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More "Burlesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... foundation in fact. He adopts the theory that there really was a tower of Babel, and all the rest he founds on conjecture." In point of fact, the anachronisms are numerous enough to make the text almost a burlesque. Nimrod, the mighty hunter, is made the chief builder of the tower, which is supposed to be in process of erection as an insult to the Deity. Abraham appears upon the scene (many years before he was born), ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... brilliancy by foot-notes; yet, seeing that one of these productions is in literature what the "Yankee Notions" and the "Nick-Nax" caricatures of John Bull are in art, and seeing that the other is not in the least a parody of the Emersonian poetry it is supposed to burlesque, and is otherwise nothing at all, we cannot help crying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... watching intently, and the people were very still, for this seemed like real life, and no burlesque. Some of the soldiery had military clothes, old militia uniforms, or the rebel trappings of '37; others, less fortunate, wore their trousers in long boots, their coats buttoned lightly over their chests, and belted in; and the Napoleonic ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard. The handbill excited some amusement, by reason of its novelty, for in itself it was but a simple and useful intimation. In ridicule of this proceeding, Bayes, the hero of the Duke of Buckingham's burlesque, "The Rehearsal," is made to say: "I have printed above a hundred sheets of paper to insinuate the ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... Overland Monthly—notably 'By Rail through France' (later incorporated in The Innocents Abroad)—because of their perfect gravity. At last, 'A Mediaeval Romance'—a story which has been said to contain the germ of 'A Connecticut Yankee', because of its burlesque of mediaevalism—won the enthusiastic ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... during the trial of Guiteau shows that he was that night in that square; and, knowing the President had left the White House, was on the look-out, with intent to murder him. The incarnate sneak was lying in wait, a horrible burlesque, to take his revenge because he thought he had been slighted, and was so malignant a fool he believed public opinion might applaud the deed. One of the dusky figures on the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... necessary to quote more examples. They are not unknown to the historian, but because they are in rhyme they have been hastily assumed to be spurious or even burlesque.[142] But the evidence of a rhyming formula is the opposite to this. It is evidence of their genuineness, and if some of the words appear to be nonsensical it is due to the fact that the sense of the old formula has been misunderstood, and has ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... called "teaching the young idea how to shoot," since the corps only bore l'arme blanche; but it was highly creditable to the waggery of the citizens of Taunton, and the most efficient burlesque upon the volunteer system I had yet seen, although I have encountered many more ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... which has no better corrective of public disorders than this, is a burlesque on the reason and intelligence of men; it is as incompatible with wisdom as it is with ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Swan saying, "Must you go, Mr. Berry? So soon!" and saw her giving the student her hand, with a bow of burlesque desolation. ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... the writer can be of no consequence to me—and I should imagine of very little to himself—that is to say if he knows himself, personally, as well as I have the honor of knowing him. The first misrepresentation is contained in this sentence:—'This letter is a keen burlesque on the Aristotelian or Baconian methods of ascertaining Truth, both of which the writer ridicules and despises, and pours forth his rhapsodical ecstasies in a glorification of the third mode—the noble art of guessing.' ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... them from your great-grandmother Jeanie Napier, who was so much admired by Sir Walter Scott at her first ball. And talking of dancing ...." and she had lifted up her skirts and set her feet waggishly twinkling in a burlesque dance, which she followed up with a travesty of an opera, a form of art she had met with in her youth and about which, since she was the kind of woman who could have written songs and ballads if she had lived in the age when wood fires and general plenty made the hearth a home for poetry, she could ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... figure of "Paul at Athens;" and for figures of Michael Angelo's, Raffaelle, Parmegiano, Poussin, are all indebted to the cartoon of Pisa. The lecture concludes with some just remarks upon the "Transfiguration," and a censure upon the coldness of Richardson, and the burlesque of the French critic Falconet, who could not discover the point of contact which united the two parts of this celebrated picture. "Raphael's design was to represent Jesus as the Son of God, and, at the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... assassination, massacre, and confiscation, perpetrated or meditated, they are forming plans for the good order of future society. Who is it that admires, and from the heart is attached to, national representative assemblies, but must turn with horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque and abominable perversion of that sacred ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... has always been a vital influence in man's aesthetic and emotional life. Drama, opera, comedy, and burlesque are variant forms, but they are alike in that they influence the audience. In the last decade the moving picture has greatly increased the power and influence of the theatre. The low price of the moving picture brings the theatre to millions who formerly were excluded from any appreciable ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... thrust a spoon to the root of his tongue. Natacha could do nothing but cry, "My God, my God, my God!" Feodor held onto his stomach, still crying, "I'm burning, I'm burning!" The scene was frightfully tragic and funny at the same time. To add to the burlesque, the general's watch in his pocket struck eight o'clock. Feodor Feodorovitch stood up in a final supreme effort. "Oh, it is horrible!" Matrena Petrovna showed a red, almost violet face as she came back; she distorted it, she choked, her mouth twitched, but she brought ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... "Zingit." What it is I don't know, and I haven't as yet come across the inevitable big advertisement; but what I have ascertained is, that Mr. EDWARD SOLOMON, who is now wearing the diamond scarf-pin presented to him by the Guards whom he led on to victory in their recent burlesque engagement, has composed a polka or waltz which bears the name of "Zingit," and which might bear on the wrapper, "If you can't play it, or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... They can be immediately picked out by the peculiar wisps of hair worn on each side of the face, like something between curls and whiskers. Sometimes they look strangely effeminate, like some rococo burlesque of the ringlets of an Early Victorian woman. Sometimes they look considerably more like the horns of a devil; and one need not be an Anti-Semite to say that the face is often made to match. But though they may be ugly, or even ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... infectious gayety, nor thought of the pathos that lay so close to it, in the fact of his recent slavery, and the distinction of being one of Wade Hampton's niggers, and the melancholy mirth of this light-hearted race's burlesque of itself. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... frogs, but with more fancy and taste. Acosta writes, "The small theatre was curiously whitened, adorned with boughs, and arches made of flowers and feathers, from which were suspended many birds, rabbits, and other pleasing objects. The actors exhibited burlesque characters, feigning themselves deaf, sick with colds, lame, blind, crippled, and addressing an idol for the return of health. The deaf people answered at cross-purposes; those who had colds by coughing, and the lame by halting; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... origin, probably coined in burlesque imitation of scholastic Latin, as "hocus-pocus" or "panjandrum"), originally a term meaning whim, fancy or ridiculous idea; later applied to a pun or play upon words, and thus, in its usual sense, to a particular form of riddle in which the answer depends on a pun. In a transferred sense the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... acquaintance with the little Tessa. He came upon her in the thronged streets during carnival time, and seeing her, a timorous, tearful little contadin, terrified by the burlesque threats of a boisterous conjurer, took her ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... the seas" is spoken by the lips of the judge, and the burlesque of justice is at an end. Mr. Martin heard the sentence with perfect composure and self-possession, though the faces of his brothers and friends standing by, showe signs of the deepest emotion. "Remove the ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... much choked by his tears on his pronouncing these words, that Fleur-de-Marie, very much affected, turned quickly toward him: he had turned away his head. An incident, half burlesque, diverted the attention of La Goualeuse, and prevented her from remarking more closely the emotion of her father: the worthy squire, who still remained behind the curtain, and, apparently was very attentively looking into the garden of the hotel, could not refrain from blowing ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... multitude of characters mythical and fabulous, is often performed in lively pantomime, the interludes being filled by a strong chorus, with songs and instrumental accompaniment. At other times the players, in grotesque masks, give burlesque versions of the graver epics, to the great amusement ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... is printed in Watson's Collection of Scottish Poems, Edin. 1711; and also noticed in the Edinburgh Topographical and Antiquarian Magazine, 1848, last page. I am anxious to ascertain if the emblem writer, and the burlesque poet, be one and the same person. The dates, I confess, are somewhat against this conclusion; but there may have been a previous edition of the Emblematical Representation (1779). The University Clark is supposed to have been an Aberdeenshire man. Possibly J. O. may be able to throw ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... The burlesque was irresistible, and none the less so that the child was so direfully in earnest. To his infant imagination no worse disaster than had befallen Clayton's cat could be devised. This animal, adored ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... our century has succeeded in one thing: it is the grandest parody on all that is lofty, or elevated or holy, it is an unparalleled burlesque on any exalted sentiment or practical good. Every ennobling tendency, every redeeming trait is cunningly caricatured, and so cleverly ridiculed that is impossible to respect them afterwards. It is hard to tell what another era may bring forth of good, but it is certain that ours has killed, to ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... of the episodes in the main narrative, a true gem amid its mockeries, its coarse though genuine humanity, its burlesque horrors, came the tale of Cupid and Psyche, full of brilliant, life-like situations, speciosa locis, and abounding in lovely visible imagery (one seemed to see and handle the golden hair, the fresh flowers, the ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... white towers and gables of the old German town. The Prince of Trente et Quarante has quite overcome the old serene sovereign of Noirbourg, whom one cannot help fancying a prince like a prince in a Christmas pantomime—a burlesque prince with twopence-halfpenny for a revenue, jolly and irascible, a prime-minister-kicking prince, fed upon fabulous plum-puddings and enormous pasteboard joints, by cooks and valets with large heads which never alter their grin. Not that ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... queen Margaret; but they lose their effect by being thrown into the form of monologue and ascribed to a departed spirit, whose agonies of grief and rage in reciting his own death have something in them bordering on the burlesque. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... to the memory of John Stuart Mill, whom Malthusians are ever quoting, it should be noted that the foregoing blasphemy is nothing more nor less than a burlesque of Positivism or of Agnosticism. The teaching of Mill, Bain, and of Herbert Spencer was that the knowledge of God and of His nature is impossible, because our senses are the only source of knowledge. Their reasoning was wrong—because a primary condition of all ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... car were groups of allegorical personages, representing WINE, PLEASURE, LOVE, PLAY. The mission of these symbolical beings was, by means of jokes, sarcasms, and mockeries, to plague the life out of Goodman Cholera, a sort of funeral and burlesque Cassander, whom they ridiculed and made game of in a hundred ways. The moral of the play was this: "To brave Cholera in security, let us drink, laugh, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... The 'Rehearsal' was a witty burlesque upon the heroic dramas of Davenant, Dryden, and others, written by George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, the Zimri of Dryden's 'Absalom and Achitophel,' 'that life of pleasure and that soul of whim,' who, after running through ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... take to be my portion in this life.' When Mr. Dickens wrote one of his Christmas Books, he shut himself up for six weeks to do it; he 'put his whole heart into it, and came out again looking as haggard as a murderer.' There is a substratum of philosophic truth in Professor Aytoun's brilliant burlesque of Firmilian. That gentleman wanted to be a poet. And being persuaded that the only way to successfully describe tragic and awful feelings was to have actually felt them, he got into all kinds of scrapes ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... indeed, but, on reflection's birth, We wonder at ourselves, and curse our mirth. His walk of parts he fatally misplaced, And inclination fondly took for taste; 380 Hence hath the town so often seen display'd Beau in burlesque, high life in masquerade. But when bold wits,—not such as patch up plays, Cold and correct, in these insipid days,— Some comic character, strong featured, urge To probability's extremest verge; Where modest Judgment her decree suspends, And, for a time, nor censures, nor commends; Where ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... was a literary game popular in the 17th and 18th centuries—the rhymed words at the end of a line being given for others to fill up. Thus Horace Walpole being given, "brook, why, crook, I," returned the burlesque verse— "I sits with my toes in a Brook, And if any one axes me Why? I gies 'em a rap with my Crook, 'Tis constancy ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... was the writer of Athenian Sport, or Two Thousand Paradoxes, merely argued to amuse and divert the Age, by a Member of the Athenian Society, London, 1707?[1] It would almost appear to have been a burlesque upon the Athenian Oracle. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... Foote's Alone". 'Foote's' was the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, where, in February, 1773, he brought out what he described as a 'Primitive Puppet Show,' based upon the Italian Fantoccini, and presenting a burlesque sentimental Comedy called 'The Handsome Housemaid; or, Piety in Pattens', which did as much as 'She Stoops' to laugh false sentiment away. Foote warned his audience that they would not discover 'much wit or humour' in the piece, since 'his brother writers had all agreed that it was highly improper, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... invented and named by Dion Boucicault; by the resuscitation of the spectacle play, with its lavish tinsel and calcium glare and its multitudinous nymphs; by the opera bouffe, with its frequent licentious ribaldry; by the music-hall comedian, with his vulgar realism; and by the idiotic burlesque; with its futile babble and its big-limbed, half-naked girls. Nevertheless there are just as good actors now living as have ever lived, and there is just as fine a sense of dramatic art in the community as ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... whether discipline be not the final cause of the universe, and whether Nature outwardly exists. The frivolous make themselves merry with the ideal theory as if its consequences were burlesque, as if it affected the stability of Nature. It surely does not. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... by Fontenelle; The Dialogues of the Gods, against mythology; True History, a parody of the false or romantic histories then so fashionable, more especially about Alexander. He certainly possessed little depth, but his talent was incredible: alertness, causticity, amusing logic, burlesque dialectics, an astonishing instinct for caricature, the art of natural dialogue, gay insolence, light but vivid psychological penetration, an almost profound sense of the ridiculous, joyous fooling; above all, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... of books was catholic; he possessed a great many and read them {11} to his friends. At the College Debate, of which he became secretary and president in his second year, he was a frequent and fluent speaker, with a remarkable command of language, though sometimes his eloquence was more than half burlesque. His powers of thought and real strength in argument were more often displayed in private discussions, where irony and humour hardly veiled the depth of ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... "odes," and "stanzas." [14] Coleridge soon came to recognise the weakness of his juvenile verses, and parodied himself—and incidentally Bowles—in three sonnets printed at the end of Chapter I. of the "Biographia Literaria," designed to burlesque his own besetting sins, a "doleful egotism," an affected simplicity, and the use of "elaborate and swelling language and imagery." He never attained much success in the use of the sonnet form. A series of twelve sonnets in his ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... divine rights of kings. The present government represents in no sense the majority of the Greek people. We Liberals, in the course of a year received the vote of the majority. At the last election, which was nothing more than a burlesque on the free exercise of the right of suffrage, we were not willing to participate in a farcical formality.... Now it is even sought to deny us the right of free speech. Our meetings were held within inclosed buildings. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... why not do equal honour to a Shakspeare, a Pitt, a Newton, or any of those illustrious men by whose superior intelligence society has so greatly profited?" The obvious truth is, that such "celebrations" are not to our taste, that there is something burlesque, to our ideas, in this useless honour; and that we think a bonfire, a discharge of squibs, or even a discharge of rhetoric, and a display of tinsel banners and buffoonery, does not supply the most natural way of reviving the memory of departed genius. At the same time, they have their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... afterwards drew in bolder colours. Thus, Montezuma, who, like the hero of an ancient romance, bears fortune to any side which he pleases to espouse, is justly pointed out by Settle, as the prototype of Almanzor; though we look in vain for the glowing language, which, though sometimes bordering on burlesque, suits so well the extravagant character of the Moorish hero. Zempoalla strongly resembles Nourmuhal in Aureng-Zebe; both shewing that high spirit of pride, with which Dryden has often invested his female characters. The language of the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... o'clock. But after dose theaters open, I stays me on the chob till twelve, or later somedimes. There is one—two—three what you call burlesque places, right by me; and no sooner do they close up, than right away those actor peoples come to buy. I do a goot business, so ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... yourself in your eternal daubs!" exclaimed M. Leminof, reseating himself. "You know that I dislike to wait. I profess, it is true, a passionate admiration for the burlesque masterpieces with which you are decorating the walls of my chapel; but I cannot suffer them to annoy me, and I beg you not to sacrifice again the respect you owe me to your foolish passion for those coarse ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... to work effectively, your son must have money. I brought him no dot, alas! Except"—with a burlesque courtesy—"my beauty and my blood. I must know how much money we shall have before ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... are called, alterations and adaptations of the plays of Shakspeare. As he has not prosecuted the subject, I will, with your permission, say a word or two on that vilest and most infamous of literary treasons, Tate's burlesque ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... jet and Italian fervor. The amplitude of his pleated trousers, which allowed only the tips of his boots to be seen, revealed his faithfulness to the fashions of his own land. There was something really burlesque to a romantic woman in the striking contrast no one could fail to remark between the captain and the count, the little Pole with his pinched face and ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... readers. One of the best evidences of the naturalness and ease of our author's writings, is to be found in the ready appreciation of them by all classes of readers. Whether the vein be a serious one, or the theme turn upon the humorous or the burlesque, it is not too much, we think, to say that the writer takes always with him the heart or the fancy of the reader. Without however pausing to characterize productions which bid fair to become very widely and ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... is a burlesque imitation and degradation of something serious. In his song, "Those Evening Bells," Moore ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... different reason. Gunner Moran was of the old navy—the navy that had been despised and spat upon. In those days his uniform alone had barred him from decent theatres, decent halls, decent dances, contact with decent people. They had forced him to a knowledge of the burlesque houses, the cheap theatres, the shooting galleries, the saloons, the dives. And now, bewilderingly, the public had right-about faced. It opened its doors to him. It closed its saloons to him. It sought ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... described by Tacitus, Annals, b. xiv. s. 16. And yet it may be a question, whether the satirist would have the hardiness to insert the very words of an imperial poet, armed with despotic power. A burlesque imitation would answer the purpose; and it may be inferred from another passage in the same poem, that Persius was content to ridicule the mode of versification then ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... everywhere in wait for charity, murmured a modulated appeal; if you heard shouts or yells afar off they died upon your ear in a strain of melody at the moment when they were lifted highest. I am aware of seeming to burlesque the operatic fact which every one must have noticed in Naples; and I will not say that the neglected or affronted babe, or the trodden dog, is as tuneful as the midnight cat there, but only that they ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... disorder; and, in some form or another—sometimes tolerated, sometimes the object of the Church's anathema—the tradition held its own down through the Dark Ages, and we meet with the substance of the Saturnalia, during the centuries immediately preceding the Reformation, in the burlesque festivals with which the rule of the Boy-Bishop has been often identified. We shall see presently how far this judgment is correct. An example will, no doubt, readily recur to the reader from a source to which we owe so many impressions of the Middle Ages, some true, others false or at least exaggerated—we ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... chins, and they were short-sighted, high-shouldered, dressed in the same style as their mother, had an unpleasant lisp, and yet they always took part in every play and were always doing something for charity—acting, reciting, singing. They were very serious and never smiled, and even in burlesque operettas they acted without gaiety and with a businesslike air, as though they were engaged ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... for zeal and gallantry, it was hoped I would do my utmost to maintain it; after which I was dismissed. I soon found that my exploit had placed me upon quite a different footing in the ship from that which I had occupied before. The men treated me with real respect, instead of the good-humoured burlesque thereof which they had accorded me hitherto; and my fellow-mids at once received me into the berth upon a footing of perfect equality with themselves, each one striving to do me some little kindness or show me some little attention, in place of playing off disagreeable ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... caused much amusement by writing the words of a quarrel of Jewish pedlers under the voices of the fugue in Mozart's overture to "The Magic Flute." Three hundred years ago Orazio Vecchi composed a burlesque madrigal in the severe style of that day, in which he tried to depict the babel of sounds in a synagogue. Obviously the musical Jew is supposed to be allied to the stage Jew and to be fit food for the humorist. Strauss's ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... society at all. They established a "little court" at the Hotel Rambouillet, where foppishness was a badge of distinction, and where a few narrow minded, starched moralists, poisoned metaphysics and turned the sentiments of the heart into a burlesque by their affectation and their unrefined, even vulgar attempts at gallantry. They culled choice expressions and epigrams from the literature of the day, employing their memories to conceal their paucity of original ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... chieftains and sold them a bill of goods (with a generous bribe of sugar) to close the borders. The next step was to corrupt the border guards, which was easy with Annie Oakleys to do the burlesque shows. ...
— Mars Confidential • Jack Lait
... latest resultant of the two forces of ennui and dissipation acting on a Society that is willing to spend money and desires to kill time. She has played many parts, some (of infinitesimal proportions), on the burlesque stage, others in the semi-private life of her own residence in the South-west district of London. Her versatility has gained for her many admirers and a precarious income, but so long as she possesses the former she scorns to live upon the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... embers of the bivouac-fire. Never had we seen him so utterly unlike himself as on this burlesque of a scout, and now that we were virtually homeward-bound, and empty-handed too, he was completely weighed down by the consciousness of our lost opportunities. If something could only have happened to Gleason before the start, so ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... to their friends. Courcillon, who thought it a mighty honour to have Madame de Maintenon every day for nurse, but who, nevertheless, was dying of weariness, used to see his friends in the evening (when Madame de Maintenon and his mother were gone), and would relate to them, with burlesque exaggeration, all the miseries he had suffered during the day, and ridicule the devotional discourses he had listened to. All the time his illness lasted, Madame de Maintenon came every day to see him, so that her credulity, which no one dared to enlighten, was the laughing-stock of the Court. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... received with cheers, and after he had gone through the mockery of clearing his throat, and pitching his voice after the usual manner of your would-be fine singers, he gave out, to the tune of a well-known rollicking Irish lilt, the following burlesque version of the subject of ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... Ale or viler Liquors, Didst inspire WITHERS, PRYN, and VICARS. This Vicars was a man of as great interest and authority in the late Reformation as Pryn or Withers, and as able a poet. He translated Virgil's AEneids into as horrible Travesty, in earnest, as the French Scaroon did in burlesque, and was only outdone in his way by the politic author ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... seen her! Burlesque. Tights. The minx! Well, she must be coining money, anyhow. I hope she doesn't forget to make some return for all the trouble she has been ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... skipping along over the waves, but sinking before they reached the "Providence." Jones, who had an element of humor in his character, responded to this cannonade with one musket, which, with great solemnity, was discharged in response to each broadside. After keeping up this burlesque battle for some hours, the "Providence" spread her sails, and soon left her foe ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... 'Tom Jones' is one of them. Many of the introductions to the chapters, not to mention a certain travestie of an Homeric battle, must needs be as wearisome to those who are not scholars, as the spectacle of a burlesque is to those who have not seen the original play. This is still more the case with our old poets, especially Milton. I very much doubt, in spite of the universal chorus to the contrary, whether 'Lycidas' is much admired by readers who are only acquainted with ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... the grey walls with inscriptions which the indignation of a purer age has caused to be removed; they carried on nightly revels which no historian could describe, and in their wicked buffoonery mocked the Creator with burlesque religious rites. Such an unholy place would be pulled down by the mob nowadays, and the gang of debauchees would figure in the police-court; but in those "good old times" the Prime Minister and the Secretary to the Admiralty were merry members of a crew that disgraced humanity. Just ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... that remained of her visit passed pleasantly enough. Hetty contrived to turn her lessons into a sort of burlesque, and to impose a good deal on Miss Davis, who was not a humorous, but indeed a most matter-of-fact person. Every day Phyllis grew more and more disgusted with their visitor, who interrupted the even course ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... on the following morning, I mailed to Mrs. Risby some verses. This sounds a trifle like burlesque; but Elena had always a sort of superstitious reverence for the fact that I "wrote things." It would not matter at all that the verses were abominable; indeed, Elena would never discover this; she would simply set about devising an excellent reason for not showing ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... other side. They are called principal dancers. Then I make a separate group of those who expect to sing, or to do any sort of a musical specialty, or any kind of a "stunt" that might be included in the show. I have had the greatest variety of specialties in a show. I have had them do magic, burlesque magic, play ukuleles, and all sorts of stunts which I have placed effectively in a show. We had a man in the Princeton show who did a little trick with a cigarette that was a scream. I saw him standing around, and ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... Reminiscences, Biographies, nay Vaudevilles, Dramas and Melodramas, in all Provinces of France, there will, through these coming months, be the due immeasurable crop; thick as the leaves of Spring. Nor, that a tincture of burlesque might be in it, is Gobel's Episcopal Mandement wanting; goose Gobel, who has just been made Constitutional Bishop of Paris. A Mandement wherein ca ira alternates very strangely with Nomine Domini, and you are, with a grave countenance, invited ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... said the Baronet. "I am honoured indeed. But the sketch is most imperfect. I shall now have much to add. I can say that the Prince, whom I had accused of idleness, is zealous in the department of police, taking upon himself those duties that are most distasteful. I shall be able to relate the burlesque incident of my arrest, and the singular interview with which you honour me at present. For the rest, I have already communicated with my Ambassador at Vienna; and unless you propose to murder me, I shall be at liberty, whether you please or not, within ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... interpreting aright my clumsy, circumlocutory phrases in attempting to describe shawls, gowns, and bonnets; and taught me the exact millinery language which I ought to have made use of with an arch expression of triumph and a burlesque earnestness of manner, that always enchanted me. At that time, every word she uttered, no matter how frivolous, was the sweetest of all music to my ears. It was only by the stern test of after-events that I learnt to analyse ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... financial outlook in the Greensleeve family was becoming rather serious: Doris threatened gloomily to go into burlesque; Catharine at first tearful and discouraged, finally grew careless and made few real efforts to find employment. Also she began to go out almost every evening, admitting very frankly that the home larder had become too lean and unattractive to ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... the same person. He has disappeared—gone to the dogs, I dare say. Burlesque Greek is not a knowledge very much in ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... will be commenced a new burlesque serial, "The Mystery of Mister E. Drood," written expressly for this paper by the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... stanzas from which are quoted in the text, is by Denis Florence McCarthy, and may be found in the Dublin University Magazine (XXXI. p. 89); and there is another poem on the subject—a very foolish burlesque—in the same magazine (LXXXIX. p. 471). Matthew Arnold's poem with the same title appeared in Fraser's Magazine (LXII. p. 133), and may be found in the author's collected works ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Chinese condense brace quite bade oppose deceive force scribe burlesque embrace machine crease measure canine emerge endorse cease ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... cousin Charles Storer lent me Gulliver's Travels abreviated, which aunt says I may read for the sake of perfecting myself in reading a variety of composures. she sais farther that the piece was desin'd as a burlesque upon the times in which it was wrote,—& Martimas Scriblensis & Pope Dunciad were wrote with the same design & as parts of the same work, tho' wrote ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... but to one play; to see the Hypocrite, and Tom Taylor's burlesque {254a} at the Strand Theatre. It was dreadfully cold in the pit: and I thought dull. Farren almost unintelligible: Mrs. Glover good in a disagreeable part. {254b} Diogenes has very good Aristophanic hits in ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... probably sent a copy of the 1818 edition of his Works. Louisa was Louisa Holcroft. Guichy was possibly the Frenchman, mentioned by Crabb Robinson, with whom the Lambs had travelled to France. Poole was, I imagine, John Poole, the dramatist, author of burlesque plays in the London Magazine and later of "Paul Pry," which, it is quite likely, he based on ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Bickerstaff himself is a gentleman and a scholar, a humourist, and a man of the world; with a great deal of nice easy naivete about him. If he walks out and is caught in a shower of rain, he makes amends for this unlucky accident by a criticism on the shower in Virgil, and concludes with a burlesque copy of verses on a city-shower. He entertains us, when he dates from his own apartment, with a quotation from Plutarch, or a moral reflection; from the Grecian coffee-house with politics; and from Wills', or the Temple, with the poets and players, the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... been acted even in the age of Nell Gwyn; and yet it is even more unlikely that Dryden should have written a play not intended for the stage. The same contradiction prevails in the piece itself; it would not be unfair to call it the most absurd burlesque ever written without burlesque intention; and yet it displays such intellectual resources, such vigour, bustle, adroitness, and bright impudence, that admiration almost counterweighs derision. Dryden could not have made ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... word or an epithet, he paints the fiercest or tenderest passions of the heart: witness the devoted love of Thekla for Max in Wallenstein; or the furious jealousy of the Queen in Don Carlos. He has not the grotesque of Shakspeare; we do not see in his tragedies that mixture of the burlesque and the sublime which is so common in the Bard of Avon, and is not infrequent with the greatest minds, who play, as it were, with the thunderbolts, and love to show how they can master them. Hence, in reading at least, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... his loft—supplied with straw culled from packages at the printing-house—the poet, well got up in his knickerbockers and velvet smoking-cap, scarf and guitar, soliloquising in burlesque rhyme on his fallen state and hopeless admiration, and looking very handsome and disconsolate, until startled by ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... narrate how in the infancy of the settlement the whisky shop was more frequented than the preaching meeting, whenever that was held, and how, on one occasion, a party of scoffing unbelievers bore in mock triumph an effigy of the Saviour through the streets. A regular meeting of infidels was held, and burlesque celebrations of the Lord's Supper performed. Still later, when the business of slaughtering hogs became an important branch of industry, it was carried on regularly, on Sundays as well as on week-days, and as this was a leading feature in the year's ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... there was a will at the lawyer's office and were invited to be present at the reading of it. I can remember it, as if it were yesterday. It was an imposing scene, dramatic, burlesque and surprising, occasioned by the posthumous revolt of that dead woman, by the cry for liberty, by the demands of that martyred one who had been crushed by our oppression during her lifetime and who, from her closed tomb, uttered a despairing appeal ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... might make a success," he said, "of an entertainment like one I attended up in the mountains last summer. It was called a 'County Fair,' and was a sort of burlesque on the county fairs or state fairs that used to be held annually, and are still, I believe, in some ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... help exclaiming to myself, What a strange burlesque is all this! instead of two noble youths, rich in all that nature and fortune can endow them with, here I have a pupil, poor little fellow! deaf, dumb, a castaway; the son of a robber, who at most can aspire only to the rank of an ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... again arrested next month; but the court did not sit until July of the next year, and their decision is not known. Col. Butler died Sept. 7, 1805. Out of the arrest and persecution of this sturdy veteran, Washington Irving (Knickerbocker) has worked up a fine piece of burlesque, in which Gen. Wilkinson's character is inimitably delineated in that of the vain and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... pleasing melancholy. Thus was I engaged when young Rupert Hentzau, who feared neither man nor devil, and rode through the demesne—where every tree might hide a marksman, for all he knew—as though it had been the park at Strelsau, cantered up to where I lay, bowing with burlesque deference, and craving private speech with me in order to deliver a message from the Duke of Strelsau. I made all withdraw, and then he said, seating ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... dotted. There is a good effect gained by sustaining certain notes over several measures, though few pianists get a real sostenuto. An "Allegro Patetico" (op. 12), "Medea" (op. 13), and a set of small pieces (one of them a burlesque called "A Caudle Lecture," with a garrulous "said she" and a somnolent "said he") make up his rather ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... reckless irreverence of Roaring Camp. The master of ceremonies was one "Boston," a noted wag, and the occasion seemed to promise the greatest facetiousness. This ingenious satirist had spent two days in preparing a burlesque of the Church service, with pointed local allusions. The choir was properly trained, and Sandy Tipton was to stand godfather. But after the procession had marched to the grove with music and banners, and the child had been ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... of Serapsis, Anubis and Isis, he had not the faintest odor of myth about him; absolutely bourgeois, he lacked even that atmosphere of burlesque that surrounded Claud; he was not even vicious. But he was a soldier, a brave one; and if, with the acquired economy of a subaltern who has been obliged to live on his pay, he kept his purse-strings tight, they were loose enough if a friend were in need, and he paid no one the compliment of ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... given in a court of justice usually cured them. The indifferent, business-like manner in which the oaths are put, the sing-song tone of voice, the rapid utterance of the words, give to this solemn act an appearance of excellent burlesque, which ultimately renders the whole proceedings remarkable for the absence of truth and reality; but, at the same time, gives them unquestionable merit as a dramatic representation, abounding with fiction, well ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... 'Merchant of Venice.' He may blunder grievously, whatever alternative he selects. If he pronounces a passage to be pure gold, it may turn out to be merely the mask of a bitter sneer; or he may declare it to be ingenious burlesque when put forward in the most serious earnest; or may ridicule it as overstrained bombast, and find that it was never meant to be anything else. It is wiser to admit that perhaps the author was not very clear himself, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... was occupied with the performance of the curious burlesque which James had invented. The day after George Brooke was beheaded, the King drew up a warrant to the Sheriff of Hampshire for stay of all the other executions. With this document in his bosom, he signed death-warrants for ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... imagined, though it might not be pleasant to describe. Suffice it to say, that she sees no shame in addressing them, or in allowing herself to be addressed by a name which a Court of law has held to be libellous when applied to a burlesque actress. She is always at Hurlingham or the Ranelagh, and has seen pigeons killed without a qualm. She never misses a Sandown or a Kempton meeting; she dazzles the eyes of the throng at Ascot every year, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... extravagances and imbue them with a terrific quality, when in weaker hands they would have become ridiculous. For anything less than the vibrating energy of Marlowe, the final scene of his Faustus would have sunk to burlesque. A cold analysis of the plot of Hamlet or Macbeth would suggest mere melodrama. A Shakespeare or a Marlowe had no hesitation in facing tasks which offered no mean between great success or great failure. Nor was the audacity in their choice ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... Tale" can boast of another good shepherd (Act 3, Sc. 3), but he savors a little of burlesque. "Macbeth" has several humble worthies. There is a good old man in the second act (Sc. 2), and a good messenger in the fourth (Sc. 2). King Duncan praises highly the sergeant who brings the news of Macbeth's victory, ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... Arcade. Balcony. Balustrade. Bandit. Bankrupt. Bravo. Brigade. Brigand. Broccoli. Burlesque. Bust. Cameo. Canteen. Canto. Caprice. Caricature. Carnival. Cartoon. Cascade. Cavalcade. Charlatan. Citadel. Colonnade. Concert. Contralto. Conversazione. Cornice. Corridor. Cupola. Curvet. Dilettante. Ditto. Doge. Domino. Extravaganza. Fiasco. Folio. Fresco. Gazette. ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... through the raised arm of Bacchus, making him look like one of those Hindu idols which are preposterously figured with a number of superfluous limbs. If the effect of this transference of the nymph's arm to its companion statue was rather burlesque than ornamental, the disconnected limb itself was certainly not without its use, small fragments of it being broken off from time to time for the purpose of whitening the door-steps and the hall-flags when the hearthstone could not readily ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... detail the first half of the book. How a man of Mr. Warricombe's intelligence could take grave interest in an arid exegesis of the first chapter of Genesis, Godwin strove in vain to comprehend. Often enough the debates were perilously suggestive of burlesque, and, when alone, he relieved himself of the laughter he had scarce restrained. For instance, there was that terrible thohu wabohu of the second verse, a phrase preserved from the original, and tossed into all the corners of controversy. Was thohu wabohu the first condition of the earth, ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... and burlesque design, united in one picture, would be monstrous; though we place two pictures of so opposite a character in the same chamber, and even close by each other, without any scruple ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... tale-telling which we find in Horace and Boccaccio, in the humorous pleasantries of love and song which are presented in Catullus and in the good popular songs of Naples, above all in the lower comedy and in farce. Italian soil gave birth in ancient times to burlesque tragedy, and in modern times to mock-heroic poetry. In rhetoric and histrionic art especially no other nation equalled or equals the Italians. But in the more perfect kinds of art they have hardly advanced ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... in this case, however, was not flattery. Culver was not a dignified youth, and his sense of humour was not of that refined order which enables a man to distinguish between comedy and burlesque. He had a general idea that he had to make himself pleasant, which he accordingly did in ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... only of the general spirit, but of the numerous passages of the Iliad itself; and even, if no such intention to parody were discernible in it, the objection would still remain, that to suppose a work of mere burlesque to be the primary effort of poetry in a simple age, seems to reverse that order in the development of national taste, which the history of every other people in Europe, and of many in Asia, has almost ascertained to be a law of the human mind; it is in a state of society much more refined and permanent ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... plays upon his face; he cannot take them seriously; and while he never goes so far as to turn into ridicule the ideals of chivalry, yet, in such episodes as the prodigious exploits of Rodomonte within the walls of Paris, and the voyage of Astolfo to the moon, he does approach dangerously near to the burlesque. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... "What the deuce are these, Coleman ? Sausages? Oh, my. And look at these burlesque fishes. Say, these Greeks don't care what they eat. Them thar things am sardines in the crude state. No ? Great God, look at those things. Look. What? Yes, they are. Radishes. ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... placed, and she felt a little embarrassed. But, on the other hand, she had pledged her word, and a silly performance it was! But she would keep it, at least until Lady Hamilton released her from her promise. Patty's ideas of honour were, perhaps, a little strained, but she took the promise of that burlesque document as seriously as if it had been of national importance. And now she was in a dilemma. To refuse to walk with the Earl was so rude, and yet to talk with him was ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... from among whom the commissioner, a president without power, is supposed to select the assignees. Thus it happens that the judge almost always appoints as assignees those creditors whom it suits the bankrupt to have,—another abuse which makes the catastrophe of bankruptcy one of the most burlesque dramas to which justice ever lent her name. The honorable bankrupt overtaken by misfortune is then master of the situation, and proceeds to legalize the theft he premeditated. As a rule, the petty trades of Paris are ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... dismissed. I soon found that my exploit had placed me upon quite a different footing in the ship from that which I had occupied before. The men treated me with real respect, instead of the good-humoured burlesque thereof which they had accorded me hitherto; and my fellow-mids at once received me into the berth upon a footing of perfect equality with themselves, each one striving to do me some little kindness or show me some little attention, in ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... called a trilogy, together with what was called a satyric play. This last might be related to the tragedies or be quite independent, as they usually were in Sophocles and Euripides. The satyric play was named from the satyrs or attendants upon Bacchus, and was a farce or burlesque intended to relieve the feelings of the spectators after the tragedies. The 'Alcestis' was entered by Euripides as a satyric play, but it only in parts approaches the characteristics of such a play. In other parts it has the dignity and beauty of a tragedy. In fact it is more nearly like a ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... locust swarms of the dancers enveloped them in shortening circles, two young and attractive maenads broke from the throng and literally entwined themselves with the troopers. Military dignity, assaulted in burlesque, tried to keep its post. But the bold nymphs were clinging, not to be "shaken"; as the mad whirl of the dancers touched the centre, the troopers and their female captors were borne away in the ricocheting, plunging motions, disappearing ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... any chance have dreamed of that stately honor. His ambitions did not lie in the direction of mental achievement. It is true that now and then, on Friday at school, he read a composition, one of which—a personal burlesque on certain older boys—came near resulting in bodily damage. But any literary ambition he may have had in those days was a fleeting thing. His permanent dream was to be a pirate, or a pilot, or a bandit, or a trapper-scout; something gorgeous and active, where his word—his nod, even—constituted ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the tribute of as many hands! Rude were his guests; he never made his bow To such an audience as salutes us now. He lack'd the balm of labour, female praise. Few Ladies in his time frequented plays, 35 Or came to see a youth with awkward art And shrill sharp pipe burlesque the woman's part. The very use, since so essential grown, Of painted scenes, was to his stage unknown. The air-blest castle, round whose wholesome crest, 40 The martlet, guest of summer, chose her nest— The forest walks of Arden's fair domain, Where Jaques ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... To burlesque such a work as "Norma," then, is to paint the lily, to gild refined gold, to caricature Lord Morpeth, or to attempt to improve PUNCH. Yet the opportunity was too tempting to be wholly overlooked, and a hint having been dropped in one of our "Pencillings," ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various
... other minds acknowledged my dominion: Now my sere fancy 'falls into the yellow Leaf,' and Imagination droops her pinion, And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk Turns what was once romantic to burlesque. ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... it is," she protested with pathos, and a burlesque of her pathos. "I never think half so well as when I have my arm around you. Then it seems as if I thought with your ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... short-sighted, high-shouldered, dressed in the same style as their mother, had an unpleasant lisp, and yet they always took part in every play and were always doing something for charity—acting, reciting, singing. They were very serious and never smiled, and even in burlesque operettas they acted without gaiety and with a businesslike air, as though they ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... face of the girl. She looked at the young man with fine disdain, as a great lady might reprove with a glance the man who snapped a camera at her. "Yes?" she asked. "Well, what are you going to do about it—arrest me?" Mocking him, in a burlesque of melodrama, she held out her arms. "Don't put the handcuffs on ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... spectacular course; Ione Burke, Polly Marshall, and Mrs. Vining were in the cast; tableau succeeded tableau; "I wish I were in Dixie," was sung, and the popular burlesque ended in the celebrated scene, "The Birth of the Butterfly in the Bower of Ferns," with the entire company kissing their finger-tips to a vociferous and ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal—a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... said the Baronet. 'I am honoured indeed. But the sketch is most imperfect. I shall now have much to add. I can say that the Prince, whom I had accused of idleness, is zealous in the department of police, taking upon himself those duties that are most distasteful. I shall be able to relate the burlesque incident of my arrest, and the singular interview with which you honour me at present. For the rest, I have already communicated with my Ambassador at Vienna; and unless you propose to murder me, I shall be at liberty, whether you please or not, within the week. For I hardly fancy the future empire ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with those of Shakespeare's queen Margaret; but they lose their effect by being thrown into the form of monologue and ascribed to a departed spirit, whose agonies of grief and rage in reciting his own death have something in them bordering on the burlesque. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... but watched the North Star and hummed a selection from a recent Simla burlesque that had much delighted ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... not already been bereft of his senses by the melodrama preceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty, her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart, but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate who fought a losing ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... leaves to sense the conquest of the heart. We laugh indeed, but, on reflection's birth, We wonder at ourselves, and curse our mirth. His walk of parts he fatally misplaced, And inclination fondly took for taste; 380 Hence hath the town so often seen display'd Beau in burlesque, high life in masquerade. But when bold wits,—not such as patch up plays, Cold and correct, in these insipid days,— Some comic character, strong featured, urge To probability's extremest verge; Where modest Judgment her decree suspends, And, for a time, nor censures, nor commends; Where ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... and especially of being taken with arms in our hands against the authority of the true and proper chief of the island. It is impossible to describe the absurd language used, and the ceremonies gone through. It would have been a complete burlesque had not the matter been somewhat too serious. As it was, when one of the counsellors kicked another for interrupting him, and the judge threw a calabash at their heads to call them to order, I could ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... of a waxwork exhibition, the characters being personated, after a burlesque fashion, by living performers. Each "figure" is first duly described by the exhibitor, and then "wound up" and made to go through certain ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... near the floor made me bend down hastily with a stern: "Don't laugh," for in his grotesque, almost burlesque discourses there seemed to me to be truth, passion, and horror enough to move ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... well or ill timed, no matter, provided they brought guffaws. It is probable, therefore, that in many other cases, where the tone and "stage business" are not as obvious, where an actor's high seriousness might elicit catcalls, and burlesque certainly would elicit chuckles, Plautus wished his ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... of allegorical personages, representing WINE, PLEASURE, LOVE, PLAY. The mission of these symbolical beings was, by means of jokes, sarcasms, and mockeries, to plague the life out of Goodman Cholera, a sort of funeral and burlesque Cassander, whom they ridiculed and made game of in a hundred ways. The moral of the play was this: "To brave Cholera in security, let us drink, laugh, game, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... lips and knit his brows with a burlesque, melodramatic air, and strode up and down, with his ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... and here and there at strategic corners coruscating groups of shops. And somewhere I came along a narrow street suddenly upon the distant prospect of a great monstrous absurd place on a steep hill against the last brightness of the evening sky, a burlesque block of building with huge truncated pyramids at either corner, that I have since learnt was the Alexandra Palace. It was so queer and bulky that it arrested and held my attention, struck on my memory with an almost dreamlike quality, ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... di Cristofano, known as Buffalmacco, a Florentine painter, the same that was pupil of Andrea Tafi, and celebrated as a burlesque character by Messer Giovanni Boccaccio in his Decameron was as we know bosom friend of Bruno and Calendrino, also painters and of an even more witty and merry humour than himself, and as may be seen in his works scattered throughout Tuscany, of no mean judgement in his art ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... with the thundering vaunts of this Scythian Shepherd. He comes in drawn by conquered kings, and reproaches these pampered jades of Asia that they can draw but twenty miles a day. Till I saw this passage with my own eyes, I never believed that it was anything more than a pleasant burlesque of mine Ancient's. But I can assure my readers that it is soberly set down in a play, which their ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... to include this little burlesque in this collection simply in memory of the Boston Miscellany, the magazine in which it was published, which won for itself a brilliant reputation in its short career. There was not a large staff of writers for the Miscellany, ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... the kind, in a wrapper. Mrs. Ormonde gave it her without asking any questions, and, in the course of the morning, happening to see her reading it, she went to look what the paper was. It proved to be an anti-Christian periodical, and on the front page stood a woodcut offered as a burlesque illustration of some Biblical incident. "Father always brings it home and gives it me to read," said the child. ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... touch, in the interpreter. Miriam had gobbled them up, and she gave them forth in the same way as the first, with close, rude, audacious mimicry. There was a moment for Sherringham when it might have been feared their hostess would see in the performance a designed burlesque of her manner, her airs and graces, her celebrated simpers and grimaces, so extravagant did it all cause these refinements to appear. When it was over the old woman said, "Should you like now to hear how you ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... amusement of the hour, frail child of Cytherea and the Graces, what relentless fate has conducted thee to the shambles? Butterfly of the summer, why should a nation rise to break thee upon the wheel? A sense of the mockery of such an execution, of the horrible burlesque that would sacrifice to the necessities of a mighty people so slight an offering, made itself felt among the crowd. There was a low murmur of shame and indignation. The dangerous sympathy of the mob was perceived ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... except her husband and maids. Of course Katenka sided with her mother and, in general, there became established between Avdotia and ourselves, from the day of her arrival, the most extraordinary and burlesque order of relations. As soon as she stepped from the carriage, Woloda assumed an air of great seriousness and ceremony, and, advancing towards her with much bowing and scraping, said in the tone of one who is presenting ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... you forget yourself in your eternal daubs!" exclaimed M. Leminof, reseating himself. "You know that I dislike to wait. I profess, it is true, a passionate admiration for the burlesque masterpieces with which you are decorating the walls of my chapel; but I cannot suffer them to annoy me, and I beg you not to sacrifice again the respect you owe me to your foolish passion for those coarse paintings; if ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... their head-gear consists of an old vicuna hat, with a horse's tail dangling behind. Their features are disguised by ludicrous masks with long beards; and, bestriding long sticks or poles, they move about accompanied by burlesque music. Every remarkable incident that has occurred in the families of the town during the course of the year, is made the subject of a song in the Quichua language; and these songs are sung in the ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... at once took London by storm. A letter of Mrs. Pendarves, dated January 19, but evidently continued later, tells us that she went to a rehearsal of Siroe: "I like it extremely, but the taste of the town is so depraved, that nothing will be approved of but the burlesque. The Beggar's Opera entirely triumphs over the Italian one." Even Mrs. Pendarves could not help enjoying it, once she had ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... in this adapted quotation must be taken to mean "Burlesques;" and if these gay and lighthearted soldiers continue their histrionics as victoriously as they have done up to now, they will become celebrated as "The Grinny-diers-and-Burlesque-Line-Regiments." Private MCGREEVY, as a cockatoo, capital: his disguise obliterated him, but as Ensign and Lieutenant WAGGIBONE stealthily observed, "What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't MCGREEVY ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... with cheers, and after he had gone through the mockery of clearing his throat, and pitching his voice after the usual manner of your would-be fine singers, he gave out, to the tune of a well-known rollicking Irish lilt, the following burlesque version of ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... release, relieved his feelings in a letter about Miss Owens to one of the somewhat older married ladies who were kind to him, the wife of one of his colleagues. She ought to have burnt his letter, but she preserved it to kindle mild gossip after his death. It is a burlesque account of his whole adventure, describing, with touches of very bad taste, his disillusionment with the now maturer charms of Miss Owens when her sister brought her back to New Salem, and making comedy of his ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... and play in the water like a young fish; when I do not yodel, cannot sing and, to my regret; dance even worse than I did when young; and when the mood of mirth and hilarity comes to me only as a rare visitant—shall we say at a burlesque performance—and never as a daily part of my existence. Madam, I am unfit to be a summer guest. If this is Liberty Hall indeed, let ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... was catholic; he possessed a great many and read them {11} to his friends. At the College Debate, of which he became secretary and president in his second year, he was a frequent and fluent speaker, with a remarkable command of language, though sometimes his eloquence was more than half burlesque. His powers of thought and real strength in argument were more often displayed in private discussions, where irony and humour hardly veiled the ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... blessedness of giving. Want, to his eye of charity, was neither native nor foreign, but human; and as human he pitied it always, and, as far as he could, relieved it. While abroad, he was constantly doing acts of beneficence; and the burlesque style with which, in his correspondence, he tries to disguise his own goodness, while using the incidents as items to write about, is one of the most delightful peculiarities in his delightful letters. The inimitable combination of humanity and humor in these passages renders ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... Senecam ipsum tradidisse haud dubitarim:" and the great professor Burman hath styled Tom Thumb "Heroum omnium tragicorum facile principem:" nay, though it hath, among other languages, been translated into Dutch, and celebrated with great applause at Amsterdam (where burlesque never came) by the title of Mynheer Vander Thumb, the burgomasters receiving it with that reverent and silent attention which becometh an audience at a deep tragedy. Notwithstanding all this, there have not been wanting some who have represented these scenes in a ludicrous ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... much, of this horrid society I did not feel positive it was certain that its alleged blood rites were fictitious. Of one thing I am sure—that the dreadful picture is no joke, and was not meant for a burlesque, though it might possibly be expected to perform the office of a scarecrow. It cannot be doubted that there are oath-bound secret societies that are regarded by the Spaniards as fanatical, superstitious, murderous and ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... the Duke is equally merciless in the description of George II.'s funeral in the Abbey, in which the "burlesque Duke" is introduced as comic ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... that you can do a bedside burlesque of 'East Lynne' that made even that Boston-looking interne with the thick glasses laugh. Go on and do it for me, there's a good girl. I could use a laugh ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... crystallization of this persistent interest. Old saws and proverbs of every people transmit from generation to generation shrewd generalizations upon human behavior. In joke and in epigram, in caricature and in burlesque, in farce and in comedy, men of all races and times have enjoyed with keen relish the humor of the contrast between the conventional and the natural motives in behavior. In Greek mythology, individual traits of human nature are abstracted, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... not be called "teaching the young idea how to shoot," since the corps only bore l'arme blanche; but it was highly creditable to the waggery of the citizens of Taunton, and the most efficient burlesque upon the volunteer system I had yet seen, although I have encountered ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... performance throughout. But, my dear Mr. CAROLUS HARRIS, one word,—when you had that capitally-arranged and highly effective scene of Bulbo going to be beheaded, why did you not carry it a bit further, and make Bulbo on the point of kneeling down, and the burlesque axe poised in the air, and then, but not till then, the moment which, like the present winter, is "critical,"—then, I say, enter the Princess with the reprieve? As it is, the effect of this dramatically ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... act of commending to our first parents the knowl- 92:15 edge of good and evil, a knowledge gained from matter, or evil, instead of from Spirit. The portrayal is still graphically accurate, for the common conception of mor- 92:18 tal man - a burlesque of God's man - is an outgrowth of human knowledge or sensuality, a mere offshoot ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... ignorance of his plagiaristic tendency as if I had known all about it: and years after Aytoun had (as I was told) avenged justice by that cleverest of spasmodic poetries, "Firmilian, by Percy Jones"—a burlesque on Alexander Smith, and a book which the world has too willingly let die. Let no one, however, after all this, fancy that I am unaware of Alexander Smith's true merit. He very neatly fitted into ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... attired as a barrister in wig and gown and Nerissa as a clerk with a green bag and a pen behind his ear. This being much appreciated, Your Humble Servant questions what portion of the Bard of Avon he shall next burlesque. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Quixote, roughly traduced by some Jervas, perhaps the best of all English books. And it was the same element that made the journey of Roderick Random to London, so ostensibly a narrative of coarse jokes and common experiences and burlesque manners, told in no very choice diction, essentially a wonderful vision of the eighteenth century, carrying to one's very nostrils the aroma of the Great North Road, iron-bound under black frost, darkened beneath shuddering woods, haunted by highwaymen, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... a good deal of ingenious and pleasing burlesque poetry extant by Antonio Malatesti. I have before mentioned his Sphinx: of this I have a dateless edition, apparently printed about the middle of the last century at Florence: the title is La ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... afterwards to become a king of hearts! A Charivari was, however, going on in front of a neighbour's door, as a nuptial serenade on the occasion of some unsuitable marriage; when the clamour of horns and kettles, marrow-bones and cleavers, saluted the mother's ears, accompanied by thirty burlesque verses, the composition of the father of the child who had ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... were crowded with a mass of cheap pleasure seekers; the burlesque theatres and motion picture places were besieged with throngs; from the open fronts of auction houses the strident voices of the auctioneers rose in feeling appeals that every one grasp the opportunities offered. "Store show" keepers stood upon high, narrow platforms ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... "however, I may acquaint you with my first exploits without offending my modesty; besides, my squire's style borders too much upon the burlesque ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... translation of the duties of friendship is the last word on that subject. He was visited unexpectedly at his office one day by a group of friends. With much ceremony, they presented him with a placque—an amusing plaster burlesque of the real article. He had the Californian sense of humor and he thoroughly enjoyed the situation. Admitting that the joke was on him, he celebrated according to time-honored rites. After his friends had left, ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... at the close of the piece) performed his part but clumsily; but the two epicures did well, and the President laughed as heartily as the rest of the audience; though considering the circumstances, it might admit of some doubt, whether the dialogue were really a burlesque, or a compliment ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... Peninsular Campaigns; the Art of Shaving, with directions for the management of the Razor; Todd's Johnson's Dictionary; Peacham's Complete Gentleman; Harris' Hermes; Roget on the Teeth; Memoirs of Pitt; Jokeby, a Burlesque on Rokeby; English Proverbs; Paley's Moral Philosophy; Chesterfield's Letters; Buchan's Domestic Medicine; Debrett's Peerage; Colonel Thornton's Sporting Tour; Court Kalendar; the Oracle, or Three Hundred Questions explained and answered; Gordon's Tacitus an Elzevir Virgil; Epistolae obscurorum ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... forgot what they had seen, but what they had said; and when to one of them his own testimony to the privy council was read, he mistook it for that of another, whose evidence he declared to be "the merest burlesque ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... introduced as something loathsome or repulsive, and (on the poet's part) to cap the absurdity of the preceding feat. The use made by other writers of a passage is one of the most valuable kinds of comment. In a burlesque some years ago, I recollect a passage was brought to a climax with the very words, "Wilt eat a crocodile?" The immediate and natural response was—not "the thing's impossible!" but—"you nasty beast!" What ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... Certain animals, and especially frogs, were created, shaped, and educated to do the grotesque, that men might study them, laugh, and grow fat. It was a droll moment with Nature, when she entertained herself and prepared entertainment for us by devising the frog, that burlesque of bird, beast, and man, and taught him how to move and how to speak and sing. Iglesias and I did not disdain batrachian studies, and set no limit to our merriment at their quaint, solemn, half-human pranks. One question still is unresolved,—Why ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... as we believe without sufficient proof, that the wit combats of the lords and ladies, {146} and the artificial speech of the sonneteering courtiers, were also introduced for burlesque. These elements appear, however, in other plays than this, with no intention of burlesque; and it seems probable that Shakespeare greatly enjoyed this display of his power as a master in the prevailing fashion of courtly repartee. In this ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... a man of humor, and the burlesque has a place in his philosophical writings; but in the words which I have just read to you he seems to have intended seriously to expound the system which replaces God by an idea. Try now to form a definite conception of this universe ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... passed from the apartment into a large hog trough, that lay along the wall and daily received the refuse of the various meals. The bird, furious with pain, was burying its beak into the leg of the soldier, while he, with the butt end of his musket aloft, and the bayonet depressed, offered the most burlesque representation of St. George preparing to give his mortal thrust ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... pink tape; he was escorting two young ladies, who were laughing and chattering as they tripped along at his side. And Spargo, glancing at them meditatively, instinctively told himself which of them it was that he and Rathbury had overheard as she made her burlesque speech: it was not the elder one, who walked by Ronald Breton with something of an air of proprietorship, but the younger, the girl with the laughing eyes and the vivacious smile, and it suddenly dawned upon him that somewhere, deep within him, there had been a notion, a hope ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... dissolved? And what is felt by these men within the Church is felt with much greater strength by multitudes of sincere men outside the Church, who do not hesitate to express their feeling and to pronounce current Christianity a burlesque and tragic travesty upon the real religion ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... Montoni to stop. If any thing could have made Emily smile in these moments, it would have been this speech of her aunt, delivered in a voice very little below a scream, and with a vehemence of gesticulation and of countenance, that turned the whole into burlesque. Emily saw, that her misfortunes did not admit of real consolation, and, contemning the commonplace terms of superficial comfort, she was silent; while Madame Montoni, jealous of her own consequence, mistook this for the silence of indifference, or of contempt, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... it was certainly first spoken of by George Grossmith, senr., of humorous memory. But Hodder and Vizetelly agree in fathering it on Blanchard's son, Sidney, at the time when Gilbert a Beckett's "Comic Blackstone" and comic histories were delighting all true connoisseurs of burlesque. Sidney Blanchard, Hodder reminds us, was possessed of a quaint wit, which was wont to deliver itself in a manner such as that in which he referred to a cashier who was never behind his desk when money was to be paid out: "Compared ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... music," Monticelli—all these men might never have been born except for their possible impact upon the so-called "Batignolles" school. Alas! such ingratitude must rankle. To see the major portion of this band of young painters, with talent in plenty, occupying itself in a frantic burlesque of second-hand Cezannes, with here and there a shallow Monet, a faded Renoir, an affected Degas, or an impertinent Gauguin, must be mortifying to the ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... literary game popular in the 17th and 18th centuries—the rhymed words at the end of a line being given for others to fill up. Thus Horace Walpole being given, "brook, why, crook, I," returned the burlesque verse— "I sits with my toes in a Brook, And if any one axes me Why? I gies 'em a rap with my Crook, 'Tis ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... stir in the crowded house. The ruffling of the face of the sea before a storm. The Sisters Sigsbee, Coon Delineators and Unrivalled Burlesque Artists, have finished their dance, smiled, blown kisses, skipped off, skipped on again, smiled, blown more kisses, and disappeared. A long chord from the orchestra. A chord that is almost a wail. A wail of regret for that which is past. Two liveried menials ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... woman. You couldn't make a prettier present to a person with whom you wished to exchange a harmless joke. It is not classic art, signore, of course; but, between ourselves, isn't classic art sometimes rather a bore? Caricature, burlesque, la charge, as the French say, has hitherto been confined to paper, to the pen and pencil. Now, it has been my inspiration to introduce it into statuary. For this purpose I have invented a peculiar plastic compound which you will permit me not to divulge. That's my secret, signore! It's as ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... and found its way to France. The Marquis de Chastellux, an author himself, took an especial interest in American literature. He wrote to congratulate Trumbull upon his excellent poem, and took the opportunity to lay down "the conditions prescribed for burlesque poetry." "These, Sir, you have happily seized and perfectly complied with.... I believe that you have rifled every flower which that kind of poetry could offer.... Nor do I hesitate to assure you that I prefer it to every work of the kind,—even to Hudibras." Notwithstanding the opinion of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... much liveliness a little Gaelic song, the burlesque elegy of a countryman on the loss of his cow, the comic tones of which, though he did not understand the language, made Waverley laugh more than once. [This ancient Gaelic ditty is still well known, both in the Highlands and in Ireland. ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... huntsman with a fox and a cat bound at the end of a staff. He was followed by nine or ten couple of hounds, who hunted the fox and the cat to the glowing horns, and killed them beneath the fire. After dinner, the Constable Marshal called a burlesque Court, and began the Revels, with the help of the Lord of Misrule. At seven o'clock in the morning of St. John's Day, December the 27th (which was a Saturday in 1561) the Lord of Misrule was afoot with power to summon men to breakfast with him when service had closed in the church. After breakfast, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... of our sketch closely studied the theatre and courted the society of actors and actresses. It was in this way that he gained that correct and valuable knowledge of the texts and characters of the drama, which enabled him in after years to burlesque them so successfully. The humorous writings of Seba Smith were his models, and the oddities of "John Phoenix" ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... three testimonies given in a court of justice usually cured them. The indifferent, business-like manner in which the oaths are put, the sing-song tone of voice, the rapid utterance of the words, give to this solemn act an appearance of excellent burlesque, which ultimately renders the whole proceedings remarkable for the absence of truth and reality; but, at the same time, gives them unquestionable merit as a dramatic representation, abounding with fiction, well related ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... and their festivities soon passed the bounds of moderation. Many were intoxicated; guests and attendants mingled together without distinction; the serious and the ludicrous, drunken fancies and affairs of state were blended one with another in a burlesque medley; and the discussions on the general distress of the country ended in the wild uproar of a bacchanalian revel. But it did not stop here; what they had resolved on in the moment of intoxication they attempted when sober to carry into execution. It was necessary to manifest ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... fall by necessity into the void of an abstract and undefinable beauty, like that of the only woman before the fall. If instead of the costume of the epoch, which is a necessary element, you substitute another, you create an anomaly which can have no excuse unless it is a burlesque called for by the vogue of the moment. Thus, the goddesses, the nymphs, the sultans of the eighteenth century are portraits ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... on their faces, the sorcerers kneeling with their heads and bodies humbly bowed down, and the magicians, who stood highest in importance, only kneeling. After this they all went through the formality of denying God and the Saints. Then they had a diabolical service in burlesque of that of the church, at which the Evil One served as priest in a violet chasuble; the elevation of the demon host was announced by a wooden bell, and the sacrament itself was made of unleavened bread. The scenes which followed resembled those of other witch-meetings. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... more abundant vein of humour than Carlyle's, though I admit that the quality of the ore is not of the finest. His every production is bathed in humour. This must never be, though it often has been, forgotten. He is not to be taken literally. He is always a humourist, not unfrequently a writer of burlesque, and ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... this. All such cases were dull. No really dramatic moments. The book-keeping of The Orb and all the rest of them was certainly a burlesque revelation but the public did not care for revelations of that kind. Dull dog that de Barral—he grumbled. He could not or would not take the trouble to characterize for me the appearance of that man now officially ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... then, recollecting himself, and thinking, as he owned afterwards, that the dispute grew too serious, with a skill all his own, suddenly and unexpectedly turned it to burlesque; and taking Sir Philip by the hand at the moment we arose after supper, and were separating for ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... choral songs are richly and sweetly modulated, and the influence of the whole poem upon Milton is very apparent in his Comus. The Knight of the Burning Pestle, written by Beaumont and Fletcher jointly, was the first burlesque comedy in the language, and is excellent fooling. Beaumont and Fletcher's blank verse is musical, but less masculine than Marlowe's or Shakspere's, by reason of their excessive use of extra syllables ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... replying, Don took Dorry's outstretched hand with nonsensical grace, and so dancing to the fireplace together, in a sort of burlesque minuet, they brought back with them two little mahogany and hair-cloth foot-benches, placing ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... former at some length and with much dulness. Dulness is certainly not the characteristic of the rhyming paraphrases of certain dialogues of Lucian which Charles Cotton wrote and published late in the seventeenth century under the title of 'Burlesque upon Burlesque, or the Scoffer Scoft.' 'We bring you here,' said Cotton, 'a fustian-piece, Writ by a merry Wag of Greece'—'a piece of raillery writ,' as he went on to say, 'when Paganism ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... formally and specifically anathematizing the lights, lungs, liver, and all odd joints, without excepting even the great toe of his victim.—To proceed in our review; the dying expostulations of poor Beatrice, are beautiful and affecting, though occasionally tinged with the Cockney style of burlesque; for instance, Bernado asks, when they tear him from the embraces of ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... Princess,"[1] as an example of the numberless dramas that grew up around the character of Pocahontas. The reader will find it particularly of interest to contrast with this piece G. W. P. Custis's "Pocahontas; or, The Settlers of Virginia" (1830), and John Brougham's burlesque, ...
— The Indian Princess - La Belle Sauvage • James Nelson Barker
... that his chief quarrel arose from the petty and pragmatical demand of Hamilton, that he should abandon it altogether. Burke soon had ample revenge, if it was to be found in the obscurity into which Hamilton rapidly fell, and the burlesque which alone revived his name from its obscurity. The contrast between the two must have been a lesson to the vanity of the one, as pungent as was its triumph. If ever the fate of Tantalus was realized to man, it was in the perpetual thirst and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... while gone, used to sweep and dust, sew and darn, in dull, unlovely Sandypoint, and get a new merino dress twice a year? No, it could not be—such transformation scenes never look place out of a Christmas pantomime or a burlesque Arabian Night—it was all a dream—a fairy fortune that, like fairy gold, would change to dull slate stones at light of day. She would never be Lady Catheron, never be mistress of this glittering Aladdin's Palace. ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... written, I am afraid, in a tone of somewhat boisterous gaiety—which I have not, however, had the heart to subdue, because it is after all the genuine offspring of the "harum-scarum" high spirits of the time. The "Cruise of the Tomtit" was, from first to last, a practical burlesque; and the good-natured reader will, I hope, not think the worse of me, if I beg him to stand on no ceremony and to laugh his way through it as ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... and grossness; they defaced the sacred trees and the grey walls with inscriptions which the indignation of a purer age has caused to be removed; they carried on nightly revels which no historian could describe, and in their wicked buffoonery mocked the Creator with burlesque religious rites. Such an unholy place would be pulled down by the mob nowadays, and the gang of debauchees would figure in the police-court; but in those "good old times" the Prime Minister and the Secretary to the Admiralty were merry members of a crew that disgraced humanity. ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... wharf-rats, common "drunks," pickpockets, shop-lifters, stealers of bread, garroters, murderers,—in common equality and fraternity. In this resting and refreshing place for vice, this caucus for the projection of future crime, this ghastly burlesque of justice and the protection of society, there was a man who had been convicted of a dreadful murder a year or two before, and sentenced to twenty-one years' labor in the State penitentiary. He had ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... May ecstasies; "Confluentia," whose threads of liquidity are eruditely, yet romantically, intertangled to represent the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle; and "The Headless Horseman," a masterpiece of burlesque weirdness, representing the wild pursuit of Ichabod Crane and the final hurling of the awful head,—a pumpkin, some say. It is relieved by Ichabod's tender reminiscences of Katrina Van Tassel at the spinning-wheel, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... What a silly you were not to come! How's your headache?... I do wish your father would have those stairs altered. It's like the ascent of Mount Parnassus." Buckstone was presenting a burlesque of that name just then, and her ladyship may have had it running ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... hateful smile of significance, lifting up the little parcel of papers between his slender finger and thumb. Then he made a long, cunning wink at him, and seemed to blow out one of his cheeks in a burlesque grimace, which, but for the horrific circumstances, would have been ludicrous. My uncle could not tell whether this was really an intentional distortion or only one of those horrid ripples and deflections which were constantly disturbing the proportions of the figure, as if it were seen through ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... prayer, in an artless letter[4120]. None of the gifts which serve to arrest and fix the attention are wanting in this style, neither grandeur of imagination nor profound sentiment, vivid characterization, delicate gradations, vigorous precision, a sportive grace, unlooked-for burlesque, nor variety of representation. But, amidst so many ingenious tricks, apologues, tales, portraits and dialogues, in earnest as well as when masquerading, his deportment throughout is irreproachable and his tone is perfect. If; as an author, he develops a paradox it is with almost English ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... not to over-inflect. Too much modulation produces an unpleasant effect of artificiality, like a mature matron trying to be kittenish. It is a short step between true expression and unintentional burlesque. Scrutinize your own tones. Take a single expression like "Oh, no!" or "Oh, I see," or "Indeed," and by patient self-examination see how many shades of meaning may be expressed by inflection. This sort of common-sense practise will do you more good than a book of rules. But don't forget ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... of translating. It is also, in the present acceptation of the word, improper. Formerly the term wise men denoted philosophers, or men of science and erudition: it is hardly ever used so now, unless in burlesque. Some say Magi; but Magians is better, as having more the form of an English word." CAMPBELL'S Translation of the Four Gospels, vol. ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... unhappy count, who had been barbarously murdered in the tragedy. This was, indeed, novelty to me. It was a peep into another planet. I gazed and listened with intense curiosity and enjoyment. They had a thousand odd stories and jokes about the events of the day, and burlesque descriptions and mimickings of the spectators who had been admiring them. Their conversation was full of allusions to their adventures at different places, where they had exhibited; the characters they had met with in different villages; and the ludicrous difficulties ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... bright, amusing dialogue, pleasing lyrical interludes, and charming displays of brilliant stage effects and pretty dresses. Unlike other plays of the same Author, there is here apparently no serious political MOTIF underlying the surface burlesque and buffoonery. ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... all the trouble, and then come home for me that I may enjoy all the triumph and all the comfort. If that is his idea of a woman's place, all right, but he must get some other girl to marry him. "Some girls will,"' Helena went on, breaking irreverently into a line of a song from a burlesque, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... while her groom stood at the brougham door in the bridle-path beyond. He had broken off a sprig of the box one day and given it to her, and she had kissed it foolishly, and laughed, and hidden it in the folds of her riding-skirt, in burlesque fear lest the guards should arrest them ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... I wrote and jumped to the conclusion that it was serious, and the rest did not read it at all, but heard of my agricultural venture at second-hand. Those cases I could not guard against, of course. To write a burlesque so wild that its pretended facts will not be accepted in perfect good faith by somebody, is, very nearly an impossible thing to do. It is because, in some instances, the reader is a person who never tries to deceive anybody himself, and therefore ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... conjecture that Thackeray's natural turn for comic burlesque, which comes out so plainly in his drawings, had become ingrained and inveterate by early practice, and certainly his immoderate delight in setting snobs and flunkeys on a pillory became a flaw in the perfection of his higher ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Madame de Maintenon every day for nurse, but who, nevertheless, was dying of weariness, used to see his friends in the evening (when Madame de Maintenon and his mother were gone), and would relate to them, with burlesque exaggeration, all the miseries he had suffered during the day, and ridicule the devotional discourses he had listened to. All the time his illness lasted, Madame de Maintenon came every day to see him, so that her credulity, which no one dared to enlighten, was the laughing-stock of the Court. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... transparent, and show that they are behind the scenes by occasionally circulating bits of sham news. They like to form a kind of select upper stratum, which most fully believes in its own intellectual eminence, and shows a contempt for its inferiors by burlesque and ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... spared in the mounting, and Adrien's money had been poured out like water on extraordinary costumes, gorgeous, highly-coloured scenery, and a hundred embellishments for this new piece of elaborate and senseless burlesque, Prince Bon-Bon. But with all its deficiencies as regarded culture, the piece appeared to be ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... Thayer, black-featured, his gnarled hands clenched into ugly knots, came abruptly forward. "I thought this was a serious thing; I didn't know you were going to turn it into a burlesque!" ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... good in the Institution. Some who send in these resolutions privately, are, no doubt, secret friends, needing a little more courage to face the pro-slavery feeling and sentiment which are all about them. Some one who read these resolutions suggested the idea of their being a burlesque. I repudiated the idea at once. They will commend themselves to you, dear Aunty, I am sure, as ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... received the refuse of the various meals. The bird, furious with pain, was burying its beak into the leg of the soldier, while he, with the butt end of his musket aloft, and the bayonet depressed, offered the most burlesque representation of St. George preparing to give his mortal thrust ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... hurried supper he set out with Cantapresto for the Philodramatic Academy. It was late when they entered their box, and several masks were already capering before the footlights, exchanging lazzi with the townsfolk in the pit, and addressing burlesque compliments to the quality in the boxes. The theatre seemed small and shabby after those of Turin, and there was little in the old-fashioned fopperies of a provincial audience to interest a young gentleman fresh from the capital. Odo looked about for any one ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... of an old vicuna hat, with a horse's tail dangling behind. Their features are disguised by ludicrous masks with long beards; and, bestriding long sticks or poles, they move about accompanied by burlesque music. Every remarkable incident that has occurred in the families of the town during the course of the year, is made the subject of a song in the Quichua language; and these songs are sung in the streets ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... the thing that pleased me most was a gay little piece of burlesque by Mr. ARTHUR CHESNEY as the red-haired shop assistant who was not a pacifist. Mr. CHARLES GLENNEY so thoroughly enjoyed the robustious sea-captain that we had to enjoy it too—a sound notion of entertainment, that. Mr. SEBASTIAN SMITH played ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... found his audience and his actors. The Prince of Wales's Theatre was directed by a burlesque actress, and devoted to light comedy and extravaganza: after that it gave up burlesque, merely heightening the effect of the comedy and prolonging the programme by a quiet farce. The company was small and strong, the theatre was well ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... swallowed the venomed drug to prevent himself falling into the hands of his enemies. Dullman, Timorous Cornet, Whimsey, Whiff, and the other Justices of the Peace who appear in this play are aptly described in Oroonoko, where Mrs. Behn speaks of the Governor's Council 'who (not to disgrace them, or burlesque the Government there) consisted of such notorious villains as Newgate ever transported; and, possibly, originally were such who understood neither the laws of God or man, and had no sort of principles to make them worthy of the name of men; but at the very council-table would contradict and ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... attractions of the Fourth of July celebration were Lon Worthington, tight-rope walker; Billy Wyatt, in fire-eating exercises; a greased pig; Ed DeLany, who was to read the Declaration of Independence and Alfred a burlesque oration. ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same time, all-powerful Being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be. These things cannot be reconciled with any such belief. On the contrary, they are just the facts which support what I have been saying; they are our authority for viewing the world as the outcome of our own misdeeds, and therefore, as something that ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... foot-notes; yet, seeing that one of these productions is in literature what the "Yankee Notions" and the "Nick-Nax" caricatures of John Bull are in art, and seeing that the other is not in the least a parody of the Emersonian poetry it is supposed to burlesque, and is otherwise nothing at all, we cannot help crying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... that the effrontery which has characterized Mormonism from the start has been most daring. Its founder, a lad of low birth, very limited education, and uncertain morals; its beginnings so near burlesque that they drew down upon its originators the scoff of their neighbors,—the organization increased its membership as it was driven from one state to another, building up at last in an untried wilderness a population that has ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... Bird, I. Fellow Travellers with a Bird, II. Children in Midwinter That Pretty Person Out of Town Expression Under the Early Stars The Man with Two Heads Children in Burlesque Authorship Letters The Fields The Barren Shore The Boy Illness The Young Children ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... a clever burlesque of the casket scene in which Gratiano played Portia's part, Shylock was Nerissa, Gobbo Bassanio, and Jessica the Prince of Morocco. Next Alice called for the Gobbos and Portia and the Prince of Morocco "stood forth" and went through a solemn travesty of ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... the blessedness of giving. Want, to his eye of charity, was neither native nor foreign, but human; and as human he pitied it always, and, as far as he could, relieved it. While abroad, he was constantly doing acts of beneficence; and the burlesque style with which, in his correspondence, he tries to disguise his own goodness, while using the incidents as items to write about, is one of the most delightful peculiarities in his delightful letters. The inimitable combination of humanity ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... present of the Ancients in Poetry, Painting, Oratory, History, Architecture, and all the noble Arts and Sciences which depend more upon Genius than Experience, we exceed them as much in Doggerel, Humour, Burlesque, and all the trivial Arts of Ridicule. We meet with more Raillery among the Moderns, but more ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... frail child of Cytherea and the Graces, what relentless fate has conducted thee to the shambles? Butterfly of the summer, why should a nation rise to break thee upon the wheel? A sense of the mockery of such an execution, of the horrible burlesque that would sacrifice to the necessities of a mighty people so slight an offering, made itself felt among the crowd. There was a low murmur of shame and indignation. The dangerous sympathy of the mob was perceived by the officer in ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... month of December of that year, a season at which the bourgeois of Paris conceive, periodically, the burlesque idea of perpetuating their forms and figures already too bulky in themselves, Pierre Grassou, who had risen early, prepared his palette, and lighted his stove, was eating a roll steeped in milk, and waiting till the frost on his windows had melted sufficiently to let the full light in. The ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... of the arsenal, who answers for the weather remaining fine, under penalty of his head, for the slightest contrary wind might capsize the ship and drown the Doge, with all the most serene noblemen, the ambassadors, and the Pope's nuncio, who is the sponsor of that burlesque wedding which the Venetians respect even to superstition. To crown the misfortune of such an accident it would make the whole of Europe laugh, and people would not fail to say that the Doge of Venice had gone at last to consummate ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and, in some form or another—sometimes tolerated, sometimes the object of the Church's anathema—the tradition held its own down through the Dark Ages, and we meet with the substance of the Saturnalia, during the centuries immediately preceding the Reformation, in the burlesque festivals with which the rule of the Boy-Bishop has been often identified. We shall see presently how far this judgment is correct. An example will, no doubt, readily recur to the reader from a source to which we owe so many impressions of the Middle Ages, some true, others false ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... he never deviates a hair's-breadth from the groove human nature has laid down. There is exaggeration, but no distortion. The most wildly funny people are low comedians of the highest order, whose fun is never forced and never fails; they found themselves on fact, and only burlesque what they have seen in actual life—they never evolve their fun from the depths of their inner consciousness; and in this naturalness, for me, lies the greatness of Leech. There is nearly always a tenderness in the laughter he excites, born of the touch of nature that makes ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... killed and captured within sight of four thousand troops who refused to go to the help of their comrades. Disgusted and defeated, Van Rensselaer turned over his command to Brigadier-General Alexander Smith, a boastful Irish friend of Madison from Virginia, who issued burlesque proclamations about an invasion of Canada, and then declined to risk an engagement, although he had three Americans to one Englishman. This ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... screws an imaginary eyeglass into his eye, which he contrives to keep contorted, and assuming a supercilious expression and a languid manner, struts leisurely towards us, with his hands in his pockets, thereby giving what I am forced to admit is an imitation of myself perfect in its burlesque. Ben Flint roars with laughter. I clutch the imp and throw him across knee and pretend to spank him. We struggle lustily till ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... a literary game popular in the 17th and 18th centuries—the rhymed words at the end of a line being given for others to fill up. Thus Horace Walpole being given, "brook, why, crook, I," returned the burlesque verse— "I sits with my toes in a Brook, And if any one axes me Why? I gies 'em a rap with my Crook, 'Tis constancy makes ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... his saddle girth, and paused to gaze at the closed front door of the house. Aside from his saddle and burlesque sombrero, he looked every inch a puncher, both in dress and in bearing. But Miss Isobel missed the effect of his new ensemble. She missed also the interesting spectacle of ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... pursued its spectacular course; Ione Burke, Polly Marshall, and Mrs. Vining were in the cast; tableau succeeded tableau; "I wish I were in Dixie," was sung, and the popular burlesque ended in the celebrated scene, "The Birth of the Butterfly in the Bower of Ferns," with the entire company kissing their finger-tips to a vociferous and ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... tone of burlesque warning. "There must be five mirrors. He knows nothing of women who thinks that one mirror may be divided among five girls. I hope Lulu ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... Meanwhile another burlesque of justice dragged wearily on in the dim courtroom. The judge was sentencing thirty-nine women to prison. When the twenty-sixth had been reached, he said wearily, "How many more ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... move as they are moved. To try them in a court of justice (should anything go wrong), would be simply ridiculous—a farce. And if every one of our deeds is fixed, what better are men than mere automata? To try them, to judge them, and to award praise and blame for what was done, would be to burlesque justice. The judgment day, therefore, and foreordination of all things cannot stand in the same category. If we hold by the one we must give up the other. God foreknows all things, but foreordains only what He himself brings to pass. ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... glancing (it will be impossible for you to do more than glance) at his illustrations of Balzac's "Contes Drolatiques," you will see further how this "drolatique," or semi-comic mask is, in the truth of it, the mask of a skull, and how the tendency to burlesque jest is both in France and England only an effervescence from the cloaca maxima of the putrid instincts which fasten themselves on national sin, and are in the midst of the luxury of European capitals, what Dante meant when he wrote "quel mi sveglio col puzzo," of the body of the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... conquered kings, and reproaches these pampered jades of Asia that they can draw but twenty miles a day. Till I saw this passage with my own eyes, I never believed that it was anything more than a pleasant burlesque of mine Ancient's. But I can assure my readers that it is soberly set down in a play, which their ancestors ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... Gwilt—the two sat down, unconscious of the future, with the book between them; and applied themselves to the study of the law of marriage, with a grave resolution to understand it, which, in two such students, was nothing less than a burlesque in itself! ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... married, Willy," she said, in a low tone. It is doubtful if he could have spoken, just then. And as if to add a finishing touch of burlesque to the meeting, a small boy with a swollen jaw came in just then and demanded something to "make ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... whole forehead; and, for a last adornment, the collar of his shirt and that of his coat came so high that his head seemed enveloped like a bunch of flowers in a horn of paper. Add to these queer accessories, which were combined in utter want of harmony, the burlesque contradictions in color of yellow trousers, scarlet waistcoat, cinnamon coat, and a correct idea will be gained of the supreme good taste which all dandies blindly obeyed in the first years of the Consulate. This ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... will suggest to the English reader the light mockery of "The Rape of the Lock", and in less degree some qualities of Gray's "Trivia"; but in form and manner it is more like Phillips's "Splendid Shilling" than either of these; and yet it is not at all like the last in being a mere burlesque of the epic style. These resemblances have been noted by Italian critics, who find them as unsatisfactory as myself; but they will serve to make the extracts I am to give a little more intelligible to the reader who does not recur to the whole poem. Parini was not one ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... to subdue them; and, as De Monts was obliged to return to France, De Poutrincourt and his companions established themselves again at Port Royal. Here, to while away the long winter, the gay adventurers established a burlesque court, which they christened "L'Ordre de Bon Temps"; and of the merry realm each of the fifteen principal persons of the colony became supreme ruler in turn. As the Grand Master's sway lasted but a day, ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... man," said the King, who never doubted that this was the introduction to something burlesque or witty, not conceiving that the charge was made ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... nothing of it just yet. Polish Confederation—horror-struck, as may be imagined, at its auxiliary Brother of the Sun and Moon and his performances—is weltering in violently impotent spasms into deeper and ever deeper wretchedness, Friedrich sometimes thinking of a Burlesque Poem on the subject;—though the Russian successes, and the Austrian grudgings and gloomings, are rising on him as a very serious consideration. "Is there no method, then, of allowing Russia to prosecute its Turk War in spite of Austria and its umbrages?" thinks Friedrich sometimes, in his anxieties ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... during the day, I never saw the minister rise with so few of his customary troops behind him. But the Opposition bench was crowded to repletion; and their leader sat looking round with good-humoured astonishment, and sometimes with equally good-humoured burlesque, on the sudden increase of his recruits. The motion was in answer to a royal message on continental subsidies. Nothing could have been more difficult than the topic at that juncture. But I never listened to Pitt with more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... external world, however, their knowledge was exceedingly crude; and the facts in nature had become so strangely distorted, through centuries of ignorance and superstition, that the solemnly pronounced verities of the time were but a burlesque upon the truth. Belief in the existence of the antipodes was considered by ecclesiastical authority as a sure proof of heresy, the philosopher's stone had been found, astrology was an infallible science, and the air ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... Florizel of Bohemia was a brilliant, original, and altogether delightful departure in light literature. The stories are a frank and wholesome caricature of the French detective story. They are legitimate pieces of literature because they are burlesque, and because the smiling Mephistopheles who lurks everywhere in the pages of Stevenson is for this time the acknowledged showman ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... that for want of the connexion, they may consequently appear ridiculous, as here he does. Again, in his third objection against my third Song, where he says— I, (that is in my own person) make a jest of the Fall, rail at Adam and Eve; and then Oliver's Porter, raving again, says, I burlesque the Conduct of God Almighty; [Footnote: Ibid.] now, pray judge whether it ought to be Constru'd so or no. This Song is suppos'd to be made and sung by Gines de Passamonte, a most notorious Atheistical Villain, who, as ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... melancholy. Thus was I engaged when young Rupert Hentzau, who feared neither man nor devil, and rode through the demesne—where every tree might hide a marksman, for all he knew—as though it had been the park at Strelsau, cantered up to where I lay, bowing with burlesque deference, and craving private speech with me in order to deliver a message from the Duke of Strelsau. I made all withdraw, and then he said, ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... for me that I may enjoy all the triumph and all the comfort. If that is his idea of a woman's place, all right, but he must get some other girl to marry him. "Some girls will,"' Helena went on, breaking irreverently into a line of a song from a burlesque, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... a word used in the theatrical business to distinguish the full-evening drama, its actors, producers, and its mechanical stage from those of burlesque and vaudeville. Originally coined as a word of reproach against vaudeville, it has lost its sting and is used by vaudevillians as well ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... broken up into little knots round the table and before the fire, and gave themselves up to the burlesque fun which is only possible or comprehensible in Paris and in that particular region which is bounded by the Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Chaussee d'Antin, the upper end of the Rue de Navarin and the ...
— A Man of Business • Honore de Balzac
... system, in full operation. Men live there, year in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in supplies. The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper they will fall in debt—a burlesque injustice in a new country, where labour should be precious, and one of those typical instances which explains the prevailing discontent and the success of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... their mother, had an unpleasant lisp, and yet they always took part in every play and were always doing something for charity—acting, reciting, singing. They were very serious and never smiled, and even in burlesque operettas they acted without gaiety and with a businesslike air, as though ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... nothing, but watched the North Star and hummed a selection from a recent Simla burlesque that had much delighted the ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... exact title of the thing, but 'Darling, Will You Meet Me In The Centre Of The Circle That The Limelight Makes Upon The Floor, Tiddle-e-yum?' would meet the case. We have Musical Comedy now in place of what used to be Burlesque in your London days, Saxham, with a Leading Lady instead of a Principal Boy, and ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... contemporary historical accounts. A poet or a dramatist is not responsible for the accuracy of chronicles. But what is an attack upon Joan, being briefly the foulest and obscenest attempt ever made to stifle the grandeur of a great human struggle, viz., the French burlesque poem of La Pucelle—what memorable man was it that wrote that? Was he a Frenchman, or was he not? That M. Michelet should pretend to have forgotten this vilest of pasquinades, is more shocking to the general sense of justice than any special untruth as to Shakspeare ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... you bury us under an avalanche of puns, and, I must say, not very good ones. Now, the story, though humorous, is not of the kind to admit of such fanciful embellishment. It reminds one rather of a burlesque at a theatre—the lowest thing, from a literary point of ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... Mr. Frend to prove that an impugner of algebra could attempt ridicule. He was, in 1803, editor of a periodical The Gentleman's Monthly Miscellany, which lasted a few months.[474] To this, among other things, he contributed the following, in burlesque of the use made of 0, to which he objected.[475] The imitation of Rabelais, a writer {209} in whom he delighted, is good: to those who have never dipped, it may give such a notion as they would not easily get elsewhere. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... repetition for half an hour as is the custom, there is another music going on—a music that cannot be written and will be difficult to describe—I mean the song of the "Cicada Stridulantia" in walnut trees above me. This insect—the balm cricket—is in appearance a burlesque, just such a house fly as you might imagine would be introduced in a pantomime; and its cry is as loud and incessant as it is peculiar. To describe it, fancy to begin with a number of strange chirps, and that every few seconds, one of those cogged wheels and spring ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... productions, even bordering on farce—are classed as "dramatic" subjects, and this, apparently, because they are strongly dramatic in certain scenes. Thus, again, genuine farce (as distinguished from "slap-stick" comedy), social comedy, burlesque and extravaganza are all classed under the head of "comedy," just as comedy-drama, tragedy, melodrama, and historical plays are classed as "dramatic." These two broad classifications will be used throughout this work except where finer distinctions are needed in order to treat ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... the next scene that the author seems to have reserved for putting forth his strongest powers of burlesque and broad humour. Isabella and Castaldo are together; the latter feels a little afraid to murder Martinuzzi, but is impelled to the deed by a thousand imaginary torches, which he fears will hurry his "moth-like soul" into their "blinding sun-beams," ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... It was intended by the writer as a sketch of some of the more striking features of the railway mania (then in full progress throughout Great Britain), as exhibited in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Although bearing the appearance of a burlesque, it was in truth an accurate delineation (as will be acknowledged by many a gentleman who had the misfortune to be "out in the Forty-five"); and subsequent disclosures have shown that it was in no ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... One of the earliest productions of this kind, which distinguished him as a painter, is supposed to have been a representation of Wanstead Assembly; the figures in it were drawn from the life, and without burlesque. The faces were said to bear great likenesses to the persons so drawn, and to be rather better coloured than some of his more finished performances. Grace, however, was no attribute of his pencil; and ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... All Screamersville turned out to hear him. William was a great favorite,—the most popular speaker in the country,—had the versatility of a mocking-bird, an aptitude for burlesque that would have given him celebrity as a dramatist, and a power of acting that would have made his fortune on the boards of a theater. A rich treat was expected, but it didn't come. The witness had taken all the wind out of William's sails. He had rendered burlesque ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... really good in parts and not really good as a whole. I have taken every poem on its own merits as poetry, its own technical merits as verse; and thus have included equally the frigid eighteenth-century conceits of "The Kiss" and the modern burlesque license of the comic fragments. But I have excluded everything which has an interest merely personal, or indeed any other interest than that of poetry; and I have thus omitted the famous "Ode on the Departing Year," in spite of ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... for near two centuries, divided and agitated the whole population of Holland and Zealand. One bore the title of Hoeks (fishing-hooks); the other was called Kaabel-jauws (cod-fish). The origin of these burlesque denominations was a dispute between two parties at a feast, as to whether the cod-fish took the hook or the hook the cod-fish? This apparently frivolous dispute was made the pretext for a serious quarrel; and the partisans of the nobles and those of the towns ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... the chief speaker in this burlesque, seems to think that the light of the nineteenth century is to be put out as soon as he tinkles his little cow-bell curfew. Whenever slavery is touched, he sets up his scarecrow of dissolving the Union. This may do for ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... time there were signs everywhere that the forces of reaction were gaining confidence.(See App. I, Sect. 5) At the Troitsky Farce theatre in Petrograd, for example, a burlesque called Sins of the Tsar was interrupted by a group of Monarchists, who threatened to lynch the actors for "insulting the Emperor." Certain newspapers began to sigh for a "Russian Napoleon." It was the usual thing among bourgeois intelligentzia to refer ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... his dining cars do not seem to be suffering from car-sickness. And you can get a beefsteak measuring eighteen inches from tip to tip. There are spring chickens with the most magnificent bust development I ever saw outside of a burlesque show; and the eggs taste as though they might have originated with a hen instead of a cold-storage vault. If there was only a cabaret show going up and down the middle of the car during meals, even the New York passengers would be satisfied with ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... September," when the prisons in Paris, which had been filled with priests and laymen arrested on charges of complicity with the enemies of liberty, were entered by ruffians acting under influence of Marat and the commune's "committee of surveillance," and, after "a burlesque trial" before an armed jury, were murdered. In Versailles, Lyons, Orleans, and other towns, there were like massacres. The victims of these massacres numbered about ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of almost diabolical persiflage, and touched the colors of the black pessimism with a few rays of hope. The final summing up, again, was adapted from a drama that had been rejected by several purveyors of the leg-burlesque as immoral. In a soliloquy intended to draw tears from the listener, the hero of Maxwell's play, when he parted from his young wife and children, before taking poison, made some apposite reflections on his case, ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... judicious remarks upon disgusting subjects in "An Essay on the Choice of Subjects in Painting," read, we believe, some years ago, by Mr Duncan, at the Institution at Bath. We remember an account in the Essay of a very ridiculous burlesque (it is not intended so to be) of some of the horrific legends of the Italian schools. The picture was exhibited in the chapel of Johanna Southcote, at Newington Butts, near London. St Johanna was represented ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... all this shocking burlesque upon legislative proceedings, we must not forget that there is something very real to this uncouth and untutored multitude. It is not all sham, nor all burlesque. They have a genuine interest and a genuine earnestness in the business of ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... discovering them, were evidently surprised, there seemed, however, to be no reason for fearing an outbreak. Suddenly, at a whisper from Steptoe, he and Whiskey Dick both threw up their hands, and stood still on the trail a few yards from them in a burlesque of the usual recognized attitude of helplessness, while a hoarse laugh ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... Universal Joint was closed. There was no one inside but Primo Palveri, the manager and majority stockholder of the Great Universal, and the new strip act he was watching. Malone didn't particularly like the idea of sharing his conversation with a burlesque stripper, but there was little he could do about it; he'd waited several days for ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... &c. immediately figure after them. But as a man who had an inclination for a park, could not always spare a thousand acres, he must submit to less, for a park must be had: thus Bond, of Ward-end, set up with thirty; some with one half, till the very word became a burlesque upon the idea. The design was a display of lawns, hills, water, clumps, &c. as if ordered by the voice of nature; and furnished with herds of deer. But some of our modern parks contain none of these beauties, nor scarcely land enough to ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... suspense and waiting they had been living upon the profits of their previous travels. They were not allowed to leave Vienna, however, without a ray of sunshine to cheer them on their homeward journey. Wolfgang had written an operetta, 'Bastien und Bastienne,' founded upon a burlesque of one of Rousseau's operas, and he had the pleasure of hearing his little work performed before a select company of connoisseurs, and of receiving their praises. Nor would the Emperor let him depart without ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... poor simple knight (in his dream), and offered his services to polish the corslet up a bit against that great occasion. He pointed toward his forge, and the knight marched to it, in three wide steps that savored strongly of theatrical burlesque. But the moment he saw the specimens of Henry's work lying about, he drew back, and wheeled upon the man of the day with huge disdain. "What," said he, "do you forge toys! Learn that a gentleman can only forge those weapons of war that gentlemen do use. And I took you ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... ballads. The ballad vied with the sermon in doing what the modern newspaper does, in satisfying the public craving for information, amusement, or guidance. It related the last great novelty, the last great battle or crime, a storm or monstrous birth. It told some pathetic or burlesque story, or it moralized on the humours or follies of classes and professions, of young and old, of men and of women. It sang the lover's hopes or sorrows, or the adventures of some hero of history or romance. It might be a fable, a satire, a libel, ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... how really hard it is to foist a moral or a truth upon an unsuspecting public through a burlesque without entirely and absurdly missing one's mark, I will here set down two experiences of my own in this thing. In the fall of 1862, in Nevada and California, the people got to running wild about extraordinary petrifactions and other natural marvels. One could scarcely pick ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... intently, and the people were very still, for this seemed like real life, and no burlesque. Some of the soldiery had military clothes, old militia uniforms, or the rebel trappings of '37; others, less fortunate, wore their trousers in long boots, their coats buttoned lightly over their chests, and belted in; and the Napoleonic ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... scandalised at a gay epilogue after a serious play, speaking of the fate of those unhappy wretches who are condemned to suffer an ignominious death by the justice of our laws, endeavours to make the reader merry on so improper an occasion by those poor burlesque expressions of tragical dramas and monthly performances.—I am, Sir, with great respect, your ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... This was, indeed, novelty to me. It was a peep into another planet. I gazed and listened with intense curiosity and enjoyment. They had a thousand odd stories and jokes about the events of the day, and burlesque descriptions and mimickings of the spectators who had been admiring them. Their conversation was full of allusions to their adventures at different places, where they had exhibited; the characters they had met with in different ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... admission were doubled on the occasion. The box tickets were 9s., the upper boxes, 8s., the pit, 6s., and the gallery, 2s.; and the proceeds realised no less a sum than 610 pounds! The performances were the "Poor Gentleman," "A Concert," by musical amateurs, and the burlesque of "Bombastes Furioso." The characters were personated for the most part in each of the pieces by amateurs, amongst whom were several of the leading gentlemen of the town, who spared no pains, study, nor cost to render their ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... of his producing "Hamlet" in preference to Mr. Gilbert's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern." Stevenson's "Macaire" may have all the literary quality that is claimed for it, although I personally think Stevenson was only making a delightful idiot of himself in it! Anyhow, it is frankly a burlesque, a skit, a satire on the real "Macaire." The Lyceum was not a burlesque house! Why should ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... of attire. Very estimable, and, we trust, very religious young women sometimes enter the house of God in a costume which makes their utterance of the words of the litany and the acts of prostrate devotion in the service seem almost burlesque. When a brisk little creature comes into a pew with hair frizzed till it stands on end in a most startling manner, rattling strings of beads and bits of tinsel, mounting over all some pert little hat with a red or green feather standing saucily upright in front, she may look exceedingly pretty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... the middle of what looks like the chorus of a burlesque show, only the men is wearin' tights instead of the women. I picked him out right away because he was the first guy I had seen in the place in citizen's clothes, outside of the guys with the kodaks. He was little ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... have you sent on board my ship as an inspector?'" In writing of his old associates satirically, he was not indulging in any rage of anger, but he would hardly have felt the impulse to give his pen such liberty unless grievances had still rankled in his memory. The scene he sets forth is one of burlesque, done like fiction. "On ascending the steps you would discern," he says, "a row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... brakeman, fired and ran a locomotive; also a freight train conductor and check clerk in a freight house; worked on the section; have been a shot gun messenger for the Wells, Fargo Company. Have been with a circus, minstrels, farce comedy, burlesque and dramatic productions; have been with good shows, bad shows, medicine shows, and worse, and some shows where we had landlords singing in the chorus. Have played variety houses and vaudeville houses; have slept in a box car one night, and a swell hotel the next; have been a traveling salesman (could ...
— Uncles Josh's Punkin Centre Stories • Cal Stewart
... He has not had time to memorise the poem of the song, and with extravagant fun Wagner makes him change the poetical and serious words into words of most ludicrous significance. Walther's melody he has not got hold of at all, and in a state of intense nervousness tries to fit the words to the burlesque tune of his previous night's serenade. The accents all fall in the wrong place; and as he stumbles miserably along the crowd begins to titter. Wagner of course was parodying and satirising the pedants of his own day, especially the composers of psalms who could not set a straightforward ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... "It's a burlesque show, brought here to win away the half dollars of the sailors on the ships here. We'd stand very little chance of getting leave to go to that ...
— Dave Darrin's Third Year at Annapolis - Leaders of the Second Class Midshipmen • H. Irving Hancock
... about this, and as Elder Stenhouse read it to me "my feelings may be better imagined than described," to use language I think I have heard before. I pleaded, however, that it was a purely burlesque sketch, and that this strong paragraph should not be interpreted literally at all. The Elder didn't seem to see it in that ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... apprehended is the cube; do we not measure by it and speak of the cubic contents of anything? The inference is easy: reduce all objects to forms which can be bounded by planes and defined by straight lines and angles; make their cubic contents measurable to the eye; transform drawing into a burlesque of solid geometry; and you have, at once, attained to the highest art. The Futurist, on the other hand, maintains that we know nothing but that things are in flux. Form, solidity, weight are illusions. Nothing exists but motion. Everything is changing every moment, ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... whip, who runs in the furrow beside the terrified horses and belabors them, thus serving the old husbandman as ploughboy. This spectre, which Holbein has introduced allegorically in the succession of philosophical and religious subjects, at once lugubrious and burlesque, entitled the Dance of ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... band is gathered to enjoy it. How they would troop to the place! They get hold of some robe or cloth of the imperial colour, and of some flexible shoots of some thorny plant, and out of these they fashion a burlesque of royal trappings. Then they shout, as they would have done to Caesar, 'Hail, King of the Jews!' repeating again with clumsy iteration the stale jest which seems to them so exquisite. Then their mood changes, and naked ferocity takes the place of ironical reverence. Plucking the mock ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... acted scenes in dumb show and danced comic ballets. These charming improvisations turned the children's heads and made their legs nimble. He led them just as he chose, making them pass, according to his fancy, from the amusing to the severe, from burlesque to solemnity—now graceful, now impassioned. We invented all kinds of costumes, so as to play different characters in succession. No sooner did the artist see them appear than he adapted his theme and rhythm to the parts wonderfully. This would be repeated for two or three evenings; after ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... of the poor, Olive saw the frightful profanities of that cant knowledge which young or ignorant minds acquire, and by which the greatest mysteries of Christianity are lowered to a burlesque. Then she inclined to think that Harold Gwynne was right, and that in this temporary prohibition he acted as became a wise father and "a discreet and learned minister of God's Word." As such she ever considered him; though she sometimes thought he received and communicated that Word less ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... "Y" and their own efforts to battle ennui with minstrel show and burlesque and dances have already been mentioned. The great high Gorka built by the American engineers in the heart of the city afforded a half-verst slide, a rush of clinging men and women as their toboggan coursed laughing and screaming in merriment down to the river where it pitched ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... crowded house. The ruffling of the face of the sea before a storm. The Sisters Sigsbee, Coon Delineators and Unrivalled Burlesque Artists, have finished their dance, smiled, blown kisses, skipped off, skipped on again, smiled, blown more kisses, and disappeared. A long chord from the orchestra. A chord that is almost a wail. A wail of regret for ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... adverse Chinese condense brace quite bade oppose deceive force scribe burlesque embrace machine crease measure canine emerge endorse cease ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... June 1791, and the loss of the "Royal George" in 1782, all form the subjects of quizzical comments, and there are many other allusions the interest of which is quite as ephemeral as those of a Drury Lane pantomime or a Gaiety Burlesque. ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... an Italian poet, born in Tuscany, who excelled in the burlesque, to whom the Italian as a literary language owes much; remodelled Boiardo's "Orlando Innamorato" in a style ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... line, and who did this, and who did that—no penitentiary business at all. Teacher tapped on the window with a ruler, and the boys and girls came in, red-faced and puffing, careering through the aisles, knocking things off the desks with many a burlesque, "oh, exCUSE me!" and falling into their seats, bursting into sniggers, they didn't know what at. They had an hour and a half nooning. Counting that it took five minutes to shovel down even grandma's beautiful "piece," that left an hour and twenty-five minutes ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... bachelor, for the boudoir of a pretty woman. You couldn't make a prettier present to a person with whom you wished to exchange a harmless joke. It is not classic art, signore, of course; but, between ourselves, isn't classic art sometimes rather a bore? Caricature, burlesque, la charge, as the French say, has hitherto been confined to paper, to the pen and pencil. Now, it has been my inspiration to introduce it into statuary. For this purpose I have invented a peculiar ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... brave little woman she was. Her childish thoughts were constantly with her parents—how best could she add to the weekly income. And this is what the same little Madge would do. Night after night, after playing in a serious piece, she would appear in burlesque, sing, dance, and crack her small jokes with the best of them. It was hard work that made her a woman—it was dearly-bought experience that gave birth to the sympathetic ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the old heroic stories, written in tripping verses, but in vain. Throughout his life, after as well as before "Sir Thopas," he could wonder and laugh at the success of stories, composed in the very style of his own burlesque poem, about heroes who, being all peerless, are necessarily all alike: one is "stalworthe and wyghte," another "hardy and wyght," a third also "hardy and wyght"; and the fourth, fifth, and hundredth are equally brave and invincible. They are called Isumbras, Eglamour, Degrevant[573]; but they ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal—a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... others held the same opinion; They took it up when my days grew more mellow, And other minds acknowledged my dominion: Now my sere Fancy "falls into the yellow Leaf,"[232] and Imagination droops her pinion, And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk Turns what was once romantic to burlesque. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... here was the headquarters of, that band of desperate men, who were in a conspiracy to make Kansas a slave State at whatever cost of blood, of fraud, or violence. Here the Territorial Legislature met to enact their bloody code of laws, and here the Territorial Judges held their courts, which were a burlesque on the very name of a civilized and Christian jurisprudence; and here, also, were kept the treason prisoners, while atrocious murderers were not molested, because they were "sound on the ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... succeeds so well as when the treatment is one of distinct persiflage. Thus the elegy on Donne is infinitely inferior to Carew's, and the mortuary epitaph on Arabella Stuart is, for such a subject and from the pen of a man of great talent, extraordinarily feeble. The burlesque epistle to Lord Mordaunt on his journey to the North is great fun, and the "Journey into France," though, to borrow one of its own jokes, rather "strong," is as good. The "Exhortation to Mr. John Hammond," a ferocious satire ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... there entered a huntsman with a fox and a cat bound at the end of a staff. He was followed by nine or ten couple of hounds, who hunted the fox and the cat to the glowing horns, and killed them beneath the fire. After dinner, the Constable Marshal called a burlesque Court, and began the Revels, with the help of the Lord of Misrule. At seven o'clock in the morning of St. John's Day, December the 27th (which was a Saturday in 1561) the Lord of Misrule was afoot with power to summon men to breakfast ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... themselves overhead,—some one seemed to be moving about. Hubbard laid his hand on that of the girl, still resting on the table, and grasped it in burlesque alarm; she could scarcely stifle her mirth. He released her hand, and, reaching his chair with a theatrical stride, sat there cowering till the noises ceased. Then he began to speak soberly, in a low voice. He spoke of himself; but in application ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... Le Roux (d. c. 1790). Dictionnaire comique, satyrique, critique, burlesque, libre & proverbial. AAmsterdam, chez Michel ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... fields. Then he acted the rollicking Irishman to perfection; the real live Yankee, with his genuine mannerisms and dialect, with proper spirit and without ridiculous exaggeration, and the Negro, so open to burlesque. The special charm of his acting in those characters was his artistic execution. He never stooped to vulgarities, his humor was quaint and spontaneous, and the entire absence of apparent effort in his performance gave his audience a most favorable impression of power in reserve. His ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... reputation. He has written for one particular actor to support his play—Lewis—more worthy to be thus considered than almost any other performer: but here his very skill gives the alarm—for Lewis possesses such unaffected spirit on the stage, a kind of vivid fire, which tempers burlesque with nature, or nature with burlesque, so happily, that it cannot be hoped any other man will easily support those characters written ...
— The Dramatist; or Stop Him Who Can! - A Comedy, in Five Acts • Frederick Reynolds
... his tyranny would have gone it is difficult to say, had not an event happened that brought his power to a premature collapse. This was the curate's sudden and somewhat unexpected marriage with a very beautiful burlesque actress who had lately been performing in a neighbouring town. He gave up the Church on his engagement, in consequence of his fiancee's objection to becoming a minister's wife. She said she could never 'tumble ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... burlesque tragedy, 'The Tragedy of Tragedies; or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... later Last Supper he is still more severe. "Nothing more utterly derogatory," he writes, "both to the dignity of art and to the nature of the subject can be imagined. S. John is seen with folded arms, fast asleep, while others of the Apostles with the most burlesque gestures are asking, 'Lord, is it I?' Another Apostle is uncovering a dish which stands on the floor without remarking that a cat has stolen in and is eating from it. A second is reaching towards a flask; a beggar sits by, eating. ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... bats on his entry into subterranean portals, we find ourselves in the abode of wonder and terror; but not till Meredith's Shaving of Shagpal (1856) do we meet again Beckford's kinship with the East, and his gift for fantastic burlesque. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Homer, however, in his Characters of Vulcan [13] and Thersites [14], in his Story of Mars and Venus, [15] in his Behaviour of Irus [16] and in other Passages, has been observed to have lapsed into the Burlesque Character, and to have departed from that serious Air which seems essential to the Magnificence of an Epic Poem. I remember but one Laugh in the whole AEneid, which rises in the fifth Book, upon Monaetes, where he is represented as thrown overboard, and drying ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... sat Amos Entwistle, the butt of not a little mirth from a half-dozen sceptics who had gathered round him. They addressed him as 'Owd Brimstone,' and made a burlesque of his Calvinistic faith, one going so far as to call him 'a glory bird,' while another declared he was 'booked for heaven fust-class baat payin' ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... to sense the conquest of the heart. We laugh indeed, but, on reflection's birth, We wonder at ourselves, and curse our mirth. His walk of parts he fatally misplaced, And inclination fondly took for taste; 380 Hence hath the town so often seen display'd Beau in burlesque, high life in masquerade. But when bold wits,—not such as patch up plays, Cold and correct, in these insipid days,— Some comic character, strong featured, urge To probability's extremest verge; ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... "As a matter of fact," he writes, "we do not occupy the territory, and cannot give foreigners the necessary protection, because Mataafa and his people can at any moment forcibly interrupt me in my jurisdiction." Yet in the eyes of Anglo-Saxons the severity of his code appeared burlesque. I give but three of its provisions. The crime of inciting German troops "by any means, as, for instance, informing them of proclamations by the enemy," was punishable with death; that of "publishing or secretly distributing anything, whether printed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... This vault of heaven with its spotless blue, this wide land that laughs in festive summer, these winds that lift my hair and come heavy with odors,—these do not fit with me, I burlesque the fair face of creation. O invisible airs, that softly sport round the castle-towers, why do you not woo my soul forth and bear it and lose it in the flawless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... so much choked by his tears on his pronouncing these words, that Fleur-de-Marie, very much affected, turned quickly toward him: he had turned away his head. An incident, half burlesque, diverted the attention of La Goualeuse, and prevented her from remarking more closely the emotion of her father: the worthy squire, who still remained behind the curtain, and, apparently was very attentively ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... Barlow). Yes! Let me think! (Points his finger at his forehead and assumes tragic attitude. Then stalks to the front of stage in manner of burlesque Hamlet.) Come, thought, come. Shed the glory of thy greatness full on me, and thus confound mine enemies. Where the ...
— The Bicyclers and Three Other Farces • John Kendrick Bangs
... aspiration, so ill-educated a love of refinement; so unarmed a credulity, noblest of weaknesses, betrayed for the laughter of a chambermaid. By an actual Bottom the Weaver our pity might be reached for the sake of his single self-reliance, his fancy and resource condemned to burlesque and ignominy by the niggard doom of circumstance. But is not life one thing and is not art another? Is it not the privilege of literature to make selection and to treat things singly, without the after-thoughts of life, without the troublous completeness of the many-sided world? Is not Shakespeare, ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... the burden of Andreae's little book. The consequence was, it set all Germany on fire. People never dreamed for a moment that it was a burlesque on the times. Thousands left their labor to follow the advice of the earnest disciples of Rosenkranz. On seeing that he had caused some mischief, Andreae wrote book after book affirming that his previous one on Christian Rosenkranz was a pure fiction intended ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... come off next Saturday afternoon, and we juniors usually help out in the scheme, you see. We try to arrange a part of it for you and help you out in some of the details. The whole thing is 'horse play,' just a sort of burlesque, and the more ridiculous you ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... distinguished by small leather caps, and the wretchedness of their attire; their number did not exceed twenty men and boys, some white, some black, and all mounted, but most of them miserably equipped; their appearance was in fact so burlesque, that it was with much difficulty the diversion of the regular soldiery was restrained by the officers; and the General himself was glad of an opportunity of detaching Col. Marion, at his own instance, towards the interior of South Carolina, with ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... Plymouth Court. When it was new, it was surrounded by "brown-stone fronts," and boys and girls who to-day are among the city's most influential citizens learned their A-B-C's within its walls. Now, the office-buildings and printing-houses and cheap hotels and burlesque shows that mark the noisy, grimy district south of the "loop" crowd in upon it; and only an occasional shabby brown-stone front survives in the neighborhood as a tenement house. But in the Jones School, the process of making influential citizens is still going on. For there the "Job Lady" has ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... have given vent to her real feelings at that time, she would have burst into a fit of laughter; it was too ludicrous. At the same time, the very burlesque reassured her still more. She went into the cabin with a heavy weight removed ...
— The Three Cutters • Captain Frederick Marryat
... general of ARTAXOMINOUS Was far less terrible than—well, thrasonic. To tear a thing to tatters, shout and "cuss," In an assembly callous and sardonic, Savours a bit too much of sheer burlesque, Scarce to the level of fine acting rises. The unexpected's piquant, picturesque, But a sound drama is not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... a magic rod, the ancient order of things was restored in the twinkling of an eye. The distinctions of rank—orders—titles, the noblesse—decorations—all the baubles of vanity—in short, all the burlesque tattooing which the vulgar regard as an indispensable attribute of royalty, reappeared in an instant. The question no longer regarded the form of government, but the individual who should be placed at its head. By restoring the ancient order of things, the Republicans had themselves ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... gave to the world in Cervantes the only Spanish writer who has achieved a great reputation outside his own country. Cervantes's masterpiece, Don Quixote, seems to have been intended as a burlesque upon the romances of chivalry once so popular in Europe. The hero, Don Quixote, attended by his shrewd and faithful squire, Sancho Panza, rides forth to perform deeds of knight-errantry, but meets, instead, the most absurd adventures. The work is a vivid picture of Spanish life. Nobles, priests, ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... affair this. All such cases were dull. No really dramatic moments. The book-keeping of The Orb and all the rest of them was certainly a burlesque revelation but the public did not care for revelations of that kind. Dull dog that de Barral—he grumbled. He could not or would not take the trouble to characterise for me the appearance of that man now officially a ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... the keeping of the customs officers. It began with the joking tone of the inspectors, who surmised that we were not trying to smuggle a great value into the country, and with their apologetic regrets for bothering us to open so many trunks. They implied that it was all a piece of burlesque, which we were bound mutually to carry out for the gratification of a Government which enjoyed that kind of thing. They indulged this whim so far as to lift out the trays, to let the Government see that there was nothing dutiable ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... colleagues, given, as it is said, to frequent excesses of drunkenness, and whom the National Assembly raised again imprudently to a throne which was not made for him,—if we show him hereafter some pity, it shall not be the result of the burlesque idea of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... to the chieftains and sold them a bill of goods (with a generous bribe of sugar) to close the borders. The next step was to corrupt the border guards, which was easy with Annie Oakleys to do the burlesque shows. ...
— Mars Confidential • Jack Lait
... often said, but as we believe without sufficient proof, that the wit combats of the lords and ladies, {146} and the artificial speech of the sonneteering courtiers, were also introduced for burlesque. These elements appear, however, in other plays than this, with no intention of burlesque; and it seems probable that Shakespeare greatly enjoyed this display of his power as a master in the prevailing fashion of courtly repartee. In this fashion, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... daughter Mary of Troyes; but the subject was one neither of courtesy nor of France; it belonged to an age far behind the eleventh century, or even the tenth, or indeed any century within the range of French history; and it was as little fitted for Christian's way of treatment as for any avowed burlesque. The original Tristan—critics say—was not French, and neither Tristan nor Isolde had ever a drop of French blood in their veins. In their form as Christian received it, they were Celts or Scots; they came ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... The cast and language of the poems appear, however, to belong to a later date; and the quaint stanza, afterwards employed in a modified form with such effect by Fergusson and Burns, is that used by Alexander Scot in The Justing at the Drum, and in other burlesque pieces of the early or middle ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... arm of Bacchus, making him look like one of those Hindu idols which are preposterously figured with a number of superfluous limbs. If the effect of this transference of the nymph's arm to its companion statue was rather burlesque than ornamental, the disconnected limb itself was certainly not without its use, small fragments of it being broken off from time to time for the purpose of whitening the door-steps and the hall-flags when the hearthstone could ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... wide over the globe. The young sculptor sat at the same board as Marsilio Ficino, interpreter of Plato; Pico della Mirandola, the phoenix of Oriental erudition; Angelo Poliziano, the unrivalled humanist and melodious Italian poet; Luigi Pulci, the humorous inventor of burlesque romance—with artists, scholars, students innumerable, all in their own departments capable of satisfying a youth's curiosity, by explaining to him the particular virtues of books discussed, or of antique works of art inspected. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... crosses down stage to lower left side of bed, sits facing LAURA.] But I do care. I know how you feel with an old cat for a landlady and living up here on a side street with a lot of cheap burlesque people. Why, the room's cold [LAURA rises, crosses to window.], and there's no hot water, and you're beginning to look shabby. You haven't got a job—chances are you won't have one. What does ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... Maharaja salaamat," &c. The horsemen immediately around him are mounted on well-fed and richly-caparisoned steeds, with all the bravery of cloth-of-gold, yak-tails, silver chains, and strings of shells; behind are troopers in a burlesque of English uniform; and altogether in the rear is a mob of caitiffs on skeleton chargers, masquerading in every degree of shabbiness and rags, down to nakedness and a sword. The cavalcade passes through the city. The inhabitants ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... row of dark houses is! Bedrooms filled with bodies—incredible nudities. Bed springs creaking. The hour of asterisks. Window blinds down. Doors locked. Lights out. The city lingers in the snow like a feeble burlesque. Houses and shops and street car tracks gesture reprovingly. Civilization bows its head in the night like an abandoned bride. Man, like an ape hunting fleas, preoccupies himself again with his ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... my work! I seem to have done it all. So you're the red-haired boy that hit me in the waistcoat. What have I done? God, what have I done? I thought I would have a joke, and I have created a passion. I tried to compose a burlesque, and it seems to be turning halfway through into an epic. What is to be done with such a world? In the Lord's name, wasn't the joke broad and bold enough? I abandoned my subtle humour to amuse you, and I seem to have ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... could have made Emily smile in these moments, it would have been this speech of her aunt, delivered in a voice very little below a scream, and with a vehemence of gesticulation and of countenance, that turned the whole into burlesque. Emily saw, that her misfortunes did not admit of real consolation, and, contemning the commonplace terms of superficial comfort, she was silent; while Madame Montoni, jealous of her own consequence, mistook this for the silence of indifference, or of contempt, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... the thirteenth century gives us on the whole the noblest books, the early part of the fourteenth affords the loveliest. They come from England, France, and the Netherlands. A noticeable element in their art is that of the grotesque and burlesque, never, of course, quite absent even from early books, but now most prominent and most delightful. The defect of the art of this time is lack of strength and austerity; its ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... once came to my mind that no Portsmouth Poll would ever wait for me. Did you ever hear anything so ridiculously absurd—such a bit of maudlin nonsense. I laughed at myself afterwards. It gave me a good, idea, though. I'll compose a burlesque, and the refrain ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... before such a word as fortitude that Mrs. Eddy's book takes on its most discouraging aspect. Her foolish logic, her ignorance of the human body, the liberties which she takes with the Bible, and her burlesque exegesis, could easily be overlooked if there were any nobility of feeling to be found in "Science and Health"; any great-hearted pity for suffering, any humility or self-forgetfulness before the mysteries of life. Mrs. Eddy professes to believe that she has found the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... (d. 1743).—Dramatist and song-writer, was believed to be an illegitimate s. of George Savile, Marquis of Halifax. He wrote innumerable burlesques, farces, songs, etc., often with his own music, including Chrononhotonthologos (1734), a burlesque on the mouthing plays of the day, and The Dragon of Wantley (1744?). His poem, Namby Pamby, in ridicule of Ambrose Phillips (q.v.), added a word to the language, and his Sally in our Alley is one of our best-known ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... his grotesquely haughty demeanor, invariably brought upon him. He was probably the most ridiculous man of his time; he had the pomp of an Eastern pasha without the grave dignity which Eastern manners confer. He was like the pasha of a burlesque or an opera bouffe. His servants had to obey him by signs; he disdained to give orders by voice. His first wife was Elizabeth Percy, the virgin widow of Lord Ogle and Tom Thynne of Longleat, the beloved of Charles John Koenigsmark, the "Carrots" of Dean Swift. While ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... this insolent buffoon to caricature you in a pointless burlesque! My dear father—if you were a free agent, you ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... open air theater was established in the park on West Fourth Street, near the outskirts of the city, which was advertised by its enterprising manager as a very respectable place, well looked after by the police. It is true that the shows were but cheap variety and vulgar burlesque, and of course liquor, as well as more harmless drinks, was sold freely; and equally of course, the lowest of the criminal classes were regular attendants. But, with all that, there was something terribly fascinating in the freedom of the place. And all too often, on a Sunday evening, ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... had not already been bereft of his senses by the melodrama preceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty, her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart, but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate who fought a losing fight with broadswords, two up and two down—click-click, ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... Arrangements for its Successor: Royalist Squib predicting Milton's speedy Acquaintance with the Hangman at Tyburn: Another Squib against Milton, called The Censure of the Rota upon Mr. Milton's Book: Specimens of this Burlesque: Republican Appeal to Monk, called Plain English: Reply to the same, with another attack on Milton: Popular Torrent of Royalism during the forty days of Interval between the Parliament of the Secluded Members and the Convention Parliament ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... Third". I have mentioned the circumstances under which they were written in the notes; and need only add that they are conceived in a very different spirit from Shelley's usual compositions. They are specimens of the burlesque and fanciful; but, although they adopt a familiar style and homely imagery, there shine through the radiance of the poet's imagination the earnest views and opinions of ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... understanding are preferable to those of the imagination, as well as to those of sense."—L. Murray cor. "Claudian, in a fragment upon the wars of the giants, has contrived to render this idea of their throwing of the mountains, which in itself has so much grandeur, burlesque and ridiculous."—Dr. Blair cor. "To which not only no other writings are to be preferred, but to which, even in divers respects, none are comparable."—Barclay cor. "To distinguish them ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... music going on—a music that cannot be written and will be difficult to describe—I mean the song of the "Cicada Stridulantia" in walnut trees above me. This insect—the balm cricket—is in appearance a burlesque, just such a house fly as you might imagine would be introduced in a pantomime; and its cry is as loud and incessant as it is peculiar. To describe it, fancy to begin with a number of strange chirps, and that ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... came to my mind that no Portsmouth Poll would ever wait for me. Did you ever hear anything so ridiculously absurd—such a bit of maudlin nonsense. I laughed at myself afterwards. It gave me a good, idea, though. I'll compose a burlesque, and the refrain ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... Eichenstine Bros. sent fifty dollars, and six ragged newsboys came to present thirty cents. A lavender note, with huge monogram and written in white ink, stated that some of the girls of the "Gay Burlesque Troupe" sent a few dimes to the "kid's" mother. The few dimes amounted to fifteen dollars. Mrs. Van Larkin's coachman had to wait with her note while Lucy answered the questions of a lame old negro who had ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... least, says the author of the "Petits Mysteres" who, as a journalist and frequenter of the coulisses, is excellent authority. He cannot resist a joke, but it is easy to sift the facts from their admixture of burlesque exaggerations. "By dint of incurring simulated dangers, the dancer accustoms herself to real peril, as a soldier in war time becomes habituated to murder and pillage. She suspends herself from wires, sits upon pasteboard clouds, disappears through trap doors, comes in by the chimney ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... Dorillus his son, and my lover, as your lordship knows, and who is no inconsiderable fortune for a maid, enrich'd only by your lordship's bounty. My lady, after this, took the letter, and all being resolv'd it should be read, she herself did it, and turned it so prettily into burlesque love by her manner of reading it, that made Madam, the Duchess, laugh extremely; who at the end of it, cried to my lady—'Well, madam, I am satisfied you have not a heart wholly insensible of love, that could so express it for another.' ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... landholders you may find our old friend, the truck system, in full operation. Men live there, year in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in supplies. The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper they will fall in debt - a burlesque injustice in a new country, where labour should be precious, and one of those typical instances which explains the prevailing discontent and the ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wished to remain some time on the continent, and in particular to visit Italy without any restraint: but his reasons for it appeared childish; it was not to cultivate his taste, or tread on classic ground, where poets and philosophers caught their lore; but to join in the masquerades, and such burlesque amusements. ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... himself, and thinking, as he owned afterwards, that the dispute grew too serious, with a skill all his own, suddenly and unexpectedly turned it to burlesque; and taking Sir Philip by the hand at the moment we arose after supper, and were ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... o'clock, even the scoffers were silent. But as the sultry night drew on toward one o'clock, Bill Day and his party felt their spirits revive a little. The calculation had failed in one part, and it might in all. Bill resumed his burlesque exhortations to the rough-looking "brethren" about him. He tried to lead them in singing some ribald parody of Adventist hymns, but his terror and theirs was too genuine, and their voices died down into husky whispers, and they were more alarmed than ever at discovering the ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... government which has no better corrective of public disorders than this, is a burlesque on the reason and intelligence of men; it is as incompatible with wisdom as it is with public ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... subjects are sublime, its writer's genius should be so too; otherwise it becomes the meanest thing in writing, viz. an involuntary burlesque. ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... She especially enjoyed overcoming the difficulties of interpreting aright my clumsy, circumlocutory phrases in attempting to describe shawls, gowns, and bonnets; and taught me the exact millinery language which I ought to have made use of with an arch expression of triumph and a burlesque earnestness of manner, that always enchanted me. At that time, every word she uttered, no matter how frivolous, was the sweetest of all music to my ears. It was only by the stern test of after-events that I learnt to analyse her conversation. Sometimes, when I was away from her, ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... when she returned from her rambles through the city, and gave a sufficiently strict account of what had happened. This was done light-heartedly and with touches of burlesque and extravagance at first; but the reports grew presently to have a more serious tone, and latterly Kitty had been so absent at times that she would fall into a puzzled silence in the midst of her narration; or else she would meet a long procession of skilfully marshalled questions ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... gentlemen of the corps dramatique "at the wing." Otherwise than as a sign of dramatic destitution, the piece called "Behind the Scenes" is highly amusing. Mr. Wild's acting displays that happy medium between jocularity and earnest, which is the perfection of burlesque. Mrs. Selby plays the "leading lady" without the smallest effort, and invites the first tragedian to her treat of oysters and beer with considerable empressement, though supposed to be labouring at the time under the stroke of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... is the aim of the short story—the introduction, for example, of the author's personality—any comment that seems to admit that, after all, fiction is fiction, a change in manner between part and part, burlesque, parody, invective, all such thing's are not necessarily wrong in the novel. Of course, all these things may fail in their effect; they may jar, hinder, irritate, and all are difficult to do well; but it is no artistic merit to evade a difficulty any more than it ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... to excess of music, which have no other origin than the prayer of the Hebrews in the third act, with its superb change of key.'" Thus by a stroke of genius, a scene which first impressed the audience as a piece of theatrical burlesque, was raised to sublimity by the solemn music ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... over to the keeping of the customs officers. It began with the joking tone of the inspectors, who surmised that we were not trying to smuggle a great value into the country, and with their apologetic regrets for bothering us to open so many trunks. They implied that it was all a piece of burlesque, which we were bound mutually to carry out for the gratification of a Government which enjoyed that kind of thing. They indulged this whim so far as to lift out the trays, to let the Government see that there was nothing dutiable underneath, where they touched or lifted the contents ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Aacus, three upright judges, to be dealt with, according to their merits, with impartial accuracy. The distribution of poetic justice in Hades at last became, in many authors, so melodramatic as to furnish a fair subject for burlesque. Some ludicrous examples of this may be seen in Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead. A fine instance of it is also furnished in the Emperor Julian's Symposium. The gods prepare for the Roman emperors a banquet, in the air, below the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... 7 choral cantatas, of which latter three were almost entirely absorbed into the Christmas oratorio and the B minor mass. Of the solo cantatas two are Italian (one of these being Bach's only developed work for voice and clavier) and two are burlesque. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... pronounced by Christopher North (who must have read it, however,) a beastly book. Campbell says, with striking justice, of another of Cotton's productions, 'His imitations of Lucian betray the grossest misconception of humorous effect, when he attempts to burlesque that which is ludicrous already.' It is like trying to turn the 'Tale of a Tub' into ridicule. But Cotton's own vein, as exhibited in his 'Invitation to Walton,' his 'New Year,' and his 'Voyage to Ireland,' (which ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... seem to have done it all. So you're the red-haired boy that hit me in the waistcoat. What have I done? God, what have I done? I thought I would have a joke, and I have created a passion. I tried to compose a burlesque, and it seems to be turning halfway through into an epic. What is to be done with such a world? In the Lord's name, wasn't the joke broad and bold enough? I abandoned my subtle humour to amuse you, and I seem to have brought tears to your eyes. What's to be done with people ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... first of these "Tales" is told by the poet himself, after a stop has been unceremoniously put upon his recital of the "Ballad of Sir Thopas" by the Host. The ballad itself is a fragment of straightforward burlesque, which shows that in both the manner and the metre (Dunbar's burlesque ballad of "Sir Thomas Norray" is in the same stanza) of ancient romances, literary criticism could even in Chaucer's days find its opportunities ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... other nations who enjoy any share of freedom, and have great objects in view, be not unavoidably embarrassed and distracted by factions? But whether we do not divide upon trifles, and whether our parties are not a burlesque upon politics? ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... made Emily smile in these moments, it would have been this speech of her aunt, delivered in a voice very little below a scream, and with a vehemence of gesticulation and of countenance, that turned the whole into burlesque. Emily saw, that her misfortunes did not admit of real consolation, and, contemning the commonplace terms of superficial comfort, she was silent; while Madame Montoni, jealous of her own consequence, mistook this for the silence of indifference, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... that pleased me most was a gay little piece of burlesque by Mr. ARTHUR CHESNEY as the red-haired shop assistant who was not a pacifist. Mr. CHARLES GLENNEY so thoroughly enjoyed the robustious sea-captain that we had to enjoy it too—a sound notion of entertainment, that. Mr. SEBASTIAN SMITH played chief rabbit with considerable ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... was just approaching the close of its colored and most extravagant stage of development. The subtlety and truth to Nature required for the pursuit of it now, had hardly begun to be thought of then. Sheer farce and coarse burlesque, with plenty of color for the money, still made up the sum of what the public of those days wanted. I was first assured of my capacity for the production of these requisites, by a medical friend of the ripe critical age of nineteen. He knew a print-publisher, and enthusiastically ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... comedy that marked the Dreyfus trial, say, or had they ever had opportunity to hear the proceedings in sundry murder trials in America, when learned counsel was asking questions and learned alienists were making answers, they would have been able to appreciate the fact that no burlesque description of a murder trial can ever be quite so utterly comic as a real murder ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... grey woollen cloth, their head-gear consists of an old vicuna hat, with a horse's tail dangling behind. Their features are disguised by ludicrous masks with long beards; and, bestriding long sticks or poles, they move about accompanied by burlesque music. Every remarkable incident that has occurred in the families of the town during the course of the year, is made the subject of a song in the Quichua language; and these songs are sung in the streets by the ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... never revelled in this habit, and consequently can neither comprehend its nature or strength, the hyperbolical language which most authors use when they speak of tobacco, must appear, in an eminent degree, burlesque and overstrained. "Tobacco," says the Anatomist of Melancholy, "divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all their panaceas, potable gold, and philosophers' stones, a soveraign remedy to ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... is the basal element in the laughable? What common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-andrew, a play upon words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque and a scene of high comedy? What method of distillation will yield us invariably the same essence from which so many different products borrow either their obtrusive odour or their delicate perfume? The greatest of thinkers, from ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... end of a staff. He was followed by nine or ten couple of hounds, who hunted the fox and the cat to the glowing horns, and killed them beneath the fire. After dinner, the Constable Marshal called a burlesque Court, and began the Revels, with the help of the Lord of Misrule. At seven o'clock in the morning of St. John's Day, December the 27th (which was a Saturday in 1561) the Lord of Misrule was afoot with power to summon men to breakfast with him when service had closed in the church. After breakfast, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... man, while her groom stood at the brougham door in the bridle-path beyond. He had broken off a sprig of the box one day and given it to her, and she had kissed it foolishly, and laughed, and hidden it in the folds of her riding-skirt, in burlesque fear lest the guards should arrest them for breaking ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... Englishman who had tossed the caber was sparring with the dramatic critic, Hazard and Hall boxed in fantastic burlesque, then, gloves in hand, looked for the next appropriately matched couple. The choice of Bideaux and ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... with so few of his customary troops behind him. But the Opposition bench was crowded to repletion; and their leader sat looking round with good-humoured astonishment, and sometimes with equally good-humoured burlesque, on the sudden increase of his recruits. The motion was in answer to a royal message on continental subsidies. Nothing could have been more difficult than the topic at that juncture. But I never listened to Pitt with more genuine admiration. Fox, in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... Woodward, when Teague had seated himself, "I'll settle my business, and then you can settle yours." He had seated himself in a chair, but he got up, shook himself, and walked around the room nervously. The lithograph of a popular burlesque actress stared brazenly at him from the mantelpiece. He took this remarkable work of art, folded it across the middle, and threw it into the grate. "I've had more trouble than enough," he went on, "and if I hadn't met you to-day ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... Dissolution of the Parliament after Arrangements for its Successor: Royalist Squib predicting Milton's speedy Acquaintance with the Hangman at Tyburn: Another Squib against Milton, called The Censure of the Rota upon Mr. Milton's Book: Specimens of this Burlesque: Republican Appeal to Monk, called Plain English: Reply to the same, with another attack on Milton: Popular Torrent of Royalism during the forty days of Interval between the Parliament of the Secluded Members ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... excellent pantomimist; could perform all the parts in a comedy himself, and with the help of Fred Loring, or some other, would improvise a burlesque on almost any well-known play. It was after one of these performances that Whittier (who sat in his quiet corner enjoying it as much as an honest Quaker dared to) said to Mrs. Thaxter, "Celia, thou knowest I have never been to the theatre, but I think at last the theatre has come to me." ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... floor made me bend down hastily with a stern: "Don't laugh," for in his grotesque, almost burlesque discourses there seemed to me to be truth, passion, and horror enough ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... changed from a Princess to a Shop-Lifter and was assigned to Cissy St. Vitus, late of a Burlesque Bunch known ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... is a gentleman and a scholar, a humourist, and a man of the world; with a great deal of nice easy naivete about him. If he walks out and is caught in a shower of rain, he makes amends for this unlucky accident by a criticism on the shower in Virgil, and concludes with a burlesque copy of verses on a city-shower. He entertains us, when he dates from his own apartment, with a quotation from Plutarch, or a moral reflection; from the Grecian coffee-house with politics; and from Wills', or the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... took it up when my days grew more mellow, And other minds acknowledged my dominion: Now my sere fancy 'falls into the yellow Leaf,' and Imagination droops her pinion, And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk Turns what was once romantic to burlesque. ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... of Portraits, engraved, painted, hewn, and written; of Eulogies, Reminiscences, Biographies, nay Vaudevilles, Dramas and Melodramas, in all Provinces of France, there will, through these coming months, be the due immeasurable crop; thick as the leaves of Spring. Nor, that a tincture of burlesque might be in it, is Gobel's Episcopal Mandement wanting; goose Gobel, who has just been made Constitutional Bishop of Paris. A Mandement wherein ca ira alternates very strangely with Nomine Domini, and you are, with a grave countenance, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... stillness of country life; and they were, in former days, particularly observant of the religious and social rites of Christmas. It is inspiring to read even the dry details which some antiquarians have given of the quaint humours, the burlesque pageants, the complete abandonment to mirth and good-fellowship, with which this festival was celebrated. It seemed to throw open every door, and unlock every heart. It brought the peasant and the peer together, and blended all ranks in one warm generous flow of joy and kindness. ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... in a hairdresser's window, if his countenance possessed the thought which is communicated to those waxen caricatures of the human face divine. He is a militia-officer, and the most amusing person in the House. Can anything be more exquisitely absurd than the burlesque grandeur of his air, as he strides up to the lobby, his eyes rolling like those of a Turk's head in a cheap Dutch clock? He never appears without that bundle of dirty papers which he carries under his left arm, and which are generally supposed ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... diplomat, and I had heard so much, of this horrid society I did not feel positive it was certain that its alleged blood rites were fictitious. Of one thing I am sure—that the dreadful picture is no joke, and was not meant for a burlesque, though it might possibly be expected to perform the office of a scarecrow. It cannot be doubted that there are oath-bound secret societies that are regarded by the Spaniards as fanatical, ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... language of the poems appear, however, to belong to a later date; and the quaint stanza, afterwards employed in a modified form with such effect by Fergusson and Burns, is that used by Alexander Scot in The Justing at the Drum, and in other burlesque pieces of the early or middle period of ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... along the wall and daily received the refuse of the various meals. The bird, furious with pain, was burying its beak into the leg of the soldier, while he, with the butt end of his musket aloft, and the bayonet depressed, offered the most burlesque representation of St. George preparing to give his mortal thrust to ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... certain of the Douglas Fairbanks productions, even bordering on farce—are classed as "dramatic" subjects, and this, apparently, because they are strongly dramatic in certain scenes. Thus, again, genuine farce (as distinguished from "slap-stick" comedy), social comedy, burlesque and extravaganza are all classed under the head of "comedy," just as comedy-drama, tragedy, melodrama, and historical plays are classed as "dramatic." These two broad classifications will be used throughout this work except where finer distinctions are needed in order to treat varieties of subjects. ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... are his own words) he bound them up in the exact order in which the plays were printed. On the margins of many of the sheets, besides the various corrections, emendations, and notes to the printer, by Mr. Steevens, there are some original sonnets, a scene for a burlesque tragedy, and other happy effusions from the pen of the same elegant and learned editor. Need I ask the reader, whether he would have the barbouille (unique) copy of Telemaque of the young Princesse Wilhelmine Auguste de Saxe-Weimar (like the Vicar of Wakefield, I like to give the full ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... come home for me that I may enjoy all the triumph and all the comfort. If that is his idea of a woman's place, all right, but he must get some other girl to marry him. "Some girls will,"' Helena went on, breaking irreverently into a line of a song from a burlesque, '"but this ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... of the room, a man in a broad-skirted green coat, with corduroy knee-smalls and gray cotton stockings, was performing the most popular steps of a hornpipe, with a slang and burlesque caricature of grace and lightness, which, combined with the very appropriate character of his costume, was inexpressibly absurd. Another man, evidently very drunk, who had probably been tumbled into bed by his companions, was sitting up between the ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... charming act like a pretty miss at her first coming out, to such work as the Four Danubes give you as the closing number, with Irene as a lead, you are, to say the least, carried over the dreadful spots, such as the young man who sways out like a burlesque queen and tells you whom he was with before Keith got him. His name should be "Pusher," "Advance Man," or something of that sort, and not artist. What he gives you, you could find just as well if not better done on Fourteenth Street. He has a ribbon-counter, adenoid voice production ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... 1834. It is a mixture of tragedy and farce: the former occasionally good, the latter poor buffoonery. In the notes, readings of the old MS. are referred to with apparent seriousness; but Gammel Gumba's Saga is quoted in a manner that seems burlesque. I cannot find the word "Kyhlam" in any dictionary. Can any of your readers tell me whether it signifies a real country, or is a mere fiction? The work does not read like a translation; and, if one, the number of modern allusions show that it is not, as it professes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... boy had not already been bereft of his senses by the melodrama preceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty, her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart, but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate who fought a losing fight with broadswords, ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... tongue, and he writes a long letter without a full stop, which is as full of substance as one of his essays. His technique is so incredibly fine, he is such a Paganini of prose, that he can invent and reverse an idea of pyramidal wit, as in this burlesque of a singer: 'The shake, which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite through the composition; so that ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... vast extent of ground, and circular grass plots surrounded by trees where the pedestrian may repose and eat and drink if he will. Here are restaurants in plenty, cafes, Panoramas, exhibitions of wild beasts, swings, tennis courts, places for running at the ring, do for burlesque dramatic performances, farceurs, jugglers, De Bach's Equestrian Amphitheatre in the style of Franconi, Salles de Danse, baths, billiard rooms, gaming tables, and even houses appropriated to gallantry. ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... in him is the combination of three things; an immense love of life, a romantic interpretation of material things, and a remarkable talent for parody and burlesque. ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... to the daily sums furnished by Necker, scarcely sufficed for those principal wants. Some years before, the Parisians had been very much displeased at the establishment of import dues on all alimentary substances. The writers of that epoch preserved the burlesque Alexandrine, which was placarded all over the town, on the erection of ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... help thinking the first stanza very good solemn poetry, as also the three first lines of the second. Its last line is an excellent burlesque surprise on gloomy sentimental enquirers. And, perhaps, the advice is as good as can be given to a low-spirited dissatisfied being:—'Don't trouble your head with sickly thinking: take a ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... presented themselves in whimsical parts and costumes. The celebrated dancer Guimard always took the leading characters in the latter performance; she danced better than she acted; her extreme leanness, and her weak, hoarse voice added to the burlesque in the parodied characters ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... 'rule of three' of forensic assassination;—given, a villain, multiplied by a false oath, the product, an execution!" He now revelled in the boldest extravagances of imagery and language, expressions which, written, might resemble the burlesque of a public jester, or the wildness of a disturbed mind, but which were followed by the audience, whom he had heated up to the point of passion, with all but acclamation. Still he revelled on. His contrasts and comparisons continued to roll out upon each ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... A parody is a burlesque imitation and degradation of something serious. In his song, "Those Evening Bells," Moore wrote ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... is a great thing to find the most obscure and broken indications of the things which really are. There is the true enchantment of true romance in the Don Quixote—for those who can understand—but it is delivered in the mode of parody and burlesque; and so it is with the extraordinary fantasy, "The Ghost-Ship," which gives its name to this collection of tales. Take this story to bits, as it were; analyse it; you will be astonished at its frantic absurdity: the ghostly galleon ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... a great rushing to and fro in preparation. Men bowed to each other with burlesque dancing school formality, offered arms, or accepted them with bearlike coyness. We stood for a moment rather bewildered, not knowing precisely ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... ex-chorus girl offered another bonne bouche to the crowd. She would never again skip airily behind the footlights of the Wellington, or any other important theater in England. So far as she was concerned, the musical comedy candle that succeeded to the sacred lamp of West End burlesque ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... be called "teaching the young idea how to shoot," since the corps only bore l'arme blanche; but it was highly creditable to the waggery of the citizens of Taunton, and the most efficient burlesque upon the volunteer system I had yet seen, although I have encountered many more elaborately ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... in the adaptation of attire. Very estimable, and, we trust, very religious young women sometimes enter the house of God in a costume which makes their utterance of the words of the litany and the acts of prostrate devotion in the service seem almost burlesque. When a brisk little creature comes into a pew with hair frizzed till it stands on end in a most startling manner, rattling strings of beads and bits of tinsel, mounting over all some pert little hat with a red or green feather standing saucily upright in front, she may look exceedingly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... Sir, this gloomy writer, who is so mightily scandalised at a gay epilogue after a serious play, speaking of the fate of those unhappy wretches who are condemned to suffer an ignominious death by the justice of our laws, endeavours to make the reader merry on so improper an occasion by those poor burlesque expressions of tragical dramas and monthly performances.—I am, Sir, with great respect, your most obedient, ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... through the whole of the volumes of Gibbon. Upon this, after brief wonder and doubt, we all thought it best to take part in a general assault upon open up, by invention of phrases on the same plan that should show it in exaggerated burlesque, and support Mr. Cogswell's indictment. Then came a struggle who should carry the absurdity farthest; and the victory remained with M. Van de Weyer until Dickens surpassed even him, and "opened up" depths of almost frenzied absurdity that would ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the mounting, and Adrien's money had been poured out like water on extraordinary costumes, gorgeous, highly-coloured scenery, and a hundred embellishments for this new piece of elaborate and senseless burlesque, Prince Bon-Bon. But with all its deficiencies as regarded culture, the piece ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... much as on this occasion. It is astonishing the variety of tones, the lively satire and taunt of which the words Senza moccolo, senza mo, are susceptible from their tongues. The scene is the best burlesque on the life of the "respectable" world that can be imagined. A ragamuffin with a little piece of candle, not even lighted, thrusts it in your face with an air of far greater superiority than he can wear who, dressed in gold and velvet, erect in his carriage, holds aloft his light on a tall ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... in a conspiracy to make Kansas a slave State at whatever cost of blood, of fraud, or violence. Here the Territorial Legislature met to enact their bloody code of laws, and here the Territorial Judges held their courts, which were a burlesque on the very name of a civilized and Christian jurisprudence; and here, also, were kept the treason prisoners, while atrocious murderers were not molested, because they were "sound on ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... to my reason; I knew that they had existed and did still exist. I was not shocked or shaken in my faith, either, by anything I read about them. Young as I was and insipient, I was prepared for what is called the burlesque Olympus of the Iliad, so grievous to Professor Murray. I think I recognised then, what seems perfectly plain to me now, that you might as well think meanly of a God of Africa because the natives make him of a cocoanut on ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... doubled on the occasion. The box tickets were 9s., the upper boxes, 8s., the pit, 6s., and the gallery, 2s.; and the proceeds realised no less a sum than 610 pounds! The performances were the "Poor Gentleman," "A Concert," by musical amateurs, and the burlesque of "Bombastes Furioso." The characters were personated for the most part in each of the pieces by amateurs, amongst whom were several of the leading gentlemen of the town, who spared no pains, study, nor cost to ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... anything in them that can be called wit. Mr. Locke's account of wit, with this short explanation, comprehends most of the species of wit, as metaphors, similitudes, allegories, enigmas, mottoes, parables, fables, dreams, visions, dramatic writings, burlesque, and all the methods of allusion: as there are many other pieces of wit, how remote soever they may appear at first sight from the foregoing description, which upon examination will be found ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... he who, amidst the religious pageants, the public falsehoods and the private apostacies, the burlesque scenes behind the stage preceding the solemn performance, what priest is he who has preserved ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... of the time—the "Toy" Symphony and the more famous "Farewell." The former is a mere jeu d'esprit, in which, with an orchestral basis of two violins and a bass, the solo instruments are all of a burlesque character. Mozart attempted something of a kindred nature in his "Musical joke," where instruments come in at wrong places, execute inappropriate phrases, and play abominably out of tune. This kind of thing does not require serious ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... he, "I know it is an age of burlesque. But let us spare the sacraments, and the altar, ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... statement—"His memory is good." Sometimes Simile is prostituted to a low and degrading use; as "His face was like a danger signal in a fog storm." "Her hair was like a furze-bush in bloom." "He was to his lady love as a poodle to its mistress." Such burlesque is never permissible. Mere likeness, it should be remembered, does not constitute a simile. For instance there is no simile when one city is compared to another. In order that there may be a rhetorical ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... sentimental Tasso. Neither poet, the one with his cheerfulness, the other with his mild melancholy, brings home, conceives the horror of the situation; the one treats the tragic in the spirit almost of burlesque, the other entirely in the spirit of elegy. So, again, with the novel writers: these professional retailers of anecdotes will pick up any subject to fill their volumes. In default of pleasant stories of filthy intrigue ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Kinsmen" there is a "distinct imitation of the circumstances of Ophelia's madness and death in Hamlet." In "The Woman Hater," assigned conjecturally to 1605 or 1606 by Professor Thorndike, there are "several burlesque imitations of Hamlet." ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... and bric-a-brac! Mina was surprised that Blent did not on the instant punish the blasphemy by a revengeful earthquake or an overwhelming flood. Cecily caught her by the arm, a burlesque apprehension screwing her face up into a fantastically ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... the sake of the opportunities it afforded of bright, amusing dialogue, pleasing lyrical interludes, and charming displays of brilliant stage effects and pretty dresses. Unlike other plays of the same Author, there is here apparently no serious political MOTIF underlying the surface burlesque and buffoonery. ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... the personage who had just addressed him with much curiosity. He was dressed in the height or rather the burlesque of fashion, wore an eyeglass, and an enormous locket on his chain. The face which surmounted all this grandeur was almost that of a monkey, and Toto Chupin had not exaggerated its ugliness when he likened it ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... In burlesque the young man exclaimed indignantly: "Paul deceived me!" he cried. "He told me he had married the most beautiful woman in Laon. He has married the most beautiful woman ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... dexterity, mixes the grand and the burlesque together; the violation of faith, sir, says Cassius, lies at the door of the Rhodians by reite-rated acts of perfidy.—The iron grate fell down, crushed those under it to death, and catched the rest as in a trap.—When the Xanthians heard the military shout, and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... this are thickly perched the effigies of the Meistersinger's feathered friends, from whom the canons of the church, as Mrs. March read aloud from her Baedeker, long ago directed his bequest to themselves. In revenge for their lawless greed the defrauded beneficiaries choose to burlesque the affair by looking like the four- and-twenty blackbirds ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... import what censure is passed upon a coxcomb who owes his present existence to the above burlesque character given to him by the poet, whose amber has preserved many other grubs and worms: but to classify Boccaccio with such a person, and to excommunicate his very ashes, must of itself make us doubt of the qualification of the classical tourist for writing upon Italian, or, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Regnard's mantle of decorum is not without a rent. In the "Legataire," as in the "Malade Imaginaire," may be found a good deal of pleasantry on the first of the three principal remedies of the physicians of the period, as mentioned by Moliere in his burlesque Latin:— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... be commenced a new burlesque serial, "The Mystery of Mister E. Drood," written expressly for this paper by the celebrated humorist, ORPHEUS ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... my seat in the car at Jersey City. On this golden Monday afternoon I should have been slowly coming down the Housatonic Valley, with my dear little wife beside me. Instead, the unfamiliar train, and the fat man at my side reading a campaign newspaper, and shaking his huge sides over some broad burlesque. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... in the gift of the nation, and I will be great." No, you won't. You think you are going to be made great by an office, but remember that if you are not great before you get the office, you won't be great when you secure it. It will only be a burlesque in that shape. ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... of undergraduate talent. In fact, more than once it has been the music which has given these operas their chief merit. Save for one war-time emergency, when University women participated, the entire cast has always been recruited from the men of the University and the burlesque of the "chorus girls" has always been one of the perennial charms of the opera in undergraduate estimation. The first opera, given in 1908, was entitled Michigenda and became instantly popular, not only because of its novelty and the excellence of its music, ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... on the other hand, she had pledged her word, and a silly performance it was! But she would keep it, at least until Lady Hamilton released her from her promise. Patty's ideas of honour were, perhaps, a little strained, but she took the promise of that burlesque document as seriously as if it had been of national importance. And now she was in a dilemma. To refuse to walk with the Earl was so rude, and yet to talk with him was to break her ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... is the boastful knight, Basilisco, whose incredible vaunts and invariable preference for the very freest of blank verse, in a play almost entirely exempt from either, read like an intentional burlesque of Tamburlaine. If so, and the suggestion is not ill-founded or improbable, it may be interpreted as an emphatic rejection of the influence of Marlowe and as a claim, on Kyd's part, to sole credit for his own form of tragedy and ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... as clever in providing a bill of fare as in inducing the public to come to the theatre, and the adaptability of the family was really wonderful. One night they would play farcical comedy; then Hamlet, reduced to four acts by Mr Wopples, would follow on the second night; the next night burlesque would reign supreme; and when the curtain arose on the fourth night Mr Wopples and the star artistes would be acting melodrama, and throw one another off bridges and do strong starvation business with ragged clothes ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... the "massacres of September," when the prisons in Paris, which had been filled with priests and laymen arrested on charges of complicity with the enemies of liberty, were entered by ruffians acting under influence of Marat and the commune's "committee of surveillance," and, after "a burlesque trial" before an armed jury, were murdered. In Versailles, Lyons, Orleans, and other towns, there were like massacres. The victims of these ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... overworn, was still of a quality inconsistent with her evident habits, and the lace-edged petticoat that peeped beneath it was draggled with mud and unaccustomed usage. Her glossy black hair, which had been tossed into curls in some foreign fashion, was now wind-blown into a burlesque of it. This incongruity was still further accented by the appearance of the room she had entered. It was coldly and severely furnished, making the chill of the yet damp white plaster unpleasantly obvious. A black harmonium organ stood in one corner, set out with black and white ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... biche en rut, n'a pour fait d'impuissance Trainé du fond des bois, un cerf à l'audience; Et jamais juge, entre eux ordonnant le congrès, De ce burlesque mot n'a ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... perhaps, it is only there From a love of the picturesque— You hint, maybe, that it takes no share In the plot of this weird burlesque; But cliffs that tremble at every touch, And that flap in the dreadful draught, Have something better to do—ah, much! Than to criticise ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... the scent of evil. It took no psychological examiner to decide that he had drifted into indulgence and laziness as casually as he had drifted into life, and was to drift out. He was pale and his clothes stank of smoke; he enjoyed burlesque shows, billiards, and Robert Service, and was always looking back upon his last intrigue or forward to his next one. In his youth his taste had run to loud ties, but now it seemed to have faded, like his vitality, and was expressed in ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... incongruities, Abyssinian heroes robed in literary scarlet, degrees conferred by the suffrages of virgins in pink bonnets and blue, a great academical ceremony drowned in an atmosphere of Aristophanean (sic) chaff'. But the chaff is the legitimate successor of the burlesque performance of the Terrae Filius at the old 'Act', and the degrees are submitted to the House with the old formula; even the presence of ladies would have been no surprise to our predecessors of 200 years ago, however much they would have astonished our mediaeval founders and benefactors; ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... years; but it was not his intention in these few lines to give a serious imitation of him. All that he attempted was to show how exactly he could apply the language and manner of Spenser to low and burlesque subjects; and in this he has completely succeeded. To compare these lines, as Dr Warton has done, with those more extensive and highly-finished productions, the Castle of Indolence by Thomson, and the Minstrel by Beattie, is manifestly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... of Shakespeare's queen Margaret; but they lose their effect by being thrown into the form of monologue and ascribed to a departed spirit, whose agonies of grief and rage in reciting his own death have something in them bordering on the burlesque. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... many of those in the upper ranks of the profession like the freedom of Bleecker street, and reside in that thoroughfare. Thompson street also contains several boarding-houses patronized by dancers and burlesque actresses. A writer in the New York World gives the following clever sketch of the more prosperous ballet-girl ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... of the dancers enveloped them in shortening circles, two young and attractive maenads broke from the throng and literally entwined themselves with the troopers. Military dignity, assaulted in burlesque, tried to keep its post. But the bold nymphs were clinging, not to be "shaken"; as the mad whirl of the dancers touched the centre, the troopers and their female captors were borne away in the ricocheting, plunging ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... was talked about, for the puff and humbug attracted people. The Montefiores, like fashionable knicknacks, succeeded that whimsical jade, Rose Peche, who had gone off the preceding autumn, between the third and fourth acts of the burlesque, Ousca Iscar, in order to make a study of love in company of a young fellow of seventeen, who had just entered the university. The novelty and difficulty of their performance, revived and agitated the curiosity of the public, for there seemed to be an implied threat ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... representatives of an unpleasant type—the petty professional or suddenly promoted clerk, who, lacking equally the operative's sturdiness and the polish of those born in a higher station, apes the latter, and, sacrificing everything for appearance, becomes a poor burlesque on humanity. Even here, on the lone, wide prairie, they could not shake off the small pretense of superiority. When supper was finished—and Coombs' suppers were the worst I ever ate in Canada—the working contingent adjourned after washing dishes to the ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... for wider fields. Then he acted the rollicking Irishman to perfection; the real live Yankee, with his genuine mannerisms and dialect, with proper spirit and without ridiculous exaggeration, and the Negro, so open to burlesque. The special charm of his acting in those characters was his artistic execution. He never stooped to vulgarities, his humor was quaint and spontaneous, and the entire absence of apparent effort in his performance gave his audience a most favorable impression of power ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... Brouillet's "Among the Dunes" (272), which deserves better than to be hung in a corner. One who has seen the Futurist pictures in the Annex should not overlook here Albert Guillaume's "Le Boniment" (370), a rich burlesque ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... characteristic of that camp—and, indeed, of others in California—that nobody, not even the ingenious theorists themselves, believed their story, and that no one took the slightest pains to verify or disprove it. Happily, Uncle Billy never knew it, and moved all unconsciously in this atmosphere of burlesque suspicion. And then a singular change took place in the attitude of the camp towards him and the disrupted partnership. Hitherto, for no reason whatever, all had agreed to put the blame upon Billy—possibly ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... this, they become friends to one another. It is obvious that this suggests something quite different from the current view of Socrates as a talker at street corners, something much more like a regular school, and that, so far as it goes, it explains the burlesque ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... noticing the bulk of mediaeval Latin literature. Excepted divisions. Comic Latin literature. Examples of its verbal influence. The value of burlesque. Hymns. The Dies Irae. The rhythm of Bernard. Literary perfection of the Hymns. Scholastic Philosophy. Its influence on phrase and method. The ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... wait for charity, murmured a modulated appeal; if you heard shouts or yells afar off they died upon your ear in a strain of melody at the moment when they were lifted highest. I am aware of seeming to burlesque the operatic fact which every one must have noticed in Naples; and I will not say that the neglected or affronted babe, or the trodden dog, is as tuneful as the midnight cat there, but only that they approach it in the prevailing ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... money, or taxes, or any thing else when yer honor is near? Will yer enter me tent and partake of me hospitalities?" demanded Pat, with a serious face, and a show of politeness that was refreshing, knowing as I did that it was intended as burlesque. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... notice the existence of two factions, which, for near two centuries, divided and agitated the whole population of Holland and Zealand. One bore the title of Hoeks (fishing-hooks); the other was called Kaabel-jauws (cod-fish). The origin of these burlesque denominations was a dispute between two parties at a feast, as to whether the cod-fish took the hook or the hook the cod-fish? This apparently frivolous dispute was made the pretext for a serious quarrel; and the partisans of the nobles and those of the towns ranged themselves ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... and a shake of the head, he conveyed more than, the greatest speaker could have done by talking in an hour." He played as usual on the 17th of February, 1673; the curtain had risen exactly at four o'clock; Moliere could hardly stand, and he had a fit during the burlesque ceremony (at the end of the play) whilst pronouncing the word Juro. He was icy-cold when he went back to Baron's box, who was waiting for him, who saw him home to Rue Richelieu, and who at the same time sent for his wife and two sisters of charity. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of the rare shade and the right touch, in the interpreter. Miriam had gobbled them up, and she gave them forth in the same way as the first, with close, rude, audacious mimicry. There was a moment for Sherringham when it might have been feared their hostess would see in the performance a designed burlesque of her manner, her airs and graces, her celebrated simpers and grimaces, so extravagant did it all cause these refinements to appear. When it was over the old woman said, "Should you like now to hear how you do?" and, without waiting for an answer, phrased and trilled ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... crediderium, cujus autorem Senecam ipsum tradidisse haud dubitarim:" and the great professor Burman hath styled Tom Thumb "Heroum omnium tragicorum facile principem:" nay, though it hath, among other languages, been translated into Dutch, and celebrated with great applause at Amsterdam (where burlesque never came) by the title of Mynheer Vander Thumb, the burgomasters receiving it with that reverent and silent attention which becometh an audience at a deep tragedy. Notwithstanding all this, there have not been wanting some who have represented these scenes in a ludicrous light; ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... hardly necessary to quote more examples. They are not unknown to the historian, but because they are in rhyme they have been hastily assumed to be spurious or even burlesque.[142] But the evidence of a rhyming formula is the opposite to this. It is evidence of their genuineness, and if some of the words appear to be nonsensical it is due to the fact that the sense of the old formula has been misunderstood, and ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... N. ridiculousness &c. adj.; comicality, oddity &c. adj.; extravagance, drollery. farce, comedy; burlesque &c. (ridicule) 856; buffoonery &c. (fun) 840; frippery; doggerel verses; absurdity &c. 497; bombast &c. (unmeaning) 517; anticlimax, bathos; eccentricity, monstrosity &c. (unconformity) 83; laughingstock &c. 857. V. be ridiculous &c. adj.; pass from the sublime to ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... poet, whose satires and burlesques kept Paris in a ripple of merriment, and to whom the child's poverty and friendless position made as powerful an appeal as her budding beauty and her modesty. It was a very tender heart that beat in the pain-racked, paralysed body of the "father of French burlesque"; and within a few days of first setting eyes on his "little Indian girl," as he called her, he asked her to marry him. "It is a sorry offer to make you, my dear child," he said, "but it is either this or a convent." And, to escape the convent, Francoise ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... grated against our sensibilities; it seemed to us that he who first invented this parody [Footnote: Parody: a burlesque or mimicking of something, usually written.] upon one of the most touching incidents in nature must have been a man without a heart. A somewhat burlesque circumstance occurred one day to modify the indignation with ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... be known in the neighbourhood as a maker of rhymes. The first of my poetic offspring that saw the light, was a burlesque lamentation on a quarrel between two reverend Calvinists, both of them dramatis personae in "Holy Fair." I had a notion myself that the piece had some merit; but, to prevent the worst, I gave a ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... productions is in literature what the "Yankee Notions" and the "Nick-Nax" caricatures of John Bull are in art, and seeing that the other is not in the least a parody of the Emersonian poetry it is supposed to burlesque, and is otherwise nothing at all, we cannot help crying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... out of the room now, a few in too much haste to thank the givers of the feast, the others bowing and shaking hands in mock burlesque of their chief. Stango had thrown down his keys ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... brace quite bade oppose deceive force scribe burlesque embrace machine crease measure canine emerge endorse ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... recount them at length to Christophe; for hours she would try to recollect some detail that she had forgotten; she never spared him one; absurdities piled one on the other, strange marriages, deaths, dressmakers' prices, burlesque, and sometimes, obscene things. He had to listen to her and give her his advice. Often she would be for a whole day under the obsession of her inept fancies. She would find life ill-ordered, she would see ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... treats Lady Morgan (then only Sydney Owenson) and "Rosa Matilda" even more roughly and asks (as has been asked about a hundred years later and was asked about a hundred years before), "Is it not amazing that the [two] most licentious writers of romance are women?" And it starts with a burlesque account of a certain Margaret Marsham who exclaims, "What then? to add to my earthly miseries am I to be called Peggy? My name is Margaritta!" "I am sure that if I am called Peggy again I shall go into a fit." But this promise of something to complete the trio with Northanger ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... word my criticism of Mr. O'DONOVAN'S method. Everyone admits the large grain of truth in his charges; the trouble is that he has too often allowed an honest indignation to carry him past his mark into the regions of burlesque, and in particular to confuse character with caricature. But as a topical squib, briskly written, How They Did It will provide plenty of angry amusement, with enough suggestion of the roman a clef to keep the curious happy in fitting originals to its many portraits. I should perhaps ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 14, 1920 • Various
... had pitched my verses in so high a key that no one could mistake their burlesque intention. What was my confusion, however, to have one of the company remark when I finished, "Extremely pretty; but a mutch, you know, is ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... basis for a burlesque or Christmas pantomime, in which the Good Fairy warns the tenant to remove his crops lest the Demon Landlord should seize upon them—the tenant being of course transmuted into Harlequin and the landlord into Clown—this would be funny enough; ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... story was at first received in this community—and which found utterance in a burlesque article in an obscure country journal, the Stars and Stripes, of Auburn—has finally been dispelled, and we find ourselves forced to admit that we stand even now in the presence of the most alarming fate. Too much credit cannot be awarded to our worthy coroner for the promptitude of his ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... animals, and especially frogs, were created, shaped, and educated to do the grotesque, that men might study them, laugh, and grow fat. It was a droll moment with Nature, when she entertained herself and prepared entertainment for us by devising the frog, that burlesque of bird, beast, and man, and taught him how to move and how to speak and sing. Iglesias and I did not disdain batrachian studies, and set no limit to our merriment at their quaint, solemn, half-human ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... occasion. The box tickets were 9s., the upper boxes, 8s., the pit, 6s., and the gallery, 2s.; and the proceeds realised no less a sum than 610 pounds! The performances were the "Poor Gentleman," "A Concert," by musical amateurs, and the burlesque of "Bombastes Furioso." The characters were personated for the most part in each of the pieces by amateurs, amongst whom were several of the leading gentlemen of the town, who spared no pains, study, nor cost ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... the same reason. The first of these "Tales" is told by the poet himself, after a stop has been unceremoniously put upon his recital of the "Ballad of Sir Thopas" by the Host. The ballad itself is a fragment of straightforward burlesque, which shows that in both the manner and the metre (Dunbar's burlesque ballad of "Sir Thomas Norray" is in the same stanza) of ancient romances, literary criticism could even in Chaucer's days find its opportunities for satire, though it is going rather far to ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... One way or the other. Either go back to the old life or start a new one. What we are living now is a horrible burlesque." ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... his side felt as if he were witnessing a burlesque of himself as he listened to the pitiless and lurid description of torment which Elder Wheat poured forth,—the same figures and threats he had used a hundred times. He stirred uneasily in his seat, while the audience paid so little attention that the perspiring little orator finally ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... Honey in a tone of burlesque warning. "There must be five mirrors. He knows nothing of women who thinks that one mirror may be divided among five girls. I hope Lulu ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... the animals, and from the corner of his eye he keeps a sharp watch upon his tiny auditor to see how the story affects him. No figure more living, original, and lovable than Uncle Remus appears in southern fiction. In him Harris has created, not a burlesque or a sentimental impossibility, but an imperishable type, the type of the true ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... its source in a rather bitter feeling of the futility of life;[129] and this is accompanied by fits of weariness which are not altogether healthy, followed by capricious moods and nervous gaiety, and a freakish liking for burlesque and mimicry. It is his eager, restless spirit that makes him rush about the world writing Breton and Auvergnian rhapsodies, Persian songs, Algerian suites, Portuguese barcarolles, Danish, Russian, or Arabian caprices, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... on, man," said the King, who never doubted that this was the introduction to something burlesque or witty, not conceiving that the charge ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... This Vicars was a man of as great interest and authority in the late Reformation as Pryn or Withers, and as able a poet. He translated Virgil's AEneids into as horrible Travesty, in earnest, as the French Scaroon did in burlesque, and was only outdone in his way by ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... with the performance of the curious burlesque which James had invented. The day after George Brooke was beheaded, the King drew up a warrant to the Sheriff of Hampshire for stay of all the other executions. With this document in his bosom, he signed death-warrants for Markham, Gray, and Cobham to ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... Court. When it was new, it was surrounded by "brown-stone fronts," and boys and girls who to-day are among the city's most influential citizens learned their A-B-C's within its walls. Now, the office-buildings and printing-houses and cheap hotels and burlesque shows that mark the noisy, grimy district south of the "loop" crowd in upon it; and only an occasional shabby brown-stone front survives in the neighborhood as a tenement house. But in the Jones School, the process of making influential ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... the antiquary, and the dilettanti,—painters, sculptors, engravers, all brought news to the 'Strawberry Gazette;' and incense, sometimes wrung from aching hearts, to the fastidious wit who professed to be a judge of all material and immaterial things—from a burlesque to an Essay on history or Philosophy—from the construction of Mrs. Chenevix's last new toy to the mechanism of a clock made in the sixteenth century, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... can be no chance for mistake even to the veriest embryonic reader of Horace, if he will but remember that, while some of these transcriptions are indeed very faithful reproductions or adaptations of the original, others again are to be accepted as the very riot of burlesque verse-making. ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... it that admires, and from the heart is attached to national representative assemblies, but must turn with horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque and abominable perversion of that sacred institute? Lovers of monarchy, lovers of republics, must alike abhor it. The members of your Assembly must themselves groan under the tyranny of which they have all the shame, none of the direction, and little of the profit. I am sure many of the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... d'Argent for the Opera. The adaptation of the work for the large stage at the Opera necessitated important modifications. The whole of the dialogue had to be set to music and the authors went to work on it. Perrin gave us Madame Carvalho for Helene and Faure for Spiridion, but he wanted to burlesque the part for the tenor and give it to Mlle. Wertheimber. He wanted to engage her and had no other part for her. This was impossible. After several discussions Perrin yielded to the obstinate refusals of the authors, but I saw clearly from ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... her hand toward his lips, and Kitty had not the power to resist him. She felt strangely theatrical, a character in a play; for American men, except in playful burlesque, never kissed their women's hands. The moment he released the hand the old wave of hysteria rolled over her. She must fly. The desire to weep, little fool that she was! was breaking through her defences. Loneliness. ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... caught her partner making a burlesque face of suffering over her shoulder, and, turning her head quickly, saw for whose benefit he had constructed it. Eugene Bantry, flying expertly by with Mamie, was bestowing upon Mr. Flitcroft a condescendingly commiserative wink. The next instant she tripped in her train and fell to the ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... large hog trough, that lay along the wall and daily received the refuse of the various meals. The bird, furious with pain, was burying its beak into the leg of the soldier, while he, with the butt end of his musket aloft, and the bayonet depressed, offered the most burlesque representation of St. George preparing to give his ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... the Council of Nice, in the fourth century, Mr. Smith indulges his usual felicitous vein of humour, in a burlesque which he puts into the mouth of a slave of the Bishop of Ethiopia,—"a little, corpulent, bald-headed, merry-eyed man of fifty, whose name was Mark; whose duty it was to take charge of the oil, trim the lamps, and perform ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various
... another; the mendicants, lying everywhere in wait for charity, murmured a modulated appeal; if you heard shouts or yells afar off they died upon your ear in a strain of melody at the moment when they were lifted highest. I am aware of seeming to burlesque the operatic fact which every one must have noticed in Naples; and I will not say that the neglected or affronted babe, or the trodden dog, is as tuneful as the midnight cat there, but only that they approach ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... threw the two unexpectedly together; and an understanding of some kind evidently was come to, for during the season they met secretly at the house of one of Lincoln's friends, Mr. Simeon Francis. It was while these meetings were going on that a burlesque encounter occurred between Lincoln and James Shields, for which Miss Todd was partly responsible, and which no doubt gave just the touch of comedy necessary to relieve their tragedy and restore them to a ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... perhaps to be connected what seems to have been one of Fielding's earliest literary efforts. This is a modernisation in burlesque octosyllabic verse of part of Juvenal's sixth satire. In the "Preface" to the later published Miscellanies, it is said to have been "originally sketched out before he was Twenty," and to have constituted "all ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... to be up to that really good farcical standard. The good PINERO has nodded over this. The Cabinet Minister is an excellent title thrown away. The Cabinet Minister himself, Mr. ARTHUR CECIL, in his official costume, playing the flute, is as burlesque as the General in full uniform, in Mr. GILBERT'S "Wedding March," sitting with his feet in hot-water. The married boy and girl, with their doll baby and irritatingly unreal quarrels, reminded me of the boy-and-girl lovers in Brantingham Hall. The mother of The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, May 3, 1890. • Various
... beggars; much of this probably was promoted and strengthened by the dictionary contained in a pamphlet, entitled, "The Life and Adventures of Bamfylde Moore Carew." It consists for the most part of English words trumped up apparently not so much for the purpose of concealment as a burlesque. Even if used by this people at all, the introduction of this cant and slang as the genuine language of the community of Gipsies is a gross imposition on ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... had an awful time with ourselves cracking rare quips. Me the center of an admiring throng. They all knew I was an actress and they asked me to act. You know the extent of my acting, a champagne dance and a burlesque on the 'Merry Widow' waltz, and my lines are limited to, 'Oh! girls, here comes the prince, now, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah.' Therefore I ducked the request to exhibit my art. I was going home after the show—I mean entertainment—and Waldo, the fellow I went with before I got sense enough to blow ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey
... as no woman would drop a wedding-ring), and follow him whither he listed all the world over. Amiable giggling Forey girls called Clare, The Betrothed. Dark man, or fair? was mooted. Adrian threw off the first strophe of Clare's fortune in burlesque rhymes, with an insinuating gipsy twang. Her aunt Forey warned her to have her dresses in readiness. Her grandpapa Forey pretended to grumble at bridal presents being ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Such leadership his record hardly augered. It was in the very lowest forms of vaudeville, in what is the analogue abroad of our negro minstrelsy, that Mr. Fay had his stage experience, a stage experience that had made him well enough known in burlesque roles to make it difficult for him to assume with success serious roles in the early years of the National Dramatic Company. Because of this old association, Dublin audiences insisted in 1902 in seeing humor in his Peter Gillane in "Cathleen ni Houlihan." For ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... was the thing most difficult to be done. But Bonaparte undertook the task; and, as if by the aid of a magic rod, the ancient order of things was restored in the twinkling of an eye. The distinctions of rank—orders—titles, the noblesse—decorations—all the baubles of vanity—in short, all the burlesque tattooing which the vulgar regard as an indispensable attribute of royalty, reappeared in an instant. The question no longer regarded the form of government, but the individual who should be placed at its head. By restoring the ancient order of things, the Republicans had ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... the hardest problems of a woman's life is to realise just when she must acknowlege that her youthful prime is past. Some women never seem able to solve it. They either hang on to the burlesque semblance of twenty-five, or else go all to pieces, and take unto themselves "views" as violent as they are sour. When they cannot command the uncritical admiration of the gaping crowd, they descend from their thrones to shy brickbats at everyone who doesn't look at them twice. A ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... period turned to authorship, and that his chief quarrel arose from the petty and pragmatical demand of Hamilton, that he should abandon it altogether. Burke soon had ample revenge, if it was to be found in the obscurity into which Hamilton rapidly fell, and the burlesque which alone revived his name from its obscurity. The contrast between the two must have been a lesson to the vanity of the one, as pungent as was its triumph. If ever the fate of Tantalus was realized to man, it was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... this gloomy writer, who is so mightily scandalised at a gay epilogue after a serious play, speaking of the fate of those unhappy wretches who are condemned to suffer an ignominious death by the justice of our laws, endeavours to make the reader merry on so improper an occasion by those poor burlesque expressions of tragical dramas and monthly performances.—I am, Sir, with great respect, your ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... foreigners to American shores. A greater ethnic contrast could scarcely be imagined than that which was now afforded by these two races, the phlegmatic, plodding German and the vibrant Irish, a contrast in American life as a whole which was soon represented in miniature on the vaudeville stage by popular burlesque representations of both types. The one was the opposite of the other in temperament, in habits, in personal ambitions. The German sought the land, was content to be let alone, had no desire to command ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... the Edgware "folly" reached L250,000. In Gardening he follows the latest whim for landscape. Here is his burlesque of the principles of Bridgeman ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... persifleur, you must never practise the art upon himself. M. Rossignol Perigord Pantoufle would have been an incomparable subject for the exercise, for he was eccentricity from top to toe. But the state of my spirits prevented my taking any share in the burlesque which too frequently befell this worthy person; and he attached himself to me as a sort of refuge from the sly, but stinging, persecution of his fellow-officers. When the hen-wife plucks the goose's bosom it makes her nestle more closely to her goslings. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... Critic," the scene a burlesque rehearsal of an old-time melodrama. Our opportunities were great, and Heaven knows we missed none of them. New York audiences are quick, and in less than three minutes they knew the actors had taken the bit between their teeth and were off on a mad race of fun. Everything seemed to "go." ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... comic interlude. Years ago a musical humorist in Vienna caused much amusement by writing the words of a quarrel of Jewish pedlers under the voices of the fugue in Mozart's overture to "The Magic Flute." Three hundred years ago Orazio Vecchi composed a burlesque madrigal in the severe style of that day, in which he tried to depict the babel of sounds in a synagogue. Obviously the musical Jew is supposed to be allied to the stage Jew and to be fit food for the humorist. Strauss's music gives a new reading to Wilde; it ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of unknown origin, probably coined in burlesque imitation of scholastic Latin, as "hocus-pocus" or "panjandrum"), originally a term meaning whim, fancy or ridiculous idea; later applied to a pun or play upon words, and thus, in its usual sense, to a particular form of riddle in which the answer depends ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... together dragged Royce away, letting Blenham lie there. Both men were naked to their waists, their shirts and undershirts in rags and strips hanging grotesquely about their hips; Royce looked like some hideously painted burlesque of a ballet-dancer in a comic skirt. Only there was nothing of burlesque or comedy ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... his feelings had become so enlisted in the conflict for the old man's removal, that he had grown to be a bitter partisan, and the recollection of all he had suffered, and of all Columbus had endured during his sickness, reconciled Jack to the appearance of crowing over a fallen foe, which this burlesque serenade would have. Nevertheless, his conscience was not clear on the point, and he concluded to submit the matter to his mother, when she should come ...
— The Hoosier School-boy • Edward Eggleston
... apprentices, who were riotously endeavouring to prevent a Highland shepherd from driving his flock past them, by shaking their aprons at the affrighted animals; and a party equally bent on amusement inside were joining with burlesque vehemence in a song which one of the men, justly proud of his musical talents, had just struck up. Suddenly the song ceased, and with wild uproar a bevy of some eight or ten workmen burst out into the green in full pursuit of a squat little fellow, who had, they said, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... in his third objection against my third Song, where he says— I, (that is in my own person) make a jest of the Fall, rail at Adam and Eve; and then Oliver's Porter, raving again, says, I burlesque the Conduct of God Almighty; [Footnote: Ibid.] now, pray judge whether it ought to be Constru'd so or no. This Song is suppos'd to be made and sung by Gines de Passamonte, a most notorious Atheistical Villain, who, as he is going Chain'd to the Galleys, is redeem'd ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... framed as to give an idea of military exercise and activity, threw into their performance steps so expressive and majestic, as not only to defend their motions and gestures from any idea of levity and burlesque, which it is so natural for the moderns to associate with that of dancing, but even to inspire the beholders with respect and a religious awe. The priests chosen for this function, were always persons of the noblest aspect, suitable to the dignity of the sacerdotal ministry. And so little needs ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... the act of composition has been called the keenest of intellectual pleasures; and this was the poet's almost sole reward in Canada a generation ago, when nothing seemed to catch the popular ear but burlesque, or trivial verse. In strange contrast this with a remoter age! In old Upper Canada, in its primitive days, there was no lack of educated men and women, of cultivated pioneers who appreciated art and good literature in all its forms. Even the average immigrant brought his favourite books with ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... sometimes played as a burlesque, for which it is well adapted. The parallel suggested between the Caliph and a robber may remind the reader of the interview between Alexander the Great and the Robber, in "Evenings at Home." One cannot help sympathising ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... The former, that of earnest and submissive contemplation, declares itself in prayers, hymns, and "the dim religious light" of cathedrals. The second mood, that of playful and erratic fancy, is conspicuous in the buffoonery of Miracle Plays, in Marchen, these burlesque popular tales about our Lord and the Apostles, and in the hideous and grotesque sculptures on sacred edifices. The two moods are present, and in conflict, through the whole religious history of the human race. They stand as near each other, and as far apart, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... to develop into a really remarkable work, and to place Irving's name in a secure place among living humorists. The "Knickerbocker History of New York" really laid the foundation of his fame. The first plan was for a mere burlesque of an absurd book just published, a Dr. Samuel Mitchill's "Picture of New York." Mitchill began with the aborigines: the Irvings began with the creation of the world. Fortunately Peter was soon called away to Europe, and Irving ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... hard to believe, almost impossible to believe, that 'Titus Andronicus' could have been written by Shakespeare, the external testimony to the authorship, notwithstanding. Even if he had written it as a burlesque of such a play as Marlow's 'Jew of Malta', he could not have avoided some revelation of that sense of moral proportion which is omnipresent in his Plays. But I can find no Shakespeare in 'Titus Andronicus'. Are we not certain ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... contrary; but I must confess it appears to me to be introduced as something loathsome or repulsive, and (on the poet's part) to cap the absurdity of the preceding feat. The use made by other writers of a passage is one of the most valuable kinds of comment. In a burlesque some years ago, I recollect a passage was brought to a climax with the very words, "Wilt eat a crocodile?" The immediate and natural response was—not "the thing's impossible!" but—"you nasty beast!" What a descent then from the drinking up of a river to a merely disagreeable repast. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... chance have dreamed of that stately honor. His ambitions did not lie in the direction of mental achievement. It is true that now and then, on Friday at school, he read a composition, one of which—a personal burlesque on certain older boys—came near resulting in bodily damage. But any literary ambition he may have had in those days was a fleeting thing. His permanent dream was to be a pirate, or a pilot, or a bandit, or a trapper-scout; something gorgeous and active, where his word—his nod, even—constituted ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... are commonly understood. The whole world of the fantastic, all things top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of man, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns of Robert Browning. But in truth a part, and a very large part, of the sanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes all this instinct of caricature. Nature may present itself ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... of the situation. The lady was of mature age—her own mistress, Wardle and his attorney could do nothing to stop the business. He certainly might have held out for four or five hundred pounds. Perker's diplomacy was wretched, and his plea about the age of the old lady mere burlesque. "You are right, my dear sir—she is rather old. The founder of the family came into Kent when Julius Caesar invaded Britain; only one member of it since who hasn't lived to eighty-five, and he was beheaded by one of the ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... our sketch closely studied the theatre and courted the society of actors and actresses. It was in this way that he gained that correct and valuable knowledge of the texts and characters of the drama, which enabled him in after years to burlesque them so successfully. The humorous writings of Seba Smith were his models, and the oddities of "John Phoenix" ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... a cat bound at the end of a staff. He was followed by nine or ten couple of hounds, who hunted the fox and the cat to the glowing horns, and killed them beneath the fire. After dinner, the Constable Marshal called a burlesque Court, and began the Revels, with the help of the Lord of Misrule. At seven o'clock in the morning of St. John's Day, December the 27th (which was a Saturday in 1561) the Lord of Misrule was afoot with power to summon men to breakfast with him when service had closed in the church. ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... remember ye got them from your great-grandmother Jeanie Napier, who was so much admired by Sir Walter Scott at her first ball. And talking of dancing ...." and she had lifted up her skirts and set her feet waggishly twinkling in a burlesque dance, which she followed up with a travesty of an opera, a form of art she had met with in her youth and about which, since she was the kind of woman who could have written songs and ballads if she had lived in the age when wood fires ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... incontestably a virgin was of the highest interest. It was reserved for a countryman of Joan of Arc's (Du Bellay) to invent a legend to disprove the fact; and to the everlasting shame of French literature, Voltaire adopted the lying calumny in his licentious burlesque-heroic poem, ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... die than to play the living burlesque of himself. Better to die than to face the shame of failure, the shame of reproach and ridicule; the epitaph of his business a few lines in the small type of "Business Troubles." Better to kill himself than risk the danger of going mad and killing perhaps his own ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... hand. The countenance has neither the fire, force, nor truth, which Denon's terra-cotta head of the poet seems to display. The extremities are meagre and offensive. In short, the whole, as it appears to me, has an air approaching the burlesque. Opposite to this statue are the colossal busts of LA-GRANGE and MALESHERBES; while those of PEIRESC and FRANKLIN are nearly of the size of nature. They are all in white marble. That of ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... was a success—I could see that it would be at the moment Mr. Bernard Shaw so forgot himself as to be interested in something he had not himself written. The Press was charmed with the play and went so far as to say, with a gross burlesque of Chesterton, that it was 'real phantasy and had soul.' Chesterton by his one produced play had earned the right to call himself a dramatic author, who could make the public shiver and think at the same ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... a mind you must have, Susanna, to pick wrong out of that! All about love and lovers! So are books and songs and plays at the theatre. I suppose you didn't understand that it was intended as a burlesque on fortune-telling?" ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... constant attention to points of etiquette cannot be too earnestly emphasized. The long lecture of instruction to the little Ruggles', preparatory to their visit to the Birds, is a comical—if burlesque—illustration of the emergency that sometimes faces some people, that of suddenly preparing to "behave themselves" on a great occasion. Although the little Ruggles' were fired with ambition to do themselves credit, their crude preparation was not equal to the ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... crowded as the clubs were during the day, I never saw the minister rise with so few of his customary troops behind him. But the Opposition bench was crowded to repletion; and their leader sat looking round with good-humoured astonishment, and sometimes with equally good-humoured burlesque, on the sudden increase of his recruits. The motion was in answer to a royal message on continental subsidies. Nothing could have been more difficult than the topic at that juncture. But I never listened to Pitt with more genuine admiration. Fox, in his declamatory ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... previous portion of this work, I attempted to define the Italian Romantic Epic, and traced the tale of Orlando from Pulci through Boiardo and Ariosto to the burlesque of Folengo. There is an element of humor more or less predominant in the Morgante Maggiore, the Orlando Innamorato, and the Orlando Furioso. This element might almost be regarded as inseparable from the species. Yet two circumstances contributed to alter ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the ground with indignation; but, suddenly recovering his calmness, he turned to me with his grave smile. "I am ashamed, Marston, of thus betraying a temper which time ought to have cooled. But, after all, what is public life but a burlesque; a thing of ludicrous disappointment; a tragedy, with a farce always at hand to relieve the tedium and the tinsel; the fall of kingdoms made laughable by the copper lace of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... certain that he had no cigarettes nor tobacco in any other form upon his person, and no matches. The door was locked behind him and double and triple locked—to judge by the sound—by a planton, usually the Black Holster, who on such occasions produced a ring of enormous keys suggestive of a burlesque jailer. Within the stone walls of his dungeon (into which a beam of light no bigger than a ten-cent piece, and in some cases no light at all, penetrated) the culprit could shout and scream his or her heart out if he or she liked, without serious ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... it must work itself out in its own way. Yet, it would be a bitter irony if, after he had travelled a continent to avoid this deed, he should be forced to kill Spurling in the end—Spurling, who had come to him of his own accord. Still more burlesque would it be if, after Spurling was at rest, he should be ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... old Izaak Walton, who is put forward as a substitute for argument on this question, and whose sole merits consisted in his having a taste for nature and his being a respectable citizen, the trumping him up into an authority and a kind of saint is a burlesque. He was a writer of conventionalities; who, having comfortably feathered his nest, as he thought, both in this world and in the world to come, concluded he had nothing more to do than to amuse himself by putting worms on a hook, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... of Rosamund, her innocent ignorance especially, is not very readily intelligible, not quite persuasive, and there is almost a touch of the burlesque in her unexpected appearance as a monk. To weave that old and famous story of love into the terribly complex political intrigue was a task almost too great. The character of Eleanor is perhaps more successfully drawn in the Prologue than in the scene where she offers the ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... surprised, there seemed, however, to be no reason for fearing an outbreak. Suddenly, at a whisper from Steptoe, he and Whiskey Dick both threw up their hands, and stood still on the trail a few yards from them in a burlesque of the usual recognized attitude of helplessness, while a hoarse ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... discussing the tramcars or the quinquennial assessment exactly as if Gilbert and Sullivan had never been born. It appeared that Milly had a future, that she was the best Patience yet seen in the district amateur or professional, that any burlesque manager would jump at her, that in five years, if she liked, she might be getting a hundred a week, and that Dolly Chose, the idol of the Tivoli and the Pavilion, had not half her style. It also appeared that Milly ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... don't know, and I haven't as yet come across the inevitable big advertisement; but what I have ascertained is, that Mr. EDWARD SOLOMON, who is now wearing the diamond scarf-pin presented to him by the Guards whom he led on to victory in their recent burlesque engagement, has composed a polka or waltz which bears the name of "Zingit," and which might bear on the wrapper, "If you can't play it, or dance it, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... this ceremony the writer has witnessed more of burlesque than on this occasion. Sometimes the performers have worn immense false mustaches, exaggerated imitations of spectacles and of other belongings of their white neighbors. Sometimes the dance has assumed a character which will not be described in this place (paragraph 146). It is called ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... one play; to see the Hypocrite, and Tom Taylor's burlesque {254a} at the Strand Theatre. It was dreadfully cold in the pit: and I thought dull. Farren almost unintelligible: Mrs. Glover good in a disagreeable part. {254b} Diogenes has very good Aristophanic hits in it, as perhaps you know: but its action ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... reverence for its sanction, two or three testimonies given in a court of justice usually cured them. The indifferent, business-like manner in which the oaths are put, the sing-song tone of voice, the rapid utterance of the words, give to this solemn act an appearance of excellent burlesque, which ultimately renders the whole proceedings remarkable for the absence of truth and reality; but, at the same time, gives them unquestionable merit as a dramatic representation, abounding with fiction, well ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... being taken with arms in our hands against the authority of the true and proper chief of the island. It is impossible to describe the absurd language used, and the ceremonies gone through. It would have been a complete burlesque had not the matter been somewhat too serious. As it was, when one of the counsellors kicked another for interrupting him, and the judge threw a calabash at their heads to call them to order, I could not help bursting into a fit of laughter, which was soon quelled when one of my ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... songs. Nor does it seem on the surface to connect him with Troy, as do the other two songs of Demodocus. (3) It gives an unworthy view of the Gods, degrading them far below Homer's general level, reducing them to ordinary burlesque figures which violate all decency, not to speak of morality. (4) Philologists have picked out certain words and expressions peculiar to this passage, which, not being employed by Homer elsewhere, tend to indicate some ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... whole, therefore, you will see that the affair was an unprecedented success; and if some did go away puzzled as to whether it was a burlesque or a tragedy, nobody was to blame for their obtuseness. There certainly are scenes in this admirable comedy not provocative of laughter; but such was the bad taste of Madam O'Connor that she joined in with the ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... heard so much, of this horrid society I did not feel positive it was certain that its alleged blood rites were fictitious. Of one thing I am sure—that the dreadful picture is no joke, and was not meant for a burlesque, though it might possibly be expected to perform the office of a scarecrow. It cannot be doubted that there are oath-bound secret societies that are regarded by the Spaniards as fanatical, superstitious, murderous and ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... served the champagne, he arose, glass in hand, and delivered a burlesque toast, finding some pleasant word for all his guests. What frank gayety! what a hearty laugh went around the table! The three young ladies giggled themselves as red as peonies. A sort of joyous chuckle escaped from the Colonel's drooping moustache. Madame Roger's smile ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... long letter without a full stop, which is as full of substance as one of his essays. His technique is so incredibly fine, he is such a Paganini of prose, that he can invent and reverse an idea of pyramidal wit, as in this burlesque of a singer: 'The shake, which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite through the composition; so that the time, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Indians, the native and lawful proprietors of the soil—we shall acknowledge, if we possess the smallest degree of candor, that the appellation of barbarian does not belong to them alone. While we continue those practices the term christian will only be a burlesque expression, signifying no more than that it ironically denominates the rudest sect of barbarians that ever disgraced the hand of their Creator. We have the precepts of the gospel for the government of our moral deportment, in violation of which, those outrageous ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... with opera-bouffe, To-morrow breakfasts with burlesque, And tights and tinsel, face to face, Encounters, pink and picturesque. Nor frown, if, in next week's review, His gropings after the artistic Should crop out into verse, and take The form of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... such a droll mock earnest, and shook her head with such a burlesque of grandmotherly solicitude, that Annie laughed in spite of herself. ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... maiden, Brunette, statuesque, The reverse of grotesque, Her pa was a bagman from Aden, Her mother she played in burlesque. ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... up and are not fed,'" quoted the rector in a burlesque despair. "Why, what we believe, boy,—what we believe! The rest of my flock know better, Mr. Ward, ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... what ho for a merry round of pleasure,' says I. 'Here's one of Hall Caine's shows, and a stock-yard company in "Hamlet," and skating at the Hollowhorn Rink, and Sarah Bernhardt, and the Shapely Syrens Burlesque Company. I should think, now, ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... McChesney, hatted and veiled by 5:45, saw the curtains of the berth opposite rent asunder to disclose the rumpled, shapeless figure of Miss Blanche LeHaye. The queen of burlesque bore in her arms a conglomerate mass of shoes, corset, purple skirt, bag and green-plumed hat. She paused to stare at Emma McChesney's ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... pieces include numerous burlesques and pantomimes, the libretti of Savonarola (Hamburg, 1884) and of The Canterbury Pilgrims (Drury Lane, 1884) for the music of Dr (afterwards Sir) C. V. Stanford. The Happy Land (Court Theatre, 1873), a political burlesque of W. S. Gilbert's Wicked World, was written in collaboration with F. L. Tomline. For the last ten years of his life he was on the regular staff of Punch. His health was seriously affected in 1889 by the death ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the strange caprice with which the great Being we call Nature goes to work, or, more correctly, by the contrast between the human point of view and Nature's mode of operations. To us, the elephant's trunk was burlesque, its walk risibly clumsy; the eagle and the kite seemed to us, as they sat, to have a severe appearance and a haughty glance; the apes, picking lice from one another and eating the vermin, were, to our eyes, contemptible and ridiculous at the same time; but Nature took everything equally ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... arrived from all over the State, and from every class of society. Eichenstine Bros. sent fifty dollars, and six ragged newsboys came to present thirty cents. A lavender note, with huge monogram and written in white ink, stated that some of the girls of the "Gay Burlesque Troupe" sent a few dimes to the "kid's" mother. The few dimes amounted to fifteen dollars. Mrs. Van Larkin's coachman had to wait with her note while Lucy answered the questions of a lame old negro ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... at Nazareth: you know an old painter would have made no bones if he wanted it for his background." I cannot say whether Collinson, if put to it, would have pleaded the like arbitrary and almost burlesque excuse: at any rate he made the blunder, and in a much more detailed shape than in Rossetti's lyric. "The Child Jesus" is, I think, the poem of any importance ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... closely studied the theatre and courted the society of actors and actresses. It was in this way that he gained that correct and valuable knowledge of the texts and characters of the drama, which enabled him in after years to burlesque them so successfully. The humorous writings of Seba Smith were his models, and the oddities of "John Phoenix" ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... of the daily papers completed her triumph. There were long notices in praise of the quality of the burlesque, touched with recurrent references to Carrie. The contagious mirth of the thing ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... the Fox. A Burlesque Poem, from the Low-German Original of the Fifteenth Century. Boston: De Vries, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... Baylis), each mounted upon hobby-horses, was most fiercely executed. Nor was the Giant Cormoran (fourteen feet in height), nor the Queen of Beauty, nor the Dragon Queen wanted to complete the chivalry of this burlesque upon ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... Hellmesberger's arrangement of the air "Ombra mai fu" from "Serse," known the world over as Handel's "Largo"—violins in unison, harp arpeggios, and organ harmonies. In nothing artistically distinguished it makes an unexampled appeal to the multitude. Some years ago a burlesque on "Cavalleria rusticana" was staged at a ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... elf, Whose great all is himself, Whose alone ipse dixit is law: What a figure he'll make, How like Momus he'll speak With sneering burlesque, ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... itself whether discipline be not the final cause of the universe, and whether Nature outwardly exists. The frivolous make themselves merry with the ideal theory as if its consequences were burlesque, as if it affected the stability of Nature. It surely does not. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... paper was entitled "Facts, Figures, and Fancies." The best thing in it was a parody on "The Deserted Village," from which an extract will be found in a later chapter. There was also a letter to the Senior Censor of Christ Church, in burlesque of a similar letter in which the Professor of Physics met an offer of the Clarendon Trustees by a detailed enumeration of the requirements in his own department of Natural Science. Mr. Dodgson's letter deals with the imaginary requirements of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... everybody agreed the owner must be masculine, as no woman would drop a wedding-ring), and follow him whither he listed all the world over. Amiable giggling Forey girls called Clare, The Betrothed. Dark man, or fair? was mooted. Adrian threw off the first strophe of Clare's fortune in burlesque rhymes, with an insinuating gipsy twang. Her aunt Forey warned her to have her dresses in readiness. Her grandpapa Forey pretended to grumble at bridal ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Puritans, hell, natural depravity, and the like. The great literatus will be known, among the rest, by his cheerful simplicity, his adherence to natural standards, his limitless faith in God, his reverence, and by the absence in him of doubt, ennui, burlesque, persiflage, or any strain'd and ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Burlesque, that is comic imitation, comprises parody and caricature. The latter is a valuable addition to humorous narrative, as we see in the sketches of Gillray, Cruikshank and others. By itself it is not sufficiently ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... down stage to lower left side of bed, sits facing LAURA.] But I do care. I know how you feel with an old cat for a landlady and living up here on a side street with a lot of cheap burlesque people. Why, the room's cold [LAURA rises, crosses to window.], and there's no hot water, and you're beginning to look shabby. You haven't got a job—chances are you won't have one. What does [Indicating picture on bed with thumb.] ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... that he saw, after watching behind the nets once or twice, that Sedleigh cricket was not the childish burlesque of the game which he had been rash enough to assume that it must be. Numbers do not make good cricket. They only make the presence of good cricketers more likely, by ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... Saracen maiden, Brunette, statuesque, The reverse of grotesque; Her pa was a bagman from Aden, Her mother she played in burlesque. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... female mimics. But there is a difference, which we do not appear to have recognised on that occasion, between good-natured and ill-natured mimicry. Now nothing can be more harmless fun than my Carrie's imitations. She never has the bad taste to mimic a deformity, or to burlesque a misfortune. She certainly said of Mrs. Blomonge (who is known to be the stoutest person in the parish of St. Bride's) that her head floated on her shoulders like a waterlily on a pond; but then the joke was irresistible, and there was ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... the dictionary contained in a pamphlet entitled, "The Life and Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew." It consists for the most part of English words, vamped up apparently not so much for the purpose of concealment, as burlesque. Even if used by this people at all, the introduction of this cant, as the genuine language of the community of Gypsies, is a ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... embryonic reader of Horace, if he will but remember that, while some of these transcriptions are indeed very faithful reproductions or adaptations of the original, others again are to be accepted as the very riot of burlesque verse-making. ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... ever render impossible the rehearsal of another great poet. But a work of art is valuable, and pleasurable in proportion to its rarity; one beautiful book of verses is better than twenty books of beautiful verses. This is an absolute and incontestable truth; a child can burlesque this truth—one verse is better than the whole poem, a word is better than the line, a letter is better than the word, but the truth is not thereby affected. Hugo never had the good fortune to write a bad book, nor even a ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... contemplation, declares itself in prayers, hymns, and "the dim religious light" of cathedrals. The second mood, that of playful and erratic fancy, is conspicuous in the buffoonery of Miracle Plays, in Marchen, these burlesque popular tales about our Lord and the Apostles, and in the hideous and grotesque sculptures on sacred edifices. The two moods are present, and in conflict, through the whole religious history of the human race. They stand as near each other, and as far apart, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... to add. I can say that the Prince, whom I had accused of idleness, is zealous in the department of police, taking upon himself those duties that are most distasteful. I shall be able to relate the burlesque incident of my arrest, and the singular interview with which you honour me at present. For the rest, I have already communicated with my Ambassador at Vienna; and unless you propose to murder me, I shall be at liberty, whether you please or not, ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a very brilliant group was come into view—four bishops in rochets and violet, with large pectoral crosses. These walked very proud and prelatical, looking disdainfully at the people who roared at the burlesque; and behind them, again, four more in gilded mitres. (I do not know what this generation knew of Catholic bishops; for not one in a thousand of them had ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... natural to suppose that this most popular of Middle-Age productions should have originated in the very region which later gave to the world a school of painting that incarnated on canvas the phases of animal life, taking its delight and best inspirations in the burlesque side of human passions. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... downright matter of fact, and the gravest part of a tragedy which is not intended for burlesque. I tell it you for the honour of Ireland. The writer hopes it will be represented:—but what is Hope? nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of Truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... attention to the musical part of the programme, and try to discover in that such evidences of talent and fine attainments as would justify him in sketching the troupe. He was not pleased, of course, with that portion of the performance (a part of which he was compelled to witness) devoted to burlesque. Nevertheless, he found in the vocal and instrumental part much that was in the highest degree gratifying; for during the evening he listened to some of the most pleasing music of the time, sung and played in a manner ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... he keeps stuttering on, "like introducing a crucifix into one of Teniers's burlesque conversation pieces." We see no reason why a crucifix should not be in the room of a good Catholic during a burlesque conversation; and Teniers, if he never have, might have painted one in such a piece without offence, had he chosen to do so; but the question ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... kept their place in the acting repertory for a long time. He was an excellent actor, especially in the role of the fashionable coxcomb. Horace Walpole said that as Bayes in The Rehearsal he made the part what it was intended to be, the burlesque of a great poet, whereas David Garrick ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... and thinking, as he owned afterwards, that the dispute grew too serious, with a skill all his own, suddenly and unexpectedly turned it to burlesque; and taking Sir Philip by the hand at the moment we arose after supper, and were separating ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... with burlesque politeness, withdrawing them from the recesses of his waistcoat and gravely presenting them. Miss Vervain burst into a helpless laugh; then she turned toward her mother with a kind of indignant tenderness, and gently arranged her shawl so that it should not drop off when she rose to leave the ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... a burlesque form, the remnants of a genuine myth. Almost all savage religions have their bird-gods, and it is probable that Aristophanes did not invent, but only used a surviving myth of which there are scarcely any other traces in ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... nominative thee, ordinarily inflect with st or est the preterits or the auxiliaries of the accompanying verbs, as is done in the solemn style. Indeed, to use the solemn style familiarly, would be, to turn it into burlesque; as when Peter Pindar "telleth what he troweth." [213] And let those who think with Murray, that our present version of the Scriptures is the best standard of English grammar,[214] remember that in it they have no warrant ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... authority, to prove the existence of these evil influences, that it requires a pen hardier than any we wield, to attack them without a suitable motive. "Flashy people," says the learned and pious Cotton Mather, Doctor of Divinity and Fellow of the Royal Society, "may burlesque these things; but when hundreds of the most sober people, in a country where they have as much mother wit, certainly, as the rest of mankind, know them to be true, nothing but the absurd and froward spirit of Sadducism can question them." Against this ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... presented the dialogue in "A Psalm of Montreal" in a form "perhaps true, perhaps imaginary, perhaps a little of the one and a little of the other," it would be quite in the manner of the author of The Fair Haven to burlesque the methods of the critics by ignoring the sincerity of the emotions and fixing on the little bit of inaccuracy in the facts. We may suppose him to be saying out loud to the critics: "You think Shakespeare's Sonnets were composed as academic exercises, ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... morality entitled Kortvending ("Change of Fortune"), which is really a collection of monologues to be delivered by students. The anonymous Ludus de Sancto Kanuto[7] (c. 1530) which in spite of its title, is written in Danish, is the earliest Danish national drama. The burlesque drama assigned to Christian Hansen, The Faithless Wife, is the only one of its kind that has survived. But the best of these old dramatic authors was a priest of Viborg, Justesen Ranch (1539-1607), who wrote ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... little supper after they got home, and Polly gave them a burlesque opera that convulsed her hearers, for her spirits rose again and she was determined to get the last drop of fun before she went back to her ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... to succeed for a few years. One of the earliest productions of this kind, which distinguished him as a painter, is supposed to have been a representation of Wanstead Assembly; the figures in it were drawn from the life, and without burlesque. The faces were said to bear great likenesses to the persons so drawn, and to be rather better coloured than some of his more finished performances. Grace, however, was no attribute of his pencil; ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... my pet," he said at last. "You've been tiring yourself too much. You must rest. You'd better not go to the Brilliant Theatre to-night—it's only a burlesque, and is sure to be vulgar and noisy. We'll stop at home and spend a quiet ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... and with extravagant fun Wagner makes him change the poetical and serious words into words of most ludicrous significance. Walther's melody he has not got hold of at all, and in a state of intense nervousness tries to fit the words to the burlesque tune of his previous night's serenade. The accents all fall in the wrong place; and as he stumbles miserably along the crowd begins to titter. Wagner of course was parodying and satirising the pedants of his own day, especially the composers of psalms who could not ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... it as follows: "Flashy people may burlesque these things, but when hundreds of the most sober people in a country, where they have as much mother-wit certainly as the rest of mankind, know them to be true, nothing but the absurd and froward spirit of ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... and I will be great." No, you won't. You think you are going to be made great by an office, but remember that if you are not great before you get the office, you won't be great when you secure it. It will only be a burlesque in ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... many gained only a bare subsistence; thousands lost their health, and not a few their lives. It was a strange play that men enacted there, embracing all the confusion, glitter, rapid change of scene, burlesque, and comedy of a pantomime, with many a dash of darkest tragedy intermingled. Tents were pitched in all directions, houses were hastily run up, restaurants of all kinds were opened, boats were turned keel ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... the death of King Charles made such an impression on the Earl of Dorset that he was invited to town, and introduced by that universal patron to the other wits. In 1687 he joined with Prior in "The City Mouse and the Country Mouse," a burlesque of Dryden's "Hind and Panther." He signed the invitation to the Prince of Orange, and sat in the Convention. He about the same time married the Countess Dowager of Manchester, and intended to have taken Orders; but, afterwards altering his purpose, he purchased for 1,500 pounds ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... thousand pair of gladiators fought during the games—a round thousand, and such clean-made, well-built fellows, and they came against each other so gallantly! You should have see it; I can't go through it. There was a lot of satyrs, jumping and frisking, in burlesque of the martial dances which preceded them. There was a crowd of trumpeters and horn-blowers; ministers of the sacrifices with their victims, bulls and rams, dressed up with gay wreaths; drivers, butchers, haruspices, heralds; images of gods with their cars of ivory or ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... returned to his seat, Kirtley gave the legs a kick "just for luck." He could not help laughing. The burlesque! The Germans were certainly a curious people. This was like some fantastic tale of Hoffmann with its marionettes and other childish stuff so ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... I had anything within the fiftieth part of the size of Sotherton, I should be always planting and improving, for naturally I am excessively fond of it. It would be too ridiculous for me to attempt anything where I am now, with my little half acre. It would be quite a burlesque. But if I had more room, I should take a prodigious delight in improving and planting. We did a vast deal in that way at the Parsonage: we made it quite a different place from what it was when we first had it. You young ones do not remember much about it, perhaps; but if dear Sir Thomas were here, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... lower Manas having left it. It is entirely without any kind of consciousness or intelligence, and is drifted passively about upon the astral currents just as a cloud might be swept in any direction by a passing breeze; but even yet it may be galvanized for a few moments into a ghastly burlesque of life if it happens to come within reach of a medium's aura. Under such circumstances it will still exactly resemble its departed personality in appearance, and may even reproduce to some extent his familiar expressions or handwriting, but it does so merely by the ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... bordering on farce—are classed as "dramatic" subjects, and this, apparently, because they are strongly dramatic in certain scenes. Thus, again, genuine farce (as distinguished from "slap-stick" comedy), social comedy, burlesque and extravaganza are all classed under the head of "comedy," just as comedy-drama, tragedy, melodrama, and historical plays are classed as "dramatic." These two broad classifications will be used throughout this work except ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... Shakespearian revivals, and now resembles most of the other theatres. "St. James' Theatre," in King Street, St. James', was built for Braham, the celebrated singer. "The Olympic" was a small house in Wych Street, Drury Lane, now destroyed. "The Strand Theatre" was famous for its burlesque extravaganzas, a form of theatrical amusement which of late has become exceedingly popular. The "New Globe Theatre" (destroyed so late as 1902) and "The Gaiety" (at the stage entrance of which are the old offices of Good Words, so frequently made use of by Dickens ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... the end of his clay pipe—a 'churchwarden' Milly called it—just such a long curved pipe as Joe Willet is made to hold between his lips in those charming illustrations of 'Barnaby Rudge'—which we all know so well—and lifting his 'wide-awake' with a burlesque salutation, which, I suppose, would have charmed the 'Plume of Feathers,' he dropped, kicked and caught his 'wide-awake,' with an agility and gravity, as he replaced it, so inexpressibly humorous, that Milly went off in a loud fit of laughter, with ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... plain and palpable parody, not only of the general spirit, but of the numerous passages of the Iliad itself; and even, if no such intention to parody were discernible in it, the objection would still remain, that to suppose a work of mere burlesque to be the primary effort of poetry in a simple age, seems to reverse that order in the development of national taste, which the history of every other people in Europe, and of many in Asia, has almost ascertained to be a law of the human mind; it is in a state of ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... was. Her childish thoughts were constantly with her parents—how best could she add to the weekly income. And this is what the same little Madge would do. Night after night, after playing in a serious piece, she would appear in burlesque, sing, dance, and crack her small jokes with the best of them. It was hard work that made her a woman—it was dearly-bought experience that gave birth to the sympathetic ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... half an hour as is the custom, there is another music going on—a music that cannot be written and will be difficult to describe—I mean the song of the "Cicada Stridulantia" in walnut trees above me. This insect—the balm cricket—is in appearance a burlesque, just such a house fly as you might imagine would be introduced in a pantomime; and its cry is as loud and incessant as it is peculiar. To describe it, fancy to begin with a number of strange chirps, and that every ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... window, if his countenance possessed the thought which is communicated to those waxen caricatures of the human face divine. He is a militia-officer, and the most amusing person in the House. Can anything be more exquisitely absurd than the burlesque grandeur of his air, as he strides up to the lobby, his eyes rolling like those of a Turk's head in a cheap Dutch clock? He never appears without that bundle of dirty papers which he carries under his ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... existence of two factions, which, for near two centuries, divided and agitated the whole population of Holland and Zealand. One bore the title of Hoeks (fishing-hooks); the other was called Kaabel-jauws (cod-fish). The origin of these burlesque denominations was a dispute between two parties at a feast, as to whether the cod-fish took the hook or the hook the cod-fish? This apparently frivolous dispute was made the pretext for a serious quarrel; and the partisans of the nobles and those of the towns ranged themselves at either side, and ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... only, the author, one would have thought, might have easily avoided. This arises from the stage directions, which supply the place of the terrific and beautiful descriptions of Milton. What idea, except burlesque, can we form of the expulsion of the fallen angels from heaven, literally represented by their tumbling down upon the stage? or what feelings of terror can be excited by the idea of an opera hell, composed of pasteboard and flaming rosin? If these follies were not actually to be ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... by the master film was relieved by a livelier, more lyric and less philosophical drama: Mack Schnarken and the Bathing Suit Babes in a comedy of manners entitled "Right on the Coco." Mr. Schnarken was at various high moments a cook, a life-guard, a burlesque actor, and a sculptor. There was a hotel hallway up which policemen charged, only to be stunned by plaster busts hurled upon them from the innumerous doors. If the plot lacked lucidity, the dual motif of legs and pie was clear ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... bureau of the hotel was scarcely the correct place in which to receive this august young man. There he stood, with his head half-way through the bureau window, negligently leaning against the woodwork, just as though he were a stockbroker or the manager of a New York burlesque company. ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... Lampe, born 1693, in Saxony, was educated in music at Helmstadt, and came to England in 1725 as a band musician and composer to Covent Garden Theater. His best-known secular piece is the music written to Henry Carey's burlesque, "The Dragon ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... "is aged, and almost always sick; a lady of honour having her appearance will make a contrast with her office. As to the other, she still has beauty and elegance; but do you imagine, Sire, that the Court of Bavaria and the Court of France have forgotten, in so short a time, the pleasant and burlesque ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... look of burlesque ruefulness over his shoulder, the comedy appeal of one schoolboy to another as they leave a scolding teacher on the far side of the door. "The governor does keep himself worked up!" he laughed, as they reached the street and paused. "If it isn't ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... to another sense they are made a relation of a wedding-night, and the act of consummation fulsomely described in the very words of the most modest amongst all poets. Of the same manner are our songs which are turned into burlesque, and the serious words of the author perverted into a ridiculous meaning. Thus in Timon's "silli" the words are generally those of Homer and the tragic poets, but he applies them satirically to some customs and kinds of philosophy which he arraigns. But the Romans ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... for the weather remaining fine, under penalty of his head, for the slightest contrary wind might capsize the ship and drown the Doge, with all the most serene noblemen, the ambassadors, and the Pope's nuncio, who is the sponsor of that burlesque wedding which the Venetians respect even to superstition. To crown the misfortune of such an accident it would make the whole of Europe laugh, and people would not fail to say that the Doge of Venice had gone at last to consummate ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... that is fallen down into it, however, I by coach endeavoured to have waited on my Lord Sandwich, but meeting him in Chancery Lane going towards the City I stopped and so fairly walked home again, calling at St. Paul's Churchyarde, and there looked upon a pretty burlesque poem, called "Scarronides, or Virgile Travesty;" extraordinary good. At home to the office till dinner, and after dinner my wife cut my hair short, which is growne pretty long again, and then to the office, and there till ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... the same scheme to ridicule a third, and either take advantage of, or invent, some story for that purpose, and mimicry will have already produced a sort of rude comedy. It becomes an inviting treat to the populace, and gains an additional zest and burlesque by following the already established plan of tragedy; and the first man of genius who seizes the idea, and reduces it into form,—into a work of art,—by metre and music, is the Aristophanes ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... that with Ale or viler Liquors, Didst inspire WITHERS, PRYN, and VICARS. This Vicars was a man of as great interest and authority in the late Reformation as Pryn or Withers, and as able a poet. He translated Virgil's AEneids into as horrible Travesty, in earnest, as the French Scaroon did in burlesque, and was only outdone in his way by the politic author ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... he is the genius of that company, that even in such frolic mad-cap games as Love's Labour's Lost, and the Taming of the Shrew, and Midsummer Night's Dream, could contrive to insert, not the broad farce and burlesque on the old pretentious wordy philosophy and pompous rhetoric it was meant to dethrone only, and not the most perilous secret of the new philosophy, only, but the secret of its organ of delivery and tradition, the secret of its use of letters, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... lightly, "you are working too hard, and need shaking up, so I thought I'd drop round and do it. We will dine at the club, then go to the Castle Square, where there is a burlesque on and no end of pretty chorus girls. I know two or three of them, and after the show we will take them out to supper; ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... Perhaps they have never read Stendhal's De l'Amour, but unconsciously they put it in practice. They have by heart their chapters—Love-Taste, Love-Passion, Love-Caprice, Love-Crystalized, and more than all, Love-Transient. All is good in their eyes. They invented the burlesque axiom, 'In the sight of man, all women are equal.' The actual text is more vigorously worded, but as in my opinion the spirit is false, I do not stand nice ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... fertility of comparison, its dialectic ingenuity, its jovialty, its drollery, its Rabelaisian laughter. But, after all, the highest type of humour is humour applying itself to the facts of life, and this is burlesque humour squandering itself in riot upon a delectable fiction. Humour is a great deal more than a plaything; it is a force, a weapon—at once sword and shield. If there is to be an art of literature in Ireland that can be called national, it ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... just such a piece of burlesque as Swift might have written: but many circumstances lead me to think it must be much older. Has it ever been ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... unheard-of cruelties, and especially of being taken with arms in our hands against the authority of the true and proper chief of the island. It is impossible to describe the absurd language used, and the ceremonies gone through. It would have been a complete burlesque had not the matter been somewhat too serious. As it was, when one of the counsellors kicked another for interrupting him, and the judge threw a calabash at their heads to call them to order, I could not help bursting into a fit of laughter, ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... keep from smiling in her face. To an outsider these family rows smacked of burlesque. One could always depend on the actors to ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... bounds of moderation. Many were intoxicated; guests and attendants mingled together without distinction; the serious and the ludicrous, drunken fancies and affairs of state were blended one with another in a burlesque medley; and the discussions on the general distress of the country ended in the wild uproar of a bacchanalian revel. But it did not stop here; what they had resolved on in the moment of intoxication they attempted when sober to carry into execution. It was necessary to manifest to the people in some ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... has no better corrective of public disorders than this, is a burlesque on the reason and intelligence of men; it is as incompatible with wisdom as it is with public prosperity ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... brushes and shillings of admission. Mr. Sambourne is excellent, too, at adaptations of popular pictures,—witness the more than happy parodies of Herrman's "A Bout d'Arguments," and "Une Bonne Histoire." His book-illustrations have been comparatively few, those to Burnand's laughable burlesque of "Sandford and Merton" being among the best. Rumour asserts that he is at present engaged upon Kingsley's "Water Babies," a subject which might almost be supposed to have been created for his pencil. There are indications, it may be added, ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... Grange.' Although written for lads, it is full of delicious nonsense that will be enjoyed by men and women.... The less serious parts are described with a mock gravity that is the perfection of harmless burlesque, while all the nonsense has a vein of good sense running through it, so that really useful information is conveyed to the young and ...
— The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales • Frank R. Stockton
... slaveholding Barbadoes. Enterprise, public and personal, has long been a stranger to the island. Internal improvements, such as the laying and repairing of roads, the erection of bridges, building wharves, piers, &c., were either wholly neglected, or conducted in such a listless manner as to be a burlesque on the name of business. It was a standing task, requiring the combined energy of the island, to repair the damages of one hurricane before another came. The following circumstance was told us, by one of the shrewdest observers of men and things with whom ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the tankard, and much the worse for wear, and unbuttoned at bottom for the ease of his enormous paunch. Behind him lay a favourite bull-dog, whose round head and single black glancing eye, as well as the creature's great corpulence, gave it a burlesque ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... This burlesque note had been maturely studied. The last sentence might be interpreted in favour of all parties. By this expedient, Aristide devised a glorious return for himself on the morrow of battle, in the shape of a laudatory article on the victors. On the following ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... and are not fed,'" quoted the rector in a burlesque despair. "Why, what we believe, boy,—what we believe! The rest of my flock know better, Mr. Ward, ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... Through all the fun, the burlesque, the amusing exaggerations and the bombastic humor runs a scheme of advice and instruction. Sometimes it takes the form of a direct caution to the reader, again it may be shown by inference, and lastly the events speak for themselves and give their own lesson. The author ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... the line, and who did this, and who did that—no penitentiary business at all. Teacher tapped on the window with a ruler, and the boys and girls came in, red-faced and puffing, careering through the aisles, knocking things off the desks with many a burlesque, "oh, exCUSE me!" and falling into their seats, bursting into sniggers, they didn't know what at. They had an hour and a half nooning. Counting that it took five minutes to shovel down even grandma's beautiful "piece," that left an hour and twenty-five ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... the first part of the work which made Cervantes famous, and which has kept his name before the world ever since. This was the inimitable Don Quixote, which gives the burlesque adventures of the self-styled "Knight of the Rueful Countenance." This book was not intended to satirize knight-errantry itself, for that had long before died out in Spain. What it did aim to do was to make ridiculous the romances of chivalry ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... no restraint in consequence of his marriage. He is adored by a certain class of burlesque actresses. He flatters them by adoring himself. He owns a small house in Belgravia, but he frequently lives elsewhere. No pigeon-shooting matches, and few poker parties, amongst a certain set, are complete without him. Having benefited only to a limited extent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... our old friend, the truck system, in full operation. Men live there, year in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in supplies. The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper they will fall in debt - a burlesque injustice in a new country, where labour should be precious, and one of those typical instances which explains the prevailing discontent and the success of the ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sportiveness in parliament, was a humorist at table, and fond of humorous recollections. His story of Dunning on his travels has got into print; but, in the hands of a genuine humorist, it must have been an incomparable ground for burlesque. Dunning, when solicitor-general, had gone to see the Prussian reviews. Some of these were profoundly secret, and were presumed to be experiments in those tactical novelties with which Frederick dazzled Europe. But others were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... theatricals, but they made him take theatricals seriously. All his plays were indeed "plays for Puritans." All his criticisms quiver with a refined and almost tortured contempt for the indulgencies of ballet and burlesque, for the tights and the double entente. He can endure lawlessness but not levity. He is not repelled by the divorces and the adulteries as he is by the "splits." And he has always been foremost among the fierce modern critics who ask indignantly, "Why do you ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... success. For there never was yet any genuine success in letters without integrity. The clever hoax is no better than the trick of imitation, that is, conscious imitation of another, which has unveracity to one's self at the bottom of it. Burlesque is not the highest order of intellectual performance, but it is legitimate, and if cleverly done it may be both useful and amusing, but it is not to be confounded with forgery, that is, with a composition which the author attempts to pass off as the production of somebody ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... nervous fever or violent convulsions on the part of young women, fond to excess of music, which have no other origin than the prayer of the Hebrews in the third act, with its superb change of key.'" Thus by a stroke of genius, a scene which first impressed the audience as a piece of theatrical burlesque, was raised to sublimity by the solemn ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... should say, inclined to be taciturn; and I do not think his habits of drinking were excited by the stimulants of society.[G] Little, I believe, is known of his life, even to the actors and playwrights, with whom he chiefly associated, from the time when his burlesque of "Hamlet Travestie" (printed in 1810) commenced his career of celebrity, if not of fame, to his death, (in the year 1862, I believe,) being then probably about seventy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... efficacious means" of cementing the union of the country that forsook him in his misfortune with the country that sent him to perish on a rock. His ashes, indeed, were to produce a friendly feeling between these two countries. What a burlesque! ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... anything? The inference is easy: reduce all objects to forms which can be bounded by planes and defined by straight lines and angles; make their cubic contents measurable to the eye; transform drawing into a burlesque of solid geometry; and you have, at once, attained to the highest art. The Futurist, on the other hand, maintains that we know nothing but that things are in flux. Form, solidity, weight are illusions. ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... me that you can do a bedside burlesque of 'East Lynne' that made even that Boston-looking interne with the thick glasses laugh. Go on and do it for me, there's a good girl. I could use a ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... for a burlesque or Christmas pantomime, in which the Good Fairy warns the tenant to remove his crops lest the Demon Landlord should seize upon them—the tenant being of course transmuted into Harlequin and the landlord into Clown—this would be funny enough; but it is ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... pre-Renascence ages—but not both for the same reason. The first of these "Tales" is told by the poet himself, after a stop has been unceremoniously put upon his recital of the "Ballad of Sir Thopas" by the Host. The ballad itself is a fragment of straightforward burlesque, which shows that in both the manner and the metre (Dunbar's burlesque ballad of "Sir Thomas Norray" is in the same stanza) of ancient romances, literary criticism could even in Chaucer's days find its opportunities for satire, though it is going rather far to see in "Sir Thopas" a predecessor ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... already been bereft of his senses by the melodrama preceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty, her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart, but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate who fought a losing fight with broadswords, two up and two down—click-click, click-click—and died all over ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... to the "massacres of September," when the prisons in Paris, which had been filled with priests and laymen arrested on charges of complicity with the enemies of liberty, were entered by ruffians acting under influence of Marat and the commune's "committee of surveillance," and, after "a burlesque trial" before an armed jury, were murdered. In Versailles, Lyons, Orleans, and other towns, there were like massacres. The victims of these ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... pretensions compared with the thundering vaunts of this Scythian Shepherd. He comes in drawn by conquered kings, and reproaches these pampered jades of Asia that they can draw but twenty miles a day. Till I saw this passage with my own eyes, I never believed that it was anything more than a pleasant burlesque of mine Ancient's. But I can assure my readers that it is soberly set down in a play, which their ancestors ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... would be drawn like a shy, unwilling periwinkle from its shell, once more to play his abased and bashful role of free entertainer to guffawing mixed audiences. For all others in the great city there were havens and homes. But for a poor, lorn, unguided vagrant, enmeshed in the burlesque garnitures of a three-year-old male child, what haven was there? By night the part had been hard enough—as the unresponsive heavens above might have testified. By the stark unmerciful sunlight; by the rude, revealing ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... Yes, you're right. One way or the other. Either go back to the old life or start a new one. What we are living now is a horrible burlesque." ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... Job. Arnold must have read Franklin's piece hastily, since he has mistaken a bit of ironic trifling for a serious attempt to rewrite the Scriptures. The Proposed New Version of the Bible is merely a bit of amusing burlesque in which six verses of the Book of Job are rewritten in the style of modern politics. According to Mr. William Temple Franklin the Bagatelles, of which the Proposed New Version is a part, were "chiefly written by Dr. Franklin for the amusement of his intimate ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... story!—something rises to my throat when I recollect how I rewarded her sisterly love!—I was elder than Clara—I should have directed her reading, and confirmed her understanding; but my own bent led me to peruse only works, which, though they burlesque nature, are seductive to the imagination. We read these follies together, until we had fashioned out for ourselves a little world of romance, and prepared ourselves for a maze of adventures. Clara's imaginations were as pure as those ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... about the trombones. I call it so, because I was obliged to be downright rude, or I never should have carried my point. Next Saturday the three acts are to be rehearsed in private. I got your letter of the 8th, and read it with great pleasure; the burlesque, too, I like very much. Excuse my writing more at this time; for, in the first place, as you see, my pen and ink are bad, and, in the second, I have still a couple of airs to write for the last ballet. ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... court did not sit until July of the next year, and their decision is not known. Col. Butler died Sept. 7, 1805. Out of the arrest and persecution of this sturdy veteran, Washington Irving (Knickerbocker) has worked up a fine piece of burlesque, in which Gen. Wilkinson's character is inimitably delineated in that of the vain and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... a blunder which it is not easy to account for. He points out how the poets began to introduce rhyme into alliterative verse, until at length rhyme came to predominate over alliteration, and "thus was this kind of metre at length swallowed up and lost in the common burlesque Alexandrine or anapaestic verse, as "A cobbler there was, and he lived in a stall.'' Percy made a serious mistake when he gave the name of Alexandrine to anapaestic verse; but he is quite right in his general statement that alliterative verse became lost in a measure ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... gods, kings, heroes, genii, demons, and a multitude of characters mythical and fabulous, is often performed in lively pantomime, the interludes being filled by a strong chorus, with songs and instrumental accompaniment. At other times the players, in grotesque masks, give burlesque versions of the graver epics, to the ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... of the favorite subjects of puppet-shows, popular melodramas, exhibitions of ombres chinoises, and pantomimes. The more the awful event, with its moral lessons, receded into the background of time, the more it lost its serious and impressive character, until it became a mere burlesque, and Hanswurst and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... resolutions privately, are, no doubt, secret friends, needing a little more courage to face the pro-slavery feeling and sentiment which are all about them. Some one who read these resolutions suggested the idea of their being a burlesque. I repudiated the idea at once. They will commend themselves to you, dear Aunty, I am sure, as honest ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... done. But Bonaparte undertook the task; and, as if by the aid of a magic rod, the ancient order of things was restored in the twinkling of an eye. The distinctions of rank—orders—titles, the noblesse—decorations—all the baubles of vanity—in short, all the burlesque tattooing which the vulgar regard as an indispensable attribute of royalty, reappeared in an instant. The question no longer regarded the form of government, but the individual who should be placed at its head. By restoring the ancient order ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... was himself a university professor,[117] and had something of Luis de Leon's fearlessness.[118] Zuniga (alias Rodriguez) was a man of a very different type: pedantically attached to the letter of the law, morbidly scrupulous on points of discipline. There seems to be no touch of burlesque intention in Luis de Leon's presentment of the man. According to Luis de Leon, Zuniga (alias Rodriguez) was half-crazed with vanity, much given to boasting of the esteem in which he was held at the Papal Court. On one occasion, the fatuous Zuniga ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... dining cars do not seem to be suffering from car-sickness. And you can get a beefsteak measuring eighteen inches from tip to tip. There are spring chickens with the most magnificent bust development I ever saw outside of a burlesque show; and the eggs taste as though they might have originated with a hen instead of a cold-storage vault. If there was only a cabaret show going up and down the middle of the car during meals, even the New York passengers would be satisfied with the ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... had made the Republican party, by 1897, the party of organized business. For twelve years the alliance had grown steadily closer. Marcus A. Hanna was its spokesman. The burlesque of his sincere and kindly face, drawn by a caricaturist, Davenport, for Eastern papers, created for the popular eye the type of commercialized magnate, but it did him great injustice. Self-respecting and direct, he believed it to ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... of those who expect to sing, or to do any sort of a musical specialty, or any kind of a "stunt" that might be included in the show. I have had the greatest variety of specialties in a show. I have had them do magic, burlesque magic, play ukuleles, and all sorts of stunts which I have placed effectively in a show. We had a man in the Princeton show who did a little trick with a cigarette that was a scream. I saw him standing around, and I asked him ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... which we bantered little Lilia first: The women—and perhaps they felt their power, For something in the ballads which they sang, Or in their silent influence as they sat, Had ever seemed to wrestle with burlesque, And drove us, last, to quite a solemn close— They hated banter, wished for something real, A gallant fight, a noble princess—why Not make her true-heroic—true-sublime? Or all, they said, as earnest as the close? Which yet ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... another early instance of our genre and a very pure one, see an anonymous Cambridge correspondent's critique of the burlesque broadside ballad of "Moor of Moore-Hall and the Dragon of Wantley," in Nathaniel Mist's Weekly Journal (second series), September 2, 1721, reproduced by Roger P. McCutcheon, "Another Burlesque of Addison's ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... of the Empire State. The country knows this, and the Democratic party, flushed with a victory which fraud has won, hardly cares to deny it."[1206] A few months later Conkling spoke of it as a well known fact that John T. Hoffman was counted in. "The election was a barbarous burlesque," he continued. "Many thousand forged naturalisation papers were issued; some of them were white and some were coffee-coloured. The same witnesses purported to attest hundreds and thousands of naturalisation affidavits, and the stupendous fraud of the whole ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... with one another; the mendicants, lying everywhere in wait for charity, murmured a modulated appeal; if you heard shouts or yells afar off they died upon your ear in a strain of melody at the moment when they were lifted highest. I am aware of seeming to burlesque the operatic fact which every one must have noticed in Naples; and I will not say that the neglected or affronted babe, or the trodden dog, is as tuneful as the midnight cat there, but only that they approach it in the prevailing ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... introduction, and, answering my question, Mr. Davis repeated the surname. He did not pronounce it as would a Middle Westerner like myself, but more as a citizen of London might. To spell his pronunciation Dyvis is to burlesque it slightly, but that is as near as it can be given phonetically. Several other words containing a long a were sounded by him in the same way, and to my ear the rest of his speech had a related eccentricity. ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... pathos, paused, and was theatrically distressed. Buckingham was seated in one of the boxes. He rose, all eyes were fixed upon a face well known in all gay assemblies, in a tone of burlesque he answered— ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... higher pitch than his model, Boccaccio. But the shrewdly practical Pandarus of the former poem—a character almost wholly of Chaucer's creation—is the very embodiment of the anti-romantic attitude, and a remarkable anticipation of Sancho Panza; while the "Rime of Sir Thopas" is a distinct burlesque of the fantastic chivalry romances.[2] Chaucer's pages are picturesque with tournament, hunting parties, baronial feasts, miracles of saints, feats of magic; but they are solid, as well, with the everyday life ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the burlesque by upsetting the chair. The Captain and Patch-Eye, chuckling at their jest, sit to a game of cards. The Duke returns to the chest. Once in a while he lays down the ship and seems to be thinking. The broken crystal of the fortune-teller lies on the floor. He picks it up and puts it ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... which, for near two centuries, divided and agitated the whole population of Holland and Zealand. One bore the title of Hoeks (fishing-hooks); the other was called Kaabel-jauws (cod-fish). The origin of these burlesque denominations was a dispute between two parties at a feast, as to whether the cod-fish took the hook or the hook the cod-fish? This apparently frivolous dispute was made the pretext for a serious quarrel; and the partisans of the nobles ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... him and silenced him; a dragoon was, however, sent to report to the governor; Don Guillermo sent a messenger after him, and bribed him too; and thus at length, after myriad rebuffs, and after being obliged to spend the last evening at a puppet-show in which the principal figure was a burlesque on his own personal peculiarities, the weary Don Guillermo, with his crew of renegadoes, and his forty chasseurs and their one hundred and four muzzled dogs, set sail ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... you can do a bedside burlesque of 'East Lynne' that made even that Boston-looking interne with the thick glasses laugh. Go on and do it for me, there's a good girl. I could use ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... succession there are ballets on skates, solo skating numbers, skating carnivals and skating races. Finally scenery is slid in on runners and the whole company, in costumes grotesque and beautiful, go through a burlesque that keeps you laughing when you are not applauding, and admiring when you are doing neither; while alternating lightwaves from overhead electric devices flood the picture with shifting, shimmering tides of color. It is like seeing a Christmas pantomime under an aurora borealis. ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... answered nothing, but watched the North Star and hummed a selection from a recent Simla burlesque that had much delighted the White Hussars. ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... You preach to me no more, You, once so glib with holy words! I am Astonished!. . . (With burlesque fury): Stay, I will surprise you too! Hark! I permit you. . . (He pretends to be seeking for something to tease her with, and to have found it): . . .It is something new!— To—pray for me, to-night, ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... in "The Clouds," to mention no other examples; and in English drama this kind of thing is alluded to again and again. What Jonson really did, was to raise the dramatic lampoon to an art, and make out of a casual burlesque and bit of mimicry a dramatic satire of literary pretensions and permanency. With the arrogant attitude mentioned above and his uncommon eloquence in scorn, vituperation, and invective, it is no wonder that Jonson soon involved ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... every class of society. Eichenstine Bros. sent fifty dollars, and six ragged newsboys came to present thirty cents. A lavender note, with huge monogram and written in white ink, stated that some of the girls of the "Gay Burlesque Troupe" sent a few dimes to the "kid's" mother. The few dimes amounted to fifteen dollars. Mrs. Van Larkin's coachman had to wait with her note while Lucy answered the questions of a lame old negro ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... Liquors, Didst inspire WITHERS, PRYN, and VICARS. This Vicars was a man of as great interest and authority in the late Reformation as Pryn or Withers, and as able a poet. He translated Virgil's AEneids into as horrible Travesty, in earnest, as the French Scaroon did in burlesque, and was only outdone in his way by the politic author ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... were scurrying out of the room now, a few in too much haste to thank the givers of the feast, the others bowing and shaking hands in mock burlesque of their chief. Stango had thrown down his ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... it into an abode of drunkenness and grossness; they defaced the sacred trees and the grey walls with inscriptions which the indignation of a purer age has caused to be removed; they carried on nightly revels which no historian could describe, and in their wicked buffoonery mocked the Creator with burlesque religious rites. Such an unholy place would be pulled down by the mob nowadays, and the gang of debauchees would figure in the police-court; but in those "good old times" the Prime Minister and ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... performance," said Mr. Charteris, as we came out of the Opera House. "I have always had a sneaking liking for burlesque." ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... morning till night, among the ladies. The "acting drama" was turned over leaf by leaf by the gentlemen. The sound of many a heavy tread of many a heavy student, was heard in the chambers; the gardens were haunted by "the characters" getting their parts; and the poet's burlesque of those who "rave, recite, and madden round the land," was realized to the life in the histrionic labours of the votaries of Thalia and Melpomene, who ranged the groves of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... undergraduate talent. In fact, more than once it has been the music which has given these operas their chief merit. Save for one war-time emergency, when University women participated, the entire cast has always been recruited from the men of the University and the burlesque of the "chorus girls" has always been one of the perennial charms of the opera in undergraduate estimation. The first opera, given in 1908, was entitled Michigenda and became instantly popular, not only because of its novelty and the excellence ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... gain a name, but to make a deep impression. One of his professed admirers made a strange mistake when he called them doggerel rhymes.[320] His Caution to Watch Against Sin is full of solemn and impressive thoughts, the very reverse of doggerel or burlesque. his poem on the house of God is worthy of a most careful perusal; and thousands have been delighted and improved with his emblems. One rhyme in the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... abounds. As the original had been inscribed by Pope to Lord Bolingbroke, so was the parody by Wilkes to Lord Sandwich; thus it began, "Awake my Sandwich!" instead of "Awake my St. John!" Thus also, in ridicule of Warburton's well-known commentary, some burlesque notes were appended in the name of the Right Reverend the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... was "The Critic," the scene a burlesque rehearsal of an old-time melodrama. Our opportunities were great, and Heaven knows we missed none of them. New York audiences are quick, and in less than three minutes they knew the actors had taken the bit between their teeth ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... No. 11 will be commenced a new burlesque serial, "The Mystery of Mister E. Drood," written expressly for this paper by the celebrated humorist, ORPHEUS ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... labors. Our little social excursions, parties of pleasure, and the contingencies that occurred in them, we decked out poetically; and thus, by the description of an event, a new event always arose. But as such social jests commonly degenerate into personal ridicule, and my friend Horn, with his burlesque representations, did not always keep within proper bounds, many a misunderstanding arose, which, however, could soon be ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the writer of Athenian Sport, or Two Thousand Paradoxes, merely argued to amuse and divert the Age, by a Member of the Athenian Society, London, 1707?[1] It would almost appear to have been a burlesque upon the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... strength of the other artists, such as Ostade, Mieris, and Dou. But, even taking into consideration its satirical character, one must say that Steen has often exceeded his purpose if he really had a purpose. The fury with which he pursued the burlesque often got the better of his feeling for reality; his figures, instead of being merely ridiculous, became monstrous and hardly human, often resembling beasts rather than men, and he has exaggerated these figures until sometimes he awakens, ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... burning of Olindo and Sofronia, and the death of Clorinda by the sentimental Tasso. Neither poet, the one with his cheerfulness, the other with his mild melancholy, brings home, conceives the horror of the situation; the one treats the tragic in the spirit almost of burlesque, the other entirely in the spirit of elegy. So, again, with the novel writers: these professional retailers of anecdotes will pick up any subject to fill their volumes. In default of pleasant stories of filthy intrigue or lewd jest, men ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... 6: For another early instance of our genre and a very pure one, see an anonymous Cambridge correspondent's critique of the burlesque broadside ballad of "Moor of Moore-Hall and the Dragon of Wantley," in Nathaniel Mist's Weekly Journal (second series), September 2, 1721, reproduced by Roger P. McCutcheon, "Another Burlesque of Addison's ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... was afterwards to become a king of hearts! A Charivari was, however, going on in front of a neighbour's door, as a nuptial serenade on the occasion of some unsuitable marriage; when the clamour of horns and kettles, marrow-bones and cleavers, saluted the mother's ears, accompanied by thirty burlesque verses, the composition of the father of the child who ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... of mind, was yet the greatest Parliamentarian of his day? What of Justin Huntly McCarthy, under his puerile mask a most dark, most dangerous conspirator, who, lightly swinging the sacred lamp of burlesque, irradiated with fearful clarity the wrath and sorrow of Ireland? What of Blocker Warton? What of the eloquent atheist, Charles Bradlaugh, pleading at the Bar, striding past the furious Tories to the very Mace, hustled ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... of the details of history, which are always wearisome and usually inaccurate, let us say generally, that the forms of art have been due to the Greek critical spirit. To it we owe the epic, the lyric, the entire drama in every one of its developments, including burlesque, the idyll, the romantic novel, the novel of adventure, the essay, the dialogue, the oration, the lecture, for which perhaps we should not forgive them, and the epigram, in all the wide meaning of that word. In ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... all the fun, the burlesque, the amusing exaggerations and the bombastic humor runs a scheme of advice and instruction. Sometimes it takes the form of a direct caution to the reader, again it may be shown by inference, and lastly the events ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... that which was now afforded by these two races, the phlegmatic, plodding German and the vibrant Irish, a contrast in American life as a whole which was soon represented in miniature on the vaudeville stage by popular burlesque representations of both types. The one was the opposite of the other in temperament, in habits, in personal ambitions. The German sought the land, was content to be let alone, had no desire to command others or to mix with them, but was determined to be ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... hung far out of his mouth. I stopped, perplexed, and asked: 'What do you mean by this screaming? take another piece of gold, take two, but leave me.' He then began again his hideous burlesque of politeness, and snarled out: 'Not gold, not gold, my young gentleman. I have too much of that trash myself, as I will show you ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... began to reflect on the advisability of illustrating it, and bringing in the artist's pencil to aid the writer's pen. I soon resolved to do this, and the third and fourth numbers contained a woodcut on the front page. In the fifth number there appeared an exquisite little burlesque sketch of the Calling of Samuel, by a skilful artist whose name I cannot disclose. Although not ostensibly, it was actually, the first of those Comic Bible Sketches for which the Freethinker afterwards became famous; and from that date, with the ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... puerile street fights with slings, of the printers' devils and schoolboys of Paris. The incidents of the war read like scenes in a comic opera. A hundred thousand armed citizens were besieged by eight thousand soldiers. The evolution of a burlesque form of cavalry, called the corps of the Portes Cocheres, formed by a conscription of one horseman for every house with a carriage gate, became the derision of the royal army. They issued forth, beplumed and beribboned, and fled back to the city, amid the execrations of the people, at the ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... I. Fellow Travellers with a Bird, II. Children in Midwinter That Pretty Person Out of Town Expression Under the Early Stars The Man with Two Heads Children in Burlesque Authorship Letters The Fields The Barren Shore The Boy Illness The Young Children Fair and Brown ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... went to the "Frivolity," to see the latest rays of the lamp of burlesque. That scene, at any rate, was familiar. There, in all their spotless panoply of expressionless face, and irreproachable shirt-front, sat the golden lads of the Metropolis in their rows, images of bored stupidity, stiffly cased in black and white. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... misshapen by storms and floods—or characters gnarled by some interior force working in conjunction with or in opposition to outward circumstances. She draws no monstrosities, or monsters, thus avoiding on the one side romance and on the other burlesque. She keeps to life—the life that fails from "the meanness of opportunity," or is "dispersed among hindrances" or "wrestles" unavailingly ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... gaming-tables, in a few days, or even hours. While a few gained a competence, many gained only a bare subsistence; thousands lost their health, and not a few their lives. It was a strange play that men enacted there, embracing all the confusion, glitter, rapid change of scene, burlesque, and comedy of a pantomime, with many a dash of darkest tragedy intermingled. Tents were pitched in all directions, houses were hastily run up, restaurants of all kinds were opened, boats were turned keel up and ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... our public likely to muster the slightest taste for comic analysis that does not tumble to farce? The doubt reduced her whole MS. to a leaden weight, composed for sinking. Percy's addiction to burlesque was a further hindrance, for she did not perceive how her comedy could be ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... men of each village grouped themselves together. Some were garbed in beaver skins, others in the shaggy hide of the bear. Still others were guiltless of apparel, and all bore themselves with an excessive dignity bordering on burlesque. Brebeuf, Daniel, and Davost stood by in their sable vestments; and in the midst of all was Champlain surrounded by the soldiers of his garrison. The next two days were given up to trade—a beaver-skin ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... served on his dining cars do not seem to be suffering from car-sickness. And you can get a beefsteak measuring eighteen inches from tip to tip. There are spring chickens with the most magnificent bust development I ever saw outside of a burlesque show; and the eggs taste as though they might have originated with a hen instead of a cold-storage vault. If there was only a cabaret show going up and down the middle of the car during meals, even the New York passengers would be satisfied with ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... season, the demirep of many, the antiquary, and the dilettanti,—painters, sculptors, engravers, all brought news to the 'Strawberry Gazette;' and incense, sometimes wrung from aching hearts, to the fastidious wit who professed to be a judge of all material and immaterial things—from a burlesque to an Essay on history or Philosophy—from the construction of Mrs. Chenevix's last new toy to the mechanism of a clock made in the sixteenth ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... that "to learn the duties of town, city, and county officers, has nothing whatever to do with the grand and noble subject of Civil Government," and that "to attempt class drill on petty town and county offices, would be simply burlesque of the whole subject." But, suppose one were to say, with an air of ineffable scorn, that petty experiments on terrestrial gravitation and radiant heat, such as can be made with commonplace pendulums and tea-kettles, have nothing ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... the days that remained of her visit passed pleasantly enough. Hetty contrived to turn her lessons into a sort of burlesque, and to impose a good deal on Miss Davis, who was not a humorous, but indeed a most matter-of-fact person. Every day Phyllis grew more and more disgusted with their visitor, who interrupted the even course of their studies and ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... mean to give offence," said the Idiot. "I've read so much of yours that was purely humorous that I believe I'd laugh at a dirge if you should write one; but I really thought your lines in the Observer were a burlesque. You had the same thought that Rossetti expresses ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... children, but you can't bring in a Bill for reforming us. You can't make us go by decimals. You can't increase our consumption by lowering our taxation. I wish you had gone back to some Board." This she said looking up into his face with an anxiety which was half real and half burlesque. ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... very early period; there appears also to have been another such temple either at or near Athens,[105] where we must look for the scene of the ridiculous cure which Aristophanes makes Aesculapius to perform on the blind god of riches. Though there is undoubtedly a rich vein of the burlesque in the Plutus of the Grecian dramatist, yet we may gather much concerning our present subject from the scene in which the slave, who had attended Plutus in the Temple, relates the whole process of his master's wife. Here also the ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... nor Ben-Zayb, nor Padre Irene, nor Padre Camorra knew it, so they begged for the story, some in jest and others from genuine curiosity. The priest, adopting the tone of burlesque with which some had made their request, began like an old tutor ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... by any chance have dreamed of that stately honor. His ambitions did not lie in the direction of mental achievement. It is true that now and then, on Friday at school, he read a composition, one of which—a personal burlesque on certain older boys—came near resulting in bodily damage. But any literary ambition he may have had in those days was a fleeting thing. His permanent dream was to be a pirate, or a pilot, or a bandit, or a trapper-scout; something gorgeous and active, where ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Bible, of course, and Aesop, Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, and a few histories, these last unfortunately of the poorer sort. He early displayed a bent for composition, scribbling verses that were very poor, and writing burlesque tales about his acquaintances in what passed ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... the address, retired with the usual profound obeisances, which not only amused the spectators, but afforded much diversion to her majesty, whose mode of smiling indicated how much she enjoyed the burlesque of the scene. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... tongue. Natacha could do nothing but cry, "My God, my God, my God!" Feodor held onto his stomach, still crying, "I'm burning, I'm burning!" The scene was frightfully tragic and funny at the same time. To add to the burlesque, the general's watch in his pocket struck eight o'clock. Feodor Feodorovitch stood up in a final supreme effort. "Oh, it is horrible!" Matrena Petrovna showed a red, almost violet face as she came back; she distorted it, she choked, her mouth twitched, but she brought something, a little ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... adopt you. Only don't be cross, little goosey. Let us go into the garden." Young Musgrave made such a burlesque of his remorse that Bessie, wounded but skin-deep, was fain to laugh too and be friends again. And thereupon they went forth together ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... which starts the heroic agility of his tongue, and he writes a long letter without a full stop, which is as full of substance as one of his essays. His technique is so incredibly fine, he is such a Paganini of prose, that he can invent and reverse an idea of pyramidal wit, as in this burlesque of a singer: 'The shake, which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite through the composition; so that the time, to a common air or ballad, keeps ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Kyhlamske vech C. Bredahl: Kiobenhavn, 1834. It is a mixture of tragedy and farce: the former occasionally good, the latter poor buffoonery. In the notes, readings of the old MS. are referred to with apparent seriousness; but Gammel Gumba's Saga is quoted in a manner that seems burlesque. I cannot find the word "Kyhlam" in any dictionary. Can any of your readers tell me whether it signifies a real country, or is a mere fiction? The work does not read like a translation; and, if one, the number of modern allusions show that it ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... "Salmagundi," Irving in connection with his brother Peter projected the work that was to make him famous. At first nothing more was intended than a satire upon the "Picture of New York," by Dr. Samuel Mitchell, just then published. It was begun as a mere burlesque upon pedantry and erudition, and was well advanced, when Peter was called by his business to Europe, and its completion was fortunately left to Washington. In his mind the idea expanded into a different conception. He condensed the mass of affected learning, which was their joint work, into five ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... from the groove human nature has laid down. There is exaggeration, but no distortion. The most wildly funny people are low comedians of the highest order, whose fun is never forced and never fails; they found themselves on fact, and only burlesque what they have seen in actual life—they never evolve their fun from the depths of their inner consciousness; and in this naturalness, for me, lies the greatness of Leech. There is nearly always a tenderness ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... ballets. These charming improvisations turned the children's heads and made their legs nimble. He led them just as he chose, making them pass, according to his fancy, from the amusing to the severe, from burlesque to solemnity—now graceful, now impassioned. We invented all kinds of costumes, so as to play different characters in succession. No sooner did the artist see them appear than he adapted his theme and rhythm to the parts wonderfully. This ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... shocking burlesque upon legislative proceedings, we must not forget that there is something very real to this uncouth and untutored multitude. It is not all sham, nor all burlesque. They have a genuine interest and a genuine earnestness in the business of the assembly which we are ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... engine. Have been a freight and passenger brakeman, fired and ran a locomotive; also a freight train conductor and check clerk in a freight house; worked on the section; have been a shot gun messenger for the Wells, Fargo Company. Have been with a circus, minstrels, farce comedy, burlesque and dramatic productions; have been with good shows, bad shows, medicine shows, and worse, and some shows where we had landlords singing in the chorus. Have played variety houses and vaudeville houses; have slept in a box car one night, and a swell hotel the next; have been a traveling ...
— Uncles Josh's Punkin Centre Stories • Cal Stewart
... service of history that "knack ... for selecting the striking and interesting points out of dull details," which he felt was his endowment.[412] The original introduction to the Tales of the Crusaders has the following burlesque announcement of his intention, in the words of the Eidolon Chairman: "I intend to write the most wonderful book which the world ever read—a book in which every incident shall be incredible, yet strictly true—a work recalling recollections ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... inserted the following poetic vignette in their City Mouse and Country Mouse, written in burlesque of ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... imagine whether these now wonderful, now charming improvisations quickened the brains and made supple the legs of our performers. He led them as he pleased and made them pass, according to his fancy, from the droll to the severe, from the burlesque to the solemn, from the graceful to the passionate. We improvised costumes in order to play successively several roles. As soon as the artist saw them appear, he adapted his theme and his accent in a marvellous ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... he asked, negligently; and his easy burlesque of her name was like the familiarity of the rest of him. He was one of those full-bodied, grossly handsome men who are powerful and active, but never submit themselves to the rigour of becoming athletes, though they shoot and ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... "I regret very much to inform you that owing to the indisposition of the young lady, Miss Beatrice Franklin and her father are unable to appear to-night. I have pleasure in announcing an extra turn, namely the Sisters De Vere in their wonderful burlesque act." ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... notes of my impressions I finally got upstairs again to bed. It was four o'clock in the morning. I laughed all the way up—at the grotesque banisters, the droll physiognomy of the staircase window, the burlesque grouping of the furniture, and the memory of that outrageous footstool in the room below; but nothing more happened to alarm or disturb me, and I woke late in the morning after a dreamless sleep, none the worse for my experiment except for a slight headache and a coldness of the extremities ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Abbess are the subjects of the next two cuts. In the former, Death has assumed the mitre and the crosier of his victim, and drags him off with such an expression of fun and burlesque pomp as we sometimes see in the face of a mischievous boy who mocks his betters. In the companion group his look is that of a demon; and with his head fantastically dressed, he drags the Abbess off by the scapulary which hangs from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... surrendered the Castle of Edinburgh on June 13th, after a resistance which towards the end assumed the character almost of a burlesque. ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... bed, crosses down stage to lower left side of bed, sits facing LAURA.] But I do care. I know how you feel with an old cat for a landlady and living up here on a side street with a lot of cheap burlesque people. Why, the room's cold [LAURA rises, crosses to window.], and there's no hot water, and you're beginning to look shabby. You haven't got a job—chances are you won't have one. What does [Indicating picture on bed with thumb.] this fellow out there do for you? Send you ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... was in due course published. Philips was furious, and providing himself with a birch rod, threatened to flog Pope. The latter, not content with his ingenious revenge, prevailed upon his friend Gay to continue the warfare and to burlesque Philips' performances in a series of realistic representations of country life."[3] Gay entered into the sport with joy—it was a game after his own heart, and one for which his talent was particularly fitted. He begins his "Proeme to the Gentle Reader" with a most palpable hit: ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... forehead; and, for a last adornment, the collar of his shirt and that of his coat came so high that his head seemed enveloped like a bunch of flowers in a horn of paper. Add to these queer accessories, which were combined in utter want of harmony, the burlesque contradictions in color of yellow trousers, scarlet waistcoat, cinnamon coat, and a correct idea will be gained of the supreme good taste which all dandies blindly obeyed in the first years of the Consulate. This costume, utterly uncouth, seemed to have been invented as a final ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... Rue Honore the coachman struck his cocked hat against a burlesque effigy of Marat swinging from the cord of ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... of moderation. Many were intoxicated; guests and attendants mingled together without distinction, the serious and the ludicrous; drunken fancies and affairs of state were blended one with another in a burlesque medley; and the discussions on the general distress of the country ended in the wild uproar of a bacchanalian revel. But it did not stop here; what they had resolved on in the moment of intoxication, they attempted when sober to carry into execution. It was necessary to manifest to the people in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... any nursery maid and her young man, while her groom stood at the brougham door in the bridle-path beyond. He had broken off a sprig of the box one day and given it to her, and she had kissed it foolishly, and laughed, and hidden it in the folds of her riding-skirt, in burlesque fear lest the guards should arrest them for breaking the ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... is a word used in the theatrical business to distinguish the full-evening drama, its actors, producers, and its mechanical stage from those of burlesque and vaudeville. Originally coined as a word of reproach against vaudeville, it has lost its sting and is used by vaudevillians as well ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... every way did honour to her progenitors. As the reader is aware, there is what is known as a "cultivated voice," the result of education—it is absolutely without affectation: there is also the voice which, in imitation of the well-trained one, is little more than a burlesque, and is affected in the highest degree: this was the only ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... paint brushes and shillings of admission. Mr. Sambourne is excellent, too, at adaptations of popular pictures,—witness the more than happy parodies of Herrman's "A Bout d'Arguments," and "Une Bonne Histoire." His book-illustrations have been comparatively few, those to Burnand's laughable burlesque of "Sandford and Merton" being among the best. Rumour asserts that he is at present engaged upon Kingsley's "Water Babies," a subject which might almost be supposed to have been created for his pencil. There are indications, it may be added, that Mr. Sambourne's talents are by no means ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... a university professor,[117] and had something of Luis de Leon's fearlessness.[118] Zuniga (alias Rodriguez) was a man of a very different type: pedantically attached to the letter of the law, morbidly scrupulous on points of discipline. There seems to be no touch of burlesque intention in Luis de Leon's presentment of the man. According to Luis de Leon, Zuniga (alias Rodriguez) was half-crazed with vanity, much given to boasting of the esteem in which he was held at the Papal Court. On one ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... The ancients, he said, surpassed the moderns in poetry, painting, oratory, history, architecture, and, in fact, all arts and sciences which depend more on genius than on experience. It was no lightening of the judgment when he added that the moderns surpass the ancients in doggerel, humour burlesque, and all the trivial arts of ridicule, the arts of the "unlucky little wits." So degraded had wit become! In the Adventurer, nos. 127 and 133, Joseph Warton showed himself to be essentially in agreement with Addison's verdict, differing only ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... supper after they got home, and Polly gave them a burlesque opera that convulsed her hearers, for her spirits rose again and she was determined to get the last drop of fun before she went back ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... about Miss Owens to one of the somewhat older married ladies who were kind to him, the wife of one of his colleagues. She ought to have burnt his letter, but she preserved it to kindle mild gossip after his death. It is a burlesque account of his whole adventure, describing, with touches of very bad taste, his disillusionment with the now maturer charms of Miss Owens when her sister brought her back to New Salem, and making comedy of his own ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... Californian's Tale A Helpless Situation A Telephonic Conversation Edward Mills and George Benton: A Tale The Five Boons of Life The First Writing-machines Italian without a Master Italian with Grammar A Burlesque Biography How to Tell a Story General Washington's Negro Body-servant Wit Inspirations of the "Two-year-olds" An Entertaining Article A Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Amended Obituaries A Monument to Adam A Humane Word ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and delighting to turn even matters of seriousness into ridicule, was immeasurably captivated by the true burlesque of those disputes, the childish virulence, the extravagant pretensions, and the still more extravagant impostures fabricated in support of the rival pre-eminence in absurdity; the visions of half-mad nuns and friars; the Convulsionaries; the miracles at the tomb of the Abbe ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... written in the early part of the revolutionary war to burlesque the meeting of the country militia, and afterwards became very popular. Although Brown had not much voice, he managed to give a correct and exceedingly laughable expression to ...
— The Yankee Tea-party - Or, Boston in 1773 • Henry C. Watson
... of their previous travels. They were not allowed to leave Vienna, however, without a ray of sunshine to cheer them on their homeward journey. Wolfgang had written an operetta, 'Bastien und Bastienne,' founded upon a burlesque of one of Rousseau's operas, and he had the pleasure of hearing his little work performed before a select company of connoisseurs, and of receiving their praises. Nor would the Emperor let him depart without a further ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... for school, and a mother for a school-mistress—is not absolutely new or original; but, again, what matters this to anyone, so long as the new shape given to the old material is genuinely amusing? So "farcical" goes with "original." But now, as to its being a "Romance?" Would not the term "burlesque" be a better term than "Farcical Romance?" The characters of the three adventurous lovers are not less burlesque than were those of the three Knights in ALBERT SMITH'S romantic Extravaganza, The Alhambra, played then by ALFRED WIGAN, and Mr. and Mrs. KEELEY. So if I may take it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... means of a touch of gum on the insect's back, and had placed in the grasp of each fly a piece of pine an inch long, cut into the shape of a rifle. The walking motion of the fly's feet twirled and balanced the stick in rather droll burlesque of musketry drill; and a dozen of these insects-at-arms, disposed in open order on the counter, were ministering ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... amicably in obedience to him." By virtue of this injunction, the Guises, the Colignies, and the Montmorencies ended by embracing, the first-named accommodating themselves with a pretty good grace to this demonstration: "but God knows what embraces!" [Words used in La Harenga, a satire of the day in burlesque verse upon the Cardinal of Lorraine.] Six years later the St. Bartholomew brought the true sentiments out ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... if she could double and quadruple 530 At pleasure the play of either pupil —Very like, by her hands' slow fanning, As up and down like a gor-crow's flappers They moved to measure, or bell-clappers. I said, "Is it blessing, is it banning, 535 Do they applaud you or burlesque you Those hands and fingers with no flesh on?" But, just as I thought to spring in to the rescue, At once I was stopped by the lady's expression: For it was life her eyes were drinking 540 From the crone's wide pair above unwinking, —Life's ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... novelty of which caused them to succeed for a few years. One of the earliest productions of this kind, which distinguished him as a painter, is supposed to have been a representation of Wanstead Assembly; the figures in it were drawn from the life, and without burlesque. The faces were said to bear great likenesses to the persons so drawn, and to be rather better coloured than some of his more finished performances. Grace, however, was no attribute of his pencil; and he was more disposed to aggravate, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... rout:—but we will say nothing of it just yet. Polish Confederation—horror-struck, as may be imagined, at its auxiliary Brother of the Sun and Moon and his performances—is weltering in violently impotent spasms into deeper and ever deeper wretchedness, Friedrich sometimes thinking of a Burlesque Poem on the subject;—though the Russian successes, and the Austrian grudgings and gloomings, are rising on him as a very serious consideration. "Is there no method, then, of allowing Russia to prosecute its Turk War in spite of Austria and its umbrages?" thinks Friedrich ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... said he, "I know it is an age of burlesque. But let us spare the sacraments, and ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... most unlucky dexterity, mixes the grand and the burlesque together; the violation of faith, sir, says Cassius, lies at the door of the Rhodians by reite-rated acts of perfidy.—The iron grate fell down, crushed those under it to death, and catched the rest as in a trap.—When the Xanthians heard the military shout, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... cravat added to the martial appearance of this six-foot mystery, with eyes of jet and Italian fervor. The amplitude of his pleated trousers, which allowed only the tips of his boots to be seen, revealed his faithfulness to the fashions of his own land. There was something really burlesque to a romantic woman in the striking contrast no one could fail to remark between the captain and the count, the little Pole with his pinched face and ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... to prove that an impugner of algebra could attempt ridicule. He was, in 1803, editor of a periodical The Gentleman's Monthly Miscellany, which lasted a few months.[474] To this, among other things, he contributed the following, in burlesque of the use made of 0, to which he objected.[475] The imitation of Rabelais, a writer {209} in whom he delighted, is good: to those who have never dipped, it may give such a notion as they would not easily get elsewhere. The point of the satire is not so good. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Boucicault; by the resuscitation of the spectacle play, with its lavish tinsel and calcium glare and its multitudinous nymphs; by the opera bouffe, with its frequent licentious ribaldry; by the music-hall comedian, with his vulgar realism; and by the idiotic burlesque; with its futile babble and its big-limbed, half-naked girls. Nevertheless there are just as good actors now living as have ever lived, and there is just as fine a sense of dramatic art in the community as ever existed in any of "the palmy days"; only, what was ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... if a Sir Launcelot had appeared in fiction one or two generations earlier, had the fact been recognised (which is not indubitable) that he bore the name of the most celebrated knight of later Arthurian romance, he would have been nothing but a burlesque figure. But in 1760, literary taste was changing. Romanticism in literature had begun to come to the front again, as Smollett had already shown by his romantic leanings in Count Fathom. With it there came interest in the Middle ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... and preparing for wider fields. Then he acted the rollicking Irishman to perfection; the real live Yankee, with his genuine mannerisms and dialect, with proper spirit and without ridiculous exaggeration, and the Negro, so open to burlesque. The special charm of his acting in those characters was his artistic execution. He never stooped to vulgarities, his humor was quaint and spontaneous, and the entire absence of apparent effort in his performance gave his audience a most favorable impression ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... be on the same street car. A drizzle softens the windows. She sits with her pasty face and her dull, little eyes looking out at the dripping street. Her cotton suit curls at the lapels. The ends of her shoes curl like a pair of burlesque Oriental slippers. She holds her hands in her lap. Red, thick fingers that whisper tiredly, "We have worked," lie in ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... cannot trust a man who, unless he is intending a burlesque, can bring himself to write like that. Crabbe not only brings himself to it, but rejoices and luxuriates in the style. The tale from which that last luckless distich is taken, "The Elder Brother," is full of pathos and about equally full of false notes. If we turn to a far different ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... received my first ignorance of his plagiaristic tendency as if I had known all about it: and years after Aytoun had (as I was told) avenged justice by that cleverest of spasmodic poetries, "Firmilian, by Percy Jones"—a burlesque on Alexander Smith, and a book which the world has too willingly let die. Let no one, however, after all this, fancy that I am unaware of Alexander Smith's true merit. He very neatly fitted into his ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... stage: Jaques had been a player where he ought to have been a true man. The whole of his account of human life is contradicted and exposed at once by the entrance, the very moment when he has finished his wicked burlesque, of Orlando, the young master, carrying Adam, the old servant, upon his back. The song that immediately follows, sings true: "Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly." But between the all of Jaques and the most of the song, there is just the ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... new belles lettres of that new time, to such grave and politic uses was first suggested; he is the genius of that company, that even in such frolic mad-cap games as Love's Labour's Lost, and the Taming of the Shrew, and Midsummer Night's Dream, could contrive to insert, not the broad farce and burlesque on the old pretentious wordy philosophy and pompous rhetoric it was meant to dethrone only, and not the most perilous secret of the new philosophy, only, but the secret of its organ of delivery and tradition, the secret of its use of letters, the secret of its ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... ancestors more than these blind encounters; even kings took part at these burlesque representations. At Mid-Lent annually they attended with their court at the Quinze-Vingts, in Paris, in order to see blindfold persons, armed from head to foot, fighting with a lance or stick. This amusement was quite sufficient to attract all Paris. In 1425, ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... what was really beautiful and charming in the scene. I thought most of the priests, very good and gentle looking,—and in all respects they were much pleasanter to the eye than the monks of the Carmelite order, who, in shaving their heads to simulate the Saviour's crown of thorns, produce a hideous burlesque of the divine humiliation. Yet many even of these had earnest and sincere faces, and I could not think so much as I ought, perhaps, of their idle life, and the fleas in their coarse brown cloaks. I confess, indeed, I felt ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... into which, in all probability, he must himself so soon descend; think how unpleasant a situation! He bore it all with a firm and unaffected countenance. This grave scene was fully contrasted by the burlesque Duke {82} of Newcastle. He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung himself back in a stall, the archbishop hovering over him with a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of his hypocrisy, ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... such attempts, are totally unlike the original, which the writers imagined they were turning into ridicule. There is not similarity enough for burlesque, or even for caricature. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... beauty; won for them the cordial and unanimous praise of the press throughout the Union, and frequent laudatory notices from the English journals. Reminiscences of early days; expositions of the Ludicrous and the Burlesque, in amusing Anecdote; Limnings from Nature; and 'Records of the Heart,' were among their prominent characteristics. It is not too much to say of the other Prose Writings which the volume will contain, that although of a somewhat different character, they are in no respect ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... observed to Barty that his father often made jokes worthy of Tom Hood, to which Barty agreed hastily, as he did not know who Tom Hood was, and besides was flirting in a mild manner with Miss Fanny Wopples, a pretty girl, who did the burlesque business. ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... the odd medley in the suburbs of Paris. Retired opera-singers, Bohemians who have made a fortune by chance, superseded politicians, officials who have perfected libeling into an art, and reformed female celebrities of the dancing-gardens and burlesque theatres. But, as society is constituted, it would have earned him the reputation of a tyrant if he had refused her receiving and returning the visits of the venerable Marchioness de Latour-Lagneau, to whom the Bishop always accorded an hour during his pastoral ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... from no restraint in consequence of his marriage. He is adored by a certain class of burlesque actresses. He flatters them by adoring himself. He owns a small house in Belgravia, but he frequently lives elsewhere. No pigeon-shooting matches, and few poker parties, amongst a certain set, are complete without him. Having ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... of the dining-room door, and realises that his scent is not so good as he had thought it. He bids his hostess and the COMTESSE good-bye in a burlesque whisper and tiptoes off to safer places. JOHN having gone out with him, MAGGIE can no longer avoid the COMTESSE's reproachful eye. That much injured lady advances upon her with ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... 1728, and at once took London by storm. A letter of Mrs. Pendarves, dated January 19, but evidently continued later, tells us that she went to a rehearsal of Siroe: "I like it extremely, but the taste of the town is so depraved, that nothing will be approved of but the burlesque. The Beggar's Opera entirely triumphs over the Italian one." Even Mrs. Pendarves could not help enjoying it, once she ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
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