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More "Comic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... music,—among these the very artistic one of Pagsanhan belonging to the escribano, Don Miguel Guevara,—swarms of Chinamen and Indians, who, with the curiosity of the former and the piety of the latter, awaited anxiously the day on which was to be celebrated the comic-mimic-lyric-lightning-change-dramatic spectacle, for which a large and spacious theater had been erected in ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Seasons; and includes the book-plate of Lord Prestongrange,—that "Lord Advocate Grant" of whom you may read in the Kidnapped of "R.L.S." Here again is an edition (the first) of Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Comic Writers, annotated copiously in MS. by a contemporary reader who was certainly not an admirer; and upon whom W.H.'s cockneyisms, Gallicisms, egotisms, and "ille-isms" generally, seem to have had the ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... child. You've retained from your old life certain conceptions of what's the thing which are—you'll forgive me for saying it—just a little like those of the comic papers. ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... do you know"—thus Sally, after many other matters had been disposed of—"there has been such an awful row between Tishy and her mother about Julius Bradshaw?" Sally is serious and impressed; doesn't see the comic side, if there is one. Her mother felt that if there was to be a volley of indignation discharged at Mrs. Wilson for her share in the row, she herself, as belonging to the class mother, might feel called on to support her, and was ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the whole action of the play. It was, therefore, to be a scene of which people did not easily tire and that remained interesting, unobtrusive and formally neat. To find such a scene it is necessary to refer back to days when the Comic and the Tragic scenes were architectural and permanent. This I did and, taking Palladio's magnificent scene at Vicenza, by a shameless process of reductio ad absurdum, evolved the scene that is now in use at Hammersmith. Palladio and Gay ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... weakness but baseness. Or rather, it would be baseness in a voluntary soldier; in the Germans it means only that the war is not their own war; that they are fighting as slaves, not as free men. The idea that we could ever live under the rule of these people is merely comic. To do them justice, they do not now entertain the idea, though they have dallied with ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... a mode of expression. Moreover, tragedy was the parent of comedy,—and since the Jews had not the first, we should hardly expect them to produce the last. It is not difficult to perceive how the Greeks could convert their goat to dramatic, or even to comic purposes; but the Jews could not deal so ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... of his presence and conversation, the invasion of his genius. Inexhaustible in arguments, matchless in the adaptation of ideas to circumstances, the most amiable and most imperious of interlocutors, stentorian and mild, tragic and comic by turns, the most eloquent of sophists and the most irresistible of fascinators, as soon as he meets a man face to face, he wins him, conquers him, and obtains the mastery.[51117] In effect, after seeing the Pope for six days, Napoleon obtains by persuasion what he could not obtain ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... amused them to see Wilfred sitting underneath. They simply roared every time he pushed up the keys. It was as good as a comic song. It really is tiresome, though, to have a piano like that at the school. John Crosby, the stonemason's little boy, sings very nicely, and I went so wrong in playing his accompaniment, through losing so many of the notes, that he finished half a verse ahead of me. I apologized ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... extravagance of imagery (though that is very Shakespearean), but a jagged energy in the very spelling. Say "chats" and "chiens" and it is not the same. Perhaps the old national genius has survived the urban enslavement most spiritedly in our comic songs, admired by all men of travel and continental culture, by Mr. George Moore as by Mr. Belloc. One (to which I am much ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... evidence the West India planters had been by no means spared. Cruel stories had been hastily and lightly told against them. Invidious comparisons had been made to their detriment. But it was well known, that one of our best comic writers, when he wished to show benevolence in its fairest colours, had personified it in the character of the West Indian. He wished the slave might become as secure as the apprentice in this country: but it was necessary that the alarms concerning the abolition ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... eager defense of her friend, and prevented the indignant words which were bubbling to Hester's lips, a gay voice was heard singing a comic song in the passage, the play-room door was flung open with a bang, and Miss Forest entered the room with a small girl seated on ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... only Scot who has lost his kilt in the war. One of the Royal Engineers gives a comic picture of a Highlander who appears to have lost nearly every article of clothing he left home in. When last seen by this letter writer he was resplendent in a Guardsman's tunic, the red breeches of a Frenchman, a pair of Belgian infantry ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... article proceeds; always in a tone of comic good-temper, but pointing to a very real grievance and point of dispute; and helping the reader to realise the long friction which went on, and finally resulted in the unanimity with which publishers and editors turned against Balzac after his famous lawsuit, and showed a vindictive ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... comic ditty of a convivial order. She put into it much vivacity, appealing to the audience to join in the chorus with a pleading, "Now all together, boys." She had tripping steps and dainty kicks that went well with ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... nonsense!" said Rosa, deliberately tearing the bold "geant" to pieces down to the bare stem, "unless he meant to be comic, and intimate that the gazer was so rash as to come too near the bush, and ran a thorn into ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... entertained Franklin, in the highest degree, with the literary gossip of London, and probably excited in his mind an intense desire to visit those scenes, which he himself was so calculated to enjoy and to embellish. On the journey he wrote the following comic letter to his wife. He had been disappointed in not receiving a line from her ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... Henrietta were momentarily united in their common amazement at the genuineness of this sorrow and to both there was something comic in the picture of the elderly Caroline, suffering from a chill and bemoaning the loss of an evening's pleasure. Henrietta cast a look of scornful surprise at her Aunt Sophia. Was the Battys' ball a matter for a broken heart? Rose said consolingly, 'It isn't till after Christmas. ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... more of the elements of comedy than anything else, and it is his own fault if he does not get off lightly. But if he cuts up rough, tries to strike or kick his drivers or tormentors, or if he goes in for a course of sulks, and flops himself down, refusing to be driven, then the comic element disappears from the scene. Out come the sjamboks, and he is treated precisely as a vicious or sulky horse would be treated under similar circumstances. As a rule, it does not take long to bring ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... come to this? Then, as now, nothing so common as that such mischances of marriage, heard of by the world, and the rather if published by the sufferers or one of them, should be received only as excellent amusement for people round about. It is as if the one thing intrinsically and unceasingly comic in the world, for most people, were the fact that it consists of man and woman, as if the institution on which human society is built and by which the succession of earth's generations is maintained, were the one only ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... looked so deplorably miserable, and at the same time so comic, that it was impossible to avoid smiling, and as he saw ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... succeeded character, comic and ridiculous like the bailiff and Grenicheux, imposing and winsome like the marquis and Germaine. The audience laughed heartily at the slap delivered by Gaspard and intended for the coward Grenicheux, which was ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... weekly comic paper, pointing to an article on one of its pages. Just as the visitors were coming in, Lebedeff, wishing to ingratiate himself with the great lady, had pulled this paper from his pocket, and presented it to her, indicating a few columns marked ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... paper in New York, the Courier des Etats-Unis, published the following instance of brave self-sacrifice by a Belgian comic singer named Martens, who at one time was in this country, and gave entertainments in the "Empire City." The scene in which he figures here as the hero is laid in Bucharest, the half-oriental capital of Wallachia, at the farther end ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... died in his thirty-fourth, and the queen in her seventieth year.—In a subject, her majesty's unseasonable love might have formed a comic, instead ...
— The Earl of Essex • Henry Jones
... Congreve's, Wycherley's, Vanbrugh's, Gibber's, or any Dramatic Works of the more modern Macklin, Garrick, Foote, Colman, or Sheridan. A good copy too of Moliere, in French, I much want. Any other good dramatic authors in that language I want also; but comic authors chiefly, though I should wish to have Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire too. I am in no hurry for all, or any of these, but if you accidentally meet with them ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Mr. CAINE'S work would be the better for a certain amount of condensation, but this is the only occasion on which he has really lost control of his pen. He has had the unfortunate idea of writing a comic Arabian Nights in close imitation of the style of the original translation, even to the insertion of short poems at every possible opportunity. Now, this is one of those ideas which at first blush would seem to contain all the elements of delightful humour; but it has the deadly flaw that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... a laughable side, even to the grimmest events, the comic element was supplied in this case by our professors of languages, drawing, and so forth, who had not dared to go back into Paris after leaving it on the 28th, on account of the fighting. When they had made up their minds to return on the 29th, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... sure that I agree that that's Hardy's philosophy. It's fair enough to say that Hardy's stories, and still more his poems, paint chiefly the gloomy and hopeless situations in life, just as Mark Twain and Aristophanes painted the comic ones. But Mark Twain was very far from thinking the world was a joke, and I doubt whether Hardy regards it at heart ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... themselves deserve. To a truly philosophic ken, there is no such thing as a trifle; the ridiculous is but skin-deep, papillae on the surface of society; cut a little deeper, you will find the veins and arteries of wisdom. Therefore will a sober man not deride the notion that comic almanacs, comic Latin grammars, comic hand-books of sciences and arts, and the great prevalence of comicality in popular views taken of life and of death, of incident and of character, of evil and of good, are, in reality, signs of the times. These ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... barrenness, insanity, infirmity, or misconduct of the first spouse. The temptation of a second dowry is still, however, operative with men of certain high castes in which bridegrooms require to be paid for. The writer well remembers the pitiful comic tale of a struggling brahman student of Bengal, whose home had been made unhappy by the advent of two stepmothers in succession alongside of his own mother. The young man did not blame his father, for his father disapproved of polygamy, ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... silver river will be quite content to reflect the glorious monuments of the past for some little time longer. The river, no doubt, could tell us a deal about the chances and changes of the mortals that lived on its banks; we have seen it reflect so many events, joyous, tragic, even comic. On the whole it wears a thoroughly contented look on its shining countenance—the look of one who knows he is thoroughly appreciated. And knowing this, the river has put up with all manner of trammels ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... venom, then strapping his spear to his hand, he encounters them boldly alone. The courtiers hide "like frightened little girls", and the king betakes him to a "narrow shelter", an euphemism evidently of Saxo's, for the scene is comic. The king comes forth when the hero is victorious, and laughing at his hairy legs, nick-names him Shaggy-breech, and bids him to the feast. Ragnar fetches up his comrades, and apparently seeks out the ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... was M. Baffo translated it in a whisper. Surprised at my knowledge, she rose from her chair to get a valuable gold watch and presented to my master, who, not knowing how to express his deep gratitude, treated us to the most comic scene. My mother, in order to save him from the difficulty of paying her a compliment, offered him her cheek. He had only to give her a couple of kisses, the easiest and the most innocent thing in good ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... any. But who the devil is Matthew of Westminster? You are as familiar with these antiquated monastics, as Swedenborg, or, as his followers affect to call him, the Baron, with his invisibles. But you have raised a very comic effect out of the true narrative of Matthew of Westminster. 'Tis surprising with how little addition you have been able to convert with so little alteration his incidents, meant for terror, into circumstances and food for the spleen. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... mimicry, and are acute in the observation of anything that appears to them absurd or ludicrous, the white man often becomes the object of their jests or quizzing. I have heard songs of this kind sung at the dances in a kind of comic medley, where different speakers take up parts during the breaks in the song, and where a sentence or two of English is aptly introduced, or a quotation made from some native dialect, other than that of the ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... Mr. Buckstone's management, comedy and farce were chiefly performed. The "Adelphi Theatre," in the Strand, near Southampton Street, was rebuilt in 1858, when it had for a quarter of a century been celebrated for melodramas, and for the attractiveness of its comic actors. The "Lyceum Theatre," or "English Opera House," at the corner of Wellington Street, Strand, was built in 1834 as an English opera-house, but its fortunes were fluctuating, and the performances not of a definite kind. This ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... music of Mendelssohn's comic opera "The Wedding of Camacho" given by Theodore Thomas, ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... manner. Dorfling put Schrotter on his right hand, and Wilhelm and Paul on his left; near Schrotter was Barinskoi and a friend of Dorfling's, named Mayboorn. This man was, like Dorfling, a Rhinelander, he combined a successful career as a writer of comic verses with a confirmed pessimism. When he had written one of his merriest couplets, he would stop his work and sigh with Dorfling over the tragedy of life. The papers treated his farces as rubbish, but the public ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... narratives of the return of spirits to earth have been accompanied by circumstances somewhat comic, it does not militate against the truth of the thing; since for one recital imprudently embellished by uncertain circumstances, there are a thousand written sensibly and seriously, and in a ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... flames, and sometimes hideous yellings and noises in imitation of the howlings and cries of wretched souls tormented by relentless demons. From this yawning cave the devils constantly ascended to delight the spectators and afford comic relief to the more serious drama. The three stages were not always used. Archdeacon Rogers, who died in 1595, left an account of the Chester play which he himself saw, and he wrote that the stage was a high scaffold with two rooms, a higher and a lower, upon four wheels. ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... and obscures ulterior interests. This tendency to promote dissoluteness is the most serious charge which Plato brings against the arts. After referring to the unseemly hilarity to which men are incited by the comic stage, he adds: ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... beginner—knew little of the trials and struggles of the ordinary student. Almost 'a royal road' was opened for him. So soon as he could draw and colour decently, patrons were ready for him. Mrs. Jordan sat—now as the Comic Muse—now as Hippolyte; a 'lady of quality' was depicted as a Bacchante. Then came portraits of the Duke and Duchess of York, the Prince of Wales, and the Duke of Clarence. He lived in Charles Street, close to Carlton House, and wrote himself 'Portrait painter to ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... King On Tuesdays at Tom's does appear, And when he does talk or does sing, To him ne'er a one can come near. For he talks with such ease and such grace, That all charm'd to attention we sit, And he sings with so comic a face That our sides are ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... Though he was naturally gay, even jovial, he was apt to give himself too important and pompous an air. He usually kept his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and only took them out to settle his eye-glasses on his nose, with a movement that was half comic, and which announced the coming of a keen observation or some victorious argument. His gestures, his loquacity, his innocent self-assertion, proclaimed the provincial lawyer. These slight defects ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... to exhibit many fine horses, and he had no reason to feel called upon to talk about anything more serious to a stranger at a house party. But it was the manner of the man, his whole personality. For Freddie was a man of fashion, with all the exaggerated and farcical mannerisms of the dandy of the comic papers. He wore a conspicuous and foppish costume, and posed with a little cane; he cultivated a waving pompadour, and his silky moustache and beard were carefully trimmed to points, and kept sharp by his active ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... go outside the field of general news. They go to the dazzling levels of society, to scandal and crime, to sports, pictures, actresses, advice to the lovelorn, highschool notes, women's pages, buyer's pages, cooking receipts, chess, whist, gardening, comic strips, thundering partisanship, not because publishers and editors are interested in everything but news, but because they have to find some way of holding on to that alleged host of passionately interested readers, who are supposed by some critics of the press ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... Socrates only, together with Aristophanes and Agathon, remained awake, and that, while he continued to drink with them out of a large goblet, he compelled them, though most reluctantly, to admit that it was the business of one and the same genius to excel in tragic and comic poetry, or that the tragic poet ought, at the same time, to contain within himself the powers of comedy. [1] Now, as this was directly repugnant to the entire theory of the ancient critics, and contrary to all their experience, it is evident ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... is hardly too much to say that this quality had been almost dormant—a sleeping beauty among the lively bevies of that literature's graces—ever since the Middle Ages, with some touches of waking—hardly more than motions in a dream—at the Renaissance. The comic Phantasy had been wakeful and active enough; the graver and more serious tragic Imagination had been, though with some limitations, busy at times. But this third sister—Our Lady of Dreams, one might call ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... were called into action in the primitive popular carnival, the comic dance or -satura-,(5) which beyond doubt reached back to a period anterior to the separation of the stocks. On such occasions song would never be wanting; and the circumstances under which such pastimes were exhibited, chiefly at public festivals and marriages, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... throw a mingled look of entreaty and menace across the table, when half-a-dozen others, rightly judging from the Doctor's tone and serio-comic expression, that his malady had many more symptoms of fun than suffering about it, called ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... atmosphere, the new conditions, do, however, make an immense superficial difference between the humour even of Mr. Bret Harte and that of English writers. His fun is derived from the vagaries of huge, rough people, with the comic cruelty of the old Danes, and with the unexpected tenderness of a sentimental time. The characters of the great Texan and Californian drama are like our hackneyed friends, the Vikings, with a touch, if we may use the term, of spooniness. Their humour is often nothing ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... idea of men of modern times, however, the grotesque plays an enormous part. It is found everywhere; on the one hand it creates the abnormal and the horrible, on the other the comic and the burlesque. It fastens upon religion a thousand original superstitions, upon poetry a thousand picturesque fancies. It is the grotesque which scatters lavishly, in air, water, earth, fire, those ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... desire to laugh. And she did laugh, loudly and unnaturally—laughed and pointed a shaking forefinger into the man's face: "You fool!" she screamed, hysterically, "you fool! I'm not afraid of you! You're not real! You can't be real! You remind me of comic opera!" ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... a comic poet, and a minute observer of manners and circumstances, that Chaucer excels. In serious and moral poetry he is frequently languid and diffuse, but he springs like Antaeus from the earth when his subject changes to coarse satire or merry narrative' ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... and I rode on. Rode on? I was dragged on by four stout horses through the village to the mountains, for in my heart I was calling to my mother, wishing that her gentle warnings had turned me back before I heard the voice of doom sounding from the depths of Mr. Pound; before I had seen the comic tragedy enacted by Squire Crumple; above all, before the man who saw through the top of his hat had uttered his enigmas ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... incidentally, the existence of a sort of comic spirit in these works which relieves the tragedy of the situations. In spite of their dark pessimism, the actors in these little dramas have an appearance of gaiety which deceives. It is by this popular humor that Gorky is the ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... fandango, and the extraordinary lightness which had become the physical property of every object in the new planet made the dancers bound to a height of thirty feet or more into the air, considerably above the tops of the trees. What followed was irresistibly comic. Four sturdy majos had dragged along with them an old man incapable of resistance, and compelled him, nolens volens, to join in the dance; and as they all kept appearing and disappearing above the bank of foliage, their grotesque attitudes, combined with the pitiable countenance of ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... no teeth, but a long mouth like a pipe; so you can be sure they eat only the smallest sea-creatures. To add to his odd look, the Seahorse moves his eyes in a comic fashion. One eye may roll round and look at you, while the other ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... had lighted his pipe, and as he gave two or three tremendous puffs he screwed his face into a profoundly serio- comic expression and winked his right eye ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... men and their motives after he reached maturity, we have but to read this drama; drama it is, but with what other character who shall say? For, like the world's pageant, it is neither tragedy nor comedy, but a tragi-comic history, in which the intrigues of amorous men and light-o'-loves and the brokerage of panders are mingled with the deliberations of sages and the strife and the death ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... at the appointed hour, the guests like ghosts flit to a gloomy gas-lit chamber. They are of various speech and race, preoccupied with divers interests and cares. Necessity and the waiter drive them all to a sepulchral syssition, whereof the cook too frequently deserves that old Greek comic epithet—hadou mageiros—cook of the Inferno. And just as we are told that in Charon's boat we shall not be allowed to pick our society, so here we must accept what fellowship the fates provide. An English spinster retailing paradoxes culled to-day from Ruskin's handbooks; an American ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... rebuke, but the odd manner in which they were said and the humorous twinkle in the minister's eyes did not well agree. He waited a moment for her answer, still holding her hand and looking down into her face with a serio-comic expression quite unlike a clergyman, until Dexie answered, in a ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... come says one of them, when those that suffer for their consciences and honour may be rewarded. Nobody who heard this from the stage in the days of Charles II. could feel that the day had come. Its comic Irishman kept the Committee on the stage, and in Queen Anne's time the thorough Tory still relished the stage caricature of the maintainers of the Commonwealth in Mr. Day with his greed, hypocrisy, and private incontinence; his wife, who had been cookmaid to a gentleman, but ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... have now to see what will become of a fat and prosperous country with a semi-obsolete fleet and a comic ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... present day,—a native of the picturesque village in which this anti-geologist resides,—describes in a recent work, with the enthusiasm of the poet, the noble mountains which rise around it. I know not, however, whether my admiration of the passage was not in some degree dashed by a few comic notions suggestive of an "imaginary conversation," in the style of Landor, between this popular author and his anti-geologic townsman, on the merits of hills in general, and in especial on the claims of those which encircle Comrie "as the mountains are round about Jerusalem." ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... strengthen them for the return journey. Ron's knowledge of the native dialect was so slight that he fell back upon the more stately phraseology of the early English poets, introducing a strange Scotch term now and again with irresistibly comic effect. ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... says: but when the Dialogue grew hot, then she could not help trying to get her hands free; and that, as the Previlles told her, sufficiently told her when Action should begin, and not till then, whether in Grave or Comic. This anecdote (told by Contat herself) has almost an exact counterpart in Mrs. Siddons' practice: who recited even Lear's Curse with her hands and arms close to her side like an Egyptian Figure, and Sir ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... unfailing verve and variety of its action: in the fine open-air atmosphere of the scenes, the sense of the stir of life they convey: most of all, in an indescribable manliness or humanness which bespeaks the true comic force—something of that same comic view that one detects in Shakspere and Moliere and Cervantes. It means an open-eyed acceptance of life, a realization of its seriousness yet with the will to take it with a smile: a large tolerancy which ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... Mercutio ... Sir Toby ... Cordelia ... Protean. Sir John Falstaff, who appears in Shakspere's King Henry IV, and again in the Merry Wives of Windsor, is generally regarded as the greatest comic character in literature.... Mercutio, the friend of Romeo; one of the most marvellous of all Shakspere's gentlemen. He is the Hotspur of comedy, and his taking off by Tybalt "eclipsed the gaiety of nations."... Sir Toby Belch is the genial character in Twelfth Night, fond of singing and drinking, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with which his age impregnated all thought and expression; but his leading characteristic, like that of his great namesake, Samuel, was a hearty common sense, which fitted him rather to be a great critic than a great poet. He had a keen and ready sense of the comic in situation, but no humor. Fletcher was as much a poet as fancy and sentiment can make any man. Only Shakspeare wrote comedy and tragedy with truly ideal elevation and breadth. Only Shakspeare had that true sense of humor which, like the universal solvent sought by the alchemists, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... with hem-stitched bands, poured in upon him. He burned with angry blushes when his mother, smiling meaningly, passed them over to him. "Put them away, mother; I don't want them," he would growl out, in a distress that was half comic and half pathetic. He would never taste of the tempting viands which were brought to him. "How you act, Thomas!" his mother would say. She was secretly elated by these feminine libations upon the altar of her son. They did not ...
— Evelina's Garden • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... into ecclesiastical erections in ages too little critical to distinguish between what the workman had purposed doing and what he had done, might come to be regarded, in a less earnest but more knowing age, as precedents for the introduction of the intentionally comic and grotesque. Innocent accidental monkeys in towels may have thus served to usher into serious neighborhoods monkeys in towels that were such with ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... it in four words. In them one would say that it is set forth. There was in London at that time popular a song, a comic, vulgar song of the 'Alls, 'The Cat Came Back'. You 'ave 'eard it? Yes? I 'eard it myself, and without emotion. It had no sinister warning for me. It did not strike me as omen. Yet, in those four ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... laughed. Kendrick's indignation was quite too comic, considering his own reputation. To this argument, those who held to the proprietor ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... The idea of anybody lending that sum of money, except on the very best security, was in itself extremely comic. ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... Scene 2. Enter Comic Villain. "I am just released from prison and must soon meet my wife." (Swears and smashes ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... friend, began to publish Salmagundi, a magazine containing humorous articles on the social life of New York. This became so popular that twenty numbers were issued. Having found so much of interest in the life of his native city, Irving next wrote a comic History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, dealing with the early period when the city was ruled by the Dutch. The novel way in which this work was announced would do credit to the most clever advertiser. About six weeks before the book was published, appeared ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... time to lower respect for woman. The bill-boards and the picture post-cards, the penny-in-the-slot machines and the motion pictures, the exhibits of quack doctors, vaudeville performances, many so-called comic operas, popular new songs, the dress of women approved by modern fashion,—these all help at times to prepare young people to fall before the special temptations that beset all commercial recreation centers. Especially dangerous are the ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... himself, and really commanded it by his striking propriety of manner. He was, as a dear friend once remarked, a "God-made" gentleman, untainted with the slightest approach to any thing like affectation or coxcombry: indeed he ridiculed the latter with much comic effect: and the words "Dandy Jack," would put him out of conceit with any article of apparel that drew forth the remark. He would answer the taunt with a face of grave rebuke, saying, "Bad Mam, bold ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... Inland Voyage. Bob's own disguises rarely got into print, but in Will Low's Chronicle of Friendships there is a photograph of him in his student days, figuring as a sort of brigand of old-fashioned comic opera, that shows he did not from the beginning shirk the obligations he imposed upon others. I remember a huge ring, inherited from his father to whom the Czar had given it for engineering services in Russia, which he kept for formal ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Ralph, in comic petulance; "you're the original laddie with a bucket of cold water. As we figured it out last night, we shall be far away from here on our way to the Esmeralda mine before Ramon and the real soldiers of fortune whose fame we have appropriated are ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... his back to the fire, and a look of concern thrown into his comic little mug, and his eyebrows raised, experienced a very pleasurable glow ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... character can never be a refined judge; never what the comic poet calls elegans formarum spectator. The excellence and force of a composition must always he imperfectly estimated from its effect on the minds of any, except we know the temper and character of those minds. The most powerful effects of poetry ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... famous comic poet and dramatist, author of the "Frogs," "Clouds," "Birds," and many other works, of which only eleven are now extant; born about 451 B.C., died not later ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... replied Craig with a gravely comic look, shrewdly adding, 'ask Mrs. Mavor'; and so the League Minstrel and Dramatic Company became an established fact, and proved, as Craig afterwards told me, 'a great means of grace ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... great store of gold concealed in a pit. Kallias now acted most cruelly and wickedly. He took the gold, and killed the poor man for fear that he should tell it to the others. It is said that ever afterwards the descendants of Kallias were jeered at by the comic poets, as being of the family of the man who found the ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... character, in the different phases of life, from the horrible to the grotesque, the grand to the comic, attest the versatility of his powers; and, whatever faults may be found by critics, the public will heartily render their quota of admiration to his magic touch, his rich and facile rendering of almost every thought that stirs, or lies yet ...
— The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete • Anonymous
... lectures, or little tiresome tracts, or sloppy yarns about "Joe Tomkins's Temperance Turkey," or effusive harangues by half-educated buffoons, will ever do any good, he must run along the ranks of my procession with me, and I reckon he may learn something. The comic personages who deal with the subject are cruelly useless; the very notion of making jokes in presence of such a mighty living Terror seems desolating to the mind; I could not joke over the pest of drink, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... bears one along like a fast-flowing river. And it is not without humour, a calm, detached humour, which, as the critic Bolinsky puts it, is not there merely "because Gogol has a tendency to see the comic in everything, but because it is true ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... stinging emphasis into rich and sonorous amplification. The analysis of Iago, and the analysis of the Weird Sisters, indicate, perhaps, the extremes of his manner. Throughout the volumes, whether the subject be comic or tragic, humorous or sublime, there is never any lack of verbal felicities. These seem to grow spontaneously in the soil of his mind; and there is no American writer whose style is more wholly free from worn and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... answered Fragoso, with comic gravity, "it appears that there is—or rather formerly was—a trunk of 'turuma,' which every year at the same time descended the Rio Negro, stopping several days at Manaos, and going on into Para, halting ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... boy of France who did the work, and the sight of him put the American into a friendly humor. He was everywhere, the little pantalon rouge, streaming the walks, dotting the cafes with red, and every wee piou-piou under the great big epaulettes of a great big comic opera generalissimo. His huge military coat fitted him awkwardly, and the crimson pompon cocked on his little fighting kepi was more often awry, and he could not by any effort achieve a strut. He was only bon enfant, this unconquered soldier lad; so ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... the comic picture, all the lights in the theater were turned on and a gentleman stepped on the stage to address ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)
... The comic poets will also occasionally borrow a classical allusion. The following is from Swift's "Description of ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... therefore debauchery is admirable, and because the Mississippi is long, therefore every American is God."*3* Notice, again, how well the defect of 'Paradise Lost' is pointed out: "And I forgive Thee, Milton, those thy comic-dreadful wars Where, armed with gross and inconclusive steel, Immortals smite immortals mortalwise And fill all heaven with folly."*4* Few better things have been said of Langland than this, — "That ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... could hardly have explained, master though he was of explanation of the feelings of man. It seemed to him that all the purity, and the beauty, and the whimsical unselfconsciousness, and the touchingness of youth that is divine, appeared in that little, almost comic action of the girl. He loved her for the action, because she was able to perform it just like that. And something in him, suddenly adored youth in a way that seemed ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... {206}[252] [A comic singer in the opera buffa. The Italians, however, distinguish the buffo cantante, which requires good singing, from the buffo comico, in which ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... quoted the charming lines of the poet, where the king of the pygmies is measured by the same standard. We have all read in Milton of the spear that was like "the mast of some tall admiral", but these images are surely likely to come to the comic poet originally. The subject is before him. He is turning it in a thousand ways. He is full of it. The figure suggests itself naturally to him, and comes out of his subject, as in that wonderful passage, when Gulliver's box having been dropped ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... far as to threaten to throw me overboard, and but for the firmness of Captain Judkins,{286} probably would have (under the inspiration of slavery and brandy) attempted to put their threats into execution. I have no space to describe this scene, although its tragic and comic peculiarities are well worth describing. An end was put to the melee, by the captain's calling the ship's company to put the salt water mobocrats in irons. At this determined order, the gentlemen of the lash scampered, and for the rest ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... with philosophic detachment. "Now I couldn't feel the slightest interest in a man in comic opera. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... mental insanities, strictly speaking, are, nevertheless, mental deformities, and their unfortunate victims are dwellers in the borderlands. Mild forms of these types of degeneration are very abundant. The effeminate, cigarette-smoking, soda-drinking young man of the comic weeklies, and the loud, horsy, slang-using, vulgar, masculine young woman are ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... the fire that night, under the leafy branches of the forest, and smoked their pipes in concert, while Wabisca busied herself in clearing away the remnants of their evening meal, they waxed communicative, and stories, pathetic, comic, and tragic, followed ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... if you had married him he would be better, and that's more to the purpose. Lionel is as idiotic as a comic song, but you have cleverness ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... wife of a Sir Everard Marshall, a comic scientist in perpetual flight from his overwhelming spouse, is one of the sort that finds a new religion every few months and is now in the first fast furious throes of her latest, which is some form of psychomania, whereof the high ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... piano failed to produce the full effect, Daniel helped out with his crow-like voice. It was the uncanny energy of expression that prevented his singing from having a comic effect. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... he had heard of the lady from an artist friend who had originally seen her at a music-hall, and had persuaded her to come and sit to him. The comic haste and relief with which he had now transferred her to Bentley lost nothing in Bentley's telling. Of course she had "a fiend of a temper." "Wish you joy of her! Oh, don't ask me about her! You'll find out for yourself." "I can manage her," said Uncle ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... in his ill-humored tone. "The grand lady's part, maybe? The deuce, you believe you've got talent then! Why, such a part would utterly do for you, my girl! You're meant for comic ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... to the hospital in a mood of chastened wonder. It did not occur to him to oppose her wish. He knew, of course, that he would have to bear the brunt of the situation: the jokes at the club, the inquiries, the explanations. He saw himself in the comic role of the adopted father, and welcomed it as an expiation. For in his rapid reconstruction of the past he found himself cutting a shabbier figure than he cared to admit. He had always been intolerant of stupid people, and it was his punishment to be convicted of stupidity. As his mind traversed ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... the fact that she couldn't read, run, and ride as much as she liked. A quick temper, sharp tongue, and restless spirit were always getting her into scrapes, and her life was a series of ups and downs, which were both comic and pathetic. But the training she received at Aunt March's was just what she needed, and the thought that she was doing something to support herself made her happy in ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... everything; for, if it were so, then a God could make snow black, and the fire cold, and him that is in a posture of sitting to be upright, and so on the contrary. The brave-speaking Plato pronounceth that God formed the world after his own image; but this smells rank of the old dotages, old comic writers would say; for how did God, casting his eye upon himself, frame this universe? Or how can God be spherical, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... come to see blackguards; but these men were something worse. There is a comic side, more or less appreciable, in all blackguardism—here there was nothing but tragedy—mute, weird tragedy. The quiet in the room was horrible. The thin, haggard, long-haired young man, whose ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... increased the old woman's fury, and her lips were just parting to utter a torrent of angry words, when Jason stepped as lightly as a boy between her and the betrothed lovers, cast a delighted glance at his favorites, and bowing with comic ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... discovery was presently followed by another—that the rudest and most contemptuous personal remark was founded on an ignorant misapprehension of the reviewer's own; while in ridicule of a mere misprint which happened to carry a comic suggestion on the face of ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... there is the secret! Rumours go abroad that the inexhaustible Paisiello, charmed with her performance of his "Nel cor piu non me sento," and his "Io son Lindoro," will produce some new masterpiece to introduce the debutante. Others insist upon it that her forte is the comic, and that Cimarosa is hard at work at another "Matrimonia Segreto." But in the meanwhile there is a check in the diplomacy somewhere. The Cardinal is observed to be out of humour. He has said publicly,—and the words are portentous,—"The silly girl is as mad as her father; ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Colonel said, "Do you know her?" adding, in a most comic way, "Between U. and E., Ladywell, I believe there is a close affinity"—meaning me, you know, by ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... to furnish these readers with amusement at no expense of trouble on their part. Even burlesque writers looked into his book to see where it could be made use of, and those who did not know him were desirous of meeting him at dinner as one likely to feed their comic vein. ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... a Learned Clerk, is the whole plot of a fat, closely-printed book of more than three hundred pages. I hope I have a fairly catholic appreciation of humour; certainly, I can enjoy most things, from MEREDITH to the American coloured comic supplement; but The Flying Inn was too much for me. It cannot have been easy to write, even given useful characters like Lord Ivywood and Captain Dalroy, whose remarks can be made to run into three or four pages; but it is considerably harder to read. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... reading Stobaeus' Anthology as I saunter in the fields: a pretty collection of Greek aphorisms in verse and prose. The bits of Menander and the comic poets are very acceptable. And this is really all I have looked ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... illustrations of visionary and fanciful traits, let the reader reflect on the significance of the comic and of caricature in art. Japanese Netsuke (tiny carvings of exquisite skill representing comical men, women, and children) are famous the world over. Surely, the fancy is the most conspicuous mental characteristic revealed in this branch of Japanese art. In Japanese poetry "a vast ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... reader of his life, and hers, realizes how little return in demonstrative affection she received as the reward for her vast, and continuous lavishment of love. She strikes me, in this, as a strange blend of the comic and the tragic. The world neglected Burton. He almost deserved it; so great a sacrifice as his wife consecrated of her life to him would compensate for the loss of anything. You admire it; but you catch yourself suspecting that this consecration must have been, at ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... hand flew to cover her mouth, and at the comic look of dismay which appeared on her face, Ricky's laugh sounded. A moment later the stranger joined in ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... and read at the present day, is a degree of honour, which, perhaps, not one comic dramatist can wholly boast, except Shakspeare. Exclusive of his, scarcely any of the very best comedies of the best of former bards will now attract an audience: yet the genius of ancient writers ...
— The Dramatist; or Stop Him Who Can! - A Comedy, in Five Acts • Frederick Reynolds
... "since you will be so polite," and giving him her hand she was about to go down, when suddenly withdrawing it, as if recollecting herself, she said, nodding with comic significance toward her sister Julia—"My sister, Mr. English, have you no gallantry ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... nonplussed about finding the opening for what I desire to say to you. You are now referring to my seemingly unchristian treatment of Monsignore Murray? Eh, what?" It seemed to please the Bishop to lay emphasis on the English "Eh, what?" He said it with a comic ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... lay a dwarf. Its ridiculous body was not over four and a half feet long, though the head was larger than that of a normal man. In the old dark ages on Earth this body would have served for the jester of a lord, the comic butt of a king; in more recent times as the prize of a circus side-show. The huge, weighty head with its ugly brooding mask of a face, the child's body below—this was for the brain of Professor Erich Geinst, the solitary German who had ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... Canal or in grotesque amusements. The lash of invasion aroused them from their century-long infancy. The same great artist that for many years had portrayed the simple thoughtlessness of this gay people, showy and light-hearted as a comic-opera chorus, afterwards painted them, knife in hand, attacking the Mamelukes with the agility of monkeys, felling those Egyptian centaurs under their slashes, blackened with the smoke of a hundred battles, or dying ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... couldn't have been; they were perfectly beautiful, and my darling Scrub fretted herself nearly to death after them. I begged almost on my knees that he would leave her one, and he wouldn't." Her eyes are now full of tears. "He is a beast!" says she. This last word seems almost comic, coming ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... as it were, by a wave of emotion. I mention so trifling a matter only to show how responsive I was to literature at an early age. I should perhaps offset this statement by certain other facts which are by no means so flattering. There was a period in my latter boyhood when comic song-books, mostly of the Negro minstrely sort, satisfied my craving for poetic literature. I used to learn the songs by heart and invent and extemporize tunes for them. To this day I can repeat some of ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... to win and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl, &c., and that even if rhyme and those measurements continue to furnish the medium for inferior writers and themes, (especially for persiflage and the comic, as there seems henceforward, to the perfect taste, something inevitably comic in rhyme, merely in itself, and anyhow,) the truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough,) can ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... certain comic relief in this long-distance diagnosing of a "case" by a boy, and yet the tragic fact beneath it all was that Wetherford was dying, a broken and dishonored husband and father, and that his identity must be concealed from his wife and daughter, who were much more deeply ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... have things cheerful here," Al'mah said almost gaily. "Sometimes I have four or five convalescents in here, and they like a little gaiety. I sing them things from comic operas—Offenbach, Sullivan, and the rest; and if they are very sentimentally inclined I sing them good old-fashioned love-songs full of the musician's tricks. How people adore illusions! I've had here an old Natal sergeant, over sixty, and he was as cracked as could be about songs ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... productions from a literary and dramatic point of view, they are by no means devoid of a fair share of shrewd humour and pointed vivacity, and are, moreover, not unimportant contributions, especially when their early date is considered, to the illustration of manners. The low-comic view predominates in most of them, and we meet with occasional grossnesses which, so far as "Jack Juggler" itself is concerned, are the more remarkable when it is recollected that the performance was presented by youths. In none of these ruder specimens ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... Puss, with a comic grin; "The words of truth you have spoken; A name for ourselves we must strive to win At once, now the ice is broken; For one or two doses of catnip tea Have had a wondrous effect ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... the previous year (1847) that Roger went to a concert, where he records how he heard a comic opera called The Alcove, by Offenbach and Deforges: "A little inexperience, but some charming things. Offenbach is a fellow who will go far if the doors of the Opera Comique are not closed against him: he has the gift of melody ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... into debt, and, after having given a paper to a creditor authorizing him to keep the son as a security for his claim, ran away, leaving poor Phil a bond slave. The story involves a great many unexpected incidents, some of which are painful, and some comic. Phil manfully works for a year, cancelling his father's debt, and then escapes. The characters are strongly drawn, and the ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... the fate of all benefactors who make themselves disliked and hated. First the great comic poet Aristophanes, in his comedy called the "Clouds," held him up to ridicule and reproach, and thus prepared the way for his arraignment and trial. He is made to utter a thousand impieties and impertinences. He is made to talk like a man ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... was genuine and comic, partaking of tragedy and despair. Desnoyers was called in; also the guests and the two guides, with servants forming a picturesque and interested background, so that Ringfield suddenly found himself the centre of an admiring, friendly, but ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... comedy called The Brothers. It acts well, but reads ill; though I can distinguish strokes of Mr. Bentley in it. Very few of the characters are marked, and the serious ones have little nature, and the comic ones are rather too much marked; however, the three middle acts diverted ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... poetical." Among the few gondolas passing at the time, there was one at some distance, in which sat two gentlemen, who had the appearance of being English; and, observing them to look our way, Lord Byron putting his arms a-kimbo, said with a sort of comic swagger, "Ah! if you, John Bulls, knew who the two fellows are, now standing up here, I think you would stare!"—I risk mentioning these things, though aware how they may be turned against myself, for the sake of the otherwise indescribable ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... store were over, Dennis wrote to his mother a warm, bright, filial letter, portraying the scene of the day in its comic light, making all manner of fun of himself, that he might hide the fact that he had suffered. But he did not hide it, as a return letter proved, for it was full of sympathy and indignation that her son should be so treated, but also full of praise for his ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... to a friendly greeting from Mr. Howell. The boys knew that "How" was a customary salutation among Indians, but "Howdy" struck them as being comic; Sandy laughed as he turned away his face. Mr. Bryant lingered while the slow-moving oxen plodded their way along the road, and the boys, too, halted to hear what the dark-skinned man had to say. But the Indian—for he was a "civilized" Delaware—was a man of very few words. In answer ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... were true? Nothing of the kind. But they flew to the sudden conclusion that somehow or other the religion of the world was in danger, if Darwinism should prove to be true. And it is very curious to note I wonder how long the world will keep on repeating that serio-comic blunder from the very beginning it has been the same; almost every single step that the world proposes to take in advance is opposed by the constituted religious authorities of the time because they assume at the outset that the theories which they have been holding ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... theosophist once found him hanging from the window pole, but cut him down in the nick of time. I said to the man who cut him down, 'What did you say to one another?' He said, 'We spent the night telling comic stories and laughing a great deal.' This man, torn between sensuality and visionary ambition, was now the most devout of all, and told me that in the middle of the night he could often hear the ringing of the little 'astral bell' whereby Madame ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... of the burning of the Theatre Royal in Sydney, we were favoured with the presence in our midst of artists who rarely, if ever before, had quitted the metropolitan stage. But our "jeune premier" in one sense has eclipsed every darling of the tragic or the comic muse. ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... much to say "on both sides." Many of us would have liked a little less poet-worship, and a little more scrutiny. "The Princess" is dismissed with a line or two of apology—but it is far more, for Dr. Bayne's purpose, than "a serio-comic poem,"—it contains, indirectly, a great deal of self-disclosure. There is something very wrong about M. Taine's way of looking at Mr. Tennyson's domestic sweetness, but he has a glimpse of a truth about the poet and his work. Whatever the worshippers of Mr. Tennyson may say, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... can give; its office is to express—and this is a good deal—a value mechanical and material, but very significant. A reversion of values may constitute a falsehood. Stage actors are sometimes indefinably comic in this way. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... ten young persons, who overwhelmed her with congratulations and compliments. She replied with a slightly tremulous voice, and casting down her eyes with the long, silky eyelashes. Count Ville-Handry stood in the centre of the room, swelling with almost comic happiness; and at every moment, in replying to his friends, used the words, "My wife," like a sweet morsel which he ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... behind this lingering demon begins the dolorous procession of the outcast. Nor have we here the infernal courtliness of the scene as represented at Chartres, the doubtful consideration of an evil spirit gently driving in a nun; it is brutality in all its horror, the lowest violence; the sometimes comic side of these struggles is not to be seen here. At Bourges the myrmidons of the deep work and hit with a will. A devil with a wild beast's muzzle and a drunkard's face in the middle of his fat stomach, is hammering ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... afraid to trust themselves with serious and solemn reflections, run to comedies, in order to laugh away compunction on the distresses they have occasioned, and to find examples of men as immoral as themselves. For very few of our comic performances, as thou knowest, give us good ones.— I answer, however, for myself—yet thou, I think, on recollection, lovest ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... and loosens our hold on it, is the only pain that is really tragic. That which attaches to particular objects is a will that is broken, but not resigned; it exhibits the struggle and inner contradiction of the will and of life itself; and it is comic, be it never so violent. It is like the pain of the miser at the loss of his hoard. Even though pain of the tragic kind proceeds from a single definite object, it does not remain there; it takes the ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... at one Christmas Eve party, and heard six people relate their adventures with spirits, you do not require to hear any more ghost stories. To listen to any further ghost stories after that would be like sitting out two farcical comedies, or taking in two comic journals; the ...
— Told After Supper • Jerome K. Jerome
... characteristics. Calkins defines a sense of humor as "enjoyment of an unessential incongruity.... This incongruity must be, as has been said, an unessential one, else the mood of the observer changes from happiness to unhappiness, and the comic becomes the pathetic. A fall on the ice which seemed to offer only a ludicrous contrast between the dignity and grace of the man erect and the ungainly attitude of the falling figure ceases utterly to be funny when it is ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... remind us of him! I did not mean to go back farther than Mr. Shakspeare, who, as you will all agree, does not understand the elegant and pathetic as well as the moderns. Has he ever approached Belvidera, or Monimia, or Jane Shore; or can you find in his comic female characters the elegance of Congreve?" and the Templar offered snuff to the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... this period the Doctor and his two men appeared on the brow of the hill, looking down in a most complacent manner upon the serio-comic scene that the little basin wherein we were encamped presented. For, indeed, despite the serious aspect of it, there was much that was comical blended with it—in a naked young man who—perfectly drunk, barely able to stand on his feet—was beating the ground with his only loin-cloth, screaming and ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... a habit of repetition quite as marked as Hamlet's may be found in comic persons, e.g. Justice Shallow ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... bit unmanageable, well as you had them in hand. Excellent, too, is the sketch of Dad, though that of Aunt Jane is a trifle too grotesque, and will, perforce, remind those of your readers, who are theatre-goers, of Mr. PENLEY in petticoats, now actually playing "Charley's" irresistibly comic Aunt at the Globe Theatre. But it is all good, and not too good to be true. Likewise, my dear Madame, you have given us two life-like sketches, one of a car-driver with his vicious mare, and the other of Molly's little ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 18, 1893 • Various
... quite wrong about Mrs. Stimpson," Daphne told herself reproachfully, after she had slipped the letter containing bill and cheque into the letter-box in the hall. "She can be kind sometimes, and I've been a little beast to see only the comic side of her! I daresay she won't even wear ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... the Great. Croker's Boswell's Johnson. Hallam's Constitutional History. Warren Hastings. (3d. sewed, 6d. cloth.) The Earl of Chatham (Two Essays). Ranke and Gladstone. Milton and Machiavelli. Lord Bacon. Lord Clive. Lord Byron, and The Comic Dramatists ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... hateful soldier! your hideous satchel makes me sick! it stinks like the belching of onions, whereas this lovable deity has the odour of sweet fruits, of festivals, of the Dionysia, of the harmony of flutes, of the comic poets, of the verses of Sophocles, ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... anecdotes are superficially trivial and even comic; but there is an abyss of horror beneath them. They reveal a condition so utterly irreligious that religion means nothing but belief in a nursery bogey, and its inadequacy is demonstrated by a toy logical dilemma, neither the bogey nor ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... the Athenians, who were thus treated. Lamia, however, exacted contributions herself to pay for an entertainment she gave to the king, and her banquet was so renowned for its sumptuosity, that a description of it was drawn up by the Samian writer, Lynceus. Upon this occasion, one of the comic writers gave Lamia the name of the real Helepolis; and Demochares of Soli called Demetrius Mythus, because the fable always has its ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... He assumed a comic expression. 'Unhappily, not a thief,' he objected. 'This young lady prevented me from appropriating your diamonds. Convey, the wise call it. I wanted to take your jewel-case—and she put me off with a sandwich-tin. I wanted to make ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... the middle-aged prima donna going about in waste places at dead of night to work mischief against a rival was indubitably comic. I would make a facetious narrative of the meeting for the amusement of Rosa at breakfast to-morrow in Paris. Then, feeling all at once at the end of my physical powers, I continued my way, and descended the steps to ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... of the deaths were horrible by reason of the eery silence that marked them, others because of the mysterious movements or amazing cunning of the tigers. The comic episodes it were not seemly to dwell upon. But fifty-seven! Nothing for it now but a hurry call to the Commissioner and the Maharaja for elephants and an army of tiger-hunters, a mobilization of the best shikaris ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... fly. They don't bother to notice that the plane of our Bleriot hasn't claw ends like the enemy's Taube. Neither do they note we carry our own distinguishing mark. We're the circus show. We're the 'comic relief' sure." ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... of them as such; consequently, what would have been impediments to a different nature were to his means of free and spontaneous action. And not only does he represent the ideas of his age, but he depicted its types and manners. In this respect he is the link between the comic dramatists and the novelists, between Congreve and Fielding. The wits, the beaux, the fine ladies, the Grub Street drudges of the reign of Anne, whatever be the fidelity or other merits of the portraitures, are more familiar to us in the satires of Pope than as reflected ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... with a sallow, lined face and large yellow teeth. When he smiled the horizontal lines in his forehead and the lines that ran from the sides of his nose to the ends of his mouth deepened so that his face looked as if it were made up to play a comic part ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... speaking to his secretary, who, if the fact deserve to be recorded, was an abbe named Fleuriel. This personage, who was an extraordinary specimen of impertinence and self-conceit, would have been an admirable study for a comic poet. He had all the dignity belonging to the great secretary of a great Minister, and, with an air of indifference, he told me that the Count was not there; but M. de Blacas was there, and I ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... sing—brown arms lounging on the table, and red hands folded in white aprons—serious at first in hymn-like cadences, then breaking into wilder measures with a jodel at the close. There is a measured solemnity in the performance, which strikes the stranger as somewhat comic. But the singing was good; the voices strong and clear in tone, no hesitation and no shirking of the melody. It was clear that the singers enjoyed the music for its own sake, with half-shut eyes, as they take dancing, solidly, with deep-drawn breath, sustained and indefatigable. But eleven ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... presence than men. Or possibly a woman knows that a masculine spook is, after all, only a man, and therefore may be charmed into helplessness, while the feminine can be seen through by another woman and thus disarmed. The majority of the comic apparitions, curiously enough, are masculine. You don't often find women wraithed in smiles—perhaps because they resent being made ridiculous, even after they're dead. Or maybe the reason lies in the fact that men ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... the parking lot the spacemen finally made the Smith family car in safety. "Blast off immediately, Lt. Smith," ordered the captain. The rocket wavered for a minute and rose. "Wait a minute, Smith. I seen Rocky Morgan do this once in a comic book. No member of the Space Patrol lets an alien get away alive. We got to kill 'em all. Head back and we'll get the rest of 'em with the hydrogen artillery." Accordingly the ship swept low over the strange planet. "Ah-ah-ah-ah." Twin sheets of imaginary flame burst ...
— The Amazing Mrs. Mimms • David C. Knight
... the corner just where Schroeder's house threatened to hide him from view, he would stop, drop the sample case, wave his hand just once, pick up the sample case and go on, proceeding backward for a step or two until Schroeder's house made good its threat. It was a comic scene in the eyes of the onlooker, perhaps because a chubby Romeo offends the sense of fitness. The neighbors, lurking behind their parlor curtains, had laughed at first. But after a while they learned to look for that little scene, ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... question of his life and death was debated he was riding in front of our party, and there was something in the anxious writhing of his supple limbs that seemed to express a sense of his false position, and struck me as highly comic. I had no crotchet at that time against the punishment of death, but I was unused to blood, and the proposed victim looked so thoroughly capable of enjoying life (if he could only get to the other side ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... audience. They all knew I was Welsh and saw the joke. The horror and suspense had been so great that when it broke with comic relief the house was really hysterical. It ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... wait longer than she anticipated, for she found that "El Diablo Cojuelo" had left his stronghold. Failing to make herself understood, Dolores fetched an old man who looked like a comic opera pirate and who could speak ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... won the gold medal for Greek. The subject of the year was "The Fragments of the Greek Comic Poets, as edited by Meineke." In this year, too, he won a classical scholarship—a demyship of the annual value of L95, which was tenable for five years, which enabled him to go to Oxford without throwing an undue strain on his ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... name—Daisy?) No, sir—don't you come fooling round here next Sunday, or I'll set the dogs on you. And you wouldn't find me in anyhow, come to think of it. I'm lunching out myself, as it happens—yes sir, lunching out. Is there anything especially comic in my lunching out? I don't often do it, you say? Well, that's no reason why I never should. Who with? Why, with—with old Dr. Bleaker: Dr. Eliphalet Bleaker. No, you wouldn't know about him—he's only an old friend of your mother's ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... seemed but a happy preparation for the exercise of devotional feelings." [7] This coexistence of serious with playful elements is often found in natures of unusual depth and richness, just as tragic and comic powers sometimes ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... expected to crack jokes about the crockery and lighten up the granite ware with persiflage. I was second bookkeeper, and if I failed to show up a balance sheet without something comic about the footings or could find no cause for laughter in an invoice of plows, the other clerks were disappointed. By degrees my fame spread, and I became a local "character." Our town was small enough to make this possible. The daily newspaper ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... define what are the things that amuse him. For him the wind of humour bloweth where it listeth. He finds his jokes in the unlikeliest places. Indeed, it is only there that he finds them at all. A thing that is labelled 'comic' chills his sense of humour instantly—perceptibly lengthens his face. A joke that has not a serious background, or some serious connexion, means nothing to him. Nothing to him, the crude jape of the professional jester. Nothing to him, the jangle of the bells in the wagged cap, the thud of the ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... suggestion, signora, that we should issue satirical pamphlets, or attempt to run a comic paper? That last, I am sure, the ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... To hear comic songs in dreams, foretells you will disregard opportunity to advance your affairs and enjoy the companionship of the pleasure loving. To sing one, proves you will enjoy much pleasure for a time, ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... horrid man, and deserved to be done away with," said Daisy. The idea struck them both as so very comic that they began to laugh ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... was pitched in the curious piping note usually associated with comic relief in a melodrama, but his wizened face was solemn as a red Indian's. It was Theydon who smiled. His preconceived ideas as to the appearance and demeanor of the London detective were shattered. Really, there was no need to take ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... portals of the Tombs, whither, as a newspaper reporter, I had gone with him, his stubborn head held high as ever. I asked myself more than once, at the time when the vile prison was torn down, whether the comic clamor to have the ugly old gates preserved and set up in Central Park had anything to do with the memory of the "martyred" thief, or whether it was in joyful celebration of the fact that others had escaped. His name is even now one to conjure with in the Sixth ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... an old woman up in New Hampshire and, like the little demon of error that it is, it leaped forth, after a long period of travail, full-fledged and panoplied, and on its lips were these words: "What fools these mortals be!" Dame Eddy gets good returns from the sacrilegio-comic tour of her progeny around the country. Intellectual Boston is at her feet, and Boston pays well ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... trust the success of his powers to fortune, he did not absolutely neglect the reputation which may be acquired by speaking on a sudden occasion; and if we believe Eratosthenes, Demetrius the Phalerean, and the comic poets, there was a greater spirit and boldness in his unpremeditated orations than in those he had committed to writing. Eratosthenes says that in his extemporaneous harangues he often spoke as from a supernatural impulse; and Demetrius tells us that in an address to the people, like a man inspired, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... with the pit that it would not be safe to hiss him from the manager's box. The venerable augurs of the literary or scientific temple may smile faintly when one of the tribe is mentioned; but the farce is in general kept up as well as the Chinese comic scene of entreating and imploring a man to stay with you, with the implied compact between you that he shall by no means think of doing it. A poor wretch he must be who would wantonly sit down on one of these bandbox reputations. A Prince-Rupert's-drop, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... Afternoons." The prefacer confesses failure. It is the turn of the reader. He may welcome the sketches in book form; he may turn scornfully from them and leave them to moulder in the stock-room of Messrs. Covici-McGee. To paraphrase an old comic ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... the fine and excellent Uncle Braesig, who, in the opinion of competent critics, is the most successful humorous figure in all German literature. Braesig is certainly a masterpiece of psychology; as remote from any mere comic effect, despite his idiosyncrasies, as from maudlin sentimentality; an impersonation of sturdy manhood and a victor in life's battles, no less than his creator, who, although he had lost seven of the most precious ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... own case, from which he selected a cigar with anxious care and much sniffing; then he bade me a ceremonious adieu and departed down the stairs, blithely humming a melody from the latest comic opera. ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... possesses to so eminent a degree is to be applied to the moral well-being of men, "to inform men in the best reason of living."[423] Himself a writer for the theatre, Jonson is naturally more concerned with comedy and tragedy than he is with any narrative forms of poetry. And to him the office of the comic poet is "to imitate justice and instruct to life—or stirre up gentle affections."[424] In Timber he iterates the same praise of poetry as being no less effective than philosophy in instructing men to good life, and informing their manners, but as even more ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... National Assembly. As often as the Ministers made timid attempts to introduce his own personal hobbies as bills, they themselves seemed unwilling and compelled only by their position to run the comic errands, of whose futility they were convinced in advance. As often as Bonaparte blabbed out his plans behind the backs of his Ministers, and sported his "idees napoleoniennes," [2 Napoleonic ideas.] his own Ministers disavowed him from the speakers' tribune in the National Assembly. His aspirations ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... of those halfpenny weeklies which—with a nerve which is the only creditable thing about them—call themselves comic. He did not see the Bishop until a shadow falling across his paper caused him ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... an Heroic Comic Poem," was begun in March, 1779, and was continued through several numbers. It described various incidents in the British retreat to New York after the battles ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... remained two years, with much gain to his body and his mind. On his return to London, he applied himself to learn the art of engraving; but his constitution would not allow him to pursue it. Yet what he did acquire of this art, with his genius for comic observation, must have been of excellent service to him in his subsequent career. This, at first, was simply literary, in a subordinate connection with "The London Magazine." His relation to this periodical gave him opportunities, which he did ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... consider that tenors who have any voices left have never learned to act, and tenors who are able to act no longer have any voices; because, as a rule, they either have studied too little, or have studied erroneously. Unless the voice has received a correct and fine culture, the German comic operas lead immediately to destruction of the voice, especially of the sensitive, easily ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... service Cazotte wrote his heroic comic- poem, the Roman d'Olivier, in twelve cantos, afterwards printed in Paris (2 vols. 8vo, 1765); and it was held a novel and singular composition. When the English first attacked (in 1759) Saint Pierre of Martinique, afterwards captured ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... a blow, as those great characters in the hands of Garrick! but I forgot I am writing to the man himself. The devil take (as he will) these transports of enthusiasm! Apropos, the whole city of Paris is bewitched with the comic opera, and if it was not for the affair of the Jesuits, which takes up one half of our talk, the comic opera would have it all. It is a tragical nuisance in all companies as it is, and was it not for some sudden starts and dashes of Shandeism, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... in fine order, and was painted like all the king's miniature fleet—white outside, and bright salmon inside. One glance at his boat's crew showed me that they were all armed—in a flashy melodramatic style, like the Red Indians of a comic opera, each naked native having a brace of revolvers buckled to a broad leather belt around his waist, from which also hung a French navy cutlass in a leather sheath. They were all big, stalwart fellows, ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke
... orchestra of Duke Friedrich of Meiningen. At the age of fourteen he wrote his first opera, "Das Waldmaedchen," which was performed several times during the year 1800. In 1801 appeared his two-act comic opera, "Peter Schmoll and his Neighbors," and during these two years he also frequently played in concerts with great success. He then studied with the Abbe Vogler, and in his eighteenth year was engaged for the conductorship of the Breslau opera. About this time appeared his first ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... Northampton Road. It will have the legs and stride of an ostrich. It will throw its feet out like dealing cards. It will lift its head and look the sun in the eye like a vulture. It will have teeth like the English spinster in a French comic paper.... And ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... caste, and the Hon. Eliot Yorke, M.P., as stage manager. This company in 1853 repeated the 'Court of Oberon' with 'The Day after the Wedding.' In 1854 'The Day after the Wedding' was again given with a comic interlude 'Personation' by Charles Kemble and a popular farce 'Turning ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... Gilbert a Beckett, we always thought, might have employed his vis comica, or force of fun, better than in linking ludicrous images and incongruous associations with the heroes of ancient and modern times. The department of Comic Biography, we believe, has received few contributions, if any, from the frolic quills of wicked wags. The cure, however, of this defect in our literature, if any there be, may be looked upon as begun in the work whose title stands at the head of this notice. The author, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... Moorfields, and thence into the new churchyard adjoining to Bedlam, where it lieth interred." Lilburne at his death was but thirty-nine years of age. He was popular to the last with the Londoners, and there were notices of him, comic and serio-comic, long after his death. By order of Council, Nov. 4, his Highness himself present, payment of the arrears of an allowance he had of 40s. a week, with continuation of the same allowance thenceforward, was granted to his ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... quickly became a favorite of the town by virtue of her singing voice, vivacity, and gift for mimicry. Admired first as a singing actress, Miss Rafter in 1731 gave unequivocal notice of her considerable talent as a comic actress in the role of Nell in Coffey's The Devil to Pay, one of several hundred she mastered. Her specialties: Flora in The Wonder, Lady Bab in High Life Below Stairs, Lappet in The Miser, Catherine in Catherine ...
— The Case of Mrs. Clive • Catherine Clive
... recapturing the likeness of the man from the nine hundred and ninety-nine anecdotes that are told of him. These for the most part leave him with an air of absurdity. In his habit of ignoring facts he appeals again and again to one's sense of the comic, like a drunken man who fails to see the kerb or who walks into a wall. He was indeed drunken with doctrine. He lived almost as much from doctrine as from passion. He pursued theories as a child chases butterflies. There is a story told of his Oxford days which shows how eccentrically ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... amid a silent-gazing people: comparable, Mercier thinks, (Nouveau Paris, iii. 22.) to some Procession de Roi de Bazoche; or say, Procession of King Crispin, with his Dukes of Sutor-mania and royal blazonry of Cordwainery. Except indeed that this is not comic; ah no, it is comico-tragic; with bound Couriers, and a Doom hanging over it; most fantastic, yet most miserably real. Miserablest flebile ludibrium of a Pickleherring Tragedy! It sweeps along there, in most ungorgeous pall, through many streets, in the dusty summer evening; gets itself ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... any one possessed before he entered into office, that he shall possess and hold until the end of his term. Next he assigns Choregi to the tragic poets, choosing three of the richest persons out of the whole body of Athenians. Formerly he used also to assign five Choregi to the comic poets, but now the tribes provide the Choregi for them. Then he receives the Choregi who have been appointed by the tribes for the men's and boys' choruses and the comic poets at the Dionysia, and for the men's ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... There is a stout iron railing along the edge of that pier—a most needful safeguard—over which the servant girls of the town lean and look down at the fishermen, who look up at them with a calm serio-comic "don't-you-wish-you-may-get-it" expression that is deeply impressive. Bargains, of course, are not easily made, and it is in attempting to make these that all the hubbub occurs. The noise is all on the women's side. The men, secure in their floating position, and certain of ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... containing bones, with a silver Athenian coin, attached to the jar by careful relatives, to pay for the deceased's transit across the Styx. A collection of terra-cotta figures are arranged upon the four shelves of case 37. These include an ancient comic actor as Hercules; Athenian ladies bearing water jugs, called Hydriophorae; Ceres; a dancing group from Athens; animals; stools; and dancing figures from the south of Italy. No less than three hundred and thirty-three handles from the wine vessels or amphorae ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... amusing; but the same gentleman on his head is worth an orchestra-chair. When a man wears his trousers where other men wear their coats, people are bound to turn around. It is not a new trick. Mystes, the Argive comic poet, and the White Queen, taught this author the value of substituting 'is' for 'is not,' until, from standing so long inverted, he himself forgets what he means, and at this point the eminent brothers Rogers take up the important work.... Please, please, Cybele, don't take it seriously!... ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... prospect to look forward to!" said Ernest, in a half-serious, half-comic way, as he usually regarded most things. "But what's to be done with these fellows now? Sailor Bill is none the worse for his temporary captivity, and I suppose Seth will be all right in a few days, after his wounds ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... pleasure that they crave must be of a different kind from that with which they can daily become familiar if they please. There are theatres and music-halls in town; it does not add to the wittiness of the Pierrot or the humour of the comic singer to find them exercising their functions on a hot dusty beach, densely packed with humanity, strewn with torn newspapers, burnt matches, orange skins, and banana peelings. Yet those who feel in this manner are a minority, ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... but tell me what it is. You won't? Then I'll find out all about it from Madonna. She knows, of course; and she'll tell me. Look here, Mrs. Blyth; I'm not going to get up till she's told me everything." And Zack, with a comic gesture of entreaty, dropped on his knees by Madonna's chair; preventing her from leaving it, which she tried to do, by taking immediate possession of the slate that hung ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... followed by Henry at the head of his cavalry, and lively skirmishes were of frequent occurrence. In a military point of view none of these affairs were of consequence, but there was one which partook at once of the comic and the pathetic. For it chanced that in a cavalry action of more than common vivacity the Count Chaligny found himself engaged in a hand to hand conflict with a very dashing swordsman, who, after dealing and receiving many severe blows, at last ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... suffered severely from the want of a market for its sugar, seemed to Froude's eyes to present in a sort of comic picture the summit of human felicity. "Swarms of niggers on board—delightful fat woman in blue calico with a sailor straw hat, and a pipe in her mouth. All of them perfectly happy, without a notion of morality—piously ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... had said in praise of Suzette gave his love for her unconscious approval; but at the same time it created a sort of comedy situation, and Matt was as far from the comic as he hoped he was from the romantic, in his mood. When he thought of going direct to her, he hated to be going, like the hero of a novel, to offer himself to the heroine at the moment her fortunes were darkest; but he knew that he was only like that outwardly, ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... the whole class, easily remembered, are, first, that they have chestnut-leaf feet; secondly, that their legs are serrated behind with a double row of notches—(why?); thirdly, that they have no tails; fourthly, that they have, most of them, very fine and very comic crests, tufts, tippets, and other variously applied appendages to their heads and chins, so that some are called 'crested,' some 'eared,' some 'tippeted,' and so on; but the least of them, our proper Dabchick, displays no absurdity ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... said Mrs. Blumenfeld, raising herself up, and again looking Esther in the face. There was an odd mixture in the expression of her own, half serious, half keenly comic. ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... English birth. The chief result of this civility, conjoined with the ferocity of his political statements, was that his English friends invariably spoke of him as "a typical Irishman." They looked upon him as so much comic relief to the more serious things of their own lives, and seemed constantly to expect him to perform some amusing antic, some innately Celtic act of comic folly. At such times, Mr. Quinn felt as if he ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... no cheering. She was disgusted, but not hurt. She believed herself to be a very fine singer, and thought that the only reason for laughter was that her audience was dull, so dull indeed that her romantic selection had been mistaken for a comic song. ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... except that little of him which seemed to square with their shallow mechanical taste. The old fairy superstition, the old legends and ballads, the old chronicles of feudal war and chivalry, the earlier moralities and mysteries, and tragi-comic attempts—these were the roots of his poetic tree—they must be the roots of any literary education which can teach us to appreciate him. These fed Shakespeare's youth; why should they not feed our children's? Why indeed? That inborn delight of the young in all that is marvellous and fantastic—has ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... and false. I have been foolish, but it was not in despising the constrictions and falsity of the academic world. I have flouted authority, but it was not the authority of the movingpicture heroes, whose comic errors are perpetuated for generations, like those of Pasteur, or so quietly repudiated their repudiation passes unnoticed, like those of Lister, in order to protect a vested interest. The authority I have flouted, in my arrogance as you call ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... While the comic side of a man in drink makes its strong appeal to the village folk, they are ready to see excuses for him, too. Anybody, they argue, is liable to be overtaken before he knows, and where is the great disgrace in an accident that may befall ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... haven't you? He's sweet and lovable in his funny, confused way, talking like a comic-strip kid one minute and an encyclopedia the next—so empty and faraway sometimes, then loving and affectionate, as though to make up to us for being ... away. I'm sure he loves us, Jerry and I, as much as we love ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... say," put in Jim Cal's thin, querulous tones from the back of the room—the voice of a fat man in trouble; can anyone say why the sorrows of the obese are always comic to the rest of the world? "A body cain't sleep nights ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... serio-comic strife of the sparrow and the moth, is he pigeon hawk's pursuit of the sparrow or the goldfinch. It is a race of surprising speed and agility. It is a test of wing and wind. Every muscle is taxed, and every nerve strained. Such cries of terror and consternation ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... Paris, where he will stay some time. Cornelius is working at a comic opera [This would be the Barber of Baghdad.—Translator's note.] in the Bernhard's-Hutle. Raff is to finish his "Samson" for Darmstadt. Tausig is giving concerts in Warsaw. Pruckner will spend the winter in Vienna and appear at several concerts. Damrosch composed lately an Overture ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... rise up and cry out—almost anything to shock these people into opening their eyes upon real life. Indeed, though I hesitate about setting it down here, I was filled for some time with the liveliest imaginings of the following serio-comic enterprise: ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... dangerous experiment, as you may be personal without intending it. An English lady of rank, speaking of an evening party, says: "At an evening party, given expressly in honor of a distinguished lady of color, we heard a thoughtless amateur dash into the broadly comic, but terribly inappropriate' nigger' song of' 'Sally, Come Up.' Before he had got through the first verse, he had perceived his mistake, and was so overwhelmed with shame that he could scarcely preserve sufficient presence of mind to carry him ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... permission to make the trip alone, but they insisted upon his company. "I am really touched," he wrote afterward to the parents of two of the visiting boys, "at the way in which your children as well as my own treat me as a friend and playmate. It has its comic side. They were all bent upon having me take them; they obviously felt that my presence was needed to give zest to the entertainment. I do not think that one of them saw anything incongruous in the President's getting as bedaubed ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... laughing reply. "Bless my loose ribs! but I wouldn't miss him for anything. He's in a new play called 'Up in a Balloon Boys.' It's great!" and Mr. Damon named a certain comic moving picture star in whose horse-play Mr. Damon took a curious interest. Tom and Ned were glad enough to go, Tom that he might have a chance to do a certain amount of thinking, and Ned because he was still boy ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... month "The Follies of a Day" was performed at Lord Barrymore's private theatre, at Wergrave. "His lordship, in the character of the gardener," according to the newspapers, "was highly comic, and his humour was not overstrained: the whole concluded with a dance, in which was introduced a favourite pas Russe, by Lord Barrymore and Mr. Delpini, which kept ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... a Comic would be more effective—a Shaving reel or a Dressing reel? It is the small incidents of every-day life that one should look to for the key to the character of a Public Man; and once a whole third of the population had seen for themselves what pain it gives me to put links and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... it amused them to see Wilfred sitting underneath. They simply roared every time he pushed up the keys. It was as good as a comic song. It really is tiresome, though, to have a piano like that at the school. John Crosby, the stonemason's little boy, sings very nicely, and I went so wrong in playing his accompaniment, through losing so many ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... for a few minutes to general conversation, and then Lord Silverbridge again took his leave. When he was gone Isabel Boncassen almost regretted that the "something particular" which he had threatened to say had not been less comic in its nature. ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... repeat, had absolutely nothing whatever to do, amidst these brilliant butterflies of fashion. After following the king during two whole days at Fontainebleau, and critically observing the various pastoral fancies and heroi-comic transformations of his sovereign, the musketeer felt that he needed something more than this to satisfy the cravings of his nature. At every moment assailed by people asking him, "How do you think this costume suits me, Monsieur d'Artagnan?" he would reply to them ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... propose a game of poker to some of the boys, but if he did not it was simply because there was too much excitement going on. That evening we were the guests of Col. McCaull at Palmer's Theater, where De-Wolf Hopper, Digby Bell and other prominent comic opera stars were playing in "The May Queen." The boxes that we occupied that night were handsomely decorated with flags and bunting, while from the proscenium arch hung an emblem of all nations, a gilt eagle and shield, ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... so audaciously put together), the popular ballads and songs are the faded finery of the West End, the foul parodies of St. Giles's, the drunken rigmarole of the black Helots—or, as they are touchingly classed in the streets, "sentimental, comic, and nigger songs." Yet Banim, and Griffin, and Furlong, Lover and Ferguson, Drennan and Callanan, have written ballads and songs as true to Ireland as ever MacNeill's or Conyngham's were to Scotland; and firmly do we hope to see with every second lad in Ireland ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... operated. The darker and more profound were his cogitations, the droller and more whimsical became the apparitions. They buzzed about him thick as flies, flapping at him, flouting him, hooting in his ear, yet with such comic appendages, that what at first was his bane became at length his solace; and he desired no better society than that of his merry phantasmata. We shall presently find in what way this remarkable phenomenon influenced ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... the morning rehearsal, with one of the finest actors of comedy to be found in London. Later in the day, after rehearsal, I spent another hour with a great tragic actor. Thus I worked in both lines, as my part was a mixture of the tragic and the comic. I put in several weeks of very hard work in this way, and felt I had gained greatly. Of course this was entirely on the histrionic side, but it gives an idea of ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... the English and Spanish theatres does not consist merely in the bold neglect of the Unities of Place and Time, or in the commixture of comic and tragic elements; that they were unwilling or unable to comply with the rules and with right reason (in the meaning of certain critics these terms are equivalent), may be considered as an evidence of merely negative properties. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of November we shall perform here a comic opera, "The Barber of Baghdad," founded on a tale from the "Arabian Nights," words and music by Cornelius. The music is full of wit and humour, and moves with remarkable self-possession in the aristrocratic region of art. I expect a very good result. "Rienzi" will ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... doubtfully, and with less weight whichever way. In the general population, who are Protestant, he recognizes friends;—and has sent them Sixty Preachers, which by Law was their due long since. Here follow two little traits, comic or tragi-comic, with which we ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... wont to make regular razzias in these districts. The process of Latinizing, moreover, made rapid progress in these regions; the Celtic nationality was evidently far from able to oppose such resistance as the more civilized nations of Sabellians and Etruscans. The celebrated Latin comic poet Statius Caecilius, who died in 586, was a manumitted Insubrian; and Polybius, who visited these districts towards the close of the sixth century, affirms, not perhaps without some exaggeration, that in that quarter only a few villages among the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... ask you to come; you asked me; so it isn't my fault," said Ben, rather gruffly, as people crowded by without pausing to hear the comic song the clown was singing in ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... my horror at the sight which I then saw? The scene, which had hitherto been tinted with comic effect, was now becoming so decidedly tragic that I did not dare at once to acquaint my worthy pastor with that which was occurring,—and, alas! ...
— The Relics of General Chasse • Anthony Trollope
... away, overcome by sudden amusement at her own attitude, which she perceived risked being slightly comic. Heroics were, to her thinking, unsuitable articles for home consumption. Yet her purpose held none the less strongly and steadily because excitement lessened. She refastened her tea gown, tied the streaming azure ribbons of it, patted bows and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... sewing silk, six handkerchiefs, and a tooth-brush," said Tarling promptly and the girl stared at him in comic dismay. ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... by the pretty manners of the trained children—and the advance in refinement is especially noticeable among those who have been speaking or singing parts. The most pleasing set of youths that I ever met were the members of a comic-opera troupe. Some of them, without an approach to freedom of manner, would converse with good sense on many topics, and their drill had been so extended as to include a knowledge of polite salutes. Not one of the boys or girls would have been ill ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... last I see of J. Bayard he was driftin' through the door, gazin' absentminded at the envelope, like he was figurin' on how much he could grab off at the first swipe. I gazes after him thoughtful until the comic side of ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... entr'acte would have been redemanded at a concert, but of course the play was the thing. Such a success, Stretton! Such a furore! She is a little goddess, a queen. You should see her and hear her! Ah me!'—with a comic ruefulness—'Holt ...
— Cruel Barbara Allen - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... Barnard Haw on his feet is not amusing; but the same gentleman on his head is worth an orchestra-chair. When a man wears his trousers where other men wear their coats, people are bound to turn around. It is not a new trick. Mystes, the Argive comic poet, and the White Queen, taught this author the value of substituting 'is' for 'is not,' until, from standing so long inverted, he himself forgets what he means, and at this point the eminent brothers Rogers take up the important work.... Please, please, Cybele, don't take it seriously!... ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... fulsome," responded Ferris, jadedly. He was thinking in a thoroughly vanquished mood what a tragico-comic end of the whole business it was that poor Don Ippolito should come to his rescue in this fashion, and as it were offer to succor him in his extremity. He perceived the shamefulness of suffering such help; it would be much better to starve; but he felt cowed, and he had not courage to take ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... 'tis great merit to act folly well; Take, take from Dryden's hand Melantha's part, The gaudy effort of luxuriant art, In all imagination's glitter drest; What from her lips fantastic Montfort caught, And almost moved the thing the poet thought. These scenes, the glory of a comic age, (It decency could blanch each sullied page) Peruse, admire, and give unto the stage; Or thou, or beauteous Woffington, display What Dryden's self, with pleasure, might survey. Even he, before whose visionary eyes, Melantha, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... for you to notice my hopping around. Of course I'd like to do something in a professional line. Of course I can sing a little and do card tricks and Irish and German comedy stuff, and of course I'm not so bad on the trapeze and comic bicycle stunts and ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... greatly diverted many young gentlemen who used the Back Kitchen as a place of nightly entertainment and refreshment. Huxter, who had a fine natural genius for mimicking everything, whether it was a favourite tragic or comic actor, or a cock on a dunghill, a corkscrew going into a bottle and a cork issuing thence, or an Irish officer of genteel connexions who offered himself as an object of imitation with only too much readiness, talked his talk, and twanged his poor old long bow whenever ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... imagine some of the party enjoying themselves after this fashion; when suddenly the calves are heard to rise, to bellow and groan, strain at the ropes with which they are fastened, and endeavour to escape; every cigar is at once extinguished, the comic changes to the serious—the wolves are on the scent. A few minutes more, and black spots are seen dotted about here and there on the snow; these increase in number and approach,—they are the wolves ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... those tragi-comic scenes, tragic enough in effect, between Father and Son; Son now about eighteen,—fit to be getting through Oxford, had he been an English gentleman of private station. It comes from the irrefragable Nicolai; who dates it about this time, uncertain ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... in reply, almost as angrily, after which, evidently satisfied that I did not understand, he behaved very nastily, though his dumb-show was so comic that it made us roar ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... jealous disposition" and "an ungovernable temper." When he returned from his various voyages she "did not receive him kindly;" but, contrariwise, sometimes received him on the side of "a poker," on the end of "a dirk" or at the muzzle of "pistol." Moreover—and this is dolefully comic—"she repeatedly left this deponent imprisoned in the house for hours under lock and key!" What a situation for a foaming mariner, accustomed to roam the vastness of the majestic, the free, the uncontrollable deep! Probably the ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... what you're told? Why, I declare you're as thin as a hurdle, and as black under the eyes as if you had been fighting with a collier. You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Look at me; do all I can I can't get up an interesting pallor like you, and I've fretted enough over those conic sections (comic sections Jim always calls them). Never mind! Wait till I get ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... had recently appeared, entitled, "A Picture of New York." Like that, our work was to begin an historical sketch; to be followed by notices of the customs, manners and institutions of the city; written in a serio-comic vein, and treating local errors, follies and abuses with ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... mental comment to the effect that "you are merely amusing us by your clever wit" by asserting that he means to be extremely serious. He then proceeds about his business with a most solemn face, which is as amusing in literature as it is in comic representations on the stage. ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... framed in bands or crowns or other heavy headgear out of which cropped a row of very small tight black curls. The Cataract of the Ganges is all there as well, a tragedy of temples and idols and wicked rajahs and real water, with Davidge and Joey Gougenheim again for comic relief—though all in a coarser radiance, thanks to the absence of fairies and Amazons and moonlit mechanical effects, the charm above all, so seen, of the play within the play; and I rank it in that relation with Green Bushes, despite the celebrity ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... looking at the young people. Among them was Shebaldin, the director of the municipal bank, who was famed for his love of literature and dramatic art. He had founded the local Musical and Dramatic Society, and took part in the performances himself, confining himself, for some reason, to playing comic footmen or to reading in a sing-song voice "The Woman who was a Sinner." His nickname in the town was "the Mummy," as he was tall, very lean and scraggy, and always had a solemn air and a fixed, lustreless eye. He was so devoted to the dramatic art that he ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... harbingers of joy. Have you read the ancient Bishop of Rennes on the subject? Really, I almost think there must be some truth in all this. The instinct of universal man is rarely far at fault. Already you have a semi-comic "gold-cure" for alcoholism, and you have heard of the geophagism of certain African tribes. What if the scientist of the future be destined to discover that the diamond, and it alone, is a specific for cholera, that powdered rubellite cures fever, and the chryso-beryl gout? It would ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... Grau. The public seemed opera-mad and the element of uncertainty eliminated from the enterprise. Mr. Conried had been an actor in Austria, had come as such to New York, and worked himself up to the position of manager of a small German theater in Irving Place. He had also managed comic operetta companies, English and German, in the Casino and elsewhere, and acted as stage manager for other entrepreneurs. For a year or two his theater had enjoyed something of a vogue among native Americans with a knowledge of the German tongue, and Mr. Conried ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... and no English writer, save Shakespeare, has drawn so many and so varied characters. It would be as absurd to interpret all of these as caricatures as to deny Dickens his great and varied powers of creation. Dickens exaggerated many of his comic and satirical characters, as was his right, for caricature and satire are very closely related, while exaggeration is the very essence of comedy. But there remains a host of characters marked by humour and pathos. Yet the pictorial presentation of Dickens's ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... was very popular with the men who hung around the opera house, or the theatre, or the billiard halls. A great many courted his company. Perhaps he was a good talker, perhaps he was a good singer and could sing a comic song; perhaps he was a literary man, and entertained them with his wit, and all were delighted with him. But as we would say, he got to the end of his rope, and when his money went his friends disappeared: The poor fellow was in a blaze of ...
— Moody's Anecdotes And Illustrations - Related in his Revival Work by the Great Evangilist • Dwight L. Moody
... so unattractive in appearance that London nicknamed her "The Pig." It is interesting to note that he also engaged a tenor, Annibale Fabri, although in those; days tenors were considered only fit for old men's parts of minor importance, and at Naples were generally given the parts of comic old women. Fabri's wife and another woman were announced as good actresses of male parts. "Fabri has a tenor voice," wrote Mrs. Pendarves, "sweet, clear and firm, but not strong enough, I doubt, for the stage. He sings like a gentleman, ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... European reputation which the Bugle established was not one to be envied. It is true that the account printed of the cause of the explosion, dramatically completed with the Professor's tragically sudden death, caused a great sensation in London. The comic papers of the week were full of illustrations showing the uses to which the Professor's instrument might be put. To say that any sane man in England believed a word of the article would be to cast an undeserved slight upon the intelligence of the British public. No one paused ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... Griffin slowly hobbled to his feet, and moving towards home, half sobbed and half sang in a way that was intensely comic— ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... baseness. Or rather, it would be baseness in a voluntary soldier; in the Germans it means only that the war is not their own war; that they are fighting as slaves, not as free men. The idea that we could ever live under the rule of these people is merely comic. To do them justice, they do not now entertain the idea, though they have dallied with it ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... J.H. Reynolds, his brother-in-law. This was followed by "Whims and Oddities," in prose and verse; "National Tales," and "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," a book full of imaginative verse. Hood's rich sense of humor found scope in his "Comic Annual," appearing through ten successive years, and his collection of "Whimsicalities." Among his minor poems, "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... ambition to be King of Poland that Louis XV. began his incredibly foolish 'secret'—a system of foreign policy conducted by hidden agents behind the backs of his responsible ministers at Versailles and in the Courts of Europe. The results naturally tend to recall a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera of diplomacy. We find magnificent ambassadors gravely trying to carry out the royal orders, and thwarted by the King's secret agents. The King seems to have been too lazy to face his ministers, and compel them to take his own line, while he was energetic enough to work like Tiberius or ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... commands the neighbouring plains. But see where artful Dryden next appears, Grown old in rhyme, but charming even in years. Great Dryden next, whose tuneful Muse affords The sweetest numbers, and the fittest words. Whether in comic sounds or tragic airs She forms her voice, she moves our smiles or tears. If satire or heroic strains she writes, 120 Her hero pleases and her satire bites. From her no harsh unartful numbers fall, She wears all dresses, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... years went by, and the scholars of Yoshida continued in vain to look around them for the abstractly perfect, and began more and more to understand the drift of his instructions, they learned to look back upon their comic schoolmaster as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... exaggerated elegance. Each was leaning on a cue, his elbow crooked in as near an imitation of Giddy's position as the stick's length would permit. The figure was curved so that it stuck out behind and before; the expression on each face was as asinine as its owner's knowledge of the comic-weekly swell could make it; the little finger of the free hand was extravagantly bent. The players themselves walked with a mincing step about the table. And: "My deah fellah, what a pretty play. Mean to say, neat, don't you know," came incongruously ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... scarcely ascertain the direction whence it came. We advanced cautiously, however, a few paces, and discovered a hole in the ground, from which, at that very moment, the dishevelled head of poor Peterkin appeared, like Jack coming out of his box. His sudden appearance and serio-comic expression would have been at any other time sufficient to have set us off in fits of laughter; but joy at finding him, and anxiety lest he should prove to be seriously hurt, restrained ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... so comic in the assertion of his delicateness of health, that we should all have laughed; but we were somewhat scared, and had ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... translucid green; and the white field of the sheer cliff, and all the roofs, gables, spires, balconies, and the green of the verandahs were exquisitely indicated and elusive in the bright air; and the beach was loud with acrobats and comic minstrels, and nurse-maids lay on the pebbles reading novels, children with their clothes tied tightly about them were busy building ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... come. Polly's in the drawing-room, and she says she's come to see what a high tea is like, and to be introduced to the dear bishop. Muriel West and Major Joicy are with her. They're singing comic ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... seated on his shoulder, was so elated with the gladsome sights and sounds, that she clasped her chubby arms round 'Passon's' neck and kissed him with a fervour that was as fresh and delightful as it was irresistibly comic. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... representing no persons other than the writers. As I write the above, I open mechanically a letter from a peace meeting assembled in Ledyard, Connecticut, composed of "Rogerine Quakers"; but what a "Rogerine Quaker" is I know not. Some of these letters are touching, and some have a comic side. A very good one comes from May Wright Sewall; would that all the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... a toilette by saying the wearer had on something white, or something black, or something red, but "it suited her down to the ground." A few misguided individuals have even been known to take refuge in the remark (made historic now by comic papers) that "they never look under the table," when asked what certain ladies had on. But this is trifling, and ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... suffers the fate of all sequels in endeavouring to revive after a lapse of years the pranks and passions of the poet Tricotrin. The first five stories in the volume, while they do not attain the excellence of "The Tragedy of a Comic Song," are worthy stories in the same kind. The other seven stories are frankly mawkish in content, although redeemed by ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of the poet upon occasion of this parody has been noticed in the Preface. "It's all very well for once," said he afterwards, in comic confidence, at his villa at Petersham, "but don't do it again. I had been almost forgotten when you revived me; and now all the newspapers and reviews ring with this fashionable, trashy author.'" The sand and "filings of ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... go reasonably steady in rope harness. She was the first hog that father bought to stock the farm, and we boys regarded her as a very wonderful beast. In a few weeks she had a lot of pigs, and of all the queer, funny, animal children we had yet seen, none amused us more. They were so comic in size and shape, in their gait and gestures, their merry sham fights, and the false alarms they got up for the fun of scampering back to their mother and begging her in most persuasive little squeals to lie down and ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... their cargoes of fish direct from the sea to the pier, and there transact sales. There is a stout iron railing along the edge of that pier—a most needful safeguard—over which the servant girls of the town lean and look down at the fishermen, who look up at them with a calm serio-comic "don't-you-wish-you-may-get-it" expression that is deeply impressive. Bargains, of course, are not easily made, and it is in attempting to make these that all the hubbub occurs. The noise is all on the women's side. The men, secure in their floating position, ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... a serio-comic effort to stare down his back. Dorothea admitted to herself that he made a decidedly handsome fellow in his blue uniform with red facings and corded epaulettes; nor does a uniform look any the worse for having seen a moderate amount ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... I saw nothing of him, nor the next. But he was very much in my mind, and it had occurred to me that as a sentimental comic character he might serve a useful purpose in the development of my plot. The third day he called ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... was that he was no longer wanted. He was simply pushed out. George Sand had a remarkable gift for bringing out the characteristics of the persons with whom she had any intercourse. This Pagello, thanks to his adventure with her, has become in the eyes of the world a personage as comic as ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... that it would not be safe to hiss him from the manager's box. The venerable augurs of the literary or scientific temple may smile faintly when one of the tribe is mentioned; but the farce is in general kept up as well as the Chinese comic scene of entreating and imploring a man to stay with you, with the implied compact between you that he shall by no means think of doing it. A poor wretch he must be who would wantonly sit down on one of these bandbox reputations. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... $350,000 per annum. He expends it principally in beautifying his delightful summer residence in Mackerelville. It has been his misfortune to pass many years of his life in a lunatic asylum, the unhappy result of organizing plans for American Comic Papers. All is joy and peace with him now, however; he looks hopefully forward to the time when PUNCHINELLO shall have attained to his legitimate rank of the Foremost Journal in the Nation. Meanwhile he lunches daily at a ...
— Punchinello Vol. II., No. 30, October 22, 1870 • Various
... wrong number. Lawrince hasn't found the price yet; he's only getting estimates; but you'd better coax him to make the change—bring the drammer closer to the hearts of the people. None of these cheap fil-lums where a comic dog runs in and upsets the tea-table, just as the parson is about to say grace, but the world's greatest artists brought within the reach of all who command the homely nickel. Do you follow me, O protector of ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... and is refined and subdivided, as an art, both in degree and kind, in France more than in any other country. The prolific authors in this department, and the variety and richness of invention they display, as well as the permanent attraction of the Comic Muse, are striking peculiarities of the French theatre. No capital affords the material and the audience requisite for such triumphs like Paris; and there is always a play of this kind in vogue there, wherein ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the telling of tall stories outside the regular course of the narrative, which bubbles over with somewhat boisterous fun. And his humour is genuine and spontaneous; it is farcical without descending to buffoonery. His comic types are built up on character, and, if not subtle, are undeniably human and living. They are drawn, moreover, ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... existence of a sort of comic spirit in these works which relieves the tragedy of the situations. In spite of their dark pessimism, the actors in these little dramas have an appearance of gaiety which deceives. It is by this popular humor that Gorky is the continuator of the work of ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... threw over his job with noisy blasphemy; when his room above the stables was invaded by stealth and a comic-paper picture of a goat's head substituted for his dead mother's photograph in the well-polished little ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... may think that "nakedly" is not a good rhyme for "sea." Nor is it. If you do that kind of thing in comic poetry no editor will give you money. But in serious poetry it is quite legitimate; in fact it is rather encouraged. That is why serious poetry is so much easier than comic poetry. In my next lecture I shall ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... yer hand." She evidently felt the cold air coming from the window, for she went over and drew the curtain. When she saw the open window, she raised her hands in a sort of dismay, which to me, knowing how little base for concern could be within her knowledge, was comic. Hurriedly she shut the window, and then, coming close over ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... strain, in which there might have been a little simple remorse, too. For she was honest—and there, across the table, sat poor old Nelson (or Nielsen) staring at her, round-eyed and so pathetically comic in his fierce aspect as to touch the most ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... upon every lane and by-path of circumstance that leads nowhere and matters not the least in their story. Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Shakespeare, and many other writers have seized upon such characters and made use of them for their comic effect. James, in illustrating this mental type, has quoted the following from ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... to the comic papers, Morty," I said, "we would have spiflicated a red child, given a merry toot and disappeared in ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... promotion a rapidly-increasing prosperity came upon Jane's young man. One day we learned that Mr. Maynard had given William a book. "'Smiles' 'Elp Yourself,' it's called," said Jane; "but it ain't comic. It tells you how to get on in the world, and some what William read to me ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Tunnel,—that great object of foreign admiration,—endeavoured to silence him by pronouncing that London had no monuments, and was not half as big as Paris; for, though he lived in Poitou, he had seen the capital. The comic look which our champion gave us when this ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... opportunity of knowing what true comedy was. It had had farces in abundance, not only of home growth, but imported, and from Italy in particular. When Moliere came before the public with his homogeneous and well-trained company, and his repertory of excellent character-sketches and comic situations, the prevailing sentiment was expressed by a member of the audience which listened to the first production of his Precieuses Ridicules: "Courage, Moliere; this is ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... great stake!" cried Charles. He arose with a serio-comic air, much pleased at the ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... some thoughts which her words suggested—so much is dry humour allied to sentiment that the mention of laurels brought to his mind a comic association which at once dispelled his chagrin. "When did you say ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Shakespeare, and Martin Tupper; the title-page being decorated in colours with views of the Temple, Stratford-on-Avon, and Albury House! If I ventured to quote the Preface, it would beat even this as the climax of fulsome flattery, and I think that my friends of the Comic Press who have done me so much service by keeping up my shuttlecock with their battledores, and so much honour by placing me prominently among the defamed worthies of the world, would in their charity (for they have some) pity the victim of such excruciating ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... that enlightenment. So, too, to understand all the goods that any man, nay, that any beast or angel, may ever have pursued, would leave man still necessitous of food, drink, sleep, and shelter; he would still love; the comic, the loathsome, the beautiful would still affect him with unmistakable direct emotions. His taste might no doubt gain in elasticity by those sympathetic excursions into the polyglot world; the plastic or dramatic quality which had enabled him to feel other creatures' ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... concealed under a badly-battered hat. Though the face of the black expressed good-humour, it might have been called sad when brought into comparison with that of the little red man, which peeped out beside it. Upon the latter, there was an expression irresistibly comic—the expression of an actor in broad farce. One eye was continually on the wink, while the other looked knowing enough for both. A short clay-pipe, stuck jauntily between the lips, added to the comical expression of the face, which was that of Mike ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... hand gone, back wounds, stomach wounds, holes in the head. They start chaffing one another. There's no hint of tragedy. A gale of laughter sweeps the ward from end to end. An Anzac captain is called on for a speech. I discover that he is our professional comic man and is called on to make speeches twenty times a day. They always start with, "Gentlemen, I will say this—" and end with a flourish in praise of Australia. Soon the ward is made perilous by wheel-chairs, in which unskilful pilots ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... she wanted to shake the hollow metal balls out of their frame, and send them whistling through the air on their own account-there, side by side with his comrades, who were excited almost to madness, a handsome lad came skipping along in elaborately graceful leaps, but carrying over his arm, with comic care, a long bull's-tail that he had tied on, and blowing alternately up and down the short scale from the shortest to the longest of the reeds composing his panpipes. Through the noisy crowd as they rushed by, sounded, now and again, a loud roar, that might as easily have been caused by ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... spectacle—the box, your portly kneeling figure, the poor devil inside wishing you had become a Fireworshipper instead of coming there to shake his soul with a sense of his ridiculousness and yours—all incredible, monstrous, comic, though of course I can put a perfect literary complexion on it in a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... word with a gesture of comic despair. "First Latin, then jiujitsu, and now the violin! Boy, who ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... her heart, to moderate its too sanguine pulsations and show the delicate lace around her cuffs, FLORA shyly entered the parlor, and surprised Mr. PENDRAGON striding up and down the apartment like one of the more comic of the tragic ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2., No. 32, November 5, 1870 • Various
... away from it—or try to—a minute at a time; and the comic gods sometimes help us. Squier[79] has a junior officer here to hold his desk down when he's gone. He's a West Point Lieutenant with a German name. His study is ordnance. A new kind of bomb gives him the same sort of joy that a new species would have given Darwin. He was over ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... Washington, accompanied the President everywhere. He was a good singer, and, when Lincoln was in one of his melancholy moods, would "fire a few rhythmic shots" at the President to cheer the latter. Lincoln keenly relished nonsense in the shape of witty or comic ditties. A parody of "A Life on the Ocean Wave" was ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... dental and optical treatment, have no public libraries, lectures, schools, debates, or camp newspapers, have not seven tennis courts, three football fields, athletic games, cricket, golf and hockey, are not amused by dramas, comic operas and cinema shows, and above all are not paid extra wages for doing their own work to make themselves comfortable. All of these advantages and more which the Ruhleben prisoners enjoy have been largely the result of the effort of the camp ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... mean; he, following up the train of his own thoughts, comprehended little or nothing of my surprise, and evidently was so engrossed by his reflections that he had neither ears nor eyes for aught around him. There was a most singular semi-comic expression in the old withered face that nearly made me laugh at first; but as I continued to look steadily at it, I perceived that, despite the long-worn wrinkles that low Irish drollery and fun had furrowed around the angles of his mouth, the real character of his ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Schmoker" gives color to the assertion that Mr. Root caught up and adapted a popular ditty for his Christian melody—as was so often done in Wales, and in the Lutheran and Wesleyan reformations. He baptized the comic fugue, and promoted it from the vaudeville stage to the ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in the one object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic to those who do not share the philosopher's perception of identity. To him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws. Though he meant to be just, he seemed haunted by a certain chronic assumption ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... have had the answer this morning. Of course she had a revolver. I've got one myself. She went to bed and did it. She used to say to me that if ever she did it that was how she would do it.... And father tells me not to add to his difficulties! Don't you think it's comic?... But she never told me everything. I knew that. I accused her of it. She ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... Whether he shut his eyes or kept them open, the same illusions operated. The darker and more profound were his cogitations, the droller and more whimsical became the apparitions. They buzzed about him thick as flies, flapping at him, flouting him, hooting in his ear, yet with such comic appendages, that what at first was his bane became at length his solace; and he desired no better society than that of his merry phantasmata. We shall presently find in what way this remarkable phenomenon influenced his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... cheap, your laughter never forced; your sigh was never the pulpit trick of the preacher. Your funny people—your Costigans and Fokers—were not mere characters of trick and catch-word, were not empty comic masks. Behind each the human heart was beating; and ever and again we were allowed to see the ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... this oppressive feeling may have weighed upon you in watching this old-fashioned family life on the banks of the Floss, which even sorrow hardly suffices to lift above the level of the tragi-comic. It is a sordid life, you say, this of the Tullivers and Dodsons, irradiated by no sublime principles, no romantic visions, no active, self-renouncing faith; moved by none of those wild, uncontrollable passions which create ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... first purely religious, rapidly developed a comic side, which by degrees became their central theme. The moral purpose of the performance was forgotten; and the Church disowned its evil changeling. To none of these early plays can the term "drama" be accurately applied; for each and all of them lack plot. They ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... have joined in the merriment produced among my companions by the ludicrous spectacle which we presented. A comic spectacle indeed; nine of us squatted at intervals over the ground, the blue smoke escaping through the interstices of our robes and blankets, and rising around our heads, as though one and all ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... on her actions, except that, though a hundred men quarrelled openly, or in their own minds, about her, no one had ever had any right to quarrel about her. With a tongue which made men gasp with laughter, with as comic a gift as ever woman had, and as equally comic a face, she had been a good-natured little tyrant in her way. She had given a kiss here and there, and had taken one, but always there had been before ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Count Victor running hard across the white level waste of the park into the very boar's den—a comic spectacle, had there been any one to see it, in a dancer's shoes and hose, coatless and excited. He looked over the railing of the fosse to find ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... brain of an old woman up in New Hampshire and, like the little demon of error that it is, it leaped forth, after a long period of travail, full-fledged and panoplied, and on its lips were these words: "What fools these mortals be!" Dame Eddy gets good returns from the sacrilegio-comic tour of her progeny around the country. Intellectual Boston is at her feet, and Boston pays well for ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... of Miss Hallie Q. Brown was very fine. From grave to gay, from tragic to comic, with a great variation of themes and humors, she seemed to succeed in all, and her renderings were the spice of the night's ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... no monopoly of patriotic enthusiasm and good faith. Englishmen return thanks to Providence for not being born anything but an Englishman, in churches and ale-houses as well as in comic operas. The Frenchman cherishes and proclaims the idea that France is the most civilized modern country and satisfies best the needs of a man of high social intelligence. The Russian, whose political and social ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... to be comic, Griggs," said the inventor, bruskly. "I'm going down to see who's fooling with that motor. It should not have been touched, although I must say it's a satisfaction to sit in a first-class place like this and hear my own machinery ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... then thirty years old and had been singing for fourteen years on the stage. She was still beautiful, though her voice had begun to show signs of wear. Rossini seems to have fallen in love with her art and herself, and he wrote ten roles for her. It was she who persuaded him away from comic to tragic opera. The political changes of the period soon changed her from public favourite to a public dislike, and Rossini, disgusted with his countrymen, married her and left Italy. It was said that he married her for her money, because she was his elder and was already ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... drawback, therefore, to apprehend where excesses too personal or stinging could be repressed as certainly as the trespasses of a hound, the Plautine master drew from his servant, without anxiety, the comic services which, in the middle ages, were drawn from the professional "fool." This original vice in the constitution of society, though greatly mitigated, in the course of two centuries from the era of Plautus, by the progress of intellectual luxury, was one main fountain of that coarseness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... putting his mind out of tune for acts of religious worship, seemed but a happy preparation for the exercise of devotional feelings." [7] This coexistence of serious with playful elements is often found in natures of unusual depth and richness, just as tragic and comic powers sometimes co-exist in ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... let no man set asunder," said he, bombastically, and even the surly milkman, and Rosenstein under his manipulating razor, when a laugh was dangerous, laughed. John Flynn, when he waxed didactic, and made use of large words and phrases, was the comic column ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... we have spoken of the way in which the action progresses in the twelve- to sixteen-scene comic pictures in the comic supplements to the Sunday newspapers. Take for example the well-known "Bringing Up Father" series of "comics." Commencing with the basic situation, the action moves progressively to a logical conclusion, ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... Club idea was originated by Ad Carter, the Evening Journal's famous cartoonist and creator of the daily comic strip ...
— What's in the New York Evening Journal - America's Greatest Evening Newspaper • New York Evening Journal
... gramophone, but why, oh, why, did they not bring some of the simple world-wide human songs which could at least have had an educational effect? The Indian group listened to this weird instrument with the profoundest gravity. If there is anything inherently comic in our low comics it ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... and by extending our line, and holding on to it, we at last got near enough to take him off the piece of detached ice on which he had providentially scrambled. I never think of the occurrence without a sickening sensation, mixed with a comic recollection of K——'s ejaculations. Whilst walking back with my half-frozen friend, the ice showed itself to be easing off rapidly with the turn of tide. At 1 A.M. we were all free, and a lane of ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... to the city so gay, Where he walked through the streets in his comic array; But think of his horror, oh! think of his dread, When, hanging immediately over his head, In the first butcher's shop that he chanced to discover, Were the mortal remains of poor Bobby, his brother, "'Tis sad," sighed our Jack, "such a difference should be Between that unfortunate ...
— Surprising Stories about the Mouse and Her Sons, and the Funny Pigs. - With Laughable Colored Engravings • Unknown
... nearly heart-broken, at the little fat man lying on his back, whose round stomach raised up the bed-clothes like a balloon filled with gas. He snored with the noise of a wheezy organ pipe, with prolonged snorts and comic chokings. His few hairs profited by his sleep, to stand up in a very strange way, as if they were tired of having been fastened for so long to that pate, whose bareness they were trying to cover, and a small stream of saliva was running out of one ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... if there was a pretty girl or two in one of them, she would be the recipient of a deluge of flowers or of really pretty bonbons. It was all play, all laughter, all a new, rollicking world of happy fools, of comic chivalry, of humorous gallantry. For my part, I thought it was the world which I had been born to live in; and I was too happy in it to imagine even that anybody could be less happy than I was. My sole grief was when my supply of confetti ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... of naughtiness, like charity is reported to do. Very likely that's why Mrs. —— is always doing so much for institutions and what not—for her sins, I suppose. I always thought she was a naughty old hypocrite! By the way, there is a comic character in "Siegfried," and in one of the others, I forget which, called Mime—a funny little dwarf, the sort of thing they put in a Christmas ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... entered into office, that he shall possess and hold until the end of his term. Next he assigns Choregi to the tragic poets, choosing three of the richest persons out of the whole body of Athenians. Formerly he used also to assign five Choregi to the comic poets, but now the tribes provide the Choregi for them. Then he receives the Choregi who have been appointed by the tribes for the men's and boys' choruses and the comic poets at the Dionysia, and for the men's and boys' choruses at the Thargelia ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... days, there was no dimming of the imaginative faculty nor of the observant. The whole neighbourhood in which he lived was an open book, in which he read the wonderful story of life in many tragic and comic tales of actual fact; and in the prison where he spent twelve years, he must often have heard from his fellow-prisoners such fragments as they knew and remembered, with which doubtless they would beguile the tedium of their confinement. ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... without widening or lessening the distance between us, for a hundred yards. But was it possible for us to hold out? How I prayed we might! We neared Clump again. The comic sight cheered me. Truly, if hopping about and entreaties could help us, what aid must that old nigger give us. I almost expected to see him soar off to us, he looked so ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... minstrels was Adam de la Halle, of Arras in Picardy—1240-1286. Upon many accounts the music of this author is of considerable interest to us. He was a good natural melodist, as the examples in Coussemaker's "Adam de la Halle" show. He is also the author of the earliest comic opera of which we have any account, the play of "Robin and Marion." We shall speak of this later, in connection with the ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... reply, "you mustn't 'sir' me. I'm the comic chauffeur—your fellow-bondsman, to wit. Name of Alison." He extended a firm brown hand. "Not to put too fine a point upon it, I'm overwhelmed to meet you. With the slightest encouragement, I shall fall upon your neck. The last footman was poor ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... among a group of men who were amusing themselves by making him drink and plying him with questions. He was already a little bit 'on' and was holding forth with a tone of indignation and a mocking smile which formed the most comic contrast: ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... more,' he says, 'the worthy delicatessener is engaged at this present moment in locking up and going away from here. In about a half an hour,' he says, 'he'll be setting in his happy German-American home picking his teeth after supper, and reading comic jokes to his little son August out of the Fleagetty Bladder. And shortly thereafter,' he says, 'what'll you and me be doing? We'll be there, in that vittles emporium, in the midst of plenty,' he says, 'filling our midsts with plenty of plenty. That's what we'll ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... said the comic fireman: "what does the dog say? Just call him, sir, if you please; his name ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... refrain from dancing, and certainly his voice danced as it sang. There was no other time so gay, except it was Purim—the feast to celebrate Queen Esther's redemption of her people from the wicked Haman—when everybody sent presents to everybody else, and the men wore comic masks or dressed up as women and performed little plays. The child went about with a great false nose, and when the name of "Haman" came up in the reading of the Book of Esther, which was intoned in a refreshingly new way, he tapped vengefully ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... that had been lying in her lap and ran over its contents again. It was a letter from the manager of a comic opera offering her a place with a large traveling company of the season. The salary was a very large figure, and the prospect held out by the manager was flattering. He had heard Rachel sing that Sunday ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... incompleteness, and to some extent even by his imperfections, that Moliere gains. Of all the great French classics, he is the least classical. His fluid mind overflowed the mould he worked in. His art, sweeping over the whole range of comic emotions, from the wildest buffoonery to the grimmest satire and the subtlest wit, touched life too closely and too often to attain to that flawless beauty to which it seems to aspire. He lacked the precision of form which is the mark of the consummate artist; he was sometimes ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... another. No horse-race or prize-fight could go on without him, and he himself never left one of these last-mentioned gatherings without finding some one to try conclusions with him. Beside this, he was a great writer and singer of comic songs, ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... rosemary, with a lemon in its mouth, which was placed with great formality at the head of the table. The moment this pageant made its appearance, the harper struck up a flourish; at the conclusion of which the young Oxonian, on receiving a hint from the Squire, gave, with an air of the most comic gravity, an old carol, the first verse of ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... during the day, revel in the license of the hour, and eat, and drink, and smoke to the highest point either of excitement or stupefaction, and enter into all the slang of the day—of the turf, the ring, the cockpit, the theatres—and shake their sides at comic songs. To enter one of these places when the theatre was over, was a luxury indeed to Titmouse; figged out in his very uttermost best, with satin stock and double breastpins; his glossy hat cocked on one side of his head, ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... piece of impertinent correspondency,—a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity,—an unwelcome remembrancer," and so on. "This theme of poor relations is replete with so much matter for tragic as well as comic associations that it is difficult to keep the account distinct without blending." The essay includes three or four admirable examples of Elia's felicity in drawing typical characters with just that touch of oddity that makes them live as individuals. The theatre which ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... oh! if you had but been with us! Young Betty, doing what the mind of man without my help never can conceive, with his legs like padded boot-trees wrapped up in faded yellow drawers, was the hero. The comic man of the company enveloped in a white sheet, with his head tied with red tape like a brief and greeted with yells of laughter whenever he appeared, was the venerable priest. A poor toothless old idiot at ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... box-car and here with sword in sheath Kincaid also had stopped, in conference with the conductor, while his lieutenants marched the column on, now halted it along the train's full length, now faced it against the open cars and now gave final command to break ranks. In comic confusion the fellows clambered aboard stormed by their friends' fond laughter at the awkwardness of loaded knapsacks, and their retorting mirth drowned in a new flood of good-bys and adieus, fresh waving of hats and handkerchiefs, and made-over smiles from eyes that had wept themselves dry. ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... fun seemed to be in a comic piece, which, however oft repeated, appeared never to grow stale. It was somewhat ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... a light-haired, ungainly youth, of about twenty, with a reputation for singing a comic song. It was understood that the Admiral designed him for College and Holy Orders, but meanwhile time was passing, and Sam sat "with idle hands at home," or more frequently, in the ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Comic poets reproach Socrates with teaching how to make a bad cause good, and Plato represents Lysias and Gorgias boasting the same thing. To these may be added several examples of Greeks and Romans, and a long list of orators whose eloquence was not only the ruin of ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... he says, kind of fretful. 'They're capitalized by a foreign syndicate after rubber, and they're loaded to the muzzle for bribing. I'm sick,' goes on Mellinger, 'of comic opera. I want to smell East River and wear suspenders again. At times I feel like throwing up my job, but I'm d——n fool enough to be sort of proud of it. "There's Mellinger," they say here. "Por Dios! you can't touch him with a million." I'd like to take that record back and ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... civil and ecclesiastical codes broke his health. For recreation he composed a Latin comedy called 'Philodoxeos,' which imposed upon the judgment of scholars, and was ascribed as a genuine antique to Lepidus, the comic poet. Feeling stronger, Alberti returned at the age of twenty to his law studies, and pursued them in the teeth of disadvantages. His health was still uncertain, and the fortune of an exile reduced him to the utmost want. It was no wonder that under these untoward circumstances even ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... were years of experimentation, packed with mistakes and changes. Few of the cars would run long or fast. It was inevitable that the automobile should take its place in jest and joke. Hence the comic era. With the development of the mechanism came the speed mania, which hardly added ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... to see the comic side of the affair. Nor was Miss Vantweekle. She was on my wife's bed ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... some not very pleasing stories about himself, but one of them shows us what a knack he had for seeing the comic side of things, and perhaps for seeing comedy where it never existed. Upon one occasion he was invited to a friend's house where the family were in the habit of assembling for prayers, and he had no sooner ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... did up the genteel comedy; he kept on hand a supply of "little jokes" gleaned from Joe Miller, current comic literature, dinner tables, clubs, etc.—"little jokes" of which every point in his discourse continually reminded him, though his hearers could not always perceive the association of ideas. This gentleman ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... wasp-waisted heroines that we must look for his triumphs; it is to his delineations, from the moralist's point of view, of vulgarity and vice,—of the "rank life of towns," with all its squalid tragedy and comedy. Here he finds his strongest ground, and possibly, notwithstanding his powers as a comic artist and caricaturist, his loftiest claim ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... father, son, the rich man, all are here, But soon the page is turned upon the comic actor's art, The masque is dropped, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... not the only Scot who has lost his kilt in the war. One of the Royal Engineers gives a comic picture of a Highlander who appears to have lost nearly every article of clothing he left home in. When last seen by this letter writer he was resplendent in a Guardsman's tunic, the red breeches of a Frenchman, a pair of Belgian ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... Stone had lighted his pipe, and as he gave two or three tremendous puffs he screwed his face into a profoundly serio- comic expression and winked his right eye mysteriously ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... dinner, invent on Sundays. See with what ardour they rush home of a night! See how they seize a half-holiday, like hungry dogs a bone! They don't want golf, bridge, limericks, novels, illustrated magazines, clubs, whisky, starting-prices, hints about neckties, political meetings, yarns, comic songs, anturic salts, nor the smiles that are situate between a gay corsage and a picture hat. They never wonder, at a loss, what they will do next. Their evenings never drag—are always too short. You may, indeed, catch them at twelve o'clock at night on the flat of their backs; but not ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... replied; "the comic-operas have made carbines absolutely ridiculous, and it would be a great misfortune to any young woman to find herself in danger from an absurd weapon. But it would be quite different with a knife—a very cold and very bright knife blade, which makes ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... scene is comparable with the one of similar gaiety in "Lord and Lady Algy"—both having an undercurrent of serious strain. The tragedy motive is relieved at almost calculated times by comedy, which shows that Fitch held to the old dramatic theory of comic relief. Often this was irritating, discounting the mood he was trying to maintain. He was not as skilful in the use of these varying elements as Pinero, with whom he might be compared—not for strength of characterization, for fullness of story or for the sheer ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... kiss: or else she would say, with a half comic petulance, "No! no! I am on his side. Give him his own way, or he will make us ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... declaimed to judge and jury; At its bar were earnest pleadings For the erring and the guilty. In its halls were panoramas, Lectures, shows, and exhibitions, All the public entertainments, All the tragic and the comic, All the festivals and music, All the city's merry-making. 'Round and 'round the gorgeous structure, (Gorgeous in that generation,) Stood in rows the public houses, Primitive and unpretending; But their tenants knew no others, They were simple, frugal tenants, They ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... great comic poet of antiquity display, when he selected the Scarabaeus; as the food which had already served the purposes of digestion with the Rider, was still capable of affording nutrition to ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... letter to Mrs. Norris printed in the Boston Bibliophile edition containing some very interesting comic verses on England somewhat in the manner ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... shrugging her shoulders, "once. And," she adds, making the bracelets jingle again, as with a tragedy queen's action of the right arm she sweeps away into space whole realms of Music Halls and comic singers, ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... came rattling down upon his head; and even one little chimney-sweeper fell astride on his nose. Nothing could compare with the immeasurable delight of the children at the astonishment of the Candidate, and the comic grimaces and head-shakings with which he received this ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... amusing to consider Jack judicially as a human exhibit, stripped of all the chimera of romance with which Little Rivers had clothed his personality. If he had not happened to meet her on the pass, the townspeople would have regarded this stranger as an invasion of real life by a character out of a comic opera. She viewed the specimen under a magnifying glass in all angles, turning it around as if it were a bronze or ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... joy at the phrase. From that moment Cennick was known as "Swaddling John";120 and his name was introduced into comic songs at the music-halls. As he walked through the streets he had now to be guarded by an escort of friendly soldiers; and the mob, ten or fifteen thousand in number, pelted him with dirt, stones and bricks. At one service, says the local ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... House Comedians were an old institution, they had not always been equally flourishing. At Railsford's, for instance, in past years they had decidedly languished. The performances had possibly been comic, but that was due to the actors, not the author, for the scenes chosen were usually stock selections from the tragedies of Shakespeare; such, for instance, as the death of King Lear, the ghost scene in Hamlet, ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... will ever forget that Christmas. To begin with, after breakfast they had a concert. The khaki boy gave two recitations, sang three songs, and gave a whistling solo. Lucy Rose gave three recitations and the minister a comic reading. The pale shop girl sang two songs. It was agreed that the khaki boy's whistling solo was the best number, and Aunt Cyrilla gave him the bouquet of everlastings as ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a strong sense of humor; yet, so to speak, he was not, in the strict sense of the term, a humorist. His comic fancy lurked in the outermost and most unlooked-for images of association,—which, indeed, maybe said to be the components of humor; nevertheless, I think they did not extend beyond the quaint, in fulfilment ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... without either exhausting their humour, or varying a note from its characteristic tone, than in his large and reiterated specimens of the eloquence of the redoubted Ritt-master. The general idea of the character is familiar to our comic dramatists after the Restoration—and may be said in some measure to be compounded of Captain Fluellen and Bobadil;—but the ludicrous combination of the SOLDADO with the Divinity student of Mareschal-College, ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... in passing); and, placing these typified traits in juxtaposition in their conflict and contrast, struck the spark of comedy. Downright, as his name indicates, is "a plain squire"; Bobadill's humour is that of the braggart who is incidentally, and with delightfully comic effect, a coward; Brainworm's humour is the finding out of things to the end of fooling everybody: of course he is fooled in the end himself. But it was not Jonson's theories alone that made the success of "Every Man in His ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... strikes me silent, seals my lips, And apts me rather to sleep out my time, Than I would waste it in contemned strifes With these vile Ibides, these unclean birds, That make their mouths their clysters, and still purge From their hot entrails. But I leave the monsters To their own fate. And, since the Comic Muse Hath proved so ominous to me, I will try If TRAGEDY have a more kind aspect; Her favours in my next I will pursue, Where, if I prove the pleasure but of one, So he judicious be, he shall be alone A theatre unto me; Once ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... characters, the mind must be trained to delight in TRUTH,—not in comic rhymes, in sentimental tales, and skeptical poetry. The truth revealed in God's Holy Word, should constitute the firm basis of education; and the works of Creation and Providence the superstructure while the Divine blessing can alone rear and ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... saloon been just around the corner, I should have got drunk. As it was, I would sprawl out in the shade on my one day of rest and dally with the Sunday papers. But I was too weary even for their froth. The comic supplement might bring a pallid smile to my face, and then I would ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... cried, "that is comic, and no mistake. I really thought it was some kind of fruit. ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... draper at Paita, does she not justify the character that I myself gave her, just before dismissing her from St. Sebastian's, of being a 'handy' girl? Mr. Urquiza's instructions were short, easy to be understood, but rather comic; and yet, which is odd, they led to tragic results. There were two debtors of the shop, (many, it is to be hoped, but two meriting his affectionate notice,) with respect to whom he left the most opposite directions. The one was a very handsome lady; and the rule as ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... first twelve years or so of their life. During that time they had been entirely in their mother's hands, hearing her opinions, regulated outwardly by her will: and yet they grew up their father's children, and not hers! How strange it was, with a touch of the comic which made her laugh!—that laugh of exasperation and impatience which marks the intolerable almost more than tears do. How was it? Can any one explain this mystery? She was of a much more vivacious, robust, ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... of life's dilemmas—little dilemmas that irritate ordinary people or in which ordinary people display themselves pusillanimous; or tragic dilemmas that find ordinary people wanting and leave them in vacillation and despair—there was none of any sort that Harry, receiving with his comic, "Mice and Mumps! Mice and Mumps, old girl!" did not receive with the assurance to her that, though this was a nuisance, he had metal and to spare to settle such; that, though this was a catastrophe, a facer, he'd too much courage, too much high, brave spirit for it to discommode him; there ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... felt as if he were taking part in a comic opera, and enjoyed the scene immensely. But now his attention was distracted by the stewards bringing in steaming platters of macaroni and stewed mutton, from which they first served the Duchessa, and then the Duke, and afterward the guests. The servants waited hungry-eyed ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... a preposterous baby. The curs were preposterous curs. Nora had always been afflicted with a surplus amount of laughter—laughter which had difficulty in attaching itself to anything, owing to the lack of the really comic in the surroundings of the poor. But with a red-headed and freckled baby boy and two trick dogs in the house, she found a good and sufficient excuse for her hilarity, and would have torn the cave where echo lies with ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... about five o'clock when Mamie, having, at a modest estimate, seen five hundred persecuted heroes, a thousand ill-used heroines, several regiments of cowboys, and perhaps two thousand comic men pursued by angry mobs, returned from her ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... proclamation that whatever any one possessed before he entered into office, that he shall possess and hold until the end of his term. Next he assigns Choregi to the tragic poets, choosing three of the richest persons out of the whole body of Athenians. Formerly he used also to assign five Choregi to the comic poets, but now the tribes provide the Choregi for them. Then he receives the Choregi who have been appointed by the tribes for the men's and boys' choruses and the comic poets at the Dionysia, and for the men's and boys' choruses at ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... bought, not only his three pink bottles, but his green ones, his blue ones, his pills, his pomades, and his perfumed medicinal soaps that were to soften the skin, strengthen the joints, and promote longevity. After this, he sang a comic song of innumerable verses (with horn obligato) and delivered a discourse, in which he said there had never been more than three great men in the world, Louis the Fourteenth, Alexander the Great, and Hippocrates, the ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... already gone to sleep, so Antoinette informed me, when the results of Mrs. McMurray's shopping came home. I am glad she has early habits. It appears she has spent a happy and fully occupied afternoon over a pile of French illustrated comic papers in the possession ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... distinguished poet under Stanislaus Augustus was count Ignatius Krasicki, bishop of Ermeland or Warmla, and later of Gnesen, the Polish Voltaire. His principal works are an epic under the title of Woyna, Chocimska or 'War of Chocim,' and three comic epics, one of which, Monachomachia, ridicules the monkish system and exhibits its absurdity in strong colours. He wrote this poem at the suggestion of Frederic the Great, to whose coterie of literary ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... it not for the antique. Genius and science are of no avail; the position of Christ in baptism in the paintings of Verrocchio and Ghirlandajo is mean and servile; the movements of the "Thunder-stricken" in Signorelli's lunettes is an inconceivable mixture of the brutish, the melodramatic, and the comic; the magnificently drawn youth at the door of the prison in Filippino's Liberation of St. Peter is gradually going to sleep and collapsing in a fashion ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... before the second day was over, Helen seemed to discover that he was too lavish; and she told him so, with a prudent grave look, putting her hand on his arm as he was about to enter an inn to dine; and the gravity would have been comic, but that the eyes through their moisture were so meek and grateful. She felt he was about to incur that ruinous extravagance on her account. Somehow or other, the purse found its way into her keeping, and then she looked proud ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... conditions seem similar to those in England. The great serio-comic novel of Antoine de la Salle, Petit Jean de Saintre, shows us in detail the education and the adventures, which certainly involved a very early introduction to life, of a page in a great house in the fifteenth century. ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... 1845, however, that he made definite use of this material, and began the sketch for his only comic opera. The first outline was drawn during a sojourn in the Bohemian mountains, when he felt in an unusually light and festive mood. But the work was soon set aside, and was not resumed until 1862, when it was finished in Paris. The score was then begun, and written almost entirely at Biberich ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... have seen the little birds as they hopped among said leaves and commented upon the scarcity of worms. I have seen the buxom flowers as they curtsied and danced above your flower-beds like a miniature comic-opera chorus. And besides that—" ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... 1. Galuppi, Baldassaro (rather Baldassare): b. 1703, in Burano, an island near Venice, and thence called Buranello; d. 1785; a distinguished composer, whose operas, about fifty in number, and mostly comic, were at one time the most popular in Italy; Galuppi is regarded as the father of the Italian ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... admissible among the dignified personages who usually push all others out from the possession of the historical page; but a chapter of that gentleman's memoirs, as they are recorded in that exemplary recueil—the "Newgate Calendar;" nay, a canto of the great comic epic (involving many fables, and containing much exaggeration, but still having the seeds of truth) which the satirical poet of those days wrote in celebration of him—we mean Fielding's "History of Jonathan Wild the Great"—does ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... be in keeping with life generally," he answered. "In a comic opera one thing is not more idiotic than another. Yes, Monsieur Laripet, we will give them Funiculi, Funicula. I once drove in coffin nails to that tune in Verona. Now we will set people eating to it in Aix-les-Bains—we, Monsieur Laripet, you and I, who ought to be the petted minions ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... first fine Sunday. Strange perverseness! I never went while you staid here, and now I go to find you! What other news is there, Mary?—What puns have I made in the last fortnight? You never remember them. You have no relish for the Comic. "O! tell Hazlitt not to forget to send the American Farmer. I dare say it isn't so good as he fancies; but a Book's a Book." I have not heard from Wordsworth or from Malta since. Charles Kemble, it seems, enters ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... arguments to find out whether they were true? Nothing of the kind. But they flew to the sudden conclusion that somehow or other the religion of the world was in danger, if Darwinism should prove to be true. And it is very curious to note I wonder how long the world will keep on repeating that serio-comic blunder from the very beginning it has been the same; almost every single step that the world proposes to take in advance is opposed by the constituted religious authorities of the time because they assume at the outset that the theories which they have been holding are divinely authorized and ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... some vaguely foreshadowed end. But there are two or three facts which stand out certain and have to be taken account of in any image we may be tempted to form of him. In the first place, his was no forbidding figure at the time to those who knew him; a queer and a comic figure evidently, but liked, trusted, and by some loved; reputed for honest dealing and for kindly and gentle dealing; remarked too by some at that time, as before and ever after, for the melancholy of his face in repose; known by us beyond doubt to have gone through great pain; known lastly ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... unnoticed—assumed the responsibility of starting the men on their journey. The odd child waved her chubby hand imperiously to her friend the driver, and cried in her loudest voice, "Away!" The driver touched his hat with comic respect. "All right, miss—time's money, aint it?" He cracked his whip, and the cart rolled off noiselessly over the thick close turf of ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... more publications than any other? Do not our publishers fatten quicker and deeper? (helping themselves, under shelter of a delusive and sneaking law, or rather absence of law, to most of their forage, poetical, pictorial, historical, romantic, even comic, without money and without price—and fiercely resisting the timidest proposal to pay for it.) Many will come under this delusion—but my purpose is to dispel it. I say that a nation may hold and circulate rivers and oceans of very readable print, journals, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... things cheerful here," Al'mah said almost gaily. "Sometimes I have four or five convalescents in here, and they like a little gaiety. I sing them things from comic operas—Offenbach, Sullivan, and the rest; and if they are very sentimentally inclined I sing them good old-fashioned love-songs full of the musician's tricks. How people adore illusions! I've had here an old Natal sergeant, over sixty, and he was as cracked as could be about ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... supper, the young men grew terribly restive and discontented. Very few of them remain, and the old traditions handed down from father to son for three or four generations are disappearing. After dinner we had music and some charming recitations by Mme. Thenard. Her first one was a comic monologue which always had the wildest success in London, "Je suis veuve," beginning it with a ringing peal of laughter which was curiously contagious—everyone in the room joined in. I like her better in some of her serious things. When she said "le ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... of eighty millions she may free her own people. She would have the hold over the land, and she would cure a cancer. I am not well off, but I would offer —— or his agent L1000, if either of them would live one week in one of these poor devil's places, and feed as these people do. Our comic prints do an infinity of harm by their caricatures—firstly, the caricatures are not true, for the crime in Ireland is not greater than that in England; and, secondly, they exasperate the people on both sides of the Channel, and they do ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... the group of girls, flushed and lovely beyond compare, holding up the ravished end of that golden braid with a comic dismay, while her despoiler laughed coarsely from a distance and pinned the trophy to his coat lapel. I now saw that blasting was too merciful. He should be removed by a slower process if the thing could as easily ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... his brother between the old lady and her daughter struck him as so irresistibly funny, that it was with the utmost difficulty that he restrained himself from a violent outburst of laughter. And, certainly, to one easily moved to merriment there was something singularly quaint and almost comic in the contrast between the subdued but courteous manner of Amos, who was patiently endeavouring to make himself agreeable to his two immediate neighbours, and the excited frivolity of Miss Morse's running fire of worldly commonplaces, occasionally interrupted by her mother's more staid utterances ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... Doggett, an excellent comic actor, who was for many years joint-manager with Wilkes and Cibber, died in 1721, and bequeathed the Coat and Badge that are rowed for by Thames Watermen every first of August, from ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... annoying cross-examination by a pert barrister. Her son's assumption of the name of Robinson had been misunderstood and severely commented upon by the judge. A sympathetic jury had awarded thumping damages, and for the next six months the family title would be a peg on which music-hall singers and comic journalists would hang their ribald jokes. Lord C—- read the letter, flushed, and dutifully handed it back to his mother. She made pretence to read it as for the first time, and counselled him to ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... whole week she sticks to it industrious, jottin' down studies of various parts of my map while I'm eatin' breakfast, and workin' over 'em until I come back from the office in the afternoon. Did I throw out any more comic cracks? Never a one—not even when the picture showed that my eyes toed in. All I did was pat her on the back and say she was a wonder. But say, I got so I dreaded to look ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... some boys looking at him, they thinking that his despair heightened his comic appearance, he began to run ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... AN EVENING PARTY.—A very valuable little book just published. A complete compendium of games, sports, card diversions, comic recreations, etc., suitable for parlor or drawing-room entertainment. It contains more for the money than ...
— The Bradys Beyond Their Depth - The Great Swamp Mystery • Anonymous
... Each was leaning on a cue, his elbow crooked in as near an imitation of Giddy's position as the stick's length would permit. The figure was curved so that it stuck out behind and before; the expression on each face was as asinine as its owner's knowledge of the comic-weekly swell could make it; the little finger of the free hand was extravagantly bent. The players themselves walked with a mincing step about the table. And: "My deah fellah, what a pretty play. Mean to say, neat, don't you know," came incongruously from the lips of Reddy Lennigan, ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... forget thy strains, While Cooper's Hill commands the neighbouring plains. But see where artful Dryden next appears, Grown old in rhyme, but charming even in years. Great Dryden next, whose tuneful Muse affords The sweetest numbers, and the fittest words. Whether in comic sounds or tragic airs She forms her voice, she moves our smiles or tears. If satire or heroic strains she writes, 120 Her hero pleases and her satire bites. From her no harsh unartful numbers fall, She wears all dresses, and she charms in all. How might we fear our ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... the Indian captives must often have been relieved by comic incidents like those of Knight's escape from his guard; but there is very little record of anything except sorrow and suffering, danger and death. Certainly in the captivity of John Slover, another of Crawford's ill-starred ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... of Lachesis, which depicts her in all the grace of youth and beauty. She is sitting spinning, and at her feet lie two masks, one comic, the other tragic, as though to convey the idea, that, to a divinity of fate, the brightest and saddest scenes of earthly existence are alike indifferent, and that she quietly and steadily pursues her occupation, regardless of human ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... been to his church?" he cried. "Not one male bach or one female fach. Go there the next Sabbath, and the black muless will not say to you: 'Welcome you are, persons Capel. But there's glad am I to see you.' A comic sermon you will hear. A sermon got with half-a-crown postal order. Ask Postman. Laugh highly you will and stamp on the floor. Funny is the Parson in the white frock. Ach y fy, why for he doesn't have a coat preacher like Respecteds? Ask me that. From where does ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... time to find everything, and when I got back to Dennis another song had begun. A young sailor I did not know was singing it, and the less said about it the better, except that it very nearly led to a row. It was by way of being a comic song, but except for one line which was rather witty as well as very nasty, there was nothing humorous about it, unless that it was funny that any one could have been indecent enough to write it, and any one else unblushing enough to sing it. I am ashamed to say I ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... conditions of men were gathered there—officers and privates in mutual good fellowship. The Second-in-Command of the Reedshires had just given them a ballad, and sung it jolly well too; and the armourer sergeant and one of their own lieutenants were fooling about as they waited to appear in a comic turn. ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... learned that a daughter had been born to him; two months later he received a notification from his steward that Varvara Pavlovna had asked for the first quarter's allowance. Then worse and worse rumors began to reach him; at last, a tragic-comic story was reported with acclamations in all the papers. His wife played an unenviable part in it. It was the finishing stroke; Varvara Pavlovna ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... thundering bouncer!" cried a voice from behind the boatswain's back. He turned sharply round, but did not discover the speaker. He shook his fist in that direction, however, with a comic expression in ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... laugh? Is it because humor and sound sense are essentially antagonistic? Has humanity found by experience that the man who sees the fun of life is unfitted to deal sanely with its problems? I think not. No man had more of the comic spirit in him than William Shakespeare, and yet his serious reflections, by the sheer force of their sublime obviousness, have pushed their way into the race's arsenal of immortal platitudes. So, ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... as the sorcerer Patience; perhaps more comic in his way than the sorcerer. He was a bilious, melancholy man, tall, lean, angular, full of languor, dignity, and deliberation in speech and action. So little did he like talking that he answered all questions in monosyllables; and yet he never failed to obey the laws ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... had never tried it, had forgotten it. Then, turning with an air half comic, but with something of earnestness, he said, naming me by way of start: "You have been holding a sort of autopsy over me ever since I tumbled over at Atlantic City. I exposed myself there too long both in the water and in the sun, but it was not ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... Miriam played on the piano, and sang with me on the guitar half a dozen songs, and then the other commenced. I don't know when I have been more amused. There was an odd, piney-woods dash about him that was exceedingly diverting, and he went through comic, sentimental, and original songs with an air that showed his whole heart was in it. Judging from the number of youth too timid to venture in, who peeped at us from the windows, I should say that young ladies are curiosities ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... 'weaknesses'." Everard looked annoyed. "Sing some of your comic songs, Harry," he said, wishing to change the subject. And Harry sung, to the great amusement of the party generally, and of Mrs. Arnold ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... a few weeks," he said, "I had beat myself into the more enviable position of snare drummer. Then I wanted to travel with a circus, and dangle my legs before admiring thousands over the back seat of a Golden Chariot. In a dearth of comic songs for the banjo and guitar, I had written two or three myself, and the idea took possession of me that I might be a clown, introduced as a character-song-man and the composer of my ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... fixed purpose to bring Van Degen to a definite expression of his intentions. The case of Indiana Frusk, whose brilliant marriage the journals of two continents had recently chronicled with unprecedented richness of detail, had made less impression on him than she hoped. He treated it as a comic episode without special bearing on their case, and once, when Undine cited Rolliver's expensive fight for freedom as an instance of the power of love over the most invulnerable natures, had answered carelessly: "Oh, his first wife was a laundress, ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... religion into farce. Whether it was quite worth while suffering their presence for the fun of seeing them mount, when starting for their excursion, is open to question, but that it was a unique and comic sight we were all agreed. The hotel garden, filled with guides, horses, donkeys, and pilgrims; the delicate exhibition of ankles and feet —such feet; the chairs to help the rotund damsels; the swarm of natives round one especially fat woman, who got down after all; the beaming face of the host, ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... His manners were unusually gentle and considerate of others, and he was specially remarkable for one trait very rarely found in the Middle Ages—he was always thoughtful of those beneath him. Another peculiarity he had, not common in his time; he was decidedly a humourist. The comic side even of his own troubles was always patent to him. Yet he was a man of extremely sensitive feeling, as well as of shrewd and delicate perceptions. He lived a most uncomfortable life, and he was ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... any especial date. Tartarin de Tarascon was, however, an exception to this rule, for the author wrote it for Messrs. Guillaume, the well-known art publishers, who, wishing to popularise an improved style of illustration, offered M. Daudet 150,000 francs (L6,000) to write them a serio-comic story. Tartarin, which obtained an instant popularity, proved the author's versatility, but won him the hatred of the good people of Provence, who have never forgiven him for having made fun of ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... called on the President, he met with a hearty reception, and Mr. Lincoln, taking him into a private room, repeated to him a story from a comic article by Orpheus C. Kerr, satirically criticising the conduct of the war. It was a story about Captain Bob Shorty and the Mackerel Brigade and the Anaconda Policy— something about generals in the field being ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... became a favorite of the town by virtue of her singing voice, vivacity, and gift for mimicry. Admired first as a singing actress, Miss Rafter in 1731 gave unequivocal notice of her considerable talent as a comic actress in the role of Nell in Coffey's The Devil to Pay, one of several hundred she mastered. Her specialties: Flora in The Wonder, Lady Bab in High Life Below Stairs, Lappet in The Miser, Catherine in Catherine ...
— The Case of Mrs. Clive • Catherine Clive
... although she was frightened at the time lest I should get capsized and drowned. I believe it, for she is a sweet and gracious lady; and I quite see, as she demonstrated, that the sight of me, teetotumming about, steering in an elaborate and showy way all the time, was irresistibly comic. And she gave a most amusing account of how, when she started looking for me to give me tea, a charming habit of hers, she could not see me in among my bottles, and so asked the little black boy where I was. "There," said he, pointing to the tree hanging against the rock out ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... him rather indifferently: she had given him a squat ungainly figure, an inexpressive face, a voice that in its intonations somewhat resembled the grating of a carpenter's saw; and, withal, no very nice conception of either comic or serious character; but he could recite in the "big bow-wow style," and think and dream of only plays and play-actors. To Davie the world and its concerns seemed unworthy of a moment's care, and the stage appeared the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... us. Their eyes were constantly fixed on the board, and they appeared not to know that I was in the room. It was really beautiful. When the examination was over, I received a look from them all, half comic, half serious, which amply repaid ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... something, and we handed over the bundle to one of the house children to hold, there was a stampede of men and women off the verandah, out of the yard, and over the fence, if need be, that was exceedingly comic, but most convincing as to the reality of the terror and horror in which they held the thing. Even its own mother could not be trusted with the child; she would have killed it. She never betrayed the slightest desire to have it with her, ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... of the Countess of Neuillant, she often met Scarron, the comic poet—a paralytic and cripple—who offered her money with which to pay for admission to a convent, a proposition which she refused; subsequently, however, the countess sent her to the Ursulines to be educated. When, after two years, she lost her mother and ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... then—something will have happened. There has come a spark in the murk; a flame now, presage of a radiance: Comus has begun. His face is a great part of his equipment. A cast of it might be somewhat akin to the comic mask of the ancients; but no cast could be worthy of it; mobility is the essence of it. It flickers and shifts in accord to the matter of his discourse; it contracts and it expands; is there anything its elastic can't express? Comus would be eloquent even were ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... and serio-comic vein exaggerates the follies of democracy which he also sees reflected in social life. To him democracy is a state of individualism or dissolution; in which every one is doing what is right in his own eyes. Of a people animated by a common spirit ...
— The Republic • Plato
... dull, but in the others we can trace a gradual advance in humorous treatment leading up to the genuine comedy of the alternative Towneley plays. Thus, like Noah and his wife, the shepherds of the adoration early became recognized comic characters, and there can be little doubt of the influence exercised by these scenes upon the later interludes. With the general evolution of the drama we are of course in no wise here concerned: what it imports us to notice is that just as it was ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... habit of repetition quite as marked as Hamlet's may be found in comic persons, e.g. Justice Shallow ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... who from drink got into debt, and, after having given a paper to a creditor authorizing him to keep the son as a security for his claim, ran away, leaving poor Phil a bond slave. The story involves a great many unexpected incidents, some of which are painful, and some comic. Phil manfully works for a year, cancelling his father's debt, and then escapes. The characters are strongly drawn, and the story ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... class seem to grow less and less like anything human in proportion to the magnificence of their surroundings. There is a type of butler employed in the comparatively modest homes of small country gentlemen who is practically a man and a brother; who hobnobs with the local tradesmen, sings a good comic song at the village inn, and in times of crisis will even turn to and work the pump when the water supply ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... itself was kept in fine order, and was painted like all the king's miniature fleet—white outside, and bright salmon inside. One glance at his boat's crew showed me that they were all armed—in a flashy melodramatic style, like the Red Indians of a comic opera, each naked native having a brace of revolvers buckled to a broad leather belt around his waist, from which also hung a French navy cutlass in a leather sheath. They were all big, stalwart fellows, though no one of ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke
... with cards, or how to sing funny songs, like that little friend of yours from Baltimore you was tellin' me about. Look at him, now. He didn't have anything but his own ability. He could tell you every time what card you was thinkin' about, and do a skirt dance and give comic recitations and imitate a dog fight out in the back yard, and now he's married to one of the richest ladies in New York. Why couldn't you 'a' been learnin' some of them clever things, so you could 'a' married ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... again. Mrs. Frimmely says, "She only cares for French songs. English comic songs," she adds, "are so vulgar." Settler for Milburd. Glad ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand
... and optical treatment, have no public libraries, lectures, schools, debates, or camp newspapers, have not seven tennis courts, three football fields, athletic games, cricket, golf and hockey, are not amused by dramas, comic operas and cinema shows, and above all are not paid extra wages for doing their own work to make themselves comfortable. All of these advantages and more which the Ruhleben prisoners enjoy have been largely the result of the effort of the ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... laid upon the latter. All these little speeches have been written for them by their priest or some religious friend, been committed to memory, and practised with the appropriate gestures over and over again at home. Their little piping voices are sometimes guilty of such comic breaks and changes, that the crowd about them rustles into a murmurous laughter. Sometimes also one of the very little preachers has a dispitto, pouts, shakes her shoulders, and refuses to go on with her part;—another, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... to the study of philosophies, which though they be not the most mature, yet ought, as kindred of the Muses, to precede them. Besides which, being drawn on one side by the tragic Melpomene, with more matter than spirit, and on the other side by the comic Thalia, with more spirit than matter, it came to pass that, oscillating between the two, he remained neutral and inactive, rather than operative. Finally, the dictum of the censors, who, restraining him from that which was high and worthy, and towards ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... you are comic!" said Kenneth, laughing heartily, and then restraining himself. "I meant the bagpipes. ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... merged in her brain in swimming circles of heat and blinding alternations of light and darkness. All the world has to show seemed to pass before her in a chaos of palms and minarets, charging cavalry regiments, roaring lions, comic policemen and scowling murderers; and the crowd around her, the hundreds of hot sallow candy-munching faces, young, old, middle-aged, but all kindled with the same contagious excitement, became part of the spectacle, and danced on the screen with ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... moderation, and even gets so far as to suggest the necessity of reformatories. He is not very romantic, and displays an amount of self-command in judicially settling the claims of the various ladies who are anxious to marry him, which is almost comic; he is perfectly ready to marry the Italian lady, if she can surmount her religious scruples, though he is in love with Miss Byron; and his mind is evidently in a pleasing state of equilibrium, so that he will be happy with either dear charmer. Indeed, for so chivalric a gentleman, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... that Gilder, Seton, Burroughs and myself went away together, and the doorman showed a mild surprise in the fact that no carriage awaited us. Gilder with comic intonation said, "Some of you fellows ought to have saved this ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... short, and having quickly hurl'd This line about, live thou throughout the world; Who art a man for all scenes; unto whom, What's hard to others, nothing's troublesome. Can'st write the comic, tragic strain, and fall From these to pen the pleasing pastoral: Who fli'st at all heights: prose and verse run'st through; Find'st here a fault, and mend'st the trespass too: For which I might extol thee, but speak less, Because ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... who contributed to Punch and other organs; wrote the "Comic Blackstone" and comic histories of England ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... or Macbeth. Sometimes a fault is committed on the part of the teacher, by permitting a pupil to confine his selections to one favorite class. I have observed in certain schools, that one particular boy would always appear in a comic piece, another in a tragic, and so on. It would be better for the teacher to require each pupil to speak a variety of pieces, so as to secure a more general and comprehensive culture than would result from practice on ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... the people as I parsed along to keep their seats. "Don't git up for me," I sed. One of the prettiest young men I ever saw in my life showed me into a seat, and I proceeded to while away the spare time by reading Thompson's "Bank Note Reporter" and the comic papers. ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... "Well, Captain, I suppose you and I are the two most notorious men in the Pacific." I think it will enable you to see the Captain if I tell you that he recited to us in cold blood the words of a new comic song; doubtless a tribute to my literary character. I had often heard of Captain Morse and always had detested all that I was told, and detested the man in confidence, just as you are doing; but really he has a wonderful charm of strength, loyalty, and simplicity. The whole celebrity ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a canopy of yellow satin, ornamented with four dragons. After the ambassadors had made five prostrations, they sat down to table, and were treated as at other times. During the entertainment, many comic tricks were acted for the amusement of the emperor and the company. The first performers that appeared were painted with white and red, like girls, and dressed in gold brocade, holding nosegays of artificial ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... weave them into poetical stories, without much substance or solemnity; enhancing the beauty that may be inherent in any part of the national legend, and either rejecting the scandalous chronicle of Olympus or Asgard altogether, or giving it over to the comic graces of levity and irony, as in the Phaeacian story of Ares and Aphrodite, wherein the Phaeacian poet digressed from his tales of war in the spirit of Ariosto, and with an equally accomplished ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... ladder is the Humorous Ballad. The "Comic Ballad" we have had with us from the days of Robin Hood, but W. S. Gilbert in his "Bab Ballads" reached heights before his time unsuspected. By the use of catchy stanzas and unusual rhymes he made the type a thing of art. Most readers are familiar ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... certain that every hand had been against him. In many cities he had stood before sarcastic judges, and been sent on to serve his little time. Adown highways unnumbered he had sawed wood, when necessary; received handouts, worn hand-me-downs; furnished infinite material for the wags of the comic press. Long he had slept under hedges and in ricks, carried his Lares in a bandana kerchief, been forcibly bathed at free lodging-houses in icy winters. Dogs had chased him, and his fellow man: he had been bitten by the one and smitten by the other. Ill-fame ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the dance and chorus, Chan retired into the tea garden, and drank so many cups of the national beverage, with such comic gestures, that the spectators were almost sorry when the opening of the opposite window drew all eyes in that direction. At the lattice appeared a lovely being; for this potato had been pared, and on the white surface ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... was a serio-comic affair which is perhaps worth relating. Two players had a gambling dispute, and resolved to settle it in a dark room with pistols. The door was locked and one of them fired, but missed. On this the other exclaimed—'Now, you rascal, I'll finish you at my leisure.' He then began ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... Punch published the day preceding—in other words, because it did not occur to Bradbury and Evans to exceed their legitimate functions as proprietors and publishers, and to require the insertion of statements on a domestic and painful subject in the inappropriate columns of a comic miscellany. No previous request for the insertion of this statement had been made either to Bradbury and Evans, or to the editor of Punch, and the grievance of Mr. Dickens substantially amounted to this, that Bradbury and Evans did not take upon themselves, unsolicited, to gratify ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... a shout of exultation, and began pointing at the ghastly head, with mockings and derisive laughter. They had put a paper crown upon the head, which they seemed to think produced a comic effect. The queen, though at first she averted her face, soon turned back again toward the horrid trophy, and laughed, with the rest, at the ridiculous effect produced by the ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... white rabbit, overgrown in the hinder half. But there is encouragement to be got from the case of the boxing boomer. The kangaroo will never become clever of himself, but perhaps the showman may teach him. There are many comic opportunities in the kangaroo—particularly in the pouch. Let ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... blackguards; but these men were something worse. There is a comic side, more or less appreciable, in all blackguardism—here there was nothing but tragedy—mute, weird tragedy. The quiet in the room was horrible. The thin, haggard, long-haired young man, whose sunken eyes fiercely watched the turning up of ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... irresistibly comic, and I question if Liston, Munden, or Joey Knight, was ever greeted with such merriment; for Romeo dragged the unfortunate Juliet from the tomb, much in the same manner as a washerwoman thrusts into her cart the bag of foul linen. But how shall I describe his death? Out came ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... was only at a late point in its progress that a chorus of comedians was officially granted by the archon; they used to be mere volunteers. It had also already certain definite forms at the time when the record of those termed comic poets begins. Who it was who supplied it with masks, or prologues, or a plurality of actors and the like, has remained unknown. The invented Fable, or Plot, however, originated in Sicily, with Epicharmus and Phormis; of Athenian poets Crates was the first to drop ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... the poet and the spectator a tacit consent that no truth is to be expected in the piece. In a farce we exempt the poet from all faithfulness in his pictures; he has a kind of privilege to tell us untruths. Here, in fact, all the comic consists exactly in its contrast with the truth, and so it ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... had never heard the name before, the Broadway brand of comic opera being outside her experience to a degree which would have been inconceivable ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark by putting it thus: "If the character of Hamlet be entirely omitted, the play must suffer, even though Henry Irving himself be cast for the title-role." Anyone going to the theatre in this spirit would be likely to be less disappointed by performances that were comic or even frankly farcical. Latterly, when he grew slightly deaf, listening to any kind of piece became too much of an effort; nevertheless, he continued to the last the habit of going ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... remember how a burlesque composed by my eldest brother was once being rehearsed in my cousin's big drawing room. From our place against the verandah railings of our house we could hear, through the open windows opposite, roars of laughter mixed with the strains of a comic song, and would also occasionally catch glimpses of Akshay Mazumdar's extraordinary antics. We could not gather exactly what the song was about, but lived in hopes of being able to ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... France between 1887 and 1895 were at a low ebb. The financial scandals which led to the resignation of President Grevy in 1887, the serio-comic political career of General Boulanger, dangerous and constant labour disturbances in the great centres of industry, the Panama financial scandals of 1893, the assassination of President Carnot in 1894, and the impossibility of forming stable Ministries, caused a general lack of confidence ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... 554; mimic &c. (imitate) 19; enact; play a part, act a part, go through a part, perform a part; rehearse, spout, gag, rant; "strut and fret one's hour upon a stage"; tread the boards, tread the stage; come out; star it. Adj. dramatic; theatric, theatrical; scenic, histrionic, comic, tragic, buskined[obs3], farcical, tragicomic, melodramatic, operatic; stagy. Adv. on the stage, on the boards; on film; before the floats, before an audience; behind the scenes. Phr. fere totus mundus exercet histrionem [Lat][Petronius ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... prefers Mrs. Behn's treatment of the situation, it must, I think, be allowed that D'Urfey has managed the jest with far greater verve and spirit. Honest Tom D'Urfey is in fact one of the least read and most maligned of all our dramatists. He had the merriest comic gifts, and perhaps when the critics and literary historians deign to read his plays he will attain a higher position in ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... and went on: 'Perhaps he'll turn out to be a Lionel Monckton or a Paul Rubens. Perhaps he'll write comic opera revues ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... asked myself with rage and astonishment: "Must I then kill that brute?" There didn't seem to be any alternative. Between him and Dona Rita I couldn't hesitate. I believe I gave a slight laugh of desperation. The suddenness of this sinister conclusion had in it something comic and unbelievable. It loosened my grip on my mental processes. A Latin tag came into my head about the facile descent into the abyss. I marvelled at its aptness, and also that it should have come to me so pat. But I believe now that ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
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