"Jester" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... last of the tobacco he had brought with him from town; ordinarily, that would have been enough to make a clerk go about banging doors and expressing himself emphatically upon many points; but no, Eleseus only grew the steadier for it firmer and more upright; a man indeed. Even Sivert, the jester, could not put him out of countenance. Today the pair of them were lying out on boulders in the river to drink, and Sivert imprudently offered to get some extra fine moss and dry it for tobacco—"unless you'd rather ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... them, flecked the rocks, and over them fell green uniformed troopers, as grass will cover a bloody field, and the Municipal Guards, swaying up from behind, paid out a sprinkling of blue—a ghastly pousse-cafe, as one grim jester described it afterward. The long massed ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... succeed as a jester, you'll need To consider each person's auricular: What is all right for B would quite scandalise C (For C is so very particular); And D may be dull, and E's very thick skull Is as empty of brains as a ladle; While F is F sharp, and will cry with a carp, ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... Trevethick. He kept them there, and would not have the pond dragged; but would go thither and gloat upon them for half a summer's day. The mansion was full of gay folks—his old town companions invited to visit him, and behold his greatness (as he had often imagined they should be): Tub Ryll was his jester now, and Parson Whymper his "chaplain." They were all playing pool as usual, and he was just about to make an easy hazard, when somebody jogged his elbow. It was the ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... of Godly Queen Esther, printed in 1561, we have a Miracle-Play going still further out of itself. One of the characters is named Hardy-dardy, who, with some qualities of the Vice, foreshadows the Jester, or professional Fool, of the later Drama; wearing motley, and feigning weakness or disorder of intellect, to the end that his wit may run more at large, and strike with the better effect. Hardy-dardy offers himself as a servant to Haman; and after Haman has urged him ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... listening pastures, and the sheep looked up in a contemplative, ancient way like old ladies at a concert with their knitting. Hazel had fastened two foxgloves round her head in a wreath, and as she went their deep and darkly spotted bells shook above her, and she walked, like a jester in a ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... Harris once said of Oscar Wilde: "If England insists on treating her criminals like this, she doesn't deserve to have any." Similarly, if the public insists on bringing its woes to its colyumists, it doesn't deserve to have any colyumists. Then the battered jester turns again to his machine and ticks off something ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... hunted like wild beasts through thickets and glens, who have abated the cruelty of priests, the pride of nobles, the divinity of kings in former times: to whom we owe it, that we no longer wear round our necks the collar of Gurth the swineherd, and of Wamba the jester; that the castles of great lords are no longer the dens of banditti, whence they issue with fire and sword to lay waste the land; that we no longer expire in loathsome dungeons without knowing the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... faces blacked, and the red handkerchief about their brows, that makes the Malietoa uniform, and the boats have been coming in from the windward, some of them 50 strong, with a drum and a bugle on board—the bugle always ill-played—and a sort of jester leaping and capering on the sparred nose of the boat, and the whole crew uttering from time to time a kind of menacing ululation. Friday they marched out to the bush; and yesterday morning we heard that some had returned to their houses for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... represented as meeting at every crossroad or entering the church door side by side. So the most solemn Miracles were scandalized by humorous Interludes, and into the most tragic of Shakespeare's scenes entered the fool and the jester. A Greek playwright might object to brutalizing scenes before a cultured audience, but the crowds who came to an Elizabethan play were of a temper to enjoy a Mohawk scalp dance. They were accustomed to violent scenes and sensations; ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... my days were numbered. I tried the water cure, homoeopathy, allopathy— everything. Some day, I must recount my consultations, on the same Sunday, with Sir James Clarke, Her Majesty's physician, and Dr. Quin, homoeopathist, jester, and, as some ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... willing, quite willing, to undertake the charge of him, to manage, and guide, and make a man of him. And yet, while it was not pure worldliness, much less was it actual love which moved her. It was a kind of habitual affection, as for the "poor thing, but mine own, sir," of the jester. He was but a poor creature, but Phoebe knew she could make something of him, and she had no distaste to the task. When she began to perceive that Reginald, in so many ways Clarence's superior, was at her disposal, a sense of gratification went through Phoebe's mind, and ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... decide the religion of the people. The true religion is but the religion of the prince; the true God is the God whom the prince wishes them to worship; the will of the priests who govern the prince, always becomes the will of God. A jester once said, with reason, that "the true faith is always the one which has on its side 'the prince and ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... set of red under-chin whiskers, which would have been more natural had they been a paler shade of scarlet. Thus disguised, he crept softly down the Opera House Building stairs and ran full into Billy Getz, Riverbank's best example of the spoiled only-son species, and the town's inveterate jester. Mr. Getz put a hand on Mr. ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... a tassel and bells. He wore also a party-coloured waistcoat, huge full breeches of all the colours of the rainbow, hose of yellow, and long shoes with rosettes of vast size. He stood forth a veritable clown or jester ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... the prudence not to appear touched with the sarcasm of a jester, they subject themselves to his power, and the wise man will have his folly anatomised, that is dissected and laid open by the squandring glances or random shots ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... exist. The eugenist will not be compelled to open the door; it will be opened for him. We can afford, therefore, to wait with supreme confidence, because the good sense of the people will not always submit to the tactics of the jester when it needs ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... twenty-five myriads because the man, who was a jester, had been led, though involuntarily, to make a joke upon him. Paulinus had said that he actually resembled a man getting angry, for somehow he was always assuming a fierce expression. [Footnote: None of ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... smiled. "This is a prank of some carnival-mad jester, child," said she. "There is not a word of truth in it. I wish ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... touches. Yet The Condemned in Doubt is a sort of moral epopee, adapted to the stage, possessing real beauty and not without depth. His most celebrated drama, in so far as it has aroused direct or indirect imitations, and owing to the type he was the first to suggest, was The Jester of Seville: that is, Don Juan. All European literatures, utilising Don Juan, became ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... inelegant, and disagreeable bluntness, which would recommend itself by an unshaven face and black teeth; while it desires to be termed pure freedom and true sincerity. Virtue is the medium of the two vices; and equally remote from either. The one is over-prone to complaisance, and a jester of the lowest, couch, he so reverences the rich man's nod, so repeats his speeches, and catches up his falling words; that you would take him for a school-boy saying his lesson to a rigid master, or a player acting an underpart; another often wrangles about a goat's hair, and armed engages for any ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... "Here begynneth the boke of Keruynge;" and beneath them is—as in the second edition of 1513—a picture of two ladies and two gentlemen at dinner, with an attendant bringing a dish, two servants at a side table, and a jester. The colophon tells us that it was "Enprynted by wynkyn de worde at London in Flete strete at the sygne of the sonne. The yere of our lorde M.CCCCC.VIII;" beneath which is Wynkyn de Worde's device, ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... between them, and a long jangling argument ensued, during which Beatrice, although she knew be had so well approved his valor in the late war, said that she would eat all he had killed there; and observing the prince take delight in Benedick's conversation, she called him "the prince's jester." This sarcasm sank deeper into the mind of Benedick than all Beatrice had said before. The hint she gave him that he was a coward, by saying she would eat all he bad killed, he did not regard, knowing himself to be a brave man; but there is nothing ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... and Juvenal, to Socrates and Plato; and Rigault considered all three satirists to be philosophers, distinguished only by the different styles which their different periods required. The satirist might disguise himself as a jester, but only to make his moral wisdom more easily digestible; peeling away his mask, "we find in him all the Gods together," "Maxims or Sentences, that like the lawes of nature, are ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... You are far too hard on the very harmless drolleries of the young men, licensed as they are moreover by immemorial usage. Indeed there used to be a regularly appointed jester, 'Filius Terrae' he was called, whose business it was to jibe and jeer at the honoured ones, by way of reminder that all human glories are merely gilded bubbles and must not be fancied metal. You saw that the Reverend ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... said the Jester; "but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... pelikin! if game is a fah' name fo' him—aw heh, as the case may be; which that bird—nine foot f'm tip to tip, the white ones—use' to be as common on this riveh as cuckle-burrs in a sheep's tail!" The jester laughed, or, more strictly, exhaled his mirth from the roof of a wide-spread mouth in a long hiss that would have been more like an angered alligator's if alligators used fine-cut tobacco. It was addressed to the commodore; for Hugh, his grandfather's ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... against himself. But to the very last there was one stinging jest on the lips of the Spartan,—the very same which the modern slaveholder flings with so great gusto against the unfortunate Yankee,—and that was Athenian cupidity. The ancient and the modern jester are alike condemned on their own indictment, since upon cupidity the most petulant, upon cupidity the most voracious in its greedy demands, rested the whole Spartan polity, as does the system of slaveholding in the South. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... every age and nation, silly thoughts and wise thoughts, thoughts of people, of things, and of nothing, good thoughts, impish thoughts, and large, gracious thoughts. There they went swinging hand-in-hand in corkscrew fashion. An antic jester in green and gold led the dance. The guests followed no order or precedent. No two thoughts were related to each other even by the fortieth cousinship. There was not so much as an international alliance between them. Each thought behaved like a ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... partly in Spanish and partly in English costume. Thus, the huge sleeves were Spanish, but the laced stomacher English. Hobby-horse represented the king and all the knightly order; Maid Marian, the queen; the friar, the clergy generally; the fool, the court jester. The other characters represented a franklin or private gentleman, a churl or farmer, and the lower grades were represented by a clown. The Spanish costume is to show ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Then Chance, that sardonic jester who loves best to thwart the dearest desires of men and warp the destiny of nations, became piqued at the peace and the plenty in the land which lay around the bay. Chance, knowing well how best and quickest to ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... followed, half a jest on the part of the other, all serious as far as David was concerned. And then—Well, who could tell how it happened? The billiard cue was in David's hand, and the skull of the jester was split, a horrible gaping ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... conventional dress of the court fool, or jester, of the Middle Ages, and, after him, of the stage clown, consisted of the "fool's cap" and suit of motley, ornamented with little ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... seldom the mere jester; he will always have a moral or two, at the very least, at his fingers' ends, or to be quite exact, at the end of his article. He is never quite irresponsible. He seldom laughs at a man who ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... the mingled mirth and tenderness of Eugene Field—the poet of whose going the West may say, "He took our daylight with him"—one of his fellow journalists has written that he was a jester, but not of the kind that Shakespeare drew in Yorick. He was not only,—so the writer implied,—the maker of jibes and fantastic devices, but the bard of friendship and affection, of melodious lyrical conceits; he was the laureate of children—dear ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... absurdity being attested by his motley costume. The king himself being attired with dignity, it took the world some centuries to discover that his own conduct and decrees were sufficiently ridiculous for the amusement not only of his court but of all mankind. The jester was commonly called a fool, but the poets and romancers have ever delighted to represent him as a singularly wise and witty person. In the circus of to-day the melancholy ghost of the court fool effects the ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... himself, who had insulted him! With the generosity of youth, Archie was instantly under arms upon the other side: had instantly created a new image of Lord Hermiston, that of a man who was all iron without and all sensibility within. The mind of the vile jester, the tongue that had pursued Duncan Jopp with unmanly insults, the unbeloved countenance that he had known and feared for so long, were all forgotten; and he hastened home, impatient to confess his misdeeds, impatient to throw himself on the ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a jester, brother," said the duenna, "keep your drolleries for some place where they'll pass muster and be paid for; for you'll get nothing from me but ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... friends, how strange and unnatural they seemed. Their most intimate friends would scarcely have recognized them. Margaret was a fat, jolly Falstaff, stuffed out to immense proportions. Edith was entirely disguised as a jester and enjoyed her own quips immensely when she tapped a visitor on the shoulder with her bauble and said, "Good morrow, fair maid, art looking for ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... when the hound seizes it. He could make Lovaina know anything he wanted to, and she could direct him to do anything she wished. In that house of mirth, brightness, and laughter, he was as a cunning and, at times, hateful jester, feared by the Tahitians, and, indeed, to whites a shadowy skeleton at the feast, a thing of indescribable possibilities. I knew him, he liked me, and I drew from him by motions and expressions some measure of his feelings and sufferings. But I, too, occasionally, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Excepting the occasional brawls we have mentioned among that irritable race the Carmen, the mingled sounds which arose from the multitude were those of light-hearted mirth and tiptoe jollity. The musicians preluded on their instruments—the minstrels hummed their songs—the licensed jester whooped betwixt mirth and madness, as he brandished his bauble—the morrice-dancers jangled their bells—the rustics hallow'd and whistled—men laughed loud, and maidens giggled shrill; while many a broad jest flew like a shuttle-cock from one party to ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... argument ensued, during which Beatrice, although she knew he had so well approved his valour in the late war, said that she would eat all he had killed there: and observing the prince take delight in Benedick's conversation, she called him "the prince's jester." This sarcasm sunk deeper into the mind of Benedick than all Beatrice had said before. The hint she gave him that he was a coward, by saying she would eat all he had killed, he did not regard, knowing himself to be a brave man: but there is nothing that great wits so much dread as the ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... scintillate and glow. The person who lacks imagination is unable to invest with interest and charm even the mountain, the river, the landscape, or the poem. The gossip, the scandal-monger, or the coarse jester proves his lack of imagination and his consequent inability to hold his own in real conversation. We hope, of course, that some of our pupils may become inventors, but this will be impossible unless they possess imagination. ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... speaking of him; and my feelings were rather like those, which I daresay most of us here have had, at Pompeii, looking at Sallust's house and the relics of an orgy, a dried wine-jar or two, a charred supper-table, the breast of a dancing girl pressed against the ashes, the laughing skull of a jester, a perfect stillness round about, as the cicerone twangs his moral, and the blue sky shines calmly over the ruin. The Congreve muse is dead, and her song choked in Time's ashes. We gaze at the skeleton, and wonder at the life which once revelled in its mad veins. We take the skull up, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... its existence. The children might make the very air vocal with their howls, Elaine might have hysterics, Mrs. Smithers render hymns in a cracked, squeaky voice, and Dick whistle eternally, but Harlan was in a strange new country, with a beautiful lady, a company of gallant knights, and a jester. ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... silent, Stranger? Thou who now and then Touched the too credulous ear with pathos, canst not speak? Hast lost thy ready skill of tongue and pen? What, Jester! Tears ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... a long journey and much danger. Leave here thy rum and presents, and return to thy patrons, Alrichs and Beeckman, bearing our English gratitude, and thou shalt wear a beautiful hat, such as the King of England allows only his jester to ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... fellow in his time, and notable jester; he loved to drink neat, as much as any man that then was in the world, and would willingly eat salt meat. To this intent he was ordinarily well furnished with gammons of bacon, both of Westphalia, Mayence and Bayonne, with store of dried neat's tongues, plenty of links, chitterlings ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... portrait of Jonson than a caricature. As to the personages actually ridiculed in "Every Man Out of His Humour," Carlo Buffone was formerly thought certainly to be Marston, as he was described as "a public, scurrilous, and profane jester," and elsewhere as the grand scourge or second untruss [that is, satirist], of the time (Joseph Hall being by his own boast the first, and Marston's work being entitled "The Scourge of Villainy"). Apparently we must now prefer for Carlo a notorious character named Charles Chester, of whom ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... impatience forgetful of his great paunch and little legs, so that he was sorely tried to keep pace with me. Yet who would not have been in haste, urged by such a spur as had I? Here, then, was the end of my shameful travesty. To-morrow a soldier's harness should replace the motley of a jester; the name by which I should be known again to men would be that of Lazzaro Biancomonte, and no longer Boccadoro—the ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... Nicholas recognised the king's jester, Archie Armstrong, a merry little knave, with light blue eyes, long yellow hair hanging about his ears, and a sandy beard. There was a great deal of mother wit about Archie, and quite as much shrewdness ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... their instruments with extempore recitatives in praise of those chiefs whom they knew. I was, of course, included, as they expected that I would be inclined to reward them handsomely. Each minstrel of any repute had a person attached to him by way of fool or jester, several of whom acted their parts very well, and strongly reminded me of ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... literary humour, a rich soil in which the plant cultivated by Mark Twain and Mr. Frank Stockton grows with vigour and puts forth fruit and flowers. Mr. Stockton is very unlike Mark Twain: he is quiet, domesticated, the jester of the family circle. Yet he has shown in "Rudder Grange," and in "The Transferred Ghost," very great powers, and a pleasant, dry kind of Amontillado flavour in his fun, which somewhat reminds one of Thackeray—the Thackeray of the "Bedford-row ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... between them, and a long jangling argument ensued, during which Beatrice, although she knew he had so well approved his velour in the late war, said that she would eat all he had killed there: and observing the prince take delight in Benedick's conversation, she called trim 'the prince's jester.' This sarcasm sunk deeper into the mind of Benedick than all Beatrice had said before. The hint she gave him that he was a coward, by saying she would eat all he had killed, he did not regard, knowing himself to be a brave man; but there is nothing that great wits so much dread ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... from a manuscript of doubtful authenticity still to be seen at Allonby Shaw. It purports to contain the autobiography of Will Sommers, the vicomte's jester, afterward ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... Became at last (oh, shame of womanhood!) A thing to frown at with a covert smile; Anything to smile at with a decent frown; A thing to steal a grace from, as I feigned The innocence of deaf unconsciousness. And I became a jester. I could jest In a wild way on sacred things and themes; And I have thought that in his better moods My husband shrank with horror from the work Which he had ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... Revels of Orsera is a little unsatisfying the elaboration of scenic description and mediaeval pageantry is conscientious in the extreme, and the laughter which followed the malicious pranks of Gangogo, the professional jester of the tourney, must, if I am to take the author's word for it, have made the glaciers ring. There is a great deal in the way of philosophy and psychology that is very baffling in this book, but of one thing I feel certain, and that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... Jester and jolly fellow, he keeps on good terms with all political opinions, and is patriotic to the bottom of his soul. A capital mimic, he knows how to put on, turn and turn about, the smiles of persuasion, satisfaction, and good-nature, or drop them for the normal expression of his natural man. ...
— The Illustrious Gaudissart • Honore de Balzac
... jumped wildly, as the cold morsel slipped along his spine, and ducking out of reach, the elder jester called back: ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... high; Lucinus Calvus, who was only 3 feet high, and aesop, the famous Greek fabulist. Later in the Middle Ages and even to the last century dwarfs were seen at every Court. Lady Montagu describes the dwarfs at the Viennese Court as "devils bedaubed with diamonds." They had succeeded the Court Jester and exercised some parts of this ancient office. At this time the English ladies kept monkeys for their amusement. The Court dwarfs were allowed unlimited freedom of speech, and in order to get at truths other men were afraid to utter one of the Kings ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the greater the applause; the louder he shouted, the better he pleased. Let him split the ears of the groundlings, let him out-Herod Herod,—the judicious might grieve, but all would be excitedly attentive. Their Jeremiah seemed at times like to become a jester,—there was a suggestion of the ludicrous in the sudden passage from birds to Greek coins, to mills, to Walter Scott, to millionaire malefactors,—a suggestion of acrobatic tumbling and somersault; but he always got a hearing. In lecturing to the students ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... lazy as to leave him to do their thinking for them. That he sometimes—and oftener in the past than now—says illuminating things is true, but firm reliance cannot be placed upon his freakish mental processes, exemplified in his writings about the war. He has played with effect the part of jester to the British public, but when, as now, his jests are empty of the kernel of good sense, the ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... heart's palace Thoughts unnumbered throng; And there, most quiet and, as a child, most wise, High-throned you sit, and gracious. All day long Great Hopes gold-armoured, jester Fantasies, And pilgrim Dreams, and little beggar Sighs, Bow to your benediction, go their way. And the grave jewelled courtier Memories Worship and love and tend ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... in the gaudy colors of a court jester, skipped here and there between the dancers making comical jokes, while he tossed, and nimbly caught a bright ...
— Princess Polly's Gay Winter • Amy Brooks
... ungratefulness were the outstanding traits of Agricola's character. Luther said that Agricola, swelled with vanity and ambition, was more vexatious to him than any pope; that he was fit only for the profession of a jester, etc. December 6, 1540, Luther wrote to Jacob Stratner, courtpreacher in Berlin: "Master Grickel is not, nor ever will be, the man that he may appear, or the Margrave may consider him to be. For if you wish to know what vanity itself is you can recognize it in no surer image ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... generously bestowed on both. Waller, the most specious flatterer of flattering courts—the early worshipper of Charles the First—the pusillanimous betrayer of his friends—the adulator of Cromwell—the wit and the jester of the second Charles—the devotional whiner of the bigot James—had not, however, sufficient power to keep the lady from her slumbers long. She was soon in the refreshing sleep, ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... was his last book. For posthumous publication he left only "The Turkish Jester; or, The Pleasantries of Cogia Nasr Eddin Effendi, translated from the Turkish by G. B." (Ipswich, 1884). This was a string of the sayings and adventures of one Cogia, in this style: "One day Cogia Nasr Eddin Effendi ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... at the first moment he was able. Henry moreover was the most disinterested man I ever saw; while Tete Rouge, though equally good-natured in his way, cared for nobody but himself. Yet we would not have lost him on any account; he admirably served the purpose of a jester in a feudal castle; our camp would have been lifeless without him. For the past week he had fattened in a most amazing manner; and indeed this was not at all surprising, since his appetite was most inordinate. He was eating from morning till night; half the time he ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... skin, showed the ex-athlete who has kept up his athletics into middle age, but also that very breeze and bound of a man whose blood runs quick and orderly through its channels. His face, a little pudgy, took illumination from a pair of lively eyes. He was the jester in the court of King Norcross; one of the half-dozen men whom the bachelor lord of railroads admitted to intimacy. A measured intimacy it was; and it never trenched on business. Bulger, like all the rest, owed half of his position to the fact that he never asked by so ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... about Venus's turtle and the London Tavern before—you begin to fail, my poor Wagg. If you don't mind I shall be obliged to have a new Jester," Lord Steyne said, laying down his glass. "Go on, Wenham, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... be denied; including, like the world, its own contradiction. Topsy-turveydom unfolds our musty ideas to the sun and spreads them out the other way. The man who reverses the Fifth Commandment and says that parents should honour their children is not a flippant jester, but a philosophic thinker. This is the true ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... is a little hot and angry after riding,' the horse-dealer returned, with the leer of a privileged jester. 'Presently, he will see my horse's points more clearly. I will wait till he has finished his talk with the Padre. I will wait ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... swept streaming behind by the wind. Maganga, a tall Mnyamwezi, stalked along like a very Goliah about to give battle alone, to Mirambo and his thousand warriors. Frisky Khamisi paced on under his load, imitating a lion and there was the rude jester—the incorrigible Ulimengo— with a stealthy pace like a cat. But their silence could not last long. Their, vanity was so much gratified, the red cloaks danced so incessantly before their eyes, that it would have been a wonder if ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... this badinage, and thought Barton a miserable jester. He caught at the epithet "Noble," and asked if any one, lawfully entitled to it, would be so degenerate as ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... could forebode it so early as 1765,—but Rousseau more than all others is the unconscious expression of the groping after something radically new, the instinct for a change that should be organic and pervade every fibre of the social and political body. Freedom of thought owes far more to the jester Voltaire, who also had his solid kernel of earnest, than to the sombre Genevese, whose earnestness is of the deadly kind. Yet, for good or evil, the latter was the father of modern democracy, and with out him our Declaration of Independence would have wanted some of those sentences ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... this somewhat pronounced opposition to a 'prelatical cut', Owen had been in his way a disciplinarian. He had arrested with his own hands, pulling him down from the rostrum and committing him to Bocardo prison, an undergraduate who had carried too far the wit of the 'Terrae Filius', the licensed jester ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... play—was I pleased with As You Like It? Well, I have known worse, but I have seen better. It seemed a mixture of prose and verse, with several topical allusions that appeared, somehow or other, to have lost their point. For instance, a dull dog of a jester (played in a funereal fashion by Mr. SUGDEN) stopped the action of the piece, for what seemed to me (no doubt the time was actually less) some three-quarters of an hour, while he explained the difference between the "retort courteous" and "the reproof ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... evident, that, in merely a glance, we fancy we comprehend them. But the more we think, the more we reflect, the more the difficulty opens on us of doing full justice to the mind of Hood. We soon discover that we are dealing, not with a mere punster or jester, not with a mere master of grimace or manufacturer of broad grins, not with an eccentric oddity in prose or verse, not with a merry-andrew who tickles to senseless laughter, not with a spasmodic melodramatist who writhes in fictitious pain, but that we are dealing with a sincere, truthful, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... of the sorry tragedy in his voice that contrasted so sharply with the banality of his words. He felt that he was but a pitiful jester who was like a clown, compelled to play a merry part when there was anguish in his mind. But—he ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... Crow smelleth powder, 'tis said, Like a soldier escheweth the taste of cold lead; No jester, or mime, hath more marvellous wit, For, wherever he lighteth, he maketh a hit! Caw! Caw! the Carrion Crow! Dig! Dig! in ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Tales? Those are not for children: Chaucer was a jester. You had better take my book. It has beautiful pictures." The young Percy took the little breviary, and, going down the path as though they sought the shade, they both quietly disappeared from the ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... with two of their admirals: the loss of the English was inconsiderable, compared to the greatness and importance of the victory.[*] None of Philip's courtiers, it is said, dared to inform him of the event; till his fool or jester gave him a hint, by which he discovered the loss that he ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... he muttered. "It's Wamba, son of Witless, the Jester of Ivanhoe. I've been trying to catch him for seventy-two years, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... Bruno might have answered in kind, but now he merely smiled at the jester, then turned again to receive the earnest cautions let fall for his ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... Critic of the craft, As stage tradition tells; And yet—perhaps 'twill only be The jester with his bells. ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... form which we know best are those of old Judge Phoenix—for so the office-jester named him when we first moved in, and we have known him by that name ever since. He is a fat old Irishman, with a clean-shaven face, who stands summer and winter in the side doorway that opens, next to the little grocery opposite, on the ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... Dickens scenes were repeated for a younger club, just trying its dramatic wings in charades, and when May-time came these younger girls of twelve to fifteen gave a very successful representation of an old English May-day with Robin Hood and his merry band, a Jester, a Dragon, a Hobby-horse and Jack in the Green, Maid Marian and the Lord and Lady of the May on the ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... jester to divert the court, Fit Scene for sportive joys and frolic mirth; Think'st thou I lack that manly constancy Which braves misfortune, and remains unshaken? Are these, are these the emblems of thy friendship, These rankling chains, say, does it gall like ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey
... let us march in the train of the great Mime, until he takes his ease in his inn,—the Black Jack aforesaid,—and laugh at his jibes and flashes of merriment, before the Mad Wag shall be silenced by the great killjoy, Death, and the jester's boon companions shall lay him in the graveyard in Portugal Fields, placing over him a friendly record of his ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... with those of time and place; the scene was shifted for a monologue of three lines or a dialogue of six; tragic and comic were interwoven; the stage was thronged with a motley variety of figures, humors, and conditions—knights, citizens, soldiers, horse-boys, peasants; there was a court-jester; songs and lyric passages were interspersed; there were puns, broad jokes, rant, Elizabethan metaphors, and swollen trunk-hose hyperboles, with innumerable Shakesperian reminiscences in detail. But the advice of Herder, to ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... when you are king you must appoint me court jester. Will you, my good Lord? We two are good contrasts: You full of dignity upon a royal throne, a golden crown upon your head, the scepter in your hand, and I dressed in motley with cap and bells. Heigh ho! That will be jolly. And after all ...
— The Buddha - A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes • Paul Carus
... purpose on the golf links ashore. He was thin, a grey-haired, silent man. His face, in repose, was that of a deliberate thinker whose thoughts had not led him to an entirely happy goal. Yet his smile when amused had a quality of gratitude to the jester, not altogether without pathos. He had a slightly cynical demeanour, a bitter tongue, and a curiously sympathetic, almost tender manner with the sick. He was professedly a fierce woman-hater, and when ashore passed children quickly ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... despatch, medically speaking, a dozen young folks in a season. Morality is powerless against a dozen vices which destroy society and which nothing can punish.—Another cup!—Upon my word of honor! man is a jester dancing upon a precipice. They talk to us about the immorality of the Liaisons Dangereuses, and any other book you like with a vulgar reputation; but there exists a book, horrible, filthy, fearful, corrupting, which is always open and will never be shut, the great book ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... humorous came under his observation without himself seeing the fun in it. Where he sets forth with intent to be humorous he sometimes attains almost to the tragic; there are few things so sad as a joke that misses fire or a jester ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... as a serious compliment; 30 but Cedric, who better understood the jester's meaning, darted at him a severe and menacing look; and lucky it was for Wamba, perhaps, that the time and place prevented his receiving, notwithstanding his place and service, more sensible marks ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... Moorish portico, and it is in the little room with the mullioned bay window that he works when he is down here, and in which of an evening we have so often smoked and talked together. He is a mighty jester, but, besides, he likes to talk to me about his work; he is one of those men who find a help and stimulus in talking, and so I have been able to follow the conception of the New Accelerator right up from a very ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... and rusted like old pots and pans that have seen a twelvemonths' weather in a ditch. Out of the merriment occasioned by his appearance, certain of the spectators began to cry, "A champion! a champion!" And others nudged with their elbows, chuckling, "It is the Queen's jester." ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... shrill and sudden cry, And, looking up, I saw the antic Puck Grappling with Time, who clutch'd him like a fly, Victim of his own sport,—the jester's luck! He, whilst his fellows grieved, poor wight, had stuck His freakish gauds upon the Ancient's brow, And now his ear, and now his beard, would pluck; Whereas the angry churl had snatched him now, Crying, "Thou ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... painted fool again and kiss my hand With jocund air to Folly's worshippers. So day by day life's bitter bread is earned With lips that smile and frame the mirthless joke, And frailer grows the soul that once was strong,— The joyless soul of one whose trade has turned Life's tragic mantle to a jester's cloak, Life's ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... not look too narrowly into the mouth of a Joe-Millerism. But Mr. Gillman, writing the life of a philosopher, and no jest-book, is under a different law of decorum. That retort, however, which silences the jester, it may seem, must be a good one. And we are desired to believe that, in this case, the baffled assailant rode off in a spirit of benign candor, saying aloud to himself, like the excellent philosopher that he evidently was, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... a great potentate, which is true enough. But he requests that you acknowlege him the greatest living ambassador! Honestly, your majesty, he has great skill as a jester, which I take it is ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... and genius, of his thousand opponents—whose crown was a branch of English oak, his sceptre a strong sapling of the same, his throne a mound of turf—who economised matters by being at once king and king's jester, and whose mere clenched fist, held up at home or across the waters, saved millions of money, awed despots, encouraged freedom in every part of the world, and had nearly established a pure form of Christianity over ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... said Frank, "and spare the rash youth of yon foolish knight. Shall elephants catch flies, or Hurlo-Thrumbo stain his club with brains of Dagonet the jester? Be mollified; leave thy caverned grumblings, like Etna when its windy wrath is past, and discourse eloquence from thy central omphalos, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... you go with us to behold it? My 185 merry host hath had the measuring of their weapons; and, I think, hath appointed them contrary places; for, believe me, I hear the parson is no jester. Hark, I will tell you what our sport shall be. ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... the lion's feeding time, and the food had evidently been good and satisfying. The music too in the minstrels' gallery had been sweet and pleasant to the ear. The Court jester had for a wonder excelled himself in his strong endeavours to put the King in a good humour, and uttered no less than three samples of his wit which had made the King roar, inasmuch as in the tail of each joke there was a slightly poisoned sting which had gone home to the ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... of a tree, Boot, remedy, Borrow out, redeem, Borrows, pledges, Bote, remedy, Bound, ready, Bourded, jested, Bourder, jester, Braced, embraced, Brachet, little hound, Braide, quick movement, Brast, burst, break, Breaths, breathing holes, Brief, shorten, Brim, fierce, furious, Brised, broke, Broached, pierced, Broaches, spits, Bur, hand-guard of a spear, Burble, bubble, Burbling, bubbling, Burgenetts, buds, blossoms, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... men under whose patronage and in whose service 'Will the Jester' first showed himself, were men who were secretly endeavouring to make political capital of that new and immense motive power, that not yet available, and not very easily organised political power which was already beginning to move the masses here then, and ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... well pleased. And there isn't a single police agent there, I'm sure. Ah! to be loved, to be loved!" Plainly enough his distress of spirit was coming back, and so, turning towards the gallery again, he tried to play the jester. "Attention, my dear Abbe, we mustn't miss their Majesties' entry. That will be the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... who had been living with us had married,—Nellie, to A. C. Jester, a cattle man, and May, to Ed. Bradford, a railroad engineer—and consequently left us; and my wife had been wishing for a long time to visit her parents in St. Louis. Taking these and other things into consideration I finally resolved to resign my seat in the legislature and try my luck behind ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... bad manners rose straightway; and the minstrel, who (as often happened in those days) was jester likewise, made merry at his expense, and advised the company to turn the wild beast ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... may-pole carried by a man dressed as a jester, and boys and girls in early English peasant costumes held the ends of the long fluttering ribbons, laughing as the ...
— Princess Polly At Play • Amy Brooks
... soldier, "we English have eyes as well as hands; but it is only when discharging our duty that we permit our tongues to dwell on what we have observed. I noted but little of this man's conversation, but from what I heard, it seemed he was not unwilling to play what we call the jester, or jack-pudding, in the conversation, a character which, considering the man's age and physiognomy, is not, I should be tempted to say, natural, but assumed for ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... courtiers following SHUMAKIM, a hump-backed jester, in blue, green and red, a wreath of poppies around his neck and a flagon in his hand. He walks unsteadily, and stutters ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... that he finds them at all. A thing that is labelled 'comic' chills his sense of humour instantly—perceptibly lengthens his face. A joke that has not a serious background, or some serious connexion, means nothing to him. Nothing to him, the crude jape of the professional jester. Nothing to him, the jangle of the bells in the wagged cap, the thud of the swung bladder. Nothing, the joke that hits him violently in the eye, or pricks him with a sharp point. The jokes that he loves are those ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... so fond of paradox Perverseness holds us thrall, So what each jester loves the best He mocks the most of all; But as the jest and laugh go round, Each in his neighbor's eyes Reads, while he flouts his heart's desire, The knowledge ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... forgotten. It is true that no literary fashion is more subject to change than the fashion of a jest, and that jokes that make one generation laugh seem insipid to the next. But there is something perennial in the fun of Rabelais, whom Bacon called "the great jester of France," and though the puns of Shakespeare's clowns are detestable the clowns themselves have not lost their power ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... time before.... At the time of the earthquake out in Foreign. A mad jester he was. A tramp class of a man. (To Jester.) ...
— Three Wonder Plays • Lady I. A. Gregory
... Above all, our noble jester succeeds in his mission of laugh-producing. But his methods are not possessed in the main of dramatic respectability. And it must be apparent that our analysis and citations have covered the ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... Sometimes it injects laughter, sometimes horror, into tragedy. It will bring Romeo face to face with the apothecary, Macbeth with the witches, Hamlet with the grave-diggers. Sometimes it may, without discord, as in the scene between King Lear and his jester, mingle its shrill voice with the most sublime, the most dismal, the dreamiest ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Stanley whom he longs to see again. He says that all the people said he was not a Christian, for he was not proud ever towards them as Christians are, but a real Sheykh, and that the Bedaween still talk of Sheykh Stanley and of his piety. The old half-witted jester of Luxor has found me out—he has wandered down here to see his eldest son who is serving in the army. He had brought a little boy with him, but is 'afraid for him' here, I don't know why, and has begged me to take the ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... and squawks as have given the bird his common name, is a wonder when in the next moment his throat swells and beginning phut-phut-coquillicot, he gives forth a long glorious song, only second to that of the wood thrush in melody. He is a jester, a caricaturist, ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... cries; "go plant Thine edifice, I care not how ill; Take notice, earth. I hereby grant Carte blanche of mortar, stone, and trowel. Go Hermes, Hercules, and Mars, Fraught with these bills on Henry Hase, Drop with yon jester from the stars, And build ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... of a marriage of convenience.... The dialogue is good: that of "Dicky Browne," a kind of licensed jester, being really bright and lively. The heroine is well drawn, and so is a terrible aunt of hers, whose encounters with the Marquis (himself ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... the jester, with a rueful air, "not much more than would buy gold thread to sew my head on again, were your highness pleased to honour ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... the Margrave, for beside him, crouched upon the floor, was a new jester, whom the seneschal had just admitted by the postern gate, and the novelty of whose jests made the huge sides of the Margrave shake and ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... Dickens was both. With all his boisterous merriment, his volleys of inextinguishable laughter, he never makes game of what is at all worthy of respect. Here, as in his later books, right is right, and wrong wrong, and he is never tempted to jingle his jester's bell out of season, and make right look ridiculous. And if the humour of "Pickwick" be wholesome, it is also most genial and kindly. We have here no acrid cynic sneeringly pointing out the plague spots of humanity, and showing pleasantly how even the good are tainted with evil. Rather does Dickens ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... from their seats, and drew their swords. They would have killed the crazy man who insulted their king; but he raised his hand and stopped them, and with his eyes looking into Robert's eyes he said, "Not the king; you shall be the king's jester! You shall wear the cap and bells, and make laughter for my court. You shall be the servant of the servants, and your companion shall be ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... the two. All the heavier because one, dressed in the bizarre attire of jester, had no sword but only a dagger for defence. Nevertheless, with his short cloak wrapped over his left arm, and the dagger in his right hand, he held his own with skill ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... jester, in whom twenty years ago the country lost an excellent clown without gaining a statesman, was in great form ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... scorns and death, That future ant-hills will not be too good For Henry Fifth, or Hotspur, or Macbeth. Promise that through to-morrow's spirit-war Man's deathless soul will hack and hew its way, Each flaunting Caesar climbing to his fate Scorning the utmost steps of yesterday. Never a shallow jester any more! Let not Jack Falstaff spill the ale in vain. Let Touchstone set the fashions for the wise And Ariel wreak his fancies ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... dull "as the fat weed that grows on Lethe's bank," the jest for them has all the poignancy of satire: on the very offals, the garbage of wit, they can feed and batten. Happy they who can find in every jester the wit of Sterne or Swift; who else can wade through hundreds of thickly-printed pages to obtain for their reward such witticisms as ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... wed;" and quoth the Droll, "'Tis well, O King of the Age." Hereupon the Sultan sent to summon the Wazir and bade him betroth the man to a woman of righteous conduct and come of decent folk. Now the Minister had with him an old nurse, and he commanded her to find a match for the Sultan's Jester; whereupon she rose and went out from him and engaged for the man a beautiful woman. And presently the marriage-tie was tied between these twain and he went in unto the bride and she tarried with him a while ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... determined, at every risk to himself, to save that last scion of Saxon royalty. But ere Cedric penetrated as far as the old hall In which he had himself been a prisoner, the inventive genius of Wamba the Jester had procured liberation for himself and his ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... poet with closely cropped hair, Or a sporting man quiet in dress; Now and then there's a lady from Boston who's fair, Now and then there's a fetterless press; Now and then there's a laugh that a jester may coax, A librettist may put on his page— But they're terribly rare in American jokes, And—oh, the ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... woman's voice; King George, a big burly man dressed as a knight, with a wooden sword and a home-made helmet; a French officer, with a cocked hat and sword; a Doctor, who wears a pig-tail; Jack Vinny, a jester; Happy Jack, a humorous character dressed in tattered garments, and Old Beelzebub, who appears as Father Christmas. In some parts of the royal county the part of King George is taken by an "Africky king," and a Turkish knight instead of the French officer. Very curious are the words ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... a jester (Chapter XX), from his motley clothes, is also sometimes a variant of Pash. And the dim. Patchett has become confused with Padgett, from Padge, a rimed form of Madge. Pentecost is recorded as a personal name in Anglo-Saxon times. Michaelmas ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... occasion the court fool, Denderis, surprised the Empress Theodora in her private chamber kissing eikons and placing them over her eyes. 'What are these things?' he inquired. 'My beautiful dolls which I love,' she replied. Not long afterwards the jester was summoned to amuse Theophilus while sitting at table. 'What is the latest news?' asked the emperor. 'When I last visited "mamma" (the jester's familiar name for the empress) I saw most beautiful dolls in her room.' ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... like a weary workman, turning his face, as smooth as an apple, with its ball-like nose, from side to side; and when he entered the dining-room, he cast a glance round at the furniture and fixed his eyes on a small picture of Rigoletto, a hunchbacked jester, and made ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... the part of clown or jester. The modern puppet play of Punch is a tradition handed down from these ancient miracles, in which the Evil One was alternately the conqueror or victim of the human Buffoon; who was also called by the names of ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... the invalid upon Janet's invitation. They found Bobby Hargrew there before them. Harum-scarum as Bobby was, nobody could accuse her of lack of sympathy; and she had already learned that her fun and frolic pleased the invalid. Bobby did not mind playing the jester for her friends. ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... king kept a jester to make jokes and amuse him and his friends at their feasts, and the jester was a privileged person, who could say anything he liked. So now they told the jester of the King of France that he must tell the king the bad news, because he could say what he liked and ...
— Royal Children of English History • E. Nesbit
... for a quarter of an hour, to make me guess what he was doing in the picture of "Napoleon" before it had been exhibited, giving me hint after hint in a rough way. But I could not guess, and he wouldn't tell me!' It is hard after this to censure so amiable a jester as the late Mr. a'Beckett, for burlesquing the strange picture called 'Hurrah for the whaler Erebus—another fish!' in the words proposed to be substituted—'Hallo, there—the oil and ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... mother, but I have a goat and a donkey, and they are all in all to me. My goat gives me the sweetest milk, and when my dear good donkey brays it seems to me there is no music like to it. So when my lord the king's jester said the sweetest singer among all the animals should save the crown and nation, and moved me ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... could not go backward and forward without assistance. It was painful in the extreme to see the man who was undergoing tortures behind the curtain step lightly before the audience amid a burst of merriment, and for more than an hour sustain the part of jester, tossing his cap and jingling his bells, a painted death's head, for he had to rouge his face ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... little fellow with a fat belly, active and nimble in spite of his weight, with a face like a skinned pumpkin was the sacristan and responded with the most frivolous refrains. He kneeled down and genuflected and turned his back to the altar and rang the bell as though it were a jester's and swung the censer round like a wheel. The others lay drunk on the steps at full length, bellowing with laughter ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... death of a tragedian less striking than the former, since all tragedies end with death, and death in itself is but a scene of tragedy. Is any lament of Shakspeare's heroes more touching than his apostrophe to the scull of Yorick, the King's jester, the mad fellow that poured a flagon of Rhenish on the clown's head: "a fellow of infinite jest; of most excellent fancy. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... unable to resist the temptation: and after her there followed the soul of Epeus the son of Panopeus passing into the nature of a woman cunning in the arts; and far away among the last who chose, the soul of the jester Thersites was putting on the form of a monkey. There came also the soul of Odysseus having yet to make a choice, and his lot happened to be the last of them all. Now the recollection of former toils had disenchanted him of ambition, and he went about for a considerable time in search of the ...
— The Republic • Plato
... from a manuscript of doubtful authenticity still to be seen at Allonby Shaw. It purports to contain the autobiography of Will Sommers, the vicomte's jester, afterward court-fool ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... printed in the year 1661, but it was represented at Christ College fully a hundred years previously. Who was the author of it is not known with certainty; but it is possible that the writer of it was John Heywood, the epigrammatist and court-jester.—See Dramaturgic oder Theorie und Geschichte der dramatischen Kunst, von Theodore Mundt, vol i, p. 809. Flogel's ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach |
