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More "Farce" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the short and the long,' he proceeded. 'All of you in shed B are bound to know. And I want to ask you where is the common-sense of keeping up this farce, and maintaining this cock-and-bull story between friends. Come, come, my good fellow, own yourself beaten, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bitter feeling now? Where that morbid pain at my heart? As I drank it all seemed to pass away. Magical change! What a fool I was! What was there to make such a fuss about? Take life easy. Laugh alike at the good and bad of it. It was all a farce anyway. What would it matter a hundred years from now? Why were we put into this world to be tortured? I, for one, would protest. I would writhe no more in the strait-jacket of existence. Here was escape, heartsease, happiness—here in this bottled impishness. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... been a play of love, to which the soul would easily become accustomed if her Beloved did not change His conduct. O poor hearts who complain of the flights of love! You do not know that this is only a farce, an attempt, a specimen of what is to follow. The hours of absence mark the days, the weeks, the months, and the years. You must learn to be generous at your own expense, to suffer your Beloved to come ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... decide the conditions. But when he was outvoted, Douglas adopted the sensible course of refusing to obstruct the work of the Committee of Thirteen by any instructions. He was inclined to believe the whole project a farce: well, if it was, the sooner it was over, the better; he was not disposed to wrangle and turn ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... and made his mother miserable, almost commanding her to use her authority, declaring that it would be her fault if this farce went on,—this disreputable farce he called it; while poor Mrs. Warrender, now as much opposed to it as he, had to bear the brunt of his objurgations until she was driven to make a stand upon the very arguments which she most disapproved. In the midst of all this Chatty stood firm. If ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... as the ringleader, and subjected the young Englishman to a short examination, which, however, was the merest farce, for the captain had already determined upon his fate. After a trial lasting, perhaps, five minutes, therefore, Jim was condemned to be shot before mid-day, as were nine more of his unfortunate ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... execution, and the house itself and land worth only a hundred or two dollars were protected by the homestead law. The facetious deputy, Clem Tweed, with "Christmas in his bones," would have committed a misdemeanor in seriously levying upon them. He had held the affair as a capital farce—even affecting with wild, appropriating gambols to seize the baby and the cat—and fully realized that malice only had prompted the whole proceeding, to humiliate Ross Gilhooley and illustrate the completeness of the victory which ...
— Who Crosses Storm Mountain? - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... over—the whole motley farce—and, while it lasts, nothing in it matters so very greatly, or at any rate matters enough to disturb our amusement, our good-temper, our toleration. Nothing matters so very greatly. And yet everything—each of us, as we try to make our difficult meanings clear, the meanings of our hidden ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... awe the weak and timorous. He was much entertained on this particular morning,—one might almost say he was greatly amused. Quite a humorous little comedy was being played at the Vatican,—a mock- solemn farce, which had the possibility of ending in serious disaster to the innocent,—and he, as a student of the wily and treacherous side of human nature, was rather interested in its development. Cardinal Felix Bonpre, a man living far away in an obscure cathedral-town ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Carson, joined in the laugh at the fellow's impudence. Kit Carson's patience was exhausted in listening to the barefaced falsehoods which the man was uttering; so, with some excuse, he left the party. The fellow was unapprised of the farce which he had been acting; and, shortly after, left the town, believing that he had acquitted himself as became ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... outposts to this Fairdale, which was a secret center of rustlers and outlaws. And what struck Duane strangest of all was the fact that Longstreth was mayor here and held court daily. Duane knew intuitively, before a chance remark gave him proof, that this court was a sham, a farce. And he wondered if it were not a blind. This wonder of his was equivalent to suspicion of Colonel Longstreth, and Duane reproached himself. Then he realized that the reproach was because of the daughter. Inquiry had brought him the fact that ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... release from his queen. In 1529, Henry and Catharine stood before a papal tribunal, presided over by Cardinal Wolsey, the king's prime minister, and Cardinal Campeggio, from Rome, for the purpose of determining the validity of the royal marriage. The trial was a farce. The enraged king laid the blame upon Wolsey, and retired him from office. The great cardinal was afterwards charged with treason, but died broken-hearted, on his way to the Tower, November ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... is being spilt in streams, and in the merriest way, as though it were champagne. Take the whole of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived. Take Napoleon—the Great and also the present one. Take North America—the eternal union. Take the farce of Schleswig-Holstein.... And what is it that civilisation softens in us? The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations—and absolutely nothing more. And through the development of this many-sidedness man may come to finding ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... the technicalities of construction would be here ridiculous, and defeat the ends of justice. The people are rude and uncivilized; their oppressors crafty and bold, who have no hesitation about lying, and bringing others to lie for them. Oaths are a farce to them. The aggrieved are timid, vacillating, and simple, and cannot readily procure even necessary evidence; for their witnesses are afraid to speak. Under these circumstances, I look at the leading features of the case, the probability, the characters, the position of parties, ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... his journey. At this time Laura, too, was awake. And at this time yesterday night, as the coach rolled over silent commons, where cottage windows twinkled, and by darkling woods under calm starlit skies, Pen was vowing to reform and to resist temptation, and his heart was at home. Meanwhile the farce was going on very successfully, and Mrs. Leary, in a hussar jacket and braided pantaloons, was enchanting the audience with her archness, her lovely ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... This farce, for so they considered it, being ended and the stage, so to speak, cleared, the audience having laughed itself hoarse, set itself to watch the proceedings of the newly chosen high-priest of Little Bonsa, who by now had recovered from the blow dealt to him by one of the murdered men. With the help ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... sixteen by sixty-four, and so could not be got in. Though I knew, or at least felt sure, that there were no such scenes in the poor man's possession, I could not laugh, as did the major part of the audience, at this shift to escape criticism. We saw a wretched farce, and some comic songs were sung. The manager sang one, but it came grimly from his throat. The whole receipt of the evening was 5s. and 3d., out of which had to come room, gas, and town drummer. We left soon; and I must say came out as sad as I have been for ever ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of "Wilhelm Meister" were written in Italy, and after Goethe's return, and the book was published in 1795. Goethe had long since outlived the extravagance of sentimentalism which overflowed in "Werther." He had himself ridiculed it in a little farce, much laughed at at the time. And if "Wilhelm Meister" were taken merely as a story, it would be found quite free from such extravagances. The story, however, is simply the framework for criticism on art, on literature, and especially for what may be called studies on education. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... affecting. "The reason," says the Spectator, "is, that persons think it makes them look ridiculous, by betraying the weakness of their nature. But why may not nature show itself in tragedy, as well as in comedy or farce? We see persons not ashamed to laugh loudly at the humour of a Falstaff,—or the tricks of a harlequin; and why should not the tear be equally allowed to flow for the misfortunes of a Juliet, or the forlornness ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... Madrid, and who have made themselves masters of its material strength; of that apparent nation—for the real nation is the one that is silent, that pays and suffers; of that fictitious nation that signs decrees and pronounces discourses and makes a farce of government, and a farce of authority, and a farce of every thing. That is what my nephew is to-day; you must accustom yourself to look under the surface of things. My nephew is the government, the brigadier, the new alcalde, the new judge—for ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... and about the excessive conservatism of the English people. I agree with him that it is monstrous that English lads should nowadays have no chance of thoroughly learning any trade. The old system of apprenticeship is almost dead, and the modern device of technical education remains a pure farce, mainly owing to the political influence of trade unions. In the same way I agree that it is ridiculous that Great Britain should go on using a clumsy and exclusive system of weights and measures, when the rest of the world is rapidly adopting the almost ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... evening, Miss Harvey, radiant in her diamonds—they cost twenty-two hundred dollars—the price would intrude itself—and Miss Gardiner, almost guiltless of foreign ornament, were thrown into immediate contact. But Miss Gardiner was not recognized by the haughty wearer of gems. It was the old farce of pretence, seeking, by borrowed attractions, to outshine the imperishable radiance of truth. I looked on, and read the lesson her conduct gave, and wondered that any were deceived into even a transient admiration. "Rich and rare were the gems she wore," but they had in them no significance ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... large building where Mrs. Conway had her apartment. McKnight left the power on, in case we might want to make a quick get-away, and Hotchkiss gave a final look at the revolver. I had no weapon. Somehow it all seemed melodramatic to the verge of farce. In the doorway Hotchkiss was a half dozen feet ahead; Richey fell back beside me. He dropped his affectation of gayety, and I thought he looked tired. "Same old Sam, I ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of the best writers of our time, whether for comedy or for tragedy; and for extravaganza, too, as witness his lively farce called The Hand of Ethelberta. He can write dialogue or description. He is so excellent in either that either, as you read it, appears to make for your highest pleasure. If his characters talk, you would gladly have them talk to the ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... capering around in the bushes, and having little skirmishes with the Spanish troops that looked more like kind of tired-out feuds than anything else. The war was a joke to us, and of no interest to them. We never could see it any other way than as a howling farce-comedy that the San Augustine Rifles were actually fighting to uphold the Stars and Stripes. And the blamed little senors didn't get enough pay to make them care whether they were patriots or traitors. Now and then somebody would get killed. It seemed like a waste of life to me. I was at Coney ...
— Options • O. Henry
... once carried Aratov back to his first frame of mind, and stifled the feeling that had sprung up in his heart when she turned to him with tears in her eyes. He was angry again, and almost shouted after the retreating girl: 'You may make a good actress, but why did you think fit to play off this farce ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... danced with all the proud and high And revelled in the pomp of this vain earth, Enjoyed that mimic farce—Society, Entitled by significance of birth, But what of this! Society's not mirth, It has its fairer and its darker side, The one is worth, the other—want of worth, What are the hollow luxuries of Pride? Oh gaze not on the gloom ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... Exeter, which had to stand a siege on their behalf; but the effort to take the city was half-hearted, and in twelve days the attempt was abandoned. Edward IV arrived in pursuit, but too late, for 'the byrdes were flown and gone away,' and a quaint farce was solemnly played out. The city had just shown openly that its real sympathies were Lancastrian, but neither King nor citizens could afford to quarrel. 'Both sides put the best face on matters; the city was loyal; the King was gracious ... the citizens gave him a full ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... work not of a man of letters but of a man of action. Chaucer has received his training from war, courts, business, travel—a training not of books but of life. And it is life that he loves—the delicacy of its sentiment, the breadth of its farce, its laughter and its tears, the tenderness of its Griseldis or the Smollett-like adventures of the miller and the clerks. It is this largeness of heart, this wide tolerance, which enables him to reflect man for us as none but ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... authority when perturbed by men of greater place. The faces of the turnkey and the sergeant are likewise admirable; and that of the soldier looking towards the latter for orders, is like an excellent piece of byplay in the farce. The drunken patriot, behind the High Sheriff, is well entitled to the attention which the artist, in his explanation, suggests; but the spectator must not dwell too long on this sorrowful wreck of fallen nature. The group in the foreground of the right hand corner, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... Juan, instantly. "Lieutenant Tyler, this farce must end. My comrades will be impatient for my return. You were about to give an answer when this fellow thrust ...
— Young Glory and the Spanish Cruiser - A Brave Fight Against Odds • Walter Fenton Mott
... while a new ulcer broke out in his heart. "He comes to mock us! we shall be the jest of his tavern friends I—he will make a farce of our miseries, and bring it out upon ...
— The Christmas Banquet (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... name, who are you?" cried Mollie, impatiently. "End this ridiculous farce—remove that disguise—let me see who I am speaking to. This melodramatic absurdity has gone on long enough—the play is played out. Talk to me, face to face, like a man, if ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... while watching the scenes on the mimic stage before him. He enjoyed the renditions of Booth with great zest; yet after witnessing "The Merchant of Venice" he remarked on the way home: "It was a good performance, but I had a thousand times rather read it at home, if it were not for Booth's playing. A farce or a comedy is best played; a tragedy is best read at home." He was much pleased one night with Mr. McCullough's delineation of the character of "Edgar," which the actor played in support of Edwin Forrest's "Lear." He wished to convey his approval to the young actor, ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... meet the day before to compare their arguments, that the same might not come twice over. But, after I left Cambridge, it became the fashion to invite the respondent to be present, who therefore learnt all that was to be brought against him. This made the whole thing a farce: and ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... novels on the library table fix his attention, nor the grave and respectable Jawkins (the only man in town), who wished to engage him in conversation; nor any of the amusements which he tried, after flying from Jawkins. He passed a Comic Theater on his way home, and saw "Stunning Farce," "Roars of Laughter," "Good Old English Fun and Frolic," placarded in vermilion letters on the gate. He went into the pit, and saw the lovely Mrs. Leary, as usual, in a man's attire; and that eminent buffo actor, Tom Horseman, dressed as a woman. Horseman's travestie seemed to ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... buried past should reveal to us its predestined fatal termination. This idea meets us again in the first act of "The Lonely Way." The fourth of those one-act plays, "Literature," is what Schnitzler has named it—a farce—but delightfully clever and satirical. ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... part of the morning was killed by what might be called an incident or a disaster or a farce—just as you look at it. First of all, right after breakfast I had the proof that I was right about the Germans. Evidently well informed of the movements of the English, they rode boldly into the ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... true. I always was that sort of chap. I'm very sorry. But now that you've found that life isn't a farce, but something quite sensible and serious, what further obstacle is ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... either tragedy, comedy, farce, or other entertainment, shocketh the propriety of the audience, or causeth a division in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... this farce is about over," Dunk sneered, with as near an approach to his old, supercilious manner as he could command, when the three who had ridden apart returned presently. "Perhaps, Weary, you'll be good enough to have this fellow put up his gun, and these—" he hesitated, after a swift glance, to apply ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... This fearful farce was enacted in the cemetery of St. Ouen, behind the beautifully severe monastic church so called, and which had by that day assumed its present appearance. On a scaffolding raised for the purpose sat ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... humour have free play. The monks in their long garments, escaping in all directions, are really comical, and in conjunction with the ingratiating smile of the lion, the scene passes into the region of broad farce. We divine the same sense of the comic in the scene in St. Ursula's history, where the 11,000 virgins are hurrying in single file along a winding road which disappears out of the picture. In the principal scene in the life of St. George, Carpaccio again achieves a masterpiece. ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... that case stood on the records. Every paper in England had some mention of it; as a rule people laughed when they read anything about it. They said it was a case of Corydon and Phyllis, a dairy-maid's love, a farce, a piece of romantic nonsense on the part of a young nobleman who ought to know better. It created no sensation; the papers did not make much of it; they simply reported a petition on the part of the Right Honorable the Earl of Lanswell ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... who only obeyed orders which they could not refuse. If desired we may however engage to bring to England all who are not domiciled in South Africa; but we cannot undertake to bring all the rank and file to trial, for that would make a farce of the whole proceedings, and is contrary to the practice of all civilized Governments. As regards a pledge that they shall be punished, the President will see on consideration that although a Government can order a prosecution, it cannot in any free country ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... For more than two thousand years the most obscene figure we know was used by the clown in popular farce and by athletes as an emblem of their profession. It raised a laugh, but was not otherwise noticed. An interesting question arises whether there ever was any protest against it, or any evidence that anybody thought it offensive. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... defeat. And this is the mode of colonizationists to evangelize Africa! and this their mode to suppress the slave trade! and this their mode to elevate the free people of color! and this their mode to emancipate the slaves! It combines the folly and absurdity of a farce with the solemnity and ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... "you need not go through the farce of trying me. I am guilty. I say this with no bravado and with no fear. Because the bullet has never been molded and the rope has never been plaited that can kill me. And the cell is not yet made that ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... thing is a wretched and humiliating farce," was George's not altogether illuminating comment on this naive revelation of the workings of the female mind. He spoke doggedly, and then hummed the refrain of a song as though ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... morning better provisions were sent to them, and not long afterwards they were again marched up to the court-house. The same farce as on the previous day was gone through, and no interpreter appearing, the judge and his assistants left the court as wise as they entered it, while the prisoners were unable to make out of what crime they were accused. ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... to his limbs; the pillows pressed a yielding coolness to his cheek; his senses failed amid faint fresh odours. Blessed state! How enviable above all waking joys the impotence which makes us lords of darkness, the silence which suffers not to reach our ears so much as an echo of the farce of life. ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... with his friend. He learned that the list of prisoners was being taken, now, more in the order in which they stood. The farce of a trial had been gone through, in the case of Jean's wife, and she had of course been condemned. She stood a good deal lower on the list than his father. There was not much chance of the day of her execution ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... from the weasel's manoeuvres, for he, too, is wont to entice the rabbits towards him by extraordinary methods, twirling round, like a cat, in pursuit of his tail, and affording such a spectacle to any onlookers that they must needs, from sheer curiosity, find out the meaning of a woodland farce, which, alas! is often followed by a tragedy. It is not known that the fox ever succeeds in fascinating the moorhen; the bird, directly she caught sight of his circling form, would probably dive, and in the cool ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... does not consist in these customs, but that it resides in natural laws, common to every country. They would certainly maintain it obstinately, if reckless chance which has distributed human laws had encountered even one which was universal; but the farce is that the caprice of men has so many vagaries that there ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... were concerned—our sympathies being wholly on the side of the ass—this astonishing spectacle remained a broad farce until the very end; but it presently became to the men engaged in it a very serious tragedy. As he made his wild charges, El Sabio galloped backward and forward again and again over the bodies of his prostrate enemies; in the course of which gallopings ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... but change, for serious plot and verse, This motley garniture of fool and farce; Nor scorn a mode, because 'tis taught at home, Which dues, like vests,[A] our gravity become; Our poet yields you should this play refuse, As tradesmen by the change of fashions lose, With some content, their fripperies of France, In hope it ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... pretends to give them the Holy Ghost by breathing on them, which she does with postures and practices that are scandalously indecent; they have likewise disposed of all their effects, and hold a community of goods, and live nearly an idle life, carrying on a great farce of pretended devotion in barns and woods, where they lodge and lie all together, and hold likewise a community of women, as it is another of their tenets that they can commit no mortal sin. I am personally acquainted with most ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... having attended one of the Claimant's "Evenings."]—He wanted to preserve the evidence as future literary material, and Stoddard day after day patiently collected the news reports and neatly pasted them into scrap-books, where they still rest, a complete record of that now forgotten farce. The Tichborne trial recalled to Mark Twain the claimant in the Lampton family, who from time to time wrote him long letters, urging him to join in the effort to establish his rights to the earldom of Durham. This American claimant was a distant cousin, who had "somehow ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the misery of London, and of the distracted swaying hither and thither of the multitudes who inhabit it, tormented him incessantly. He always chafed at it, and he never seemed sure that he had a right to the enjoyment of the simplest pleasures so long as London was before him. What a farce, he would cry, is all this poetry, philosophy, art, and culture, when millions of wretched mortals are doomed to the eternal darkness and crime of the city! Here are the educated classes occupying themselves with exquisite emotions, with speculations ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... this particular characteristic, the arrondissement of Issoudun was governed, in 1822, by men who all belonged to Berry. The administration of power became either a nullity or a farce,—except in certain cases, naturally very rare, which by their manifest importance compelled the authorities to act. The procureur du roi, Monsieur Mouilleron, was cousin to the entire community, and his substitute belonged to one of the families of the ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... night. Then he rose up and walked back to Podgorica rejoicing, with those who had carried him the day before. As he crossed the Vizier bridge, he sceptically remarked that he would have been healed without undergoing the farce of the pilgrimage. Straightway he fell to the ground, the same helpless cripple that he ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... at Bodmin bore such evident marks of treachery, that it could not be attributed to the general trepidation and disorder which possessed the army, and circumstances proved that a correspondence subsisted between Monthault and the Parliamentary general, which the farce of taking him prisoner and committing him to close custody, when the King's forces were generally permitted to disband and return to their houses, strongly confirmed. Lord Hopton recollected that his designs had been counteracted by Fairfax, in a ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... his name, age, etc., in a courteous, kindly tone, wholly devoid of sternness, which filled Panna with vehement rage. This was not the terrible personification of the fell punishment of crime, but a smooth farce, acted ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... secondary election, under the only conditions in which secondary election is preferable to primary. Generally speaking, in an electioneering country (I mean in a country full of political life, and used to the manipulation of popular institutions), the election of candidates to elect candidates is a farce. The Electoral College of America is so. It was intended that the deputies when assembled should exercise a real discretion, and by independent choice select the President. But the primary electors take too much interest. They only elect a deputy to vote for Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Breckenridge, and ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... of necessity, sir. The civil government in Richmond has become a farce. I acknowledge it sorrowfully. Your soldiers are ill clothed, half starved, and the power to recruit your ranks is gone. The people have lost faith in their civil leaders. Disloyalty is rampant. In the name of ultra State Sovereignty, treason is everywhere threatening. Soldiers ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... was no sting in the blows this time; all the zest seemed to have gone out of the affair; and, but for the whack the Biffer gave, Jimmy never felt anything. The third time down was a farce, for, after Jimmy had deliberately stopped opposite the Biffer in order to let him have as many as his injured soul required, no one touched him. In fact they were all shaking hands with Jimmy, who was now his smiling self once more and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... went on a still hunt for proofs. Singularly enough, they never found any. A hint from headquarters, and the den would close up till after the excitement was over. All the newspapers understood that the police lied; but the editors were either afraid or indifferent; and the farce was played over yearly for the benefit of the ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... the Horse Guards in Kennet, ed. 1719, iii. 432, London Gazette, July 9, 1685; Oldmixon, 703; Paschall's Narrative; Burnet, i. 643; Evelyn's Diary, July 8; Van Citters,.July 7-17; Barillon, July 9-19; Reresby's Memoirs; the Duke of Buckingham's battle of Sedgemoor, a Farce; MS. Journal of the Western Rebellion, kept by Mr. Edward Dummer, then serving in the train of artillery employed by His Majesty for the suppression of the same. The last mentioned manuscript is in the Pepysian library, and is of the greatest value, not on ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... branches of the Government, and magnate after magnate had committed not only one violation, but constant violations, of the criminal law. They were unmolested; having the power to prevent it they assuredly would not suffer themselves to undergo even the farce of prosecution. Such few prosecutions as were started with suspicious bluster by the Government against the Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the Tobacco Trust and other trusts proved to be absolutely harmless, and have had no result except to strengthen the position of the trusts. The great ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... 'los'; the farce quickened to drama. A couple of idle soldiers, rifle-less and armed only with the bayonets at their belts, had edged near the door; others had disappeared behind the house; Judas, mincing on his feet like a soubrette, moved briskly away; and the corporal, tossing the wreck ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... that filled the street. An attempt had been made at the last moment to alter the charge against the boys to insulting behaviour, or something equally trivial, and all in court looked for much amusement. In fact, the tremendous bushranging sensation had degenerated into something very like a farce. ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... down his victim when the entire machinery of a great police department seems helpless to discover anything. The high chiefs and commissioners grant a condescending permission when Muller asks, "May I do this? ... or may I handle this case this way?" both parties knowing all the while that it is a farce, and that the department waits helpless until this humble little man saves its honour by solving some problem before which its intricate machinery has stood ...
— The Case of The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... which I set up and prepared for him in the pilot-house. He only had to release a spring at the right moment, and the thing was done. He developed the picture whilst we were making our little excursion out to sea and back. Well, the whole thing was a farce; but I believe it has effectually secured us from interruption during our researches among the ruins; and if so, it was ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... both tribunals to procure the result, such as it was. Many good, but easy, men had thought it best, for the reputation of the Christian ministry, not to rake too deeply into such an unpleasant business. Especially in the Synod the proceedings had been a farce. When Riverius, the moderator of the Synod, at the close of the proceedings, had said to Morus, "Never was a Moor so whitewashed as you have been to-day," could not everybody, with any sense of humour, perceive that the Reverend gentleman had been joking? Then, what ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... lived," she went on, "I kept up the miserable farce. As you know, we never loved each other. Then he died, and I found I couldn't bear it any longer. There was no reason why I should. I went away. I should never have seen you again, only Mrs. Chester would take no refusal. And I had put it ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... right, waiting to cut the cards. You speak of 'justice.' It's a myth. The statue above the court-house stands first on one foot, then on the other, tired of waiting, tired of the sharp rocks of technicality, tired of the pompous farce. Why, Dale," he waved a hand toward an opposite corner, "if old Daniel Webster were here ...
— The Angel of Lonesome Hill • Frederick Landis
... the victory, the fellowship which, developed under Partow, who believed that Napoleons and Colossi and gods in the car and all such gentlemen belonged to an archaic farce-comedy, had grown under Lanstron. "The staff reports," began the messages that awakened a world, retiring with the idea that the Browns were grimly holding the defensive, to the news that three millions had outgeneralled ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... in a city where one has visited quietly for years; to see the doors of fashionable mansions open wide to receive you, which never opened before. I suspect that the whole corps of science laughs in its sleeves at the farce. ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... Another twenty minutes and the hotel would loom up before them, and the little farce, comedy, or tragedy, whichever it might be, would be finished. The curtain would fall, and the two principal actors ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... of murder also, the judge who sat upon the case, and the murderer who was on trial for his life before him, were boon-companions together, eating and drinking at the same table throughout the trial. Then came the conclusion of the farce—the uproar round the court-house during the trial, drowning the voice of the prosecutor while pleading, without the least attempt by the court to put it down—then the charge of the judge to the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... called upon me one morning before I was up, and, on my entering the room, I recognized my old acquaintance, dressed in a rusty, full-trimmed black suit, with his pockets full of papers, which instantly reminded me of the poet in Garrick's farce of Lethe. After we had finished our breakfast he drew from his pocket part of a tragedy, which he said he had brought for my correction. In vain I pleaded inability, when he began to read; and every part on which I expressed a doubt as to ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... played "The Rising of the Moon" and "A Pot of Broth" in New York. They made, unfortunately, no great success in their appearances, as their plays were not presented in bills devoted solely to Irish plays, but as curtain-raisers to the usual conventional farce. Almost all the actors whom I have mentioned as leaving the National Players eventually found their way into the conventional plays, but almost none of them made successes there comparable in any degree to their successes in folk-drama or in plays out of old Irish ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... possessions, took his leave, knelt down to prayers, slept calmly, rose, prayed again, and about eleven in the forenoon, October 4th, taking his watch in his hand, said, "Thanks be to my God, my last hour approaches." All laughed at such a farce from a man of such a character; yet they remarked that the left side of his face grew pale. He then leaned his arm on the table, prayed, and remained motionless, with his eyes closed. The clock struck twelve—no signs of life or motion could be discovered; they ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... women wore flat straw hats, like a dinner plate, hair plastered down, head-dresses of gigantic black ribbons, aprons of gay stripes, and ten petticoats coming only a little below the knee. The men wore farce-comedy ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... very well pleased with your capital long letter. A better farce than the whole affair of that letter-opening (ducks and Mr. Weightman included) was never imagined. {282} By-the-bye, speaking of Mr. W., I told you he was gone to pass his examination at Ripon six weeks ago. He is not come back yet, and what has become of him we don't know. Branwell ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... their flotilla. Three English frigates would sink the whole force at Boulogne in the open sea. The French seem to know this; yet, to amuse the populace, and to play upon the fears of the English Ministry, the farce is kept up, and daily reports are made by the Commandant of the state of the flotilla. There is a delightful walk on the beach, which is a flat strand of firm sand, as far as the tide reaches. In the summer evenings when the tide serves, this ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... Nothing at all, my good man... What more do you want? The farce is over. I will only ask you to take this little note to Master Prasville, your employer. Clemence, please show Mr. Polonius out. And, if ever he calls again, fling open the doors wide to him. Pray look upon this as your home, ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... am very much afraid you will never succeed as a boy. It seems to me that even an ordinarily masculine girl of your age would have been clear-headed enough to see the absurdity of your little farce. It is nothing but a farce, mere babyishness. You have been playing with yourself and with your doll. No boy ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... or less of a farce," he went on a little bitterly. "It's a silly show. The best we can do is to hold our personality intact. It doesn't appear that integrity has much ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... the victorious Confederacy was sulking in his tent on the field of Manassas, playing this pitiful farce about the date of a commission, and allowing his army to go to pieces, George B. McClellan with tireless energy and matchless genius as an organizer was whipping into shape Lincoln's new levy of five hundred thousand ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... this chest?" Quoth he, "From my apprentice Al-Rashid who gave them to me," and they said, "The pimp is mad! Al-Rashid will assuredly hear of his talk and hang him over the door of his lodging and hang all in the Khan on account of the droll. This is a fine farce!" Then they helped him to carry the chest into his lodging and it filled the whole closet.[FN288] Thus far concerning Khalif; but as for the history of the chest, it was as follows: The Caliph had a Turkish slave-girl, by name Kut al-Kulb, whom he loved with love exceeding and the Lady Zubaydah ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... the land is full of apes, which have Their own gods and worship; how ghastly, this!— That demons (for it must be so) should build, In mockery of man's upward faith, the souls Of monkeys, those lewd mammets of mankind, Into a dreadful farce of adoration! And flies! a land of flies! where the hot soil Foul with ceaseless decay steams into flies! So thick they pile themselves in the air above Their meal of filth, they seem like breathing heaps Of formless life mounded upon the earth; And buzzing always like the pipes and strings ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... reply. Here was one cause of his disinclination to meet his wife—having to keep up the farce of Dr. Ashton's action. It seemed, however, that there would no longer be any farce to keep up. Had it exploded? He said nothing. Maude gazing at him from the sofa on which she sat, her dark eyes ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... in reality; should the buttons all simultaneously start, and the solid wool evaporate, in very Deed, as here in Dream? Ach Gott! How each skulks into the nearest hiding-place; their high State Tragedy (Haupt- und Staats-Action) becomes a Pickleherring-Farce to weep at, which is the worst kind of Farce; the tables (according to Horace), and with them, the whole fabric of Government, Legislation, Property, Police, and Civilized Society, are dissolved, in wails ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... into your life in a moment of frivolous recklessness, but you had entered into mine with another purpose, and I could not rid myself of you. Your hold upon me was strong. It grew stronger, do what I would, and the farce became ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... Penruddock, in 'The Wheel of Fortune', and Tristram Fickle, in the farce of 'The Weathercock', for three nights, in some private theatricals at Southwell, in 1806, with great applause. The occasional prologue for our volunteer play was also of my composition."—'Diary; Life', p. 38. The prologue was written by ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... to whom their salt must serve for nourishment Sentimentality puts up infant hands for absolution She herself did not like to be seen eating in public Slightest taste for comic analysis that does not tumble to farce The greed of gain is our volcano The man had to be endured, like other doses in politics Vagrant compassionateness of sentimentalists What might have been What the world says, is what the wind says Without those ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... I am afraid folks might make a farce of it; and, therefore, should you change your style, I still advise a volume of dramas ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... the cabin, but neither door nor port-hole could be opened for fear of the water coming in. Dinner was a farce, to use Tom's way of expressing it, for everything was cold and had to be eaten out of hand or from a tin cup. Yet what was served tasted very good to those ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... The rest was farce. Thorpe was built on the true athletic lines, broad, straight shoulders, narrow flanks, long, clean, smooth muscles. He possessed, besides, that hereditary toughness and bulk which no gymnasium training will ever ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... farce was soon after followed by a scene truly tragical—the murder of the two young princes. Richard gave orders to Sir Robert Brakenbury, constable of the Tower, to put his nephews to death, but this gentleman, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... deeper." Mr. Tilley showed the great advantages which would accrue to New Brunswick eventually in consequence of confederation. He combated the statement made by Mr. Smith that after confederation the provincial legislature would become a mere farce, showing that of all the Acts passed during the previous two years there were only seven which would have come under the control of the general legislature. Mr. Tilley closed by dwelling on the impression of power which union would have on the minds of those abroad who were plotting our ruin. The ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... Molly, in disgust. "How much longer does he intend keeping up the farce? He must ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... usual a circumstance in Afghanistan as scarcely to account for the events that ensued. Yet it furnished the excuse for an outbreak. Early on September 3, when assembled for what proved to be the farce of payment at Bala Hissar (the citadel), three regiments mutinied, stoned their officers, and then rushed towards the British Embassy. These regiments took part in the first onset against an unfortified building held by the Mission and a small escort. A steady musketry fire from the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... latter for the benefit of the Louisville Fancy Grocery Co. Broom making is a trade largely monopolized by the blind, shirt making is done by women, and there is only one free chain factory in the State, and at that a released convict can not hope to get employment. The whole thing is a cruel farce. ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... prohibitory restrictions. The Constitutions of Mississippi, Arkansas, and other States, restrict the power of the legislature in this respect. Why this express prohibition, if the law-making power cannot abolish slavery? A stately farce, indeed, formally to construct a special clause, and with appropriate rites induct it into the Constitution, for the express purpose of restricting a nonentity!—to take from the lawmaking power what it never ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... for wit, but, as he was fond of saying himself, no sympathy with farce or mere high spirits. I doubt even if he had a sense of humour in the ordinary meaning of that term, or in the Frenchman's definition: "la mlancholie gaie que les Anglais nomment 'humour.'" To say this is not to say that he did not enjoy a humorous, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... I acted in a little French musical farce together at Cornelys's; he had a charming voice and ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... when none watched the effort or heard the agony? Why torture himself? Why torture others? If the world were good, why was he not to have his part? If it were bad, might he not find a quiet nook under the wall, out of the storm? Why must he try to breast it? If Ayre was right, what a tragical farce his struggle was, what a perverse delusion, what an aimless flinging away of the little joy his little life could offer! If this were so, then was he indeed alone in the world—except for Claudia. Was his choice in truth between this world and the next? ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... back room and looked at himself in the glass and began and laughed all over from the beginning again. Then he looked at me and repeated himself. That's why I asked you if you thought an Irishman had any humor. He'd been doing farce comedy from the day I saw him without knowing it; and the first time he had an idea advanced to him with any intelligence in it he acted like two twelfths of the sextet in ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... somewhat resembling that of Cleveland, though disclaiming Cleveland as his model. The Boston Journal led in the exploitation of the charges, and partisans forgot decency on both sides. Nast, having formerly cartooned Blaine in the "Bloody Shirt," now turned to "A Roaring Farce—The Plumed Knight in a Clean Shirt," while others pointed out the fact that the admirer who coined the "plumed knight" epithet had been counsel for the fraudulent ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... prevent it. She was very gentle and yielding as a whole, but behind the gentleness and sweetness he knew there was a spirit he did not like to rouse. He must manage some other way. He had told Ruby he would neither give his clothes nor money to the farce, and he prided himself on never going back on his word. But he didn't tell her he wouldn't buy anything, and his face brightened as he ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... life, perhaps - to open, and to read them. And what have we to do with books? The Herr Doctor might perhaps be asked for his advice; but we have no INDEX EXPURGATORIUS in Grunewald. Had we but that, we should be the most absolute parody and farce upon this tawdry earth.' ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on October 6, 1669, is nothing but a farce. But Moliere excels in farce as well as in higher comedy, and 'Monsieur de Pourceaugnac' is one of the best of its kind. The attacks upon the doctors of the time are not exaggerated. Moliere acted the ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... highest patriotism. My Commander is brave enough to dare the authorities at Washington for the good of his country. The sooner this farce under Pope ends the better—no man of second rate ability can win against the great Generals of ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... Miss Franklin; it is evident that you can see as well as I can. Come, end this farce at once, and let me ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... the severe weather of this night and driven the carriage for the sake of being near his master as long as possible, "Cuthbert, take the carriage around to the 'Highlander' and put up there for the night. We shall want it to take us back to the castle to-morrow, after this ridiculous farce is over." ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... aspire, struggle, and are determined to rise, but just when they are fitted to endure, and to enter upon ampler spheres of service, the curtain falls on the tragedy, the stage scenery is changed, a new company of players takes their places, and the farce, for it is a farce as well as a tragedy, goes on from century to century, and there is no meaning in anything. If that were the true interpretation of life, on earth's loftiest mountain there might ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... my place, and by and by the King comes and the Duke of York; and then the play begins, called "The Sullen Lovers; or, The Impertinents," having many good humours in it, but the play tedious, and no design at all in it. But a little boy, for a farce, do dance Polichinelli, the best that ever anything was done in the world, by all men's report: most pleased with that, beyond anything in the world, and much beyond all the play. Thence to the King's house to see Knepp, but the play done; and so I took a hackney alone, and to the park, and ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... to its utmost capacity. It was the first night of a new piece. The unfortunate comedy which Ada had so strongly condemned had been withdrawn, and a so-called musical farce—consisting of very bad music, and still worse comedy—hastily put on in its stead. As usual, no expense had been spared in the mounting, and Adrien's money had been poured out like water on extraordinary costumes, gorgeous, highly-coloured scenery, ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... behind him, the Fokker; behind the Fokker, the Nieuport, and I, last of all, behind the Nieuport. We exchanged shots merrily. Finally the Fokker let the Caudron go, and the Nieuport stopped chasing the Fokker. I fired my last shots at the Nieuport and went home. The whole farce lasted over an hour. We had worked hard, but without visible success. At least, the Fokker (who turned out to be Althaus) and I ...
— An Aviator's Field Book - Being the field reports of Oswald Boelcke, from August 1, - 1914 to October 28, 1916 • Oswald Boelcke
... sapphire blue against the horizon; beyond which, at about nine o'clock, there suddenly shot up towards the zenith, a pale, gold aureole, such as precedes the appearance of the good fairy at a pantomime farce; then, gradually lifting its huge back above the water, rose a silver pyramid of snow, which I knew must be the cone of an ice mountain, miles away in the interior of the island. From the moment we got hold of the land, our cruise, as you ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... She came to London again, and wrote farces, which she could not get accepted; but she obtained an increase of salary to three pounds a week by unwillingly consenting not only to act in plays, but also to walk in pantomime. At last, in July, 1784, her first farce, "The Mogul Tale," was acted. It brought her a hundred guineas. Three years later her success as a writer had risen so far that she obtained nine hundred pounds by a little piece called "Such Things Are." She still lived sparingly, invested savings, and was liberal only to the poor, and ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... feel a certain lowering of my regard. He who studies, he who is yet employed in groping for his premises, should keep his mind fluent and sensitive, keen to mark flaws, and willing to surrender untenable positions. He should keep himself teachable, or cease the expensive farce of being taught. It is to further this docile spirit that we desire to press the claims of debating societies. It is as a means of melting down this museum of premature petrifactions into living and impressionable soul that we insist on their utility. If we could once ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... assumption of the identity between the Roman satire and the Greek satyric drama. The Roman 'satira',—I speak of things familiar to many of my hearers,—is properly a full dish (lanx being understood)—a dish heaped up with various ingredients, a 'farce' (according to the original signification of that word), or hodge-podge; and the word was transferred from this to a form of poetry which at first admitted the utmost variety in the materials of which it was composed, and the shapes into which these materials were wrought up; being the ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... and read the playbill. He read the name of the play, the titles of its acts, and the names of its actors. He wondered if the man who just then drove up in a hansom was one of the heroes of the piece, or whether he was one of the performers in the farce announced to follow the play. Still the people streamed in. There was no one he knew, ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... the labourers at Great Oakhurst, whom she knew so well, Clara always felt as if all her reading had been a farce, and, indeed, if we come into close contact with actual life, art, poetry and philosophy seem little better than trifling. When the mist hangs over the heavy clay land in January, and men and women shiver in the bitter cold and eat raw turnips, to indulge in fireside ecstasies over the divine ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... mother having been a daughter of the great Umako. The throne was therefore offered to him. But since the offer followed, instead of preceding the Empress' approval of Prince Karu, Furubito recognized the farce, and knowing that, though he might rule in defiance of the Kamatari faction, he could not hope to rule with its consent, he threw away his sword and declared his intention ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... professedly followed French methods, observed the unities, and used the rhymed couplet. But they were not French; they were a nondescript incubation by Dryden himself, and were called heroic dramas. They were ridiculed in the Duke of Buckingham's farce, the Rehearsal; but their ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... teaching had first made me familiar. Their denials of everything which to me had been previously sacred appalled me like the overture to some approaching tragedy. Their confident attempts at some new scheme of affirmations affected me like a solemn farce. ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... if there is for us only the physical might of nature and the world is only what it seems to be; if there is no other God except such as can be found within this sort of cosmic process, then human life is a sardonic mockery, and self-respect a silly farce, and all the heroism of the heart and the valor of the mind the unmeaning activities of an insignificant atom. The very men who will naturally enter your churches are the ones who have always found that theory of life intolerable. It doesn't take in all the facts. They could ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... on the other hand, was always on a broad grin—or rather roar. He breathed farce, both in story and feature. Unlike the boatswain, who was middle-sized and very trig, as well as scrupulously neat, the carpenter was over six feet, broad in proportion, with big, round, red, close-shaven face, framed with abundance of white hair. He looked not unlike ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... February 2, 1923). Yet the Daily Herald reporter had seen nothing ungentlemanly in attending a garden party at Buckingham Palace and publishing a sneering account of it afterwards under the heading of "Pomp and Farce in the Palace" (date of ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Countess, but now is the time for you to decide the issue. Why should you return to Castle Marlanx? Why keep up the farce—or I might say, tragedy—any longer? You love Graustark. You love the Prince. You betray them both by consorting with their harshest foe. Oh, I could tell you ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... fault, not you. I don't know what right I had to imagine you understood me—you seemed to understand me—to fancy that we had anything in common, that in time—" He broke into a low wretched laugh. "And all the while you were engaged to another man! Good God, what a farce! what a miserable mistake from ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... our mind's eye, sit Charley Joe's minions, carousing at our expense, washing down each mouthful with good fizz bought with our hard-earned gold. Licence-pickings, boys, and tips from new grog-shops, and the blasted farce of ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... the paint applied to his face, it was wisely announced that for the future the Deity should be covered by a cloud. These plays, carried about the country, taken up by the baser sort of people, descended through all degrees of farce to obscenity, and, in England, becoming entangled in politics, at length disappeared. It is said they linger in Italy, and are annually ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Neath, are unmistakably the Queen's diction and not his, cannot be left out of the account in estimating his betrayers. From October 26, when the illegally-assembled Parliament, in the hall of Bristol Castle, went through the farce of electing the young Prince to the regency "because the King was absent from his kingdom," and October 27th, which is given (probably with truth) by Harl. Ms. 6124 as the day of the judicial murder of Hugh Le Despenser ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... process of transmission, without seeing that for the age-old wisdom of those whom we call the uneducated we are substituting a jerry-built knowledge—got from books—which we only half believe in ourselves? New lamps for old! The pity of it! The farce! ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... American author. Its characters, representing three generations, illustrate humorously the truth that what is to-day's innovation becomes to-morrow's August convention. The Honeymoon (1911) is a farce ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... of amusement struck upon Rallywood. They were playing a farce; Count Simon, with his mortal enmity, was but acting his part. The whole procedure was hollow yet he Rallywood would have to give his life to prove that all this seeming was deadly earnest—that the blustering ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... familiar still, were utterly estranged from each other. Some few score of years afterwards, when all the parties represented are grown old, what bitter satire there is in those flaunting childish family-portraits, with their farce of sentiment and smiling lies, and innocence so self-conscious and self-satisfied. Osborne's own state portrait, with that of his great silver inkstand and arm-chair, had taken the place of honour in the dining-room, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to thread. The huge system of the trades is, for some reason, quite confounded by this multiplicity of reefs; the wind intermits, squalls are frequent from the west and south-west, hurricanes are known. The currents are, besides, inextricably intermixed; dead reckoning becomes a farce; the charts are not to be trusted; and such is the number and similarity of these islands that, even when you have picked one up, you may be none the wiser. The reputation of the place is consequently infamous; insurance offices exclude it from their field, and it was not without misgiving ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said Titherington. "It's all very well you're talking like that, but this is serious. The whole election's becoming a farce. Miss Beresford——" ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... send him away," Arina Prohorovna rapped out. "I don't know what he looks like, he is simply frightening you; he is as white as a corpse! What is it to you, tell me please, you absurd fellow? What a farce!" ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... he said, speaking with great deliberation, as though he weighed each word he uttered, "we will end this farce of questions and answers. They are unnecessary as far as I am concerned, and are unworthy of you. A long time ago I held a conversation in this very room with your friend Alexis Saberevski who possesses ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... persons of our own sex we could possibly afford to endure it. But such is not the case. Our wives and our daughters, our sisters and our mothers, are subjected to the same insults and to the same uncivilized treatment. You may ask why we do not institute civil suits in the State courts. What a farce! Talk about instituting a civil-rights suit in the State courts of Kentucky, for instance, where decision of the judge is virtually rendered before he enters the court-house, and the verdict of the jury substantially rendered before it is impaneled. ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... which were to burn her to death. Her laugh was caused by the thought of her escape from persecution and of the joyful resurrection soon to come. It was not an indication that she was not serious, and that her abjuration of witchcraft was a farce, as her ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... It might have been sublimest farce-comedy, had they not lacked the perspective necessary for its appreciation. But it was enough that they realized that the demagogue had come crashing down—enough that, watching his furtive disappearance that night, they learned how pitiful a coward ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... moment he was declaiming violently, "You have all the vices of the last century, and none of its amenities. Honor is a mere name. Love is a farce. You have ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... "at length the farce is played—away with those slaves whom I have forced through the difficult gates of Joy!" and she clapped her hands. But when they had borne the bodies thence she drew me ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... the phenomenally successful farce, Peers and Pyjamas, at the Plenipotentiaries Theatre. The fine central living-room contains sixteen doors, opening into bedrooms, kitchen, coal-cellar, etc. May be as conveniently entered by the window as by the doors. All the latter ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... was up. The debate, thought he, was fast becoming a farce. The King was fooling his subjects. The King must be taught a lesson. As the Diet broke up, he stood at the door, and shouted out in ringing tones: "Let all who love the King and the land, let all who care for unity and love, let all ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... in trying to kill each other came out of opposite trenches and fraternised. They took photographs of mixed groups of Germans and English, arm-in-arm. They exchanged cigarettes, and patted each other on the shoulder, and cursed the war.... The war had become the most tragic farce in the world. The frightful senselessness of it was apparent when the enemies of two nations fighting to the death stood in the grey mist together and liked each other. They did not want to kill each other, these Saxons of the same race and blood, so like each other in physical appearance, ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... with a Koran in his hand, swearing that all the time he is walking on his own land. To meet the difficulty of a false oath, while he is walking over his neighbor's land, he puts a little dust from his own field into his shoes. As both sides are acquainted with the trick, the dismal farce of swearing is usually soon abandoned, in favor of ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... said and done was more or less theatrical. Sincerity was to a great extent at a discount, and later years of experience in politics confirmed my impressions that the whole was a game to induce the people to think that their friend was Codlin, and not Short. And the farce is continued to the present time, only more so, ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... and black of heart. I have submitted to the farce of this durbar, but that is as far as my patience will ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... fifty dollars for the second best comedy, to be produced at the Bijou. The first prize went to George F. Abbott, Rochester, N.Y., for his very excellent comedy, 'The Man in the Manhole,' and the second prize to S.F. Austin, of San Antonio, Tex., for a farce, 'The ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... been fooled and I broke the valise open. The heavy stuff rolled in the cotton was only a lot of old coupling-pins from the railroad. I was disgusted with this sinner, this thief. But it was droll—it was droll—and I could scarcely sleep with laughing at the whole farce. I know that was sinful. I should have cried. But he was clever, that ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... the squire, angrily, "I demand that this farce come to an end. I believe the bidding of this boy to be a premeditated swindle. If so, I will do my best to ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... obtained by their own inspector. The result was that the duties of the inspector of the acts were afterwards controlled by a committee of that local authority, who decided the cases in which prosecutions should be.undertaken, and the administration of the acts was "little better than a farce.'' No power existed to compel local authorities to carry out the acts. The committee came to the conclusion that in many cases the responsibility for the adulteration of articles of food did not rest with the retailer but with the wholesale dealer ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... but it is political love; and all the men live in the hope of a future. Henri is clever, his talent borders on genius, and he is in communication with Spain, the land of deceit. Who knows if even his noble answer to the ambassador was not a farce, and if he did not warn the ambassador of it by some sign unknown to me? Henri has spies; those beggars were nothing more nor less than gentlemen in disguise. Those pieces of gold, so artistically cut, were pledges ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... never spoken, "though it may seem hard for a week or two, like the loss of any other toy, I deprive you of nothing, but add to your comfort, and (if there be such a thing) to your happiness, when I forbid you ever to see that foolish child again. All marriage is a wretched farce, even when man and wife belong to the same rank of life, have temper well assorted, similar likes and dislikes, and about the same pittance of mind. But when they are not so matched, the farce would become a long, dull tragedy, if anything were worth lamenting. There, I have reasoned enough ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... too sudden and complete. It was Lord Gorell whose vote had turned the close division which took place on the question of receiving my statement. It was Lord Gorell without whose countenance and authority the farce of the books could never have been performed. Yet here was Lord Gorell, after assenting to all the provisions for the optional censorship paragraph by paragraph, suddenly informing his colleagues that they had been wrong all through and that I had been right all through, and ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... plainly, you are absurd, contemptible, and odious! This sorry farce outstrips all one could have imagined, and all that the Versailles papers said of you must have been true; for what you are doing now is worse than anything they could ever have dared to imagine. It was not enough to violate ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... concession, but finally she had her way; the farce was enacted and they left her as she had requested them to do, alone with her dreams ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... in the most lifeless and gloomy of broodings; if you do not come back to me, the only soul I can love, if you are not joyful and strong, sincere, sympathetic, and loving, all of these—I shall know it is a farce for me to ever hope to gain any life with you. I do not believe that any woman can grow without love, and a great deal of it. Why do you suppose I am writing all this—I, who have felt such deep and true love for you? I have no courage—the dampness of ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... contained humorous elements, such as the realistically comic figure of the merchant who sold spices and ointment to the Maries on their way to the tomb of Christ. In the later plays these interpolations developed into scenes of roaring farce. When Herod learned of the escape of the Wise Men, he would rage violently about the stage and even among {25} the spectators. Noah's wife, in the Chester play of The Deluge, refuses point-blank ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... hero of the hour. Elizabeth received him at the palace. The Spanish ambassador, De Silva, met him there at dinner. He talked freely of where he had been and of what he had done, only keeping back the gentle violence which he had used. He regarded this as a mere farce, since there had been no one hurt on either side. He boasted of having given the greatest satisfaction to the Spaniards who had dealt with him. De Silva could but bow, report to his master, and ask instructions how he ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... the dwarf exposed his bare side. The evangelist continued to back away from his new assailant, who continued vigorously to follow him up. The youngsters in the crowd broke into laughter. The scene passed swiftly from tragedy to farce. At this point the ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... to the position in novel-writing are, I suppose, Le Roi des Montagnes and Tolla, each of which, and perhaps one other, we may examine in some detail, grouping the rest (with one further exception) more summarily. They are the better suited for our purpose in that one is comedy if not farce, and the other a gradually threatening and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... buried in Westminster Abbey; he was the author of many comedies and farces, which, however, are of no great merit, but his abiding fame rests upon his powers as an actor, his remarkable versatility enabling him to act with equal ease and success in farce, comedy, and tragedy; his admirable naturalness did much to redeem the stage from the stiff conventionalism under which it then laboured; his wife, Eva Maria Violette, a celebrated dancer of Viennese birth, whom he married in 1740, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... been too clever for me, and so I suppose you have the right to mock me. There is no need to go on with this farce. The sight of your treasures gave me the gold-fever, I suppose, and it drove me mad, as it has driven many others mad, and I betrayed you. There is no use saying any more. I see that I have been betrayed too, and that my life is in your ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... with his sheaves Of humour, passion, cruelty, tyranny, life, Fit shadows for the boards; till in the strife Of dream with dream, their Slaver-Saint came true, And their Blind Pirate, their resurgent PEW (A figure of deadly farce in his new birth), Tap-tapped his way from ORCUS back to earth; And so, their Lover and his Lass made one, In their best prose ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... the judgment of God. That judgment was near, it was imminent; and but for the many instances in which the life of the rich, the great, and the powerful was redeemed by the highest virtue, this pitiful farce of a national existence would have been played out already; but for the good men still found in Sodom, the city of abominations must long since have been destroyed. People there were to laugh at these predictions, but they were only ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... to regard himself as a timid, insufficient, and "weak" type, who would never marry; to regard Diana Duke as a materialistic maidservant; and to regard his first fancy for her as the small, dull farce of a collegian kissing his landlady's daughter. And yet the phrase about military music moved him queerly, as if he ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... musical diversion of the Muses Galantes, which Rameau rightly or wrongly pronounced a plagiarism, and at the request of Richelieu he made some minor re-adaptations in Voltaire's Princesse de Navarre, which Rameau had set to music—that "farce of the fair" to which the author of Zaire owed his seat in the Academy.[136] But neither task brought him money, and he fell back on a sort of secretaryship, with perhaps a little of the valet in it, to Madame Dupin ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... starved from its birth. It likes a comic song very much, if the song refers to fashionable articles of ladies costume, or holds up to ridicule members of Congress, policemen, or dandies. It is not averse to a sentimental song, in which "Mother, dear," is frequently apostrophized. It delights in a farce from which most of the dialogue has been cut away, while all the action is retained,—in which people are continually knocked down, or run against one another with great violence. It takes much pleasure in seeing Horace Greeley play ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... see you have some honesty left in your composition. You acknowledge the deception, and we will let the farce end here. You have become a thief and a midnight incendiary. I have been weak and indulgent towards you. My eyes are opened, and I ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... good, because they have simply gotten enough to misuse. You cannot satisfy a man's appetite by stopping him at the door of your dining room, where he can get only a smell of the dinner while he sees others eating. Of course he would turn away in disgust and call it all a farce. You cannot teach a man to swim by stopping him at the water's edge. You cannot convince a man that he is at the top of a mountain when you stop him at the base, where he can look up and see others above him; and you cannot show a man the virtue of education ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... a little—ever so little—crazed. He supposed she, like Dorcas, fancied he knew everything about Wylder. She was constantly hinting something of the kind; and begging of him to make a disclosure—disclosure of what? It was enough to drive one mad, and would make a capital farce. Rachel has a ridiculous way of talking like an oracle, and treating as settled fact every absurdity she fancies. She is very charming and clever, of course, so long as she speaks of the kind of thing she understands. But when she tries to talk of serious business—poor ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Inn Field. In this latter strife Pope took small part; for, notwithstanding his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, he hated music with an entire sincerity. He also affected to hate the drama; but some have thought this accounted for by the fact that, early in his career, he was damned for the farce of Three Hours after Marriage, which, after the fashion of our own days, he concocted with another, the co-author in this case being a wit of no less calibre than Gay, the author of The Beggars' Opera. The astonished ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... of the trades is, for some reason, quite confounded by this multiplicity of reefs; the wind intermits, squalls are frequent from the west and south-west, hurricanes are known. The currents are, besides, inextricably intermixed; dead reckoning becomes a farce; the charts are not to be trusted; and such is the number and similarity of these islands that, even when you have picked one up, you may be none the wiser. The reputation of the place is consequently infamous; insurance offices exclude it from their field, and it was not without misgiving ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... derived from I do not know where—a Palais Royal farce, I believe—had once got into my head, it was impossible for me to get rid of it, and I felt bursts of wild merriment ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... confused by the subtleties and partial statements of the lawyers, these twelve honest but ignorant men were called upon to decide between physicians offering precisely opposite opinions. It is well when this so-called administration of justice ends as a monstrous farce and not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... the Army were unanimous in saying that as a military or naval factor the United States might be considered as less than nothing. This was the situation when the last Sussex Note of America brought matters to a crisis, and even the crisis itself was considered a farce as it had been simmering for so long ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... inexhaustible, imperturbable store of talk. His words gushed forth abundantly in original remarks, laughable images, the metaphors that flow from the comic genius of crowds. He had the natural picturesqueness of the unadulterated farce. He was brimming over with amusing stories and buffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all repertories of house-painter's nonsense. Being a member of divers of the low haunts called lists, he knew ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... most tremendous words Since 'Mene, Mene, Tekel,' and 'Upharsin,' Which hands or pens have ever traced of swords. Heaven help me! I'm but little of a parson: What Daniel read was short-hand of the Lord's, Severe, sublime; the prophet wrote no farce on The fate of nations;—but this Russ so witty Could rhyme, like Nero, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... represented, for the first time on any stage, an entirely new and original Musical Farce, entitled ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand
... pending, he preferred that the Senate, rather than a committee, should decide the conditions. But when he was outvoted, Douglas adopted the sensible course of refusing to obstruct the work of the Committee of Thirteen by any instructions. He was inclined to believe the whole project a farce: well, if it was, the sooner it was over, the better; he was not disposed to wrangle and turn the farce ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... scene, and, under other circumstances, might have amused me. There was something irresistibly comic in the puzzled looks of the actors; but I had been too deeply affected by the tragedy to laugh at the farce. There was too much of horror around me. Seguin perhaps dead; she gone for ever, the slave of the brutal savage. My own peril, too, at the moment; for I knew not how soon I might be discovered and dragged forth. This affected me least of all. My life was now of little value ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... lies in capacity to direct others, becoming incapacity to direct one's self, in the dream of the infinitely great stopped short by the infinitely little, in what seems to be the utter uselessness of talent. To arrive at immobility by excess of motion, at zero from abundance of numbers, is a strange farce, a sad comedy; the poorest gossip can ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Countess von Rosen is not a complete failure, and would perhaps have been a bit of a success, if only she had made Prince Otto come nearer to losing his virtue. The most perfect in style, perhaps, of all Stevenson's efforts it is yet most out of nature and truth,—a farce, felt to be disguised only when read in a certain mood; and this all the more for its perfections, just as Stevenson would have said it of a human being too icily ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... had a partial success. The only sure cure for drunkenness is to stop before you begin. Entire legal suppression of the dram shop is successful where a stiff, righteous, public sentiment thoroughly enforces it. Otherwise it may become a delusion and a farce. ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... the stage set and the curtain ready to rise on the farce, the audience did not arrive until the shadow of the evening blotted the windows of the office where big Lawlor waited impatiently, rehearsing his part; but when the lamp had been lighted, as though that were a signal for which the tenderfoot had waited, came a knock at the door of the room, and ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... are Joseph Rouletabille," he replied; "well, young man, I'll teach you what comes of making a farce of justice. By virtue of my discretionary power, I hold you ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... is invariably a useless proceeding," added the man in the corner, with a shrug of the shoulders. "No one, not even a latter-day domestic, would be fool enough to keep stolen property in the house. However, the usual farce was gone through, with more or less protest on the part of Mr. Shipman's servants, and with the ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... laugh, but it's a fact, and you know it. Why, ain't Sandy's case proof enough that I'm right? I heard you telling a crowd in there last night—" Bill tilted his head backward towards the room behind them—"that this law-and-order talk is all a farce. What if it is? It don't do any good for you to bawl it out in public and get the worst men in the Committee down on ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... now understood what his or her part was to be, Yram said they had better shake hands all round and take a couple of hours' rest before getting ready for the banquet. George said that the Professors did not shake hands with him very cordially, but the farce was gone through. When the hand-shaking was over, Dr. Downie and Mrs. Humdrum left the house, and the Professors retired grumpily to ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... that after his religious work he wrote the comedy because "nothing can make the town so fond of a man as a successful play."[121] The historian who had to record such strange events, following close on each other, as an author publishing a book of piety, and then a farce, could never have discovered the secret motive of the versatile writer, had not that writer possessed the ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... known the King," says Hervey, "get out of his bed choking with a sore throat, and in a high fever, only to dress and have a levee, and in five minutes undress and return to his bed till the same ridiculous farce of health was to be presented the next day at the same hour." It must be owned, however, that George made a stout fight against ill-health, and if he shammed being well, he kept up the sham for a good long time. He came into the world ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Independence, which preceded the Declaration, spoke of "the State of Great Britain." Sometimes it stands for the government,—as when Louis XIV., at the height of his power, exclaimed, "The State, it is I"; or when Sir Christopher Hatton, in the famous farce of "The Critic," ejaculates,— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... jokes, the final farce, "Handy Andy," pleased Alfred so greatly that he remained for the next performance as did Lin and her beau, Cousin Charley and several of Alfred's friends. He bought a song book containing only the words. He caught several of the airs and ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... Philippe, with his bourgeois following, had been an imbecile, and he could tell how the citizen-king had hoarded his coppers in a woollen stocking. As for the Republic of '48, that had been a mere farce, the working classes had deceived him; however, he no longer acknowledged that he had applauded the Coup d'Etat, for he now looked upon Napoleon III as his personal enemy, a scoundrel who shut himself up with ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... said the huge Monsieur Mollot, clerk of the court; "otherwise what is here taking place would be a mere farce; we should not be free in our action, in which case we might as well continue to do the will of Monsieur ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... had touched a spring—and there he was at the door himself, rushing back. He, too, had remembered. It was almost a collision, and nothing but their good Southern breeding, the way they took it, saved it from being like a rowdy farce. ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... was told by the warder, by the bishop, and by Justinus, the day after to-morrow was fixed for the bridal of his betrothed. In two days the bride, decked by base and mocking hands for an atrocious and accursed farce, would be wreathed and wedded, not to him, the bridegroom whom she loved, but to the Nile—the insensible, death-dealing element. He rushed up and down his cell like a madman, and tore his lute-strings when he tried to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... police department seems helpless to discover anything. The high chiefs and commissioners grant a condescending permission when Muller asks, "May I do this? ... or may I handle this case this way?" both parties knowing all the while that it is a farce, and that the department waits helpless until this humble little man saves its honour by solving some problem before which its intricate machinery ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... This little farce is repeated in some shape every day. I am very idle. I smoke a great deal, and lounge about all day, with my hands in my pockets. I am free from that ineffable weariness of ceaseless giving which I experienced six months ago. I was shorn of my hereditary trinkets at that period; and I have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... to-day," he said, throwing himself into a lounge and lighting a cigar; "not an ounce of specie, and no jewellery to mention—and there was no killing, so don't put on that face of yours. Why, my dear boy, it was a perfect farce! I, myself, argued for twenty minutes with an old woman, who sat mewing like a cat on her box, and when I got her off it, thinking she had a thousand in diamonds, it was full of baby linen. And I'll tell you a better thing. An old Dutch ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... Dorset County Chronicle. His chief studies, however, were philological; and in 1829 he published An Etymological Glossary of English Words of Foreign Derivation. In 1832 a strolling company of actors visited Mere, and Barnes wrote a farce, The Honest Thief, which they produced, and a comedy which was played at Wincanton. Barnes also wrote a number of educational books, such as Elements of Perspective, Outlines of Geography, and in 1833 first began his poems in the Dorsetshire ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... stupefied that I stammered out my answers. I asked myself whether she had not really been making fun of me with Doctor Parent, if it were not merely a very well-acted farce which had been got up beforehand. On looking at her attentively, however, my doubts disappeared. She was trembling with grief, so painful was this step to her, and I was sure that her throat was ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... of spiritualization produces results in striking contrast to the farce of materialization: the one produces the results of chastity and purity, the other the downward tendencies and earthward ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in this book. There is that screaming farce called "The Suicides in the Rue Sombre." Now, then, you Magazine zealots, speak up and tell me truly: is there anything too difficult for you in this? If so, the psychology of what is called "public taste" becomes a subject not ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... inconveniently crowded that dancing was a mere farce, only kept up by the loyal support of Mrs. Rohscheimer's compatriots. The bulk of the company crowded around in intermingling groups, to the accompaniment of ceaseless shuffling and murmuring which all but drowned the strains of the celebrated orchestra. But lining the wall around ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... the time when Nolan's braggadocio must have broken down. At first, they said, he took a very high tone, considered his imprisonment a mere farce, affected to enjoy the voyage, and all that; but Phillips said that after he came out of his state-room he never was the same man again. He never read aloud again, unless it was the Bible or Shakespeare, or something else he was sure of. But it was not that merely. He never entered in ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... from the main thoroughfare, but with a sinister quiet. Tall dwellings marched shoulder to shoulder along the ways, shuttered, dark, grim, with an effect of conspirators, their heads together in lawless conference. The streets were intolerably narrow, the paving a farce; pools of stagnant water stood in the depressions, piles of refuse banked the walls. The fetid air hung motionless but sibilant with stealthy footsteps and whisperings.... Preferable to this seemed even ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... both with fabliau and with allegory. The personifying taste, which bred or was bred from allegory, is very close akin to the dramatic taste, and the fabliau, as has been said more than once, is a farce in the making, and sometimes far ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... conspiracy; have shown to the debased and unenlightened multitude that their force is physically irresistible, and recommended them to make use of it, promising that if they hold in power, they will only use that power to the abolition of our farce of a constitution, of a church, and of a king; and that if the nation is to be governed at all, it shall only be governed by the many. This is cheering. Hail, patriot lords! all hail! I am in hopes yet that the great work will be achieved, in spite of the laughs and sneers and ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... recent; under this sanction, they stalk around somewhat like supernumeraries at the Opera, dressed in purple and gold, representing a conclave of cardinals or the Diet of the Holy Empire. Never has the political drama degenerated into such an impudent farce!—On the 31st, at half-past six in the morning, Dobsen and his bullies present themselves at the council-general of the Commune, tender their credentials, and make known to it its deposition. The Council, with edifying complacency, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... unadulterated hedging! I didn't look for that from you. Shall I tell you what we both think of him? He is a farce and a fake, and I rather think that I am going to run him out of the State pretty soon. . . . What would you say of a doctor who couldn't tell the difference between a wound made by a man bumping his head when he fell and by a smashing blow with a gun-barrel? Patten ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... rather accompany yourself, as you say you play the fiddle." Then without giving him time to answer he said to one of the band, "hand this gentleman a fiddle, as he calls it." Hodgkinson took the fiddle, and pitching upon the beautiful Finale at the end of the first act of the farce of the Padlock, he played and sung it not only to the astonishment of them all, but so much to their satisfaction and delight, that Mr. K. after asking him whether he thought he could sing accompanied by the band, and being answered in the affirmative, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... near cousins, scuffling and fighting, only one of the three plays has more than a trace. Hence the earlier remark, that Heywood was before his time. It is not devils in bearskins and wooden-sworded vices that create true comedy; they belong to the realm of farce. Yet they continued to flourish long after Heywood had set another example, and with them the cuffing of ears and drunken gambolling which we may see, in the works of other men, trying to rescue prosy scenes from dullness. In Johan Johan is simple comedy, the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... baffled by these precautions, and, having smoked their pipe, and vapored off their valor, took their departure. The farce, however, did not end here. After a little while the warriors returned, ushering in another savage, still more heroically arrayed. This they announced as the chief of the belligerent village, but as a great pacificator. ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... capacity for wit, but, as he was fond of saying himself, no sympathy with farce or mere high spirits. I doubt even if he had a sense of humour in the ordinary meaning of that term, or in the Frenchman's definition: "la mlancholie gaie que les Anglais nomment 'humour.'" To say this is not to say that he did not enjoy a humorous, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... is time to put an end to this scandalous farce! My niece is not for you; I have promised her and given her away. Know that, day after to-morrow, the 19th of this month, at ten o'clock in the morning, she will marry M. Leon Renault, ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... Rangui. There I saw Rangui and Tawiti striking blow after blow with their paddles upon an object resembling the figure of a man covered with a cloak. It was easy to perceive that the two wily chiefs were simply beating one of the benches of the canoe. After this farce had been played for some little time, Rangui's paddle broke in his hands. The sham man was made to appear to fall down, when Rangui, addressing me, said that he had just killed the thief, and wished to know whether that would satisfy me. I assured him that it would, laughing to myself at ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... their beautiful wives,—or otherwise,—sat at the table d'-hote, and sumptuous dishes flitted here and there, while corks popped like so many Chinese crackers, and champagne bubbled up like blood. At night, the Provost Guard enacted the farce of coming by deputations to each public bar, which was at once closed, but reopened five minutes afterward. Congress water was in great demand for weak heads of mornings, and many a young lad, girt up for war, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... hinted, it was formerly thought that pupils knew history adequately when they could rattle off a list of dates and tell something of the deeds and misdeeds of a set of unhappy persons who masqueraded as statesmen and courtiers. Such unedifying farce has nothing to do with history, which is a serious, instructive, and all-embracing study. The social life of the great mass of a nation is far more important and interesting than the eccentric deeds of a few high-placed rogues or saints. The old ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... that his 'merit as a dramatic writer has been vastly underrated'. Ravenscroft has a facility in writing, an ease of dialogue, a knack of evoking laughter and picturing the ludicrous, above all a vitality which many a greater name entirely lacks. As a writer of farce, and farce very nearly akin to comedy, he ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... at all, my good man... What more do you want? The farce is over. I will only ask you to take this little note to Master Prasville, your employer. Clemence, please show Mr. Polonius out. And, if ever he calls again, fling open the doors wide to him. Pray look upon this as your home, Mr. ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... negotiations could have been continued in a friendly spirit. Moreover, the so-called ruthless submarine campaign was, according to the opinion of Admiral von Tirpitz, who was at that time still in office, although he was not consulted until the decision was taken, a military farce. He declared the order to be technically nonsense, and the pompous way in which it was issued as unnecessarily provocative and a challenge. The whole thing was ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... was by no means her first show. Before that she had been pantomime fairy, orphan child in melodrama, waif in a music-hall sketch, millionaire's pet in a Society play, a mischievous boy in a popular farce, dancer in a big ballet, and now the lead in a famous fairy play, at a salary of ten pounds a week. No wonder Dad and Mumdear, and even the elder girls, regarded her with a touch of awe and worship. But feted as she is, she has never been spoilt; and she remains, in spite of her ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... deceiver of the world, as Horace calls him, this muta persona, I take to have been more happy in his part than the greatest actors that fill the stage with show and noise; nay, even than Augustus himself, who asked, with his last breath, whether he had not played his farce very well. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... concern which Marjorie alone knew to be false. Privately Mary's deceitful attitude was a sore trial to her. Honest to the core, she felt that she would rather her chum had maintained open hostility than a farce of good will which was dropped the moment they chanced to be alone. Still she resolved to bear it and look forward to a happier ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... is a bad thing to get punished will largely depend upon the punishment, but when you deserve to be punished, and some one else is at hand to receive it in your stead, then punishment is apt to become a farce. Just consider this: I deserve the whipping, but you are hired to take it for me. Perhaps you think this is a joke, but I am really in earnest. I am alluding to a practice which was actually once in vogue—though never to a great extent—in this and other countries. By whipping one boy instead ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... corner is another theatre, on a smaller scale, where Momus holds his court; so that be you seriously, sentimentally, or humorously disposed, you may, without quitting the shelter of the piazzas, satisfy your inclination. Tragedy, Comedy, and Farce all lie before you within the purlieus of ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... diminutive, and ugly beyond conception. His complexion was of a yellowish brown, and his nose not much smaller than the rest of his entire person. At the same time he kept grinning with stupid courtesy, exhibiting his huge mouth, and making a thousand scrapes and bows to me. As this farce was now becoming inconvenient to me, I thanked him briefly and turned about my still trembling steed, thinking either to seek another adventure, or in case I met with none, to find my way back, for during my wild chase the sun had already passed the meridian; but the little ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... live and die like the beasts that perish. They aspire, struggle, and are determined to rise, but just when they are fitted to endure, and to enter upon ampler spheres of service, the curtain falls on the tragedy, the stage scenery is changed, a new company of players takes their places, and the farce, for it is a farce as well as a tragedy, goes on from century to century, and there is no meaning in anything. If that were the true interpretation of life, on earth's loftiest mountain there might well be raised ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... no truth in the report that Mr. JAMES WELCH intends renaming his successful farce (now moved to the New Theatre) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... so easily spoken. Men talk of forgiveness when their anger rankles deepest in their hearts. In the course of years I shall forgive her. I hope I shall. But to say that I can forgive her now would be a farce. She has ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... impossible, it will spell disgrace and misfortune to us all. The Emperor will interfere, for this is going too far. We must hinder this farcical ceremony; his Highness cannot marry two wives! It will be Moempelgard over again! Think how absurd, Graevenitz! Cannot you see that this farce is bigamy?' ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... death We were not so alone, who might not quit, Smiling, this tediousness of breath, These bubble joys that flash and burst and flit,— This tragicomedy of life, where scarce We know if it be farce, ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... Taylor. Last night, a little before sundown, until after dark, we were amused by a farce enacted by the natives, apparently to keep us quiet and render us powerless, while they approached the water hole and got what water they required. They commenced at some distance off, raising a heavy black smoke, (by setting fire to the spinifex), and calling out most lustily at the top of ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... handing me my cloak, "this is a richer farce than mine! 'Tis you who should wear the cap and bells! But come, I will be your guide to the ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... we always done in Russia when a Czar suggests reforms?—nothing. You forget we are diplomatists. Men of thought should have nothing to do with action. Reforms in Russia are very tragic, but they always end in a farce. ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... door—my cry had set her going, as if I had touched a spring—and there he was at the door himself, rushing back. He, too, had remembered. It was almost a collision, and nothing but their good Southern breeding, the way they took it, saved it from being like a rowdy farce. ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... imposing personage enough, of the very type to awe the weak and timorous. He was much entertained on this particular morning,—one might almost say he was greatly amused. Quite a humorous little comedy was being played at the Vatican,—a mock- solemn farce, which had the possibility of ending in serious disaster to the innocent,—and he, as a student of the wily and treacherous side of human nature, was rather interested in its development. Cardinal Felix Bonpre, a man living far ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... plan something splendid, a 'grand combination,' as you used to call your droll mixtures of tragedy, comedy, melodrama and farce," answered his sister, with her head already full of ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... Milton, Cromwell, were great men, for they showed great power by acts and thoughts, that have not yet been consigned to oblivion. They must needs be men of lofty stature, whose shadows lengthen out to remote posterity. A great farce-writer may be a great man; for Moliere was but a great farce-writer. In my mind, the author of Don Quixote was a great man. So have there been many others. A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... as Dioscorides says, l. 1. c. 128. And there is an excellent sweet water extracted from the distill'd leaves and flowers: To which the naturalist adds, that they us'd the berries instead of pepper, to stuff and farce with them. Hence the mortadella a mortatula, still so call'd by the Italians, perhaps the myrtides of Athenaeus, deip. l. 2. c. 12. The vinum myrtites so celebrated by the{290:1} ancients, and so the oyl; And in some places the leaves for tanning ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... sharply as to the actions of Dorothy and Tavia while they were in her department. Did they appear hurried, or did they seem to crowd others? These and like questions were put to the clerk. Dorothy felt by this time that the whole thing was a farce. How could they help crowding? And why would they not appear in a hurry, when there were not half enough clerks to attend to ...
— Dorothy Dale's Queer Holidays • Margaret Penrose
... conjure by in Lost Valley. Steptoe Service prated of Gov'ment. It was a farce, a synonym for juggled duty, a word to suggest the one-man law of the place, for even Courtrey, who made the sheriffs—and unmade them—did it under the grandiloquent name of Government. She looked at him keenly, and there was a sudden hardening in ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... cannot keep up the farce that she is a real lady-in-waiting. In one place he tells us that she dusts the throne of the Princess; can you see her ladyship, eighteen last February, doing that? At other times he allows her to take ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... of dramatic vivacity; in these the "Host," Master Harry Bailly, acts as a most efficient choragus, but the other pilgrims are not silent, and in the "Manciple's" Prologue, the "Cook" enacts a bit of downright farce for the amusement of the company and of stray inhabitants of "Bob-up-and-down." He is, however, homoeopathically cured of the effects of his drunkenness, so that the "Host" feels justified in offering up a ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... in the victory, the fellowship which, developed under Partow, who believed that Napoleons and Colossi and gods in the car and all such gentlemen belonged to an archaic farce-comedy, had grown under Lanstron. "The staff reports," began the messages that awakened a world, retiring with the idea that the Browns were grimly holding the defensive, to the news that three millions ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... asked Broderick. What's to prevent rascals taking advantage of such a movement—running it to suit themselves? They're much cleverer than honest, men; more powerful.... Else do you think I'd use my political machine? No, no, Benito, this is farce—disaster." ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... tendency of his disposition to pathetic or humorous idealization. Perhaps in "The Old Curiosity Shop" these qualities are best seen in their struggle and divergence, and the result is a magnificent juxtaposition of romantic tenderness, melodramatic improbabilities, and broad farce. The humorous characterization is joyously exaggerated into caricature,—the serious characterization into romantic unreality, Richard Swiveller and Little Nell refuse to combine. There is abundant evidence of genius both in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... considered almost brutal. He calls on her and pretends he would like to take her to the theatre, if it is in town, or for a ride, if it is in the country. She pretends she would like to go. Both of them know what the real purpose is, and both of them pretend they don't. They start the farce by pretending a deceit which deceives nobody. They wait for nature to set up an attraction which shall overrule their judgment, rather than act by judgment first and leave it to nature to take care of herself. How much ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... is a gigantic farce of the most ingenious construction. The whole comedy hinges on a huge joke, played by a heartless nephew on his misanthropic uncle, who is induced to take to himself a wife, young, fair, and warranted ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... to enable her to pass the preliminary examinations necessary to begin her studies in the medical college which was an outcast among its kind and known among the profession as a "diploma mill." She selected it because the course was easy and the tuition light, though its equipment was a farce and its laboratory too meagre to deserve the name; one of the commercial medical colleges turning out each year by the hundreds, for a few dollars, illiterate graduates, totally unfitted by temperament and education for a ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... the effort or heard the agony? Why torture himself? Why torture others? If the world were good, why was he not to have his part? If it were bad, might he not find a quiet nook under the wall, out of the storm? Why must he try to breast it? If Ayre was right, what a tragical farce his struggle was, what a perverse delusion, what an aimless flinging away of the little joy his little life could offer! If this were so, then was he indeed alone in the world—except for Claudia. Was his choice in truth between this ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... I have none to tell. It is the story of Paragot, the beloved vagabond—please pronounce his name French-fashion—and if I obtrude myself on your notice it is because I was so much involved in the medley of farce and tragedy which made up some years of his life, that I don't know how to tell the story otherwise. To Paragot I owe everything. He is at once my benefactor, my venerated master, my beloved friend, my creator. Clay in his hands, he moulded me according to his caprice, ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... extremely arduous. In the event of our having to give two representations, the time at our disposal was so very short that, for all the rehearsals, we had but ten days before us. And since we were concerned not with a light comedy or farce, but with a grand opera, and one which, in spite of the trifling character of its music, contained numerous and powerful concerted passages, the undertaking might have been regarded almost as foolhardy. Nevertheless, I built my hopes ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... knew of them. I have tried to be more careful this time. During the revising process "The Woman-Haters" has more than doubled in length and, let us hope, in accuracy. Even now it is, of course, not a novel, but merely a summer farce-comedy, a "yarn." And this, by the way, is all that it pretends ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... all, behind the Nieuport. We exchanged shots merrily. Finally the Fokker let the Caudron go, and the Nieuport stopped chasing the Fokker. I fired my last shots at the Nieuport and went home. The whole farce lasted over an hour. We had worked hard, but without visible success. At least, the Fokker (who turned out to be Althaus) and I had ...
— An Aviator's Field Book - Being the field reports of Oswald Boelcke, from August 1, - 1914 to October 28, 1916 • Oswald Boelcke
... however, I failed to see all the ins and outs of it. I could understand a desire to get rid of me; there would be one less of the afterguard, and then, too, I knew too much of the men's sentiments, if not of their plans. But why all this elaborate farce of the mock quarrel and the alleged mistake? Could it be to guard against possible failure? I could hardly think it worth while. My only theory was that they had wished to test my strength and determination. The whole ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... was all a farce. What's a ceremony? For all I knew it wasn't even legal. When you did not answer my letter I thought that was what your silence meant. I asked a girl to ask her father who was a lawyer if a marriage was legal when the girl was under age and the parents didn't know ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... prove so constant a Butt, to Farce-wrights, and Hackney Laughers; when, upon Examination, he is, by a thousand Degrees, preferable to the British Hobbinol, or French Gregoire? For Teague is a very Pattern of Hospitality; so much so, that if a Gentleman should happen to miss ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... is not over!" he exclaimed. "There are proofs which neither the baron nor his wife know that I have. I have the proof of the infamous swindle of which the Marquis de Tregars was the victim. I have the proof of the farce got up by M. de Thaller and myself to defraud the stockholders of ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... these occasions always irritates with its strangeness and discomfort. The few occupants seem odd and oddly dressed, and you wonder how they got there. The particular weekly that you want is not taken in; the dinner is execrable, and the ventilation a farce. All these evils oppressed me to-night. And yet I was puzzled to find that somewhere within me there was a faint lightening of the spirits; causeless, as far as I could discover. It could not be Davies's letter. Yachting in the Baltic at the end of September! The very idea ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... they have been gay; and age by age they have exchanged language imitated from the children they doubtless never studied, and perhaps never loved. Why so? They might have chosen broken English of other sorts—that, for example, which was once thought amusing in farce, as spoken by the Frenchman conceived by the Englishman—a complication of humour fictitious enough, one might think, to please anyone; or else a fragment of negro dialect; or the style of telegrams; or the ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... marquants, and mine was this:—'Whatever Sheridan has done, or chosen to do, has been, par excellence, always the best of its kind. He has written the best comedy ("School for Scandal"), the best drama (in my mind, far before that St. Giles's lampoon, the "Beggars' Opera"), the best farce (the "Critic,"—it is only too good for a farce), and the best address ("Monologue on Garrick"), and, to crown all, delivered the very best oration (the famous "Begum Speech") ever conceived or ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... estates of Compiegne and Chambord, receiving a yearly income of seven and a half million francs, payable by the French treasury. The Spanish princes were similarly treated, Ferdinand signing away his rights for a castle and a pension. To crown the farce, Napoleon ordered Talleyrand to receive them at his estate of Valencay, and amuse them with actors and the charms of female society. Thus the choicest humorist of the age was told off to entertain three uninteresting exiles; and the ex-Minister of Foreign ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... been a considerable farce, in which I had played the most humiliating part. Indeed, but for the interposition of Barraclough I must have come out of it the butt of all shafts. As it was, I was sensitive in regard to my position, and more than once was tempted ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... drunk than that the misery which his drunkenness causes to innocent people should be punished, or prevented. The helpless must always suffer for the selfishness of other people—that is one of the "divine" laws of civilisation. The liberty of the subject is not only a farce, but a crime, when the liberty jeopardises the lives of the minority. The liberty to harm others will be a "liberty" punishable by law in the state which is anything more than democratic, except as a ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... "If this farce continues longer than an hour and a half, I shall throw down my harp and go away," said Carlo, in a tone of severity. "I swear it to you by the spirit of my mother! Remember it; I shall show you the time ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... persuade people that all is well, when all is not well! That's exactly what women always do and always have done, and plume themselves upon it. And so this ridiculous farce is kept up, because these wretched women go smiling about the world, hugging their stupid resignation to their hearts, and pampering up their sickly virtue, at the expense of ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... Frenchman, dead or alive. And yet, because I chanced to be among the crew, I was to be hung by the neck! I knew well enough, from what I had heard of French justice, that any excuses would be but breath wasted. Indeed, as one of the few English of the party, I should probably be spared even the farce of a trial. My only hope was that Captain Cochin, who had not been unkind to me so far, would speak ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... not fully understand his feeling about it, which was that with the soiled experience of her marriage another ceremony with him would be a mere legal farce. To the pure idealism of his nature it seemed cleaner, nobler for them to take this step without any attempt to regularize it in the eyes of Society. To him she was justified in doing what she had done, in leaving her husband for him, and that would have to be enough ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... glance, steady as a rifle, had not wavered. "No, you needn't work yourself up into a passion—and as for your lordly, dictatorial airs, I am past the age when they affect me—keep them for your servants. By God!—what a farce it all is! Let us talk of something ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... poison, death, and hell. But he asks him, what is the use of a Council at all if the Pope arrogates to himself beforehand, as his decrees fulminate, the right of altering and tearing up its decisions. Far better to spare the expense and trouble of such a farce, and say, 'We will believe and worship your hellship without any Councils.' The piece of arch-knavery practised by the Pope in himself announcing a Council against Emperor and Empire was, in fact, nothing new. The Popes from the very first had practised all kinds of devilish wickedness, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... "This farce must end. I cannot bandy words with such as you. Not another dollar shall you receive from me—not a penny. You had my final word at Massac, last Spring. Quit this boat instantly, and leave St. Louis. If I see you again, or hear of your hanging around the garrison, I'll ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... home worth defending, lies with the individual defenders. To attempt to put it into the hands of those who are not physically fitted to maintain the obligations that may result from any vote or any legislative act, is to render law a farce, and to betray the trust imposed upon them by the constitution they have sworn to uphold. Universal manhood suffrage is the crowning result in the long evolution of government. Our statesmen of the Revolutionary period did not contemplate it. But stability was the thing for which ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... Adrienne Le Couvreur, a beautiful actress, denied burial. After all, we do feel an interest in what is to become of our bodies. There is a modesty that belongs to death. Upon this subject Voltaire was infinitely sensitive. It was that he might be buried that he went through the farce of confession, of absolution, and of the last sacrament. The priests knew that he was not in earnest, and Voltaire knew that they would not allow him to be buried in any of the cemeteries of Paris. His death was kept a secret. The Abbe Mignot made arrangements for the burial at Romilli-on-the-Seine, ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... a Welshman a "goat." All the schoolboys who were not Welsh delighted in teasing us by applying the uncomplimentary nickname. This once resulted at the Sharon operahouse, in turning a dramatic episode into a howling farce. ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... laughing schools, Our author flies sad Heraclitus rules, No tears, no terror plead in his behalf, The aim of Farce is but to make you laugh Beneath the tragick or the comick name, Farces and puppet shows ne'er miss of fame Since then, in borrow'd dress, they've pleas'd the town, Condemn them not, ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... she will be true to herself. Let Dissenters, whether they be Church of England, as perhaps they may still call themselves, Methodist or Presbyterian, presume to grumble, and there shall be bruising of lips in pulpits, tying up to whipping-posts, cutting off ears and noses—he! he! the farce of King Log has been acted long enough; the time for Queen Stork's tragedy is drawing nigh;" and the man in black sipped his gin and water in a very ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... a fine thing or a foolish thing, as the case may be; an encouragement to friendliness, or a tribute to fashion; an expression of good nature, or a bid for favour; an outgoing of generosity, or a disguise of greed; a cheerful old custom, or a futile old farce, according to the spirit which animates it and the form ...
— The Spirit of Christmas • Henry Van Dyke
... Fowl, to dress. Ditto to farce. Fricassee of Chickens, brown. Ditto white. Fish Gravey for Soups. Flounders, pickled. Frontiniac-Wine imitated. Fruits preserv'd for Tarts. Florence-Wine imitated. Frontiniac-Wine to make. Fowls, the Sorts. Fish, to boil firm. Fish ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... most intelligent telegraphic despatch that it was possible for one human eye to convey to another, and said more plainly than words could—"You shall see how I can humbug them all." That look opened my eyes completely to the farce that was acting before me, and entering into the spirit of the scene, I must own that I enjoyed it amazingly. The blacksmith was mesmerised by a look alone, and for half an hour went on in a most funny manner, keeping the spectators with their ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... "So sweet, my dear! So perfectly wonderful! You really have got some dandy actors!" And, "Why don't you try something lighter—something simpler, don't you know. Something really popular that these poor people could understand and appreciate? A little farce! I could ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... what his or her part was to be, Yram said they had better shake hands all round and take a couple of hours' rest before getting ready for the banquet. George said that the Professors did not shake hands with him very cordially, but the farce was gone through. When the hand-shaking was over, Dr. Downie and Mrs. Humdrum left the house, and the Professors retired ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... "No farce," said Susanna, gently. "Only a wedding—at which you shall give the bride away. And now—the launch is waiting. The sooner you are off, the sooner ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... answered the other, with sudden change to ostentatious indifference. "It's time the farce stopped. I, for one, have had enough of it. If you like, I will tell Lady Ogram myself, ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... the farce is both argument and comment. Walker was either a citizen of the United States, levying war upon a friendly foreign state, and as such amenable to the penalties of our neutrality laws,—or he was a citizen of Nicaragua, as he pretended to be, abusing our protection to organize warlike ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... Chronicle. His chief studies, however, were philological; and in 1829 he published An Etymological Glossary of English Words of Foreign Derivation. In 1832 a strolling company of actors visited Mere, and Barnes wrote a farce, The Honest Thief, which they produced, and a comedy which was played at Wincanton. Barnes also wrote a number of educational books, such as Elements of Perspective, Outlines of Geography, and in 1833 first began ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... you have some honesty left in your composition. You acknowledge the deception, and we will let the farce end here. You have become a thief and a midnight incendiary. I have been weak and indulgent towards you. My eyes are opened, and I shall pursue ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... authorities at Bahia had remained quiescent, since officially no state of war existed, and in the eyes of the Government the Dutch were supposed merely to be quelling some revolutionary movements ere they departed for Europe! Now the time came for this farce to be ended, and the Governor of Bahia sent troops to the north to join the insurgents in their struggle against the Dutch. The traitor Hoogstraten now definitely joined these forces, and the whole of the country south ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... to be jealous or afraid that the other had come to raise the siege, as it was rumoured, nor did the said lady of Cleves show any sign of discontent at seeing her rival in her place. Moreover, Sire, if it please you to hear the end of this farce, that evening, and the next, the two ladies supped at the King's table together, although the lady of Cleves sat a little backward, in a corner, where the Princess of England, Madame Mary, is wont to be; and the following day, the said lady of Cleves returned with ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... supplant Bolivar, Marino convoked a congress, which proved to be a farce, having but ten members. Marino solemnly resigned his place of second in command of the army and also resigned on behalf of Bolivar, without the slightest authorization from his chief. The "congress" appointed Marino supreme chief of the army and decided to establish the capital of the republic ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... a farce. One run for each despatch rider every third day was the average. St Jans was not the place we should have chosen for a winter resort. Life became monotonous, and we all with one accord began applying for commissions. Various means were used to break the monotony. Grimers, under the Skipper's ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... humorous; and his work is informed with a genuine Irish raciness that gives it a perennial freshness. He is a man gaily in love with life, and with a quick eye for all the varied humours of it. "Handy Andy" is one of the most amusing books ever written; a roaring farce, written by a man who combined the liveliest sense of fun with a painter's gift of portraying real character in a few vivid touches. Samuel Lover died ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... that we were now to thread. The huge system of the trades is, for some reason, quite confounded by this multiplicity of reefs, the wind intermits, squalls are frequent from the west and south-west, hurricanes are known. The currents are, besides, inextricably intermixed; dead reckoning becomes a farce; the charts are not to be trusted; and such is the number and similarity of these islands that, even when you have picked one up, you may be none the wiser. The reputation of the place is consequently infamous; insurance offices exclude it from their field, and it was not without misgiving that ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Elizabeth received him at the palace. The Spanish ambassador, De Silva, met him there at dinner. He talked freely of where he had been and of what he had done, only keeping back the gentle violence which he had used. He regarded this as a mere farce, since there had been no one hurt on either side. He boasted of having given the greatest satisfaction to the Spaniards who had dealt with him. De Silva could but bow, report to his master, and ask instructions how ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... was sliding swiftly through the woods, Berlin now nigh, there occurred a thing at Regensburg; tragic thing, but ending in farce,—Finale of REICHS-ACHT, in short;—about which all Regensburg was loud, wailing or haha-ing according to humor; while Berlin was paying its ransom and left-hand gloves. One moment's pause upon this, though our haste ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... the underling, the tool, the servile, brainless, little fetcher-and-carrier of these men, was punished—was hanged, and upon the narrow shoulders of this pitiful scapegoat was packed the entire sin of Jefferson Davis and his crew. What a farce! ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... had inadvertently selected as the frontispiece. It appears," Timbs continues, "that the landlady and her daughter were the reigning toast of the Templars, who then frequented Dick's; and took the matter up so strongly that they united to condemn the farce on the night of its production; they succeeded, and even extended their resentment to everything suspected to be this author's (the Rev. James Miller) for ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the young king, the fashion at the new court to despise and distrust the Greeks, to underrate their exploits, and to declaim against their honesty. The revolution was treated as a war of words, the defence of Missolonghi as a trifle, and the naval warfare as a farce. The Greeks have since, on the mountains of Maina, and on the plain of Phthiotis, shown themselves so far superior to the Bavarians when engaged in the field, that we shall say nothing on that subject. Their honesty has been generally ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... day," Smith slowly said— "Let us plan to carry out the crowning farce, May it serve to charm the haughty Powhatan, As it pleases England's monarch for the time. Yes, the scarlet robe will dazzle Indian chief, An' it is your wish to make of him a clown. 'Tis a trifling matter that; more serious far Charges given you by the London Company, Who from distant lands ...
— Pocahontas. - A Poem • Virginia Carter Castleman
... every respect. The figures were different; their voices, one a contralto, the other soprano; one delicate, the other robust. Rose is living and the other passed out of life. It is so in everything in life. The petty jealousy of singers and players is a laughable farce. Even our grandest singers have shown this weakness because a rival was billed with lettering a quarter of an inch larger. This lowers the singer in the eyes of the public. No two singers can sing alike, even if they sing the same song. The interpretation belongs to the individual ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... none," answered Juan, instantly. "Lieutenant Tyler, this farce must end. My comrades will be impatient for my return. You were about to give an answer when this fellow ...
— Young Glory and the Spanish Cruiser - A Brave Fight Against Odds • Walter Fenton Mott
... began the great farce of the invasion of England; flat-bottomed boats were ordered to be built from one end of France to the other; they were even constructed in the forests on the borders of the great roads. The French, who have in all things a very ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... every citizen had his price; that neither virtue nor genius was proof against clever although selfish corruption; that political honestly was a farce; and that the only way of governing those knaves who elbowed their way up through the masses was to rule them by cunning more acute than their own and knavery more subtle and ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... trying to kill each other came out of opposite trenches and fraternised. They took photographs of mixed groups of Germans and English, arm-in-arm. They exchanged cigarettes, and patted each other on the shoulder, and cursed the war.... The war had become the most tragic farce in the world. The frightful senselessness of it was apparent when the enemies of two nations fighting to the death stood in the grey mist together and liked each other. They did not want to kill each other, these Saxons of the same race and ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... declarations, soon fled to the Legation Quarter and besought an asylum. His men held out until two in the afternoon, when their resistance collapsed and the cease-fire sounded. The number of casualties on both sides was infinitesimal, and thus after eleven days' farce the Manchu dynasty found itself worse off than ever before. It is necessary, however, not to lose sight of the main problem in China, which is the establishment of a united government and a cessation of internecine warfare,— issues which have been somewhat simplified by Chang Hsun's ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... sister's heart? No! the father might resign himself to his quiet philosophy, but he, at least, would have none of it. It should never be said within the college walls that he looked tamely on while a farce of this kind was being played out, especially as some of his most intimate fellow-students, and a beloved one in particular, took more than a common interest ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... transcendent conceptions for the most part in foreign personages. Of Shakespeare's fourteen comedies, the scene of only one is laid in England; and that one, "The Merry Wives of Windsor"—the only one not written chiefly or largely in verse—is a Shakespearean farce. Of the tragedies (except the series of the ten historical ones) only two, "Lear" and "Macbeth," stand on British ground. Is "Hamlet" on that score less English than "Lear," or "Othello" than "Macbeth"? Does Italy count Juliet ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... "'Where is this farce, or freak, or whatever you call it, to end?' said I, as Harriot pulled me into the dark passage ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... they are accustomed to remain for the farce and the Canzonettisti Napoletani which close the performance; so at the Sicilia they remain for the cinematograph. Every evening during Holy Week the programme posted up at the door concluded with these words "Indi Cinematografo," and there were ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... on distinct subjects, through an innovation introduced by Sophocles, if not before—the tragic poet added a fourth or satyrical drama; the characters of which were satyrs, the companions of the god Dionysus, and other historic or mythical persons exhibited in farce. He thus made up a total of four dramas, or a tetralogy, which he got up and brought forward to contend for the prize at the festival. The expense of training the chorus and actors was chiefly furnished by the choregi,—wealthy ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... buffoonery; even of its near cousins, scuffling and fighting, only one of the three plays has more than a trace. Hence the earlier remark, that Heywood was before his time. It is not devils in bearskins and wooden-sworded vices that create true comedy; they belong to the realm of farce. Yet they continued to flourish long after Heywood had set another example, and with them the cuffing of ears and drunken gambolling which we may see, in the works of other men, trying to rescue prosy scenes from dullness. In Johan Johan is simple ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... it I asked myself the questions that I have asked here; what was the soul in all those stones? They were varied, but it was not variety; they were solemn, but it was not solemnity; they were farcical, but it was not farce. What is it in them that thrills and soothes a man of our blood and history, that is not there in an Egyptian pyramid or an Indian temple or a Chinese pagoda? All of a sudden the vans I had mistaken for ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... good as a three-act farce," he cried. "Yes, you turnip, I am quite sure. I had the sense to make a duplicate of the right parcel, and now, my friend, you've got the duplicate and I've got the jewels. An old dodge, ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... tragic-farce has palled us long, Why actors and spectators do we stay?— To fill our so-short roles out right or wrong; To see what shifts are yet in the dull play 25 For our illusion; to refrain from grieving Dear foolish friends by our untimely ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... region. But Arkansas and North Carolina were soon swept along by the current, and seceded in May. Virginia and Tennessee were finally carried (the former in May, the latter in June) by the aid of troops, who swarmed in from the seceded States, and turned the elections into a farce. Unionists in the Virginia Convention were given the choice to vote secession, leave, or be hanged. Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland resisted all attempts to drag them into the Confederacy, though the first two, after ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... a species of farce adopted by the Romans from the Oscan town of Atella in Campania. See Livy, vii. 2, for this and the early history of ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... the Virgin Mary had appeared to him and called him to repentance. After the Revolution, he attempted to make his peace with the town by a penance more scandalous than his offence. One night, before he acted in a farce, he appeared on the stage in a white sheet with a torch in his hand, and recited some profane and indecent doggerel, which he called ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Watts. Strictly speaking he should have had my Album verses, but a very intimate friend importuned me for the trifles, and I believe I forgot Mr. Watts, or lost sight at the time of his similar Souvenir. Jamieson conveyed the farce from me to Mrs. C. Kemble, he will not be in town before the 27th. Give our kind loves to all at Highgate, and tell them that we have finally torn ourselves out right away from Colebrooke, where I had no health, and are about to domiciliate for good at Enfield, where I ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... "It's I who stand for truth here! Believe in you! In you, who by a heartless falsehood—and nothing else, nothing else, do you hear?—have brought me here, deceived, cheated, as in some abominable farce!" She sat down on a boulder, rested her chin in her hands, in the pose ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... me." In the newcomer's voice there was no longer any mockery. "I gave you credit for more intelligence. We played our little farce and it is done—the episode is closed, so far as I am concerned. I supposed you understood that much. I helped you and I came here to ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... all; the worst one risks is to sleep on straw in return for making them sleep on rosewood. But when their beauty is bought by the ounce at the perfumer's, and will not stand three drops of water on a rag; then their wit consists in a couplet of a farce, and their talent lies in the hand of the claqueur, it is hard indeed to understand how respectable men with good names, ordinary sense, and decent coats, can let themselves be carried away by a common place passion for these most ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... patronage. The application succeeded, coloured coats with metal buttons came into fashion, and dandies of the first water appeared in bright snuff-coloured, pale green, and blue coats, such as are now only worn by Paul Bedford or Keeley, in broad farce. In 1836 a cheap mode of gilding, smart for a day, dull and shabby in a week, completely destroyed the character of gilt buttons, and brought up the Florentine again. This change was, no doubt, materially assisted and maintained by Bulwer's novel of "Pelham," ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... skin and black of heart. I have submitted to the farce of this durbar, but that is as far as my patience will go. God ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... another, and the third was Father Zamora. A reference in a letter of his to "powder," which was his way of saying money, was distorted into a dangerous significance, in spite of the fact that the letter was merely an invitation to a gambling game. The trial was a farce, the informer was garroted just when he was on the point of complaining that he was not receiving the pardon and payment which he had been promised for his services in convicting the others. The ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart; or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent. In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason. This was Rousseau's opinion respecting men: I extend it to women, and confidently assert that they have been ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... narrowness and pride, and left curiosity to play its part freely, as in a child or a man of science. You lay aside all your own hobbies to watch provincial humours develop themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now grave and beautiful like an ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... closer to the horizon. The heavens in that quarter grew red and bloody. The shadows lengthened, the light dimmed, and in the sombre recesses of the forest life slowly died away. Even the wild fowl in the river softened their raucous chatter and feigned the nightly farce of going to bed. Only the tribesmen increased their clamor, war-drums booming and voices raised in savage folk songs. But as the sun dipped they ceased their tumult. The rounded hush of midnight was complete. Stockard ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... "superlunatical" attempt at serious farce or farcical morality marks the nadir of Dekker's ability as a dramatist. The diabolic part of the tragicomic business is distinctly inferior to the parallel or similar scenes in the much older play of "Grim the Collier ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... whole gallery of other drawings, usually of Irishmen, which have been the delight of innumerable readers. The striking alternation between two extremes of character and conduct, between tragedy and farce, between ridiculous meanness and pathetic unselfishness, is to be found in all his novels, though in his later and finer work it is controlled and tempered to more artistic proportions. But in the productions of his youth the darker tints so predominate as to ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... applied to his face, it was wisely announced that for the future the Deity should be covered by a cloud. These plays, carried about the country, taken up by the baser sort of people, descended through all degrees of farce to obscenity, and, in England, becoming entangled in politics, at length disappeared. It is said they linger in Italy, and are annually ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... continued. The Chinese on either side had begun exchanging insults; the still, hot air of the tropic dawn was vibrant with the Cantonese monosyllables tossed back and forth like tennis-balls over the low sand rampart. The thing was degenerating into a farce—the "Bertha's" Chinamen would ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... one risks is to sleep on straw in return for making them sleep on rosewood. But when their beauty is bought by the ounce at the perfumer's, and will not stand three drops of water on a rag; then their wit consists in a couplet of a farce, and their talent lies in the hand of the claqueur, it is hard indeed to understand how respectable men with good names, ordinary sense, and decent coats, can let themselves be carried away by a common place passion for ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... in the memory. For the rest there are some gleams of real fun where a beach-comber tries to palm off a dyed cat as the long-deferred tortoise-shell, and the exit of this animal from a world too covetous to hold it is thoroughly sound farce. But on the whole I failed to get many of those quiet gurgles of delight which are the best tribute one can pay ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... represented by a painted mulatto, for Spanish law in Cuba is strict, and prohibits the genuine article from appearing on the stage. The theatre opens four times a week, including Sunday, and the entertainment is varied every night. To-day the company rehearse a local drama, a zarzuela, and a farce called 'Un Cuarto con dos Camas' being a version of Morton's 'Double-bedded Room.' A famous actor from Spain is the star of the present season. At rehearsal he is a fallen star, being extremely old and shaky, but at night his make-up is wonderful, ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... of 1594 a translation of a Latin Farce by the Roman Dramatist, Plautus, was made ready for publication in London. It may even have been published then, for, although the title page date is 1595, then, as often now, the issue was made in advance ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... ALICIA. O tragic farce - not even rimes completed! Nay, darling! no rebellion. When you know My secret, you will understand. You are bound To Adela within the portico, To me upon this ground. By day, in life, adore the Lares, man! By night, in deaht, make ...
— Household Gods • Aleister Crowley
... of Pierrot married to one woman and wishing to marry another; a farce mingled with passion, which had been discovered by a vaudeville-writer, aided by a poet, among the stock-pieces of the old Italian theatre. Renee took the part of the deserted wife, this time, appearing in various disguises when her husband was love-making elsewhere. Noemi was the woman with ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... "wilt thou not tremble beneath the glance of those who seek the secret of thy life? Yes; study well thy part; have ready thy mask; go on bravely with thy cowardly farce! And now begone; thy nightly task is done;—beg, beg from sleep the oblivion of what thou art and of thy threatening future! Sleep! I tremble at the very thought of it! Father in heaven, have mercy ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... to the custom of the country. I scarcely think the pasha knows anything more about what sort of a looking document an English passport ought to be, than does the mulazim and the leading citizens of Eski Baba; but he goes through the farce of critically examining the vise of the Turkish consul-general in London, while another Turk holds his lighted cigarette close to it, and blows from it a feeble glimmer of light. Plainly the pasha cannot make anything more ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... says. But as I tell her, she only gives a great deal more of the trouble she wishes to save one by such obstinacy. We are now reading the fine 'Legend of Montrose' till 9; then, after ten minutes' refreshment, the curtain rises on Dickens's Copperfield, by way of Farce after the Play; both admirable. I have been busy in a small way preparing a little vol. of 'Readings in Crabbe's Tales of the Hall' for some few who will not encounter the original Book. I do not yet know if it will be published, but I shall have ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... native genius and the aptness to acquire the art, and who did acquire the highest art of his age, and went on far beyond it, exhibiting new ingenuities and resources, and a breadth that has never been equalled, and which admits at once and harmonizes the deepest tragedy and the broadest farce, and, in language, the loftiest flights of measured rhetoric along with the closest imitation of common talk;—and all this he so used, so elaborated through it the poetic creations of his mind, in such glorious union and perfection of high purpose and art and reach of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... move though there was no longer violence in his hold. He spoke deeply, above her bent head. "I can't stand this farce much longer. I'm only human after all, and there is a limit to everything. I can't keep at arm's length for ever. Flesh ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... out this year in England, not more than at the rate of three a fortnight regularly registered throughout the whole year, and hardly more than one a week during the second half of the year! Clearly, censorship and registration had then become an absolute farce. ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... way occasionally, and to dress it up by the help of fancy, to my own taste. When I get in the midst of it, it is too apt to lose its charm, and then there is the trouble and ennui of being obliged to take an active part in the farce; but to be a mere spectator is amusing. I am glad, therefore, that I brought no letters to Prague. I shall leave it with a favorable idea of its society and manners, from knowing nothing accurate of either; and with a firm belief that every pretty woman ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... pen. And now when a high Cabinet officer, the Constitutional adviser of the Executive, flees from office before charges of corruption, shall the historian add that the Senate treated the demand of the people for its judgment of condemnation as a farce, and laid down its high functions before the sophistries and jeers of the criminal lawyer? Shall he speculate about the petty political calculations as to the effect on one party or the other which induced his judges to connive at the escape of ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... incense rises ever from Earth's altar to Heaven's eternal throne; but it matters not how pure the man if he be a cringing coward, how brave the woman if she be a brazen bawd. Lucrece as Caesar were infamous, and Caesar as Lucrece were a howling farce. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... royal palaces of St James's and Whitehall were exempted from the operation of this statute, so long as the sovereign was actually resident within them—which last clause probably showed that the entire Draconian enactment was but a farce. It is quite certain that it was inoperative, and that it did no more than express the conscience of the legislature—in deference to PRINCIPLE, 'which ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... face to determine whether he had ever seen him before; but the face was entirely new to him. He was quite confident that he had never seen the commander before. There was something rather ludicrous in the situation, and he felt as though he was taking part in a farce; at any rate, there was nothing serious or compromising in it, and in spite of the confusion in his mind, he could not ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... love and his property. But how can I touch off my feelings, when, in the fourth act; the villain was detected; and all ended as it should! And, oh! Tibbie, mommy enjoyed it nearly as much as I, though the farce at the end vastly shocked her—and, indeed, Tibbie, 't was most indelicate, and made me blush a scarlet, and all the more that Sir William whispered that he enjoyed the broad parts through my cheeks—and she says if dadda insists, we'll ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... you for sisterly help and comfort, such as you gave just now, I would have frozen in the snow, and been less cold. Unless you break down the bar you put between us, I never want to see your face again,—never, living or dead! I want no sham farce of friendship between us, benefits given or received: your hand touching mine as it might touch Bone's or David Gaunt's; your voice cooing in my ear as it did just now, cool and friendly. It maddened me. Rest can scarcely come from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... sourly. "Come, come, sir, that is a farce you and I have worn out this ten years. This is the London workman himself, come to excuse himself to Mary and Co., for not applying to them before: and the long and the short is, he offers the Handlers ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... Cuba except that it shall prosper morally and materially, and wishes nothing of the Cubans save that they shall be able to preserve order among themselves and therefore to preserve their independence. If the elections become a farce, and if the insurrectionary habit becomes confirmed in the Island, it is absolutely out of the question that the Island should continue independent; and the United States, which has assumed the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... from him, and looking at them with a cynical air. "I thought you were in love with me, and that the truth would be too severe a blow to you. Ha! ha! And, for the same reason, you generously forbore to tell me that you were no more in love with me than with the man in the moon. Each played a farce, and palmed it off on the other ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... "Farce," Maroossia and F., myself and Misha. Afterwards we had supper. At the next table to us were the M's., Alexander Ivanitsky and the Baroness B. Since her return she certainly looks much better. At first ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... phrase, derived from I do not know where—a Palais Royal farce, I believe—had once got into my head, it was impossible for me to get rid of it, and I felt bursts of wild merriment welling up ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... instances appears to have been a mere farce. "When Charles Moritz, a young German, visited England in 1782, he was much surprised at this custom, and in his Diary he mentions that a clergyman had fought a duel with another in Hyde Park, and killed the man; he was found ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... being can tell what he is after, where he is going, what he is talking about, or what he means to say. He will tell you the whole story of the Second Punic War, speaking of a sentimental comedy played at the Gymnase Theatre, and a low farce of the Palais Royal Theatre will furnish him the pretext to quote ten lines of Xenophon in the original Greek. Monsieur Jules Janin is, notwithstanding all this, an excellent fellow, and a man of great talents; but you must not ask him to work miracles; in other words, you ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... mixed multitude of ballad-writers, ode-makers, translators, farce-compounders, opera-mongers, biographers, pamphleteers, and journalists, would appear crowding to the hospital; not unlike the brutes resorting to the ark before the deluge! And what an universal ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... folly to be ashamed to shed a tear at any part of a tragedy, however affecting. "The reason," says the Spectator, "is, that persons think it makes them look ridiculous, by betraying the weakness of their nature. But why may not nature show itself in tragedy, as well as in comedy or farce? We see persons not ashamed to laugh loudly at the humour of a Falstaff,—or the tricks of a harlequin; and why should not the tear be equally allowed to flow for the misfortunes of a Juliet, or the forlornness ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... with the exception of the more popular places, was crowded; and the boisterous absurdity of the farce was at its height. Rainham at first felt quite disconcerted by the proximity of the ludicrous figure in bathing dress who was leaning over the footlights, and declaiming his woes with a directness of appeal to the audience which alone would have marked the nationality of the ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... American "detective" agencies have many and varied trades. But they not only supply strike-breakers, perjurers, spies, and even assassins, they have also been successful in making an utter farce of trial by jury. It appears that even some of the best known American detectives are not above the packing of a jury. At least, such was the startling charge made by Attorney-General George W. Wickersham, May 10, 1912. In the report to President Taft Mr. ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... savage: don't let us forget our usual amenity, and that tone of playfulness and sentiment with which the beloved reader and writer have pursued their mutual reflections hitherto. Well, Snobbishness pervades the little Social Farce as well as the great State Comedy; and the self-same moral is tacked ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... give an entertainment in the schoolroom, and admitted the poor into the cheaper seats. Everybody knows the nature of these functions. There were readings and recitations; young ladies sang drawing-room songs or played the violin; tableaux were displayed or a polite farce was performed; a complimentary speech wound up the entertainment; and then the performers withdrew again for several months into the aloofness of their residences, while the poor got through their winter evenings as ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... When this farce is well under way, people make ready to hunt for the cabbage. They bring a stretcher and place upon it the "infidel," armed with a spade, a cord, and a large basket. Four powerful men raise him on their ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... such evident marks of treachery, that it could not be attributed to the general trepidation and disorder which possessed the army, and circumstances proved that a correspondence subsisted between Monthault and the Parliamentary general, which the farce of taking him prisoner and committing him to close custody, when the King's forces were generally permitted to disband and return to their houses, strongly confirmed. Lord Hopton recollected that his designs had been counteracted by Fairfax, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... more or less of a farce," he went on a little bitterly. "It's a silly show. The best we can do is to hold our personality intact. It doesn't appear that integrity has much to ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... language that he surpasses contemporary prose writers. And it is a mastery which is equally shown in every form of composition. There is a famous bit of Byron's about Sheridan to the effect that he had written the best comedy, made the finest speech, and invented the drollest farce in the English language. And it is hardly extravagant to say of Thackeray that, of all the Englishmen of this century, he has written the best comedy of manners, the best extravaganza, the best burlesque, the best parody, and the best comic song. And to this some of ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... without education, learns everything. He possessed an inexhaustible, imperturbable store of talk. His words gushed forth abundantly in original remarks, laughable images, the metaphors that flow from the comic genius of crowds. He had the natural picturesqueness of the unadulterated farce. He was brimming over with amusing stories and buffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all repertories of house-painter's nonsense. Being a member of divers of the low haunts called lists, he knew all the new tunes ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... genre of the Opera comique, the French stage is far superior to the Italian. In the French comedy everything is graceful and natural; the Italians cannot catch this happy medium, so that their comedies and comic operas are mostly outre, and degenerate into downright farce and buffoonery. ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... The Jacobite farce, or tragedy, was speedily brought to a close by the battle of Culloden; there did Charlie wish himself back again o'er the water, exhibiting the most unmistakable signs of pusillanimity; there were the clans cut to pieces, at least those who could be brought to the ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... head surgeon of the Hotel-Dieu; he went away. As it happened, Desplein asked him to dine with him that day, not at his own house, but at a restaurant. At dessert Bianchon skilfully contrived to talk of the mass, speaking of it as mummery and a farce. ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac
... cried Yvon, as soon as he saw himself in the country. "Explain yourself, dear Finette; what farce are we playing now?" ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... while at the top of their voices, yet each afraid, in spite of his bluster, to close with his opponent in actual contest. It was a miniature exhibition of the beak-to-beak challenging often indulged in by two rival cocks of the farmyard. For some minutes the little farce was kept up, then one of the birds became tired of the game and darted over to the next ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... shrieked with laughter. The absurdity of the situation passes the limits even of a farce. A certain Duke, who had received L6000 a year, whereof a large part came of an immoral trade, had been to London and sold his interest in it for L70,000, because if he had not taken that, he would probably have got nothing. With thirteen years' purchase ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... 'Thin th' quarantine at Oporto is a farce.' An' he plunged into th' seething mass iv handwritin' experts an' ex-prisidents iv th' raypublic in th' ...
— Mr. Dooley: In the Hearts of His Countrymen • Finley Peter Dunne
... forcing him to do this?" demanded Gaylor. "No! He's forcing it on us. My God!" he exclaimed, "do you think I want this farce? You say, yourself, you told him it would kill him, and he will go on with it. Then why do you blame us? Can ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... back. More and more the conviction grew upon her that those moments of tenderness had been no more than a part of the game he had summoned her to play for Jeanie's sake. He had called it a hollow bargain. He had declared that for no other reason would he have proposed it to her. And now that the farce was over, he had withdrawn from it. He had said that he had not found it easy. He had called it mere pretence. And now she had begun to think that he meant their separation to be final. If he had uttered one word of farewell, if he had but sent her a line later, ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... parliament he cancelled the former act that had deprived her, as against all reason, conscience, and course of nature, and contrary to the laws of God and man,(57) and restored her possessions to her, this was but a farce, and like his wonted hypocrisy; for the very same year he obliged her to convey the whole estate to him, leaving her nothing but the manor of Sutton for her maintenance. Richard had married her daughter; but what claim had Henry to ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... war is industrial democracy, without which political democracy is a farce. That sentence is Dr. Jonathan's. But when I was learning how to use the bayonet from a British sergeant in Picardy I met an English manufacturer from Northumberland. He is temporarily an officer. I know your opinion of theorists, but this man is working ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... South Wales (including the Port Phillip and Moreton Bay districts) was granted representative government, but the distance between Sydney and Melbourne and the disproportion of representatives made it a farce as far as Port Phillip was concerned. Melbourne proceeded to demonstrate to the British Government the necessity for Separation. Victoria was established as a separate ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... adds his scene in the farce: "La Plessis said to Rahuel (he was the concierge) yesterday that she had been gratified at dinner to find that Madame had turned the child out of her seat and put herself in the place of honour. And Rahuel, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... particular point of view. I am singularly, exceptionally, fortunate, I am healthy; I have tastes which I can gratify, work which I keenly enjoy. Whether the tastes are worth gratifying or the work worth doing I cannot say. At least they act as an anodyne to self-consciousness; they help me to forget the farce in which I play my part. Like Solomon, and all who have had the best of life, I call it vanity. What do you suppose it is to those—by far the largest number, remember—who have had the worst of it? To them it is not vanity, ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... owes her much, and he has some good friends. Comte de Chassepot prevented him from playing the stupid farce of a Roman son by sacrificing his father's funeral to a discussion on the laicisation of the schools; for, seeing what he had in his mind, Comte de Chassepot simply moved an adjournment of the council. His evil genius is M. Petit, now a senator, the present mayor of Amiens. I have caught M. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... the same chance that our writers of novels have, we might now have a school of American dramatists of which we should be as proud as of our school of American novelists. In dramatic composition, the equivalent of the Short-story is the one-act play, be it drama or comedy or comedietta or farce. As the novelists have learned their trade by the writing of Short-stories, so the dramatists might learn their trade, far more difficult as it is and more complicated, by the writing of one-act plays. But, while the magazines of the United ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... progress, I believe, is the only thing that can carry on the world to a fitness for self-government. I have no idea that the Hungarians are fit for it. See what France has done with her free constitution! Oh! was there ever such a solemn farce, before Heaven, as that voting,—those congratulations to the ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... of the ship and of the artillery, and went off in high style, applauded, as it deserved to be applauded, with the loudest acclamations. The quarter-deck of a British line-of-battle ship has often enough been a stage for the exhibition of bloody tragedies; but to witness a comedy and a farce upon that stage, and in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, was delightful from its very singularity. When the performance came to an end, the stage was knocked down, the seats removed, and everything cleared ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... fact which we have alluded to and promised some account of to our readers, dates in more modern times; indeed, all the actors in that far-famed farce are still living. ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... none," was the sulky reply, "but I'm tired of this lemon-squeezing farce. We can never raise a thousand dollars, let ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... replace the stuff at some expense; but not in a day or an hour. And how—with one dose in all the world!—keep up the farce? The dose consumed, the play was at an end. An end—or, no, was he losing his wits, his courage? On the instant, in the twinkling of an eye, he ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... Neuborg's envoy, an honest Jesuit, who draws out of his pocket victoriously two portraits of his good lord, ogles Mademoiselle as long as he could, and talks "goguette" to her for a whole hour, is one of the most amusing farces anywhere to be met with. Unluckily, the farce was not worth the candle in the opinion of certain judges, and all the diversions of Saint-Fargeau did not prevent our princess from regretting with all her heart that pompous Court of Versailles in which the young Louis was giving such graceful ballets, brilliant carousals, and piquant masquerades. ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... well I know. Last night I dreamed; I rode on your black horse into your city of dreams;" and the moment of passion ended in farce. For Wogan, startled by the words, set her down there and then into the pool. She stood over her ankles in water. She uttered a little cry and shivered. Then she laughed and sprang lightly onto dry soil, making much of ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... did, I am afraid folks might make a farce of it; and, therefore, should you change your style, I still advise a volume of ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... primary. Generally speaking, in an electioneering country (I mean in a country full of political life, and used to the manipulation of popular institutions), the election of candidates to elect candidates is a farce. The Electoral College of America is so. It was intended that the deputies when assembled should exercise a real discretion, and by independent choice select the President. But the primary electors take too much interest. They only elect a deputy to vote for Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Breckenridge, ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... who recognise a most absurd and most dangerous element of the public school curriculum in the whole farce of this German composition. Originality is demanded here: but the only shape in which it can manifest itself is rejected, and the 'formal' education that the system takes for granted is attained to only by a very ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... spoken than the musicians, who had orders to attend, entered, and answered fully the expectations the princes had been led to entertain of their abilities. After the concerts, an excellent farce was acted, and the entertainment was concluded by dancers ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... only would happen!" exclaimed her ladyship. "A riot, a massacre—anything! It all sounds like a farce to you, Genevra, but you haven't been here for five months, ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... the only reasonable thing to do. Our present mode of life is a farce. We are drifting farther apart every day. Perhaps I have changed. I know you have. We are two strangers chained together. We have made a muddle of it, and the best thing we can do ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... theist; but, so far as his work is concerned, this particular belief is otiose. Otherwise indeed (as was remarked above) history could not be a science; for with a deus ex machina who can be brought on the stage to solve difficulties scientific treatment is a farce. The transcendent element had appeared in a more subtle form through the influence of German philosophy. I noticed how Ranke is prone to refer to ideas as if they were transcendent existences manifesting themselves in the successive ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... very fantastic, very reminiscent of Christmas charades, but the farce had a grim, murderous undercurrent; the life of one dearer to me than life itself hung upon our success; the swamping of the White world by Yellow hordes might well be the price ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... next day, and come to him if she felt able to do so. Of course I never delivered the letter, but the next day I went to Mona Forester, and told her that her lover had deserted her; that she was no wife, for their marriage had been but a farce; that he had not even given her his real name; that he was already weary of her, and she would never see him again, for he was pledged to marry me as soon as he ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... in the individual himself, as if a remarkably simple-hearted man should pride himself on his knowledge of the world, and how well he can manage it:—and secondly, there always is in a genuine humour an acknowledgement of the hollowness and farce of the world, and its disproportion to the godlike within us. And it follows immediately from this, that whenever particular acts have reference to particular selfish motives, the humourous bursts into the indignant and abhorring; whilst all follies not selfish are pardoned or palliated. ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... under Nerva in the year 97. At this point he closed his public career. He had reached the goal of a politician's ambition and had become known as one of the best speakers of his time, but he seems to have realized that under the Principate politics was a dull farce, and that oratory was of little value in a time of peace and strong government. The rest of his life was to be spent in writing history. In the year of his consulship or immediately after it, he published the Agricola and Germania, short monographs in which he practised the ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... all is well, when all is not well! That's exactly what women always do and always have done, and plume themselves upon it. And so this ridiculous farce is kept up, because these wretched women go smiling about the world, hugging their stupid resignation to their hearts, and pampering up their sickly virtue, at the expense of their sex. Hang ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... "godlike insolence of youth," though less offensive in its implications, is the farce, Goetter, Helden, und Wieland, written in the autumn of the same year, 1773. At an earlier period Wieland had been one of the gods of Goethe's idolatry, but Wieland was now the most distinguished champion of those French models against which Goethe and the youths associated with him ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... his meerschaum. His wife had been cleaning house that day and he couldn't find any pipe but the long one. What was the result? Why, he wrote such a humorous description of the play that everybody thought 'East Lynne' was a farce comedy and, when the performance closed on the following night, two-thirds of the audience wanted their ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman
... and went out into the street. I walked down Broadway, chuckling to myself. What a glorious farce it all was! My fortune! Phyllis my wife! What if she had accepted me? I laughed aloud, and people turned and stared at me. Oh, yes! I was to travel and write novels and have my pictures in book reviews, and all that! ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... down to the station, of course; it is only in later years that the farce of "seeing people off" is seen in its true colours. Edward was the life and soul of the party; and if his gaiety struck one at times as being a trifle overdone, it was not a moment to be critical. As we tramped ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... 35 You have a good repute for gentleness And wisdom: can it be that you sit here To countenance a wicked farce like this? When some obscure and trembling slave is dragged From sufferings which might shake the sternest heart 40 And bade to answer, not as he believes, But as those may suspect or do desire Whose ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... affording immense diplomatic facilities and advantages. But red-tape etiquette, never violated by the government, may prove our financial ruin beyond redemption. It costs this government five times as much to support an army as it does the United States; and the call for conscripts is a farce, since the speculators (and who is not one now?) will buy exemptions from the party who, strangely, have the authority to ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... the music of a ringing orchestra; then came Apollo, striking the lyre with the plectrum, and singing an ode to the praise of the House of Este; then followed, as an interlude within an interlude, a kind of rustic farce, after which the stage was again occupied by classical mythology—Venus, Bacchus and their followers—and by a pantomime representing ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... fixed humble livelihood; more than that, he has just achieved an object fondly cherished. His past life,—alas! what has he done with it? His actual life, broken fragment though it be, is at rest now. But still the everlasting question,—mocking terrible question, with its phrasing of farce and its enigmas of tragical sense,—"WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?" Do with what? The all that remains to him, the all he holds! the all which man himself, betwixt Free-will and Pre-decree, is permitted to do. Ask not the vagrant alone: ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mentioned had expired, we had reached a depth of five feet, and yet no signs of any treasure became manifest. A general pause ensued, and I began to hope that the farce was at an end. Legrand, however, although evidently much disconcerted, wiped his brow thoughtfully and recommenced. We had excavated the entire circle of four feet diameter, and now we slightly enlarged the limit, and went to the farther depth of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... l. 14. Fescennina, etc.: the rude Fescennine farce grew from rites like these, where rustic taunts were hurled in alternate verse; and the pleasing license, tolerated from year to year, ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... end of the building, and at the other end is another platform for the choir. A young Irishman of the name of Sloan preaches a sensible sort of discourse, to which a Presbyterian could hardly have objected. Last night this same Mr. Sloan enacted a character in a rollicking Irish farce at the theatre! And he played it well, I was told; not so well, of course, as the great Dan Bryant could; but I fancy he was more at home in the Mormon pulpit ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... The farce had already continued through two generations at the opening of the Reformation. Gerald, the eighth earl, was twice in rebellion against Henry VII. He crowned Lambert Simnel with his own hand; when Lambert Simnel ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... their views from the gossip of journalists would suppose. According to ordinary rumor, fashionable entertainments in New York are scenes of extravagance so wild that they cease to be luxurious and assume the characteristics of a farce. My own short experience led me to a conclusion the very reverse of this. Certain hotels, no doubt, are notoriously over-gilded. A story is told of a certain country couple who stayed for a night at one of them. ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... indignantly from me, and began to invent doggerel, parodying this precious incantation. But Severance did not seem to enjoy the joke, and it grows tiresome to enact one's own farce and do one's ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... conception, his complexion of a brownish-yellow, and his nose scarcely smaller than the rest of him together. The fellow's mouth was slit almost from ear to ear, and he showed his teeth with a grinning smile of idiot courtesy, while he overwhelmed me with bows and scrapes innumerable. The farce now becoming excessively irksome, I thanked him in the fewest words I could well use, turned about my still trembling charger, and purposed either to seek another adventure, or, should I meet with none, to take my way back to the city; for the sun, during ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... natural wonder in existence. They pass on till out of sight, face about and "continue the motion," passing back and forth as many as five times. Wearied at length of this performance, Smith rose and said, "Come, let's end this farce," or something to that effect. We arose, left the place, and were surprised to find a moment after that they were actually ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... saw sparkling on the fingers of what he had conceived to be the butler or footman, at once satisfied him that he was then addressing the worthy nobleman himself. In the meantime, having made this discovery, he resolved to act the farce out. ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... utterly estranged from each other. Some few score of years afterwards, when all the parties represented are grown old, what bitter satire there is in those flaunting childish family-portraits, with their farce of sentiment and smiling lies, and innocence so self-conscious and self-satisfied. Osborne's own state portrait, with that of his great silver inkstand and arm-chair, had taken the place of honour in the dining-room, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... feeling inclined for farce, if blessed chance would throw it in my way. You see, I was going to live at last, and life for ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... whole stage to themselves. As like as not they'll weary of the play, and of themselves, if left alone. No harm will come of all the sentimental strutting and the romantic attitudinizing, other than viewing the scene, later, in perspective, as a rather amusing bit of emotional farce. ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... which for the moment held the country down. His disgust at "the bigoted fury of Irish Protestants" had backed Lord Cornwallis in checking the reprisals of his troops and of the Orangemen; but the hideous cruelty which he was forced to witness brought about a firm resolve to put an end to the farce of "Independence" which left Ireland helpless in such hands. The political necessity for a union of the two islands had been brought home to every English statesman by the course of the Irish Parliament during the disputes over the Regency. While England repelled the claims of the Prince of Wales ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... Do you understand? You are not married to your husband. I deceived you as I was bribed to do. I was not a justice. I had no right to perform that ceremony. It was a solemn farce. Your false lover desired to possess the privileges without assuming ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... discovered. Had they mentioned it openly in Parliament on October 11, the matter might have ended there. But they lacked the nerve: the occasion passed: and nothing remained, especially for Rufus, but evasion, shiftiness, half-truth passing as whole truth, the farce of indignant virtue—a performance which left him not a shred of dignity and ought to have made it unthinkable that he should ever again be given public office. The perfect word on the whole episode was uttered, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... first class mystery story; and then there is that enormously successful mystery play, written by Mrs. Rinehart in conjunction with Avery Hopwood, The Bat. Nor was this her first success as a playwright for she collaborated with Mr. Hopwood in writing the farce Seven Days. Shall I add that Mrs. Rinehart has lived part of her life in haunted houses? I am under the impression that more than one of her residences has been found to be suitably or unsuitably haunted. There was that house at Bellport on Long Island—but I really ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... was almost a wail in the boy's voice. "That makes the whole democratic system in the Empire a farce! It's totally unnecessary! You're unnecessary! He could ...
— The Unnecessary Man • Gordon Randall Garrett
... you as you had me, and you must just speak 'as you best can.' Do not let us exchange 'tu quoque' as in a farce, or compel me to say to you as you said to me, 'I know Socrates as well as I know myself, and he was wanting to speak, but he gave himself airs.' Rather I would have you consider that from this place we stir not until you have unbosomed yourself of the speech; for ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... to-morrow's ceremony is only a farce. Do you think that anyone is ever really fit according to the rubric? Away with such silly nonsense, there is nothing in heaven or earth to compare with the delights of coition!" And his movements went on, each stroke of that fine cock filling her vagina to repletion, and arousing ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... Babbalanja, "their lives are a continual farce, gratuitously performed for the diversion of Mardi. My lord, perhaps we had best doff our dignity, and land among them as persons of lowly condition; for then, we shall receive more diversion, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... exercise in this narrow short passage was a farce, though it was often more agreeable to be out here than sitting in the cramped space of one of the tiny sleeping cabins. The four prisoners rested, or moved listlessly about, until the evening meal was ready. Then Captain Kennor was summoned to eat with ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... a gigantic farce of the most ingenious construction. The whole comedy hinges on a huge joke, played by a heartless nephew on his misanthropic uncle, who is induced to take to himself a wife, young, fair, and warranted silent, but who, in the end, turns out neither silent nor a woman ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... bold for any situation. He would carry the farce through if they insisted on it. He no longer planned to elude the waster. They were ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls—only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... pitched in and helped the children; I suppose they did, though I wasn't here to see. But I do know that now when they need advice and practical help, they're apparently forgotten. Their attendance at school last winter was a farce and yet the authorities let an investigation slide; Mr. Hildreth promises vaguely to 'look after them' in the fall—and there they are, six fine American children ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... zarzuela appears to have been the forerunner and origin of all musical farce and "opera comique," only naturalised in our country during the present generation. The theatres in all the provinces are always full, always popular; the pieces only run for short periods, a perpetual variety being aimed at by the managers—a thing ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... day in vain, till at length he made his appearance in a very thoughtful dark sute of Clothes, and two Pair of Spectacles on at once. He was conducted from Room to Room with great deference, to the Minister; and carrying on the Farce of the Place, he told his Excellence, That he had pretended in this manner to be wiser than he really was, but with no ill Intention; but he was honest Such-a-one of the Train, and he came to tell him that they wanted Wheel-barrows ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... recoveries of ground. He wheeled about, retracing his steps, as if he might so catch in his face at least the stirred air of some other quick revolution. It was indeed true that his fully dislocalised thought of these manoeuvres recalled to him Pantaloon, at the Christmas farce, buffeted and tricked from behind by ubiquitous Harlequin; but it left intact the influence of the conditions themselves each time he was re- exposed to them, so that in fact this association, had he suffered it to become constant, ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... be a farce, did I not? How could it be otherwise, when a man like Hubbard was the presiding magistrate? His sympathies were entirely with those who had violated the law; and though he made an effort to conceal his bias, the ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... where he would peck and scream and flutter, determined to nestle there for a nap. My solicitude increased as he lived on, and I hoped to "raise" him. He literally demanded every moment of my time, my entire attention during the day, and, alas! at night also, until I seemed to be living a tragic farce! ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... are greying, how many of us know you? Do we know your Rue du Pont Neuf, with its silent melodrama under the dawning heavens, or do we know only the farce of your Montmartre? Do we know the drama of your Comptoir, of your Rue Montorgueil, when your skies are faintly lighting, or do we know only the burlesque of your Maxim's and your Catelans? Do we, when the week's work of your humbler ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... the Fun Club. Fun is like cant, like humour, a word which is untranslatable. Fun is to farce what pepper is to salt. To get into a house and break a valuable mirror, slash the family portraits, poison the dog, put the cat in the aviary, is called "cutting a bit of fun." To give bad news which is untrue, whereby people put on mourning by mistake, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... improvisations limited by prose. If a theme call for nobler treatment, he becomes an unflagging fountain of ludicrously adequate blank-verse. Or again, he may deliver himself in rhyme. There is no form of utterance that comes amiss to him for interpreting the human comedy, or for broadening the farce into which that comedy is turned by him. Nothing can stop him when once he is in the vein. No appeals move him. He goes from strength to strength while his audience is more ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... the door was Miss Grahame's open landaulet, and there were she and Gwen in it, just starting to see the former's little boy. That was how Dave was spoken of, at the risk of creating a scandal. They immediately lent themselves to a gratuitous farce, having for its object the liberation of Mr. Pellew and Miss Dickenson ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Nativity," for example, the adoration of the Magi is interrupted by Mak, who steals a sheep and carries it to his wife. She hides the carcass in a cradle, and sings a lullaby to it while the indignant shepherds are searching the house.] until the sacred drama degenerated into a farce. Here and there, however, a true Miracle survived and kept its character unspotted even to our own day, as in the famous Passion Play ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... herself in a false position. Freddy's lessons were, of course, a farce; and Cecil now seemed never to care to practise with her. Miss Prosody, with every hour of the day marked out for herself and pupils, made sarcastic reflections on her want of occupation; but, unhappy though she was, she could not make up her mind to leave ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... as to the revenue; and because frauds will be to a very great extent obviated, which are now practiced under our ad valorem system, and which have made our government almost equal in infamy to that of Mexico and other countries, where their revenue laws are a mere farce." ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... kept store Down by "the Creek," almost next door, George Patterson must claim a line Among the men of auld lang syne; A man of very ancient fame, Who in old '27 came. One of the first firm doth remain, He is our worthy Chamberlain, Who ne'er in life's farce cut a dash On other people's errant cash; Who guards, as it is right well known, Better than e'er he did his own, The people's money, firm and sure, To the last cent, safe and secure. And opposite ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... not?" And with an impulsive quickness of action, he took a sword from a stand of weapons near him, drew it from its scabbard and kissing the hilt, held it out to De Launay who did the same—"That is understood! And for the rest, Roger my friend, take it all lightly and easily—as a farce!—as a bit of human comedy, with a great actor cast for the chief role. We are only supers, you and I, but we shall do well to stand near the wings ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... best-natured, and best-loved man of letters of his day, was the special friend of Pope. His early work, 'The Shepherd's Week', was planned as a parody on the 'Pastorals' of Pope's rival, Ambrose Philips, and Pope assisted him in the composition of his luckless farce, 'Three Hours after Marriage'. When Gay's opera 'Polly' was forbidden by the licenser, and Gay's patrons, the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, were driven from court for soliciting subscriptions for him, Pope warmly espoused his cause. Gay died in 1732 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Pope's ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... more ready and willing to recognize his own failures than Motley. He was as honest and manly, perhaps I may say as sympathetic with the feeling of those about him, on this occasion, as was Charles Lamb, who, sitting with his sister in the front of the pit, on the night when his farce was damned at its first representation, gave way to the common feeling, and hissed and hooted lustily with the others around him. It was what might be expected from his honest and truthful nature, sometimes too severe in ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... no longer attempted to conceal our grief. It seemed as though we had all at once resolved to abandon the farce of pretending not to notice John's estrangement from his wife, or of explaining away his neglectful ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... designed by its maker to bear heavy weights, gave way in a splintering flurry of broken legs under the pressure of the master of the house: and Sally's mood underwent an abrupt change. There are few situations in life which do not hold equal potentialities for both tragedy and farce, and it was the ludicrous side of this drama that chanced to appeal to Sally at this moment. Her sense of humour was tickled. It was, if she could have analysed her feelings, at herself that she was mocking—at the feeble sentimental Sally who had once ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... that I was, perhaps, the last person capable of any such deed enabled me to grind out this shocking threat in a voice worthy of it, and with a face, I hoped, not less in keeping. It was all the more mortifying when Dan Levy treated my tragedy as farce; in fact, if anything could have made me as bad as my word, it would have been the guttural laugh with ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... beacon. fanfarrn m. boaster, bully. fango m. mud, mire, slime. fantasa f. fancy, imagination, caprice, whim. fantasma m. f. phantom, ghost, specter, scarecrow. fantstico, -a fantastic, imaginary. farsa f. farce, humbug. fascinar fascinate. fatal adj. fatal, ominous, unfortunate. fatdico, -a baleful, sinister. fatigado, -a weary. favor m. favor, protection, help. faz f. face, aspect. fe f. faith, honor, trust; a ——- in truth; ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... by a song and dialogue about a Coster's son, a precocious little chap, about three years old, and "only that 'igh, you know," in whom his father takes so great a pride that it works his own temporary reformation. It is so natural as to be just on the borderland between farce and pathos, and recalls time past, when ROBSON played The Porter's Knot, and such-like pieces. Now what more do Music Halls want than what Mr. CHEVALIER gives them? This is the very essence of a dramatic sketch of character, given in just the time it takes to sing the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... were evidently baffled by these precautions, and, having smoked their pipe, and vapored off their valor, took their departure. The farce, however, did not end here. After a little while the warriors returned, ushering in another savage, still more heroically arrayed. This they announced as the chief of the belligerent village, but as a great pacificator. His people had ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... to shoot Free-State men who disputed the right of the South to plant and to maintain slavery there. Under these circumstances the first election for members of the territorial legislature was a farce. Yet Reeder felt obliged to let the new assembly go on with its work of making easy the immigration of masters with their "property"; when he went East a little later he took occasion to protest in a public address against the intrusion of Missouri voters. He was regretfully removed from office, ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... time when Nolan's braggadocio must have broken down. At first, they said, he took a very high tone, considered his imprisonment a mere farce, affected to enjoy the voyage, and all that; but Phillips said that after he came out of his state-room he never was the same man again. He never read aloud again unless it was the Bible or Shakespeare, ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... Horse Guards in Kennet, ed. 1719, iii. 432, London Gazette, July 9, 1685; Oldmixon, 703; Paschall's Narrative; Burnet, i. 643; Evelyn's Diary, July 8; Van Citters,.July 7-17; Barillon, July 9-19; Reresby's Memoirs; the Duke of Buckingham's battle of Sedgemoor, a Farce; MS. Journal of the Western Rebellion, kept by Mr. Edward Dummer, then serving in the train of artillery employed by His Majesty for the suppression of the same. The last mentioned manuscript is in the Pepysian library, and is of the greatest value, not on account ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... vice rice lace city since nice trice dice farce fence slice pace mice voice lance price trace grace pence mince truce mace cease hence prince place brace fleece dance thence space twice peace glance chance splice spruce ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... number of rooms all well and comfortably furnished, but although my imagination may have been responsible for the idea, they all seemed to possess a chilly and repellent atmosphere. I felt that to essay sleep in any one of them would be the merest farce, that the place to all intents and purposes was uninhabitable, that something incalculably ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... factor? This heavy-blooded man?... But he did speak of half-requited—Oh, Saints of Heaven! What a jest of the world! The threads of tragedy are tangled into a farce!" ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... meanders takes; There motley images her fancy strike, Figures ill paired, and similes unlike. She sees a mob of metaphors advance, Pleased with the madness of the mazy dance; How Tragedy and Comedy embrace; How Farce and Epic get a jumbled race; How Time himself stands still at her command, Realms shift their place, and ocean turns to land. Here gay description Egypt glads with showers, Or gives to Zembla fruits, to Barca flowers; Glittering with ice here hoary hills are seen, There painted valleys ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... was an inauspicious landing. With September begin the north-east winds, and we had an average experience that afternoon. Was it not a farce—a great deal more than a farce: a saucy, flippant imposition on the tender mercies of Providence—for an individual who could not endure a few hours of tossing on the bosom of the ocean without becoming deadly ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... subject will discharge a blank-loaded pistol at one, when told to do so, or stab him with a paper dagger. While admitting the facts, the Nancy theorists claim that the subject knows the performance to be a farce; gets suggestions of the unreality of it from the experimenters, and so acquiesces. This is probably true, as is seen in frequent cases in which patients have refused, in hypnotic sleep, to perform suggested acts which shocked their modesty, veracity, ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... own wonderful Club? And what do you think of him when he gets up here and tries to pass as a model of justice, when as likely as not, he has pre-arranged the whole affair, and told every one what part he is to play in the farce?" ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... technicalities of construction would be here ridiculous, and defeat the ends of justice. The people are rude and uncivilized; their oppressors crafty and bold, who have no hesitation about lying, and bringing others to lie for them. Oaths are a farce to them. The aggrieved are timid, vacillating, and simple, and cannot readily procure even necessary evidence; for their witnesses are afraid to speak. Under these circumstances, I look at the leading features of the case, the probability, the characters, ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... of the Board," said Jim, "I'm not going to tell you anything that you don't know about yourselves. You are simply making a farce of the matter of hiring a teacher for this school. It is not as if any of you had a theory that the teaching methods of one of these teachers would be any better than or much different from those of the others. You know, and I know, that whichever is finally engaged, or even if your silly deadlock ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... but when at last he had seen her brougham, she had driven rapidly past him, thickly veiled, and he did not think she had even noticed him. He would have written to her, but he was still unable to hold a pen; and he reflected that, after all, it would have been a hideous farce for him to offer condolences and sympathy, however much he might desire to hide from himself his secret satisfaction at her husband's death. Too proud to think of obtaining information through such base channels as Del Ferice was ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... singing his old songs, and ROBERT HALE and GEORGE ROBEY twice daily elsewhere, but in the Law Courts Playhouse CHARLES DARLING has been lately at his very best. Dropping in there last week, during the performance of a new farce, entitled Romney's Rum 'Un, I was again fascinated by the inexhaustible wit and allusive badinage of this great little comedian, beside whose ready gagging GEORGE GRAVES himself is inarticulate. Had not GEORGE ROBEY invented for application to himself the descriptive ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... ordinary singer of operetta is insufficient for the part. Furthermore, traditions have sprung up. The comic element has been suppressed and the piece has been denatured by this change. In Germany they conceived the idea of playing this farce seriously with an ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
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