled about restlessly, pronouncing serio-comic denunciations upon everything in Egypt from Lord Wolseley to the baggage-mules, and informing his inexorable keeper at short intervals, that if something didn't hurry up and happen, glory be, but he'd commit ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... heroic,' said the painter; 'I now and then dabble in the comic, but what I do gives me no pleasure, the comic is so low; there is nothing like the heroic. I am engaged here on a heroic picture,' said he, pointing to the canvas; 'the subject is "Pharaoh dismissing Moses from Egypt," after the last plague—the death of the first-born,—it ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... man who from drink got into debt, and, after having given a paper to a creditor authorizing him to keep the son as a security for his claim, ran away, leaving poor Phil a bond slave. The story involves a great many unexpected incidents, some of which are painful, and some comic. Phil manfully works for a year, cancelling his father's debt, and then escapes. The characters are strongly drawn, and the story is ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... of Art in Great Britain, by Dr. Waagen German Poetry, Comic and Humorous Greyson Letters, the, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Farrar's "Life of Christ." Ashurst smiled. Her anxiety about his beliefs seemed to him comic, but touching. Infectious too, perhaps, for he began to have an itch to justify himself, if not to convert her. And in the evening, when the children and Halliday were mending their shrimping nets, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the miserable fin de siecle church showmen who to draw fashionable audiences did not fear to offer the attraction of cavatinas and waltzes rendered on the cathedral organ by manufacturers of profane music, by ballet mongers and comic opera-wrights. ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... however, that he made definite use of this material, and began the sketch for his only comic opera. The first outline was drawn during a sojourn in the Bohemian mountains, when he felt in an unusually light and festive mood. But the work was soon set aside, and was not resumed until 1862, when it was finished in Paris. The score was then begun, and written almost ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... a comic opera company through the wheat-belt—one way; he had led a burlesque troupe into Arizona and had traded it ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... the theater at Herculaneum, were found two equestrian statues of admirable workmanship, occupying the same place as the great bronze lamps did at Drury Lane. The smallest of the theaters is said to have been comic, tho I should doubt. From both you see, as you sit on the seats, a prospect of the most ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... the Inspirer than the Protector. The religion of the Greeks preserved and dignified the poetry it created; and the bard, "beloved by gods as men," became invested, as well with a sacred character as a popular fame. Beneath that cheerful and familiar mythology, even the comic genius sheltered its license, and found its subjects. Not only do the earliest of the comic dramatists seem to have sought in mythic fables their characters and plots, but, far before the DRAMA itself arose in any of the Grecian ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... came to condemn remained to applaud. The reputation of the composer went on increasing until he became the foremost name of musical Italy, for his fertility of production was remarkable; and he gave the theatres a brilliant succession of comic and serious works. In 1758 he produced at Rome his "Alessandro nell' Indie," whose success surpassed all that had preceded it, and two years later a still finer masterpiece, "La Buona Figluola," written to a text furnished by the poet Goldoni, ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... years he worked and studied, and accomplished great things musically, then the Elector of Bavaria invited him to write a comic opera for the Carnival, which invitation the boy joyfully accepted, and at once set to work on the none too easy task. He was now at home again, and his father and Nannerl listened eagerly to his themes, as bit by bit ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... are used mostly to provide a bass part for the harmony of the wood-wind group, but they are also sometimes employed (especially the bassoon) to depict comic or grotesque effects. ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... Mercier thinks, (Nouveau Paris, iii. 22.) to some Procession de Roi de Bazoche; or say, Procession of King Crispin, with his Dukes of Sutor-mania and royal blazonry of Cordwainery. Except indeed that this is not comic; ah no, it is comico-tragic; with bound Couriers, and a Doom hanging over it; most fantastic, yet most miserably real. Miserablest flebile ludibrium of a Pickleherring Tragedy! It sweeps along there, in most ungorgeous pall, through many streets, in the dusty summer evening; gets itself ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... be so new—though I believe that Mr. Potter himself repudiates the notion that there can be anything new in the drama—that it was almost criminal to slight it. Nothing was made of it. It almost escaped attention. Instead, we got a crew of comic opera Scotchmen singing songs, and an absurd picture of Robert Burns, who was injected pell-mell into the "romance." ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... "Quite comic, isn't it, my dear? What foolish things mothers are, aren't they? Just as fond of ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... our day, was as incongruous a figure as was the American at the Court of King Arthur; he was as unhappily out of the picture as would be Cyrano de Bergerac on the floor of the Board of Trade. Judged, as at the time he was judged, by writers of comic paragraphs, by presidents of railroads, by amateur "statesmen" at Washington, Harden-Hickey was a joke. To the vacant mind of the village idiot, Rip Van Winkle returning to Falling Water also was a joke. The people of our day had not the time to understand ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... smart new dress and hat, with a huge boa of ostrich feathers half covering her thin, bare neck. There was a glint of jewels about her as she moved. The man with the young, weak voice gazed at her admiringly, with a half-pitiful, half-comic air of pride in being seen ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... them keen and alert. As they had been dehumanized by war, so he rehumanized them by natural means. He had a farm, with flowers and vegetables, pigs, poultry, and queer beasts. A tame bear named Flanagan was the comic character of the camp. Colonel Campbell found a thousand qualities of character in this animal, and brought laughter back to gloomy boys by his description of them. He had names for many of his pets—the game-cocks and the mother-hens; and he taught the men to know each ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... Deirdre's death being immediately followed by a cheerful account of the relationships of the chief heroes of the Heroic Period; a still better example of this practice in the old Irish literature is the almost comic relief that is introduced at the most tragic part of the tale of the murder ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... 1740), English actor, "of great glee and much comic vivacity," was the original Clincher in Farquhar's Constant Couple (1699), Boniface in The Beaux' Stratagem (1707), and Sir Francis Courtall in Pavener's Artful Wife (1717). He played at all the London theatres of his time, and in the summer at a booth at Bartholomew Fair. He had three sons, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... I believe, too," he said, with comic relief. "I didn't know but I'd been trying to convert you without knowing it." They both laughed, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... baskets. Then they picked flowers, hunted for wintergreen, and decked the horse and wagon with ferns and wreaths of laurel,—only simple country pleasures, it is true, but they at least had the charm of newness for two of the party. That evening they sang all sorts of songs, from gospel hymns to comic operas, and Blanch showed in so many ways that she admired her new-found friend that ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... fierce eyes glanced from one pale face to another along the miserable line of his captives. In a harsh, imperious voice he said something which brought Mansoor, the dragoman, to the front, with bent back and outstretched, supplicating palms. To his employers there had always seemed to be something comic in that flapping skirt and short cover-coat above it; but now, under the glare of the mid-day sun, with those faces gathered round them, it appeared rather to add a grotesque horror to the scene. The dragoman salaamed ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... must always be a laughable side, even to the grimmest events, the comic element was supplied in this case by our professors of languages, drawing, and so forth, who had not dared to go back into Paris after leaving it on the 28th, on account of the fighting. When they had made up their minds to return on the 29th, we persuaded those of them who wore ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the ...
— Quotations from the Works of Mark Twain • David Widger
... you are but the half of Menander, Lover of diction pure, with the first have a place—and with reason. Would that vigor as well to your gentle writing were added. So your comic force would in equal glory have rivaled Even the Greeks themselves, though now you ignobly are vanquished. Truly I sorrow and grieve that you lack ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... in the Miracle Plays.—While the old drama generally confined itself to religious subjects, the comic element occasionally crept in, made its power felt, and disclosed a new path for future playwrights. In the Play of Noah's Flood, when the time for the flood has come, Noah's wife refuses to enter the ark ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... positively disgustin'. No artist iv our day has succeeded so well in showin' up th' maneness iv th' people he has mugged. We ondershtand that th' atrocious Higbie paid wan hundherd thousan' dollars f'r this comic valentine. It is worth th' money ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... situation did not seem even comic, so ignorant was the world of its humors; yet Minister Adams sailed for England, May 1, 1861, with much the same outfit as Admiral Dupont would have enjoyed if the Government had sent him to attack Port Royal with ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... which drew into this circle all that possessed life and youth, was the wife. Beautiful one could by no means call her, but, enchanted by her natural loveliness, her mind, and her unaffectedness, you forgot this in a few moments. A rare facility in appreciating the comic of every-day life, and a good-humored originality in its representation, always afforded her rich material for conversation. It was as if Nature, in a moment of thoughtlessness, had formed an insipid countenance, but immediately ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... an Indian attack upon the emigrant train, and here "Rosalie" displayed the archest heroism and the pinkest and most distracting self-possession, in marked contrast to the giddy worldling who, having accompanied her apparently for comic purposes best known to himself, cowered abjectly under wagons, and was pulled ignominiously out of straw, until Red Dick swept out of the wings with a chosen band and a burst of revolvers and turned the tide of victory. Attired as a picturesque ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... and Drusus, then Germanicus, and then Agrippina herself. In this descendant of hers the spirit of the great-grandmother finally reappeared, for it had been eclipsed by the fatal and terrible struggle between Tiberius and Agrippina, by the madness of Caligula, and the comic scandals of the first part of the reign of Claudius. All this served to bring back into the state a little of that authoritative vigor which the nobility in the time of its splendor had considered the highest ideal of government. Tacitus says of her ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... conies out in its connection with laughter and the sense of the comic, of which it may be said to constitute the physical basis. While we are not here concerned with laughter and the comic sense,—a subject which has lately attracted considerable attention,—it may be instructive to point out that there is more than an analogy between laughter and the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... studied the gargoyles round the roof, and, in spite of defacements, made out most of them—here a grinning demon with a struggling human being in its clutch—there an odd beast, part human, part pig, clothed in a kind of jacket, playing a harp—dozens of comic, hideous, heterogeneous figures ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... artists with costly stones, such as lapis lazuli and malachite, crystals, blood-stone, jasper, agates and chalcedony, to represent fruit-pieces and magnificent groups of game or of musical instruments; while the pilasters were decorated with masks of the tragic and comic Muses, torches, thyrsi wreathed with ivy and vine, and pan-pipes. These were wrought in silver and gold, and set with costly marbles, and they stood out from the marble background like metal work on a leather shield, or the rich ornamentation ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... charming manner. Dorfling put Schrotter on his right hand, and Wilhelm and Paul on his left; near Schrotter was Barinskoi and a friend of Dorfling's, named Mayboorn. This man was, like Dorfling, a Rhinelander, he combined a successful career as a writer of comic verses with a confirmed pessimism. When he had written one of his merriest couplets, he would stop his work and sigh with Dorfling over the tragedy of life. The papers treated his farces as rubbish, but the public adored ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... theatre are devoured by the Siamese with insatiable appetite, and the popular preference is awarded to those intellectual contests in which the tragic and comic poets compete for the prize. The laughter or the tears of the sympathetic groundlings are accepted as the expression of an infallible criticism, and by their verdict the play is crowned or damned. The common people, such is their passion for the drama, get whole tragedies ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... face, was called up by the remembrance of the admiration which his daughter had evidently called forth. Harry watched the smile, and in his heart called the new partner "lucky," and "cute," and looked at Charlie's discontented face with a comic astonishment that would have excited some grave astonishment to their host, if by any chance he had looked up to see. Though why Charlie should look discontented about it, Harry could not ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... to any known type, and like nothing but ourselves. 'Nearly every Englishman,' says an excellent and by no means unfriendly observer, George Sand, 'nearly every Englishman, however good-looking he may be, has always something singular about him which easily comes to seem comic;—a sort of typical awkwardness (gaucherie typique) in his looks or appearance, which hardly ever wears out.' I say this strangeness is accounted for by the English nature being mixed as we have seen, while the Latin ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... close of the dance and chorus, Chan retired into the tea garden, and drank so many cups of the national beverage, with such comic gestures, that the spectators were almost sorry when the opening of the opposite window drew all eyes in that direction. At the lattice appeared a lovely being; for this potato had been pared, and on the white surface were painted pretty pink cheeks, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... arch-chief died in jail. I see him now, going through the gloomy portals of the Tombs, whither, as a newspaper reporter, I had gone with him, his stubborn head held high as ever. I asked myself more than once, at the time when the vile prison was torn down, whether the comic clamor to have the ugly old gates preserved and set up in Central Park had anything to do with the memory of the "martyred" thief, or whether it was in joyful celebration of the fact that others had escaped. His name is even now one to conjure with in the Sixth ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... better about the American Negro than any other person during the present century. She has given laboriously and minutely wrought pictures of plantation life. She has held up to the gaze of the world portraitures comic and serio-comic, which for the gorgeousness and awfulness of their drapery will perish only with the language in which they ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... Parnassus came over the brow of the hill, and I saw the river in the distance once more. How different all this was from my girlhood visions of romance. That has been characteristic of my life all along—it has been full of homely, workaday happenings, and often rather comic in spite of my best resolves to be highbrow and serious. All the same I was something near to tears as I thought of the tragic wreck at Willdon and the grief-laden hearts that must be mourning. I ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... him. "Do it again," said he, "and let us see who will tire first." He kept her on his knee some time while he and she drank tea. He was now like a buck indeed. All the company were much entertained to find him so easy and pleasant. To me it was highly comic to see the grave philosopher—the Rambler—toying with a Highland beauty! But what could he do? He must have been surly, and weak too, had he not behaved as he did. He would have been laughed at, and not more respected, though ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... invitingly in its crotch; away high up upon its straight and graceful stem, birds of magnificent plumage are flitting from tree to tree, making the grove vocal with their notes; monkeys, mischievous, but not considered dangerous, dance overhead upon the boughs, and with comic antics provoke a smile. With gentle breezes wafting perfumes such as Gouraud never was gladdened with in his most happy ambrosial dreams, and glimpses of the blue sky, seen partially through the waving foliage, ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... you tell him from me that his father is a wretch. Is there a wife? I think someone said there was—well, she probably doesn't know all I know." The old woman pulled down her mouth in comic disapproval. ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... Maison Rustique, and the English Gervase Markkam. Poor Richard's Almanack gives it twice, as "the foot of a master is the best manure" and "the eye of a master will do more work than both his hands." It is perennial in its appeal. The present editor saw it recently in the German comic paper Fliegende Blaetter. But the jest is much older than Cato. It appears in Aeschylus, Persae, 171 and Xenophon employs it in ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... general most truly delightful. I could read the Beggar's Bush from morning to night. How sylvan and sunshiny it is! The Little French Lawyer is excellent. Lawrit is conceived and executed from first to last in genuine comic humour. Monsieur Thomas is also capital. I have no doubt whatever that the first act and the first scene of the second act of the Two Noble Kinsmen are Shakspeare's. Beaumont and Fletcher's plots ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... here. In it Gally, following Casaubon,[2] theorizes that the character evolved out of Greek Old Comedy. The Augustans saw a close connection between drama and character-writing. Congreve (Dedication to The Way of the World, 1700) thought that the comic dramatist Menander formed his characters on "the observations of Theophrastus, of whom he was a disciple," and Budgell, who termed Theophrastus the father of modern comedy, believed that if some of Theophrastus's ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... for everything he chose to say was well said. A familiar story, grave or gay, when clothed with his words, and accentuated by his expressive gestures and the mobility of his countenance, had all the charm of novelty; while a comic anecdote from his lips sparkled with wit, born of his own keen sense of humor. I found in him that most rare combination of a powerful personality united to a ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... seated on his shoulder, was so elated with the gladsome sights and sounds, that she clasped her chubby arms round 'Passon's' neck and kissed him with a fervour that was as fresh and delightful as it was irresistibly comic. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... the mental state of the hundreds of persons who kill themselves every year upon what would seem to be absurdly inadequate provocation—of the man, for example, who commits suicide because his wife declines to get out his clean underclothes, or the woman who takes poison because she has received a comic valentine? In its religious aspect, why is the tendency to suicide greatest among Protestant Christians and least among Mohammedans and Jews? In its racial aspect, why is the suicide rate of Japan eight times that of Portugal, and the rate of American whites eight or ten ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... Deal on the 23rd July, and by slow stages was conducted with every mark of respect to London. His passage through the city was associated with an episode of a decidedly comic character if we are to believe the chronicler. A story is told(1085) that the night before Campeggio entered London, Wolsey sent him twelve mules with (empty) coffers, in order to give a semblance of wealth to the legate ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... too little time for recovery. All her sympathy was for her poor Uncle Sandro who, in the meantime, was sitting in jail! Yet the thought of his situation in some way struck her as ludicrous—almost like comic opera. ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... earlier writers. I certainly cannot give a sufficient reason why the society of Johnson and Reynolds, full of shrewd common sense, enjoying humour, and with a literary social tradition, should not have found other writers capable of holding up the comic mirror. I am upon the verge of a discussion which seems to be endless, the causes of the decay of the British stage. I must give it a wide berth, and only note that, as a fact, Sheridan took to politics, and his mantle fell on no worthy successor. The next craze (for which he was partly responsible) ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... school, by rambling into the country on the festivals of the saints, and now and then by acting plays; notably, that famous one which Rabelais wrote for them in 1531: "The moral comedy of the man who had a dumb wife;" which "joyous patelinage" remains unto this day in the shape of a well-known comic song. That comedy young Rondelet must have seen acted. The son of a druggist, spicer, and grocer—the three trades were then combined—in Montpellier, and born in 1507, he had been destined for the cloister, being a sickly lad. His uncle, one of the ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... white, quantity and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty other {296} contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way. The mind saw how each term belonged to its contrast through a knife-edge moment of transition which it effected, and which, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... population almost entirely native New-Yorkers in moderate circumstances. A village, then, with its shops and school-houses and churches; it is as provincial in its way as the Lonelyville of the comic weeklies. The grocery is the village club, at least for the respectable part of the male population, the men who would not be seen in a corner saloon. There were half a dozen of the regulars now ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... and his story belong more or less to the tragic muse, and this subject is, perhaps, rather more the property of the comic: for great poets are rare, and really it is the smaller genius we have always with us that is likely to suffer most from those 'immunities'; still more the talent that would fain bear the greater name, and most of all the misguided industry which ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... comes in the apprehension of yet another Promethean analogy: have I confounded male and female, and incurred the penalty? Or no— when will resemblances end?—have I, rather, cheated my hearers by serving them up bones wrapped in fat, comic laughter in philosophic solemnity? As for stealing—for Prometheus is the thief's patron too— I defy you there; that is the one fault you cannot find with me: from whom should I have stolen? if any one has dealt before me in such forced unions and hybrids, I have never made ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... contempt, there seems little reason to doubt that closer knowledge of one another will but increase the mutual sympathy and esteem of the Briton and the American. The former will find that Brother Jonathan is not so exuberantly and perpetually starred-and-striped as the comic cartoonist would have us believe; and the American will find that John Bull does not always wear top-boots or invariably wield a whip. Things that from a distance seem preposterous and even revolting will often assume a very different guise when seen in their native environment and judged by their ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Majesty's," was built in 1821; under Mr. Buckstone's management, comedy and farce were chiefly performed. The "Adelphi Theatre," in the Strand, near Southampton Street, was rebuilt in 1858, when it had for a quarter of a century been celebrated for melodramas, and for the attractiveness of its comic actors. The "Lyceum Theatre," or "English Opera House," at the corner of Wellington Street, Strand, was built in 1834 as an English opera-house, but its fortunes were fluctuating, and the performances not of a definite kind. This ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... is a community of citizens; but if the mode of government should alter, and become of another sort, it would seem a necessary consequence that the city is not the same; as we regard the tragic chorus as different from the comic, though it may probably consist of the same performers: thus every other community or composition is said to be different if the species of composition is different; as in music the same hands produce different harmony, as the Doric ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... that peculiar manner of an illuminated comic perception: for the moment he was all falcon; and he surprised himself more than Clara, who was not in the mood to take surprises. It was the sight of her which had animated him to strike his game; he was down ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... his torment was the "trapper-boys," and other youngsters with whom he came into contact. He was a newcomer, and so they hazed him; moreover, he had an inferior job—there seemed to their minds to be something humiliating and comic about the task of tending mules. These urchins came from a score of nations of Southern Europe and Asia; there were flat-faced Tartars and swarthy Greeks and shrewd-eyed little Japanese. They spoke a compromise language, consisting mainly of English curse ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... judges, and been sent on to serve his little time. Adown highways unnumbered he had sawed wood, when necessary; received handouts, worn hand-me-downs; furnished infinite material for the wags of the comic press. Long he had slept under hedges and in ricks, carried his Lares in a bandana kerchief, been forcibly bathed at free lodging-houses in icy winters. Dogs had chased him, and his fellow man: he had been bitten by the one and smitten by the other. Ill-fame and obloquy had followed ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... year 1000 the church is well-nigh shut against the peasant through the difference between his language and hers. By 1100 her services became quite unintelligible. Of the mysteries played at the church-doors, he has retained chiefly the comic side, the ox and the ass, &c. On these he makes Christmas carols, which grow ever more and more burlesque, forming ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... the honour of speaking to his secretary, who, if the fact deserve to be recorded, was an abbe named Fleuriel. This personage, who was an extraordinary specimen of impertinence and self-conceit, would have been an admirable study for a comic poet. He had all the dignity belonging to the great secretary of a great Minister, and, with an air of indifference, he told me that the Count was not there; but M. de Blacas was ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... no monopoly of patriotic enthusiasm and good faith. Englishmen return thanks to Providence for not being born anything but an Englishman, in churches and ale-houses as well as in comic operas. The Frenchman cherishes and proclaims the idea that France is the most civilized modern country and satisfies best the needs of a man of high social intelligence. The Russian, whose political and social estate does not seem enviable to his foreign contemporaries, ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... to his academic contemporaries and friends. He was a tall, burly man, with a strong black head and black eyes under bushy brows, combined with an infantile mouth and chin, long and happily caricatured in all the comic papers. But in his D.C.L. gown he made a very fine appearance; assembled Oxford was proud of him as one of the most successful of her sons; and his progress toward the dais ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "It's rather comic, isn't it?" Mr. Softly Bishop acquiesced. "I wonder why Oswald Morfey has abandoned his famous stock for ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... edge of the mesa, and there below shone the small, scattered lights of the town. The graphophone was playing in the saloon. Its music—some raucous, comic song—insulted ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
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