|
|
|
More "Comic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... several times, 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 ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Americans, if I may be frank, I prefer the verse of Mr. Bret Harte, verse with so many tunes and turns, as comic as the "Heathen Chinee," as tender as the lay of the ship with its crew of children that slipped its moorings in the fog. To me it seems that Mr. Bret Harte's poems have never (at least in this country) been sufficiently esteemed. Mr. ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... step, though a short one, nearer the sun. Besides, if, as I suspect, the estate in view be connected with the old haunted castle in which you played the astrologer in your northern tour some twenty years since, I have heard you too often describe the scene with comic unction, to hope you will be deterred from making the purchase. I trust, however, the hospitable gossiping Laird has not run himself upon the shallows, and that his chaplain, whom you so often made us laugh at, is still ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... groups. There is the story of the Civil War period, which pictures the "darky" on the old plantation, devoted to "young Massa" or "old Miss,"—the Negro of slavery. Then there are stories of recent times in which the Negro is used purely for comic effect, a sort of minstrel-show character. Neither of these is the Negro of to-day. A truer picture is found in the stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar. The following story is ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... here; this is very nice, being put on to the tricks of the trade, but the money end of it isn't cutting much ice, and isn't there any way you can just buy things—the way you do in Cincinnati? Can't you get their stuff without making a comic opera out ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... 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 ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... which so much as even suggested rudeness or greed. He was as scrupulous of his Mess Rules as a Roman Catholic Priest is of his conduct at High Mass. To the newly-joined Subaltern, Guest Night conveyed the holy impression of a religious rite. But here was a comic demonstration of the fact that the strictest training is only, after all, a veneer. Two Senior Officers were actually squabbling about a quarter-pound tin of marmalade! The Subaltern could not help smiling. The incident merely showed how raw and jagged ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... I feel sorry to find you like this—alone—alone in a restaurant, and on Christmas Eve of all times. It makes me as sad as when I saw a wedding party at Paris once in a restaurant—the bride was reading a comic paper and the groom was playing billiards with the witnesses. Ugh, when it begins that way, I thought, how will it end? Think of it, playing billiards on his wedding day! Yes, and you're going to say that she was reading a comic paper— that's a different ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... an arm gone, a hand gone, back wounds, stomach wounds, holes in the head. They start chaffing one another. There's no hint of tragedy. A gale of laughter sweeps the ward from end to end. An Anzac captain is called on for a speech. I discover that he is our professional comic man and is called on to make speeches twenty times a day. They always start with, "Gentlemen, I will say this—" and end with a flourish in praise of Australia. Soon the ward is made perilous by wheel-chairs, in which unskilful pilots steer themselves out into the green adventure of the garden. ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... feel it, and act it; perhaps he might extravagantly add, 'beyond any one else.' 'Tis likely, Mr. Savage might be then more vehement in this assertion, as some of his friends had been more used to see me in a comic, than a serious light; and which was, indeed, more frequently my choice. But to go on. When I read the play to the manager, Mr. Quin, &c. (at which several gentlemen, intimate friends of the author, were present) I was complimented by them all; Mr. Quin particularly ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... 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 ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... and her countenance would be so awfully comic. Mind, if it is ever to come off, I must be there to see it. I know what she would say as well as possible. She would turn to poor Gussy. 'Augusta,' she would say, 'I always expected it. I always did.' Then I should come out and curtsey to her, and say so prettily, 'Dear aunt, it was only our ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... instant, as you direct; and in a tragi-comic humour, for I have a tear in my eye and a smile on my cheek. Dearest Darsie, sure never a being but yourself could be so generous—sure never a being but yourself could be so absurd! I remember when you were a boy you wished to make your fine new whip a present to old Aunt Peggy, merely because ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... historical, 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 ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... Aurora on that day regaled him with over a thousand comic anecdotes, this being the expression of her frolicsome and exuberant mood. He furnished her with a few to add to her store, Italian ones, proving that he was not wholly without some share of her ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... man could possibly mean; he, following up the train of his own thoughts, comprehended little or nothing of my surprise, and evidently was so engrossed by his reflections that he had neither ears nor eyes for aught around him. There was a most singular semi-comic expression in the old withered face that nearly made me laugh at first; but as I continued to look steadily at it, I perceived that, despite the long-worn wrinkles that low Irish drollery and fun had furrowed around the angles of his mouth, the ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... 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, ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... 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. Tho he meant to be just, he seemed haunted by a certain chronic assumption ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... Immediately following the comic picture, all the lights in the theater were turned on and a gentleman stepped on the ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)
... A RIGHT TO USE AN OLD PUN IN MAKING A NEW JOKE? This was a question which arose in the Quidnuncs coterie the other evening, after Muggins had sent in the following, for the comic column of a weekly paper, the editor of which had returned it gratefully but firmly, on the score of superannuation: 'If Truth lie at the bottom of a well, why should we be surprised that so many kick the bucket before they are ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... one hundred and eighty had not. But did he say that? Oh, no, he did not say that! He was not that sort of, a college president. Instead, he remained calm and sympathetic, and like a conspirator in a comic opera glanced apprehensively round his, ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... tone of comic astonishment, "a fire in the parlor? What a luxury!" and he drew a long breath. In fact, the new-comer was in the habit of drawing long breaths at the end of each sentence, a habit he had acquired in singing; and these breaths were almost like the roaring of a wild beast. Catching sight ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... obtuse masculine mind a care for clothes and the habit of dealing with a good dressmaker. At the head of the stairs she gave a little cry of surprise, for Paul Deulin was coming along the broad corridor towards her, swinging the key of his bedroom and nonchalantly humming an air from a recent comic opera. He was, it appeared, as much at home here as in London or ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... some reason overcome with embarrassment when they met me. Some of them looked upon me as a queer fish and a comic fool; others were sorry for me; others did not know what attitude to take up to me, and it was difficult to make them out. One day I met Anyuta Blagovo in a side street near Great Dvoryansky Street. I was going to work, and was carrying two long brushes ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... on the table an' gin he hed never said a word, tae see it lyin' there wes a veesitation. But he 's a weel-meanin' bit craturie, Maister Peebles, an' handy wi' a magic lantern. Sall," and then Hillocks became incapable of speech, and you knew that the thought of Dr. Davidson explaining comic slides had quite ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... good deal, but my works had been almost exclusively for the stage, and for those theatres that devoted themselves to extravaganza and burlesque. I had written many pieces of this description, full of puns and comic songs, and they had had a fair success, but my best piece had been a treatment of English history during the Reformation period, in the course of which I had introduced Cranmer, Sir Thomas More, Henry the Eighth, Catherine ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... 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 ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... Alps in summer; how in winter time to skate; How to hold the deadly rifle; how a yacht to navigate; How to make the winning hazard with an effort sure and strong; How to play the maddening comet, how to sing a comic song; How to 'utilize' Professors; how to purify the Cam; How to brew a sherry cobbler, and to make red-currant jam. All the arts which now we practise in a desultory way Shall be taught us to perfection, ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... 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 ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... the Frenchman in every note of the gamut, abused Paddy: necessity and wit were on Paddy's side; he parried all that was said against his chaise, his horses, himself, and his country, with invincible comic dexterity, till at last, both his adversaries, dumb-foundered, clambered into the vehicle, where they were instantly shut up in straw and darkness. Paddy, in a triumphant tone, called to my postilions, bidding them "get on, and not be stopping ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... in it they shut up the remains the combustion had spared. The manikin was then clothed with the royal vestments—we know that those clothes are not worth much—and they did not forget to ornament it with Cousin Benedict's famous spectacles. There was something terribly comic in this masquerade. ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... her to go reasonably steady in rope harness. She was the first hog that father bought to stock the farm, and we boys regarded her as a very wonderful beast. In a few weeks she had a lot of pigs, and of all the queer, funny, animal children we had yet seen, none amused us more. They were so comic in size and shape, in their gait and gestures, their merry sham fights, and the false alarms they got up for the fun of scampering back to their mother and begging her in most persuasive little squeals to lie down and give ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... troubled her even more than the pain, was that, when the latter began to subside, one of her cheeks commenced to swell. She was anxious to look her very best before her lover: her lopsided face gave her a serio-comic expression. The swelling had diminished a little before she set out on the bleak December afternoon to meet her lover. Before she went, she looked long and anxiously in the glass. Apart from the disfigurement ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... began to strike a definite musical note. It first caught the eye and ear of its public by presenting the popular new marches by John Philip Sousa; and when the comic opera of "Robin Hood" became the favorite of the day, it secured all the new compositions by Reginald de Koven. Following these, it introduced its readers to new compositions by Sir Arthur Sullivan, Tosti, Moszkowski, Richard Strauss, Paderewski, Josef ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... You would find her a very intelligent person, and well worth talking to. She can tell, when she pleases, the most remarkable stories,—real flesh-and-blood stories,—true stories of human nature. For the Street of the Geisha is full of traditions,—tragic, comic, melodramatic;—every house has its memories;—and Kimika knows them all. Some are very, very terrible; and some would make you laugh; and some would make you think. The story of the first Kimiko belongs to the last class. It is not one of the most extraordinary; but it is one ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... fits of abstraction. Beyond all this, for the outside of the man, we may say that he was of fascinating, extreme and satyr-like ugliness and enormous sense of humor; that he was a perpetual joke to the comic poets, and to himself; an old fellow of many and lovable eccentricities; and that you cannot pick one little hole in his character, or find any respect in which he does ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... cannot be entirely conducted on these principles; man cannot live by Almavivery alone; and the Great Creature, having failed upon several theatres, was obliged to step down every evening from his heights, and sing from half-a-dozen to a dozen comic songs, twang a guitar, keep a country audience in good humour, and preside finally over the mysteries of ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 piece in two Acts, would ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... slipped the last roll of silver into her pocket, drank a little of her grog, and, leaning against the glazed partition, quietly settled herself down to listen to the men talking politics. Gavard had taken up the newspaper again, and, in tones which he strove to render comic, was reading out some passages of the speech from the throne which had been delivered that morning at the opening of the Chambers. Charvet made fine sport of the official phraseology; there was not a single line of it which he did not tear ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... William Kemp 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 greatly applauded for his buffoonery, his extemporal wit,[v:2] ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... 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 does his Church come ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... face at this moment resembled the tragic mask much more than the comic. But Miss Garland was not looking at him; she had ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... before the magistrates for tampering with village girls, and waylaid and cudgelled by injured husbands, fathers, sweethearts. A hundred years ago his character and actions might have been described at length by the painter of manners; but the Comic Muse, nowadays, does not lift up Molly Seagrim's curtain; she only indicates the presence of some one behind it, and passes on primly, with expressions of horror, and a fan before her eyes. The village had heard how the young ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... observations, let me add, that in looking at this question, we must consent to throw off our national prejudices; and in drawing the comparison, not to regard English plays, whether tragic or comic, as the standards of perfection. English Comedy is not only considered inferior to that of most nations, but it is in many respects bad in its tendency, and may almost be looked upon as a school for vanity. To conclude, instead of regarding the drama as it is, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... men's shoulders the whole way to Chew Magna to be buried there in the Strachey Chapel. The event set down in cold print does not sound of very great interest or importance. It will seem, indeed, at first hearing to partake a little too much of the countryman of the melodrama, or of the comic papers, who always talks about funerals and corpses. As a matter of fact, however, Israel Veal has so little self-consciousness and possesses such a gift for dignified narration that, told by him, the story, if indeed it can be called a story, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... of Napoleon, the prestige of his presence and conversation, the invasion of his genius. Inexhaustible in arguments, matchless in the adaptation of ideas to circumstances, the most amiable and most imperious of interlocutors, stentorian and mild, tragic and comic by turns, the most eloquent of sophists and the most irresistible of fascinators, as soon as he meets a man face to face, he wins him, conquers him, and obtains the mastery.[51117] In effect, after seeing the Pope for six days, Napoleon obtains ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... No horse-race or prize-fight could go on without him, and he himself never left one of these last-mentioned gatherings without finding some one to try conclusions with him. Beside this, he was a great writer and singer of comic ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... a passage from Paradise Lost, or Macbeth. Sometimes a fault is committed on the part of the teacher, by permitting a pupil to confine his selections to one favorite class. I have observed in certain schools, that one particular boy would always appear in a comic piece, another in a tragic, and so on. It would be better for the teacher to require each pupil to speak a variety of pieces, so as to secure a more general and comprehensive culture than would result from practice on a single ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... 4th of March he wrote from Newcastle: "The readings have made an immense effect in this place, and it is remarkable that although the people are individually rough, collectively they are an unusually tender and sympathetic audience; while their comic perception is quite up to the high London standard. The atmosphere is so very heavy that yesterday we escaped to Tynemouth for a two hours' sea walk. There was a high north wind blowing, and a magnificent sea running. Large vessels were being towed in and out over ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Querida laughed, too, saying: "Quite right, Mr. Cameron. It's only bluff with, us; we never work. Life is one continual comic opera." ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... necessary to produce some more original idea, to strike a really decisive blow, and so Dowie revealed to a stupefied Chicago that he was the latest incarnation of the prophet Elijah. Then while the serious Press denounced him for blasphemy, and the comic Press launched its most highly poisoned shafts of wit against him, the whole of Sion exulted in clamorous rejoicings. For the prophet knew his Chicago. Credulity gained the upper hand, and the whole city ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... 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
... The night of the "comic oration" is come, and the speaker is arranging his back hair in the star dressing-room of the theatre. The orchestra is playing selections from the Gentile opera of "Un Ballo in Maschera," and the house is full. Mr. John F. Caine, the excellent stage ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... Dieu! no! it is that gentleman there," said Montalais, pointing to Malicorne, who, during this scene, had preserved the most imperturbable coolness, and the most comic dignity. ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the religious plays were still a part of the Church services, they contained humorous elements, such as the realistically comic figure of the merchant who sold spices and ointment to the Maries on their way to the tomb of Christ. In the later plays these interpolations developed into scenes of roaring farce. When Herod learned of the escape of the Wise Men, he would rage violently about ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... last we have a treatise upon our caricaturists and comic draughtsmen worthy of the great subject.... An entertaining history of caricature, and consequently of the events, political and social, of the century; in fact, a thoroughly readable and instructive book.... And what a number of political occurrences, scandals public and private, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... and though all Father Daly said was very edifying, her thoughts wandered, and wonderful legends and tales about a voice heard for one week at the Wimbledon Convent thronged her brain, and she invented quite a comic little episode, in which some dozen or so of London managers met at Benediction. She thought that their excuses one to the other would ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... sendin praichers to th' heathen an sich, But we've heathen at hooam at require 'em as mich: Just luk at that craad at comes troopin along, Some yellin aght th' chorus o'th' new comic song; Old an young,—men an wimmen,—some bummers, some swells, Turned aght o' some dnnkin an singin room hells;— They seek noa dark corners, they glory i'th' leet, This is Briggate,—their ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... than his wife. His manners were unusually gentle and considerate of others, and he was specially remarkable for one trait very rarely found in the Middle Ages—he was always thoughtful of those beneath him. Another peculiarity he had, not common in his time; he was decidedly a humourist. The comic side even of his own troubles was always patent to him. Yet he was a man of extremely sensitive feeling, as well as of shrewd and delicate perceptions. He lived a most uncomfortable life, and he was quite aware of it. The one person who should have been his ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... 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 I have ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... circumstances. It 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 ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... merely an inexperienced "gun" at a shooting-party, who has begun following his bird before it has risen above the head of his loader. This very clumsy violation of the etiquette of sport proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he has learned to shoot from the comic papers, and that his coat-of-arms can never again be looked upon as ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... that night, a new comic singer of great promise having been announced, and oh! it was sad to see the youths of both sexes, little more than big boys and girls, who went there to smoke, and drink, and enjoy ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 use in ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... 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 canons ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... had no redundance of the article, and his senior curate had just started on a vacation ramble with a brother; but a sort of misgiving crossed him as he heard Herbert Bowater's last comic song pealing out, and beheld the pleasingly plain face of a Miss Strangeways on either side of him. Had he not fought the Eton and Harrow match over again with one of them at dinner? and had not a ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... strange one—as strange as if taken from a comic opera. The fishing-sloop rocking on the long swell, the dog cowed and uncertain, one deaf man doubtingly flashing the lantern in the face of Bart Hodge, and the other swaying unsteadily on his feet, as if he contemplated making a ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... that the mighty bard had no belief himself in any such being. But, as a dramatist, he was obliged to suit himself to the current fashion of thought, and he refers to the Devil when it serves his purpose just as he introduces ghosts and witches. His Satanic Majesty not being then a comic figure, he is spoken of or alluded to with gravity. Even when Macbeth flies at the messenger in a towering rage, and cries "the Devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon," he does not lose his sense of ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... shirt with 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. She ...
— Evelina's Garden • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... 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 ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... after poetry, as an "agreeable" art at the very foot of the list, and as the play of tone in the vicinity of the entertaining play of fortune [games of chance] and the witty play of thought. The explanation of the comic (the ludicrous is based, according to Kant, on a sudden transformation of strained expectation into nothing) lays great (indeed exaggerated) weight on the resulting physiological phenomena, the bodily shock which heightens vital ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... 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
... vulgarised chorus is "Tooral looral," of which the most recent appearance is in a song which the world owes to the bad taste of the comic muse—that thinks it cannot be a muse until it blackens its face to look ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... might be spared quite such a ridiculous speech as that to which we have just listened. However, I have nothing to say about its comic side. What I want to say is this. It is perfectly true Mansfield had a spite against Pledge. So had I; so had Cresswell. So had eleven out of twelve of all the other monitors. And I'll tell you why. When a fellow deliberately sets ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... afterwards the history of the artist's career is but the history of his works, of his innumerable illustrations to books, and the sketchbooks, comic panoramas, and humorous cartoons he published on his own account. Besides, I am not writing a life of George Cruikshank, and all this time I have been keeping him on the threshold of the city of Mexico. Let it suffice to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... serio-comic affairs that occurred during my service, may be worth the narration. Shortly after reaching Randolph, one of our sergeants named Brown imported his better-half from Memphis, and for some days they agreed remarkably well; but the sergeant obtaining a jug of ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... dreadful, is much more probable. No doubt children who came across them had a surreptitious treat, even as urchins of both sexes now pounce with avidity upon stray copies of the ultra-popular and so-called comic papers. But you could not call Ally Sloper, that Punchinello of the Victorian era—who has received the honour of an elaborate article in the Nineteenth Century—a child's hero, nor is his ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... which form the sixth volume of this series, began in 1842, and lasted ten years. They provide occasion for many diverting anecdotes, and for references to his colleagues who founded the fortunes of that most successful of comic papers; but as on this plan the biographical lines cross and recross each other it is not easy for the reader to obtain a connected or comprehensive view of Thackeray's career. Nevertheless as the system fortunately affords ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... that in which some eaglets are reared, made by interlacing branchlets of white mangrove until the mass was sufficient to support his weight. With a double ended paddle rudely shaped from the thin buttress roots of the red mangrove, and comic in the crudeness and disproportion of its parts, he felt himself safe miles out to sea. When he approached a passing vessel he presented the illusion, not of walking, but of sitting on the water, for the float was almost completely submerged. ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... full on Mercer, and I hurt myself directly by bursting out into a silent fit of laughter, which drew my bruised face into pain-producing puckers. But it was impossible to help it, all the same, for Mercer's phiz looked so comic. ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... of his dear and admired American friend, he says all these things, good and evil, with an English accent; and at the American play his English accent was irrepressible. "It's too comic; no, it's too comic," he called in his enjoyment; being the only perfectly fearless child in the world, he will not consent to the conventional shyness in public, whether he be the member of an audience or of a congregation, ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... Arthur Seymour Sullivan has enjoyed for a few years past, growing out of his extraordinarily successful series of comic operettas, beginning with "The Sorcerer" (1877), which first caught the public fancy, and ending with "The Mikado" (1885), has almost overshadowed the permanent foundations upon which his reputation must rest; namely, his serious and sacred music. He was born in London, May 13, ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... this he was as hypochondriacal as a comic actor and took no part in the life of the household. He stirred only when he saw his master pick up his hat and stick. Zamore died of brain fever, brought on, no doubt, by overwork in trying to ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... irritated, though it would be comic if the consequences were not so awful, by observing how men shut one another in a delusion and cannot get out of this ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... 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
... father, "I don't think my brother ever heard of Nichocorus, the Greek comic writer; yet he has illustrated him very ably. Saith Nichocorus, 'The best cure for drunkenness is a sudden calamity.' For chronic drunkenness, a continued course of real misfortune must be ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... always treats the subject with profound seriousness; secondly, that he always uses it as a practical motive. "I do not think," said Socrates, "that any one who should now hear us, even though he were a comic poet, would say that I am talking idly."16 Again, referring to Homer's description of the judgments in Hades, he says, "I, therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts, and consider how I may exhibit my soul before ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... that Mr Seagrove had a great deal of comic talent; he was an excellent mimic, and could alter his voice almost as he pleased. It was a custom of his to act a scene as between other people, and he performed it remarkably well. Whenever he said ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... want to remember what I did while it's fresh in my mind. Let me see, this was the way I stood. Or was it more like this? No, like this." He turned to me, beaming. "What a great idea it was, my taking up golf! It's all nonsense what you read in the comic papers about people foozling all over the place and breaking clubs and all that. You've only to exercise a little reasonable care. And what a corking game it is! Nothing like it in the world! I wonder if Betty is up yet. I must go round and show her how ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 least is a ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... 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, I knew that neither ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... was something that might be called comic, there was nothing of this in the latter. On the contrary, it was a ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... a comic German heard his inquiry, scrutinized him with a withering glare, and jerked a thumb towards a door. He found himself in such an office as may have seen the first Rothschild make his first profits—a room austere as a chapel, rigidly confined to the needs of business. A screen, pierced ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... was genuine and comic, partaking of tragedy and despair. Desnoyers was called in; also the guests and the two guides, with servants forming a picturesque and interested background, so that Ringfield suddenly found himself the centre of an admiring, friendly, ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... coach-boy, as they called him on account of his small size, in spite of his being no longer young. He was a tiny little man, brisk, snub-nosed, curly-headed, with an everlastingly smiling, childish face, and little eyes, like a mouse's. He was a great joker, a most comic fellow; he was great at all sorts of tricks—he used to fly kites, let off fireworks and rockets, to play all sorts of games, gallop standing up on the horse's back, fly higher than all the rest in the swing, and could ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of those who profess to see some impropriety in the introduction of real names into a narrative of this kind, that objections precisely similar to theirs were long ago raised, and long ago disposed of, in the case of Parliamentary reports, newspaper articles, society papers, and comic publications of all kinds; and, further, that I have never received the slightest intimation that my literary methods were displeasing to the illustrious personages whom my narratives ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... young life worthily and gloriously sacrificed to redeem the liberty of mankind, instead of to expiate the heedlessness and folly of their fathers, and expiate it in vain. We had even to assume that the parents and not the children had made the sacrifice, until at last the comic papers were driven to satirize fat old men, sitting comfortably in club chairs, and boasting of the sons they had ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... Dramatic Works of the more modern Macklin, Garrick, Foote, Colman, or Sheridan. A good copy too of Moliere, in French, I much want. Any other good dramatic authors in that language I want also; but comic authors chiefly, though I should wish to have Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire too. I am in no hurry for all, or any of these, but if you accidentally meet with them very-cheap, get them ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... not generally known—was dramatised and produced at Covent Garden, but had a very short run, and was an utter failure, as might have been expected. Mrs. Gore was requested to adapt it for the stage by the chief comic actors of the day, and she writes to Miss Ferrier on ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... corner just where 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 unto ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... '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 ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur: he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass, the tragic and the comic indifferently and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point, finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the scrutiny ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... the Haymarket theatre, the farce of the Lying Valet was to be performed, Sharp, by Mr. Shuter; but that comedian being absent, an apology was made, and it was announced that the part would be undertaken by Mr. Weston, whose transcendent comic powers were not then sufficiently appreciated. Coming on with Mrs. Gardner, in the part of Kitty Pry, there was a tumultuous call of "Shuter! Shuter!" but Tom put them all in good temper, by asking, with irresistibly quaint ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... 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
... Roscoe Day, D.D., S.T.D., LL.D., D.C.L., L.H.D., a leading light of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who offers himself as comic relief in our Clerical Vaudeville. Dr. Day is Chancellor of Syracuse University, a branch of the Mental Munitions Department of the Standard Oil Company; his function being to manufacture intellectual weapons and explosives to be used in defense of the ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... [1] The comic performances of the Athenians were usually brought out at a festival of Bacchus, which lasted for three days. The first of these was devoted to the tapping of their wine-casks; the second to boundless jollity (Plato specifies a town, but not Athens, every single inhabitant of which was found ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... 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
... question was put in such a comic manner, with that one eye tipped up towards him, that Guly could not repress a smile; but he cordially satisfied him on that point, feeling still able, in spite of his diminished salary, to pay for a beggar's dinner, ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... Sir Lionel had made another tender of his hand to another lady ten or twelve days since, but to this must be added the fact that all Littlebath knew that he had done so. Miss Todd, after the first ebullition of her comic spleen, had not said much about it; but Miss P. Gauntlet's tongue had not been idle. She, perhaps, had told it only to the godly; but the godly, let them be ever so exclusive, must have some intercourse ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... story in the 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 of those productions in which the reader is expected to collaborate. The author has deliberately ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... the columns of the rank and file. They didn't want the grand duke themselves, but they didn't want Blakely's mother to have him; Blakely's mother and Mrs. Sanderson-Spear, and Mrs. Tudor Carstairs. In a way, it was better than a comic opera; ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... and humorous pieces, which derived their chief merit from the circumstances which suggested them; and were calculated rather to excite a moment's laughter in the merry circle of schoolfellows, than to be cited as specimens of the author's comic powers, particularly when we reflect, that the broadly humorous was never Pushkin's favourite or even successful manner of writing: in the delicate, subdued, Cervantes tone of humour, however, he was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... of so much time being taken up by his work for the professor, he did little for the comic weeklies. But occasionally, through his friend, the artist, a five or ten-dollar bill came into his hands. He bought himself a new suit, and some other articles which he found he needed, and wrote home to ask his mother if she wished ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... honesty, is a man to be envied. If it had been eighty pound, the luxuriousness of feeling would have been increased. Every pound lost, would have been a hundredweight of happiness gained. The still small voice, Christopher,' cries Brass, smiling, and tapping himself on the bosom, 'is a-singing comic songs within me, and ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... big beard, sipped his tea, chatted over his misfortunes in a half-comic, half-serious tone, and ended by promising his sister that he would do his very best to make himself agreeable to the Widow Bold. Then Charlotte followed her father to his own room, softened down his wrath, and persuaded him to say nothing more ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... This comic opera phase came to a head in the famous Drawbaugh case, which lasted for nearly four years, and filled ten thousand pages with its evidence. Having failed on Reis, the German, the opponents of Bell now brought forward an American inventor named Daniel Drawbaugh, and opened up a noisy newspaper ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... a severe sentence to be passed. Isidorus, the Cynic philosopher, said to him aloud, as he was passing along the streets, "You sing the misfortunes of Nauplius well, but behave badly yourself." And Datus, a comic actor, when repeating these words in the piece, "Farewell, father! Farewell mother!" mimicked the gestures of persons drinking and swimming, significantly alluding to the deaths of Claudius and Agrippina: and ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... 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 eyes fiercely watched the turning up of the cards, never ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... answer, and mutual explanation, and gradually the comic side of the affair struck them; each saw how the other had been done, and they burst into roar after roar of such laughter as left them weak and helpless. They had been properly fooled. But the fat bullocks were recovered, and the ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... characters in the Totem and Comic Dances wear masks and carry staves decorated with feathers. Occasionally the women assistants ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... through the French-window, and linked arms with Rose, whilst the two strange figures followed like a couple of characters in a comic opera. ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... Galuppi, Baldassaro (rather Baldassare): b. 1703, in Burano, an island near Venice, and thence called Buranello; d. 1785; a distinguished composer, whose operas, about fifty in number, and mostly comic, were at one time the most popular in Italy; Galuppi is regarded as the father of the Italian ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... far as I know, there are not many who can. It was rather comic, though, to see your ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... saying, my boy. As for my part—why, I don't bother much about a blue tin heaven or a comic-supplement hell, but I'm right smart interested in right here and now. It's a right nice little old world, take it by and large, and I like to help out at whatever comes my way, if it takes fourteen innings. But, so long as you feel that way about it, maybe you'll believe me now, when ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... 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 ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... by reading aloud his proofs and passages not yet published. She described to us 'Boffin,' out of Our Mutual Friend, as admirable. He shows all to Forster before-hand, and consults him as to plot, characters, etc. He has a humorous fashion of giving his little boys comic names; later to appear in his stories. Thus, one known as 'Plorn,' which later appeared as 'Plornish.' This is a pleasant picture of the great writer's domestic life, and it gives also a faint 'adumbration' of what is now forgotten: the ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... described how he had heard of the lady from an artist friend who had originally seen her at a music-hall, and had persuaded her to come and sit to him. The comic haste and relief with which he had now transferred her to Bentley lost nothing in Bentley's telling. Of course she had "a fiend of a temper." "Wish you joy of her! Oh, don't ask me about her! You'll find out for yourself." "I ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... had scarcely died away before Clive began a conversation with a low growl, making remarks of what he apparently considered a comic nature about everything and everybody in the room, with a distinctness that made them entirely audible to those seated around them. Leslie's cheeks flamed and her eyes flashed angrily, but he only seemed to enjoy it the more, and kept ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... of the magnificence 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 ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... and amateurs come in turn to declaim and sing; where the president, Lubin, "decorated with his scarf," shouts the Marseilles Hymn five or six times, "Ca Ira," and other songs of several stanzas, set to tunes of the Comic Opera, and always "out of time, displaying the voice, airs and songs of an exquisite Leander.. . I really believe that, at the last meeting, he sung alone in this manner three quarters of an hour at different times, the assembly repeating ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Sawney (that is, Alexander Pope), taking the change; for it is he, a little lump of flesh, that talks, instead of a little spirit." Dennis's profound gravity contributes an additional feature of the burlesque to these heroi-comic poems themselves, only that Dennis cannot be playful, and will not ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... three weeks! (What's the daughter's name—Daisy?) No, sir—don't you come fooling round here next Sunday, or I'll set the dogs on you. And you wouldn't find me in anyhow, come to think of it. I'm lunching out myself, as it happens—yes sir, lunching out. Is there anything especially comic in my lunching out? I don't often do it, you say? Well, that's no reason why I never should. Who with? Why, with—with old Dr. Bleaker: Dr. Eliphalet Bleaker. No, you wouldn't know about him—he's only an old friend of your mother's ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... 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 ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... using tracing paper, making the lines with a fine crow-quill and ink. Then you can easily trace from these copies through the ground glass. We also made some very good sets of shadow pictures by cutting out suitable sketches in paper from the comic and other illustrated journals, and mounting them between two sheets of glass. These answered admirably, and when carefully cut out, no one would believe, when thrown on the sheet, that ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... Tim? Are there not? Listen! You'll see!" She held up a tiny forefinger to the great man towering above her. As he looked down on her, so pixy-like in the twilight of the pines, he felt his flesh creep. She seemed to be waiting for something infinitely comic which yet should startle her. She was poised, half turned as though for flight, yet hung so, without a quiver in an endless listening pause. The man tried in vain to remember the name of a single saint, so held was he by ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... and Walpole. Frederick the Great. Croker's Boswell's Johnson. Hallam's Constitutional History. Warren Hastings. (3d. sewed, 6d. cloth.) The Earl of Chatham (Two Essays). Ranke and Gladstone. Milton and Machiavelli. Lord Bacon. Lord Clive. Lord Byron, and The Comic Dramatists ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... included, to promenade in front of the assembled crowd, in "full dress," and then, after we 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 as a champion boozer—for I know that the Herald ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... causes so slight as any by possibility supposable in the trivial Rezenvelt. To feel teased by such a man, to dislike him, occasionally to present him with your compliments in the shape of a duodecimo kick—well and good, nothing but right. And the plot manifestly tended to a comic issue. But murder!—a Macbeth murder!—not the injury so much as the man himself was incommensurate, was too slight by a thousand degrees for so appalling a catastrophe. It reacts upon De Montford, making ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... deficiency, dearth, paucity, scarcity, deficit. Lame, crippled, halt, deformed, maimed, disabled. Large, great, big, huge, immense, colossal, gigantic, extensive, vast, massive, unwieldy, bulky. Laughable, comical, comic, farcical, ludicrous, ridiculous, funny, droll. Lead, guide, conduct, escort, convoy. Lengthen, prolong, protract, extend. Lessen, decrease, diminish, reduce, abate, curtail, moderate, mitigate, palliate. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... land and sea toward Pozzuoli, which is so interesting as the scene of Jove's memorable struggle with the Titans, and just when we were really beginning to feel equal to it, a company of minstrels suddenly burst upon us with guitars and mandolins and comic songs much dramatized, while the immediate natives offered us violets and other distracting flowers. In the effect, art and nature combined to neutralize each other, as they do with us, for instance, in those restaurants where they have music during dinner, and where you do not ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... pit. Kallias now acted most cruelly and wickedly. He took the gold, and killed the poor man for fear that he should tell it to the others. It is said that ever afterwards the descendants of Kallias were jeered at by the comic poets, as being of the family of the man who found the gold ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... Dodgson's illustrations in Misch-Masch, a periodical of the nature of The Rectory Umbrella, except that it contained printed stories and poems by the editor, cut out of the various newspapers to which he had contributed them. Of the comic papers of that day Punch, of course, held the foremost place, but it was not without rivals; there was a certain paper called Diogenes, then very near its end, which imitated Punch's style, and in ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... could, of course, be no piano accompaniment, but the girls made up for it by a liberal clashing of cymbals, rattling of castanets, and jingling of tambourines. They were as "cute" and "coony" as they knew how to be, putting a great deal of action into the songs, and adding a few comic asides. At Raymonde's suggestion, they had decided during the performance of "The Darkies' Frolic" to dance a lively kind of combined fox-trot and cake-walk measure to illustrate the words. They had ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... the war, when we began to think Maryland had "breathed and burned" long enough, and ought to "come." What part of her did come was first-class. How the woods did ring with song! There were patriotic songs, romantic and love songs, sarcastic, comic, and war songs, pirates' glees, plantation melodies, lullabies, good old hymn tunes, anthems, Sunday-school songs, and everything but vulgar and obscene songs; these were scarcely ever heard, and were nowhere in the army well ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... 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 you to help ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... naked rock, an active imagination sees forms of men and of animals in endless whimsical repetitions, may sometimes have suggested the particular form of the ludicrous which appears in the popular legend. But the natural instinct of humour which saw physical features in a comic light, and threw a playful human interest over the whole face of nature, was a distinctively. Teutonic characteristic." There opens out here an unexplored region for original research. Taking the nature-mystic's mode of experience as a basis for enquiry, how far is the comic a purely ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... Racine's work won the palm. The rivalry created a bitterness between the two authors, of which, naturally, the defeated one tasted the more deeply. An ill-considered pleasantry, too, of Racine's, in making, out of one of Corneille's tragic lines in his "Cid," a comic line in "The Suitors," hurt the old man's pride. That pride suffered a worse hurt still. The chief Parisian theatre, completely occupied with the works of his victorious rival, rejected tragedies offered ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... were a stalwart gang.... Their talk was as muscular as their arms. When these laughed, as only men fresh and hearty and in the open air can laugh, the world became mainly grotesque: it seemed at once a comic thing to live,—a subject for chuckling, that we were bipeds, with noses,—a thing to roar at, that we had all met there from the wide world, to hobnob by a frolicsome fire with tin pots of coffee, and partake of crisped bacon and toasted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... it certainly has many of the same characteristics. Calkins defines a sense of humor as "enjoyment of an unessential incongruity.... This incongruity must be, as has been said, an unessential one, else the mood of the observer changes from happiness to unhappiness, and the comic becomes the pathetic. A fall on the ice which seemed to offer only a ludicrous contrast between the dignity and grace of the man erect and the ungainly attitude of the falling figure ceases utterly to be funny when it is seen to entail some physical injury; ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... stick in my throat? Oh, Fanny, is it his legs, think you, or is it his title?" Through all her sorrow—and she was very sorrowful—Mrs. Robarts could not help smiling. And, indeed, there was every now and then something even in Lucy's look that was almost comic. She acted the irony so well with which she strove to throw ridicule on herself! "Do laugh at me," she said. "Nothing on earth will do me so much good as that; nothing, unless it be starvation and a whip. If you would only tell me that I must be a sneak and an idiot to care for a ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... years in a big school. Of one thing, however, Margaret felt quite convinced. If Eleanor had known of the predicament in which Margaret was placed, she would, after a moment or two of consternation, have gone off into fits of laughter. And no doubt the situation had its comic side; even Margaret, full of alarm as she was, could not restrain a smile as she thought of the very queer governess that she ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... in his mind out of the abandoned abduction scheme. This plan was as brief and simple as it was horrible. Powell, alias Payne, the stalwart, brutal, simple-minded boy from Florida, was to murder Seward; Atzerodt, the comic villain of the drama, was assigned to remove Andrew Johnson; Booth reserved for himself the most conspicuous role of the tragedy. It was Herold's duty to attend him as page and aid him in his escape. Minor parts were given to stage-carpenters and other hangers-on, who probably did not understand ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... is a peremptory little body, with a great deal of human nature in her, who wins our hearts by her comic speeches and funny ways. She complains of being bewitched by people, and the wind 'blows her out,' and she thinks if her comrade dies in the snow-storm she will be 'dreadfully 'shamed of it,' and has rather a lively time, ...
— Prudy Keeping House • Sophie May
... and I called the attention of Don Felipe Agoncillo to this remarkable intelligence and asked him what he thought of it. He said emphatically that it was "Nothing," "No true," "Nothing at all," and he laughed at the comic idea. There was also in the Salt Lake newspapers a statement that the Aguinaldo 'government' had sent to President McKinley a letter strongly expressing good-will and gratitude. There did not seem to be much news in this for Don Felipe, ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... high-class comedy—"to describe individual ages and classes," one must admit that I am entitled to do so. I must remark in advance that neither Koerner nor Kleist has done anything for high-class comedy. But Kleist in his Broken Pitcher has drawn a comic character-picture which is so full of life that it reminds us of Shakespeare, if of any one, while Koerner in his Nightwatchman has drawn nothing but a funny caricature; with the former the character shapes the situations, whereas with the latter the situations shape the characters, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... naturally learned: he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards and found her there. I cannot say, he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, and insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him. No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets, ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... the bride sat, waiting for the meeting; and when Emma did really come, very tragico-comic, half pleasure, half tears, was the hearty embrace between the two women. Mr. Harper stood and looked on—he played the young husband as composedly as he had done the lover and the bridegroom, except for a slight jealous movement as he saw the clinging, the kisses, the tears, which, with the warmth ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... astonishing sight, he was so fat, so heavy, so red. He was one of those enormous beings with whom Death seems to be amusing himself—playing perfidious tricks and pranks, investing with an irresistibly comic air his slow work of destruction. Instead of manifesting his approach, as with others, in white hairs, in emaciation, in wrinkles, in the gradual collapse which makes the onlookers say: "Gad! how he has changed!" he took a malicious pleasure ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... curious scene, and, under other circumstances, might have amused me. There was something irresistibly comic in the puzzled looks of the actors; but I had been too deeply affected by the tragedy to laugh at the farce. There was too much of horror around me. Seguin perhaps dead; she gone for ever, the slave of the brutal savage. My own peril, too, at the moment; for I knew not how soon I might be discovered ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... first literary success came with some short stories contributed to the magazines, which appeared in book form as Sketches by Boz (1835). A publisher marked these sketches, engaged Dickens to write the text or letterpress for some comic pictures, and the result was Pickwick, which took England and America by storm. Then followed Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Old Curiosity Shop,—a flood of works that made readers rub their eyes, wondering if such a fountain of laughter ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... though without education, learns everything. He possessed an inexhaustible, imperturbable store of talk. His words gushed forth abundantly in original remarks, laughable images, the metaphors that flow from the comic genius of crowds. He had the natural picturesqueness of the unadulterated farce. He was brimming over with amusing stories and buffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all repertories of house-painter's nonsense. Being a member of divers of the low haunts called ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... fowls, and an immense root of fresh kava. Speeches were made, after which mats were spread out for the dancers, who had been called by the sound of a bugle. There were two long rows of them, with two comic men and a hunchback, apparently the king's jester. They first sang a song of welcome to us, and then sang, danced, and acted several pieces—all well done and some very droll indeed. The hunchback excelled particularly in an imitation ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... 1728 while still in her teens, Kitty Rafter (1711-1785) quickly became a favorite of the town by virtue of her singing voice, vivacity, and gift for mimicry. Admired first as a singing actress, Miss Rafter in 1731 gave unequivocal notice of her considerable talent as a comic actress in the role of Nell in Coffey's The Devil to Pay, one of several hundred she mastered. Her specialties: Flora in The Wonder, Lady Bab in High Life Below Stairs, Lappet in The Miser, Catherine in Catherine ...
— The Case of Mrs. Clive • Catherine Clive
... 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 there, and ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Dramatic Works, Ben Jonson's, Dryden's, Congreve's, Wycherley's, Vanbrugh's, Gibber's, or any Dramatic Works of the more modern Macklin, Garrick, Foote, Colman, or Sheridan. A good copy too of Moliere, in French, I much want. Any other good dramatic authors in that language I want also; but comic authors chiefly, though I should wish to have Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire too. I am in no hurry for all, or any of these, but if you accidentally meet with them very-cheap, get ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... approach him by pointing out his own route; and by extending our line, and holding on to it, we at last got near enough to take him off the piece of detached ice on which he had providentially scrambled. I never think of the occurrence without a sickening sensation, mixed with a comic recollection of K——'s ejaculations. Whilst walking back with my half-frozen friend, the ice showed itself to be easing off rapidly with the turn of tide. At 1 A.M. we were all free, and a lane of water extending ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... manage to scrape up enough comic subjects, when sadness is so generally prevalent, and how they succeed in making their public laugh spontaneously and heartily, without the slightest remorse or arriere pensee, has been a very interesting ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... between the painter and my brother that they should depart the next day but one; they then began to talk of art. "I'll stick to the 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 ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... only England know are inclined to think that the check-suited fellow countryman is a creation of the French and German comic press. Those who have lived outside of England for some considerable number of years have learned better. The late Senator Hoar in his Autobiography of Seventy Years has some very shrewd remarks about Matthew Arnold. The Senator had a cordial regard for Matthew Arnold—"a ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... close upon the scene of accident before she discerned it. Catching at the same moment a look of annoyance on Flint's face, she swerved a little, as if with intent to pass by, like the priest and the Levite, on the other side; then, reassured by Brady's look of half-comic despair, she set down her basket ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... of porcelain at Sevres, and also added much to the beauty of Paris. He commenced the erection of the Madeleine. Theaters and comic opera-houses were speedily built, and water was distributed over the city by ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... words followed on there was a suggestion of oddity in that awful voice singing a comic song, and there were a few suppressed laughs at the idea. As the song progressed, the utter dreary weariness of the voice, and the rather funny words, compelled the fellows to laugh in uncontrollable bursts; ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... 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 ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... rosettes of black, red, and yellow—as disreputable a lot of individuals as ever turned religion into farce. Whether it was quite worth while suffering their presence for the fun of seeing them mount, when starting for their excursion, is open to question, but that it was a unique and comic sight we were all agreed. The hotel garden, filled with guides, horses, donkeys, and pilgrims; the delicate exhibition of ankles and feet —such feet; the chairs to help the rotund damsels; the swarm of natives round one especially fat woman, who got down after all; the beaming ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... characters of your friends. You must excuse me, but it seems to me odd that Miss Minerva Tattle, who used to treat serious things so lightly, should now be treating light things so seriously. You ought to frequent the comic opera more, and dine with Mrs. Potiphar once a week. If your good humor can't digest such a hors d'oeuvre as little Mrs. Vite, what will you do with such a piece de ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... must we do violence to usage and so stretch the word "Beauty'' as to make it cover all qualities or aspects of objects which have aesthetic value, including those "modifications of the beautiful'' which we know as the sublime, the comic and the rest? But the wider we try in this way to make the denotation of the term the vaguer grows the connotation. We are thus left equally incapable of saying what the quality is, and in which aspect or attribute of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... neighbouring plains. But see where artful Dryden next appears, Grown old in rhyme, but charming even in years. Great Dryden next, whose tuneful Muse affords The sweetest numbers, and the fittest words. Whether in comic sounds or tragic airs She forms her voice, she moves our smiles or tears. If satire or heroic strains she writes, 120 Her hero pleases and her satire bites. From her no harsh unartful numbers fall, She wears all dresses, and she charms in all. How might we fear our English poetry, That ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... The comic elements of eastern and western folk-lore are closely akin, and the Lie-stories, or Luegenmaerchen, in Nos. 4, 8, and 17 of these Indian Tales find their parallels in most European collections. As an example of the close kinship which prevails among the jests which make merry the hearts of men ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... DEAREST CASSANDRA,—The letter which I have this moment received from you has diverted me beyond moderation. I could die of laughter at it, as they used to say at school. You are indeed the finest comic writer ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... female canary. Though unmated, it laid some eggs, and the happy bird was so carried away by her feelings that she would offer food to the eggs, and chatter and twitter, trying, as it seemed, to encourage them to eat! The incident is hardly tragic, neither is it comic. ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... any more of my regard. Enough of this; I must bring my pen to order, for if I were to suffer myself to revise what I have written I should be tempted to throw it in the fire, but I have determined that you shall see my whole heart. I have not yet informed you that I received your serio-comic note on Thursday afternoon, for which accept ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... place, and now, to amuse the Ghent citizens, a couple of little boys came to the cafe and set up a small concert: one played ill on the guitar, but sang, very sweetly, plaintive French ballads; the other was the comic singer; he carried about with him a queer, long, damp-looking, mouldy white hat, with no brim. "Ecoutez," said the waiter to me, "il va faire l'Anglais; c'est tres drole!" The little rogue mounted his immense brimless hat, and, thrusting his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, began ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... almost like that wicked Haman," she said, once, in a serio-comic voice, "and as if he were my Mordecai. I shall never think we have achieved perfect success until I have forced him to shake hands with me." But Nan, who cared very little about ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... from justice, can at all doubt that they are most distressingly affected in their heels with a species of "running itch"? It seems that this malady of their heels operates on these sound-headed and honest-hearted creatures very much like the cork leg in the comic song did on its owner: which, when he had once got started on it, the more he tried to stop it, the more it would run away. At the hazard of wearing this point threadbare, I will relate an anecdote which seems too strikingly in point to be ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... frown could silence the petty battery when it was beginning to be offensive. Without a drawback, therefore, to apprehend where excesses too personal or stinging could be repressed as certainly as the trespasses of a hound, the Plautine master drew from his servant, without anxiety, the comic services which, in the middle ages, were drawn from the professional "fool." This original vice in the constitution of society, though greatly mitigated, in the course of two centuries from the era of Plautus, by the progress of intellectual luxury, was one main fountain of that coarseness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... fright, and astonishment of the various parties present, there was something so exquisitely absurd in the old woman's proceeding, that nearly every one felt inclined to laugh; but the terror of O'Grady kept their risible faculties in check. Fate, however, decreed the finale should be comic; for the cook, suddenly recollecting herself, exclaimed, "Oh, murther! the goose will be burned!" and ran out of the room; a smothered burst of laughter succeeded, which roused the ire of O'Grady, who, making a charge right and left amongst the delinquents, the room was soon cleared, ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... good people of Madrid it is a sermon, full of absolute truth and vivid reality. The class of persons who attend these spectacles is very different from that which you find at the Royal Theatre or the Comic Opera. They are sober, serious bourgeois, who mind their shops and go to mass regularly, and who come to the theatre only in Lent, when the gay world stays away. They would not dream of such an indiscretion as reading the Bible. Their doctrinal ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... certainly sad enough and serious enough without any such serio-comic incidents. Famine was already stalking the country with giant strides, and no palliative measures as yet proposed seemed to be of the slightest avail. Early in January, 1847, O'Connell left on that journey of his which was ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... In vain did the Quexes of this frivolous city hope for even a crumb—there was nothing for them. Mr. ASQUITH came into office, held it, and left it without a single concession to Demos's love of personalia. He did not even wear comic collars or white hats or a single eyeglass or any other grotesquely significant thing; and how much poorer are we in consequence and how much poorer will ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various
... well, somewhere—"the real comic muse is the one under whose laughing mask tears ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... stranger music, I remember thee; I remember the silk shirts, the four sous of Italian cheese, the roll of bread, and the glass of milk, the streets were thy dining-room. And the five-mile walk daily to the suburban music hall where five francs were earned by playing the accompaniments of comic songs. And the wonderful room on the fifth floor, which was furnished when that celebrated heritage of two thousand francs was paid. I remember the fountain that was bought for a wardrobe, and the American organ with all the instruments ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... proved agreeably stimulating to me in another way; a comic writer had attributed an anecdote to him according to which, when his friend Caraffa declared himself an admirer of my music, he had served him his fish without sauce at dinner, and explained in so doing that his friend liked music without melody. ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... 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 ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... theatre; he listens in silence, never hisses, and applauds with measure. Does not the spectacle please him? He chews his buyo and goes out quietly, not to trouble those who may like it. He expects in his plays a combat every fifteen seconds, and all the rest of the time repartee between comic personages, or terrifying metamorphoses. The comedy chosen for this fete was "Prince Villardo, or the Nails Drawn from the Cellar of Infamy," comedy with ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... artistic to preserve a somber note throughout. But I was a realist in those days, and in real life mysteries occur to real persons with their individual humors, and mysterious circumstances are apt to be complicated by comic. The indispensable condition of a good mystery is that it should be able and unable to be solved by the reader, and that the writer's solution should satisfy. Many a mystery runs on breathlessly enough till the denouement is reached, only to ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... didn't," said Ralph complacently. "And Sir Giles didn't get drunk as a lord and tumble about the ballroom, and yell comic—awfully comic—songs, till someone hauled him off to the refreshment-room and filled him up with whiskey till he ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... flowed faster; never had he seen Sophie more beautiful. The audience, however, could not entirely forget the comic scene which they had just witnessed; there was heard ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... story of the African prince who was stolen from his native Angola, no one saw any reason why the Negro should not be a subject for serious treatment on the stage, and the play was a great success, lasting for decades. In 1768, however, was presented at Drury Lane a comic opera, The Padlock, and a very prominent character was Mungo, the slave of a West Indian planter, who got drunk in the second act and was profane throughout the performance. In the course of the evening Mungo entertained the audience with such lines ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... the Indians have been taught a supernatural dread of particular pictures. One of the young men drew, with a piece of charcoal, a figure resembling a frog, on the side of the tent, and by significantly pointing at me, excited peals of merriment from his companions. The caricature was comic; but I soon fixed their attention, by producing my pocket compass, and affecting it with a knife. They have great curiosity, which might easily be directed to the attainment of useful knowledge. As the dirt accumulated about these people was visibly of a communicative nature, ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... criminal folly and 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
... 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
... use them, together with Rabelais, La Bruyere, Moliere, and Diderot, as his best, if not his constant, sources of inspiration. In the stories of the first of the three above-mentioned modern writers, the reader usually meets with some child of poor parentage, who, after most extraordinary and comic experiences, marries the child of a nobleman. In those of the second, the hero or heroine struggles with powerful enemies, is aided by powerful friends, and moves in an atmosphere of blood and mystery until vice is chastized and virtue finally rewarded. The two writers, however, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... the morning there was life and movement on every farm. The doors of the cattle sheds were thrown wide open and the cows were let out. They were prettily coloured, small, supple and sprightly, and so sure-footed that they made the most comic leaps and bounds. After them came the calves and sheep, and it was plainly to be seen that they, too, were in ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... He was sitting in the smoking-room of the club having tea, and listening rather wearily to Surbiton's account of the last comic song at the Gaiety, when the waiter came in with the evening papers. He took up the St. James's, and was listlessly turning over its pages, when this strange heading caught ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... as I held the blind on one side, the sunlight shone full on Mercer, and I hurt myself directly by bursting out into a silent fit of laughter, which drew my bruised face into pain-producing puckers. But it was impossible to help it, all the same, for Mercer's phiz looked so comic. ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... 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 with all the cant ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... All afternoon 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 ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... they had abandoned 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 ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... route led to Mauleon (seventy-two kilometres) via Oloron, straight across Bearn, where the peasants are still of that picturesque mien which one so seldom sees out of the comic-opera chorus. One reads that the Bearnais ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... chocolate leisurely. "Acrobats expect to be laughed at, and certainly this was a most astonishing tour de force. Seriously, my dear," she added, seeing Margaret's troubled look, "how are we to take our Western cousin, if we do not treat her as a comic monstrosity? Is it possible that she is a Montfort? I shall call ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... what Shakespeare thought of men and their motives after he reached maturity, we have but to read this drama; drama it is, but with what other character who shall say? For, like the world's pageant, it is neither tragedy nor comedy, but a tragi-comic history, in which the intrigues of amorous men and light-o'-loves and the brokerage of panders are mingled with the deliberations of sages and the strife and ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... but a long mouth like a pipe; so you can be sure they eat only the smallest sea-creatures. To add to his odd look, the Seahorse moves his eyes in a comic fashion. One eye may roll round and look at you, while the ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... Besides, if, as I suspect, the estate in view be connected with the old haunted castle in which you played the astrologer in your northern tour some twenty years since, I have heard you too often describe the scene with comic unction, to hope you will be deterred from making the purchase. I trust, however, the hospitable gossiping Laird has not run himself upon the shallows, and that his chaplain, whom you so often made us laugh at, is still ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... sermons were frequently either scholastic arguments or popular, often comic tirades against current immorality; the materials were taken from the stories of the saints as much as ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... hurt me. I am Dutch." She was the calmest of us all, for those intermittent 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 ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... 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 of bar-keeping for that day. Indeed the event had ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sixth volume of this series, began in 1842, and lasted ten years. They provide occasion for many diverting anecdotes, and for references to his colleagues who founded the fortunes of that most successful of comic papers; but as on this plan the biographical lines cross and recross each other it is not easy for the reader to obtain a connected or comprehensive view of Thackeray's career. Nevertheless as the system fortunately ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... disappointment was genuine and comic, partaking of tragedy and despair. Desnoyers was called in; also the guests and the two guides, with servants forming a picturesque and interested background, so that Ringfield suddenly found himself the centre of an admiring, ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... drummer in a brass band. "In a few weeks," he said, "I had 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 ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... that, sir," said Gedge, filling the brass cup again from a tall metal bottle. "Still, it do seem rather comic. What makes ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... and 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 as well as Crebillon. Yet I count those persons ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... milk—that's to say, I put my cup in the moonlight. He swears that I use phrases of this kind—'It is easy because it is difficult, though on the other hand it is difficult because it is easy'.... He asserts that I am always looking for a word, always striving 'thither,' and with comic rage inquires: 'whither-thither? whither?' He has also circulated a story about me that I ride at night up and down by the river, singing Schubert's Serenade, or simply moaning, 'Beethoven, Beethoven!' She is, he will say, such an impassioned ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... depends much on their intellectual powers and energy, or on the fruits of these same powers in their forefathers. No excuse is needed for treating this subject in some detail; for, as the German philosopher Schopenhauer remarks, "the final aim of all love intrigues, be they comic or tragic, is really of more importance than all other ends in human life. What it all turns upon is nothing less than the composition of the next generation...It is not the weal or woe of any one ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... his uncle that he might learn to become a sculptor. Before long, while polishing a marble tablet he pressed on it too heavily and broke it. His uncle thrashed him. Lucian's spirit rebelled, and he went home giving the comic reason that his uncle beat him because jealous of the extraordinary power he showed in ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... views, in this final section of the Friedrich-Voltaire Correspondence, at first so barren otherwise and of little entertainment, one finds that this too, when once you CAN "read" it (that is to say, when the scene and its details are visible to you), becomes highly dramatic, Shakspearean-comic or more, for this is Nature's self, who far excels even Shakspeare;—and that the inextricably dark condition of these Letters is a real loss to the ingenuous reader, and especially to the student of Friedrich. Among the frequently recurring topics, one that oftenest ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... called, and leant out of the smoking-room window. He seemed in high spirits. "I was hoping you'd come. I heard you all bear-gardening, but there's better fun up here. I, even I, have won a great victory for the Comic Muse. George Meredith's right—the cause of Comedy and the cause of Truth are really the same; and I, even I, have found tenants for the distressful Cissie Villa. Don't be angry! Don't be angry! You'll forgive me when ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... decorously dull, but in the others we can trace a gradual advance in humorous treatment leading up to the genuine comedy of the alternative Towneley plays. Thus, like Noah and his wife, the shepherds of the adoration early became recognized comic characters, and there can be little doubt of the influence exercised by these scenes upon the later interludes. With the general evolution of the drama we are of course in no wise here concerned: what it imports us to notice is that just as it was the picture of the ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... a face like a comic mask. How should I forget her, by Pluto, whose handmaid she doubtless is at ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... King of Poland that Louis XV. began his incredibly foolish 'secret'—a system of foreign policy conducted by hidden agents behind the backs of his responsible ministers at Versailles and in the Courts of Europe. The results naturally tend to recall a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera of diplomacy. We find magnificent ambassadors gravely trying to carry out the royal orders, and thwarted by the King's secret agents. The King seems to have been too lazy to face his ministers, and ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... Goethe must yield the precedence, though his youthful triumphs were Goetz of Berlichingen and Werther. There was in Tieck's early works the promise, and far more than the promise, of the greatest dramatic poet whom Europe had seen since the days of Calderon; there was a rich, elastic, buoyant, comic spirit, not like the analytical reflection, keen biting wit of Moliere and Congreve, and other comic writers of the satirical school, but like the living merriment, the uncontrollable, exuberant joyousness, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... audience for the whole action of the play. It was, therefore, to be a scene of which people did not easily tire and that remained interesting, unobtrusive and formally neat. To find such a scene it is necessary to refer back to days when the Comic and the Tragic scenes were architectural and permanent. This I did and, taking Palladio's magnificent scene at Vicenza, by a shameless process of reductio ad absurdum, evolved the scene that is now in use at Hammersmith. Palladio and ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... more than anything else, and made her ready to leave all to their mercy, save for deference to Edgar, and gratitude to Felix. Robina would look on soberly enough in admiration; but Lance's notions of art were comic, and Fulbert's were arbitrary, and both were imperiously carried out with due contempt for the inferior sex, and were sure to ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... black fellow, whose sobriquet is Othello, manages the castanets, and there is a tolerable flute played by one of the afterguard. The concerts usually commence with sentimental songs, such as "Home, sweet Home," and the Canadian Boat Song: but the comic always carries off the palm; "Jim along Josey," "Lucy Long," "Old Dan Tucker," and a hundred others of the same character, are listened to delightedly by the crowd of men and boys collected round the fore-hatch, ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... a breach of privilege. The House refused to hear witnesses on Kielly's behalf, treated the charge as proved, and demanded that he should apologize at the bar of the House. Kielly refused, adding that Kent was a liar and a coward. Then followed an interlude of comic opera. Kielly was committed, whereupon Mr Justice Lilly granted a writ of habeas corpus. This was not to be borne by the imperious Assembly, and the Speaker promptly issued his warrant for the re-arrest of Kielly, ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... 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 ruin of private persons, ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... 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 caused him ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... of Cicero the tragedies of Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius, and the comedies of Plautus were those chiefly produced. While the latter had been in the previous period supplanted by the more tasteful but in point of comic vigour far inferior Terence, Roscius and Varro, or in other words the theatre and philology, co-operated to procure for him a resurrection similar to that which Shakespeare experienced at the hands of Garrick and Johnson; but even ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... "Just the Cheese" (Vol. vii., p. 617.).—This phrase is only some ten or twelve years old. Its origin was this:—Some desperate witty fellows, by way of giving a comic turn to the phrase "C'est une autre chose," used to translate it, "That is another cheese;" and after awhile these words became "household words," and when anything positive or specific was intended to be pointed out, "That's the cheese" became adopted, which is nearly ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... having won "le prix de solfege" at the Marseille Conservatoire, and her talent having come to the ears of Mr. Plunkett, the director of the Palais Royal, he engaged her for the Palais Royal in Paris, where she created the part of La Chaste Suzanne, by Paul Ferrier. Giving up comic opera for comedy, Jane Hading went to the Gymnase, where she created the part of Claire de Beaulieu in "Le Maitre de Forges." London had the opportunity of seeing her in that and "Prince Zilah," by Jules Claretie, later on, and fully indorsed the Parisian ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... ascend the steps and go away together. SOPHY comes to the stone bench on the left, upon which she deposits her bag. She opens the bag, produces a little mirror and a comb, and puts her "fringe" in order—humming as she does so an air from the latest comic opera. Then she returns the comb and mirror to the bag and—bag in hand—prepares to depart. While this is going on QUEX returns, above the low hedge. He ascends the steps and looks off into the distance, watching the retreating figure of the DUCHESS. ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... and Spanish theatres does not consist merely in the bold neglect of the Unities of Place and Time, and 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. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... some tame landscape desolately bare Is charmed by sunshine into seeming fair; So, gentle friends, if you your smiles bestow, That which is tame in us will not seem so. Our play is a charade. We split the word, Each syllable an act, the whole a third; My first we show you by a comic play, Old, but not less the welcome, I dare say. My second will be brought upon the stage From lisping childhood down to palsied age. Last, but not least, our country's joy and pride, A British Jury will my whole decide; But what's the word you'll ask ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... of their Hettys and Maggies and Rosamonds and Gwendolens, suffers the abatement that these slimnesses are, when figuring as the main props of the theme, never suffered to be sole ministers of its appeal, but have their inadequacy eked out with comic relief and underplots, as the playwrights say, when not with murders and battles and the great mutations of the world. If they are shown as "mattering" as much as they could possibly pretend to, the proof of it is in a hundred other persons, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... 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 ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... saw Tidy advancing, however, she ceased her evolutions, and, turning to the others with a comic grimace, she bade them hold off, while she held discourse ...
— Step by Step - or, Tidy's Way to Freedom • The American Tract Society
... and threatened rebellion, he threatened in turn that he would rule them with a rod of iron, as if their actual conditions were not bad enough. Some of his oppressions were of a fantasticality bordering on comic opera: travellers had to give up their provisions at the frontier and eat the official bread of Monaco; ships entering the port were confiscated if they had brought more loaves than sufficed them for their voyage thither; no man might cut his own wood without leave of the ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... "Guilty Woman," which won for you your first medal? And do you remember the breakfast at Ledoyen's on Varnishing Day? There were more than twenty-five at a table intended for ten. What follies we committed, especially that little, little—what did he call himself—I mean that little comic fellow, who was always making portraits which resembled no one? Oh, yes, Tavernier! And you took me home with you to your studio, where you had two great manikins which frightened me so, and I called to you, ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... person, causing roars of laughter by a description of a night in the garden of a Boarding School, into which he had been entrapped on the pretext that the actor was about to run away with one of the young ladies. In the most comic fashion, he related how he had been captured by the whole school, headed by its principal, and locked up in a cupboard, and was only released by his faithful man, Sam, whom, personally, some of them knew—(loud applause.) ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... 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 ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... the word. The noise he made was more like the squeaking of a pencil on a slate; it set one's teeth on edge; the violin itself seemed to squeal with pain. And while he fiddled, and the young man hammered at his zither, the old woman and girl slowly revolved in a waltz. It may sound comic to hear about, but if you could have seen! ... It fairly plucked at one's heart. I do not think that I have ever in my life witnessed anything quite so sad. The little crowd outside, negroes, mind you, ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... can go for many miles at a speed which will tax a good 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 hat, battered and bruised out of all shape, on his head. In his hand he ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... she says: but when the Dialogue grew hot, then she could not help trying to get her hands free; and that, as the Previlles told her, sufficiently told her when Action should begin, and not till then, whether in Grave or Comic. This anecdote (told by Contat herself) has almost an exact counterpart in Mrs. Siddons' practice: who recited even Lear's Curse with her hands and arms close to her side like an Egyptian Figure, and Sir Walter Scott, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... enough money to buy cigarettes. I say, 'Let me take a profession. Let me be a soldier.' Every one rises up and protests against the idea of a Saracinesca serving in the Italian army. Why? Remember that your father was a volunteer officer under Pope Pius Ninth.' It is comic. He spent an afternoon on the Pincio for his convictions, and then retired into private life. 'Let me serve in a foreign army—France, Austria, Russia, I do not care.' They are more horrified than ever. 'You have not a spark of patriotism! To serve a foreign ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... "I have a court chaplain charged with these affairs. Rather tell me about the latest comic opera." ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... lance, by which otherwise they must have been severely wounded. The dramatic pieces were performed by both sexes, and sometimes by persons of the highest quality. They were of a mixed character, serious, and comic, but for want of a thorough acquaintance with the language, they have been very imperfectly described to us. Thus, oppressed by no care, burdened by no toil, tormented by no passion, seldom visited by sickness, their wants easily satisfied, and their pleasures ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... attention was arrested by a small shop at the corner, a vivid contrast to its neighbours. It was the typical shop of the poor quarter, a shop entirely English. Here were vended tobacco and sweets, cheap pipes of clay and cherry wood; penny exercise-books and penholders jostled for precedence with comic songs, and story papers with appalling cuts showed that romance claimed its place beside the actualities of the evening paper, the bills of which fluttered at the doorway. Dyson glanced up at the name above the door, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... two stay sleepily there, looking at the stars like two cats, when I am trying to lure you indoors with the latest comic-opera music! Meinheer van Hert, Mister Pym says, ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... all with the chase, should give any heed to me. The idea that a French officer might be riding with them was too absurd to enter their minds. I laughed as I rode, for, indeed, amid all the danger, there was something of comic in ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... battlefield—half battleship, half caterpillar—which have given the Germans the surprise of their lives, a surprise all the more effective for being sudden and complete. The Germans, no doubt, have their surprise packets in store for us, but we can safely predict that they are not likely to be at once so comic and so efficient as these unlovely but painstaking monsters. As an officer at the front writes to a friend: "These animals look so dreadfully competent, I am quite sure they can swim. Thus, any day now, as you go to your business in the City, you may meet ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... perpetual and unfathomable mystery to her. Where the flesh leg left off and the wooden leg began, and if, when the wooden leg stumped so loud and hard on the floor, it did not hurt the flesh leg at the other end, puzzled little Hetty's head for many a long hour. Her grandfather's frequent and comic references to the honest old wooden pin did not diminish her perplexities. He was something of a wag, the old Squire; and nothing came handier to him, in the way of a joke, than a joke at his own expense. When he was ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... Equestrians, contortionists, mimes, singers, were readily found in the city, where a brave or an honest man had become rare indeed. What a performance lacked in art, he supplied by shamelessness; and nowhere was laughter so hearty, or the crowd so dense, as in that part of the circus where comic singers and dancers vied with the grossest traditions ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... they cried agean, for nawther on em felt at all inclin'd for readin noa comic stooaries, or thowt at they'd find much comfort i'th Yorksher dialect that neet; soa Louisa put em back into th' box an nivver oppen'd em—but as th' box wor rayther thin, shoo had to slide em in one at a time, an as shoo wor puttin in th' second one, th' remainin almanac slipt off her ...
— Yorkshire Tales. Third Series - Amusing sketches of Yorkshire Life in the Yorkshire Dialect • John Hartley
... two kinds of critics of such work as ours. First there is the wide public for whom we work and by whom we are paid; "who lives to please must please to live"; and who lives by drawing for a comic periodical must manage to please the greater number. The judgment of this critic, though often sound, is not infallible; but his verdict for the time being is final, and by it we, who live by our wits and from hand to mouth, must either stand ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... 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 with ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... microscope to tell the difference between them and a well-rehearsed society scene on the stage of the Francais! That's their model, of course. It is positively touching to see old Colonel Patterson subduing his twang and shutting the lid down on his box of comic stories. I should think Mrs. Patterson might allow him at least that one about the cowboy and the tenderfoot who wanted to take ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the smith, in a species of serio-comic desperation, when they had all assembled below, "let's ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... Brian 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 in skipping about the stage when ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... Lance was allowed to bring his friend Harewood to a concert of the choral society; and on the following evening Alice Knevett came to tea, and there was a series of wonderful charades, chiefly got up by Clement and Robina, and of comic songs by Lance and Bill Harewood—all with such success, that Alice declared that she had never seen anything so delightful in all her experience ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Chillingly who has, in any way, distinguished himself above his fellows. That name has been a dead weight on my intellectual energies. In the catalogue of illustrious Englishmen there is, I think, no immortal Sir Peter, except Sir Peter Teazle, and he only exists on the comic stage." ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... human life is; how childish its ambitions, how ridiculous its pomps, how trivial its dignities, how cheap its heroisms, how capricious its course, how brief its flight, how stingy in happinesses, how opulent in miseries, how few its prides, how multitudinous its humiliations, how comic its tragedies, how tragic its comedies, how wearisome and monotonous its repetition of its stupid history through the ages, with never the introduction of a new detail; how hard it has tried, from the Creation down, to play itself ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... of those unseen comedies, played in the secret regions of the consciousness between two beings of whom one will be the dupe of the other, though it keeps on this side of wickedness; one of those dark and comic dramas to which that of Tartuffe is mere child's play,—dramas that do not enter the scenic domain, although they are natural, conceivable, and even justifiable by necessity; dramas which may be characterized as not vice, only the other ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... had once been quite a nice lobby. But now the rug was worn to strings and the wallpaper had acquired a glaze of dirt that made it look like ancient newspapers. Behind the scarred ruin of an oak counter stood a clerk so fat Rick wondered how the floor could support him. He was reading a comic book, and he didn't even look up ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... of Soapers the King On Tuesdays at Tom's does appear, And when he does talk or does sing, To him ne'er a one can come near. For he talks with such ease and such grace, That all charm'd to attention we sit, And he sings with so comic a face That our sides are just ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... Civil War period, which pictures the "darky" on the old plantation, devoted to "young Massa" or "old Miss,"—the Negro of slavery. Then there are stories of recent times in which the Negro is used purely for comic effect, a sort of minstrel-show character. Neither of these is the Negro of to-day. A truer picture is found in the stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar. The following story is from his ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... sleepless drew him alertly to his feet, and showed him all his companions standing about the lawn in similar attitudes of expectancy. There was no need to ask what they were expecting. They were waiting to hear the nocturnal experiences, comic or commonplace or whatever they might prove to be, of that eccentric friend, whose experiment (whether from some subconscious fear or some fancy of honor) they had not ventured to interrupt. Hour followed hour, and still nothing stirred in the wood save an occasional bird. ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... it, child. You've retained from your old life certain conceptions of what's the thing which are—you'll forgive me for saying it—just a little like those of the comic papers. ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... Nathan, "I ask myself sometimes whether du Bruel is really deceived. Truly there is nothing more comic, nothing stranger than the sight of a careless young fellow ruling a married couple, his slightest whims received as law, the weightiest decisions revoked at a word from him. That dinner incident, as you can see, is repeated ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... many miles at a speed which will tax a good 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 hat, battered and bruised out ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... 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 ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... determined efforts at restoring the natural and spontaneous good cheer which the party appeared to have lost, but her exertions were only partially successful, and although Agatha Fearwell and Cleopatra sang other songs, the recollection of that tragico-comic Les Epouseuses du Berry had evidently sunk too deeply ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... 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 turned ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... faith of the audience. To all foreigners the show is at first shocking and then tedious; to the good people of Madrid it is a sermon, full of absolute truth and vivid reality. The class of persons who attend these spectacles is very different from that which you find at the Royal Theatre or the Comic Opera. They are sober, serious bourgeois, who mind their shops and go to mass regularly, and who come to the theatre only in Lent, when the gay world stays away. They would not dream of such an indiscretion ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... Make as much fun as you like about it; but tell me what it is. You won't? Then I'll find out all about it from Madonna. She knows, of course; and she'll tell me. Look here, Mrs. Blyth; I'm not going to get up till she's told me everything." And Zack, with a comic gesture of entreaty, dropped on his knees by Madonna's chair; preventing her from leaving it, which she tried to do, by taking immediate possession of the slate that ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... 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
... replied, "but I get more fun from you than from anybody, and when you are in a serious mood you are the most comic man I know. He's delicious, ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... for the Francais. He has written one hundred and fifty vaudevilles for the Gymnase. As a lyrical poet he stands unequalled for the number of his libretti, having written the poetry of forty grand operas and of one hundred comic operas. His works, exclusive of novels, are three hundred and forty ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... ridicule 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 health, ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... he made, 'Tis now for better reasons—to be paid. Believe him, he has known the world too long, And seen the death of much immortal song. 20 He says, poor poets lost, while players won, As pimps grow rich, while gallants are undone. Though Tom the poet writ with ease and pleasure, The comic Tom abounds in other treasure. Fame is at best an unperforming cheat; But 'tis substantial happiness to eat. Let ease, his last request, be of your giving, Nor force him to be damn'd to get ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... there formerly was movement and life is now lethargy and death. An act of love becomes a transaction long discussed and almost, as it were, settled by notarial seal. But we have in another place shown that we never refuse to seize upon the comic element in a matrimonial crisis, although here we may be permitted to disdain the diversion which the muse of Verville and of Marshall have found in the treachery of feminine manoeuvres, the insulting audacity of their talk, amid the cold-blooded cynicism which they exhibit ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... showing a diction altogether remarkable, two well-known gymnasts doing wonderful stunts on horizontal bars, a prize pupil from the Conservatory at Nantes acting, as only the French can, in a well- known little comedy, two clever, comic monologists of the La Scala sort, and as good as I ever heard even there, and a regimental band which plays good music remarkably. There is even a Prix de Rome in the regiment, but he is en conge, so I 've not heard him yet. I wonder if you take it in? Do you realize ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... its origin, there has, nevertheless, remained an association with the dance that will continue for all time. Especially is this true of the lighter branch of the drama, comedy, and the modern combination known as musical comedy or comic opera. In the popular stage entertainments of the day dancing forms an important feature of a large percentage of all productions that appear in the leading theatres. In many of the classical plays, by great dramatists, that are annually chosen for revivals, the dance appears, and the actor or ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... enough, she had felt sore and angry about it, and the comments in the newspapers had not been consolatory. She had learned to dread even the comic papers; but there was nothing spiteful in the one which Tom produced that evening. ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... Aristophanes has not spared the Dionysiac festivals. But the raillery and sarcasm of a comic writer must always be received with many grains of allowance. He has, at least, been candid enough to confess that no one could be initiated who had been guilty of any crime against his country or the public security.—Ranae, v. 360-365.—Euripides makes ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... energy, or on the fruits of these same powers in their forefathers. No excuse is needed for treating this subject in some detail; for, as the German philosopher Schopenhauer remarks, "the final aim of all love intrigues, be they comic or tragic, is really of more importance than all other ends in human life. What it all turns upon is nothing less than the composition of the next generation...It is not the weal or woe of any one individual, but that of the human race to come, which is here at ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... summer; how in winter time to skate; How to hold the deadly rifle; how a yacht to navigate; How to make the winning hazard with an effort sure and strong; How to play the maddening comet, how to sing a comic song; How to 'utilize' Professors; how to purify the Cam; How to brew a sherry cobbler, and to make red-currant jam. All the arts which now we practise in a desultory way Shall be taught us to perfection, when we own the Ladies' sway." Thus ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... to write a comic description of the duel. His father-in-law would read it and laugh. A good story, told or written, was more than meat and drink ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... pattens 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 ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... literature, as I think may be found by examining my notes to my translation of Heine's works, and went with Field several times to Frankfort, to attend the theatre, and otherwise amuse ourselves. There I once made the acquaintance of the very famous comic actor Hasselt. He was a grave, almost melancholy man when off the stage, very ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... every hand had been against him. In many cities he had stood before sarcastic 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 ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... leant out of the smoking-room window. He seemed in high spirits. "I was hoping you'd come. I heard you all bear-gardening, but there's better fun up here. I, even I, have won a great victory for the Comic Muse. George Meredith's right—the cause of Comedy and the cause of Truth are really the same; and I, even I, have found tenants for the distressful Cissie Villa. Don't be angry! Don't be angry! You'll forgive me when ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... father a rich, strong, musical, and sympathetic voice, which made him a pleasant speaker and afterward a successful public reader. He very naturally excelled in conversation at table and in getting up little comic almanacs, satirizing the boys, but always in good-humor, never descending to anything bitter or vulgar. Indeed, in all his fun, he showed ever a certain purity and ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... graver character than usually associated with comic opera is naturally afforded by Mr. HAYDYN COFFIN. Miss PHYLLIS BROUGHTON is introduced not only to sing but to dance, and performs the latter accomplishment with a grace not to be surpassed, and only to be equalled by Miss KATE VAUGHAN. Mr. ASHLEY, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... more peculiar, sir,' replied Mr Wopples, restoring the bulky packet of tickets to his pocket, 'dealing as it does with the adventures of a youth who hides his father's will in a cruet stand, which is afterwards annexed by a comic bailiff.' ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... dead Past bury its dead" would be a better saying if the Past ever died. The persistence of the Past is one of those tragi-comic blessings which each new age denies, coming cocksure on to the stage to mouth its claim to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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; and if he wrote he wanted to write, not a love letter—Reggie ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... unconscious sleep, from which she was aroused into somnambulism and delirium. In her waking state she was a modest well-behaved girl, and spoke but little. In the somnambulic state, she appeared quite another being; evinced considerable powers of mimicry; sang comic songs; was obedient to every motion of her magnetiser; and was believed to have the power of prophesying the return of her illness — the means of cure, and even the death or recovery of other ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... 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
... sure that I agree that that's Hardy's philosophy. It's fair enough to say that Hardy's stories, and still more his poems, paint chiefly the gloomy and hopeless situations in life, just as Mark Twain and Aristophanes painted the comic ones. But Mark Twain was very far from thinking the world was a joke, and I doubt whether Hardy regards it ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... learned, he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature, he looked inwards and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat and insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him—no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... subjects, he was, as we have seen, popularly termed the King of the Commons. For the purpose of seeing that justice was regularly administered, and frequently from the less justifiable motive of gallantry, he used to traverse the vicinage of his several palaces in various disguises. The two excellent comic songs entitled The Gaberlunzie Man and We'll gae nae mair a roving are said to have been founded upon the success of his amorous adventures when travelling in the disguise of a beggar. The latter is perhaps the best comic ballad ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... right," he remarked. "Now listen attentively to me. The skipper has one overpowering weakness, and that is a fondness for a comic song. Let him be ever so exasperated, a comic song—a good comic song, mind you—never fails to soothe him. Therefore, if he should happen to-night, by any chance, to refer to your unfortunate lapse of duty yesterday, listen patiently ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... MAN (with a comic gesture of despair). It's no use, dear lady: I can't make you see it from the professional point of view. (As he turns away to get back to the ottoman, the firing begins again ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... of Prussia, but the industry was not a success until Napoleon took it up and in 1810 offered a prize of a million francs for a practical process. How the French did make fun of him for this crazy notion! In a comic paper of that day you will find a cartoon of Napoleon in the nursery beside the cradle of his son and heir, the King of Rome—known to the readers of Rostand as l'Aiglon. The Emperor is squeezing the juice of a beet into his coffee and the nurse ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... charming fantasia on the old theme of Cinderella, both succeeded in hitting Parisian taste. No less fortunate was 'Griselidis' (1901), a quasi-mediaeval musical comedy, founded upon the legend of Patient Grizel, and touching the verge of pantomime in the characters of a comic Devil and his shrewish spouse. Of Massenet's later works none has been more successful than 'Le Jongleur de Notre Dame' (1902), which, besides winning the favour of Paris, has been performed at Covent Garden ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... But the comic always treads on the heels of the pathetic for it is not probable that Miss Stisted valued very much the photograph of what in her "True Life," she thought fit to call "an eccentric tomb" in a "shabby sectarian cemetery." [679] The removal ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... and adventures, and finally dramas of incidents and emotions. The whole thing began by pantomime, and this was of Chopin's invention; he occupied the place at the piano and improvised, while the young people gesticulated scenes and danced comic ballets. I leave you to imagine whether these now wonderful, now charming improvisations quickened the brains and made supple the legs of our performers. He led them as he pleased and made them pass, according to his fancy, from the droll to the severe, from the burlesque ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the light puff of smoke from each rifle rose at once into the air, giving Charlie a fine view of the field; and the simultaneous springing up of so many astonished savages, their queer grimaces, and the grotesque manner in which they scrambled out of range, struck the lad as irresistibly comic, especially as he considered that it was Bub's blunder that was at the bottom ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... bought, not only his three pink bottles, but his green ones, his blue ones, his pills, his pomades, and his perfumed medicinal soaps that were to soften the skin, strengthen the joints, and promote longevity. After this, he sang a comic song of innumerable verses (with horn obligato) and delivered a discourse, in which he said there had never been more than three great men in the world, Louis the Fourteenth, Alexander the Great, and ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... great indignation, have been known to say Mollath Dew warnas! God’s curse upon thee! and Carew in his Survey of Cornwall of 1602 gives a by no means nice phrase (which he spells all anyhow and translates wrong), Mollath Dew en dha ’las! The curse of God in thy belly! Another serio-comic but rather cryptic expletive, peculiar to Camborne, or at any rate to the Drama of St. Meriasek, is Mollath Dew en gegin! God’s curse in the kitchen! It does not seem to mean anything in particular, except perhaps that one’s ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... but it's the very devil to make him quiet. There were four at his head, and three at his tail, two at the wheel, turning, and one up aloft, hallooing like a demon in the air; and when Master Brien showed a little aversion to this comic performance, they were going to drag him into the box bon gre, mal gre, till Bottom interposed and saved the men and the horse from destroying ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... so comic in their movements as the life-sized ones in Catania, not because they were better managed, but because they attempted less and because, being so small, their defects were less obvious. A small one may, and generally does, enter like a bird alighting on a molehill, but he has ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... natural beauty, pure air, and quietude. The recreative pleasure that they crave must be of a different kind from that with which they can daily become familiar if they please. There are theatres and music-halls in town; it does not add to the wittiness of the Pierrot or the humour of the comic singer to find them exercising their functions on a hot dusty beach, densely packed with humanity, strewn with torn newspapers, burnt matches, orange skins, and banana peelings. Yet those who feel in this manner are a minority, otherwise certain ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... 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 ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... how he had been struck with her word. "'Funny'?" "Oh, I don't mean a comic toy—I mean some little thing with a charm. But absolutely RIGHT, in its comparative cheapness. That's what I call funny," she had explained. "You used," she had also added, "to help me to get things cheap in Rome. You were splendid for beating ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... money could do anything: the slaves were thirsting for an upheaval, and with so elderly an emperor were naturally expecting to see one soon. The evils of the new court were those of the old, and while equally oppressive were not so easily excused. Even Galba's age seemed comic and despicable to a populace that was used to the young Nero and compared the emperors, as such people will, in point ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... with his back to the fire, and a look of concern thrown into his comic little mug, and his eyebrows raised, experienced a very pleasurable ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Hermann took his friend to the theatre, where a comic piece was being performed. In his young days Warren had been very partial to plays of that kind, and his joyous peals of laughter on such occasions still rang in the ears of his friend. But the attempt was a complete failure. Warren watched the performance ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... and most common means of enlarging a sentence is by the extension, or repetition, of the final cadence—that effect which is so frequent in the chamber and symphonic music of Haydn, and which has its comic manifestation in the so-called "crescendo" ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... party of Australians were supplying a little comic relief. Their function originally had been to prevent the escape of any Turks should the town be captured, but as the refugees failed to appear, for obvious reasons, the Australians rode forth to inquire into the matter. A mist of obscurity hangs over their doings ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... to this rule, for the author wrote it for Messrs. Guillaume, the well-known art publishers, who, wishing to popularise an improved style of illustration, offered M. Daudet 150,000 francs (L6,000) to write them a serio-comic story. Tartarin, which obtained an instant popularity, proved the author's versatility, but won him the hatred of the good people of Provence, who have never forgiven him for having made fun of their foibles. On one ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... particular pictures. One of the young men drew, with a piece of charcoal, a figure resembling a frog, on the side of the tent, and by significantly pointing at me, excited peals of merriment from his companions. The caricature was comic; but I soon fixed their attention, by producing my pocket compass, and affecting it with a knife. They have great curiosity, which might easily be directed to the attainment of useful knowledge. As the dirt accumulated about these people ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... at Lee with comic blankness. "Mrs. Redfield is hopelessly urban. As the wife of a forest supervisor, she cares more for pavements and tram-cars than for the ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... his brothers and a friend, began 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 was published, appeared this notice ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... If you hadn't, I should certainly have been nonplussed about finding the opening for what I desire to say to you. You are now referring to my seemingly unchristian treatment of Monsignore Murray? Eh, what?" It seemed to please the Bishop to lay emphasis on the English "Eh, what?" He said it with a comic ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... certain point,—the point where wit degenerates into mockery, and liberty into license: nature is never put to shame, and will commonly bear much more. Especially to the American sense did their humorous and comic strokes, their negro-minstrelsy and attempts at Yankee comedy, seem in a minor key. There was not enough irreverence and slang and coarse ribaldry, in the whole evening's entertainment, to have seasoned one line of some of ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... Hardham was, by night, a numberer of the pit for Garrick at Drury Lane. One day he happened to blend Dutch and rappee and poured the mixture into a drawer labelled 37. Garrick so liked the pinch of it which he chanced upon, that he introduced a reference to its merits in some of his comic parts, with the result that Hardham's little shop in Fleet Street soon became a resort, and no nose was properly furnished without No. 37. As Colton ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... secular advantage; these latter weigh doubtfully, and with less weight whichever way. In the general population, who are Protestant, he recognizes friends;—and has sent them Sixty Preachers, which by Law was their due long since. Here follow two little traits, comic or tragi-comic, with which ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 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
... contrivance of distraction, escape from vile affronts. The object of my expedition being explained, the Governor found on his register that poor Hathelin, aged thirty-two to thirty-four years, was an engraver by profession. The lieutenant-general of police had arrested him long ago for a comic or satirical engraving on the subject of M. le Marquis ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... that night was an episode in the story of Krishna. The characters were the infant god, his mother, Jasodha, and an ancient Brahmin who has come from her own country to congratulate her on the birth of a child. He is a comic character—the sagging belly and the painted face of the pantomime. He answers Jasodha's inquiries after friends and relations at home. She offers him food. He professes to have no appetite, but, on being pressed, demands portentous measures of rice and flour. While ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... the boys played a rousing trio on mouth organs, and young Willie Brown played a long piece on the violin. Tommy Holmes, Tilly's brother, who worked in Algonquin and came home week-ends, then gave a recitation, a comic selection which cheered everybody up after the wails of ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... finds the metre imperfect, but the pedant comes to its defence with a tribrachys or an anapaest, and sets it right at once by applying to one language the rules of another. If we may be allowed to change feet, like the old comic writers, it will not be easy to write a line not metrical. To hint this once, is sufficient. (see 1765, VI, ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... small the homestead, linen and window curtains are generally to be found. So many comforts, coupled with the bare simplicity of the boards, the long benches for seats, and hard wooden chairs, did not lead us to expect the comic tragedy to follow. ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... 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 ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... collector of the popular legendary ballads concerning Ruebezahl and other spirits, ghosts and witches, also deserves mention. The Silesian, Stranizki, who, A.D. 1708, founded the Leopoldstadt theatre at Vienna, which afterward became so celebrated, and gave to it the popular comic style for which it is famous at the present day, was also a poet of extreme originality. Gottsched appeared as the hero of Gallomania, which was at that time threatened with gradual extinction by the Spanish and Hamburg ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... nightmare kind of life, unrelieved by even a phantom show of success. Men in the Sierras, out on the great Western plains, knew not the sea. They could not be roused to enthusiasm. Fisher-folk and fisher-life were outside their sympathies. They preferred a comic song—a song that hit a famous person, or a political principle, or a Western foible. Miners liked to hear about "Leadville Jim." It touched their sensibilities when the "Three Fishers who Went ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... a man to be envied. If it had been eighty pound, the luxuriousness of feeling would have been increased. Every pound lost, would have been a hundredweight of happiness gained. The still small voice, Christopher,' cries Brass, smiling, and tapping himself on the bosom, 'is a-singing comic songs within me, and all is ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... of Ancient History at Giggleswick University will shortly take up his duties as Editor of Chestnuts, the new comic weekly. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... little girls," Hal said, waving his hand comically, like a duke in a comic opera. "Run along, little girls, run along," he said, rolling his r's in real stage fashion, and holding the pond ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore • Laura Lee Hope
... it is not right to be impatient with them; for, in nine cases out of ten, they are no more responsible for their mental limp than the poor Chinese woman is for her feeble feet. From their infancy up to what in our comic caricature of words we call "maturity," they have been bandaged. How should their muscles be good for any thing? From the day when we give, and take, and arrange the baby's playthings for him, hour by hour, without ever setting before him to choose one of two and give up the ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... wishes to catch the public ear with the sound of his repining. Be it that he complain of the world generally, or specify the particular occasion of his dumpishness, he is in either aspect equally contemptible. What a serio-comic spectacle a man presents who imagines that everybody is in a leagued conspiracy against him to disappoint his hopes and thwart his plans for success! He thinks he is kept from rising by some untoward ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... is comic imitation, comprises parody and caricature. The latter is a valuable addition to humorous narrative, as we see in the sketches of Gillray, Cruikshank and others. By itself it is not sufficiently suggestive and affords no story or conversation. Hence in the old caricatures the ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... In one of these a weighted string is hung up at one end of a tent, and the children, starting from the other end, try to cut it with a pair of scissors. This would be easy enough, were it not that each player is blindfolded by a great hollow head with a grinning, ugly face, something like the comic masks we see in the shop windows. There are no holes for the eyes, and the head rests down on the shoulders of the player, like a great extinguisher, making her look like the caricatures in which little ...
— Harper's Young People, May 18, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... don't know what to do about the matter, for I never could work up another man's ideas. Even your vivid imagination could hardly conjecture anything more ghastly than the dying man, lying by an open window overlooking the English channel, relating in a sepulchral whisper the comic situations of his humorous hero so that I might take up the thread ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... while expounding some thought which they believed to be grave and profitable; but this frivolous stupidity had not been found in any great writer since the time of Rabelais and the time of the Elizabethans. In many of the comic scenes of Shakespeare we have precisely this elephantine ingenuity, this hunting of a pun to death through three pages. In the Elizabethan dramatists and in Browning it is no doubt to a certain extent ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... cafe. The horrible brass band in the meantime had quitted the place, and now, to amuse the Ghent citizens, a couple of little boys came to the cafe and set up a small concert: one played ill on the guitar, but sang, very sweetly, plaintive French ballads; the other was the comic singer; he carried about with him a queer, long, damp-looking, mouldy white hat, with no brim. "Ecoutez," said the waiter to me, "il va faire l'Anglais; c'est tres drole!" The little rogue mounted his immense brimless hat, and, thrusting his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, began ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of war, Lincoln was keenly appreciative of anything that disclosed the comic or grotesque side of men or happenings,—largely, doubtless, for the relief afforded him. At the beginning of Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania, in June, 1863, when the Union forces under Colonel Milroy were driven out of Harper's Ferry by the Confederates, great consternation and alarm were caused ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... 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 moustaches that ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... some humorous and perhaps even comic passages in "The Intellectual Life"; these passages are unconsciously humorous or comic, as Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton seems to have no sense of humour. For instance, it was a great surprise to me to discover that poverty was unfavourable to the ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... thing was the records. The phonygraft in here is full of light opery and poplar music like that. Not a smell o' fugues and classic stuff. An' in at Schuyler's, as we seen to-night, there's no gay songs, no comic ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... joke is the Comic Opera you've written for us—"King Tuppence, or A Good Deal Less than Half a Sover- eign"—in which the celebrated English tenor, Mr. Wilkinson, burlesques your personal appearance and gives grotesque imitations of your Royal peculiarities. ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... always the Stipulator, the person who asks the question, who is primarily alluded to. But the serviceableness of the stipulation is most vividly illustrated by referring to the actual examples in the pages of the Latin comic dramatists. If the entire scenes are read down in which these passages occur (ex. gra. Plautus, Pseudolus, Act I. sc. i; Act IV. sc. 6; Trinummus, Act V. sc. 2), it will be perceived how effectually the attention of the person meditating the promise ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... anything about it, I was sent flying by the dogs. In the confusion that ensued they stopped, luckily, so that I escaped without damage, as far as that went. To tell the truth, I was angry, but as I had sense enough to see that the situation, already sufficiently comic, would be doubly ridiculous if I allowed my annoyance to show itself, I wisely kept quiet. And, after all, whose fault was it? I was really the only one to blame; why in the world had I not got away faster? I now changed my plan entirely — there ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... that of old Mr. Cosey, a philanthropic, wealthy, and munificent stock-broker, whose cash, always at the disposal of his friends, enables Reuben to accomplish his purposes, the author seems to have dwelt con amore. The comic dialogue of the piece arises chiefly from the contrasted feelings of Mr. Cosey and Mr. Trot. Cosey admires the city, and is miserable in Wales, while Trot, a wealthy cotton-spinner, rejoices at the loss of a large share of his property because ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... Mercer, and I hurt myself directly by bursting out into a silent fit of laughter, which drew my bruised face into pain-producing puckers. But it was impossible to help it, all the same, for Mercer's phiz looked so comic. ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... 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 books and the ...
— Mars Confidential • Jack Lait
... two men as to their tribal God idea has added to the gayety of nations. But when any view is laughed at, it is doomed. From the very moment that the doctrine of election, that made God love a few aristocrats and pass the non-elect by, became a matter of joke in the comic papers, that theory was dead. Not otherwise is it with this idea of a tribal God. When Barry Paine ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... 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, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... the king's guest, through overwhelming strength and greater momentum, had lightly plucked from his seat a stalwart adversary. Others of his following failed not in the "attaint," and horses and troopers floundered in the sand. Apart from the duke's victory, two especial incidents, one comic, stood out ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... it there issued from its gloomy depths a strange rumbling sound which induced him to stop and cock his gun. A curious feeling of serio-comic awe crept over him as the idea of a fiery dragon leaped into his mind! At the same time, the fancy that the immense abyss of darkness might be one of the volcanic vents diminished the comic and increased the serious feeling. Ere long the sound assumed the ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... the enemy had been repaired and Grant's men were crossing to press them back on Vicksburg, so as to clear Grand Gulf. Grant's supply train (raised by impressing every horse, mule, ox, and wheeled thing in the neighborhood) looked more like comic opera than war. Fine private carriages, piled high with ammunition, and sometimes drawn by mules with straw collars and rope lines, went side by side with the longest plantation wagons drawn by many oxen, or with a two-wheeled cart drawn by a ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... intercede with his mother (he had no father) not to let him return. He told me that almost nightly, and especially when new fellows came, the youths in his dormitory (eleven in number) would waylay him, hold him down, and rub his parts to the tune of some comic song or dance-music. The boy who could choose the fastest time had the privilege of performing the operation, and most had to be the victim in turn unless new boys entered, when they would sometimes be subjected ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... 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 Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... 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 one cabin-boy in a rowboat. Luckily for the cabin-boy, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... color. columna column. columpio swinging. comandante commander, major. comarca district. combatir to fight. combustible m. fuel. comensal m. table companion, fellow-guest. comenzar to begin. comer to eat. cometer to commit. comico comic. comida dinner. comienzo beginning. comitiva suite, retinue. como how, as, like, when. compadre godfather, friend. companero companion. compania company. comparar to compare. compensar to compensate. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... ecclesiastical erections in ages too little critical to distinguish between what the workman had purposed doing and what he had done, might come to be regarded, in a less earnest but more knowing age, as precedents for the introduction of the intentionally comic and grotesque. Innocent accidental monkeys in towels may have thus served to usher into serious neighborhoods monkeys in towels that were ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... and address that it is a pleasure to take part in them. The very day on which I took from the head of my wife the wreath of orange blossoms which she wore, I understood that we were playing at a royal coronation—the first scene in a comic pantomime!—I have my gendarmes!—I have my guard royal!—I have my attorney general—that I do!" he continued enthusiastically. "Do you think that I would allow madame to go anywhere on foot unaccompanied by a ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... however, the phrase 'grotesque' is a misleading description of ugliness in art. It does not follow that either the Chinese dragons or the Gothic gargoyles or the goblinish old women of Rembrandt were in the least intended to be comic. Their extravagance was not the extravagance of satire, but simply the extravagance of vitality; and here lies the whole key of the place of ugliness in aesthetics. We like to see a crag jut out in shameless decision from the cliff, we like to see the red ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... hanging 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 ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... "No! What makes you say? ... Oh, I laughed— did I? But don't you know that people laugh at absurdities that are very far from being comic? Didn't you read the latest books about laughter written by philosophers, psychologists? There is a ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... field of general 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
... and I can tell you what he is—he's a florist, and married nineteen years, and his wife's forty—years older than me, but I've scarcely spoke to her, and no children, so I fetched it to show him, and as soon as he set eyes on it, he says—(Female "Character-Comic" on Stage, lugubriously. "Ritolderiddle, ol de ray, ritolderiddle, olde-ri-ido!") I can't tell you how old it is, but 'undreds of years, and Chinese, I shouldn't wonder, but we can't trace its 'istry—that's what he said, and if he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various
... is nothing so strange in a new vicinity as the different weight attached to family names. We have known districts where the word Smith itself, even without the fictitious dignity of y in the middle and e at the end, was pronounced with great veneration. Jones—elsewhere sacred to the comic muse—is of as potent syllable—unluckily it has only one—along the banks of the Usk, as Scott or Douglas on the Nith and Yarrow. And such is the effect of territorial or moral association, that we shall willingly withdraw an objection we made to a line in the tragedy of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... debauchery. The wisest, or at least 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 collection well known ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... may be followed by a revulsion of feeling, it yet deserves a more sympathetic treatment than art and morals have known how to accord it. Erotic poets, to hide their want of ability to make the dumb passion speak, have played feebly with veiled insinuations and comic effects; while more serious sonneteers have harped exclusively on secondary and somewhat literary emotions, abstractly conjugating the verb to love. Lucretius, in spite of his didactic turns, has been on this subject, too, the most ingenuous and magnificent of poets, although he chose to confine ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Beaulieu I had had more than enough of the wild spirits of my comic postman. On entering the town he insisted upon taking me to a hotel which he said he could recommend to me with as much confidence as if I were his brother. Then he left me; but I had not seen the last of him. He presently returned, while I was enjoying the luxury of a ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... life has not yet lost its charms for me, Edward! I like my own ease, my own pleasure best, and wish to be free a short time longer," replied the young man, stretching himself on a sofa, with a comic air of nonchalance and affectation; then starting up, he added, theatrically, "I am going to be a senator, a senator; and how in the world can I think of matrimony but as a state of felicity unsuited to such a hard-working fellow as I am, or ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, set up what was practically a new religious order, with new Scriptures and elaborate new observances, and to their list of the accursed added one Jeschu, a bastard magician, whose comic rogueries brought him to a bad end like Punch or Til Eulenspiegel: an invention which cost them dear when the Christians got the upper hand of them politically. The Jew as Jesus, himself a Jew, knew him, never dreamt of such things, and could follow Jesus without ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... Let this "Comic Opera," for so is it described in the bills, be cut down as ruthlessly, but not as blindly, as William cut down Crosstree; let something catching be substituted for most of the music of the First Act,—specially omitting the "Why, certainly!" ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... notice as a sign of progress that Euphues has substituted a moral narrative for his usual discourse. The relations between the two friends have become distinctly amusing, and might, in abler hands, have resulted in comic situation. Euphues, having learnt the lesson of the burnt child, is now a very grave person, proud of his own experience and of its fruits in himself. ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... for Garrick at Drury Lane. One day he happened to blend Dutch and rappee and poured the mixture into a drawer labelled 37. Garrick so liked the pinch of it which he chanced upon, that he introduced a reference to its merits in some of his comic parts, with the result that Hardham's little shop in Fleet Street soon became a resort, and no nose was properly furnished without No. 37. As Colton wrote, in ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... I reely come here?" asked the "permanent." "'Cause I love Piggy's son, Oscar. Oh, he is that comic! He do make me laugh so, I never can see enough of him. Don't you love looking ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... History at Giggleswick University will shortly take up his duties as Editor of Chestnuts, the new comic weekly. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... little body, with a great deal of human nature in her, who wins our hearts by her comic speeches and funny ways. She complains of being bewitched by people, and the wind 'blows her out,' and she thinks if her comrade dies in the snow-storm she will be 'dreadfully 'shamed of it,' and has rather a lively ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... possibly a woman knows that a masculine spook is, after all, only a man, and therefore may be charmed into helplessness, while the feminine can be seen through by another woman and thus disarmed. The majority of the comic apparitions, curiously enough, are masculine. You don't often find women wraithed in smiles—perhaps because they resent being made ridiculous, even after they're dead. Or maybe the reason lies in the fact that men have written ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... After the more comic manifestations and the chilling of generous enthusiasm come subtler, darker deeds. Everything considered, the title to the universe claimed by White Folk is faulty. It ought, at least, to look plausible. How easy, then, by emphasis and omission to make children believe ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... of characters of a 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, but does ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... 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 ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... who, with other practitioners of the day, believed in curing all maladies by copious bleeding and a dose of calomel. He was the fashionable physician of that time and especially prided himself upon his physical resemblance to Benjamin Franklin. He had much dramatic ability of a comic sort, and I have often heard the opinion expressed that if he had adopted the stage as a profession he would have rivalled the comedian William E. Burton, who at this time was delighting his audiences at Burton's Theater on Chambers Street. In my early ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... appeal of the present interest, until it becomes ungovernable and obscures ulterior interests. This tendency to promote dissoluteness is the most serious charge which Plato brings against the arts. After referring to the unseemly hilarity to which men are incited by the comic stage, ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... no other time so gay, except it was Purim—the feast to celebrate Queen Esther's redemption of her people from the wicked Haman—when everybody sent presents to everybody else, and the men wore comic masks or dressed up as women and performed little plays. The child went about with a great false nose, and when the name of "Haman" came up in the reading of the Book of Esther, which was intoned in a refreshingly new way, he tapped vengefully with a little hammer or turned the handle of a little ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... dentistry, was sent out from the Cincinnati College, and she, I believe, is still in active practice in Kansas. She graduated in 1866. Mrs. Hirschfeld, before spoken of, returned to Germany and became at once a subject for the fun of the comic papers, and for the more serious work of the Bajan and Uberlana und Meer, both of them containing elaborate and illustrated notices of her. She had some friends in the higher walks of life; notable amongst these was President Lette of the Trauen-Verein, whose aid and powerful influence ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... all these worthy bourgeois, proud of their accomplishments, considered their society as far superior in attractions to that of Ville-aux-Fayes, and repeated with comic pomposity the local dictum, "Soulanges is a town of society and social pleasures," it must not be supposed that Ville-aux-Fayes accepted this supremacy. The Gaubertin salon ridiculed ("in petto") the salon Soudry. By the manner in which Gaubertin remarked, "We are a ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... good public cannot resign itself to getting along without gaiety, it goes to operetta and turns naturally to Offenbach who created it and furnished an inexhaustible supply. My phrase is not exaggerated, for Offenbach hardly dreamed of creating an art. He was endowed with a genius for the comic and an abundance of melody, but he had no thought of doing anything beyond providing material for the theatre he managed at the time. As a matter of fact he ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... scarcely died away before Clive began a conversation with a low growl, making remarks of what he apparently considered a comic nature about everything and everybody in the room, with a distinctness that made them entirely audible to those seated around them. Leslie's cheeks flamed and her eyes flashed angrily, but he only seemed to enjoy it the more, and kept on with his ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... mimicry, and are acute in the observation of anything that appears to them absurd or ludicrous, the white man often becomes the object of their jests or quizzing. I have heard songs of this kind sung at the dances in a kind of comic medley, where different speakers take up parts during the breaks in the song, and where a sentence or two of English is aptly introduced, or a quotation made from some native dialect, other than that of the performers. ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... great stake!" cried Charles. He arose with a serio-comic air, much pleased at the turn things ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... Umbrella-handle, of silver-mounted horn; V was a comic Valentine, a little creased ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... barely time to throw a mingled look of entreaty and menace across the table, when half-a-dozen others, rightly judging from the Doctor's tone and serio-comic expression, that his malady had many more symptoms of fun than suffering about it, called ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... limitations of its origin, there has, nevertheless, remained an association with the dance that will continue for all time. Especially is this true of the lighter branch of the drama, comedy, and the modern combination known as musical comedy or comic opera. In the popular stage entertainments of the day dancing forms an important feature of a large percentage of all productions that appear in the leading theatres. In many of the classical plays, by great dramatists, that are annually chosen ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... should not fight a duel with Mr. Whistler, as Mr. Whistler well knows. First, only under the very gravest circumstances, if under any at all, would an Englishman accept a challenge to a duel. The duel has been relegated to the realms of comic opera. As for inviting me to proceed to Belgium for the purpose of fighting him, he might as well ask me to strip myself naked and paint my face and stick feathers in my hair—dress myself as a Redskin, in fact, and walk down St. James's Street ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... as much gravity as he was able, considering the difficulty he had to restrain his risibility; and, supposing that the intellect of the poor lady was impaired, in a comic serious tone observed:—"Well, my master is a most wonderful man, that his murdered body should be food for the ravens of the Alpujarras, and his troubled spirit be haunting Don Alonso's garden; when at the same time I saw him ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... father, with a curt laugh, would humorously acquiesce in the theory of the sacredness of Edwin's bedroom. As for Edwin, he saw nothing extraordinary in his attitude concerning his bedroom; and he could not understand, and he somewhat resented, that the household should perceive anything comic in it. He never went near his sisters' bedroom, never wished to go near it, never ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... and half a squall from George Bernard Shaw; but the greater part of the time the ship of the stage is careering wildly under bare poles, with a man lashed to the helm (and let us hope that, like Ulysses, he has cotton wool in his ears), before a hurricane of comic opera. We need a recognised stage and a recognised school. America has become too great, and its influence abroad too large, for us to afford to have recourse to that ancient and easy method of criticism which ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... generous fairy in as many pleasant ways as they would permit. The theatre continued to be her delight, as well as her school of life, and a box-party followed nearly every dinner. She was like a child in the catholicity of her appetite, for she devoured Shakespearian bread, Ibsen roasts, and comic opera cream-puffs with almost equal gusto—and mentally thrived upon the mixture. To the outsider she seemed one of the most fortunate women ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... successfully is found in a very remote past, and that Daedalus discarded his invention because of the tragedy related below. Only a few years since, most people looked upon one who tried to work out practically the problem of flying as somewhat "short" mentally. Hence the use of such efforts for comic effect as in "Darius Green and His ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... tae see it lyin' there wes a veesitation. But he 's a weel-meanin' bit craturie, Maister Peebles, an' handy wi' a magic lantern. Sall," and then Hillocks became incapable of speech, and you knew that the thought of Dr. Davidson explaining comic slides had ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... almost every note of human feeling: home and duty, song and gaiety, daring and neighbourly kindness, love of sky and sea and air and orchards, of the good-smelling earth and wholesome animal life, and all the incidents, tragic, comic, or commonplace, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... there, smoking and declaiming, his eyes blazing, one hand playing with Watson's favourite dog, an Aberdeen terrier who was softly smelling and pushing against him. All that litany of mockery and bitterness, which the Comic Spirit kindles afresh on the lips of each rising generation, only to quench it again on the lips of those who 'arrive,' flowed from him copiously. He was the age indeed for 'arrival,' when, as so ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sport to shoot at some lazy old buzzard as he comes within range. He can see the ordinary arrow, and if you shoot close, he dodges, swoops downward, flops sidewise, twists his head round and round, and speeds up to leave the country. He presents the comic picture of a complacent old gentleman suddenly disturbed in his monotonous existence and frightened into a most unbecoming ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... Lockhart's scattered verse in Blackwood as further illustrations of his poetic gift,—a number of admirable stanzas (in the character of Wastle) in the ottava rima of Whistlecraft and Beppo (1819); the best known of his comic poems, Captain Paton's Lament; and some lines from a translation in hexameters of the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad, that appeared as late as 1843, which must have sent more than one reader to the magazine, and made them echo the biographer's ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... bury its dead" would be a better saying if the Past ever died. The persistence of the Past is one of those tragi-comic blessings which each new age denies, coming cocksure on to the stage to mouth its claim ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Perry saw Betty standing in front of a booth, talking to a comic policeman. She was dressed in the costume of an Egyptian snake-charmer: her tawny hair was braided and drawn through brass rings, the effect crowned with a glittering Oriental tiara. Her fair face was stained to ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the attentive stage; 320 The Monarch's stately step, and tragic pause, The Hero bleeding in his country's cause, O'er her fond child the dying Mother's tears, The Lover's ardor, and the Virgin's fears; The tittering Nymph, that tries her comic task, Bounds on the scene, and peeps behind her mask, The Punch and Harlequin, and graver throng, That shake the theatre with dance and song, With endless trains of Angers, Loves, and Mirths, Owe to the Muse ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... to 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
... February 1, 1899, and scored as promptly as "One Night." The demand for the booklets was phenomenal, and Mr. Kountz received thousands of friendly letters applauding him for his humor. He also received flattering offers from the leading comic weeklies, the metropolitan dailies, and great advertisers throughout the Union. He declined them all, being primarily a business man, and carrying literature ...
— Billy Baxter's Letters • William J. Kountz, Jr.
... had the Comic scene, (The flattering reflex of a sensual age) Shown prurient Folly's rank licentious mien, Refined, embellish'd on ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... exclaimed Lottie, still laughing, blushing, and affecting comic alarm; "being joined together by a minister's wife is almost as bad as by ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... in the temple [of Apollo], as contesting for the prize when Tarpa presides as judge, nor can have a run over and over again represented in the theatres. You, O Fundanius, of all men breathing are the most capable of prattling tales in a comic vein, how an artful courtesan and a Davus impose upon an old Chremes. Pollio sings the actions of kings in iambic measure; the sublime Varias composes the manly epic, in a manner that no one can equal: ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... inclination to claim for the Keswick bard any prodigious or pre-eminent powers of fun, or to give him place beside the rollicking jesters and genial merry-makers, whose humour gives English literature a distinctive character among the nations. But that he is so void of the comic faculty as certain potent authorities allege, we persistently doubt. Mr Macaulay affirms that Southey may be always read with pleasure, except when he tries to be droll; that a more insufferable jester ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... he entered into office, that he shall possess and hold until the end of his term. Next he assigns Choregi to the tragic poets, choosing three of the richest persons out of the whole body of Athenians. Formerly he used also to assign five Choregi to the comic poets, but now the tribes provide the Choregi for them. Then he receives the Choregi who have been appointed by the tribes for the men's and boys' choruses and the comic poets at the Dionysia, and for the men's and boys' choruses ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... grotesque element. We carefully 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
... Denham, must we e'er forget thy strains, While Cooper's Hill commands the neighbouring plains. But see where artful Dryden next appears, Grown old in rhyme, but charming even in years. Great Dryden next, whose tuneful Muse affords The sweetest numbers, and the fittest words. Whether in comic sounds or tragic airs She forms her voice, she moves our smiles or tears. If satire or heroic strains she writes, 120 Her hero pleases and her satire bites. From her no harsh unartful numbers fall, She wears all dresses, and ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... croyance a la loi de causalite. In 1901 Felix Alcan published in book form a work which had just previously appeared in the Revue de Paris entitled Le Rire, one of the most important of his minor productions. This essay on the meaning of the Comic was based on a lecture which he had given in his early days in the Auvergne. The study of it is essential to an understanding of Bergson's views of life, and its passages dealing with the place of the ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... hill at full speed, for, by Edwards's direction, the light had been shifted to the other tube in such a way as to dissolve the "Morning" into a hideous picture of the conventional horned and hoofed devil. The picture was originally meant to be comic, but it now set Jim to running ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... 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 ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... hurried in. Outside the door the servants were on the watch. I caught sight of the landlady, who succeeded ill in concealing her comic chagrin. ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... purpose. Once, when the French drove in his outposts, he gave the order to fire the powder, and a part of the magazine was actually destroyed when Marmont (who above all things hated ridicule, and was severely taxing the respect of his beautiful army by these serio-comic excursions after a raw militia) withdrew his troops and retired in an abominable temper ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... seen some of his black and 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 career is not to be slurred over, for it is a clue to ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... old comic entrance, tripping his right toe over his left heel, and turning to shake his fist at an imaginary enemy. The boys, determined to ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... were respectively the burglar and the householder, of whom the latter staked his property and the former a certain period of personal liberty; and the rules of the game were equally binding on both. It was a conception worthy of comic opera; and yet, incredible as it may seem, it is the very view of crime that is today accepted and ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... Idyl," is delicious, particularly in the chances it gives the flautist. There is a fragmentary cantilena which would make the fortune of a comic opera. The third number, "In October," is particularly welcome in our music, which is strangely and sadly lacking in humor. There is fascinating wit throughout this harvest revel. "The Shepherdess' Song" is the fourth movement. It is not precieuse, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... advertiser in the county," followed by the usual price list of the merchant's wares. There was an unprecedented demand for that issue. The reputation of the "Clarion," both as a shrewd advertising medium and a comic paper, was established at once. For a few days the editor waited with some apprehension for a remonstrance from the absent Dimmidge, but none came. Whether Mr. Dimmidge recognized that this new advertisement ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... used to convey to children the common sense truths of life, hidden beneath their comic, crudely cut coats. Good examples are "Old Man Know-All," "Learn to Count," and "Shake the Persimmons Down." All through the Rhymes will be found here and there many stanzas full of common uncommon sense, worthwhile ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... as well as male; I presume no one here will gainsay me that. But you do not know them officially. The politicians who joke about three acres and a cow, the writers who are comic about mothers-in-law, the very boot-blacks have your solicitude, but you ignore their ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... put into his chair, and, accompanied by his children and friends, was dragged through every alley, and every little meandering path. He would not spare himself a single turn—he had a tear to give to every well-known tree, an adieu to make to every painted figure. To de Lescure and the others, the comic attitudes of these uncouth ornaments was, at the present moment, any thing but interesting; but to the Marquis, each of them was an old and well-loved friend, whom even in his extremity he could hardly ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... whole action of the play. It was, therefore, to be a scene of which people did not easily tire and that remained interesting, unobtrusive and formally neat. To find such a scene it is necessary to refer back to days when the Comic and the Tragic scenes were architectural and permanent. This I did and, taking Palladio's magnificent scene at Vicenza, by a shameless process of reductio ad absurdum, evolved the scene that is now in use at Hammersmith. Palladio and ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... 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 ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... Woman," which won for you your first medal? And do you remember the breakfast at Ledoyen's on Varnishing Day? There were more than twenty-five at a table intended for ten. What follies we committed, especially that little, little—what did he call himself—I mean that little comic fellow, who was always making portraits which resembled no one? Oh, yes, Tavernier! And you took me home with you to your studio, where you had two great manikins which frightened me so, and I called ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... true. I want to write a serio-comic opera, a new sort of thing, and it struck me you were just cut out for that kind of singing. You have the face and the—you know—the refinement; sort of thing not easy to find. It's a poor chance, I'm afraid, coming out as ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... restored to the colleges.] Fifthly, having thus lessened the power of the censors, consuls, praetors, and tribunes, he by way of compensation—a serio-comic compensation it must have seemed to his shrewd yet superstitious mind—restored the right of co-optation to the sacred colleges of augurs and pontiffs, and increased their numbers, thus multiplying harmless ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... came when it was necessary to produce some more original idea, to strike a really decisive blow, and so Dowie revealed to a stupefied Chicago that he was the latest incarnation of the prophet Elijah. Then while the serious Press denounced him for blasphemy, and the comic Press launched its most highly poisoned shafts of wit against him, the whole of Sion exulted in clamorous rejoicings. For the prophet knew his Chicago. Credulity gained the upper hand, and the whole city flocked to the tabernacle of Sion, ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... is that of the last form published in Hazlitt's own lifetime, namely, that of the second edition in the case of the Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, the lectures on the poets and on the age of Elizabeth, and the Spirit of the Age, and the first edition of the Comic Writers, the Plain Speaker, and the Political Essays. A slight departure from this procedure in the case of the essay on "Elia" is explained in the notes. "My First Acquaintance with Poets," and "Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen" are ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... 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 ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... shoulders. When the laughter ceased, she picked up the book at once, and again resuming a suitable expression, began the reading seriously. Sanin could not get over his admiration; he was particularly astonished at the marvellous way in which a face so ideally beautiful assumed suddenly a comic, sometimes almost a vulgar expression. Gemma was less successful in the parts of young girls—of so-called 'jeunes premieres'; in the love-scenes in particular she failed; she was conscious of this herself, and for that reason gave them a faint shade of irony ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... and other poems take things strangely (The comic is experienced tragically. The representation is "grotesque"), to notice the unbalanced, incoherent nature of things, arbitrariness, confusion... is not, in any case, the characteristic of "style." Proof is: Lichtenstein writes poems ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... scourging inflicted upon him by angels for having loved Cicero too well; yet his repentance was but short-lived, since he caused the monks of the Mount of Olives to pass their nights in copying the Ciceronian dialogues, and did not shrink himself from expounding the comic and lyric poets to the children ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... enemy, but we secured the services of actors well trained in Wild West and "crook" parts, capably led by those two prominent comedians, Mr. Mutt and Mr. Jeff. The film ends, of course, with the second meeting at the Central Hall, Westminster, when Messrs. Mutt and Jeff again appear as comic and objectionable interrupters, and are ignominiously ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... the dignity and nobleness of the Cid—you may be another Talma: but pass the Channel—show yourself to the English, and in spite of yourself you will become as comic as Arnal. Arnal! do I say? why, he would not make them laugh so much as you do; and they would consider our inimitable comedians, Levassor and Hoffmann, as serious personages. Do not be angry. They would only laugh ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... the bell and the door flew open. Sounds of laughter and comic songs issued from the abode and in a second they were in the crowded drawing room. It was packed with all the Elite and a stout duchess with a good natured face was singing a lively song and causing much merriment. The earl ...
— The Young Visiters or, Mr. Salteena's Plan • Daisy Ashford
... officer had crossed the Rapidan and driven General Buford before him. The result now was that, while Stuart was pressing the enemy in his front, General Buford came down on Stuart's rear, and Fitz Lee on the rear of Buford. The scene which ensued was a grand commingling of the tragic and serio-comic. Every thing was mingled in wild confusion, but the day remained with the Southern cavalry, who, at nightfall, had pressed their opponents back toward the river, which the Federal army crossed that night, blowing up the railroad ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... Olifants River. There the song of many birds, not to be found on the Hoogeveld, can be heard, and there it was delightfully warm, in comparison with the chilly air of the Hoogeveld. Of an evening we made large fires, as there was plenty of dry wood. We sat round the fire, chatting or listening to the comic songs which one of our comrades sang. It was a happy time—away from khaki, far beyond reach of the roar of cannon—a time of rest in preparation for the evil ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... for the Allies' cause have been obliged to bow before this young hero, more noble in his defeat than all the conquerors of Europe in their victory. But the Germans have not felt it. Not only did they try to ridicule King Albert in their comic papers. Even the son of Governor von Bissing did not hesitate to fling in his face the generous epithet, "Lackland." [3] As soon as the last attempt to conciliate the King had failed the German press in Belgium began a most violent and abusive campaign against him. The Duesseldorfer ...
— Through the Iron Bars • Emile Cammaerts
... horses to rest, Julianillo started up, and beginning to sing a well-known comic air, sauntered out of the inn towards the stables. Don Francisco waited till he supposed his companion was on the road, and then, paying his reckoning to the landlord, begged that his horse might be brought round. Just as he was mounting, the ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... 22 the train party got off as quick as possible, and about 4 p.m. a big lorry came for our equipment. We loaded it, seven of us mounted on the top, and the rest went in two of our own cars. The scene was really intensely comic. Seven Scottish women balanced precariously on the pile of luggage; a Serbian doctor with whom Dr. Inglis is to travel standing alongside in an hysterical condition, imploring us to hurry, telling us the Bulgarians were as good as in the town already; Dr. Inglis, quite unmoved, demanding ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... stern realities of war, Lincoln was keenly appreciative of anything that disclosed the comic or grotesque side of men or happenings,—largely, doubtless, for the relief afforded him. At the beginning of Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania, in June, 1863, when the Union forces under Colonel Milroy were driven out of ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... pass naturally from absurdity to beauty, and in which all the figures could be harmonious and yet distinct, and that is the Chinese world as we know it in Chinese art. For in that there is something fantastic yet spiritual, something comic but beautiful, a mixture of the childish and the sacred, which might say to the eye what Mozart's music says to the ear. Only in Chinese art could Papageno be a saint; only in that world, which ranges from ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... of his country and countrymen. It seems hardly possible that in this narrow-minded, disagreeable, and essentially vulgar character, Cooper could have fancied he was creating anything but a contemptible boor. The contrast between what is said of him, and what is said by him, almost reaches the comic. We read constantly of his caustic satire; we find little of it in his conversation. His fine face is, according to the author, always expressing contempt and sarcasm; but the examples of these that are ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... 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 world would have been powerless ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... lamentably plain; we had paid fifty thousand 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 of Jim and Mamie ached in ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... produced a prodigious quantity of work, and was a celebrated man before he was twenty. No one knows how many drawings he made. He "lived like an Arab," worked early and late, and with astonishing rapidity made thousands of drawings for the comic papers, besides early beginning the publication of independent books. One estimate, which Mr. Jerrold thinks excessive, credits him with having published forty thousand drawings before he was forty! Mr. Jerrold himself reckons two hundred and sixty-six drawings ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... in the 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 of those productions in which the reader ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... flightiness, but only made her worse; with Dermot she would only make ridiculous nonsense, and utter those heartrending laughs; and when I tried to soothe her, and speak low and quietly, she started away from me, showed me her foreign purchases, or sang snatches of comic songs. ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... tell you, man," said Frye, "it's going to be the greatest success of the year. I am the only man who has ever put grand-opera effects into comic opera with success. Just listen to the chords of this opening chorus." And so he inspired the singer with some of his own spirit. They went to work with a will. Silas might have been reluctant as he felt the strain upon him grow, ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... I might have joined in the merriment produced among my companions by the ludicrous spectacle which we presented. A comic spectacle indeed; nine of us squatted at intervals over the ground, the blue smoke escaping through the interstices of our robes and blankets, and rising around our heads, as though one and all of us were ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... begun following his bird before it has risen above the head of his loader. This very clumsy violation of the etiquette of sport proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he has learned to shoot from the comic papers, and that his coat-of-arms can never again be looked upon as anything ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... meetings. What strange meetings, to which patriotic deputations, volunteers and amateurs come in turn to declaim and sing; where the president, Lubin, "decorated with his scarf," shouts the Marseilles Hymn five or six times, "Ca Ira," and other songs of several stanzas, set to tunes of the Comic Opera, and always "out of time, displaying the voice, airs and songs of an exquisite Leander.. . I really believe that, at the last meeting, he sung alone in this manner three quarters of an hour at different times, the assembly repeating the last line of the verse."—"How ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... without warning. I will say they were pretty glad to see us when we bore down on them. As we neared, they began to paddle frantically, as though fearful we should be snatched away from them at the last moment. The crew were mostly Arabs and Lascars, and the first mate, a typical comic-magazine Irishman, delivered himself of the following: "Sure, toward the last, some o' thim haythen gits down on their knees and starts calling on Allah; but I sez, sez I, 'Git up afore I swat ye wid the axe-handle, ye benighted haythen; sure if this boat gits saved 't will be the ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... house in all Paris most addicted to private theatricals. This reproduction of a forgotten play, with its characters attired in the costume of the period in which the play was placed, had had great success, a success due largely to the excellence of the costumes. In the comic parts the dressing had been purposely exaggerated, but Madame de Nailles, who played the part of a great coquette, would not have been dressed in character had she not tried to make herself as ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... without weapons of defense and offense. Arriving at the office next day, Roland found a scene of desolation, in the middle of which, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, sat Jimmy, the vacant-faced office boy. Jimmy was reading an illustrated comic paper, and appeared undisturbed by ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "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
... devotion, on my poor part! Deign to think, may not this too,—in the present state of my King, of my Two Kings, and of all Europe,—be itself a kind of spheral thing?" So that the aquiline lightning was but momentary; and abated to lambent twinklings, with something even of comic in them, as we shall gather. Voltaire had his difficulties with Valori, too; "What interloping fellow is this?" gloomed Valori, "A devoted secretary of your Excellency's; on his honor, nothing more!" answered Voltaire, bowing to the ground:—and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... goes without saying, my boy. As for my part—why, I don't bother much about a blue tin heaven or a comic-supplement hell, but I'm right smart interested in right here and now. It's a right nice little old world, take it by and large, and I like to help out at whatever comes my way, if it takes fourteen innings. But, so long as you feel ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of Bremen is a good type of humorous tale. It shows all the elements of true humor. Its philosophy is healthy; it views life as a whole and escapes tragedy by seeing the comic situation in the midst of trouble. It is full of the social good-comradeship which is a condition of humor. It possesses a suspense that is unusual, and is a series of surprises with one grand surprise ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... fifty pleasantly written and delightfully printed pages to readers who like to muse quietly on the elementary principles of love and life without risking the surprise of startling or revolutionary lines of thought. There is nothing peculiarly good or bad in the many comic illustrations by Mr. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... The Contributions to Punch, which form the sixth volume of this series, began in 1842, and lasted ten years. They provide occasion for many diverting anecdotes, and for references to his colleagues who founded the fortunes of that most successful of comic papers; but as on this plan the biographical lines cross and recross each other it is not easy for the reader to obtain a connected or comprehensive view of Thackeray's career. Nevertheless as the system fortunately affords room and reason for giving many fresh details of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... 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
... inquire the name of the guest), the slender form and comely features of Lord Mauleverer. The earl approached with the same grace which had in his earlier youth rendered him almost irresistible, but which now, from the contrast of years with manner, contained a slight mixture of the comic. He paid his compliments, and in paying them declared that he must leave it to his friend, Sir William, to explain all the danger he had dared, for the sake of satisfying himself that Miss Brandon was no less lovely than when ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hopping off in a comic sort of way till he was out of sight of her, and then never going near the spot any more. They would all have been glad to follow if he ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... had lived up to the comic papers, Morty," I said, "we would have spiflicated a red child, given a merry toot and disappeared ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... of abusive epithets nobody could surpass him. One of his droll comic sentences was often worth a speech of an hour in putting down an opponent, or in gaining supporters to his side. At Nisi Prius, he turned his mingled talent for abuse and drollery to great effect. He covered a witness with ridicule, or made ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... the same boat, you know," said a literary friend to Jerrold. This literary friend was a comic writer, and a comic writer only. Jerrold replied, "True, my good fellow, we do row in the same boat, ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... than she was M. Baffo translated it in a whisper. Surprised at my knowledge, she rose from her chair to get a valuable gold watch and presented to my master, who, not knowing how to express his deep gratitude, treated us to the most comic scene. My mother, in order to save him from the difficulty of paying her a compliment, offered him her cheek. He had only to give her a couple of kisses, the easiest and the most innocent thing in good company; but the poor man was on burning coals, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... written more and written 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
... up in New Hampshire and, like the little demon of 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 ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... person to write a Tragedy which he entitl'd, Christ suffering. This is mention'd to vindicate Tragedy from the small esteem, or rather infamy, which in the account of many it undergoes at this day with other common Interludes; hap'ning through the Poets error of intermixing Comic stuff with Tragic sadness and gravity; or introducing trivial and vulgar persons, which by all judicious hath bin counted absurd; and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratifie the people. And though antient Tragedy use no Prologue, yet using sometimes, in case of self defence, or ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... upon the shining top of the counter and shoving his head forward inquiringly, "is all this that we do be hearing about your suffragette? Who is she? What is she? The newspapers are filled to the top with her, but sorra the sight of her did I ever see. If she has any existence outside of the comic supplement, gentlemen, I'd like to have ye show me where. Did ye ever hear a whisper of her till she began to send herself by registered mail and chain herself to lamp posts? Niver the one of ye! Is your wife a suffragette? She's ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... only good in themselves, but they give an impression of greater powers than they embody. They seem to indicate a large, broad, vigorous mind, of which poetry has been the recreation rather than the vocation. A brilliant mischievousness, in which the serious and the ludicrous, the tender and the comic, the practical and the ideal, are brought rapidly together, is the leading characteristic of his muse. In almost every poem in his volume, serious, or semi-serious, the object appears to be the production of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... of oddities, and the telling of tall stories outside the regular course of the narrative, which bubbles over with somewhat boisterous fun. And his humour is genuine and spontaneous; it is farcical without descending to buffoonery. His comic types are built up on character, and, if not subtle, are undeniably human and living. They are ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... lest I should get capsized and drowned. I believe it, for she is a sweet and gracious lady; and I quite see, as she demonstrated, that the sight of me, teetotumming about, steering in an elaborate and showy way all the time, was irresistibly comic. And she gave a most amusing account of how, when she started looking for me to give me tea, a charming habit of hers, she could not see me in among my bottles, and so asked the little black boy where I was. "There," said he, pointing to the tree hanging against the rock out in the river; ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... "Quite comic, isn't it, my dear? What foolish things mothers are, aren't they? Just as fond of their bairns as ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... with a quaver of comic regret. "Our civilization has so narrowed the times that murder is inexpressibly inconvenient. One ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... as to their tribal God idea has added to the gayety of nations. But when any view is laughed at, it is doomed. From the very moment that the doctrine of election, that made God love a few aristocrats and pass the non-elect by, became a matter of joke in the comic papers, that theory was dead. Not otherwise is it with this idea of a tribal God. When ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... I've recited so often in public I don't mind at all now. I've decided to give 'The Maiden's Vow.' It's so pathetic. Laura Spencer is going to give a comic recitation, but I'd rather ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... it even so? Nay, then I see our wars Will turn into a peaceful comic sport, When ladies crave to be encount'red with. You may not, my lord, ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... his sudden shift from cordiality to a look half incredulous, half embarrassed was almost comic. ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... is anywhere 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 ...
— The Parthenon By Way Of Papendrecht - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... invincible fatality ever brought her toward him whom she was seeking to avoid. And it was her husband who was aiding this inevitable and execrable meeting. A bitter smile played on her lips. There was something mournfully comic in this stubbornness of Cayrol's, in throwing her in the ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... of waking dreams where the spirit soars into a world of unrealities and possibilities! Nothing astonishes one, nothing shocks one; and the unbridled fancy makes no distinction between the comic and the tragic. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... working in such trousers. Note the smart liveries of the girls who have taken the places of male carriage starters, mechanics and elevator operators, at a great London shop. They are very natty, aren't they? Almost like costumes from a comic opera. Well, they are not operatic costumes. They are every-day working liveries. Girls wear them in the most mixed London crowds—wear them because the man-shortage makes it necessary for these girls to do work which skirts do not fit. All French ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... a tent, and the children, starting from the other end, try to cut it with a pair of scissors. This would be easy enough, were it not that each player is blindfolded by a great hollow head with a grinning, ugly face, something like the comic masks we see in the shop windows. There are no holes for the eyes, and the head rests down on the shoulders of the player, like a great extinguisher, making her look like the caricatures in which little bodies are represented with big heads. The ...
— Harper's Young People, May 18, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... twenty-fifth year, and had entered on his mismanagement of Drury Lane Theatre. He had already written "The Rivals," which had not proved a success on its first appearance; "St. Patrick's Day, or the Scheming Lieutenant," a farce; "The Duenna," a comic opera; but he was yet to write "A Trip to Scarborough," and "The ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... general 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 by some critics of the press to be clamoring for the ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... across the parking lot the spacemen finally made the Smith family car in safety. "Blast off immediately, Lt. Smith," ordered the captain. The rocket wavered for a minute and rose. "Wait a minute, Smith. I seen Rocky Morgan do this once in a comic book. No member of the Space Patrol lets an alien get away alive. We got to kill 'em all. Head back and we'll get the rest of 'em with the hydrogen artillery." Accordingly the ship swept low over the strange planet. ...
— The Amazing Mrs. Mimms • David C. Knight
... looking after its illustrations himself, and a letter to Frank Bliss, of The American Publishing Company, refers to the frontpiece, which, from time to time, has caused question as to its origin. To Bliss he says: "It is a thing which I manufactured by pasting a popular comic picture into the middle of a celebrated Biblical one—shall attribute it to Titian. It needs to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... so far from putting his mind out of tune for acts of religious worship, seemed but a happy preparation for the exercise of devotional feelings." [7] This coexistence of serious with playful elements is often found in natures of unusual depth and richness, just as tragic and comic powers sometimes co-exist in ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... will ever forget that Christmas. To begin with, after breakfast they had a concert. The khaki boy gave two recitations, sang three songs, and gave a whistling solo. Lucy Rose gave three recitations and the minister a comic reading. The pale shop girl sang two songs. It was agreed that the khaki boy's whistling solo was the best number, and Aunt Cyrilla gave him the bouquet of everlastings as a reward ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... whilst they arranged them for the dance. Wilhelm was called upon to play, and the dance commenced; a partner, however, was wanting. Just then a quiet citizen passed by. The gentleman who had no partner approached the citizen with comic respect, and besought him to take part ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... comrades gave him many comic names, And he became the victim of all sorts of naughty games; Nor did the master like him, for he felt that such a face, Mid a row of ruddy youngsters, was extremely out ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... You always were a pleasant gentleman that it was a treat to have staying at Wimpole Street. Wimpole Street!—Ha, ha, ha!" said Sam, laughing softly. "My word! how comic it does seem. What would they say in Wimpole Street if ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... extensive domains, with the fret of spring alert in every sap cell. I have seen the little birds as they hopped among said leaves and commented upon the scarcity of worms. I have seen the buxom flowers as they curtsied and danced above your flower-beds like a miniature comic-opera chorus. And ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... considerable amusement in looking over the artists who are usually employed in copying or studying from the celebrated pictures in the different galleries; but I have been taught discretion on such occasions by a ridiculous incident which occurred the other day, as absurdly comic as it was unlucky and vexatious. A friend of mine observing an artist at work in the Pitti palace, whom, by his total silence and inattention to all around, she supposed to be a native Italian who did not understand a word of English, went up to him, and peeping ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... taking note of everything that 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 superior, ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... from laughing. This idea of choosing a wife like a governess for her linguistic accomplishments seemed to him exceedingly comic. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... 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 person whom nobody had ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... lying soaking in the sleet, while the wretched servants were trying to pitch the tent in the high wind. They had slept out in the snow the night before, and were mentally as well as physically benumbed. Their misery had a comic side to it, and as the temperature made me feel specially well, I enjoyed bestirring myself and terrified Mando, who was feebly 'fadding' with a rag, by giving Gyalpo a vigorous rub-down with a bath-towel. Hassan Khan, with ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... sky-high over all the Parish, on a sudden! The almost-sublime of Maupertuis, which exists in large quantities, here is a new artist who knows how to treat it. The engineer of the Sublime (always painfully engineering thitherward without effect),—an engineer of the Comic steps in on him, blows him up with his own petards in a most unexampled manner. Not an owlery has that poor Maupertuis, in the struggle to be sublime (often nearly successful, but never once quite), happened to drop from him, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... missed her comic touches upon men and things, but the fever shown by her manner accounted ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
Copyright © 2025 e-Free Translation.com
|
|
|
