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More "Grotesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... remarkable in the appearance of this splendid islander was the elaborate tattooing displayed on every noble limb. All imaginable lines and curves and figures were delineated over his whole body, and in their grotesque variety and infinite profusion I could only compare them to the crowded groupings of quaint patterns we sometimes see in costly pieces of lacework. The most simple and remarkable of all these ornaments was that which decorated ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... gone, Anna proceeded to take a more particular survey of her apartment. It was a large, but not very lofty room, panelled with oak, and having two windows looking across a wide lawn to the main road. The bright fire in the ample fireplace illuminated the richly-carved cornice, with its grotesque heads and fanciful scrollwork. It had evidently been a dining-room, for some of the heavy furniture, in the fashion of the period in which it had been last inhabited, still remained. There were the massive table and the old-fashioned ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... instance, at the last General Election, or for President Kruger's hat in the election before; their poetic sense is perfect. The Chinaman with his pigtail is not an idle flippancy. He does typify with a compact precision exactly the thing the people resent in African policy, the alien and grotesque nature of the power of wealth, the fact that money has no roots, that it is not a natural and familiar power, but a sort of airy and evil magic calling monsters from the ends of the earth. The people hate the mine owner who can bring a Chinaman ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... Honore, opposite the Oratoire and near the office of the Messageries, at the sign of the Amour peintre. The shop was on the ground floor of a house sixty years old, and opened on the street by a vaulted arch the keystone of which bore a grotesque head with horns. The semicircle beneath the arch was occupied by an oil-painting representing "the Sicilian or Cupid the Painter," after a composition by Boucher, which Jean Blaise's father had put up in 1770 and which sun and rain had been doing their best ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... man or woman who would have been satisfied with playing the piano enough to read a score or sing sufficiently to take part in a chorus, has, in the case of other arts, to undergo the training of a painter, sculptor or art critic, and often to delude himself or herself with grotesque ambitions in ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... mad girl in the next but one, and the woman and man on that camel have just eloped from a place sixty miles away," the hearer would not disbelieve because he would know that nothing is too wild, grotesque, or horrible to happen in ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... shone forth in the darkness like an evil sort of beacon, its silly grotesque face grinning like a true hobgoblin of Hallowe'en; for, having scooped out its pulp and seeds, they had set a candle therein and lighted it just before they sent ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... Wetherbee?" exclaimed Barker, with a deep frown upon his rugged features, which looked almost grotesque in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... impart, if I say that St. Paul's always seemed a dispersed and interrupted St. Peter's in its structure and decoration, and a very hard, unsympathetic, unappealing Westminster Abbey in its mortuary records. The monuments of the Abbey are often grotesque enough, but where they are so they are in the taste of times far enough back to have become rococo and charming. I do not mind a bronze Death starting out of a marble tomb and threatening me with his dart, if he is a Death of the seventeenth century; but I do very much mind the ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the world; but that too was far from perfection. Schiller's style in the Robbers is partly of a kind with the incidents and feelings which it represents; strong and astonishing, and sometimes wildly grand; but likewise inartificial, coarse, and grotesque. His sentences, in their rude emphasis, come down like the club of Hercules; the stroke is often of a crushing force, but its sweep is irregular and awkward. When Moor is involved in the deepest intricacies of the old question, necessity and free will, and has convinced himself ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... giving to the materials much elegance of form. With those inimitable models from the Greek and Roman vases, brought into modern use by the ingenious Mr. Wedgwood, they will not bear a comparison. And nothing can be more rude and ill-designed than the grotesque figures and other objects painted, or rather daubed, on their porcelain, which however are generally the work of the wives and children of the labouring poor. That they can do better we have evident proof; for if a pattern be sent out from England, the artists in Canton ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... Grotesque uncertain shapes infest the dark And wings of bats are heard in aimless flight; Discordant voices cry and serpents hiss, No friendly star, no beacon's ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... punch had gone round, she waxed inveterately eloquent, indeed, so much so that the mourner, the colleen dhas dhun, herself was more than once forced to smile, and in some instances fairly to laugh at the odd grotesque spirit ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... seemed unbearable. At length, however, the door of the room in which the jury sat opened, and one by one they returned. With strained eyes, all looked at their faces, trying to read there what their decision was. It seemed almost grotesque that these twelve, commonplace, unimaginative men, with no ability out of the common order, with little or no knowledge of the law, with minds unfitted to grasp the inwardness of the evidence which had been given, should have to pronounce the verdict of life or death upon the young man who stood ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... himself that things would seem different in the morning; but when he wakened from a restless sleep, crowded with dreams one more grotesque than another, he was still prone to be gloomy. He could think more clearly by daylight—that was all: his pitying sympathy for her had only increased. It interfered with everything he did; just as it had formerly done—just ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... of attempts to negotiate a peace is grotesque, yet the conditions surrounding the North and the South and the stress of the times speak in defence of the ambitious spirits who came to the front and essayed, by negotiations, to put an end to the war. Providence ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... the tender to the grotesque—would it not have been agreeable to hear something more than two lines from the lips of a lover so stout-hearted, yet so ardent, in his own rough, blunt way, as he who has thus ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... to the ground from the lowest platform. He looked around, dazed. The sky was pink in the east. It was dawn. Where had the night gone? He stared amazed at grotesque figures that waited, silent, patient, like beings from another world. Then he realized it was the fueling crew dressed in protective clothing, swathed like strange cocoons in plastic that would keep their vulnerable human skins from the harm of ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... ruined. This has a good apartment, and a fine gallery, a hundred and twenty feet by eighteen, which takes up one side: the wainscot is pretty and entire: the ceiling vaulted, and painted in a light genteel grotesque. The whole is built for show: for the back of the house is nothing but lath and plaster. From thence we Went to Bocton-Malherbe, where are remains of a house of the Wottons, and their tombs in the church; but the roads were so exceedingly ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... useless apparel, they commenced their task. After much cautious labor they gained their point and stood among the animals. As soon, however, as they arrived, one of the young horses of the band became frightened at the grotesque figures cut by the two creeping men and exhibited his fear by snorting and kicking up his heels. This alarmed the remainder of the horses and caused quite a commotion among them, which had the effect to alarm the savages, who sprang for their arms. With ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... where the Empress, Prince Henri, and a hundred and fifty of the chief nobility and foreign ministers sat down to supper. The rest of the company went up, by stairs on the outside of the room, into the lofty galleries placed all around on the inside. Such a row of masked visages, many of them with grotesque features and bushy beards, nodding from the side of the wall, appeared very ludicrous to those below. The entertainment was enlivened with a concert of music: and at different intervals persons in various habits entered the hall, and exhibited Cossack, Chinese, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... such exaggerated politeness, and with such a cunning leer in his eyes, that his tone and manner were most grotesque; and as he concluded he took up the large Bible ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... "[s]exually explicit language." The "Sexuality/Pornography" category includes, inter alia, "hard-core adult humor and literature" and "[s]exually explicit language." The "Tasteless" category includes "hard-to-stomach sites, including offensive, worthless or useless sites, grotesque or lurid depictions of bodily harm." The "Hacking" category blocks "sites providing information on or promoting illegal or questionable access to or use of communications equipment and/or software." SmartFilter ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... no farther. At that, two odd little beings sprang to his side; the one brown as the earth itself, with eyes like diamonds for brightness, and deft little fingers, cunning in all works of skill. Pulling off his wisp of a cap, and making a grotesque little bow, he asked, "Will you take a guide for the under-world tour?"—"That I will," said Alba, "for I no longer find myself able to move a step."—"Ha, ha!" laughed the dwarf, "of course you can't move in that great body, the ways are too narrow; you must come out of yourself ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... street doors. There were beasts of all sorts; horses, in particular, of every breed, from the spotted barrel on four pegs, with a small tippet for a mane, to the thoroughbred rocker on his highest mettle. As it would have been hard to count the dozens upon dozens of grotesque figures that were ever ready to commit all sorts of absurdities on the turning of a handle, so it would have been no easy task to mention any human folly, vice, or weakness, that had not its type, immediate or remote, in Caleb Plummer's room. And not ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... the Edda will deny that Wuchowsen, or the Wind-blower, as he appears in the Passamaquoddy tale, is far more like the same bird of the Norsemen than the grotesque Thunder Bird of the Western tribes. He is distinctly spoken of by the Indians of Maine as a giant and a bird in one, sitting on a high cliff at the end of the sky, the wind—not thunder—coming from ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... jaws, gleaming fangs, raised hackles, and straining limbs, the great Wolfhound had pitted himself, with roaring fury, against the leather-coated man who wielded the hot iron. To an observer who had known of this, there would have been something at once rather pathetic and a good deal grotesque about Finn's present kittenish play with Jess. To lend verisimilitude to the game Finn had to growl low down in his throat at intervals, while Jess snarled and barked; but when Finn laid one paw on the kangaroo-hound's curved back, as he frequently did at different ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... backwards and forwards a hundred times between two points within the sacred precincts, repeating a prayer each time. The count is kept either upon the fingers or by depositing a length of twisted straw each time that the goal is reached; at this temple the place allotted for the ceremony is between a grotesque bronze figure of Tengu Sama ("the Dog of Heaven"), the terror of children, a most hideous monster with a gigantic nose, which it is beneficial to rub with a finger afterwards to be applied to one's own nose, and a large brown box inscribed with the characters Hiyaku Do in high relief, ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... of locomotion. Its head was disproportionably small to the size of its body, judged according to our usual ideas of the relative difference of bulk between these parts, while its whiskers were evidently larger and stronger than those of any other animal. These singularities gave it a grotesque appearance, not lessened by an approximation in its square short countenance to a caricatured resemblance of the human face, while the half stolid half ferocious stare, with which it regarded us, contributed to render it ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... presents that had been promised to the "afflicted circle," they came to them duly, and from London too. And they were rich gifts also; but such a collection of odd and grotesque articles, certainly are not often got together. Master Raymond had commissioned an eccentric friend of his in London to purchase them, and send them on; acquainting him with the peculiar circumstances. There were yellow birds, and red dragons, and other fantastic animals, birds and beasts. ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... an air of learned indifference. He wants, in one respect, grace, form, expression; but he has everywhere sense and meaning, perfect costume and propriety. His personages always belong to the class and time represented, and are strictly versed in the business in hand. His grotesque compositions in particular, his Nymphs and Fauns, are superior (at least, as far as style is concerned) even to those of Rubens. They are taken more immediately out of fabulous history. Rubens' Satyrs and Bacchantes have a more jovial and voluptuous aspect, are more drunk with pleasure, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... matched well their inhospitable stare. The Starvation Mountains had always been reputed rich in mineral and malevolent in their attitude toward man and beast. Even the Joshua trees stood afar off and lifted grotesque arms defensively against them. But Casey was not easily daunted, and eerie places held for him no meaning save the purely material one. If he could find water and the rich vein of ore some one had told him was there, then Casey ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... no care of his anger followed me. Alone, in the dark, I thought only of the scene placed by the poet before my eye, where the free flow of life, sudden and graceful dialogue, and forms, whether grotesque or fair, seen in the broad lustre of his imagination, gave just what I wanted, and brought home the life I seemed born to live. My fancies swarmed like bees, as I contrived the rest of the story;—what all would do, what say, where go. My confinement tortured me. I could ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... entertain her; but whatever you do, don't laugh! It's awfully bad form to make fun of a visitor." And Lilias left the room, to return followed by a tall female figure, which certainly approached perilously near the grotesque in appearance. ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... you, madam," he began with a grotesque echo of the ancient pompousness. "God knows I had never anticipated such ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... very noble falls of water near Quebec, la Chaudiere and Montmorenci: the former is a prodigious sheet of water, rushing over the wildest rocks, and forming a scene grotesque, irregular, astonishing: the latter, less wild, less irregular, but more pleasing and more majestic, falls from an immense height, down the side of a romantic mountain, into the river St. Lawrence, opposite the most smiling part of the island of Orleans, to the cultivated ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... all. But I vaguely felt he and I were at cross-purposes. I grew almost as uncomfortable under his gaze as if he had been examining me in the interest of the other side. He managed to fluster me. As a witness for Harold, I was a grotesque failure. ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... Benson decided that he simply could not go to the Naval Academy presenting any such grotesque picture as he did now. Yet he had no money about him with which to purchase more presentable clothes in town. So ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... below by the lighthouse and a point of land, whereon stands the elephant. This elephant is not indigenous, and he stands alone in the sand, a wooden sham without an explanation. Why the hotel-keeper's mind along the coast regards this grotesque structure as a summer attraction it is difficult to see. But when one resort had him, he became a necessity everywhere. The travelers walked down to this monster, climbed the stairs in one of his legs, explored the rooms, looked ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... dirty. He carried two English ration bags, besides his own rucksack, and they were all filled to bursting with loot. Evil beamed from his narrow, leering eyes; and when he smiled at Boudru it twirled his demon-like mouth into a grotesque shape. He looked both depraved and suspicious, a disreputable scoundrel with a gun, and that, you will find in the fullness of time, was ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... to-day the lions of Dantzig—the Exchange, the Cathedral, and the Armoury. The Exchange is a most curious building of great antiquity, and the hall is certainly the most curious and grotesque room in the world. The walls are covered with large pictures and wooden statues painted in colour. It is a Gothic edifice built in 1379, and the roof of the hall is supported by four slender pillars. ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... course powerfully assisted by the creative state of the eye under this nervous apprehensiveness, I continued to shape into images of Agnes forms without end, that upon nearer approach presented the most grotesque contrasts to her impressive appearance. But I had ceased even to comprehend the ludicrous; my agitation was now so overruling and engrossing that I lost even my intellectual sense of it; and now first I understood practically and feelingly the anguish of hope alternating with disappointment, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... believe in the pathos of provincialisms. There is, however, no doubt of Mr. Swinburne's mastery over the form, whether the form be quite legitimate or not. The Weary Wedding has the concentration and colour of a great drama, and the quaintness of its style lends it something of the power of a grotesque. The ballad of The Witch-Mother, a mediaeval Medea who slays her children because her lord is faithless, is worth reading on account of its horrible simplicity. The Bride's Tragedy, with its strange ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... a spree. He had rolled up his coat for a pillow, and had thrown one arm across his purple, bloated face. Only the weak, helpless, open mouth could be seen. His muscular hands were relaxed, and the whole prostrate figure was pathetic in its unconsciousness of will and grotesque unhumanness. Fate had been too strong for Tom Davis. His birth and all the circumstances of his useless life had brought him with resistless certainty to this level, and his progress in the future could only be an ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... charming teeth. The black-rimmed glasses she wore emphasized the clearness and candor of her eyes. Her thick, fair hair was firmly fastened in a group of knobs down the back of her head. There was an element of the grotesque in her appearance and in her careful, clumsy movements, yet, with it, a quality almost graceful, that suggested homely and wholesome analogies,—freshly-baked bread; fair, sweet linen; the safety and content of evening firesides. This ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... rubbing his arm. No serious injury seemed to be done to the man, and the couple presently turned their attention to the machine by the roadside. They were not in cycling clothes Hoopdriver observed. One wore the grotesque raiment for which the Cockney discovery of the game of golf seems indirectly blamable. Even at this distance the flopping flatness of his cap, the bright brown leather at the top of his calves, and the chequering of his stockings were perceptible. The other, the rear ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... passion in it such as we find in Agamemnon or Othello. We sympathize, indeed, with the fears, the bravado, the despair that succeed the crime. But when all is said, the central figure of the book is born out of fantasy. He is a grotesque made alive by sheer imaginative intensity and passion. He is as distantly related to the humanity we know in life and the humanity we know in literature as the sober peasant who cut his friend's throat, saying, "God forgive me, ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... John Rebstock's from Williams Cache," continued Sassoon. The yarn would have sounded decently well in the circumstances for which it was intended, but in the searching gaze of the eyes now confronting and clearly recognizing him, it sounded so grotesque that de Spain would fully as lief have been sitting between his horse's legs as ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... ends abruptly in a country which is a complexity of gasometers, canals, railway junctions, between which cabbage fields in long spokes radiate from the train and revolve. There is the grotesque suggestion of many ships in the distance, for through gaps in a nondescript horizon masts appear in a kaleidoscopic way. The journey ends, usually in the rain, among iron sheds that are topped on the far ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... real Gloria had a far different part to play. Every morning, with a terrible reality at her heart, she glanced over the newspapers for news of John Storm. She had not far to look. A sort of grotesque romance had gathered about him, as of a modern Don Quixote tilting at windmills. His name was the point of a pun; there were cartoons, caricatures, and all other forms of the joke that is not a joke because it ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... The one thing that more than any other has helped them to conceive of the American situation is its being the gigantic joke which we often feel it to be; I don't know but it appears to them more grotesque than it does to us even. At first, when Aristides would explain some peculiarity of ours, they would receive him with a gale of laughing, but this might change into cries of horror and pity later. ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... were shown many interesting things in the house—objects of art and of worship; things which told of distant lands and of hoary antiquity; engravings of a strange and disturbing character; variegated stones, turquoise, pearls; ugly, amorphous, and grotesque idols; representations of the god-child—there were many of these, but only one face profoundly ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... was a flare of torches and the grotesque play of shadows between the grotto-like walls of an abandoned coal mine. About her too ranged in the spectral formality of masked faces and black rubber coats; of peaked hats with low turned brims, stood ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... kind of "walking gentleman"; Lydia, though enamoured, is modest and dignified; Clinker is a worthy son of Bramble, with abundant good humour, and a pleasing vein of Wesleyan Methodism. But the grotesque spelling, rural vanity, and naivete of Winifred Jenkins, with her affection for her kitten, make her the most delightful of this wandering company. After beholding the humours and partaking of the waters of Bath, they follow ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... viceroy fell wounded into their hands and Canterac surrendered. On receipt of the glorious news, the people of Lima greeted Bolivar with wild enthusiasm. A Congress prolonged his dictatorship amid adulations that bordered on the grotesque. ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... His choice of themes was dictated less by a careful search after what was most characteristic of each epoch than by his own strong predilections. He loved the picturesque, the heroic, the enormous, the barbarous, the grotesque. Hence Eviradnus, Ratbert, Le Mariage de Roland. He loved also the weak, the poor, the defenceless, the old man and the little child. Hence Les Pauvres Gens, Booz endormi, Petit Paul. He delighted in the monstrous, he revelled in extremes, ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... rivulet which entered it out of the mouth of a gigantic crocodile well executed in brick and stone. The edges of the pond were bricked, and in the centre rose a fantastic and picturesque pavilion ornamented with grotesque statues. The pond was well stocked with fine fish, which come every morning to be fed at the sound of a wooden gong which is hung near for the purpose. On striking it a number of fish immediately came out ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... meeting so color long years of acquaintanceship, that, should these circumstances be comic in their nature, the intercourse which follows partakes much of the grotesque. Thus, perhaps, it is, that the misfortunes of Edward Martin, apart from the whimsical demeanor of the man himself, provoke in my memory a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... wet, and almost naked, quickly followed; the whole forming, in their haggard looks and the endless variety of their costume, an assemblage at once as melancholy and grotesque as it is possible to conceive. So eager did the people appear to be to pour out upon us the full current of their sympathies, that shoes, hats, and other articles of urgent necessity were presented to several of the officers and men before they had even quitted ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... smoke went out through a little hole in the roof. This hall has never been restored, you see. That's the best thing about it, most people think, lady. Here's the oak paneling, turned gray with age; there, up on the wall, are the original grotesque figures, carved in wood; here, are two of the old tables, as old as the hall; and there's the musicians' gallery, at ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... popular, with his grotesque descriptions of life, his exaggerations, his impossible characters and improbable incidents: yet so genial in sympathies, so rich in humor, so indignant at wrongs, so broad in his humanity, that everybody loved to read ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... mysterious light moving about the yard,—a light that fell now on the bare wall, now on the front steps, making threads of gold of the twisted iron railings, then on the posts of the leaning fence, against which hung three feathery objects,—grotesque and curious in the changing shadows,—and again on some barrels and boxes surrounded by ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... quaint old place and one of the oldest boroughs in England. It contained, both in its main street and the narrow passages leading out of it, many old houses with projecting wooden beams ornamented with grotesque gargoyles and many other exquisite carvings in a good state of preservation. Like Totnes, the town possessed a "Butter Walk," built early in the seventeenth century, where houses supported by granite pillars overhung the pavement. ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... almost unpaid. Over against him was Howe, with eleven thousand men in the field, and still more in the city of New York, well disciplined and equipped, well-armed, well-fed, and furnished with every needful supply. The contrast is absolutely grotesque, and yet the force of one man's genius and will was such that this excellent British army was hemmed in and kept in harmless quiet ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... character, in the different phases of life, from the horrible to the grotesque, the grand to the comic, attest the versatility of his powers; and, whatever faults may be found by critics, the public will heartily render their quota of admiration to his magic touch, his rich and facile rendering of almost every thought that stirs, ...
— The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete • Anonymous
... a silk hat, that he might go to Washington with head- gear equal to the occasion. A farmer's wife knit him a pair of yarn stockings. Hundreds of such attentions, kind in intent, grotesque in appearance, he received with that kindness which is the soul of courtesy. There was a woman at whose modest farmhouse he had once dined on a bowl of bread and milk, because he had arrived after everything else had been eaten up. She came into Springfield to renew her ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... apace, With wondrous speed to take his place; Costly, yet so grotesque his gear, All start amazed as he draws near. Crosswise the guards before his face, Entrance to bar, their halberds hold— Yet there he ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... who were of both sexes and chiefly elderly, seemed to me at that first sight to be dressed in every variety of out-of-date clothes, many of them rather shabby and some almost grotesque. ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... at a foot's pace, followed by his twin shadows; past the temples of Maha Deo, still rosy where they faced the west, still rumbling and throbbing with muffled music; past wayside shrines, mere alcoves for grotesque images—Shiva, Lord of Death, or Ganesh the Elephant God—each with his scented garlands and his nickering chiragh; past shadowy groups round the dinner fires, cooking their evening meal: on and out through the double fortified gateways into the deserted road, his whole ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... select here and there incidents illustrative of the whole. And here let me say that the frequent attacks made on myself and others, that we were attracted to Free-thought propaganda by the gains it offered, formed a somewhat grotesque contrast to the facts. On one occasion I spent eight days in Northumberland and Durham, gave twelve lectures, and made a deficit of eleven shillings on the whole. Of course such a thing could not ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... gnarled beech fuel, and at the wood-lice which ran out from beneath the bark to the extremity of the logs as the heat approached them. The low-down ruddy light spread over the dark floor like the setting sun over a moor, fluttering on the grotesque countenances of the bright andirons, and touching all the furniture ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... burst forth at fifty different points at once. Not a street, not a court but has its "case." Over a dozen of John's hands are down with it already. Two more have sunk prostrate beside their work within the last hour. The panic grows grotesque. Men and women tear their clothes off, looking to see if they have anywhere upon them a rash or a patch of mottled skin, find that they have, or imagine that they have, and rush, screaming, half- undressed, into the street. Two men, meeting in a narrow passage, both rush back, too ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... pen is the only tool you can handle, your only means of earning bread! Year after year the number of you is multiplied; you crowd the doors of publishers and editors, hustling, grappling, exchanging maledictions. Oh, sorry spectacle, grotesque ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... then, abruptly, the candle they were carrying gave a little flicker. This time they stopped in their tracks and shouted. Bill suddenly loosened his hold on the younger man's shoulder and began hopping forward, and the light threw huge, grotesque, strangely moving shadows on the wall ahead of them. Dick ran after him, crowding on his heels and shouting meaningless hopes. Abruptly they came to a right-angle drift, and then, but a few yards down it, they discovered an upraise, crude and uncared-for, but climbing ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... by her Christian name, too sensitive to call by her surname, so Miss Grieve she remained, as announced, to the end of the chapter, and our rosy little Jane died before she was actually born. The man took her grotesque luggage into the kitchen, and Salemina escorted her thither, while Francesca and I fell into each ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... cried the driver, for the old white steed had caught sight of the car and was testifying to its dislike of it by grotesque prancings and sidlings that threatened to wreck the ramshackle trap. "Here, get out of my way!" he ordered Oliver, "that is, if you know how to handle that snorting locomotive ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... the cook who asks for twenty sous from the Limousin whose nose with inflated nostrils took in the perfumes of beauty. To saunter is to enjoy life; it is to indulge the flight of fancy; it is to enjoy the sublime pictures of misery, of love, of joy, of gracious or grotesque physiognomies; it is to pierce with a glance the abysses of a thousand existences; for the young it is to desire all, and to possess all; for the old it is to live the life of the youthful, and to share their passions. Now how many answers have not the sauntering artists heard to the categorical ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... This is in course of years, the real, the hidden condition of a nation, which has been bathed in Christian ideas, whether it be a young vigorous race, or an old and degenerate; and it will manifest itself socially and historically in those characteristics, sometimes grotesque, sometimes hideous, sometimes despicable, of which we have so many instances, medieval and modern, both in this hemisphere and in the western. It is, I say, the necessary result of the intercommunion of divine faith ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... of all feasts of the Church he held views of an almost grotesque peculiarity. He looked upon each of them as nugatory and worthless, but the keeping of Christmas appeared to him by far the most hateful, and nothing less than an act of idolatry. 'The very word is Popish', he used to ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... (Hong Kong, 1902, p. 28). A still more positive judgment on this matter is passed by MADROLLE (Chine du Sud et de l'Est, Paris, 1904, p. 17). "The attitudes of the Venerable Ones," he says, "are remarkable for their life-like expression, or sometimes, singularly grotesque. One of these personalities placed on the right side of a great altar wears the costume of the 16th century, and we might be inclined to regard it as a Chinese representation of Marco Polo. It is probable, however, that the artist, who had to execute the statue ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... specimen of Chinese embroidery, fig. 246, resembles the first, as far as materials and execution are concerned, but the design is different. The grotesque animals, flowers and shells it represents, can be worked separately, or connected together so as to form a ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... for the highest reaches of impassioned prose. Nor is this all. His pages do not lack in humor—humor of the truest and most delicate type; and if De Quincey is at times impelled beyond the bounds of taste, even these excursions demonstrate his power, at least in handling the grotesque. His sympathies, however, are always genuine, and often are profound. The pages of his autobiographic essays reveal the strength of his affections, while in the interpretation of such a character as that of Joan of Arc, or in allusions like those to the ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... at night in the light of a bonfire this dance is most grotesque and terrible. The naked black bodies, gleaming in the fire, the blood-curdling yells, and the demoniacal figures of the howling, leaping dancers, remind one of ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... works. Certain it is that the appetite for all kinds of fun, verbal and other was a part of Hood's nature. We see it in the practical jokes he was continually playing on his good-humored wife—such as altering into grotesque absurdity many of the words contained in her letters to friends: we see it—the mere animal love of jocularity, as it might be termed—in such a small point as his frequently addressing his friend Philip de Franck, in ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... argued that there is no truer criterion of the vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits of that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothic art there is no disputing the proposition. Weatherbury tower was a somewhat early instance of the use of an ornamental parapet in parish as distinct from ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... variations being of no service to man, and not beneficial, far more often injurious, to the creatures themselves? Did He ordain that the crop and tail-feathers of the pigeon should vary, in order that the fancier might make his grotesque pouter and fantail breeds? Did He cause the frame and mental qualities of the dog to vary, in order that a breed might be formed of indomitable ferocity, with jaws fitted to pin down the bull for man's brutal sport? But, if we give up the principle in one case—-if we do not admit ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... beautiful creations of their art. Moldings and capitals, pulpits, altars, and choir screens, the wooden seats for the clergy and choristers, are sometimes literally covered with carving representing graceful leaf and flower forms, familiar animals or grotesque monsters, biblical incidents or homely scenes from everyday life. In the cathedral of Wells, in England, one capital shows us among its vines and leaves a boy whose face is screwed up with pain from ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... a man of the City, should come to me, another man of the City, with such an absurd idea in your head, is simply grotesque.' ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... returned them with the remark that "almost any young gentleman with a sweet tooth might be expected to write such things." Mrs. Carlyle was a very clever woman, but she was not quite "educated up to" Keats. The history of letters is full of these grotesque limitations of taste, in the presence of great art which has not yet been "classed." But we are here considering the much stranger and indeed extremely disconcerting case of a product which has been accepted, with acclamation, by the judges of one generation, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... servant watched him closely, and upon receiving a sign from his master, he too put on his official costume, which consisted of a velvet robe and a helmet. The servant then struck up a tune on the richly-toned organ which always formed a part of Mangin's outfit. The grotesque appearance of these individuals, and the music, soon drew together an ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... resolved to abandon the struggle, and set up on a less ambitious footing in one of the cabins at Lisconnel. So he got ready for the move by selling off his little bit of live stock, all except Rory, the old black pony, who had a very large head and a white face like a grotesque mask, and with whom he would not have parted on the most tempting terms. As for his great-aunt Moggy, when she heard of this arrangement, she resigned herself to her fate, which was obviously the Union away at Moynalone. What ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... school girl she had certainly done the lady's part well. What she wore I do not exactly know; nor would it perhaps be well to describe what might seem grotesque to such prejudiced readers as have no judgment beyond the fashions of the day. But I will not let pass the opportunity of reminding them how sadly old fashioned we of the present hour also look in the eyes of those equally infallible judges who have been ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to do her some injury, to force her to keep some memory of me. I knew her to be so beautiful that I should have liked to be able to retrace my steps so as to shake my fist at her and shout, "I think you are hideous, grotesque; you are utterly disgusting!" However, I walked away, carrying with me, then and for ever afterwards, as the first illustration of a type of happiness rendered inaccessible to a little boy of my kind by certain laws of nature which it was impossible ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... to itself these grotesque fallacies till it lost sight of plain and simple truths. Seven o'clock in the morning is too early for any rational human being to be herded into a factory at the call of a steam whistle. Ten hours a day of mechanical task is too long: nine hours is too long: eight hours is ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... complete till Grandfather Vine had done choking over his heel-taps, but Ellen had undoubtedly endured a good deal with remarkable patience—her virtue ought in justice to be rewarded. Also Joanna noticed for the first time that she was looking grotesque as well as uncomfortable, owing perhaps to the hat being still on hind part before. So the necessary dispensation was granted, and Ellen further refreshed by a ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... took place on the 8th of September. The ceremony was shorn of the grotesque pageantry of chivalric times, and was confined to the interior of the abbey. The royal procession moved in state carriages from St. James's Palace, and was escorted by the cavalry. His majesty was saluted with hearty ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... we might have had a much more disagreeable voyage in a better ship. Captain Blethen is beyond all praise, and so is the chief engineer, whose duties are incessant and most harassing, owing to the critical state of the engines. The Nevada now presents a grotesque appearance, for within the last few hours she has received such an added list to port that her starboard wheel looks nearly out of ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... struggling up from the small fire, and the light from the one tall candle flickering and growing unsteady as it flashed upon the two thin, sharp faces close beside it, while the antique furniture looked more grotesque and grim than ever in the deep shadow, and the never-wearying clock still ticked calmly on, regardless alike of the contending elements without and the wordy warfare within; true it is that the conversation between the sisters was divested of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... his voice grew cheery, his old face shone, and in a burst of hearty enthusiasm he flung up his cap and cheered like a boy. So did the others, and as the fairy shout echoed through the belfry a troop of shadowy figures, with faces lovely or grotesque, tragical or gay, sailed by on the wings of the wintry wind and waved their hands to the spirits of ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... the human race in these respects. Wherever the corruption of humanity manifested itself especially in the abuse of supersensible powers for the satisfaction of lower inclinations, desires and passions, unsightly human shapes, grotesque in form and size were the result. These were not able to survive the Atlantean period, and became extinct. Post-Atlantean humanity was formed physically from those Atlantean ancestors in whom such a solidification of the bodily form had taken place that ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... corrupted people whom we are civilising by teaching them our vices. The ferocious and uncontrolled authority of grotesque bashaws, who gravely use their grand cordons of the Legion of Honour as handkerchiefs, and for a mere yea or nay order a man to be bastinadoed. It is the justice of the conscienceless, bespectacled cadis under the palm-tree, Maw-worms of the Koran and ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... Johnson, and many years before, as I have been assured by those who knew him earlier, Mr. Levet had an apartment in his house, or his chambers, and waited upon him every morning, through the whole course of his late and tedious breakfast. He was of a strange grotesque appearance, stiff and formal in his manner, and seldom said a word while any ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... Aubin in Normandy, where, indeed, the poet first heard of it in all its details. It is a story which, if the method of poetry and the method of prose could for a moment be accepted as equivalent, might be said to be of the school of a light and humorously grotesque Zola. It has the fundamental weakness of "The Ring and the Book"—the weakness of an inadequate ethical basis. It is, indeed, to that great work what a second-rate novelette is to a masterpiece ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... cages, household utensils, ovens, furniture, little earthenware dishes full of food or water for the dog and the cats, a wooden clock, bed-quilts, engravings of Eisen, heaps of old iron, all these things mingled and massed together in a way that produced a most grotesque effect,—a true Parisian dusthole, in which were not lacking a few old numbers of ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... was devoted to hardware of all sorts, from excellent Dutch delf to the coarse pottery furnished by Staffordshire, with occasional luxuries in the form of Chelsea tea-services, or costly jars of grotesque shapes from Pekin, sent by the London china-shops. All sorts of toys and fancy articles were to be found. Painted mirrors, which were then greatly in fashion, fans, long leathern gloves, jewelled snuff-boxes, wooden ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... the proper set. Shouts of laughter greeted every ridiculous pose and awkward stumble, and certainly nothing could be more provocative of merriment than their appearance. They trailed the dresses over the stubble in mock dignity; they improvised a dance, and went through all the grotesque changes they could invent. Their comments and jokes were most spicy and personal, ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... silence—a strange, unforgettable moment for Francis Ledsam, who seemed by some curious trick of the imagination to have been carried away into an impossible and grotesque world. The hum of eager conversation, the popping of corks, the little trills of feminine laughter, all blended into one sensual and not unmusical chorus, seemed to fade from his ears. He fancied himself in some subterranean place of vast dimensions, through the grim ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... little Poem, with much of the grotesque in its half-dozen Embellishments, and some tripping work in its lines. "The End," with "Who danced at the Wedding?" and the tail-piece—a devil-bantling, rocked by imps, and the cradle lit ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... pacify him presently. Habit is a tenacious ruler and, grotesque figures though we were, the "zur" he had addressed to me brought out the officer in me. I talked to him as I would have done to one of my own men, and he quietened down at last and ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... scientific, natural, and sacred,—its reverence for the dead, and its dim and portentous traditions! and what a reflex of Nineveh's palmy days are the winged lions exhumed by Layard! What more authentic tokens of Mediaeval piety and patience exist than the elaborate and grotesque carvings of Albert Duerer's day? The colossal Brahma in the temple of Elephanta, near Bombay, is the visible acme of Asiatic superstition. And can an illustration of the revival of Art, in the fifteenth century, so exuberant, aspiring, and sublime, be imagined, to surpass the Day and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... elephant, about the size of a trolley car and with 15-foot tusks; the giant sloth which could look into a second-story window; here the saber-toothed tiger fought with the megatherium; mighty rhinoceroses sloshed their clumsy way, and huge and grotesque birds filled the ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney
... curtains in front of the doorway parted. My eyes, lifted to the height of fair tallness they expected to encounter, looked for an instant upon vacancy. Then they dropped to meet those of a grotesque and piteous little hunchback, whose agonized gaze cried to me, as did the hitching of her poor shoulders and the sudden trembling flutter of her hands to her mouth: 'For God's ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... is, unquestionably, not a little staggering to the modern civilised conscience; and this particular war possessed the additional unpleasantness of having in it, at first sight, an element of the grotesque. It is not too much to say that it struck the majority of the British public as being of the nature of a very bad joke. For it was as though a very small and very cheeky boy, after making offensive signs, had spat in the nation's face. Clearly ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... by the facts. It was about here that I found that my credulity with regard to Belle was becoming over-taxed, though it may be that Mr. ROY MELDRUM, her creator, believed in her; he has at least a solemnity and sincerity of style that carries him, apparently unwitting, through every peril of the grotesque. Of course Belle comes to town, smashes all booking records at the Basilica, and establishes herself as the idol of society. Later on, I regret to add, she becomes, so to speak, tinged with wine. Perhaps this unfortunate failing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... a grand ducal residence there, which was famous in the later Medicean days for the multiplicity and ingenuity of its water-works. All kinds of surprises, picturesque and grotesque effects, and practical jokes, had been prepared by the ingenious, but somewhat childish skill of the architect. Turning the handle of a door would produce a shower-bath, sofas would become suddenly boats surrounded by water, and such like more or less disagreeable surprises ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... of these days had almost driven from Zen's mind the tragedy of George Drazk. When she thought of it at all it presented such a grotesque unreality—it was such an unreasonable thing—that it assumed the vague qualities of a dream. It was something unreal and very much better forgotten, and it was only by an unwilling effort at such times that she could bring herself to know that it was not unreal. It ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins—of happiness and unhappiness. That respectability and evening parties where one has to dress, and wretched slums at the back of Gray's Inn—something solid, immovable, and grotesque—is at the back of it, Jacob thought probable. But then there was the British Empire which was beginning to puzzle him; nor was he altogether in favour of giving Home Rule to Ireland. What did the Daily ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... roamed abroad, melancholy and malignant? Peering into that dark boundary of forest, the eye vainly endeavoured to pierce the gloom. Fancy peopled its confines with flitting shapes, and beheld a grinning hobgoblin in the grotesque stump of many a half-burnt tree, on which the light momentarily flickered. The ear listened eagerly for sounds in the distant solitude; and one almost expected to hear shrieks of laughter or of terror borne ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... me, Mr. Isbister, is one of the problems most constantly before my mind. We happen to be—as a matter of fact, there are no very trustworthy connections of ours. It is a grotesque and unprecedented position." ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... build a fort at Kenowit, are of the same tribe, and number about three hundred men. They speak the Milanow language, and have the same customs of burial. The men and some of the women are tattooed in the most grotesque patterns. When you look at them closely the invention displayed is truly remarkable; but at a distance they give a dingy, dusky appearance to the men, as if they were daubed with an inky sponge. Nature having denied ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... before the Lords and Commons. This debate in the Commons was remarkable in many respects, but most of all for Grattan's debut. A lively curiosity to hear one of whom so much had been said in his own country, pervaded the whole House, as Grattan rose. His grotesque little figure, his eccentric action, and his strangely cadenced sentences rather surprised than attracted attention, but as he warmed with the march of ideas, men of both parties warmed to the genial and enlarged philosophy, embodied in the interfused ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... church, held various incumbencies, and was Divinity Lecturer, and minor canon of St. Paul's. It is not, however, as a churchman that he is remembered, but as the author of the Ingoldsby Legends, a series of comic and serio-comic pieces in verse, sparkling with wit, and full of striking and often grotesque turns of expression, which appeared first in Bentley's Miscellany. He also wrote, in Blackwood's Magazine, a novel, My ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... 1870 at St. Aubin in Normandy, where, indeed, the poet first heard of it in all its details. It is a story which, if the method of poetry and the method of prose could for a moment be accepted as equivalent, might be said to be of the school of a light and humorously grotesque Zola. It has the fundamental weakness of "The Ring and the Book"—the weakness of an inadequate ethical basis. It is, indeed, to that great work what a second-rate novelette is to ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... peopleless city of Belgrade and waited for his captors. They came then, timidly reassured by his non-violence. While he talked to them pleasantly the citizens of London and Paris suddenly began to dance jerky and grotesque jigs on the pavements of their cities. In the same moment the Chief Justice of the Court of the Nations, at a cocktail party in Washington, writhed in the exquisite pain of total muscle cramp, his august features twisted into a mask ...
— The Mightiest Man • Patrick Fahy
... I have no right to enrol myself as one of the disciples of Epicurus, but when I think of myself, spontaneously there comes to my mind the grotesque epithet which Horace applied to the Epicureans in his Epistles, a characterization which for my part I accept and regard as an honour: "Swine of the herd of Epicurus, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... had not a decided taste for the fine arts, and his taste in composition seems to have leaned towards the grotesque and the bombastic. He used always the most exaggerated phrases; and it is seldom, if ever, that his bulletins present those touches of sublimity which are founded on dignity and simplicity ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... was a fat, apoplectic looking man, with a bald head which shone like satin, and a drooping moustache slightly discoloured by tobacco. His appearance, which she had never objected to before, seemed to her grotesque; but in spite of this, she could smile almost naturally at his jokes, which she ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... much even of his wit is the mere filth-throwing of a naughty boy; or at best the underbred jocularity of the "funny column," the topical song, or the minstrel show. There are puns on the names of notable personages; a grotesque, fantastic, punning fauna, flora, and geography of Greece; a constant succession of surprises effected by the sudden substitution of low or incongruous terms in proverbs, quotations, and legal or religious formulas; scenes ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... ghastly hybrid on the steps raised his right hand in meticulous salute ... and died. It was an ironic, grotesque gesture. ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... Greenland—the great Humboldt glacier— shedding its bergs into the dark blue sea, the waters of which had by that time been partially cleared to the northward. On the left was the weird pack and its thousand grotesque forms, with the wreck in its iron grasp; on the right the perpendicular cliffs, and the bright sky over all, with the smoke of the campfires rising into it from ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... at once so pitiless and so just as Shakespeare? Did ever any other mingle the grotesque and the pathetic with a realism so daring and yet so true ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... her head and winked back at the irritated saleswoman in such a grotesque fashion that the lively Lizzie giggled again, for which she was told she ought to be ashamed of herself. Good-natured Lizzie admitted the truth of this accusation, but declared that Becky was so funny she ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... yews and cypresses planted here and there, and an oak paling beyond; to the east lay the "fair mount," again recommended by the same authority, but not so high, and with but one ascent; to the west the path darkened under trees, and over all rose up against the sunset sky the tall grotesque towers and vanes of the garden-house. The flowers burned with that ember-like glow which may be seen on summer evenings, and poured out their scent; the air was sweet and cool, and white moths were beginning to poise and stir among the blossoms. The two ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... might or who chose went masked. So few did not choose that street and piazza seemed filled with all orders of being and moments of time. Terrible, grotesque, fantastic, pleasing, went the rout, and now the hugest crowd was here and now it was there, and now there were moments of even diffusion. At night the lights were in multitude, and in multitude the flaring and strange decorations. Day and night ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... chancel tall; The darkened, roof rose high, aloof On pillars lofty, light, and small: The keystone that locked, each ribbed aisle Was a fleur-de-lis, or a quatre-feuille; The corbels were carved grotesque and grim; And the pillars, with, clustered shafts so trim, With, base and with capital flourished around, Seemed bundles of lances which garlands ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... come to the conclusion by this time that Cullingworth is simply an interesting pathological study—a man in the first stage of lunacy or general paralysis. You might not be so sure about it if you were in close contact with him. He justifies his wildest flights by what he does. It sounds grotesque when put down in black and white; but then it would have sounded equally grotesque a year ago if he had said that he would build up a huge practice in a twelvemonth. Now we see that he has done it. His possibilities are immense. He has such huge ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... of platform work, so I will only select here and there incidents illustrative of the whole. And here let me say that the frequent attacks made on myself and others, that we were attracted to Free-thought propaganda by the gains it offered, formed a somewhat grotesque contrast to the facts. On one occasion I spent eight days in Northumberland and Durham, gave twelve lectures, and made a deficit of eleven shillings on the whole. Of course such a thing could not happen in ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... at Kimberley are familiar to most readers. They differ from the mines in German South-West Africa and the Congo in that they are deep level excavations. The Kimberley mine, for example, goes down 3,000 feet. To see this almost grotesque gash in the earth is to get the impression of a very small Grand Canyon of the Colorado. It is an awesome and terrifying spectacle for it is shot through with green and brown and purple, is more than ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... grimace so much like his own, that it brought on a contest in which the yarn winding was laid aside for a time, while they stood before a mirror, each trying to outdo the other in making grotesque faces. ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Amy Robsart, his discarded wife, is languishing. Victor Hugo is, in modern fiction, the greatest master of antithesis of mood between scene and scene. His most emphatic effects are attained, like those of Gothic architecture, by a juxtaposition of the grotesque and the sublime. Often, to be sure, he overworks the antithetic; and entire sections of his narrative move like the walking-beam of a ferry-boat, tilting now to this side, now to that. But in spite of his excess ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... I was glad to tread once more the surface of Pellucidar. Mysterious and terrible, grotesque and savage though she is in many of her aspects, I can not but love her. Her very savagery appealed to me, for it is the savagery ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... all Ireland from the Romish faith would be found, if we could only manage to have her mass celebrated with the dry coldness of the Reformation. This may seem ridiculous at first sight, and I grant it is a grotesque way of viewing the subject, but yet there may be truth in it; and to consider it for a moment seriously, look at the fact, that the north of Ireland is the stronghold of Protestantism, and that the north is the least Irish portion of the island. There is a strong ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... of horns and hoofs, of forked tail and all the rest of it seek to give material form to this being. They are grotesque to an extreme, and therefore caricatures. A caricature so disproportions and exaggerates as to make hideous or ridiculous. In our day when every foundation of knowledge is being examined there has been a natural but unthinking turning away from the very being of Satan ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... from one of the pockets of the grotesque coat a piece of sheepskin, which he proceeded to cut into two ...
— Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral • Margaret Pollock Sherwood
... her that the Prince was staying at the Hotel de Russie close by. The afternoon was waning, and already the narrow streets of the lower town were in shadow; soon the shops would be lit up and gay with the gleam of marbles, the glimmer of Roman pearls and silks, and the green, grotesque ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... self-preservation is the dominant, mean characteristic of modern mankind. The universal attitude is: spare me and take all my less worthy neighbours. In gaining in skin-deep civilisation we have lost in the animal-fighting capacity. We are truly mainly grotesque when our ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... he sat on his three chairs, immense, grotesque—the more grotesque for his splendid dignity of bearing—there was in his soul of a gallant gentleman the consciousness of that other, whom he was shielding from a similar ordeal. Compassion and generosity, so great that they comprehended love ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... their trains with laughing eyes and saucy tongues and a last farewell of "Bonne chance, mes petits! Bonne chance et toujours la victoire!" At every wayside halt artists were at work with white chalk drawing grotesque faces on the carriage doors below which they scrawled inscriptions referring to the death of "William," and banquets in Berlin, and invitations for free trips to the Rhine. In exchange for a few English cigarettes, too few for such trainloads, they ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... the tribunal was announced. A majority, consisting of Lord Alverstone and the three American members, had decided substantially in favour of the United States. Sir Louis Jette and Mr Aylesworth declined to sign the award, and declared it in part a 'grotesque travesty of justice.' ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... biography, which mainly supplied arbitrarily compiled, if extended, catalogues of names. To each name were attached brief annotations, which occasionally offered a fact or a date, but commonly consisted of a few sentences of grotesque, uncritical eulogy. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... wearisome with repetition of commonest design, and degraded by their gilded shops, wide-fuming, flaunting, glittering, with apparatus of eating or of dress. Splendor of palace-flank and goodly quay, insulted by floating cumber of barge and bath, trivial, grotesque, indecent, as cleansing vessels in a royal reception room. Solemn avenues of blossomed trees, shading puppet-show and baby-play; glades of wild-wood, long withdrawn, purple with faded shadows of blood; sweet windings and reaches of river far among the brown vines and white orchards, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Paint Pot provokes a smile. There is no grandeur here. It seems a burlesque on volcanic power. The steam which oozes through the plastic mass tosses its substance into curious Liliputian shapes, which rise and break like bubbles. A mirthful demon seems to be engaged in molding grotesque images in clay, which turn a somersault, and then fall back to vanish in the seething depths. Now it will be a flower, then a face, then, possibly, a manikin resembling toys for children. Meanwhile one hears constantly ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... evidently formed from the relics of some monastery or religious house. Here and there, the fancy or interest of the owner had induced him to remodel the structure; and an ill-designed and ungraceful mixture of the modern with the ancient gave to the whole somewhat of a grotesque appearance, that was heightened by the noble trees, which had once towered in majesty and beauty, being in many places lopped and docked, as if even the exuberance of nature was a crime in the eyes of the present lord of ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... the waist upward, emaciated by opium smoking, and having a sickly look painful to see. Most of the shops have a carved railing and a counter facing the street, the ends of which are ornamented by grotesque shapes of dogs and gilded idols. A figure of a pug-nosed dog with bandy legs is very common. At the first glance it would be supposed that this was one of those nondescripts the Chinese are so fond of devising, but a closer examination shows that the figure is an admirably ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... But beyond the wall was a kitchen garden. It was lighter there, and I could see dimly that we were passing down an aisle of old espaliers that stretched sturdy, rigid arms, locked finger to finger with each other in their solemn grotesque guardianship of the enciente they enclosed. No doubt in front of them was some kind of herbaceous border. I caught sight of the occasional spire of a hollyhock, and smelt the acid insurgence ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... the fallen steed, as devils flock around the deathbed of a defaulting deacon. A soldier on the outer edge of the extended line swings his rifle with swift, backhanded motion over his shoulder, and brings the butt amidst the crowd of carrion. The vultures hop with grotesque, ungainly motions from their prey, and stand with wings extended and clawed feet apart, their necks outstretched and curved heads dripping slime and blood, a fitting setting amidst the black ruin of war. The charger now looks upward ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... something inscrutably ludicrous in the anxiety, bordering upon consternation, that lurks in the elongated and grotesque shadow that George Harvey casts upon Washington. The Republican fathers, who now feel a sense of responsibility, after a lapse of many years, for the future of party and country, do not yet know ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... grotesque figures in the blank arches of the gable which forms the eastern end of St. Hugh's Chapel," and of these, "one is popularly said to represent the 'Devil looking over Lincoln.'"—Handbook to the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... nearly all the night in the chapel, alone. The place was full of things. I felt there all the gods that ever were worshipped ... and all the great spirits of mankind. And I perceived fully how silly, weak, grotesque, and vain I was; and yet, how big and wonderful, it would be to swim counter, as I meant, to the huge, swollen, successful currents of the commercial, bourgeois practicality of ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... the ground, and further on, where the men at a command from Peyton had laid down their burden, another. In those ragged, dusty heaps of clothes, from which all the majesty of life seemed to have been ruthlessly stamped out, only what was ignoble and grotesque appeared to be left. There was nothing terrible in this. The boy moved slowly towards them; and, incredible even to himself, the overpowering fear of them that a moment before had overcome him left him as suddenly. He walked from the one to the ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... which was almost universal now with the nobles and gentry, but by no means so amongst the citizens. The periwig was surmounted by a high-crowned hat adorned with feathers and ribbons, and ribbons floated from his person in such abundance that to unaccustomed eyes the effect was little short of grotesque. Even the absurd high-heeled shoes were tied with immense bows of ribbon, whilst knees, wrists, throat, and even elbows displayed their bows and streamers. The young dandy wore the full "petticoat breeches" of the period, ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... her gondola, in the evening, has heard sailors cursing one another in all the languages of the Latin seas, and has remembered everything. The wretched man stared at her, horrified and dismayed at what she compelled him to hear, at her grotesque figure, foaming ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... then to salt, in each of which she dealt with surprising success. There was, too, such an air of bustle, activity, and good-humor about her that people loved to deal with her. Her appearance was striking, if not grotesque. She was tall and strong, walked rapidly, and when engaged in fair or market disposing of her coarse merchandise, was dressed in a short red petticoat, blue stockings, strong brogues, wore a blue cloak, with the hood turned up, over her head, on the ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... our simplicity and good-humour, and partly with that very love of the grotesque which debases our ideal, we have a sympathy with the lower animals which is peculiarly our own; and which, though it has already found some exquisite expression in the works of Bewick and Landseer, is ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... Lupercalia is unmistakably within the region of magic rather than of religion. Some potency was believed to work in the act of striking, though apparently without a spoken spell or carmen, such as usually accompanies acts of this kind; and this part of the rite, grotesque though it was, was allowed to survive by the grave religious authorities who drew up the calendar of religious festivals. It was probably a superstition too deeply rooted in the minds of the people to admit of being excluded; and, strange to say, it survived, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... in all directions, but saw nothing, and only heard, faintly, the flying footfalls of the lad. Can there be anything more dreadful than the matutinal apparition of an ugly old maid at her window? Of all the grotesque sights which amuse the eyes of travellers in country towns, that is the most unpleasant. It is too repulsive to laugh at. This particular old maid, whose ear was so keen, was denuded of all the adventitious aids, of whatever kind, which ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... faces hers looked out quaintly lovely as a pictured child's wearing its grandmother's bonnet. Everything draped itself about or clung to her in entrancing folds which however whimsical were never grotesque. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... smoke of innumerable wood fires faltered upward from the clustering chimney-pots, only to be rent into fragments and beaten down upon the glistening tiles of the mansard roofs. The wide asphalts reflected the horses and carriages and trains and pedestrians in forms grotesque, zigzagging, flitting, amusing, like a shadow-play upon a wrinkled, wind-blown curtain. The sixteenth of June. To Fitzgerald there was something electric in the date, a tingle of that ecstasy which frequently comes into the blood of a man to ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... the world of men and that of the gods, the "Island of the Double," "Land of the Shades," where the living came into close contact with the souls of the departed. It was inhabited by the Dangas, tribes of half-savage dwarfs, whose grotesque faces and wild gestures reminded the Egyptians of the god Bisu (Bes). The chances of war or trade brought some of them from time to time to Puanit, or among the Amamiu: the merchant who succeeded ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... she exclaimed, so sharply that I was suddenly abashed. My intended familiarity and its expression appeared grotesque, although a few minutes before she was so friendly. But I could not waste precious time in studying a girl's caprices, so I ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... sense of the futility of the contemporary church, but this time it came in the most grotesque form. For hanging half out of the casement he was suddenly reminded of St. Francis of Assisi, and how at his rebuke the ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... drawings hung against the walls, while on the tables, on the hanging shelves, and in elegant glass cupboards, there were a thousand knick-knacks; small vases, statuettes, groups in Dresden china, and grotesque Chinese figures, old ivory, and Venetian glass, which filled the large room with their precious and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... the ruffled patch of white tied pertly under her chin. Her smoothly turning shoulders, filmed in lawn, and low bodice crowned an extravagant circumference of ruffled silk and rosettes. Against the night of the Province, the invisible but felt presence of immutable hills, she was like a puppet, a grotesque figure of comedy. He regarded her sombrely from the step, his chin ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... book I had ordered six months ago arrives at last, and I have to change the first half of it from top to bottom! How could I have dreamed the French prisoners were watched over like a female charity school, kept in a grotesque livery, and shaved twice a week? And I had made all my points on the idea that they were unshaved and clothed anyhow. However, this last is better business; if only the book had come when I ordered it! A PROPOS, many of the books you announce don't come as a matter ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... however exalted or however grotesque, have their foundation in experience. The notion of personal volition in Nature had this basis. In the fury and the serenity of natural phenomena the savage saw the transcript of his own varying moods, and he accordingly ascribed these phenomena to beings ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... but there was no original English artist before the time of WILLIAM HOGARTH (1697-1764), and he may really be named as the first master of a purely English school of painting. When Hogarth was fifteen years old he was apprenticed to a silversmith, and the grotesque designs which he copied for armorial bearings helped to increase his natural love for all that was ridiculous and strange. After 1718 he was much occupied in engraving for booksellers, and at length he began to paint small genre pictures ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... tragedy of a German St. Preux who falls in love with his titled pupil and dishonors her, with the result that she too runs away from home and tries to commit suicide, while her lover in his chagrin emasculates himself. These are grotesque tragedies, not devoid of literary power, but devoid of high sentiment and saturated with a woeful vulgarity. We cannot wonder that the high-minded Schiller should have condemned Wagner's malodorous ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... ambled easily and briskly along with his rider's feet just brushing the low "poverty-pines" which grew by the roadside. They wore all sorts of clothing. The blue and the gray were already peacefully intermixed in the garments of most of them. The most grotesque variety prevailed especially in their head-gear, which culminated in the case of one who wore a long, barrel-shaped, slatted sun-bonnet made out of spotted calico. They were boisterous and even amusing, had ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... a-shovin' in me oar," returned Bill, with a grotesque tug at his forelock. "I seen som'at o' the sort done once, though, an' if so be as you ses so, ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... war, but that all Germans know it in their hearts; that, being guilty, they will fully accept punishment, bow patiently beneath the yoke, and become in future good, harmonious members of the European family. The illusion is grotesque. There is hardly a German who does not believe that the war was made by Russia and by England; that Germany is the innocent victim; that all right is on her side, and all wrong on that of the Allies. If, indeed, she ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... grandfather to the unfortunate Anne Boleyn. He lived at Blickling, about thirteen miles from Norwich, where Anne is believed to have been born. Several bishops also lie in the cathedral, and among the later tombs is that of Dr. Moore, who died in 1779, and whose periwigged head is in grotesque juxtaposition with a cherub making an ugly face and appearing to be drying his eyes with his shirt. The spire of Norwich Cathedral rises two ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... fire and fried them. The Bishop, the girl, the two boys, and the two slaves sat in a ring on the carpet, ate the fried fish, and blessed the Lord. Vivantius spoke of the torture he had undergone, and prophesied the speedy triumph of the Church. His language was grotesque, and full of word-play and rhetorical tropes. He compared the life of the just to a tissue of purple, and to explain the ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... entering a subdued city, satiated with victory and peace. After him came Jess, now white from age, with her cart; and in it a woman, carefully wrapped up,—the carrier leading the horse anxiously, and looking back. When he saw me, James (for his name was James Noble) made a curt and grotesque "boo," and said, "Maister John, this is the mistress; she's got a trouble in her breest—some kind o' an income ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... this book has had it in his mind to go across America, and then tell the people of France, in a small volume costing one franc, all about the grotesque ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... threw his hands out with a gesture that strained the narrow garment he wore almost to bursting. He began to talk, to argue, to plead; then suddenly he yielded, and turned and ran, a grotesque, long-legged shape, toward the ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... Tertiary period. Long after the cave was formed, and after many stalactites had been hung on those spacious halls with their down-grown crystals, it was completely filled with glacial mud charged with acid, whereby the dripstones were eroded in singular grotesque shapes. The eroded forms remained after the mud had been mostly removed by flowing water. Massive columns have been wrenched from the ceiling by this aqueous energy and lie prostrate on the floor; a hollow column, forty feet high and thirty feet in diameter, stands erect, but has been pierced ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... of body, or established mode of expression, which never fails to excite mirth if it be pointed out to notice. By premonition of these particularities, I secured our pleasantry.' The feminine characters, Flirtillas, and Cleoras, and Euphelias, and Penthesileas, are, if possible, still more grotesque. Macaulay remarks that he wears the petticoat with as ill a grace as Falstaff himself. The reader, he thinks, will cry out with Sir Hugh, 'I like not when a 'oman has a great peard! I spy a great ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... soiled shirt that was unbuttoned at the hairy throat, presented a remarkable figure. His heavy body was fitted with legs like posts; his wide shoulders and deep chest, with arms to match his legs, were so huge as to appear almost grotesque; his round head, with its tumbled thatch of sandy hair, was set on a thick bull-neck; while all over the big bones of him the hard muscles lay in visible knots and bunches. The unsteady poise, the red, unshaven, sweating face, and the angry, blood-shot eyes, revealed the reason ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... to man, and not beneficial, far more often injurious, to the creatures themselves? Did He ordain that the crop and tail-feathers of the pigeon should vary, in order that the fancier might make his grotesque pouter and fantail breeds? Did He cause the frame and mental qualities of the dog to vary, in order that a breed might be formed of indomitable ferocity, with jaws fitted to pin down the bull for man's brutal sport? But, if we give up the principle in one case—-if we do not ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... amused herself tracking them until she traced them to the palm tree or cactus bush that caused them. One in particular gave her a long hunt till she finally ran it to its lair, and it proved to be the shadow of a grotesque lead statue half hidden by a flowering shrub. Forgetting the hour and the open windows all around her, she burst into a rippling peal of laughter, which was interrupted by the appearance of a figure, imperfectly seen through ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... was streaming upon them as they lay heads towards us on the ground. And every man had a round red spot on the top of his head about as big as a dollar, where the redskins had taken his scalp. It was frightful, but it was grotesque; and the red sunlight seemed to paint everything all over." Lincoln paused, as if recalling the vivid picture, and added, somewhat irrelevantly, "I remember that one ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... an annual of the year 1845. The copper-plate engravings of lovely ladies, who had flourished in that day, were yellow and spotted with mildew; the costumes grotesque and outlandish; the simpering beauties faded and commonplace. Even the little clusters of verses (in which the poet's feeble candle shed its sickly light upon the obscurities of the artist's meaning) had an old-fashioned twang; like music on ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... by its victims. What makes the genius is just the fact that he looks out upon life, that he feels, that he uses his eyes, in his own way; also, that he invents his own methods of expression. Beardsley saw the satire of life, he loved the grotesque which has so gone out of date in our matter-of-fact day that we almost forget what it means, and no doubt disease gave a morbid twist to his vision and imagination. But, above all, he was young, splendidly young: young when he began work, ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... hardly be said to be a part of it. Their poverty, their homespun trousers which were usually too short and too tight, and their poverty together with a natural shyness, kept them out of school affairs, although they were always at the top of their classes. To me they were worthy—though a bit grotesque. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... The divinely beautiful Altara—butchered for meat like a calf? Grotesque! Ghastly! "What! You eat your prisoners?" He felt ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... Book of MacRegol, and in the Lindisfarne Gospels, are singularly interesting. Floral work is also rare. But in geometrical ornament, beautifully symmetrical—diagonal patterns, zigzags, waves, lozenges, divergent spirals, intertwisted and interwoven ribbon and cord work—and in grotesque zoological forms,—lizards, snakes, hounds, birds, and dragons' heads,—the Irish school attained their highest artistic development. Their art is striking, not for originality, not for its beauty, which is nevertheless ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... and soldiers, cold, wet, and almost naked, quickly followed; the whole forming, in their haggard looks and the endless variety of their costume, an assemblage at once as melancholy and grotesque as it is possible to conceive. So eager did the people appear to be to pour out upon us the full current of their sympathies, that shoes, hats, and other articles of urgent necessity were presented to several of the officers ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... that she was protecting me!" he thought. "She is the man and rejoices that I, the weak comrade, should be protected from danger. . . . What a grotesque situation!" ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... followed by a furious burst of yells; there was the rush of feet, sounds as of blows struck against the stout poles, and directly after, dimly-seen against the starlit sky, dark grotesque-looking heads appeared as at least a dozen of the Indians gained the top of the defence, but only to be beaten back by the butt-ends of the men's fire-locks, all save two who dropped over in our midst, and fought desperately for a ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... this week is of a unique and handsome piece of Chippendale work. The outline is elegant, and the scrollings delicate. The pedestals are peculiar in their form, the panels being carved in draperies, etc. In the frieze are two drawers, with grotesque heads forming the handles. The back is fitted with shaped glass and surmounted by an eagle. The whole forms a very characteristic piece of work of the period, having been made about 1760-1770. As our readers are aware, Thomas Chippendale published his book of designs ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... night to sleep as she and Bill had slept, with her face bared to the stars. She would draw her bed a little aside from the camp fire and from the low seclusion of a thicket lie watching the nimble flames at their merry dance, smiling lazily at the grotesque shadows cast by Jake and his frau as they moved about the blaze. And she would wake in the morning clear-headed, alert, grateful for the pleasant woodland smells arising wholesomely from the fecund bosom of ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... with his face daubed with grease and wine lees, sometimes swallowed up in a grotesque mask. A wretched, cracked earthen cup, or an old wooden shoe, hanging by a string to his belt, he uses to ask alms in the shape of wine. No one refuses him, and he pretends to drink, then pours the wine on the ground by way of libation. At every step, he falls and rolls in the ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... another itinerant, a preacher, Eliakim Abbott, drawn after the fashion of that crude grotesque which is found in Hawthorne's early work, and is not without a reminiscence of Scott in the literary handling; and the two become fellows of the road, the one with a sermon, the other with a story, and their fortune with their audiences is related. The only adventure of note, ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... winter season in the front line trenches was a grotesque figure. His head was crowned with a helmet covered with khaki because the glint of steel would advertise his whereabouts. Beneath the helmet he wore a close fitting woolen cap pulled down tightly around his ears and ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... temptations of egotism and petulance, and least subjected to anything above them,—academics, artists, litterateurs, strong-minded women, 'debating' youths, Scotchmen of the phrenological grade, and Irishmen of the young-Ireland school."[164] There are very many beside this grotesque group, who exclaim, with one of his warmest admirers, "Carlyle is my religion!" There are others again who say gratefully what John Sterling wrote him in his last brief letter, "Towards me it is still more true than ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... were, at the close of the eighteenth century, curtailed and falsified; how, in most minds, simple verbal reasoning combined them together in dogmas and axioms; what an offspring these metaphysical simulacra gave birth to, how many lifeless and grotesque abortions, how many monstrous and destructive chimeras. There is no place for any of these fanciful dreams in the mind of Bonaparte; they cannot arise in it, nor find access to it; his aversion to the unsubstantial phantoms of political abstraction extends beyond disdain, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... with something deeper than even his own joy. Just as the fantastic figure of Rebekah had disappeared into the kitchen, the groomsman touched Martin's arm gently, and whispered, "Look at McIntyre!" The bridegroom turned; his grave, silent friend had been watching the grotesque little creature with a smile slowly breaking over his face, and when Tim arose, with a yell, and bounded after her, John McIntyre threw back his head and laughed. Yes, the repellant, dark-faced watchman laughed, a deep, hearty, joyous ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... towards the blue dome of the sky, crashed in a rugged, dusty heap of stone, brick, cement and mortar. The steel framework, like the skeleton of some prehistoric monster, still reared to dizzy heights but in a bent and twisted shape of grotesque outline. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... ghost—flowers born of moonlight?) Pure Feeling lacks in REASON, needing values, And, lacking so, fills Eye of Soul with fantasies, With wild distortions of imagination's lust. (Who loves the fire—hued, smoke blooms of Hell's Land?) And always Fear feeds Feeling's grotesque growths Till Soul's Eye on its own creation looks As on eternal Truth. Then Truth and Nature, Deity and Man Evolve dread enmity and horrors multiple, And Soul flees terror-stricken on ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... (Fig. 250) is built in the manner shown by Figs. 171, 172, and 173, but in the present instance the ridge-pole is a log which is allowed to extend some distance beyond the house both in front and rear, and the front end of the ridge-pole is carved in the shape of a grotesque or comical animal's head like those we see on totem-poles. The roof is made of shakes (see Figs. 126 to 130) and the shakes are held in place by poles pegged onto the roof in much the same manner as we have described ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... polishes words until they glitter with beauty, charging them with fulminating meaning—straightway he is called mad by men who sweat and toil on the stock exchange. Have you ever, my dear Quell, watched those little, grotesque brokers on a busy day? No? Well, you will say that no lunatic grimacing beneath the horns of the moon ever made such ludicrous, such useless, gestures. And for what? Money! Money to spend as idiotically as it ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... wedding day dawned fresh and cloudless, and from remote valleys and coves a procession of saddled mounts, ox-carts, and foot travellers, grotesque in their oddly conceived raiment of festivity, set toward the house at the river's bend. They came to look at the bride, whose beauty was a matter of local fame, and for their first inquisitive scrutiny of the stranger who had wooed with such interest-provoking dispatch and upon whom, ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... to convey a correct idea of the beauty, the magnificence, of some of the scenes through which we passed. Sometimes thousands of the most grotesque, fanciful, and beautiful icebergs and icefields surrounded us on all sides, intersected by numerous serpentine canals, which glittered in the sun (for the weather was fine nearly all the time we were in the straits), like threads of silver twining round ruined palaces of crystal. The ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... Madame, and I worked for another half hour, and went through like ladies to see a sight which enchanted us. A most magnificent cavern, cool and dark, though some light penetrated in from above somewhere, the ground was covered with fine dry sand, the numerous grotesque shapes and oddities all around the cavern seemed almost made on purpose for little private habitations and snug corners. It was so large in size that it had nothing of the musty feeling of the little ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... individuals live; recipes for their passions, their good and bad propensities, insofar as such have the Will to Power and would like to play the master; small and great expediencies and elaborations, permeated with the musty odour of old family medicines and old-wife wisdom; all of them grotesque and absurd in their form—because they address themselves to "all," because they generalize where generalization is not authorized; all of them speaking unconditionally, and taking themselves unconditionally; all of them ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... faith. They discarded for ever all the old tales of sorcery and witchcraft, and communion with the devil. They said there were no such horrid, unnatural, and disgusting beings as the incubi and succubi, and the innumerable grotesque imps that men had believed in for so many ages. Man was not surrounded with enemies like these, but with myriads of beautiful and beneficent beings, all anxious to do him service. The air was peopled with sylphs, the water with undines or naiads, the bowels of the earth with gnomes, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... story, Robert himself was rather a grotesque-looking animal, very tall and lanky, with especially long arms, which excess of length they retained after he was full-grown. In this respect Shargar and he were alike; but the long legs of Shargar were unmatched in Robert, for at ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... whose bold license the ancient chronicler records, were rarely seen alone. They haunted parties of pomp and pleasure; they linked together the extremes of life,—the grotesque Chorus that introduced the terrible truth of foul vice and abandoned wretchedness in the midst of the world's holiday and pageant. So now, as they wheeled into the silent, squalid street, they heralded a goodly company of dames and cavaliers on horseback, who were passing through the neighbouring ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... temples rarely offer much of interest; the construction is usually simple and their treasures are few, but everything is freely shown, there are no dark corners, and the spacious courts gay with flowers are full of charm. The sacred images which they contain are generally grotesque or hideous. Not often does one show a trace of the gracious serenity that marks the traditional representations of Buddha; on the other ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... be saluted, and speak with intervals of musettes on the organ? It would suit Renan at least; and surely this, which is so venerable and sanctioned by time in our eyes, would have seemed quite as odd and grotesque a thing ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... Spaniard or Greek. He wore a species of caftan, a silk bonnet, and the extremities of his breeches were concealed in a pair of wide boots. In his left hand he held a parasol, and in his right the end of a cord, to which was attached a graceful Albanian greyhound.... Cagliostro saluted this grotesque being, who bowed slightly, but with satisfied dignity. 'You do not reside in Messina, signor?' he said in Sicilian, but with a marked foreign accent. Cagliostro replied that he was tarrying for a few days, and they began to converse on the beauty of the ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... Kingdom, how much more would the misuse of the same food in a semi-tropical climate like Australia be disapproved of! Indeed, I am perfectly certain, that were those who have given attention to food and dietetics in possession of the facts, they would unhesitatingly condemn the grotesque inversion of food-habits at present in vogue throughout Australia. There is one very important matter which unquestionably requires to have special attention drawn to it. I refer to the customary Australian mid-day meal. Strange to say, all through the hot season, as well as the rest ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... vegetables: their guns supplied them with an abundance of meat, of a flavor as delicious as the refined palate of a modern epicure could well wish. Their clothes were made chiefly of the skins of animals, and were easily procured: and although calculated to give a grotesque appearance to a fine gentleman in a city drawing room; yet were they particularly suited to their ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... way I discovered many little dead birds, and the farther I went the more I found. Among the low bushes were also many old rabihorcados, dead and dry. Some were twisted among the network of branches, and several were hanging in limp, grotesque, horribly suggestive attitudes of death. Manuel had all of the Indian's leaning toward the mystical, and he believed the rabihorcados had destroyed themselves. Starved they may very well have been, but to me the gales of that wind-swept, ocean desert accounted for the hanging rabihorcados. ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... was of rough-hewn red sandstone, combining solid dignity and some artistic merit, for Benham had not stood still architecturally speaking. The River Drive was a grotesque, yet on the whole encouraging exhibit. Most of the residences had been designed by native talent, but under the spur of experiment even the plain, hard-headed builders had been constrained to dub themselves "architects," and adopt modern methods; and here and there stood evidences ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... presented of the Irish priest as a money-grabbing martinet, whom his flock regard with mingled sentiments of detestation and fear, is a caricature as libellous as it is grotesque. Even the high standard of sexual morality which prevails in the country is attacked as being merely the result of early marriages, inculcated by a priesthood thirsting for marriage fees, and virtue itself is in this way ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... is the fine art debased in the temples, in these ponderous monuments of their officialism; for here and there in them you see exquisite bits of low relief carving, that a Greek would have been proud of, hidden away in interminable hieroglyphic histories spread indiscriminately over grotesque pillars and vast walls, as regardlessly of decorative effect as advertisements in a newspaper's columns. The open desert is the best of Egypt, and this thread of blue canal strung with lakes through its sand is very ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... singing the first verse, "I ac' monkey moshuns," the one in the middle would screw up his face and hump his shoulders in the most grotesque ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... after-thoughts of life, without the troublous completeness of the many-sided world? Is not Shakespeare, for this reason, our refuge? Fortunately unreal is his world when he will have it so; and there we may laugh with open heart at a grotesque man: without misgiving, without remorse, without reluctance. If great creating Nature has not assumed for herself she has assuredly secured to the great creating poet the right of partiality, of limitation, ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... least subjected to anything above them,—academics, artists, litterateurs, strong-minded women, 'debating' youths, Scotchmen of the phrenological grade, and Irishmen of the young-Ireland school."[164] There are very many beside this grotesque group, who exclaim, with one of his warmest admirers, "Carlyle is my religion!" There are others again who say gratefully what John Sterling wrote him in his last brief letter, "Towards me it is still more true than towards England that no ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... table with a lamp on it, surrounded by a circle of children, or of nephews and nieces, who nudge each other and point to their father or uncle, whispering, "Hush—he's asleep;"—and laughing at the grotesque expression that sleep has given ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... himself, boasting and throwing out his chest. "I'd like to have the chance to show what I can do," he declared. A thought that had been in his mind on the winter day when Uncle Charlie Wheeler put the name of Beaut upon him came back and he walked up and down before the woman making grotesque motions with his hands as Cracked McGregor had walked up and down ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... fell from her hand, and the omelette rolled, a grotesque mass, upon the carpet. She swayed, dizzily, raising one hand to her brow, but had recovered herself even as Leroux sprang forward ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... a great rock jutted out above the lake, that same barren rock wherein I had sat the day I discovered this cataract; now as I viewed this rock I was struck by its grotesque shape and then, all at once, I saw it was hatefully like to a shrivelled head—there were the fleshless jaws, the shrunken nose and great, hollow eye-socket. And now even as I stared at the thing my companion spied it also, for I felt ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... of this anti-climax to martyrdom was too grotesque. Eileen burst into a peal of laughter, which was taken by her mother as a tribute to her lively vituperation. Decidedly, life was deliciously odd. Suddenly she remembered her posted letter to ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... time referring to my planisphere, endeavored to distinguish the various constellations. I think I have before observed that our garden was on a terrace, and lay open to the road. One night, some country people passing very late, saw me in a most grotesque habit, busily employed in these observations: the light, which struck directly on the planisphere, proceeding from a cause they could not divine (the candle being concealed by the sides of the pail), the four stakes supporting a large paper, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... consists in covering the whole tusk with a succession of boldly carved grotesque figures—human, animal, and symbolic—giving the tusk a rich embroidered-like look, the thick ends being finished off with a suitable diamond pattern belt and the tip finished with an equally appropriate series of carvings ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... is most beautiful as well. You are, in effect, at the bottom of the ocean—or rather, at the bottom of many oceans in one. No light comes to you except through the grottos about you—grottos haunted by weird forms of the deep, from graceful to grotesque, from almost colorless to gaudy-hued. To your dilated pupils the light itself has the weird glow of unreality. It is all like the wonders of the Arabian Nights made tangible or like a strange spectacular dream. If one were in a great diving-bell at the bottom of the veritable ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... States, and that everything east of Chicago was negligible and even misleading. And when I entered Indianapolis I discovered that Chicago was a mushroom and a suburb of Warsaw, and that its pretension to represent the United States was grotesque, the authentic center of the United States being obviously Indianapolis.... The great towns love thus to affront one another, and their demeanor in the game resembles the gamboling of young tigers—it is half playful and half ferocious. For myself, I have to say that my heart was ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... for the future, it is absolutely necessary that these funds should be utilized again for the advancement of learning. Why should not a fellowship be made into a career for life, beginning with little, but rising like the incomes of other professions? Why should the grotesque condition of celibacy be imposed on a fellowship, instead of the really salutary condition of—No work, no pay? Why should not some special literary or scientific work be assigned to each fellow, whether resident in Oxford or sent abroad on scientific missions? Why, instead ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... seemed to be a plumber's wooden triangle. This preliminary operation having been completed, there then began a regular riot all over the ship. The yards were suddenly manned with red devils, black monkeys, and every kind of grotesque monster, while the whole ship's company, officers and men promiscuously mingled, danced the cancan upon deck. In order that the warmth of the day should not make us forget that we had arrived in his dominions, the Arctic father had stationed certain ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... but if at last a man snatched his hand from Satan, and prayed to the Lord Jesus, he went directly, took the book, found the name, and passed the "red hand" over the page; on seeing which Satan would stamp and cry. He gave very grotesque descriptions of the evil spirit's mortification, and always ended by bestowing on him a hearty kick. From seeing the effect, in point of watchfulness, prayer, and zeal, produced on this young Christian by such continual realization of the presence of the great tempter, I have ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... the trees stalked the giant Abyssinian, and the shadows and torchlight distorted him to grotesque proportions. He walked as if his weight was nothing; yet on his great shoulders he bore a half-grown ox, its feet hobbled, its tongue hanging from its panting mouth. Straight to the fire he stepped and cast his burden down, turning again without a word and ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... IV. took place on the 8th of September. The ceremony was shorn of the grotesque pageantry of chivalric times, and was confined to the interior of the abbey. The royal procession moved in state carriages from St. James's Palace, and was escorted by the cavalry. His majesty was saluted with ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... spoke his voice grew cheery, his old face shone, and in a burst of hearty enthusiasm he flung up his cap and cheered like a boy. So did the others, and as the fairy shout echoed through the belfry a troop of shadowy figures, with faces lovely or grotesque, tragical or gay, sailed by on the wings of the wintry wind and waved their hands to ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... fuel to the fire of my unrest. My wearied body and overstrained mind awakened all my imagination into preternatural activity. Ideas, visions, almost inspirations, floated before it with startling vividness. Most of them were grotesque enough, some were ghastly, some recalled thoughts and sensations that had for years been buried in the debris of my past life. But, behind and above them all, hovered the shape of that awful woman, and through them gleamed the memory of her entrancing ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... controversies, menus, recipes, priestly prescriptions, the canonical books, psalms, love-poems, an undigested hotch-potch of exalted and questionable sentiments, of communal and egoistic aspirations of the highest order. It was a wonderful liturgy, as grotesque as it was beautiful—like an old cathedral in all styles of architecture, stored with shabby antiquities and side-shows and overgrown with moss and lichen—a heterogeneous blend of historical strata of all periods, in which gems of poetry and pathos and spiritual fervor glittered and pitiful ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of the great temple of Denderah, some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled. .. Nor must there be omitted another strange ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... difficult by wives who wouldn't allow them the use of the living female model and who made scenes if they encountered on the staircase such sources of inspiration. These ladies struck him as vulgar and odious persons, with whom it seemed grotesque that Julia should have anything in common. Of course she was not his wife yet, and of course if she were he should have washed his hands of every form of activity requiring the services of the sitter; but even these qualifications left him with a power to wince at the way in ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... from Mother has more power to calm him than anything we could do with our whole hearts? But how can he! I can't understand it! I can't bear it, to come in on him and Cousin Parnelia, in their evenings, and see them bent over that grotesque planchette and have him look up at me so defiantly, as though he were just setting his teeth and saying he wouldn't care what I thought of him. He doesn't really care either. He doesn't think of anything but ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... privileges; that at the same time they brought her great fame and influence; that she was at times haunted by doubts whether she ever really saw them; and, lastly, that her biographers have given them a more grotesque and materialistic character than is justified ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... Sunday afternoon. Bluebell was on her way to the Maples, and had not proceeded far when she observed a Robinson Crusoe-looking figure in one of those grotesque fur caps and impossible hooded blankets that the fashionable Briton in Canada so fondly affects. She was speculating idly upon ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... p. 241). Probably the sculptures were like many still to be seen in the temples of that date in Southern India, where the base of the pillar is elaborately carved with grotesque figures of elephants, horses, ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... Generally these beasts frequent thin brush country; but I have three or four times seen them quite out in the open flat plains, feeding with the hartebeeste and zebra. They are about the size of our ordinary deer, are delicately fashioned, and can utter the most incongruously grotesque of noises by way ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... which is heard to play in this cheerful fashion, while at the same time we know that discomfiture is cruelly harrying it: that its inmost feelings are wounded, and that worse is in store for it, affects the contemplative mind with an inexpressibly grotesque commiseration. Do but listen to this one, which is the joint corporate voice of the men of Hillford. Outgeneraled, plundered, turned to ridicule, it thumps with unabated briskness. Here indeed might Sentimentalism shed a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... be seen by the musicians, but could hear them at her ease. At length, enchanted at a piece which they had just played, she abruptly thrust her head beyond the curtains, and cried out, "Mort diable! but they sing delightfully!" At this grotesque sight, the Italians, and particularly the castrati, who are not the bravest men in the world, were so frightened that they were ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... the bottom and hung over his feet like huge bags, his long, thin, arms showed, half way to his elbows, in a coat that was too small to button about even his narrow chest. That boy never missed his lessons, though, but when he learned them no one ever knew for he seemed to be always drawing grotesque figures and funny faces on his slate or whittling slyly on some curious toy when the teacher's back was turned. He had no particular chum or crony. He was never a leader but dared to follow the boldest. To the little boys and girls he was a hero; to ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... of the newest style, the varnished panels of which reflect the whole moving panorama of the landscape, and show a picture, likewise, of our friend, with his visage broadened, so that his meditative smile is transformed to grotesque merriment. Within, sits a youth, fresh as the summer morn, and beside him a young lady in white, with white gloves upon her slender bands, and a white veil flowing down over her face. But methinks her blushing cheek burns ...
— The Toll Gatherer's Day (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... these treacherous invaders is absolutely touching in the light of our subsequent knowledge. They reared no sacred temples, nor did they seem to worship idols, and yet some few antiquities have been preserved which would seem to indicate that the natives possessed grotesque images, half human and half animal, like Chinese gods in effect. These were wrought so rudely out of stone as hardly to convey any fixed idea; vague and imperfect, it is not safe to define them as idolatrous images. They might ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... the vigour and audacity of the Mantis will lead it. They include the large grey cricket (Pachytylus cinerascens, Fab.), which is larger than the creature which devours it; the white-faced Decticus, armed with powerful mandibles from which it is wise to guard one's fingers; the grotesque Truxalis, wearing a pyramidal mitre on its head; and the Ephippigera of the vineyards, which clashes its cymbals and carries a sabre at the end of its barrel-shaped abdomen. To this assortment of disobliging creatures let us add two horrors: the silky Epeirus, ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... might easily be rendered impregnable; it commands both the town and harbour. The place itself deserves little notice; the houses are mean, and interspersed with negro huts, but there is one fine church, with several tolerable paintings in it. One struck me as especially grotesque, although I had often seen queer things in Roman Catholic churches in Europe. It was a representation of Hell, with Old Nicholas, under the guise of a dragon, entertaining himself with the soul of an unfortunate heretic in his claws, who certainly ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... moment the big doors of the shed were thrown open, and Mr. Sharp came in. He started back in astonishment at the sight of the three grotesque figures, their faces black with the soot, and their clothes covered with sawdust and ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... up with Italians, is a painful necessity in order that the people of America may be enabled accurately to measure the fatherland traditions and the fixed mental attitude of Italians generally toward our song birds. I shall now hold a mirror up to Italian nature. If the image is either hideous or grotesque, the fault will not be mine. I specially commend the picture to the notice of American game wardens and judges on ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... discarded for ever all the old tales of sorcery and witchcraft, and communion with the devil. They said there were no such horrid, unnatural, and disgusting beings as the incubi and succubi, and the innumerable grotesque imps that men had believed in for so many ages. Man was not surrounded with enemies like these, but with myriads of beautiful and beneficent beings, all anxious to do him service. The air was peopled with sylphs, the water with undines ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... innocence, and by the time I had got back to Bly with him I remained merely bewildered—so far, that is, as I was not outraged—by the sense of the horrible letter locked up in my room, in a drawer. As soon as I could compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I declared to her that it was grotesque. ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... the principles peculiar to French traffic; it had all at once assumed the aspect of dramatic complication. It had only been necessary for us to stop on our lounging stroll along the stone wharves, diverting our gaze for a moment from the grotesque assortment of old houses that, before now, had looked down on so many naval engagements, and innocently to ask a brief question of a nautical gentleman, picturesquely attired in a blue shirt and a scarlet beret, for the quays immediately to swarm with jerseys ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... charge of the stupendous task of organizing Egypt, a work that would tax the powers of a Caesar. The romantic poet lost his head. Wine-inspired orations that delighted his guests, portrait busts of himself in every town, grotesque catalogues of campaigns against unheard-of negro tribes inscribed even on the venerable pyramids did not accord with the traditions of Rome. Octavian cut his career short, and in deep chagrin Gallus ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... exposed to the full sweep of the Atlantic storm! She set him off upon his own scenery, to the destruction of his laborious English, as he dwelt on the glories of his beloved rocks rent by fierce sea winds and waves into fantastic, grotesque, or lovely shapes, with fiords of exquisite blue sea between, the variety of which had been to him as the gentle foliage of tamer countries. Not a tree stood near the 'town' of Ballymakilty, but the wild crags, the sparkling waters, the broad open hills, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fancy, be transformed Into fleet Oreads sporting visibly. The Zephyrs, fanning, as they passed, their wings, Lacked not for love fair objects whom they wooed With gentle whisper. Withered boughs grotesque, Stripped of their leaves and twigs by hoary age, From depth of shaggy covert peeping forth In the low vale, or on steep mountain side; And sometimes intermixed with stirring horns Of the live deer, or goat's depending beard; These were the lurking ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... being set about two thirds up, instead of at half the height of the head. But his manner of work is always right; and his tragic power, though rarely developed, and warped by habits of caricature, is, in reality, as great as his grotesque power. ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... whiteness, showing mistily, was the snowy flock itself. Sheep grazed in groups, the tan shaded slope in faint colouring beneath them. Here and there a mother turned her head to call back anxiously for the bleating lambkin lost behind the white curtain; and, dim and grotesque, the awkward strayling would come gamboling into sight. Near by on a little hillock, a single sheep stood with its head thrown up, a ghostly lookout. The hidden sun made the haze faintly luminous about this wandering flock of cloudland. We were not the first to move ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... pretty picture that night lighted by pumpkin Jack o' Lanterns in which electric bulbs had been hidden, and by grotesque paper lanterns representing bats, owls and all sorts of flying nocturnal creatures. The side walls had been covered with gorgeous autumn foliage, palms and potted rubber plants stood all about, and last, but by no means least, there was a long table laden with goodies and more pumpkin decorations. ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... reality there are, not a great way off. These, or something closely resembling them. No satyrs could show in more grotesque guise than the forms at that moment moving up to the wall, on ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... men thereupon witnessed a feat that was not only deadly in its precision but oddly grotesque. Cunningham's right hand flew out with the sinister quickness of a cobra's strike, and he had Flint's brawny wrist in grip. He danced about, twisted and lurched until he came to an abrupt stop behind Flint's back. Flint's mouth began to bend at ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... l'Encuerado. When he caught sight of us, the Indian raised a loud "Hiou! hiou!" Waving his hat in the air, he threw upon the ground some dark object, which fell heavily on the turf, and then he began dancing. We roared with laughter at his grotesque steps, and Lucien ran towards the Mistec, who, after his dance, was acting the acrobat ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... reckoned the inhabitants at many thousands; he was but newly dead, and in the same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his fingers eight residual natives. Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to readers of Herman Melville under the grotesque misspelling of Hapar. There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must have been neglected: 'He shall be able ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... half way through the hatchway, looking back, still astonished beyond measure at the grotesque ugliness of this black-faced creature. I had never beheld such a repulsive and extraordinary face before, and yet—if the contradiction is credible—I experienced at the same time an odd feeling that in some way I had already encountered exactly the ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... towers, old belfries, old crosses, slender spires innumerable, rose up amid a world of quaint gables and angular roofs. Story above story sprang those curious dwellings; irregular yet homogeneous; dear to the painter's and the poet's eye; elaborate in ornament; grotesque in design; well suited to the climate, and admirably adapted to the wants and comforts of the inhabitants; picturesque like the age itself, like its costume, its manners, its literature. All these characteristic beauties and peculiarities are now utterly gone. All the old picturesque ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... mere question of fun it is no doubt amusing only to people who are ready to be amused. And yet there is a quaint fascination in it as a whole, in the rows of old women with demure little children in their laps ranged on the stone seats along the bridge, the girls on the pavement, the grotesque figures dancing along the road, the harlequins, the mimic Capuchins, the dominoes with big noses, the carriages rolling along amidst a fire of sugarplums, the boys darting in and out and smothering ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... excess of the fantastic to pretend that all those glittering balls, those coloured candles and those variegated parcels are the blossoms of the absurd tree! How excessively grotesque to tie all those parcels to the branches, in order to take them off again! Surely, something less medieval, more ingenious, more modern than this could be devised—if symbolism is to be indulged ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... slightly bewildered by something in her attitude, sighed with relief, and then turned with the grotesque resemblance of a smile in his face to greet Forel, ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... mountain-green, containing long crystals of vitreous feldspar, appears exposed. It is the real porphyrschiefer of Werner; and it would be difficult to distinguish, in a collection of stones, the phonolite of Parapara from that of Bilin, in Bohemia. It does not, however, here form rocks in grotesque shapes, but little hills covered with tabular blocks, large plates extremely sonorous, translucid on the edges, and ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... contributed of its produce to the pot-au-feu. An old black cat was sitting as close to the fire as he could without singeing his whiskers, and gravely watching the simmering pot with longing eyes. His ears had been closely cropped, and he had not a vestige of a tail, so that he looked like one of those grotesque Japanese chimeras that everybody is familiar with. Upon the table, near at hand, a white plate, a tin drinking cup, and a china dish, bearing the family arms stamped in blue, were neatly arranged, evidently in readiness for somebody's supper. For a long time the cat remained perfectly ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... collapsed in her chair, a slim, gray-faced girl with the rouge giving a grotesque vitality to her bloodless cheeks. She got up very calmly and gave him the cablegram. Then she fainted in a ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... crashing roof, and clatt'ring grate, And hurling wall, and falling spire, Mingle in jarring din and ruin dire. Wild ruin scours the works of men; Their motly fragments strew the plain. E'en in the desert's pathless waste, Uncouth destruction marks the blast: And hollow caves whose secret pride, Grotesque and grand, was never ey'd By mortal man, abide its drift, Of many a goodly pillar reft. Fierce whirling mounts the desert sand, And threats aloft the peopl'd land. The great expanded ocean, heaving ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... materials for romance in England? Must we look to Scotland for a supply of whatever is original and striking in this kind?" And we answer—"Yes!" Every foot of soil is with us worked up: nearly every movement of the social machine is calculable. We have no room left for violent catastrophes; for grotesque quaintnesses; for wizard spells. The last skirts of ignorance and barbarism are seen hovering (in Sir Walter's pages) over the Border. We have, it is true, gipsies in this country as well as at the Cairn of Derncleugh: but they live under clipped hedges, and repose in ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... grass, was on his hands and knees, searching. He accomplished a complete circuit of the body, his round-shouldered, stooping figure making grotesque, elephantine shadows under the light of the torch as he moved about slowly, not trusting his eyes, but feeling with his hands every inch ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... annual of the year 1845. The copper-plate engravings of lovely ladies, who had flourished in that day, were yellow and spotted with mildew; the costumes grotesque and outlandish; the simpering beauties faded and commonplace. Even the little clusters of verses (in which the poet's feeble candle shed its sickly light upon the obscurities of the artist's meaning) ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... his shoulder. "Steady, Randall," he muttered. "They're terrible enough, God knows—but remember we must seem just as grotesque to them." ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... and to the border comes Of Eden, where delicious Paradise, Now nearer, crowns with her enclosure green, As with a rural mound, the champain head Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, Access denied; and overhead upgrew Insuperable highth of loftiest shade, Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm, A sylvan scene, and, as the ranks ascend, Shade above shade, a woody theatre Of stateliest view. Yet ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... took something wizard-like and mystical from the large spectacles through which they shone; a mouth round which played an ironical smile, and in which a physiognomist would have remarked singular shrewdness, and some closeness, complete the picture. Imagine this figure, grotesque, peregrinate, and to the eye of a peasant certainly diabolical; then perch it on the stile in the midst of those green English fields, and in sight of that primitive English village; there let it sit straddling, its long legs dangling down, a short German pipe emitting ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cocked her head to one side, extended a satin-clad foot, threw out her hands with fingers extended, and struck a grotesque pose. "Turn—and behold!" she ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... and thick with grease, stretched over a small round body, that contrasted strangely with his lean and bony face. And all this formed a jovial, grotesque and ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... with that stare of idiotic wonder peculiar to the humbler classes of countries called civilised. We managed to withstand the ordeal of their scrutiny with an assumed air of true savage indifference. Not without an effort, however: since it was difficult to resist laughing at the grotesque exclamations and speeches, which our appearance and movements elicited from these wondering yokels. We were cautious not to notice their remarks—appearing as if we understood them not. Peg-leg, by the aid of his Anglo-American jargon—picked up ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... I found out from my men that so great was the horror of the place, that even smugglers, when hard pressed, have been known to risk capture rather than put in to the island; and on my inquiring the cause of these rumours, they gave me various vague and grotesque stories about dead men and women, and a figure which sat on the seaward cape and wept, with long hair drooping all over her; and, worst of all, of two boys, dressed in an antique dress, whom to see was certain disaster, and to ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... imposing cheminee advancing far into the floor, a high, fantastic structure also of black oak like the panelling of the room, but overrun with chains of black rats, carved and combined with a wild diablerie, and lit by numerous lights in branching ironwork. The dim grotesque shapes of the pictures, the gesticulating, shouting crowd in front of them, the mediaevalism of the room and of that strange sign dangling outside: these things took the English lad's excited fancy and he pressed his way in behind his ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... creature, this little Maya of his. She had been born on Mars and, orphaned by some unknown disaster, had been cared for during her first years by the mysterious, grotesque native Martians. When they took her at last to one of the dome cities, she was sent to Earth for rearing. And now she was back on Mars as an undercover agent of the Earth government, seeking to ferret out the rebels known to be engaging ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... art should be his privilege, when he has proven his fitness to exercise it, and has otherwise earned his daily bread; and its results should be free to all. There is an instinctive sense of this, even in the midst of the grotesque confusion of our economic being; people feel that there is something profane, something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a statue. Most of all, the artist himself feels this. He puts on a bold front with the world, to be sure, and brazens it out as Business; but he knows ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... you." They felt his coldness. Conversation halted when he came near and made him feel that he was the subject of their talk. As a matter of fact, he generally was. He was a source of great speculation with them. Some of them had gone so far as to bet he wouldn't live a year. They all seemed grotesque to him, so work-scarred and bent and hairy. Even the men whose names he had known from childhood were queer to him. They seemed shy and distant, too, not like his ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... came to an end at length, and Mrs. Henson rose suddenly. There was a grotesque suggestion of the marionette in the movement. She bowed as if to some imaginary personage and moved with dignity towards the door. Reginald Henson stood aside and opened it for her. She passed into the dim hall as if absolutely unconscious of his presence. Enid flashed a look of defiance at ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... undefinable thing had just gone wrong. And with that, his whole body was suddenly rigid, every muscle locking in mid-motion. He felt momentum topple him slowly forwards; then he was no longer falling but stopped, tilted off-balance at a grotesque angle, suspended in a web of forces he could not feel. Not the slightest sound had come from Kilby, invisible in ...
— The Other Likeness • James H. Schmitz
... Of the two Gitanos one was an elderly man, tall and bony, with lean, skinny, and whimsical features, though perfectly those of a Gypsy; he spoke little, and his expressions were generally singular and grotesque. His companion, who was the man whom I had first noticed in the street, differed from him in many respects; he could be scarcely thirty, and his figure, which was about the middle height, was of Herculean proportions; shaggy black ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... young for a lover, nor particularly mature for a person of affairs. There was reserve in his glance, and restraint upon his mouth. He carried a horn lantern which hung upon a swivel, and wheeling as it dangled marked grotesque shapes upon the shadier part ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... head-dress; the two latter articles, being susceptible of ornamentation, are usually adorned with eagle feathers, foxtails, or a string of sleigh-bells about the player's waist. The men are painted in the most grotesque and fantastic manner. It is not unusual to see some of them painted blue or yellow all over their persons, and before the paint has dried it is streaked with their fingers in zig-zag fashion from head to foot, sometimes up and down and sometimes zebra fashion. A yellow ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... scow has its grotesque features, the sight is a sad one, and we are glad to leave it and pull across the river to Fort McMurray. We call upon Miss Christine Gordon, a young Scottish woman and a free-trader, if you please, ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... true that virile force, preferably with a touch of the brutal, has a high place in the natural woman's heart, none the less does an ideal of male purity, of the masculine subdued to gentle virtues, make strong appeal to the imagination in her sex. To the everyday man, Kite seemed a mere pale grotesque, a creature of flabby foolishness. But Olga Hannaford was not the only girl who had dreamed of devoting her life to him. If she could believe his assurance (and she all but did believe it), for her alone had he felt anything worthy ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... Why grotesque; why amazing? [Sitting in the low-backed arm-chair.] All that is amazing about it is that Philip should lack the superior courage which enables a man, in special circumstances, to sink his ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... to his plane, leaped in, and soared southward. His face was a grotesque mask of madness, and his cries ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... back toward the main street, a grotesque figure with his red-brown hair tumbled over his white, nervous countenance of the pointed chin, with his hooked nose, ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... with such strict attention as the foreign tongue requires, but you miss the neat, well-ordered sanctuary, the picture of family life (for there are no little children present!) and the agreeable array of dress. The flapping, monstrous bloomers tire your eyes, and so do the grotesque, coarse clothes and the tokens of extreme poverty. I grow more and more patriotic every day, and am astonished at what I see and hear ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... slightly elevated, there is placed a "Jinriki-sha," which is the riding vehicle of Japan, a two-wheeled affair resembling our modern dog-cart; it is drawn by a man in costume and seated in it is a woman, also in costume, holding above her and large enough to extend over the table, one of those grotesque paper umbrellas, which are as much a part of that country as its rice and tea. The edges of these are festooned with red and white flowers and hung with the smaller sized, globe shaped lanterns ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... produced a pipe from one pocket, after having drawn a handful of curious small jade figures from another and pushed them along the edge of the study table, without comment, for his friend to look at. Some of them were so finely carved that they looked like a heap of grotesque insects struggling together as they lay there, but though Dr. Leslie's eyes brightened as he glanced at them, he gave no other sign of interest at that time, and answered his ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... copied from the same authentic source as that preceding it, is a somewhat grotesque portraiture of one of the Lancers of the Sultan of Begharmi, described, in an historical and geographical account by a native prince, as an extensive country, containing woods and rivers, and fields fit for cultivation; but now desolated, as the inhabitants say, by the "misconduct of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... Hugo's singular affection for the monster—he had Stephano to justify him, but unfortunately did not possess either the humour of that drunken Neapolitan butler or the power of his and Caliban's creator—had made a mere grotesque of Han, but had been reduced within more artistic limits in Bug. In Le Dernier Jour and Claude Gueux it was excluded by the subjects and objects alike.[99] Here it is, if not an intellectus, at any rate sibi permissus; and, as it does ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... been wrecked and his whole company massacred or drowned on or near Vanikoro. Many natives still living remembered the arrival of the French. Some of them related that they thought those who came on the big ships to be not men but spirits; and such a grotesque bit of description as was given of the peaks of cocked hats exactly expressed the way in which the appearance of the strangers would be likely to appeal to the native imagination:—"There was a projection from their foreheads or ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... time he lay awake, trembling and chattering with nervous chills, and when he did fall asleep it was only to drop into monstrous dreams in which he once again saw ever enacted, with various grotesque variations, the tragic drama which his waking eyes ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... supported the Ionic volute, while the arch, which appeared to spring from these capitals, had, for a keystone, heads more monstrous than those of the fabled animals of Ctesias; or so ludicrous, that you forgot the classic griffin in the grotesque conception of the Italian artist. Here was a gibbering monkey, there a grinning pulcinello; now you viewed a chattering devil, which might have figured in the "Temptation of St. Anthony;" and now a mournful, mystic, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... if the frequency of the swearing prevent its making its proper impression in the right place. And the name "Robert Herrick," bestowed on one of the three beach-loafers, might have been shunned. You may call an ordinary negro "Julius Caesar": for out of such extremes you get the legitimately grotesque. But the Robert Herrick, loose writer of the lovely Hesperides, and the Robert Herrick, shameful haunter of Papeete beach, are not extremes: and it was so very easy to avoid ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... for their great delight, like that of the ogres, is to kill all they meet, and to eat the flesh of those whom they kill. Often they appear as hunters, of monstrous size, with tusks instead of teeth, and with horns on their heads, and all kinds of grotesque and frightful weapons and ornaments. They are very strong, and make themselves stronger by various arts of magic; and they are strongest of all at nightfall, when they are supposed to roam about the jungles, to enter the tombs, and even to make their way into the ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... such—could lawfully and validly perform that function. This, I submit, is not to be construed as an act of liberality on the Church's part. It is simply the result of the impasse to which it would otherwise be brought by the grotesque teaching that the Deity would condemn everlastingly the soul of an unbaptised infant. This, according to Augustine, being the Christian religion, naturally some loophole had to be fabricated, because priests are not always at hand in ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... were over Bacon found on what terms he must stand with Buckingham. By a strange fatality, quite unintentionally, he became dragged into the thick of the scandalous and grotesque dissensions of the Coke family. The Court was away from London in the North; and Coke had been trying, not without hope of success, to recover the King's favour. Coke was a rich man, and Lady Compton, the mother of the ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... the Hun-agents and Hun-lovers in our midst have made us only too sickenly familiar. This monstrous parody of divine compassion is escorted to that headquarters of Pro-Germanism and red revolution, the Labor Temple, and there performs, in the presence of moving picture cameras, a grotesque parody upon the laying on of hands and the healing of the sick. The 'Times' presents a photograph of this incredible infamy. We apologize to our readers for thus aiding the designs of cunning publicity-seekers, but there is no other ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... an old maid. When she had opened her blinds with the furtive motion of the bat, she looked in all directions, but saw nothing, and only heard, faintly, the flying footfalls of the lad. Can there be anything more dreadful than the matutinal apparition of an ugly old maid at her window? Of all the grotesque sights which amuse the eyes of travellers in country towns, that is the most unpleasant. It is too repulsive to laugh at. This particular old maid, whose ear was so keen, was denuded of all the adventitious aids, of whatever kind, which she employed as embellishments; ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... cow's horns upon her head, and on the left side by a nome goddess, bearing upon her head the jackal-symbol of her nome. (b) The Ecuador Aphrodite. Bas-relief from Cerro-Jaboncillo (after Saville, "Antiquities of Manabi, Ecuador," Preliminary Report, 1907, Plate XXXVIII). A grotesque composite monster intended to represent a woman (compare Saville's Plates XXXV, XXXVI, and XXXIX), whose head is a conventionalized Octopus, whose body is a Loligo, and whose ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... goblins they were represented sometimes under very grotesque forms. There is a bronze figure of one found at Herculaneum, and figured in the Antiquites d'Herculanum, plate xvii. vol. viii., which represents a little old man sitting on the ground with his knees up to his chin, a huge head, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... a story of fears, suppressions, monstrous imaginations, symbolic replacements. I don't remember much of that sort of thing in my own case. It may have faded out of my mind. There were probably some uneasy curiosities, a grotesque dream or so perhaps; I can't recall anything of that sort distinctly now. I had a very lively interest in women, even when I was still quite a little boy, and a certain—what shall I call it?—imaginative slavishness—not towards ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... wet!" grumbled Fred, as he followed the lanthorn, watching their grotesque shadows on the wall, the flashing of the light on the water, and the glimmering on the ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... just on that he counted to subdue you; keep this carefully in your mind; in order to let you give him an easy throw, he will present you at need grotesque arguments, and so soon as he sees you confident, simply satisfied with the excellence of your replies, he will involve you in sophisms so specious that you will fight in vain ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... the scene was too much for him. Had he continued to look he would have burst uncontrollably into tears. It mattered not that the corpse of a common rascally valet lay under that pall; it mattered not that a grotesque error was being enacted; it mattered not whether the actuating spring of the immense affair was the Dean's water-colouring niece or the solemn deliberations of the Chapter; it mattered not that newspapers had ignobly misused the ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... only at the foot of his own table, after ladling out and serving around the stewed oysters "hot and hot," that the commodore, rubbing his hands, and smiling until his great face was as grotesque as a nutcracker's, announced that Miss Nancy Skamp was turned out of office—yea, discrowned, unsceptred, dethroned, and that Harry Barnwell reigned in her stead. The news had come in that evening's mail! All present ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... torture, mesmerism, and revengeful cruelty; tales of weird beauty; allegories of conscience; narratives of pseudo-science; stories of analytical reasoning; descriptions of beautiful landscapes; and what are usually termed "prose poems." He also wrote tales grotesque, humorous, and satirical, most of which are failures. The earlier tales are predominantly imaginative and emotional; most of the later ones are predominantly intellectual. None of the tales touches ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... was abundantly cheered too when he rose from the piano; for the music was quaint and original with a sort of unholy, grotesque pathos running through ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... an exploring expedition, in the keeper's jolly-boat. It was only a short distance to the first island, a small rocky one, with a bit of sandy beach, along which were scattered the charred embers of past fires. From under our feet darted the grotesque little robber-crabs, with their stolen shell houses on their backs. A great white jellyfish, looking like a big tapioca pudding, had been washed up with the tide out of the reach of the sea, and a small colony ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... question had received some approach to a solution. There are always men hide-bound by convention and unwilling to move hand or foot in aid of a remedial measure, who are yet profoundly grateful to the agitator whom they revile, and profoundly thankful that the antics which they deem grotesque, have saved themselves from responsibility and their country from ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... walls, as always, an offence to the eye; big texts seemed to squirm, like semi-paralysed eels, over the chancel arch and round the East window. The latter, off which Jimmy could hardly take his eyes, was a veritable triumph of the Victorian tradition. Its colouring was gruesome, its design grotesque; and yet it was a source of great pride to the congregation as a whole, having been put in to the memory of a banker who had left nearly a million. They no more dreamed of doubting its artistic merits than they did of questioning ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... octagonal stone pavilion was put up in A.D. 1826 over the Minar by Major Smith, of the Engineers, who had the superintendence of the repairs of the Kutb, but it was taken down by the order of Government' (Harcourt, The New Guide to Delhi, p. 123). This 'grotesque ornament' was removed in 1848 by order of Lord Hardinge, and bereft of its wooden pavilion, which had carried a flag-staff (Carr Stephen, p. 64; Fanshawe, p. 266). It has now been moved farther ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... here in a social capacity to discuss personal matters," said Eveley coldly. "I told you yesterday that my home is saddened by the grotesque figure of maladjustment stalking in our midst under his usual guise of Duty. As I have explained so many times, there is bound to be a happy adjustment. But this time I can not figure it out. Now I ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... flattened. Clustered pillars. Windows and doors square-headed with perpendicular lines. Grotesque ornament. (The last fifty years of the sixteenth century were characterized by a debased Gothic style with Italian details in the churches and a beauty and magnificence in domestic architecture which has never since ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... which are always liable to break out: the animated comparisons of the degradation of philosophy by the arts to the dishonoured maiden, and of the tyrant to the parricide, who 'beats his father, having first taken away his arms': the dog, who is your only philosopher: the grotesque and rather paltry image of the argument wandering about without a head (Laws), which is repeated, not improved, from the Gorgias: the argument personified as veiling her face (Republic), as engaged in a chase, ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... tales, abounding in the most grotesque situations and humorous touches, which will greatly ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... wine with us. He was a plain decent well-behaved man, and expressed his gratitude to Dr. Johnson for having once got him permission from Dr. Taylor at Ashbourne to play there upon moderate terms. Garrick's name was soon introduced. JOHNSON. 'Garrick's conversation is gay and grotesque. It is a dish of all sorts, but all good things. There is no solid meat in it: there is a want of sentiment in it. Not but that he has sentiment sometimes, and sentiment, too, very powerful and very pleasing: but it has not its full proportion in ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... described by all contemporaries, English and Flemish, in the same language—were accounted as the wildest and fiercest of barbarians. There was something grotesque, yet appalling, in the pictures painted of these rude, almost naked; brigands, who ate raw flesh, spoke no intelligible language, and ranged about the country, burning, slaying, plundering, a terror to the peasantry and a source of constant embarrassment to the more orderly troops ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... form grotesque beyond belief. It seemed to be some gigantic wild beast—mountain lion or great bear, though of a size beyond credence—which slowly sprawled down the slope walking erect upon its hind feet with its forelegs stretched out ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... with his gripsack, gazing in a trance of true admiration at the hollowed crags, topped by the gray, grotesque wood, and crested finally by the ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... explained without the help of numerous examples. The collection published by Takumi includes a good deal of matter in which a Western reader can discover no merit; but the best of it has a distinctly grotesque quality that reminds one of Hood's weird cleverness in playing with grim subjects. This quality, and the peculiar Japanese method of mingling the playful with the terrific, can be suggested and explained only by reproducing in Romaji the texts of various ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... office of "a great daily," and that the kindest thing a fond father could do for a promising boy would be to start him as a local reporter and make him get his first experience of life in the collection of "city items." There is in all this the expression, though in a somewhat grotesque form, of a widespread popular feeling that nothing is worthy of the name of education which does not fit a man to earn his bread rapidly and dexterously. Considering with how large a proportion of the human race the mere feeding and ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... with candor and precision, they have no cause for complaint if it is assumed that their aims are practically identical with those of the British anti-Jewish propagandists whose arguments they repeat in detail, including every grotesque stupidity and every ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... thirty terraces, each with a solid stone wall to hold the earth in place. It is wonderful what an amount of labor it costs to earn even the little the natives seem to care for. Our hotel here is an old monastery, and on one side of the court is the cathedral with its grotesque paintings. One becomes fairly sickened with the ghastly spectacle of the dead Christ. It is amazing how little they make of the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... wantonly impoverished. Hence the tiresome and ridiculous wrangling in connection with her "conjunct feoffment," neither Margaret nor Henry being conscious, in the complete absence of all sense of humour on their part, that the situation was occasionally grotesque. Stolidly unmindful of the effect they produced on the minds of others in the pursuit of their own selfish ends, they pursued the tenor of their way with bucolic doggedness. The doggedness ended in the defeat of all Henry's enemies; in Margaret's case ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... strikingly picturesque by-world, where there are many illuminated and splendid fragments of Nature's story. He who visits this section will first be attracted by an array of rock-formations, and, wander where he will, grotesque and beautiful shapes in stone will frequently attract and ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... passed through the dripping weeds on his way to the stable they left a chill moisture upon his bare feet. His eyes were heavy with sleep, and to his cloudy gaze the familiar objects of the barnyard assumed grotesque and distorted shapes. The manure heap near the doorway presented an effect of unreality, the pig-pen seemed to have suffered witchery since the evening before, and the haystack, looming vaguely in the drab distance, appeared to be ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... and eloquent it was! The evening red touched its grey towers with a mellow light, like sunshine on a venerable head. Lower down, flights of rooks circled round the fretted niches, quaint windows, and grotesque gargoyles, while the great steps below swarmed with priests and soldiers, gay strangers and black-robed nuns, children ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... people related that the gods had struck him with madness to avenge the murder of the Apis, and they attributed to him numberless traits of senseless cruelty, in which we can scarcely distinguish truth from fiction. It was said that, having entered the temple of Phtah, he had ridiculed the grotesque figure under which the god was represented, and had commanded the statues to be burnt. On another occasion he had ordered the ancient sepulchres to be opened, that he might see what was the appearance of the mummies. The most faithful members of his family and household, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... half-gloom, colliding or falling prone as the vessel pitched, eyes fixed straight ahead, following the powerful silver lines of water which ribbed the dark and splashed against the steaming steel; white-yellow smoke spirals writhed about their heads like some grotesque saraband; coatless, shirtless, their streaked, sweating bodies gleamed ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... glad to tread once more the surface of Pellucidar. Mysterious and terrible, grotesque and savage though she is in many of her aspects, I can not but love her. Her very savagery appealed to me, for it is the savagery of ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... preserved it to the present day had avoided the lamentable plastering which disfigures so many others. The walls were built with fine large stones, on which time had left its melancholy impress. There was no grotesque painting on them to mar their quiet beauty, and the dim light that filtered through at that early hour gave them ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... yellow. The flaring locks streaming from his head made him resemble a Peruvian image of the sun, and it was this peculiar coiffure which had procured for him the odd name of Cockatoo. The fact that this grotesque creature invariably wore a white drill suit, emphasized still more the suggestion of his ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... the woman who had thus sworn against me. With horror I saw what grotesque injustice was done to me. I broke out into a ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... Venty and Diana had been retained by Flossy and Laura to call them at five minutes of seven, and Laura and Flossy had called the others. And at seven o'clock, precisely, a bugle-horn sounded in the children's quarters, and then four grotesque riders, each with a soldier hat made of newspaper, each with a bright sash girt round a dressing- gown, each with bare feet stuck into stout shoes, came storming down the stairs, and as soon as the lower floor was reached, each ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... truth, a heart-rending spectacle. All the wooded part of the island was now completely bare. One single clump of green trees raised their heads at the extremity of Serpentine Peninsula. Here and there were a few grotesque blackened and branchless stumps. The side of the devastated forest was even more barren than Tadorn Marsh. The eruption of lava had been complete. Where formerly sprang up that charming verdure, the soil was now nothing ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... to Sibou on the Rajah's promise to build a fort at Kenowit, are of the same tribe, and number about three hundred men. They speak the Milanow language, and have the same customs of burial. The men and some of the women are tattooed in the most grotesque patterns. When you look at them closely the invention displayed is truly remarkable; but at a distance they give a dingy, dusky appearance to the men, as if they were daubed with an inky sponge. ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... Music.—[SWAGGRINO, the grotesque dwarf, enters],(117) bending beneath the weight of a large cask which he bears on his shoulder.—He pauses, examines RIP, then invites him to assist him in placing the cask on the ground, which ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... every day, especially the song of Clontarf and his own death; treating him very much, in fact, as English royalty, during the last generation, treated another Irish bard whose song was even more sweet, and his notions of Irish history even more grotesque, ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... the first rays of the sun lit up the Biggersbergen in all their grotesque beauty, I realised for the first time where I was, and found that I was considerably more than 12 miles from Elandslaagte, the fateful scene of yesterday. Tired out, half-starved and as disconsolate as the donkey in the ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... the temples, in these ponderous monuments of their officialism; for here and there in them you see exquisite bits of low relief carving, that a Greek would have been proud of, hidden away in interminable hieroglyphic histories spread indiscriminately over grotesque pillars and vast walls, as regardlessly of decorative effect as advertisements in a newspaper's columns. The open desert is the best of Egypt, and this thread of blue canal strung with lakes through its sand is very pretty ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... hurriedly away, but the knowledge which she took with her destroyed her peace of mind for many a day. Things hitherto familiar and friendly now became full of terror, and the comfort of her life was gone. Even her own shadow, cast by the flickering fire and dancing in grotesque shape on the ceiling, made her shudder; and when at night she peered timidly out of her lattice, and saw the row of elms standing dark against the sky at the end of the field, she shook with fear. Turning hastily from this to the shelter of the bed-clothes she would find no refuge, but a ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... where his people had their home, and it is the queer and uncanny music of these humorous and prankish people that Grieg has brought out in this closing movement of the suite. It is a rapid, dance-like movement which, in the orchestral arrangement, is extremely grotesque in the tone coloring; even on the piano, when sufficiently well done, much of this ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... find these weird Bible-cults, some of them pathetic, some of them dangerous, some of them merely grotesque. Thus, for example, there was John Alexander Dowie, who founded the "Christian Catholic Church in Zion" and dressed himself up in scarlet and purple robes with stars on. Through his Zion City Bank and Zion City Realty Company he became enormously wealthy; ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... the great French Fair! Everything under the sun is there, Whatever is made by the hand of man: Silks from China and Hindostan, Grotesque bronzes from Japan; Products of Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, Lapland, Finland, I know not what land— North land, south land, cold land, hot land,— From Liberia, From Siberia,— Every fabric and invention, From every country you can mention: From Algeria and Sardinia; ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... of those midsummerlike days that sometimes fall in early April to our yet bleak and desolate zone, our hearts sang of Africa and golden joys. A Libyan longing took us, and we would have chosen, if we could, to bear a strand of grotesque beads, or a handful of brazen gauds, and traffic them for some sable maid with crisp locks, whom, uncoffling from the captive train beside the desert, we should make to do our general housework forever, through the right of lawful purchase. But we knew that this ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... in your lap?" she quizzed harshly. Every accent of her voice, every remotest intonation, was like the Senior Surgeon's at his worst. The suddenly forked eyebrow, the snarling twitch of the upper lip, turned the whole delicate little face into a grotesque but desperately unconscious caricature of ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... at last to a short range of mountains whose name matched well their inhospitable stare. The Starvation Mountains had always been reputed rich in mineral and malevolent in their attitude toward man and beast. Even the Joshua trees stood afar off and lifted grotesque arms defensively against them. But Casey was not easily daunted, and eerie places held for him no meaning save the purely material one. If he could find water and the rich vein of ore some one had told him was there, then Casey would be happy ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... the pace of the pony, seemed to reiterate in grotesque assertion his spoken word. Ramon's tired body tingled as Dex strode faster. The horse nickered, and an answering nicker came from the night. His own tired pony struck into a trot. Dex stopped. Ramon slid down, and, stumbling forward, he touched a black bulk ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... revelation of history than it is a revelation of the poet. His choice of themes was dictated less by a careful search after what was most characteristic of each epoch than by his own strong predilections. He loved the picturesque, the heroic, the enormous, the barbarous, the grotesque. Hence Eviradnus, Ratbert, Le Mariage de Roland. He loved also the weak, the poor, the defenceless, the old man and the little child. Hence Les Pauvres Gens, Booz endormi, Petit Paul. He delighted in the monstrous, he revelled ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... abreast they rapidly made their way to the station like three grotesque figures in ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... monstrous serpents coiled in groups like the spirals of a solomonic column; gigantic negroes, heads down and hands on the ground, the roots like fingers thrust deep into the soil, their feet in the air, grotesque stems with bunches of leaves springing from them. Some, vanquished by the centuries, were lying on the ground, sustained by forked branches, like old men trying to lift themselves with the ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and starting up, gazed about him in sheer surprise; for an instant, in that state of bewilderment that comes with sudden awakening, he almost believed himself in a Western ranch bunkhouse, and that some happy cowboy outside roared a grotesque ballad. He gazed at the interior of a rough shack built of pine boards, with bunks constructed in tiers on both sides. There were figures in them—Western cowboys, perhaps. Then it seemed, somehow, that the voice drifting from the outside was strangely familiar. Back at Bannister College, ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... hundred poor beggars were counted sleeping out on the pavements of the main streets of Sydney the other night—grotesque bundles of rags lying under the verandas of the old Fruit Markets and York Street shops, with their heads to the wall and their feet to the gutter. It was raining and cold that night, and the unemployed had been driven in from Hyde Park and the bleak Domain—from ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... and landed at Combe Martin, wandered about the countryside with a band of companions, and was finally pursued and captured in Lady Wood, outside the village. In the Ascensiontide sports the Earl wears a grotesque costume: a mask, and a smock padded with straw, and round his neck a chain of biscuits. He has with him a hobby-horse and buffoon covered with fantastic trappings, and carrying a small article called a "mapper" (which is conjectured ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... writings of men like Doni and Straparola were stripped of their reflections on the clergy, while their indecencies remained untouched; or to show how Ariosto's Comedies were sanctioned, when his Satires, owing to their free speech upon the Papal Court, received the stigma.[153] But I may refer to the grotesque attempts which were made in this age to cast the mantle of spirituality over profane literature. Thus Hieronimo Malipieri rewrote the Canzoniere of Petrarch, giving it a pious turn throughout; and the Orlando Furioso was converted by several hands ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... imposing temples, not made with hands, to the agencies of the gods. Here are to be found carved in the stone by those cunning instruments of the hands of Nature—the wind, the rain, the sunbeam and the frost—curious, often grotesque, figures irresistibly suggestive of forms of life. Here stands a statue of Liberty, leaning on her shield, with the conventional Phrygian cap on her head; there is a gigantic frog carved in sandstone; yonder is a pilgrim, staff in hand. Groups ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... carvings and perforated work. Here hung bars of musical bells; there stood great jars and vases; everywhere were fantastic furnishings of silks and costly metals. Feathery green bamboos grew in dragon pots. In the corners stood grotesque figures in armor. ...
— Little Sky-High - The Surprising Doings of Washee-Washee-Wang • Hezekiah Butterworth
... the chapel are the lofty stalls of the Knights of the Bath, richly carved of oak, tho with the grotesque decorations of Gothic architecture. On the pinnacles of the stalls are affixt the helmets and crests of the knights, with their scarfs and swords; and above them are suspended their banners, emblazoned with armorial bearings, and contrasting the splendor of gold and purple ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... epithet, he paints the fiercest or tenderest passions of the heart: witness the devoted love of Thekla for Max in Wallenstein; or the furious jealousy of the Queen in Don Carlos. He has not the grotesque of Shakspeare; we do not see in his tragedies that mixture of the burlesque and the sublime which is so common in the Bard of Avon, and is not infrequent with the greatest minds, who play, as it were, with the thunderbolts, and love to show how they can ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... parti-coloured or fancy ball. Rumours were soon silenced by certainty, and our friends were amongst those who received an invitation to meet all the world of Goslington and a fragment of the world of London, about to be brought into strange conjunction at W—Castle. What shapes! grotesque, and gay, and gorgeous—ghosts of things departed—started up before the sparkling eyes of Emily, as she put the reviving talisman into F—'s hand. No wonder that her charmed sight failed to discover what ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... the grimly mixed pile of four centuries, with its absurd little round tower, its grotesque gargouilles, and grass-grown walls,—St. ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... most approved D'Orsay fashion. Of course, it is impossible to come to any right conclusion as to the authenticity of the African airs, especially as they have arranged the compositions of the great European masters in such a grotesque manner. The executants are five in number; one plays the tambourine, Mr. Germon, who is the leader; another the bone castanet; the third, the accordion; and the two others, the banjo, or African guitar. The castanet player does not sing; but his four colleagues ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... its grotesque mixture of the ancient principles of the magistracy with the novel theories of philosophy, the resolution of the Parliament was quashed by the king. Orders were given to arrest M. d'Espremesnil and a ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the justice to state that her gratitude for the King's liberality was well-nigh exaggerated, while no change was perceptible in her manners and bearing. She had, naturally, a grand, dignified air, which was in strange contrast to the grotesque buffoonery of her poet-husband. Now she is exactly in her proper place, representing to perfection the governess of a ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... little of the transit. He had bad short periods of wakefulness, when the recurring agony of his body woke and racked him afresh, and only during these did he see the other two grotesque figures, sometimes widely separated, sometimes close, dazzlingly half-lit by Jupiter's light. But he was conscious that one of the three was keeping them more or less together, though only later did he know that this one was Carse—Carse, who hardly slept, who drove off unconsciousness ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... I repeat, but, on the contrary, some wholesome stimulus to the fancy of men like Luca and Donatello themselves, came of the grotesque and impertinent zoology ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... familiar attitude with his feet on the table or over the mantelpiece. The two fought each other long and sternly on those memorable platforms in Illinois in 1858, and in their physique there must have been, as they stood side by side, a grotesque parody of their intellectual want of harmony. Douglas's usual sobriquet was "the little giant," and it fitted well—a man of stalwart proportions oddly "sawed off." His voice was vibrant and sonorous, his mien compelling. It was no great speech, a few sentences ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... heard shootin'—" began Galloway, staring in astonishment at the grotesque posture Rack Slimson had assumed the better to endure the ministrations of ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... II. (Lecture IV.), by Sandro; Venus in her planet, the ruling star of Florence. Anything more grotesque in conception, more unrestrained in fancy of ornament, you cannot find, even in the final days of the Renaissance. Yet Venus holds her divinity through all; she will become majestic to you as you gaze; and there is not a line of her chariot wheels, of her buskins, or of her throne, ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... and Lady Webling were in a state of panic, too. They smiled at her with a wan pity and fear. She caught them whispering often. She saw them cling together with a devotion that would have been a burlesque in a picture seen by strangers. It would have been almost as grotesque as a view of a hippopotamus and his mate cowering hugely together and nuzzling each other under the menace of ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... he could see all avenues of approach to the house, and waited. Twenty minutes went by, and then Sam became suddenly alert and attentive, for the arc-light revealed a small, grotesque figure slowly approaching along the sidewalk. It was brown in colour, shaggy and indefinite in form; it limped excessively, and paused to rub ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... whom the 'Journal Epoca' obtained a special interview respecting the Leninist legislation on the sex problem, complains that a vast amount of grotesque misrepresentation has appeared on the subject in ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... They seemed to inhabit them, as snails their shells but I was sure some of them were intruders, and belonged to the gnomes or goblin-fairies, who inhabit the ground and earthy creeping plants. From the cups of Arum lilies, creatures with great heads and grotesque faces shot up like Jack-in-the-box, and made grimaces at me; or rose slowly and slily over the edge of the cup, and spouted water at me, slipping suddenly back, like those little soldier-crabs that inhabit the shells of sea-snails. ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... insignificant things that no one notices except yourself ... a change of expression, eyes shining-lips curled in a sneer-the deep import of a phrase that is lost! Yet take these things together and they compose the mask of our race ... terrible ... grotesque ... a race ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... praiseworthy absence of all inflation or bombast, seems at times to have been smitten by a fatal desire to "split the ears of the groundlings" and produce an impression by showy parades of a not overwhelmingly profound scholarship; and the effect of these contrasts would be grotesque in the extreme, were it not absolutely painful in a work of such high average merit. What, for instance, will be thought of the taste of a writer who could close a really pathetic scene of estrangement between the lovers by such a sentence ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... think of nothing else. Then she led the way still further to the rear, to a compound quite behind all the other compounds and other houses of the gorgeous mandarin's palace. The last stand of the defenders. They were scattered about the courtyard in all attitudes, in grotesque and uncouth positions, all dead. She pointed to a figure lying face downward, a thin, elderly figure, in blood-soaked black brocade, with a magnificent queu lying at right angles ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... acutely miserable. Her exaltation of spirits was a bare memory. She hated her dowdy frock, her glaring contrast to the vivid Ila, accentuated by that grotesque similarity of attire. She listened to Ila's brilliant chatter and recalled her own halting phrases, her narrow vocabulary, and wondered angrily at the conceit which had prompted her to hope that she was overcoming her ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... to give Hall a vivid description of his grotesque guest. "Looks a bit like a disguise, don't it? I'd like to see a man's face if I had him stopping in my place," said Henfrey. "But women are that trustful—where strangers are concerned. He's took your rooms and he ain't even given ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... that so a gradual approximation will be made towards imitations having some resemblance to the realities. The extreme indefiniteness which, in conformity with the law of evolution, these first attempts exhibit, is anything but a reason for ignoring them. No matter how grotesque the shapes produced; no matter how daubed and glaring the colours. The question is not whether the child is producing good drawings. The question is, whether it is developing its faculties. It has first to ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... The cap, the stays, the high-heel'd shoe, The 'kerchief and the bonnet too, With apron as the lily white, Put all the male attire to flight— The culotte, waistcoat, and cravat, The bushy wig, and gold-trimm'd hat. Ye gods! behold! what high burlesque, Jane Shore and Juliet thus grotesque! ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... ancient windows, and that fearful threshold, with the blood still glistening on it,—he dwelt and wandered so much there, that he had no real life in the sombre house on the corner of the graveyard; except that the loneliness of the latter, and the grim Doctor with his grotesque surroundings, and then the great ugly spider, and that odd, inhuman mixture of crusty Hannah, all served to remove him out of the influences of common life. Little Elsie was all that he had to keep life real, and substantial; and she, a child so much ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... appearance of the country about Calais does not differ materially from that in the immediate neighbourhood of Dover, which is much less fertile than the greater part of Kent; but the cottages are decidedly inferior to the English. The first peculiarity that struck us was the grotesque appearance of the Douaniers, who came to examine us on the coast; and when we had passed through the numerous guards, and been examined at the guard-houses, previously to our admission into the town, ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... is common to all early literature before coming under the chastening hand of the master) is undoubtedly its tendency to extravagance; though much depended upon the individual writer, some being stylists and some not, all were prone to frequent and grotesque exaggerations. The lack of restraint and self-criticism is everywhere apparent; the old Irish writer seems incapable of judging how to shape his material with a view to presenting it in its best form. Thus, we have the feeling, even with regard to the Tain Bo Cualnge, that what has come ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... myth is almost world-wide. It includes examples from all quarters, and examples of great beauty as well as of singular, almost grotesque hideousness; the New Zealand myth is surely the best type of the former, and perhaps the Fijian of the latter. As Mr. Lang says: "all the cosmogonic myths waver between the theory of construction, ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... platforms with stacked arms, and made outrageous love to girls who ran by the side of their trains with laughing eyes and saucy tongues and a last farewell of "Bonne chance, mes petits! Bonne chance et toujours la victoire!" At every wayside halt artists were at work with white chalk drawing grotesque faces on the carriage doors below which they scrawled inscriptions referring to the death of "William," and banquets in Berlin, and invitations for free trips to the Rhine. In exchange for a few English cigarettes, too few for such ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... term gives more luxuriant illustrations of the fermentation processes I have mention'd, and their froth and specks, than those Mississippi and Pacific coast regions, at the present day. Hasty and grotesque as are some of the names, others are of an appropriateness and originality unsurpassable. This applies to the Indian words, which are often perfect. Oklahoma is proposed in Congress for the name of one of our new Territories. Hog-eye, Lick-skillet, Rake-pocket and Steal-easy are the names of ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... could not, deliberately, make a single poem any more than a multitude of people could, deliberately, make a single picture, one man doing the nose, one man an eye and so on. Such a suggestion is grotesque, and Grimm never meant it. If I might guess at what he meant, I would suggest that he was thinking that the origin of ballads must have been similar to the origin of the dance, (which was probably the earliest form of ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... of the last few months. There was now Doria's awful change of soul-attitude towards Adrian. It was right that Liosha should be made aware of the emotional subtleties that underlay the bare facts. It seemed cruel to tell her of the last scene, so pathetic, so tragic, so grotesque, between the man she loved and the other woman. But her unflinching bravery and her great heart demanded it. And as I told her, walking nervously about the room, she followed me with her ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... without interest or ideals; their minds were dull and heavy, and yet here they responded to the divine spirit of the music. There is no more impressive sight than that of thousands of people held spellbound by a melody; it is by turns sublime, grotesque, and touching. ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... where it was lighted by the flickering red blaze. It was all over in a moment, a mere glimpse, but it formed one of those sudden pictures which paint themselves on the brain and can never after be effaced. I recall yet the long shade cast by the man's gun, the grotesque shape of his flapping army overcoat, the quick change in the silhouette as he wheeled to retrace his beat. But there was no noise, not even the sound of his footsteps reaching us. Even as I gazed, lying nearly full length upon my horse, we had crossed the open, and a perfect ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... to drop the metaphor of giant and dwarf, the King of the French suffered so much, his Ministers were so mercilessly ridiculed, his family and his own remarkable figure drawn with such odious and grotesque resemblance, in fanciful attitudes, circumstances, and disguises, so ludicrously mean, and often so appropriate, that the King was obliged to descend into the lists and battle his ridiculous enemy in form. Prosecutions, seizures, fines, regiments of furious legal ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... at the very earliest opportunity." At this she turned and looked at me with her direct, unswerving gaze, so that I grew suddenly uncomfortable. "You don't doubt my word, do you, Diana?" I questioned, glancing down at my grotesque attire. ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... was grinding an organ before the shop, and a miserable little shrivelled monkey was sitting on the instrument. The Count stopped, bit a piece for himself out of the tart, and gravely handed the rest to the monkey. "My poor little man!" he said, with grotesque tenderness, "you look hungry. In the sacred name of humanity, I offer you some lunch!" The organ-grinder piteously put in his claim to a penny from the benevolent stranger. The Count shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... he had no eyes, was not at all behind-hand, but appeared, as the flame rose and fell, to open and shut his no eyes, with the regularity of the glass-eyed dogs and ducks and birds. The big-headed babies were equally obliging in lending their grotesque aid to ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... excellence for the highest reaches of impassioned prose. Nor is this all. His pages do not lack in humor—humor of the truest and most delicate type; and if De Quincey is at times impelled beyond the bounds of taste, even these excursions demonstrate his power, at least in handling the grotesque. His sympathies, however, are always genuine, and often are profound. The pages of his autobiographic essays reveal the strength of his affections, while in the interpretation of such a character as that of Joan of Arc, or in allusions like those to the pariahs,—defenceless outcasts ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... Ratcliffe Highway, D'Arcy said, 'Here we are then,' and pointed to a shop, or rather two shops, on the opposite side of the street. One window was filled with caged birds; the other with specimens of beautiful Oriental pottery and grotesque curiosities in the shape of Chinese ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... of considerable character and attainments. Who would guess it who read all these trivial comments, these catalogues of what he had for dinner, these inane domestic confidences—all the more interesting for their inanity! The effect left upon the mind is of some grotesque character in a play, fussy, self-conscious, blustering with women, timid with men, dress-proud, purse-proud, trimming in politics and in religion, a garrulous gossip immersed always in trifles. And yet, though this was the day-by-day man, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... for safety to the beach in stormy weather.[368] In regard to art the natives display some taste and skill in wood-carving. For example, the projecting house-beams are sometimes carved in the shape of crocodiles, birds, and grotesque human figures; and their canoes, paddles, head-rests, drums, drum-sticks, and vessels are also decorated with carving. Birds, fish, crocodiles, foliage, and scroll-work are the ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... in Freeman's language, "slaughtered" him. The next year Froude brought out, in a volume with other essays, his Spanish Story of the Armada, written in his raciest manner, and proving from Spanish sources the grotesque incompetence of Medina Sidonia. There are few better narratives in the language, and the enthusiastic admiration of a great American humourist was as well deserved as it ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... much kindness underneath his wrath for him to be capable of murdering even a thievish sparrow. He likes to make others believe, however, that he is desperately in earnest. His keen sense of the comic and the grotesque in human nature makes him one of the raciest of story-tellers; but although he does not put his tongue in traces, he is none the less a worthy priest. There are many such as he in France—men who are really devout, but never sanctimonious, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... model of dainty comfort. All the superficial elegancies were provided for. It was a sunny, dustless apartment, with snow-white muslins, white enamel, and a frieze of grotesque Noah's Ark animals perambulating round the wall. There were huge dolls' houses, with electric lights; big closets of toys. From the earliest moment possible these three infants began to have private lessons in everything, including drawing, music ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... beauties and finenesses of temperament, a critical appreciation of the characteristic qualities of landscapes and buildings, a sense which finds satisfaction as well in such commonplace things as the variety of grotesque vehicles that go to compose a luggage train, or the grass-grown, scarped, water-logged excavations of a brick-field, as in the sharp rock-horns of some craggy mountain, impulsive as a frozen flame, or the soft outlines of fleecy ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Mrs. Churchley left the house, when, after a brief interval, he followed her out of the drawing-room on her taking her sisters to bed. She was waiting for him at the door of her room. Her father was then alone with his fiancee—the word was grotesque to Adela; it was already as if the place were ...
— The Marriages • Henry James
... observed so closely and guarded so well by his companion Mariotto that he lived to be an old man—finished the course of his life at the age of sixty-four, leaving behind him the name of a good and even rarely excellent master of grotesque-painting in our own times, wherein every succeeding craftsman has always imitated his manner, not only in Florence, but also in ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... Christianity leads poetry to the truth. Like it, the modern muse will see things in a higher and broader light. It will realize that everything in creation is not humanly beautiful, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light. It will ask itself if the narrow and relative sense of the artist should prevail over the infinite, absolute sense of the Creator; if it is for man to correct God; if a mutilated nature will be the more beautiful for ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... was that she was nearly always somewhere else. You couldn't catch her; you couldn't pin her down to come and talk. Scrap's fears that she would grab seemed grotesque in retrospect. Why, there was no grab in her. At dinner and after dinner were the only times one really saw her. All day long she was invisible, and would come back in the late afternoon looking a perfect ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Pierre faithfully reported to his mistress the groom's extraordinary insolence and impudence of the night before. The girl struggled with and conquered her desire to laugh; for monsieur was somewhat grotesque in his rage. ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... whole parts of themselves (rather useful and important parts elsewhere) can enjoy a great opera—a huge conspiracy of symbolism, every visible thing in it standing for something that can not be seen, beckoning at something that cannot be heard. Nothing could possibly be more grotesque, looked at from the outside or by a tourist from another planet or another religion, than the celebration of the Lord's Supper in a Protestant church. All things have their outer senses, and these outer senses ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... fancy it was around the isolated "Ford Mansion," better known as the "headquarters," that the wind wreaked its grotesque rage. It howled under its scant eaves, it sang under its bleak porch, it tweaked the peak of its front gable, it whistled through every chink and cranny of its square, solid, unpicturesque structure. Situated on a hillside that descended rapidly to the Whippany ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... sense of quality; even the rich to-day in this country wear imitation laces. The effect of all this is a bewildering restlessness in costume—a sheeplike willingness to follow to the extreme the grotesque and the fantastic. The very general adoption of the ugly and meaningless fashions of the last few years—peach-basket hats, hobble skirts, slippers for the street—is a case in point. From every side this is bad—defeating ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... he rowed, looked down at the two men sleeping under-foot. The cook's arm was around the oiler's shoulders, and, with their fragmentary clothing and haggard faces, they were the babes of the sea, a grotesque rendering of the ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... followed the thing to the road where my kit was waiting, Murdoch MacDonald put all my worldly possessions on the equipage. They seemed to occupy very little room in the huge structure. Murdoch, shouldering his rifle, followed it, and I, rather ashamed of the grotesque appearance of my caravan, marched on as quickly as I could in front, hoping to escape the ridicule which I knew would be heaped upon me by all ranks of my beloved brigade. A man we met told us that the battalion had gone to Steenvoorde, so thither we made our way. On ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... laurel. But these leaks were few and served only to accentuate the blackness of his environment, which his imagination found it easy to people with all manner of unfamiliar shapes, menacing, uncanny, or merely grotesque. ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... Abbey melted all such absurdities into the breadth of its own grandeur, even magnifying itself by what would elsewhere have been ridiculous. Methinks it is the test of Gothic sublimity to overpower the ridiculous without deigning to hide it; and these grotesque monuments of the last century answer a similar purpose with the grinning faces which the old architects scattered among their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... old log, just within the shadow at the edge of the opening. The first arrival came in with a rush. There was a sudden scurry behind me, and over the log he came with a flying leap that landed him on the smooth bit of ground in the middle, where he whirled around and around with grotesque jumps, like a kitten after its tail. Only Br'er Rabbit's tail was too short for him ever to catch it; he seemed rather to be trying to get a good look at it. Then he went off helter-skelter in a headlong rush through the ferns. Before I knew what had become of him, over the log he came again ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... shells, and feathers, they leaped about with torches in their hands; then saw his suspected slave enter through a back door, his black skin painted to represent a skeleton. The old man held up a fat toad, which, he said, was his familiar, and the company began to worship it with grotesque and obscene ceremonies. Though he felt a thrill of disgust and even a dim sense of fear at the spectacle, the planter broke in at the door and confronted the Obeah man. Had he ordered the old fellow to do any given task ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... round in his mind for some excuse to avoid going indoors with him and wasting precious time in breaking bread and eating salt, when there lurched out of an adjoining doorway an ungainly figure in turban and sandals and the full flower of that grotesque regalia which passes muster at cheap theatres and masquerade balls for the costume of a Cingalese. The fellow had bent forward out of the deeper darkness of the house-passage into the murk and gloom of ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... curiousness, so attractive alike to sage and dilettante, lie its dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at once grotesque and awful. Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and wild we have within our threshold,—a stalwart laboring force, suited to the semi-tropics; if, deaf to the voice of the Zeitgeist, we ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... device should have existed, and, secondly, that these ledges were carved and ornamented. These misericords, as they are called, were usually curiously, even grotesquely carved. Some of these carvings were founded on natural objects, some were grotesque heads, others represented subjects with man and animals. There were pews for the nobility, but, apart from the few old and weak people who used the rough bench or two in the body of the church, or the stone bench ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... beak in the air, and his gloves extended in a most grotesque attitude, was immovable and rigid as stone. Not a muscle moved, and the Little Panjandrum, after staring at him a moment, ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... the roof. The floor is paved with great flat stones, and resounds continually with the footsteps of visitors, who walk to and fro, up and down the aisles, looking at the chapels, the monuments, the sculptures, the paintings, and the antique and grotesque images and carvings. Colored light streams through the stained glass of the enormous windows, and the tones of the organ, and the voices of the priests, chanting the service of the mass, are almost always resounding and echoing from ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... camp was. The red light of the morning sun was streaming upon them as they lay heads towards us on the ground. And every man had a round red spot on the top of his head about as big as a dollar, where the redskins had taken his scalp. It was frightful, but it was grotesque; and the red sunlight seemed to paint everything all over." Lincoln paused, as if recalling the vivid picture, and added, somewhat irrelevantly, "I remember that one man had ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... fashioned. In Izumo, particularly, such stone-carving has a decidedly primitive appearance. There is an astonishing multiplicity and variety of fox-images in the Province of the Gods—images comical, quaint, grotesque, or monstrous, but, for the most part, very rudely chiselled. I cannot, however, declare them less interesting on that account. The work of the Tokkaido sculptor copies the conventional artistic notion of light grace and ghostliness. The rustic ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... but still it was better than nothing. The opposite coast formed one vast bay, terminating on the south by a very sharp point, which was destitute of all vegetation, and was of a very wild aspect. This point abutted on the shore in a grotesque outline of high granite rocks. Towards the north, on the contrary, the bay widened, and a more rounded coast appeared, trending from the southwest to the northeast, and terminating in a slender cape. The distance between these two extremities, which made the bow of the bay, was about ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... less effect according to the different degrees of density in the media, or the deviation of the ray from the perpendicular. If the second medium be very dense in proportion, the ray will be both refracted and reflected; and the object from which it proceeds, will assume a variety of grotesque and extraordinary shapes, and it will sometimes appear as in a reflection from a concave mirror, dilated in size, and ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... greater proportion of impertinence. He has been vastly lavish of erudition, of smut, and insipid raillery. An agreeable tale of two pages is purchased at the expense of whole volumes of nonsense. There are but few persons, and those of a grotesque taste, who pretend to understand and to esteem this work; for, as to the rest of the nation, they laugh at the pleasant and diverting touches which are found in Rabelais and despise his book. He is looked upon as the prince of buffoons. The ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... which, as Charley well understood, was intended all in kindness. He told him how Mr. Snape complained of him, how the office books told against him, how the clerks talked, and all Somerset House made stories of his grotesque iniquities. With penitential air Charley listened and promised. Mr. Oldeschole promised also that bygones should be bygones. 'I wonder whether the old cock would lend me a five-pound note! I dare say he would,' said Charley to himself, as he left the office. ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... heavily-built man who had answered the captain's questions. He received me with a grotesque bow, pinching the brim of his wide straw hat as he bobbed his head. I did not like his looks. He had as hanging a face as ever a malefactor carried. His features were heavy and coarse, his brow low and protruding, his eyes small, ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... manual work and of the rule of silence; their elaborate cookery and nice taste in wines; their interest in the cut and material of their clothes and the luxury of their bed coverlets: the extravagance of the furniture in their chapels, and even the grotesque architecture of their buildings. He especially censures the magnificent state in which the abbots live and with which they travel about, and he declares himself emphatically against that exemption ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... the Palace as a surprise for the Infanta; his father, who was a poor charcoal- burner, being but too well pleased to get rid of so ugly and useless a child. Perhaps the most amusing thing about him was his complete unconsciousness of his own grotesque appearance. Indeed he seemed quite happy and full of the highest spirits. When the children laughed, he laughed as freely and as joyously as any of them, and at the close of each dance he made them each the funniest of bows, smiling and nodding at them just ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... century, beneath a projecting rock, crowned with a few red cedars and pine-trees, a rudely constructed, but roomy block-house. In front of the building, and between two massive perpendicular beams, connected by cross-bars, swung a large board, upon which was to be distinguished a grotesque figure, painted in gaudy colours, and whose diadem of feathers, tomahawk, scalping-knife, and wampum, denoted the Indian chief. Beneath this sign a row of hieroglyphical-looking characters informed the passer-by that he could here find "Entertainment for man and beast." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... We have seen by what a little seeming triviality of an incident she may intimate that our cherished hope has been struck dead, or that the execution of some other decree has turned the current of our life away. It is sometimes as if she contemptuously sent us a grotesque and dwarfish messenger, who makes grimaces at us while telling us the bad news, which is ungenerous and scarcely dignified. So we need not wonder if Mick Doherty had to read the death-warrant of his ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... Don Quixote sallied out, completely armed with Mambrino's helmet, which had a great hole in it, on his head, his shield on his arm, and leaning on his lance. His grotesque appearance amazed Don Fernando and his companions very much, who wondered at his gaunt face so withered and yellow, the strangeness of his arms, and his grave manner ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... middle-aged woman with coarse features and coarse figure. Animal beauty she had once had. The beauty had utterly flown, but the animal all remained. She had a shifty and wandering eye, burned out and lusterless, that told of dreams that were of men, men who these many years had not included her husband, grotesque figure that he was, ugly as a satyr in one of the myths suggested by the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... I am?' said the old man drawing himself up, with a sudden hauteur which was not without dignity, despite his shrunken form and grotesque appearence. 'Well, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... highways of political life. But we can recognize real conviction and the deepest feeling beneath his scornful rhetoric and his bitter laugh. He was no more a mere dilettante than Swift himself, but now and then in the midst of his most serious thought some absurd or grotesque image will obtrude itself, and one is reminded of the lines on the monument of Gay rather than of the fierce epitaph of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... reflected. Vallack's proposition did not strike him as particularly grotesque. He felt it was a natural question, and he only regretted that it had been put, because, though he had driven more than one young man to righteousness along the path of terror, in this present case the truth came too late save to add another horror to death. He believed in all ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... piano a negro performer was playing with a keen appreciation of time if of nothing else, and two others with voices that might not have been unpopular in a decent minstrel show were rendering a popular air. They wore battered straw hats and a make-up which was intended to be grotesque. ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... discarded their grotesque head-dress. Ross had a woollen muffler wrapped round his head, while his companion had been given the loan of a red stocking-cap, but they still retained the weird garb in which they had made their journey ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... be invented, if only to produce, externally, an appearance of coinciding cause and effect; and not a single plot could be without secret doors and vaults, terrible oaths and perjury. If Ibsen, Gorky, Hauptmann, Gabrielle D'Annunzio and others had brought us nothing else but liberation from such grotesque ballast, from such impossibilities as destroy every illusion as to the life import of a play, they would still be entitled to our gratitude and the gratitude of posterity. But they have done more. Out of the confusion of trap doors, secret passages, folding screens, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... anatomies are kept together and attached to the vehicle, composed of rope, leather, iron, steel, brass, and every thing else that could by any possibility be used for the purpose; the queer-looking postillion, with his long cue, huge boots, and pipe, all combine with the grotesque appearance of the Diligence itself, to form an ensemble ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... driven from Paradise. Satan suffers in a defiant silence. It is to this intense self-concentration that we must attribute the strange deficiency of humour which the poet shared with the Puritans generally, and which here and there breaks the sublimity of the poem with strange slips into the grotesque. But it is above all to this Puritan deficiency in human sympathy that we must attribute Milton's wonderful want of dramatic genius. Of the power which creates a thousand different characters, which endows each with its appropriate act and word, which loses ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... we pretend to understand a religion if we do not know its secret? That secret, in Australia, yields the certainty of the ethical character of the Supreme Being. Mr. Macdonald says about the initiator (a grotesque figure):— ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... a natural manner which surpassed all the art in the world. Grotesque and terrible, he threw the table into consternation by his sincerity. Madame Martin, whom he ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... habits of the class to which he belongs, and bears with acquired philosophy the hardships and privations which fall to their lot. Like "Ragged Dick," he has a sense of humor, which is apt to reveal itself in grotesque phrases, ...
— Ben, the Luggage Boy; - or, Among the Wharves • Horatio Alger
... castellated monuments of the middle ages just as they were left by the builders, must come to this country. With us in old Europe, they are either modernized or in ruins, and in many of them every tower and gate reflects the taste of a separate period; some edifices showing a grotesque progress from Gothic to Italian, and from Italian to Roman a la Louis Quinze: a succession which corresponds with the portraits within doors, which begin with coats of mail, or padded velvet, and end with bag-wigs and ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... been built as an afterthought. On shelves were confusedly disposed dusty bits of bronze, plaster, coarse pottery and rare glass; things valueless and things beyond price standing in careless fellowship. A canvas of Corot looked down upon a grotesque, grimacing Japanese idol, a beautiful bronze reproduction of a vase by Michael Angelo stood shoulder to shoulder with a bean-pot full of tobacco; a crumpled cravat was thrown carelessly over the arm of a dancing faun, while a cluster of Barye's matchless animals were apparently ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... warfare? [Cheers.] We think we cannot. [Cheers.] The enemy, borrowing what I may, perhaps, for this purpose call a neutral flag from the vocabulary of diplomacy, describe these newly adopted measures by a grotesque and puerile perversion of language as a "blockade." [Laughter.] What is a blockade? A blockade consists in sealing up the war ports of a belligerent against sea-borne traffic by encircling their coasts with an impenetrable ring of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... into the newspapers. That was the basis of all success, according to his views. It seemed to me that he was confounding cause with effect; but I did not argue the point. I laughed until my sides ached over the grotesque suggestions which poured from him. I was to lie senseless in the roadway, and to be carried into him by a sympathising crowd, while the footman ran with a paragraph to the newspapers. But there was the ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... delirium, the fever, the self-loathing, the prostration, the despair. I view in the looking-glass a haggard face, with red eyes. I look down upon shaking hands, flaccid muscles, and shrunken limbs. I speculate if I shall ever be one of those grotesque and melancholy beings, with bleared eyes and running noses, swollen bellies and shrunken ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... corporal's apparatus; and of the corporal himself in the height of his attack, just as it struck my uncle Toby, as he turned towards the sentry-box, where the corporal was at work,—for in nature there is not such another,—nor can any combination of all that is grotesque and whimsical in her works ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... events in history, the works of the Pisan artists closely resemble some sculptures executed on the walls of Northern cathedrals, as well as early mosaics in the South of Italy. We might have noticed how all the grotesque elements which appear in Nicola Pisano, and which may still be traced in Ghiberti, are entirely lost in Michel Angelo, how the supernatural is humanised, how the symbolical receives an actual expression, and how ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... there came into view, moving slowly, Ned and Koku. Their portable lights were glowing, and then, in order to see them better, Tom turned out the exterior searchlights. This made the two forms, in their rather grotesque dress, stand out in bold relief amid the swirling green waters ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... the giant Abyssinian, and the shadows and torchlight distorted him to grotesque proportions. He walked as if his weight was nothing; yet on his great shoulders he bore a half-grown ox, its feet hobbled, its tongue hanging from its panting mouth. Straight to the fire he stepped and cast his burden ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... Sing. There was that deliciously commingled mysterious foreign odor that I had so often noticed; there was the old array of uncouth-looking objects, the long procession of jars and crockery, the same singular blending of the grotesque and the mathematically neat and exact, the same endless suggestions of frivolity and fragility, the same want of harmony in colors, that were each, in themselves, beautiful and rare. Kites in the shape of enormous dragons and gigantic butterflies; kites so ingeniously arranged as to utter at ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... earth; and the cars which had followed it in its descent lay in a confused heap behind. On the top of the bank, near to us, the last car of all stood obliquely on end, with its hind wheels in the air in a somewhat grotesque and threatening attitude. All was now still and silent. The killed and wounded, if there were any, had been removed. No living thing was visible but the errant engineer and others from our train clambering with lanterns in their hands over a prostrate wreck, ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... use ordinary hand-soap. "Golly! I must go in and get a shaving-stick. No, darn it! I haven't got enough money with me. I must try to remember to get some to-morrow." He rebuked himself for thinking of soap when love lay dying. "But I must remember to get that soap, just the same!" So grotesque is man, the slave and angel, for while he was sick with the desire to go back to the one comrade, he sharply wondered if he was not merely acting all this agony. He went into the store. But he did not telephone to Ruth. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... kind, and, therefore, superior to all others, even to Sir Walter Scott's, which are, one and all, ethical; in other words, they treat of human nature only from the side of the will. So, too, in the Zauberfloete—that grotesque, but still significant, and even hieroglyphic—the same thought is symbolized, but in great, coarse lines, much in the way in which scenery is painted. Here the symbol would be complete if Tamino were in the end to be cured ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... hight of about 300 feet more. The water in the course of time in decending from those hills and plains on either side of the river has trickled down the soft sand clifts and woarn it into a thousand grotesque figures, which with the help of a little immagination and an oblique view at a distance, are made to represent eligant ranges of lofty freestone buildings, having their parapets well stocked with statuary; collumns of various sculpture both grooved and plain, are also seen supporting long ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
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