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More "Ludicrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mowbray to draw him out by degrees into a repetition of the history of his first attempt to play the character of Shylock. A play altered from Shakespeare's, and called "The Jew of Venice," had been for some time in vogue. In this play, the Jew had been represented, by the actors of the part, as a ludicrous and contemptible, rather than a detestable character; and when Macklin, recurring to Shakespeare's original Shylock, proposed, in the revived Merchant of Venice, to play the part in a serious style, he was scoffed at by the whole ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... embarrassment in the city, and much difficulty was experienced in quartering the Emperor's horses; since to improvise stables in a few days, almost in a moment, was impossible, and to build carriage-houses in the midst of courts would have had a ludicrous effect. But fortunately this difficult situation was ended by one of the quartermasters of the palace named M. Emery, a man of great intelligence, and an old soldier, who, having learned from Napoleon and the force of circumstances never to be overcome by difficulties, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... instead of vaulting clear over the rails, as he had anticipated, his Excellency was drawn back in his leap, and found himself seated astride upon the barrier, with a desperate woman tugging at his tail, and trying to pull him back into the arena. Nothing, we believe, has ever exceeded the ludicrous misery displayed in his Excellency's visage on finding himself in this perilous situation. But seeing the private secretary and a mob of clerks, with their pens in their hands, hastening to his rescue, he made a desperate effort, and cast himself off on the other side; and finally succeeded ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... fashion his most effective weapon. Fashion enthralls man, it deprives him of his freedom; it is the most autocratic dictator, its mandate being obeyed by all classes, high and low, without exception. Every season it issues new decrees, and no matter how ludicrous they are, everyone submits forthwith. The fashions of this season are changed in the next. Look, for example, at women's hats; some years ago the "merry widow" which was about two or three feet in diameter, was all the rage, ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... that seems ludicrous as we recall it now. The youths of the community, imbued with the idea that "cold steel" would play an important part in the conflict, provided themselves with huge bowie-knives, fashioned by our home blacksmith, and with these fierce weapons swinging from their belts were much ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... and Hippocrates. The originality, though a queer one to be sure, of Gabirol is to bring the ethical qualities of man into relation with all these. The approximations are forced in every instance and often ludicrous. Instead of attempting to give a psychological analysis of the qualities in question, he lays stress on their physical basis in one of the five senses, as we ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... wanton and ludicrous tales. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton (Lord Lytton) published six of the Lost Tales of Mil[e]tus in rhymeless verse. He pretends he borrowed them from the scattered remnants preserved by Apollodo'rus and Conon, contained in the pages of Pausa'nias and Athenaeus, or dispersed ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... dogmatic and off-hand manner which is far from scientific. It is not surprising, therefore, that the most widely divergent opinions are expressed. Nor is it surprising that ignorant and chaotic notions among the general population should lead to results that would be ludicrous if they were not pathetic. To mention one instance known to me: a married lady who is a leader in social-purity movements and an enthusiast for sexual chastity, discovered, through reading some pamphlet against solitary vice, that she had herself been practicing ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... sense,—when suddenly a friend at your elbow laughs aloud, and offers you a piece of Bologna sausage. As in real life, so in his writings,—the serious and the comic, the sublime and the grotesque, the pathetic and the ludicrous are mingled together. At times he is sententious, energetic, simple; then again, obscure and diffuse. His thoughts are like mummies embalmed in spices, and wrapped about with curious envelopements; but within these the thoughts themselves are kings. At times glad, beautiful ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... their sorrows to John, and then the breach becomes too wide ever to be bridged over. Unless John is an exceptionally independent man he will attempt in his clumsy way to bring both women to the same way of thinking, and the result would be ludicrous were it not also pitiful. The chances are nine hundred and ninety-nine to one thousand that he will succeed in making his mother feel that he is unduly influenced by his silly wife, while said wife thinks indignantly that John is, and always will ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... he attacked the old monopoly, and visioned a time when a claim to individual ownerships of the earth's surface would be as ludicrous as were now the assertion of title to a fee-simple somewhere in the moon. He mustered statistics; he adduced historic and contemporary example of the just and the unjust in land-holding; he gripped the throat of a certain English duke, and held him up ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... in brief, one American example (to be found at length in S. P. R. Proceedings XVIII.) of well-recorded telepathic transmission. The incident thus transferred is trivial and even ludicrous; the fact of the transference was absolutely useless. But the case is not only none the worse for this; it is all the better. When we are trying to prove that such transmission exists, we want to keep clear, if we can, of emotional complications. If P is brooding over A's ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... he said this ... the haunting face of the sewer digger came back to Judd ... came back in such a ludicrous light that Judd looked at Barley and laughed. Get him out of the hole? Certainly he would! The other players—grim, tired, water-soaked—saw Judd laugh. His first time under fire in the biggest game of the year ... and ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... turn of my rear gun came afterwards when the pilot flattened out and steered northward along the wrong border of No Man's Land. Once, when flying very low, we looked into a wide trench and saw a group of tiny figures make confused attempts to take cover, tumbling over each other the while in ludicrous confusion. ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... would say in some use of that term—a thief who had no shame in his thievery but rather gloried in it. If you left anything edible within his ingenious and comprehensive reach he regarded it as a challenge. There comes to me a ludicrous incident that concerned a companion of one winter journey. He had carefully prepared a lunch and had wrapped it neatly in paper, and he placed it for a moment on the sled while he turned to put his scarf about him. But in that moment Nanook saw it and it was gone. ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... up and are very open; their eyes project outwards. When walking they carry their heads low, on a short neck; and their hinder legs are rather longer compared with the front legs than is usual. Their bare teeth, their short heads, and upturned nostrils give them the most ludicrous self-confident air of ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... distinctness, a sort of resurrection dream of which the events of the two days before supplied the bones and skeleton outline. As in all very vivid and dreadful dreams the whole vision was connected and coherent, there were no ludicrous and inconsequent interludes, none of those breakings of one thread and hurried seizures of another, which though one is dreaming very distinctly, supply some vague mental comfort, since even to the sleeper they are reminders that his experiences are not solid but mere phantasies woven by ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... says, to palliate or extenuate the crimes he himself has been guilty of: but laments, for Mr. Lovelace's own sake, that he gives him, with so ludicrous and unconcerned an air, such solemn and useful lessons and warnings. Nevertheless, he resolves to make it his whole endeavour, he tells him, to render them efficacious to himself: and should think himself but too happy, if he shall be enabled to set him ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... then be adopted, I would say—destroy the facility of spirit-drinking, by laying on a heavy duty. It is in vain that interested sophistry would plead its benefits in particular cases—such, for instance, as the ludicrous plea of the needfulness of drams for market-women on wet and frosty mornings.[A] Set these specious benefits against the dreadful results to men's health and pockets, from the present low price of spirits, and ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... beyond his power. When, therefore, he exerted his magic strength, the mountains bent and the seas receded; but when the philosopher attempted to lead forth the Princess of Zulichium in the youthful dance, youths and maidens turned their heads aside lest they should make too manifest the ludicrous ideas with which they ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... may be remembered that Mr Mansfield had a competitor in Mr Bandman Palmer, who, however, missed horror by the simple vulgarity of his horrors, and, though he may have impressed the simple-minded, was ludicrous to the thoughtful. ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... very ludicrous. Jack crept under the table to show us how he and the cook made eyes at each other down there in the darkness, not daring to speak. The pantomime was necessary, for the Genoese had very little English ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... be worthy of the name of a cause. Yet the men who could show that he had failed to clear up the mystery could themselves throw no light upon it. The government was especially ignorant of all that it should have known; and there is something almost ludicrous in the tone of the speech made by the President of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the spectacle, found it hard to preserve their gravity. The confusion, the clamour, the grotesque appearance of an army in which there could scarcely be seen a shirt or a pair of pantaloons, a shoe or a stocking, presented so ludicrous a contrast to the orderly and brilliant appearance of their master's troops, that they amused themselves by wondering what the Parisians would say to see such a force mustered on the plain ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in New Jersey when it rains is to let it rain; and what I did when he pounded was to let him pound. I was perfectly willing he should pound; I even hoped that he enjoyed it. In spite of the anxiety I felt for poor Kate, I could not help laughing at the ludicrous earnestness with which he swore and pounded. Like most men, my uncle was cool when he was not excited; and as there had been nothing on the present occasion to excite him, I suppose he was cool. Doubtless he stopped to dress himself before he answered the summons. Very ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... heartily. The idea of anyone voluntarily entering upon a single combat with the terrible Frisian giant, who for months had been a name of fear among the thousands that beleaguered Haarlem, struck them as really ludicrous. ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... took no Pains to shew it at his latest Hour, that is, he did not dye like one of those prophane Wits, who bid the Curtains be drawn, and said the Farce of Life was ended. This is making our Warfare too slight and ludicrous: He departed with more Grace, and, like the memorable Type of his Prudence, Don Quixote de la Mancha, where he perceiv'd his Sand was running out, he repented the Extravagance of his Knight-Errantry, and ingenuously confess'd his Family Name. ...
— The Theater (1720) • Sir John Falstaffe
... great inside as out. It was a horrid din of discordant sounds. Conversation at the supper table was out of the question, and as soon as it was over we went out among the boys who had come to charivari us. There were perhaps fifty of them, with blackened faces and ludicrous dresses, and after the bride and bridegroom had shown themselves and received their congratulations, they went their way, and left us to enjoy ourselves in peace. It was after this manner the young folks wedded. There was ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... the table scratching his bristly head and looking the picture of ludicrous bewilderment. I watched him and meanwhile debated whether or not I should take the opportunity to knock him down. That was undoubtedly the proper course. But I could not bring myself to do it. A spirit of wild mischief possessed me; a strange, unnatural ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... that followed may be conceived, but cannot be described. Some of the men burst into laughter, for anything ludicrous is irresistible to an Eskimo of the very far north. A few were petrified. Others there were who resented this indignity to the heir-apparent, and flourished their spears in a threatening manner. These ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... "that's all that is the matter with her. She sees all her friends married and established, she has the perfectly ludicrous idea that she is not as young as she used to be. She feels like an ambitious thoroughbred that's been left ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... embarrassing was the duty he had taken on himself. To force an entrance into the banquet-hall of a great and powerful noble, surrounded by the rank of Naples, and to arraign him for what to his boon-companions would appear but an act of gallantry, was an exploit that could not fail to be at once ludicrous and impotent. He mused a moment, and, slipping a piece of gold into the porter's hand, said that he was commissioned to seek the Signor Zanoni upon an errand of life and death, and easily won his way across the court, and into the interior ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Hildreff. I hez your permission, sah?" and the negro rolled his eyes with a ludicrous expression ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... passed the small gate of the inner fence it was easy for me to see that this royal pair were not upon the best of terms, for each of them tried to get through it first, to show his right of precedence. The result was somewhat ludicrous, for they jammed in the gateway. Here, however, Umbelazi's greater weight told, for, putting out his strength, he squeezed his brother into the reeds of the fence, and won through a foot or ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... gross contempt and what passed among them for ridicule. They mimicked the high stomach as they stood, as the dead man had stood, with arms aloft in rebellion against his lot, and fell back, as he had fallen, screaming, to kick and wallow on the ground. Here was plot and matter for ludicrous corroboree, the first rehearsal of which took place on ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... dispersed. With it they could claim the status of a separate dynasty. Yet the capture of Nanking was put off until the last act of all. These sapient leaders, whose military knowledge was antiquated, acted with an indifference to the most obvious considerations, that would have been ludicrous if it had not been a further injury to a suffering people. In 1858 their apathy was such that it not merely saved Nanking but played the whole game into the ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... And if the orderly people are English, they add that (1) is the inferior method, and characteristic of the South. It is inferior. Yet those who pursue it at all events know what they want; they are not puzzling to themselves or ludicrous to others; they do not take the wings of the morning and fly into the uttermost parts of the sea before walking to the registry office; they cannot breed a tragedy quite ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... involved in giving a man such faculties and capacities, if this be the only field on which they are to be exercised. If you think of what most of us do in this world, and of what it is in us to be, and to do, it is almost ludicrous to consider the disproportion. All other creatures fit their circumstances; nothing in them is bigger than their environment. They find in life a field for every power. You and I do not. 'The foxes have holes, and the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... know that the girl was respectable, and so far worthy of her son. The idea of such an inquiry would have filled Mercy's parents with scornful merriment, as a thing ludicrous indeed. People in THEIR position, who could do this and that, whose name stood so high for this and that, who knew themselves well bred, who had one relation an admiral, another a general, and a marriage-connection ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... list of fifty-four Articles, containing instructions to the clergy of his diocess of Canterbury, some of which are too ludicrous and puerile to excite any other sentiment than laughter in ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... other monkeys. A few young monkeys and one old Anubis baboon alone took no notice of the snake. I then placed the stuffed specimen on the ground in one of the larger compartments. After a time all the monkeys collected round it in a large circle, and staring intently, presented a most ludicrous appearance. They became extremely nervous; so that when a wooden ball, with which they were familiar as a plaything, was accidentally moved in the straw, under which it was partly hidden, they all instantly ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... imagine what I want to go there for! You wouldn't suppose, would you, that I had any special secrets— an old man like me;—for instance, you would not suspect me of any love secrets, eh?" And he made a ludicrous attempt to appear sentimental. "The fact is, Roger,—I have got into a little scrape over at The Islands—" here he looked warmer and redder than ever;—"and I want to take precautions! You understand—I want to take care that the King does not hear of it—Gott in Himmel! What a ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... o'clock Mr. Binns arrives, and is highly amused at the ludicrous mistake that brought me to the Armenian pastor's instead of to his man, with whom he had left instructions concerning me, should I arrive after his departure in the evening for the vineyard; in return he has an amusing story to tell of the people waylaying ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... trepidation; his bow draws out nothing but groans or squeals; and so, in order to correct these visceral complaints, a piece of rosin is awkwardly produced from his trousers' pocket, and applied to the rheumatic member, with some half-dozen brisk rubs in a parenthesis of music. The effect is painfully ludicrous!—— ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... sensitive face flushed hotly. He felt himself to be in an extremely ludicrous position, Mr. Watson stood in the background ready to second anything he might say, but very glad to be able to take a subordinate position in the affair, and Donald leaned back against a tree and looked upon the little scene with an extravagant ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... Kemp wanted me to," he responded; "and I shall never forget that meeting with her niece while life lasts, it was so ludicrous. I arrived at the depot just as the train had stopped, and the passengers were already pouring from the car. In my haste to reach the throng I slipped upon a banana peel, and the next instant I was plunging headlong ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... in, I could not resist laughing at my ludicrous situation. I felt as one does when looking at a ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... threshold; and looking through the glass I saw the master of the establishment shaving a fat-faced neighbour. Now I had come to see and pay my compliments to a poet, and there did appear to me to be something strangely awkward and irresistibly ludicrous in having to address, to some extent, in a literary and complimentary vein, an individual actually engaged in so excessively prosaic and unelevated a species ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... luck and bad management as to the work of Bridport's fleet. Intended, moreover, primarily as diversions to keep England occupied at home and sicken her of the war, they did not altogether fail of their aim. Some of these projects verged on the ludicrous, as that of corraling a band of the criminals and royalist outlaws that infested France and dropping them on the English coast for a wild campaign of murder and pillage. Fifteen hundred of these Chouans were actually landed at Fishguard ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... Americans were well in the stream, and some had gained the bank, on the Canadian side, when eighteen or twenty of the red children of the forest, sprang to their feet, and gave a yell, so hideous, that the Americans, stricken with panic, fled with almost ludicrous precipitancy. So terror-stricken, indeed, were the valiant host, that they left arms, accoutrements, and haversacks, behind them. No further attempt was made by General Hull, on Amherstburgh. It would have been captured with great difficulty, if it ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... some wag in the crowd made a remark about the diminutive size of the speaker, and the ludicrous figure he would cut as a general, at which ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... pony's head round, and jogged along with Arthur. His mother was charmed to see him in such high spirits, and welcomed Mr. Smirke for his sake, when Arthur said he had forced the curate back to dine. He gave a most ludicrous account of the play of the night before, and of the acting of Bingley the Manager, in his rickety Hessians, and the enormous Mrs. Bingley as the Countess, in rumpled green satin and a Polish cap; he mimicked ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the girl, the pure and sweet unreason of her proceedings, was beyond his mental grasp. The attitude of reproach which this delicate and altogether lovely young blossom of a thing had adopted towards him filled him with dismay and a ludicrous sense of guilt. He had a keen sense of the unreason and contrariness of her whole attitude, but he had no contempt towards her on account of it. He felt as if he were facing some new system of things, some higher order of creature for whom unreason was the finest ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... simile, and figure. This is a sin to which women are wofully prone. They commit it with glee, and I have often found it a most difficult matter to make them realise the absurdities which result from the practice of it. As an illustration of the ludicrous consequences of unbridled indulgence in metaphor and simile, I quote the following extract (not, however, the work of a woman) from a serious ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... destroyed, the delicacy of the sex be violated, the dignity of halls of legislation degraded, by an attempt to introduce them there. Such duties are inconsistent with those of a mother;" and then we have ludicrous pictures of ladies in hysterics at the polls, and ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... his work, printed on large paper and sumptuously bound. He loved to read in this, as people read over the letters of friends who have long been dead; and it might have awakened a feeling of something far removed from the ludicrous, if his comments on his own production could have been heard. "That's a thought, now, for you!—See Mr. Thomas Babington Macaulay's Essay printed six years after thus book." "A felicitous image! and so everybody would have said if only Mr. Thomas Carlyle had hit upon ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... courage, endurance, and humanity, to the front. One feels glad to know that all the praise did not make her other than the humble British girl, though few, perhaps, could pass through such an ordeal of adulation unscathed. The flatteries had, however, a ludicrous as well as a touching side, as may be seen from the following extract. Hero-worship leads to the hoarding of many things, including bark of trees, stones, mortar, old rags, and hair; and it is little wonder if Grace found the latter tendency ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... the end of each verse. He sang several verses; at the time I knew how many, but am unable now to recall the exact number. He must surely have been a sound sleeper or the loud laughter which filled the room would have waked him, for the scene was ludicrous in the extreme: Terry sitting up in bed, sound asleep, at the hour of midnight, and singing with a loud voice and very earnest manner, to an audience who were unable to understand one word of the song. At the close of the last verse he lay quietly down, all unconscious of the ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... commendation ends and irony begins, where attraction ends and pretence begins, in a manner which would be impossible for persons possessed of a different order of apprehension. Persons possessed of identical apprehension view objects in an identically ludicrous, beautiful, or repellent light; and in order to facilitate such identical apprehension between members of the same social circle or family, they usually establish a language, turns of speech, or ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... himself the lord of creation had ever blessed or cursed the universe with his presence. Down in the yard lies Austin with sprawling limbs, his face glimmering white in the dawn, and the hose nozzle still projecting from his dead hand. The whole of human kind is typified in that one half-ludicrous and half-pathetic figure, lying so helpless beside the machine which it ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a step, and there rested motionless, under the sway of an emotion akin to dismay. He stood staring intently at his son with a perplexity in his expression that was almost ludicrous. When, at last, he spoke, his voice was a ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... have been inspired by the same thought, and evidently longs in his heart for the advent of the new seamanship. He is an expert, of course, and I rather believe he's the same gentleman who did not see his way to fit water-tight doors to bunkers. With ludicrous earnestness he assured the Commission of his intense belief that had only the Titanic struck end-on she would have come into port all right. And in the whole tone of his insistent statement there was suggested the ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... portion of his father's life lived in a fine house on Lafayette Place. I have attended evening parties there that were exceedingly simple in character, and at which Mrs. Astor was always plainly dressed and wore no jewels. I have a very distinct recollection of one of these parties owing to a ludicrous incident connected with myself. My mother was a woman of decidedly domestic tastes, whose whole life was so immersed in her large family of children that she never allowed an event of a social character to interfere with what she regarded as her household or maternal duties. We older children were ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... it being contrary to etiquette. Conversation was therefore impossible, and he was very glad, therefore, when at length his Majesty got up and retired, with a gait which was intended to be very majestic. It was to represent the step of a lion, but the outward sweep of the legs looked only like a ludicrous waddle. The king had in reality gone to eat his breakfast, as he had not broken his fast since hearing of the traveller's arrival. He quickly returned, and Speke was again invited in, with his men. He found the king standing on a red blanket, talking and laughing to a hundred or ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... amalgamated with one another. Yet, while amendment in these matters is to be striven for, there is nothing that the teacher who wishes to establish habits of orthoepy has to be more watchful in guarding against, than bestowing upon his pupils an affected or mincing utterance, all the more ludicrous and objectionable, it may be, in that a certain set of words are pronounced with over-nicety, while almost all others are left in a state ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... decided to leave Parliament. But the effect of this "secession" was marred by the occasional reappearance of Sheridan, Tierney, and others who had loudly advocated it.[456] Unpatriotic in conception, it speedily became ludicrous from its half-hearted execution. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... morning to the Chapel of St. Januarius, to see the blood liquefy. The grand ceremony was last Saturday at the Cathedral, but the miracle is repeated every morning in the Chapel for eight days. I never saw such a scene, at once so ludicrous and so disgusting, but more of the latter. There was the saint, all bedizened with pearls, on the altar, the other silver ladies and gentlemen all round the chapel, with an abundance of tapers burning before them. Certain people were admitted within the rails of the altar; the ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... soon as the letter was sealed, put on her bonnet, and taking Mr Ramsden's servant with her, stepped into the chaise, and drove to the house of Mr Nicholas Forster. She found Mrs Forster squatted on the bed in her ludicrous attire, awaiting her return ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... Crati'nus—under whom comedy received its full development—Cimon is highly eulogized, and his rival, Pericles, is bitterly derided. With unmeasured and unsparing license comedy attacked, under the veil of satire, not only all that was really ludicrous or base, but often cast scorn and derision on that which was innocent, or even meritorious. For the reason that the comic writers were so indiscriminate in their attacks, frequently making transcendent genius ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... May's smirk exactly, and wagging his tail slightly, he commenced to play the false Kishwegin. He sidled and bridled and ejaculated with raised hands, and in the dumb show the tall Frenchman made such a ludicrous caricature of Mr. Houghton's manager that Madame wept again with laughter, whilst Max leaned back against the wall and giggled continuously like some pot involuntarily boiling. Geoffrey spread his shut fists across the table and shouted with laughter, Ciccio threw back his head and showed ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... hold on Peter, who, adopting a ludicrous air of extreme cunning, rushed immediately around to the other table, where he burst into derisive laughter and thumbed his nose ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... waistcoat. Sometimes you inhabit the expansive bosom of a matron. Nor do you confine yourself to one class alone out of the many that go to the composition of our social life. You have impelled grocers to ludicrous pitches of absurdity; you have driven the wife of a working-man to distraction because her neighbour's front room possesses a more expensive carpet, of a sprucer pattern than her own. Clerks have suffered acutely from your stings, and actresses have spent many a sleepless ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 11, 1891 • Various
... impostor, was the author of a discovery of a gold mine, a few months before: a composition resembling ore mingled with earth, which he pretended to have brought from it, he produced. After a number of attendant circumstances, too ludicrous and contemptible to relate, which befell a party, who were sent under his guidance to explore this second Peru, he at last confessed, that he had broken up an old pair of buckles, and mixed the pieces with sand and stone; and on assaying the composition, ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... Poet," a dramatic attack upon himself. In this attempt to forestall his enemies Jonson succeeded, and "Poetaster" was an immediate and deserved success. While hardly more closely knit in structure than its earlier companion pieces, "Poetaster" is planned to lead up to the ludicrous final scene in which, after a device borrowed from the "Lexiphanes" of Lucian, the offending poetaster, Marston-Crispinus, is made to throw up the difficult words with which he had overburdened his stomach as well as overlarded his ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... women in childbirth, were tainted with the Sabbatian heresy. So bitter and widespread were the charges and counter-charges, that at one moment every Jewish community in Europe stood excommunicated by the Chief Rabbis of one side or the other—a ludicrous position, whereof the sole advantage was that it brought the Ban into contempt and disuse. It was not likely that a controversy so long-standing and so impassioned would fail to permeate Poland; and, indeed, among us the quarrel, introduced as it was by Baruch Yavan, who was agent ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... taken or offered to take any part in the rebellion. Told of the letter found, and of the date it bore, he laughed. That letter made everything very simple and clear. At the date it bore he had been away at Flushing marrying a wife, whom he had since brought thence to Middelburg. It was ludicrous, he urged, to suppose that in such a season—of all seasons in a man's life—he should have been concerned with rebellion or correspondence with rebels, and, ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... first time. "Donald, fetch out the pony. Can you ride bareback?" he asked: "I fear there's no saddle but an old piece of sacking." In spite of my protestations the pony was led forth; a starved little beast, on whose over-sharp ridge I must have cut a sufficiently ludicrous figure when hoisted into place with the valises slung ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... stayed, against the Emperor's orders, five days too long at Odessa—that was all—yes, you see, a little French actress who was there, who sang operettas; oh, how she did sing operettas! Offenbach, you know;" and the General tried to hum a bar or two of the 'Dites lui', with ludicrous effect. "Charming! To leave her, ah! I found that very hard. I remained five days: that wasn't much, eh, Zilah? five days? But the devil! There was a Grand Duke—well—humph! younger than I, of course—and—and—the Grand Duke was jealous. Oh! there was at ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... tight and too short. She used Maurice's slang without its virile appropriateness; when they accepted an invitation from one of Maurice's new acquaintances, her anxiety to be of his generation was pathetic—or ludicrous, as one happened to look at it. These friends of Maurice's seemed to have innumerable interests in common with him that she knew nothing about—and jokes! How tired she got of their jokes, which were mostly preposterous badinage, expressed with entire solemnity ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... that I do not seem able to join my spirit to God.... God have pity on me, for they have burdened me with food. Oh, how thoughtless of them!' His words cannot be translated. Naif in the extreme, they become ludicrous in English. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... cheerful statement was ludicrous; the latter part was true, but the process was so lengthy that the war ended leaving it still incomplete! What actually happened at the time stated was that a return was demanded from the various units in ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... was a severe one. "An obscure painter of the Flemish school," wrote Clinton to his friend and confidant, Henry Post, "has made a very ludicrous and grotesque representation of Jonah immediately after he was ejected from the whale's belly. He is represented as having a very bewildered and dismal physiognomy, not knowing from whence he came nor to what place bound. Just so ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... laughing at you, but, under the circumstances I really could not help it. Your ignorance of the true state of affairs strikes me as so positively ludicrous. You forget, my good sir, that I am behind the scenes—in your secret, you know," he added, seeing a look of bewilderment at the other expression. "Why, man, you and all your people are absolutely at our mercy. You look surprised, but I assure you such is the fact. I really ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... the stage lights going at almost full tilt in the dungeon scene of "Fidelio," the effect of Florestan's exclamation, "Gott! welch' Dunkel hier!" upon an audience fully three-fourths of which was composed of Germans or descendants of Germans the ludicrous effect may be imagined. Many stories were current among the artists of the blithe indifference of the occupants of the boxes to artistic proprieties when they interfered with the display of gowns and jewels. One of them was that the chairman of the amusement ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... born and who live, no matter how quietly, in the security of a perfectly good ledge above and away from the social ladder's rungs, the evidence of one frantically climbing and trying to vaunt her exalted position is merely ludicrous. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... and shook hands with every new arrival with all the warmth and cordiality of old friendship. While thus he inquired for various absent individuals, and asked most affectionately for sundry aunts and uncles not forthcoming, a slight incident occurred which by its ludicrous turn served to shorten the long half-hour before dinner. An individual of the party, a Mr. Blake, had, from certain peculiarities of face, obtained in his boyhood the sobriquet of "Shave-the-wind." This hatchet-like conformation had grown with his ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... referebam"] ... Could I then upbraid you with blindness who did not know that you were blind,—with personal deformity who believed you even good-looking, chiefly in consequence of having seen the rather neat likeness of you prefixed to your Poems [Marshall's ludicrous botch of 1645 which Milton had disowned] ... Nor did I know any more that you had written on Divorce. I have never read that book of yours; I have never seen it ... I will have done with this subject. That book is not mine. I have published, and shall yet publish, other ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... magnificence in the public scene ever before Spenser's imagination; and its quaintness, because the whole outward apparatus of representation was borrowed from what was past, or from what did not exist, and implied surrounding circumstances in ludicrous contrast with fact, and men taught themselves to speak in character, and prided themselves on keeping it up by substituting for the ordinary language of life and emotion a cumbrous and ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... the chief command was given to Chrzanowski, a Pole, who did not know Italian, had not studied the theatre of the war, and was so little favoured by nature that, to the impressionable Italians, his appearance seemed ludicrous. This deplorable appointment was made to satisfy the outcry against Piedmontese generalship; as if it was not enough, the other Polish general, Ramorino, accused of treachery by the revolutionists in 1832, but now praised to the skies by the democratic party, was placed ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... some of our electric exhibitions produce mirth. For instance, the effect of electricity on the monkeys in Montalluyah—who are very sagacious, having faces white like a human being, and talking like parrots—is ludicrous in the extreme. When engaged in chewing and eating their favourite nuts, they find themselves, in spite of their cunning, raised to a great height, without seeing the man underneath their pedestal, who impels them ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... attempted later, if at all. His chief concern now was for the soldier he had thrown. And now he made his way back, and found to his dismay that the man was beginning to recover his senses. As Fred came back he stretched, yawned, and sat up, with the most ludicrous mixture of fright and wonder in his eyes. Fred had his gun, and at the sight of that the soldier ...
— The Boy Scouts In Russia • John Blaine
... glance at the two ludicrous figures that approached him, the policeman first listened to the excited explanation of the boy indifferently, then with incredulity, and ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster
... words, and guessing their meaning, by degrees he put together the following sentence: "I drink to the health of my beloved darling, and kiss her little foot a thousand times, and am impatiently expecting her arrival." He pictured the pitiable, ludicrous part he would play if he had agreed to go to Nice with his wife. He felt so mortified that he almost shed tears and began pacing to and fro through all the rooms of the flat in great agitation. His pride, his plebeian fastidiousness, was revolted. Clenching ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... ever beheld the stupendous absurdities attendant on 'A message from the Lords' in the House of Commons, turn upon the Medicine Man of the poor Indians? Has he any 'Medicine' in that dried skin pouch of his, so supremely ludicrous as the two Masters in Chancery holding up their black petticoats and butting their ridiculous wigs at Mr. Speaker? Yet there are authorities innumerable to tell me—as there are authorities innumerable among the Indians to tell them—that the nonsense ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... hardly help for laughing, poor Dinny's aspect was so ludicrous; but by dint of placing the broken dissel-boom up to where he was sitting, and crawling up to him, Dinny was aided ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... complaining of the campaign waged against motor-cars by humorous artists, who never seem to tire of depicting accidents. "One common and ludicrous error in many drawings," he said, "is the placing of the driver on the wrong side of the car." But surely, in an accident, that is just ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton
... —[For a ludicrous description of Menou see the Memoirs of Marmont:— "Clever and gay, he was an agreeable talker, but a great liar. He was not destitute of some education. His character, one of the oddest in the world, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... combining extreme irreverence of form with a total lack of irreverence of spirit toward the real spiritual mysteries of religion. He burlesques saints and devils alike, mocks the swarm of miracles of the mediaeval Church, makes salient all the ludicrous aspects of mediaeval religious faith in its devout credulity and barbarous gropings; yet he never sneers at holiness or real aspiration, and through all the riot of fun in his masques, one feels the sincere Christian and the warm-hearted man. But he was evidently troubled by the feeling ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... which were piled on trays in front of the throne. I remember noting an incident. An old fellow with a lame leg stumbled and upset his tray, so that the contents rolled hither and thither. His attempts to recover them were ludicrous and caused the monarch on the throne to relax from his dignity and smile. I mention this to show that what we witnessed was no set scene but apparently a living piece of the past. Had it been so the absurdity of the bedizened old man tumbling ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... curtain there were a number of other choice pictures by artists of ancient days. Here was the famous cluster of grapes by Zeuxis, so admirably depicted that it seemed as if the ripe juice were bursting forth. As to the picture of the old woman by the same illustrious painter, and which was so ludicrous that he himself died with laughing at it, I cannot say that it particularly moved my risibility. Ancient humor seems to have little power over modern muscles. Here, also, was the horse painted by Apelles ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Licinius"—both works exhibiting considerable skill and mastery in versification, but by far too much tinged (as might indeed be expected) with the light reflected from the youthful poet's reading to deserve a place among his original productions. For the amusement of his comrades, also, he wrote a number of ludicrous 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... of Alberdina's large peasant head was perched a small round hat, positively the most ludicrous thing ever seen in the shape of millinery. With its band of red satin ribbon and tiny bunch of field flowers, it seemed to defy the ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... by a horrible fear that his mournful demeanour might cause his banishment from her, kept making desperate efforts to be lively, which were a dismal failure. It was ludicrous. The gayer he affected to be, the more emphatic was his manifest depression. So she wearied of his company. One day he called at her hotel, and, as was his custom, went immediately to her sitting-room without sending in ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... contrary to etiquette. Conversation was therefore impossible, and he was very glad, therefore, when at length his Majesty got up and retired, with a gait which was intended to be very majestic. It was to represent the step of a lion, but the outward sweep of the legs looked only like a ludicrous waddle. The king had in reality gone to eat his breakfast, as he had not broken his fast since hearing of the traveller's arrival. He quickly returned, and Speke was again invited in, with his men. He found the king standing on a red blanket, talking ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... ridiculous a Plight; —Dum sudor ad imos Manaret Talos; And Demitto Auriculas, ut iniquae mentis Acellus Cum gravius dorso subiit onus. And other Representations of the same sort, seem to place Horace in a very mean and ludicrous Light; which it is probable he never apprehended in the full Course of exposing his Companion;—Besides, the Conduct of his Adversary is in several Places, excessively, and, as it may be construed, designedly, insolent ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... ludicrous exhibition of the aweful, melancholy, and venerable Johnson[767], happened well to counteract the feelings of sadness which I used to experience when parting with him for a considerable time. I accompanied him to his door, where he gave me ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... broken in health and shattered in mind, and then exiled from the province for criticism of the Government which was certainly no more severe than now appears every day in Opposition newspapers. The conflict had elements of the ludicrous, too, as when Captain Matthews was ordered by his military superiors to return to England because in the unrestrained festivities of New Year's Eve he had called on a strolling troupe to play Yankee Doodle and had shouted to the company, ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... determined to draw her unhappy visitor from his shell. But her most brilliant efforts were in vain. Poor Shock remained hopelessly engaged with his hands and feet, and replied at unexpected places, in explosive monosyllables at once ludicrous and disconcerting. Not even The Don, who came to her assistance, could relieve the awkwardness of the situation. Shock was too large to be ignored, and too ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... at once more confused and ludicrous: he poised himself alternately on either foot, and scratched his head vigorously, while his facial expression was something too comical for description. Finally, through a series of embarrassed chuckles and gurgles, he rippled into a broad guffaw, articulating ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... reverence. But that feature of the pagan pantheon, which I am contrasting with this, viz., that no pagan deity is an abstraction but a vile concrete, impresses myself with a subtler sense of horror; because it blends the hateful with a mode of the ludicrous. For the sake of explaining myself to the non-philosophic reader, I beg him to consider what is the sort of feeling with which he regards an ancient river-god, or the presiding nymph of a fountain. The impression which he receives is pretty much ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... sight, and who had kept on pushing up the trap-door with his head, gave it a final thrust, and the door fell over with a loud flap, which made Jem Wimble sit up, with his face so swollen and bruised that his eyes were half-closed; and this and his dirty face gave him an aspect that was more ludicrous than strange. ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... on the Demon and the Tar Baby is so preposterously ludicrous that it cannot have been independently invented, and we must therefore assume that they are causally connected, and the existence of the variant in South Africa clinches the matter, and gives us a landing-stage ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... superiority,—"for, upon my soul, I don't know where I'd turn for a crust if I weren't." In the end the talented ladies and gentlemen usually went home by an inexpensive line as the voluntary arrangement of a public to whom plain soda was a ludicrous hardship, and native vegetables an abomination at any price. Then Llewellyn and Rosa Norton—she had a small inalienable income, and they were really married though they preferred for some inexplicable reason to be thought guilty of less conventional behaviour—would depart in another ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... difficulties. Notwithstanding all this, the last gentleman was said to be young, but a clever lawyer. Now a play of the humorous invaded his face; and while from his eye there came out a strong love of the ludicrous, a curl of sarcasm now and then ruffled his lip. They called him the British agent—in other words, the Counsel for Her Most Gracious Majesty. Smooth had no stronger evidence of this fact than that ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... brows nervously bent, and a self-obliterating smile wavered upon his lips. His hair had begun to thin and to turn grey, but he had a heavy moustache, which would better have sorted with sterner lineaments. As he walked—or sidled—into the room, his hands kept shutting and opening, with rather ludicrous effect. Something which was not exactly shabbiness, but a lack of lustre, of finish, singled him among the group of men; looking closer, one saw that his black suit belonged to a fashion some years old. His linen was irreproachable, but he wore no sort of jewellery, one little black ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... visit the Doves, he discarded his garments of hide, including the picturesque zebra-skin trousers, and appeared dressed in smart European clothes which he had contrived to obtain from Durban, and a large hat with a white ostrich feather, that struck Rachel as even more ludicrous than the famous trousers. Also he was continuously sending presents of game and of skins, or of rare karosses, that is, fur rugs, which he ordered to be delivered to her personally—tokens, all of them, that she could not misunderstand. Her father, however, misunderstood them ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... must, no doubt, sound ludicrous, but the fact is that the animal, in itself a harmless beast, became the occasion, or was made the means, of forcing on me encounters with a person whom I particularly wish to avoid. You, however, will not be annoyed in ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... segregated Tuskegee was another obvious cause for the repeated delays in the operational date of the 477th, and its crews were finally assembled only weeks before the end of the war. Competition for black bomber crews also led to a ludicrous situation in which men highly qualified for pilot training according to their stanine scores (achievements on the battery of qualifying tests taken by all applicants for flight service) were sent instead to navigator-bomber ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... town was plunged into a state of ludicrous excitement by the spectacle of Madame Lola Montez rushing through Mill Street, with a lady's delicate riding whip in one hand and a copy of the Marysville Herald in the other, vowing vengeance on "that scoundrel of an editor," etc. She met him at the Golden Gate Saloon, a crowd, ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... they started off, packing loads of about twenty-five pounds each. To me their progress up the mountain side seemed extraordinarily slow. Were they never going to get anywhere? Their frequent stops seemed ludicrous. I was to learn later that it is as difficult at a high elevation for one who is not climbing to have any sympathy for those suffering from soroche as it is for a sailor to appreciate the sensations of ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... wholly incorrigible; secondly, we hope that her indelicacy, vanity, and malignity are inimitable, and that, therefore, her example is very little dangerous; and thirdly, though every page teems with errors of all kinds, from the most disgusting to the most ludicrous, they are smothered in such Boeotian dulness that they can do no harm.' In curious contrast to this professional criticism is a passage in one of Byron's letters to Moore. 'Lady Morgan,' writes the poet, 'in ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... and heroic, passing the best years of her womanhood in preparing dishes for the appetite of a dyspeptic husband, in looking after house-linen, and arranging lessons for a child. Matilda Blind says "This affects one with something of the ludicrous disproportion of making use of the fires of Etna to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... must admit that this is not an arrangement which seems right on the face of it. Treaties are quite as important as most laws, and to require the elaborate assent of representative assemblies to every word of the law, and not to consult them even as to the essence of the treaty, is prima facie ludicrous. In the older forms of the English Constitution, this may have been quite right; the power was then really lodged in the Crown, and because Parliament met very seldom, and for other reasons, it was then necessary that, on a multitude ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... or any attitude which resembles it, is wrong. To him who really comprehends what literature is, and what the function of literature is, this attitude is simply ludicrous. It is also fatal to the formation of literary taste. People who regard literary taste simply as an accomplishment, and literature simply as a distraction, will never truly succeed either in acquiring the accomplishment or in using ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... too ludicrous, and Kay sat down on the edge of the porch and laughed until she wept. Then, as Pablo still stood truculently in the doorway, waiting an answer to his query, she called to Murray, who had rushed to the aid of the potato baron, and asked him if he had found any clothing in the room, and, ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... a pioneer school in Pennsylvania affords a fine opportunity to study the methods of teaching then in vogue. Many of them may appeal to us as being ludicrous; but undoubtedly Dock's teaching was in many ways far in advance of the times, when the usual and most-approved method of "imparting knowledge" consisted in beating ideas into ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... soon begin to perceive that New York society is a blending of the ludicrous and pathetic. The really charming women have two terrible faults, one which their fathers, husbands, and brothers have taught them, and one which they have apparently contracted without extraneous aid. The first is their ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... him, but to those who come after him, with a wider knowledge of the properties of matter and the nature of living beings, and a wholly different attitude towards such problems, the primitive man's solution may seem merely a ludicrous travesty. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... harsh treatment Ravenscroft has met with at the hands of the critics it may be worth while emphasizing Genest's opinion that his 'merit as a dramatic writer has been vastly underrated'. Ravenscroft has a facility in writing, an ease of dialogue, a knack of evoking laughter and picturing the ludicrous, above all a vitality which many a greater name entirely lacks. As a writer of farce, and farce very nearly akin to ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... but it is full of worship—of worship that disdains concealment, that recks not of ridicule or comment, that believes too utterly to care if others disbelieve. There are in the East many men who do not pray. They do not laugh at the man who does, like the unpraying Christian. There is nothing ludicrous to them in prayer. In Egypt your Nubian sailor prays in the stern of your dahabiyeh; and your Egyptian boatman prays by the rudder of your boat; and your black donkey-boy prays behind a red rock in ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... into the hands of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, and the example set by him for those under his guidance, and by his master, the shogun, soon found followers among all classes of the people. As an instance of ludicrous luxury it may be mentioned that the timbers intended for the repair of the castle in Yedo were wrapped in wadded quilts when transported to the city from the forest. Finally, the treasury became so empty ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... delightful factor in what I may call the Arsene Lupin entertainment is the eminently ludicrous part played by the police. Everything passes outside their knowledge. Lupin speaks, writes, warns, orders, threatens, carries out his plans, as though there were no police, no detectives, no magistrates, no impediment of any kind in existence. They seem of no account to him whatever. No obstacle ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... good-humored, excursive, sensible, whimsical, intelligent being that he appears in his writings. Scarcely an adventure or character is given in his works that may not be traced to his own party-colored story. Many of his most ludicrous scenes and ridiculous incidents have been drawn from his own blunders and mischances, and he seems really to have been buffeted into almost every maxim imparted by him for the instruction ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... scratching his bristly head and looking the picture of ludicrous bewilderment. I watched him and meanwhile debated whether or not I should take the opportunity to knock him down. That was undoubtedly the proper course. But I could not bring myself to do it. A spirit of wild mischief ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... Humorous Poet," a dramatic attack upon himself. In this attempt to forestall his enemies Jonson succeeded, and "Poetaster" was an immediate and deserved success. While hardly more closely knit in structure than its earlier companion pieces, "Poetaster" is planned to lead up to the ludicrous final scene in which, after a device borrowed from the "Lexiphanes" of Lucian, the offending poetaster, Marston-Crispinus, is made to throw up the difficult words with which he had overburdened his stomach as well as overlarded his vocabulary. In the end Crispinus with his ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... for a half incredulous, half frightened look at her. She met his eyes steadily—the torn veil, quite discarded now, was in her pocket. She did not know the man; but it was quite evident from the almost ludicrous dismay which spread over his face that he ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... Preface to Cantos I., II. of Childe Harold (Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 5), Byron relies on the authority of "Ariosto Thomson and Beattie" for the inclusion of droll or satirical "variations" in a serious poem. Nevertheless, Dallas prevailed on him to omit certain "ludicrous stanzas." It is to be regretted that no one suggested the excision of sections xix.-xxi. from the second ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... down upon the ice, half hysterical, partly from the sense of the degrading, ludicrous plight I was in, partly from intense yet painful delight at being thus once more with him, seeing some recognition in his eyes again, and hearing some cordiality ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... wounded almost envied; the powder so burnt into our face that years could not remove it; the proved character of every man and officer on board, the implicit trust and adoration we felt for our commander; the ludicrous situations which would occur in the extremest danger and create mirth when death was staring you in the face, the hair-breadth escapes, and the indifference to life shown by all—when memory sweeps along ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... appalled bewilderment was almost ludicrous. "If he knows all that, and you knew all that, why didn't you let me click him when I ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... to Broad Street, the impression deepens, stirs, until you realize you are standing in a place of strength and power, in the very heart of the nation's financial life. The crowd of curb brokers yelling out quotations before the Stock Exchange seems merely a casual and ludicrous episode, and the Stock Exchange itself but a ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... and animals, he sometimes pours forth his own wild notes with full fervor. Yet I have often listened vainly for hours to hear him utter anything but a few idle repetitions of monotonous sounds, interspersed with some ludicrous varieties. Why he should neglect his own pleasing notes, to tease the listener with his imitations of all imaginable discords, is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... unknown to the great body of the people, and who under no circumstances should have aspired beyond the government of a colony. This administration which commenced in arrogance ended in panic. There was an interval of perplexity; when occurred the most ludicrous instance extant of an attempt at coalition; subordinates were promoted, while negotiations were still pending with their chiefs; and these negotiations, undertaken so crudely, were terminated in pique; in a manner which added to political disappointment personal ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... a person is very much addicted to tippling. "'Moistify,' a low word, generally used in a ludicrous ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... little chance of fulfilling; when in pecuniary straits, they either raised money upon the instruments, or allowed them to fall into the hands of distraining creditors. Inquiry into the circumstances of a would-be customer sometimes had ludicrous results; a newly-married couple, for instance, would be found tenanting two top-floor rooms, the furnishing whereof seemed to them incomplete without the piano of which their friends and relatives boasted. Not a few professional swindlers came to the office; confederate rogues, vouching for each ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... added Al Soft, or "The Wise," and he was born at Hauran, in Mesopotamia. ["Biographie Universelle."] Some have thought he was a Greek, others a Spaniard, and others, a prince of Hindostan: but, of all the mistakes which have been made respecting him, the most ludicrous was that made by the French translator of Sprenger's "History of Medicine," who thought, from the sound of his name, that he was a German, and rendered it as the "Donnateur," or Giver. No details of his life are known; but it is asserted, that he wrote more ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... have been stuck fast by the accumulation of paint. As he bent it slowly back upon the rusted hinges his heart beat so fast that he could scarcely catch his breath, though he was conscious all the while of a ludicrous aspect of his position, knowing that it was most probable that the cavity within would be found empty. The cupboard was small but very deep, and in the obscure light seemed at first to contain nothing except a small heap of dust and cobwebs. His sense of disappointment ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... Everett says, p.114 of his work, "It is good to be positive but better to be correct; and the reader I doubt not will agree with me, that such dogmatical blundering as this is prevent-. ed from being offensive only as it is ludicrous."] ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... made no further show of fight. He remained standing in the centre of the courtyard, a ludicrous, rather pathetic, figure. As the tyres of the car gritted on the gravel of the drive, the office door was flung open and the yellow-faced man ran out, ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... not restrain her laughter when she thought of the ludicrous scene that had just taken place, but she suddenly stopped in the midst of her merriment, for she felt as if a soft hand had just taken hers, and as if a pair of dark eyes were looking at her affectionately. Perhaps this thought may have come into her head ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... husband and wife. The dialogue is sprightly throughout, and the anxious desire of Sganarelle to kill his supposed injurer, whilst his cowardice prevents him from executing his valorous design, is extremely ludicrous. The chief aim of our author appears to have been to show how dangerous it is to judge with too much haste, especially in those circumstances where passion may either augment or diminish the view we take of certain objects. This truth, animated by a great deal of humour ...
— Sganarelle - or The Self-Deceived Husband • Moliere
... had been much abroad with his master, was asked, upon his return, to state the most ludicrous fact ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... ridiculous, without owning the power of exactly testing and truly judging character, would certainly have esteemed a proper subject for satire, a matter for mimicry and laughter. They would have been hugely mistaken for their pains. Sincerity is never ludicrous; it is always respectable. Whether truth—be it religious or moral truth—speak eloquently and in well-chosen language or not, its voice should be heard with reverence. Let those who cannot nicely, and with certainty, discern the difference ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... (for he cannot see well straight before him) to see whence the bananas are coming; or when again, after gorging a couple, he sits gulping and winking, digesting them in serene satisfaction, he is as good a specimen as can be seen of the ludicrous—dare I say the intentionally ludicrous?—element ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... humor, and the surprising abundance of purest namby-pamby. The presence of the latter class might be explained by the absence of the former, for namby-pamby cannot exist along with a healthy sense of the ludicrous. There has been a persistent craze among native song-writers for little flower-dramas and bird-tragedies, which, aiming at exquisiteness, fall far short of that dangerous goal and land in flagrant silliness. This weakness, however, will surely disappear in time, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... or ice is almost wholly ludicrous. Whether sleeping, quarrelling, or playing, whether curious, frightened, or angry, its interest is continuously humorous, but the Adelie penguin in the water is another thing; as it darts to and fro a fathom or two below the surface, as it leaps porpoise-like ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... made a great many rather ludicrous mistakes, inevitable to one who had just taken a first canter through the vast field of French art; mistakes in names and dates, in the order of men and generations. And when he made a blunder he was apt ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... America, and have been frequently described by travelers. Often they were of a religious nature, having something to do with devotional exercises; but not seldom they were simply for amusement. Occasionally they were mere pantomimes, where the actors appeared in costume and masks, and went through some ludicrous scene. Thus, to quote one example out of many, Lieutenant Timberlake saw some among the Cherokees, about the middle of the last century, which he speaks of as "very diverting," where some of the ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... I nearly laughed outright. The gratitude of that poor dupe of the confessional to the priest who had come to bring shame and destruction to his house, and the idea of that very man going himself to convey to his home the corrupter of his own wife, seemed to me so ludicrous that, for a moment, I had to make a superhuman ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... that which galled, which degraded her in her own eyes. Only three weeks since she had felt that entire and arrogant belief in herself, in her power over her own life and Philip's, on which she now looked back as merely ludicrous!—inexplicable in a girl of the most ordinary intelligence. What power had girls over men?—such men ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... any sympathy with the owner of a gin-palace; but as long as China permits the growth of opium throughout the length and breadth of the land, taxes it, and pockets a large revenue from it,—sympathy with her on the subject is simply ludicrous and misplaced."—(J. W. Walker v. ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... down stiffly and picked up the dog. This time he handed over a second handkerchief with a ludicrous air ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... It was ludicrous to see and hear Mrs. Davis, she thought papa an extraordinary man before, but now, she knew not how to express her admiration of his courage and discernment even I, fell in for a share of her praises. "Who could," she said "have thought it!" indeed, every one seemed surprised, ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... trials had not wholly dulled youth's sense of the ludicrous in Vaniman. He sat down that evening to the meal that had been prepared by Guard Wagg, late of the state prison, for three fugitive convicts, also late of that institution. The chimney of the kerosene lamp was smoky and the light was dim, therefore Vaniman's grin was hidden from ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... to every town-bred child. When these pleasant conversations took place in the kitchen the two old servants would sit gazing at the face of their mistress, apparently absorbed in admiration. They evidently regarded her as the most perfect being that had ever been created; and, though there was a ludicrous side to their simple idolatry, I ceased to wonder at it when I began to know her better. They reminded me of two faithful dogs always watching a beloved master's face, and showing in their eyes, glad or pathetic, how they sympathise with ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... such a ludicrous little thing; for, you see, the whole story turns upon nothing but ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... to the group of blacks, who were assembled at the corner of the house. They thought it a shame not to be a good rider and when they saw the awkward manner in which Mr. Wilmot finally mounted the horse and the ludicrous face of Jim Crow as he sprang up behind him, they were, as they afterward told Aunt Esther, "dreffully tickled and would have larfed, sartin, if they hadn't knowed marster would ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... a touch of vanity in his smile, as though in memory of some old, half-ludicrous story from ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... and confused inward feeling to get him ready for his next mental step. He had jumped off the tower; true; but he was alive and well, with no bones broken. What should he do now? Should he try to tear the tower down? The attempt would not be so very ludicrous, seeing he should only have to join those—socialists, anarchists, faddists—already at the work. But he admired the tower, and preferred to see is stand. If he did anything at all, it would be to try to creep back ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... great certainty, never failing; and though much knowledge might be gained from his lecture, people seemed more inclined to laugh than to learn; perhaps from his peculiar manner, and partly from his introducing something ludicrous, as on exhibiting the powers of a magnet, by lifting a large box, he observed it was not empty, and on opening the lid, five or six black cats put up their heads, which he instantly put down, saying, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... the "calliope" was truly ludicrous. To this was soon added all sorts of noises that only street urchins know how to ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose
... to make you laugh. There are also events recorded, which, at the time, may have produced effects analogous to comedy. The approach of the Gibeonites to the camp of Israel in their mock-beggarly costume might be mentioned. Shimei's cursing David has always seemed to us to border on the ludicrous. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... across the Pacific Ocean, at Guam, one of the Ladrone Islands, a ludicrous incident occurred. The Charleston steamed into the harbor, firing a few shots at the fort at its entrance. Several Spanish officers came out to the warship in a boat to apologize for not returning the salute, saying they had no powder. What ...
— Young Peoples' History of the War with Spain • Prescott Holmes
... main questions which arise in connection with this doctrine; and, to begin with, we may state with the utmost frankness that nothing is easier than to interpret the {24} conception of Divine immanence in such a manner as to make it appear either ludicrous or hateful or simply meaningless—in any case repulsive from the religious point of view. This, to come straight to the point, is what is bound to happen when God's indwelling in man is explained as meaning that man is de facto one ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... of the Kayser, not to be found in any Roman historian, and full of quaint and ludicrous jumbles of the ancient and the modern, I was suddenly stopped by finding that the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... on the first day of mobilization, and developed into real tragedy as the days slipped by. For although at first there was something a little ludicrous in the plight of the well-to-do, brought down with a crash to the level of the masses and loaded with paper money which was as worthless as Turkish bonds, so that the millionaire was for the time being no richer than the beggar, pity stirred in one at the sight of ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... the exhibition, heightened by Major Milroy's grave inquiry at the end of it, was so irresistibly ludicrous that the visitors shouted with laughter; and even Miss Milroy, with all her consideration for her father's sensitive pride in his clock, could not restrain herself from joining in the merriment which the catastrophe of the puppets had provoked. But there are ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... Sternhold and Hopkins' Version and point out none of the "weedy-trophies," the quaint and even uncouth lines which disfigure the work. We must, however, in considering and judging them, remember that many words and even phrases which at present seem rather ludicrous or undignified had, in the sixteenth century, significations which have now become obsolete, and which were then neither vulgar nor unpoetical. I also have been forced to take my selections from a copy ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... poor Bluecher's strange hallucination, which, though ludicrous, is very sad. He fancies himself with child by a Frenchman; and deplores that such an event should have happened to him in his old age! He does not so much mind being with child, but cannot reconcile himself to the thought that ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... occurred to the authorities there to revive Wagner's one other juvenile opera. The score of 'Das Liebesverbot' was accordingly unearthed, and the parts were allotted. The first rehearsal, however, decided its fate. The opera was so ludicrous and unblushing an imitation of Donizetti and Bellini, that the artists could scarcely sing for laughter. Herr Vogl, the eminent tenor, and one or two others were still in favour of giving it as a curiosity, but in the end it was thought better to drop it altogether, less on account ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... B m," she then said, and added, perhaps trying to drown the memory of her ludicrous error in politeness, "I hope another time I shall not ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... remarkable instances of murder originating in mad self-conceit; and of the murderer's part in the repulsive drama, in which the law appears at such great disadvantage to itself and to society, being acted almost to the last with a self-complacency that would be horribly ludicrous if it were not utterly revolting; is presented in the case ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... have your hair cut, Frank. Look here; this is the fighting trim!" and Jack Winch, pulling off his cap, made Frank laugh till the tears came into his eyes, at the ludicrous sight. Jack's hair had been clipped so close to his head that it was no longer than mouse's hair, giving him a peculiarly grim ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... resource, and there was by some mischance a limited supply of these. Bottles were improvised for candlesticks, and stationed in the corners and on the pianos of the massive parlors, rendering the scene grotesque and ludicrous in the extreme, while the closer nestling of lovers and the solemn stillness reigning on every hand gave sublimity to the picture. The poet Saxe happened to be among the guests at Congress Hall, and borrowed a candle from a ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... of the body, blows, bites, meaningless exclamations are prescribed or described in the diverse love-scenes. In Hindoo dramas several of the artificial symptoms—pure figments of the poetic fancy—are incessantly referred to. One of the most ludicrous of them is the drops of perspiration on the cheeks or other parts of the body, which are regarded as an infallible and inevitable sign of love. Urvasi's royal lover is afraid to take her birch-bark message in his hand ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... but the magnificent bay of Avlona just within its narrowest section, and this is a Moslem district to which the Epirots have never laid claim, and which would therefore in any case fall within the Albanian frontier. The second argument is almost ludicrous. The destiny of Epirus is not primarily the concern of the other Albanians, of for that matter of the Greeks, but of the Epirots themselves, and it is hard to see how their nationality can be defined except in terms of their own conscious and expressed desire; for a nation ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... impulse was to affect not to see her, and turn into his bachelor house, but she had certainly seen him, and made so shrill and piercing a whistle on her fingers that, pretend as he would not to have seen her, it was ludicrous to appear not to have heard ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... passengers on their first passing the equinoctial line: a riotous and ludicrous custom, which from the violence of its ducking, shaving, and other practical jokes, is becoming annually less in vogue. It is esteemed a usurpation of privilege to baptize on ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... theatre—as Charlotte Bronte, for instance—hardly feel the illusion at all. At least, this is true of the opera, where the departure from reality is so striking that the impression can hardly fail to be a ludicrous one, till the habit of taking the performance for what it is intended to be is ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... the gods, Rosellini is as yet the only—and I believe, still a very questionable—authority, and Arundale's little book, excellent in the text, has this great defect, that its drawings give the statues invariably a ludicrous or ignoble character Readers who have not access to the originals must be warned against this frequent fault in modern illustration (especially existing also in some of the painted casts of Gothic and Norman ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... pounds, might have sixty, might have three times sixty. Harcourt would probably have found it inexpedient to give way to any love had there been no money to gild the passion. He was notoriously a man of the world; he pretended to be nothing else; he would have thought that he had made himself ludicrous if he had married for love only. With him it was a source of comfort that the lady's pecuniary advantages allowed him the hope that he might indulge his love. So he did ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... circumstances in which they are placed could have justified their bringing it on so soon. In two months, besides having foreign affairs of the greatest consequence on their hands, they have concocted a Reform Bill and settled the finances of the nation for the next year, which is quite ludicrous; but they are obliged to have money voted immediately, that in case they should be beaten on Reform or any other vital question which may compel them to dissolve Parliament, they may have passed their estimates and be provided with funds. Their secrets are well kept—rather too well, for nobody ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... excitement, that her muscles should be strained and her face set. This has a very real pleasure of its own, and I do not think it unsightly. Public speaking and singing may distort the mouth and disturb the facial muscles to a most ludicrous extent and give the eyes quite an unnatural appearance; but I have never yet heard it said that a man or woman should give up either because of its effect upon the appearance. Why, then, should women abandon athletic exercises, which ...
— Lawn Tennis for Ladies • Mrs. Lambert Chambers
... the men of the wilderness laugh over the serious drivel of most fiction writers who make a specialty of northern tales, nothing is so supremely ludicrous as the attempts made by the average movie director to depict northern life in Canada. Never have I seen a photoplay that ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... the way of a gentleman?" hiccuped the man, bringing himself up with ludicrous effort to his full height, and suspending his capering for the better ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... various risks; sloughing of the whole flap at once, shrinking of it after weeks or even months; certain inevitable drawbacks, as the cicatrix on the forehead, the very various and ludicrous changes of colour to which the new organ is subject,—these cannot be remedied by further operation. Two points generally require a second use of the knife a few weeks after:—(1.) The neck of the flap is sure to be redundant ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... but you have quite destroyed it; and now I find I have no other chance for saving my life, but by calling for the help of some regular physician." In the debate, the members on both sides seemed to wander from the question, and indulge themselves in ludicrous personalities. Mr. H. Walpole took occasion to say, that the opposition treated the ministry as he himself was treated by some of his acquaintances with respect to his dress. "If I am in plain clothes," said he, "then they call me ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... anomalous, ill-considered, ludicrous, ridiculous, chimerical, ill-judged, mistaken, senseless, erroneous, inconclusive, monstrous, stupid, false, incorrect, nonsensical, unreasonable, foolish, infatuated, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... nose before he will act; bring it there and he will go on acting after everybody else has stopped. He lives very much in the moment, because he is essentially a man of facts and not a man of imagination. Want of imagination makes him, philosophically speaking, rather ludicrous; in practical affairs it handicaps him at the start, but once he has "got going," as we say, it is of incalculable assistance to his stamina. The Englishman, partly through this lack of imagination and nervous sensibility, partly through ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... fourth or fifth day the committee make false faces of husks, in which they run about, making a frightful but ludicrous appearance. In this dress, (still wearing the bear-skin,) they run to the council-house, smearing themselves with dirt, and bedaub every one who refuses to contribute something towards filling the baskets of incense, ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... who are aware of the petty retaliations of the little tyrants will well understand how with this crude arrangement it is possible to have the most absurd agriculture. True it is that for some time this absurdity, which would be ludicrous had it not been so serious, has disappeared; but even if the words have gone out of use other facts and other provisions have replaced them. The Moro pirate has disappeared but there remains the outlaw who infests the fields and waylays ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... indeed told by an Indian author that numbers regretted the departure of the Persians. The drolls and players of the capital began, immediately after they went away, to amuse their countrymen with a ludicrous representation of their own disgrace; and the fierce looks and savage pride of their conquerors, which had been so late their dread, became in these imitations one of their chief ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... made, the next question he asked, in all earnestness, soberness and simplicity, was "W-h-o-i-c-h came out ahead?" The personal appearance and manner of the General, and the absurd question, uttered in a vehement and stammering way, touched a ludicrous spot in the minds of the spectators so permanently that should you ask one of them to-day, "Which came out ahead?" he will smile or give you a shout of ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... the jungle, and are so amusing, swinging themselves from the branches of tall trees, leaping, flying almost, in pursuit of one another for mere fun, that it was sad to put them in prison, where they never lived long, and where they only exhibited a ludicrous and humiliating parody on the ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... as if to speak and then shut it again. Ludicrous as it all looked, it was sufficient to show me just how unbalanced sane people can become at the sight of gold. The three of us looked at each other, and then I fancy we all laughed, ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... undeniable wren-like trait, that of twitching, wagging, and thrashing his long tail about to help express his emotions. It swings like a pendulum as he rests on a branch, and thrashes about in a most ludicrous way as he is feeding on the ground upon the worms, insects, and fruit that constitute ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... Cobb, who was long a member of his family during the war, and who enjoyed a laugh as much as any man could, said that he never saw Washington laugh, excepting when Colonel Scammel (if this was the person) came to dine at headquarters. Scammel had a fund of ludicrous anecdotes, and a manner of telling them, which relaxed even the gravity of ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... women had been mixed up in ugly work about gold before, and somehow the vision of my dream girl standing by the safe stuck to me all that day. Suppose I had helped her to cover up a theft from Dudley! It was funny; but the ludicrous side of it did not strike me. What did was that I must see her alone and get rid of the poisonous distrust of her that she, or Marcia, had put into my head. But that day went by, and two more on top of it, and I had no chance to speak to ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... had succeeded in restoring some degree of order, he found the mishaps of the young divine proved as intimidating as ludicrous. Not one of the company chose to go Envoy Extraordinary to the dominions of Queen Meg, who might be suspected of paying little respect to the sanctity of an ambassador's person. And what was worse, when it was resolved that a civil card from ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... in bewilderment, stretching out his brawny arm, nearly five feet in length, and staring at it in ludicrous astonishment, 'who'd have thought that I should ever ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... tessellated cliffs of the Cathedral, through Via Tornabuoni and out into ten minutes' sunshine beside the Arno. Much of all this is the gravest and stateliest part of Florence, a quarter of supreme dignity, and there was an almost ludicrous incongruity in seeing Pleasure leading her train through these dusky historic streets. It was most uncomfortably cold, and in the absence of masks many a fair nose was fantastically tipped with purple. But as ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... was overturned with ludicrous results. Thus the Lynn coach, when being driven through Trumpington, on one occasion was overturned against the wall of a cottage. It so happened that the good house-wife was washing at the time; it further ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... which several times he had nearly secured his man; but still, making all allowances for native vanity in concealment and addition, he was distinctly funny—he represented the matter for once in its ludicrous rather than in its disastrous aspect. He observed also, looking around the table, that after all he had lost less by Colonel Clay in four years of persecution than he often lost by one injudicious move in a single day on the London Stock Exchange; while he seemed to imply to the solid ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
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