"Farcical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was a prominent, and, in the opinion of many of his cotemporaries, a very important personage in the most eventful period of English history. He was a principal actor in the farcical scenes which diversified the bloody tragedy of civil war; and while the King and the Parliament were striving for mastery in the field, he was deciding their destinies in the closet. The weak and the credulous of both parties, who sought to ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... Governor, Maciel, appears to have behaved very badly, and with no little treachery towards his fellow-countrymen. Nassau, when Maciel surrendered, treated him with contempt, and imprisoned him. The situation had now become grimly farcical. In Europe the Dutch were supplying the Portuguese with arms and stores, and acting in general as their allies; while in Brazil the two nations were openly at war, and the Dutch were sending hostile expeditions ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... Look here, Dick!" His voice changed abruptly. "I'm not ordering. I'm asking. That boy is a mill-stone round your neck. Let him go! He'll be happy enough. I'll see to that. Give him up like a dear chap! Then you'll be free—free to chuck this absurd, farcical existence you're leading now—free to make your own way in the world—free to marry and be happy." Dick made a slight movement under the hand that held him, but he did not attempt to speak. The squire went on. "You can't hope for any of those things under existing conditions. It wouldn't ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... however, was but the usual farcical compliance with the law which nobody regards and which nobody executes. Women were there in plenty—mostly old, unkempt women, wearing but a bodice and skirt and boots. The kitchen was a bare, blue-washed apartment, the floor sanded, with a long wooden table and two ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... and criticism of the drama had frequently been given place in the Port Folio, and Brown's Literary Magazine had published a farcical account of a "Theatrical Campaign" by Dick Buckram (Vol. I, p. 222), but the first magazine in America that attempted to take the theatre for its province was the Theatrical Censor, By a Citizen, first published in Philadelphia, ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... forward, which he did with quiet dignity. The judge then said, in a sudden, grating voice: "Get a new soul. That thing's not fit for a dog. Get a new soul." All this, of course, in the eyes of the sagacious, was premonitory of that melancholy and farcical day when his wits actually deserted him in open court. It was a libel case between two very eminent and powerful financiers, against both of whom charges of considerable defalcation were brought. The case was long and ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... much greater measure of success. Her former opponents had withdrawn their opposition and undertaken to lend her positive assistance to attain ends which were directed against themselves. This chapter of Entente diplomacy is marked by broad streaks of farcical comedy calculated to bewilder the serious student. France was converted to political orthodoxy on the subject of the Baghdad Railway and its cultural significance. Some of her publicists frankly repented that she had so long looked upon it with disfavour, and threw the blame on Russia, for whose ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... it is impossible to read them without discerning in them all the powers which afterwards produced "Evelina" and "Cecilia"; the quickness in catching every odd peculiarity of character and manner; the skill in grouping; the humour, often richly comic, sometimes even farcical. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... mind the extracting of them had become a major operation, as, for example, the taking off of a limb. He had spent three days in a nursing home in Welbeck Street. His life was now saved, and he was a convalescent, and passed several hours daily in giving to friends tragi-farcical accounts of existence in a nursing home. Mr. Enwright's ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... Arnold's home on the Schuylkill. In the centre of a large lawn stood a double mansion of stone, and a little to each side were seen outhouses for servants and kitchen use. The open space toward the water was extensive enough to admit of the farcical tilting of the afternoon. A great variety of evergreen trees and shrubs gave the house a more shaded look than the season would otherwise have afforded. Among these were countless lanterns illuminating the grounds, and from the windows on all sides a blaze of light was visible. ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... sunny grin spread over her smooth cheeks. She was all smiling, and presently, as the breeze dimpled her, all a "snicker" up into the roots of her hair, up among her forest-tresses. Mollychunkamug! Who could be aught but gay, gay even to the farcical, when on such a name? Is it Indian? Bewildered Indian we deem it,—transmogrified somewhat from aboriginal sound by the fond imagination of some lumberman, finding in it a sweet memorial of his Mary far away ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... burly soul, rumbling Johnsonianly upon lettered topics, puffing unending Virginia cigarettes, gazing with shy humor through thick-paned spectacles—well, on Friday, June 23, 1916, Bob and I decided to collaborate in writing a farcical novel. It is still unwritten, save the first few chapters. I only instance this to ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... table rappings, and such things, because they were undignified, because the ghosts cracked jokes or waltzed with dinner-tables. I do not share this objection in the least. I wish the spirits were more farcical than they are. That they should make more jokes and better ones, would be my suggestion. For almost all the spiritualism of our time, in so far as it is new, is solemn and sad. Some Pagan gods were lawless, ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... the accompanying sacrifice of a goat) sprang from the graver songs, and comedy (village-song) from the lighter and more farcical ones. Gradually, recital and dialogue were added, there being at first but a single speaker, then two, and finally three, which last was the classical number. Thespis (about 536 B.C.) is said to have introduced ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... late thirties, red-headed and inclined to be podgy. He was not built to express poetic passions—how many of us are, if it comes to that?—or to sustain their onslaught with dignity. Emotion seemed to have bloated him with unshed tears. There was nothing noble in his distress—only a farcical ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... novel Henry of Ofterdingen reaches a depth of obscurity which is saved from absurdity only by the genuinely fervent glow of a soul on the quest for its mystic ideals: "The blue flower it is that I yearn to look upon!" No farcical romance of the nursery shows more truly the mingled stuff that dreams are made on, yet the intimation that the dream is not all a dream, that the spirit of an older day is symbolically struggling for some expression in words, gave it in its day a serious importance at ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the farcical nature of public meetings, and the hollowness, worthlessness, and accidental character of popularity, than the circumstances of Durham's arrival here. He has done nothing in Canada, he took himself off just as the fighting was going to begin, his whole conduct has been visited with universal ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... and addressed himself to the only person of ultimate importance—namely, Mrs. Cole. He lay down on all fours, looked up directly into her face, bared his teeth this time in a smile and not in a growl, and wagged his farcical tail. ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... turned for relief to more than usual levity and mockery. Hence the perpetual interruption of the serious and affecting, and sometimes even awful, interest which belongs to the main argument of the piece, by scenes of farcical and extravagant caricature which might be pleasant enough as varieties in that farce of unreason with which he usually entertains us, but which, coming upon the mind in a state of serious emotion, are offensive and disagreeable. The two styles appear two opposite and incompatible ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... appears that Miss Morrison got hold of a humorous book called 'The Brass Bottle,' a fantastic, farcical thing, about a genie who had been sealed up in a bottle for a thousand years getting out and causing the poor devil of a hero no end of worry by heaping riches and honours upon him in the most embarrassing manner. ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... against the Bonapartists, which in our day are repeated against the republicans and the legitimists by the Younger Branch, flourished in the speech. These trite commonplaces, which might have some meaning under a fixed government, seem farcical in the mouth of administrators of all epochs and opinions. A saying of the troublous times of yore is still applicable: "The label is changed, but the wine is the same as ever." The public prosecutor, one of the most distinguished legal men under the Empire, attributed the crime to a fixed determination ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... London, 1857, p. 5, and passim; and for a passage giving the keynote of the whole, with a most farcical note on coprolites, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... that we are mov'd as we ought to be, and that we consequently have Sentiments suitable to the Dignity of our Nature. For these and many other Reasons, too long to mention here, I must confess myself to be an Enemy also to all ludicrous Epilogues and Farcical Pieces, at the End of Tragedies; and must think them full as ridiculous as if we were to dress a Monarch in all his Royal Robes, and then put a ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... living wife, sometimes with her consent, sometimes without it. One old gentleman, whose name is not to be mentioned, was sealed thus for eternity to Martha Washington and to Empress Josephine. It sounds farcical and foolish in the extreme; fit only to be counted as a silly joke, unworthy the attention of a sane soul for a minute; but it is terribly sober when it is remembered that there are hundreds of thousands of innocent, honest, and unsuspecting Mormons who ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... be as abusive as Horace upon the occasion—but if there is no catachresis in the wish, and no sin in it, I wish from my soul, that every imitator in Great Britain, France, and Ireland, had the farcy for his pains; and that there was a good farcical house, large enough to hold—aye—and sublimate them, shag rag and bob-tail, male and female, all together: and this leads me to the affair of Whiskers—but, by what chain of ideas—I leave as a legacy in mort-main to Prudes and Tartufs, to enjoy ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... out of my mouth as it seemed of their own volition. I was tired of this farcical bargaining, and determined to put an end to it, once for all. I stood up and faced his blank stare of amazement, without ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... some extraordinary prescience, some inexplicable presentiment, the approaching catastrophe cast its shadow over his mind and he felt vaguely that the life-journey of genius would be incomplete and farcical without the final tragedy: whoever lives for the highest ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... declaring no play should contain an effect, a line, a scene or an act which does not bear on the end in view by developing either the characters or the action. The entire second act, containing the farcical examination-scene, is useless. Robertson again sinned in this way in the Nightingale: although it had no effect on the plot, although it was entirely unnecessary, he introduced a pretty tableau representing the heroine, a lovely prima-donna, singing under the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... word, which I should abhor to use unless where, as in this case, I seek to rouse the vigilance of the inattentive by the apparent intemperance of the language. Pope, in too many instances, for the sake of some momentary and farcical effect, deliberately assumes the license of a liar. Not only he adopts the language of moral indignation where we know that it could not possibly have existed, seeing that the story to which this pretended indignation is attached was to Pope's knowledge a pure fabrication, but he ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... awaken a good deal of attention, not all of it pleasant, on the part of Friedrich. From the first he had, as usual, been a most clear-eyed observer of everything; and found the business, as appears, not of tragical nature, but of expensive-farcical, capable to shake the diaphragm rather than touch the heart of a reflective on-looker. He has a considerable Poem on it,—WAR OF THE CONFEDERATES by title (in the old style of the PALLADION, imitating an unattainable JEANNE D'ARC),—considerable Poem, now forming itself at leisure in his thoughts, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... up. He saw the parlour, the ground glass of the door, the tumblers and bottles on the table, the sharp features and strained, farcical eyes of Malkiel framed in the matted, curling hair. Then all was not over yet. There was something still in store for him. He sat up, pushed the creaming four-shilling foam out of his sight, turned to his interlocutor, and with a great effort ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... but he saw his days upon the road with truth and shame. He had failed in his penance. Garry was right. He did everything by fits and starts. And he could justify whatever was most conducive to his comfort and his inclination. His pilgrimage had been farcical. He had fled from discomfort, magnifying pettiness into tragedy. And he had been disloyal to the son he loved. For there under the willow when his startled eyes had found Joan, he had passionately ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... inches long. This weapon is used for digging up the bed of the river, but if it could be insinuated out of the water into a drowsy angler's leg it would probably make him sit up. As the paddle is as long as the fish the creature presents a really farcical appearance. The species runs to a hundredweight, I believe, ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... a word she did not have a right to utter, but her message opened the eyes of the people. That must be suppressed. That voice must be silenced. Her trial in a capitalist court was very farcical. What chance had she in a corporation court with a put-up jury and a corporation tool ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... 1518. I think he has more wit than Maillard, and occasionally displays a brilliant imagination; with the same singular mixture of grave declamation and farcical absurdities. He is called in the title-page the golden-tongued. It runs thus, Predicatoris qui lingua aurea, sua tempestate nuncupatus est, Sermones quadragesimales, ab ipso olim ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of Wattier's Club was Bligh, a notorious madman, of whom Mr Raikes relates:—'One evening at the Macao table, when the play was very deep, Brummell, having lost a considerable stake, affected, in his farcical way, a very tragic air, and cried out—"Waiter, bring me a flat candlestick and a pistol." Upon which Bligh, who was sitting opposite to him, calmly produced two loaded pistols from his coat pocket, which he placed on the table, and said, "Mr Brummell, if you are really desirous to put a ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... more properly speaking, musical farce, is becoming more and more popular in both Europe and America it is also becoming proportionately more farcical; although in many theaters it is staged as often as the more serious drama, in some having exclusive dominion; and although theater managers find that these plays draw bigger crowds and fill their houses better than any other, in the large ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... easily kindled. Nicholas of Reist brings to-day a forgotten descendant of the Tyrnaus family, and with your consent would make him King. I say with your consent, because the House of Laws is nothing to-day but a farcical assembly, and they will do what Reist bids them. The real decision rests with you. Listen. Russia will refuse to recognize this man. If you accept him her restraining hand upon Turkey will be removed. Russia herself may not think it worth while to move against you, ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... receiving them she loved to answer them. She was a good and even a brilliant letter writer, but often and often she would tear up what she had written and begin again. There was not much news in Bryngelly; it was difficult to make her letters amusing. Also the farcical nature of the whole proceeding seemed to paralyse her. It was ridiculous, having so much to say, to be able to say nothing. Not that Beatrice wished to indite love-letters—such an idea had never crossed her mind, but ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... feet, which are most like a very shuffling anapaest—the verse which appears in the comedies of Udall and Still—held its ground. We have it in the morality of the New Custom, printed in 1573, but no doubt written earlier, in the Interlude of The Trial of Treasure, in the farcical comedy of Like Will to Like, a coarse but lively piece, by Ulpian Fulwell (1568). In the very curious tragi-comedy of Cambyses this doggerel appears partly, but is alternated with the less lawless ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... as "the Murchison letter," did a great deal to impress thoughtless voters that Mr. Cleveland was "un-American." The incident was dramatic and farcical to a degree. The Murchison letter, which interested the entire country for two or three weeks, purported to come from a perplexed Englishman, addressing the British Minister at Washington, Lord Sackville-West. It sought counsel of Her Majesty's representative, as ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... humor. Mrs. Malaprop's mistakes, in what she herself calls "orthodoxy," have been often objected to as improbable from a woman in her rank of life; but, though some of them, it must be owned, are extravagant and farcical, they are almost all amusing,—and the luckiness of her simile, "as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile," will be acknowledged as long as there are writers to be run away with, by the wilfulness of this truly ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... star performer, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt. Under the influence of Eugene Scribe, Sardou began his career at the Theatre Francais with a wide range of well-made plays, varying in scope from the social satire of Nos Intimes and the farcical intrigue of Les Pattes de Mouche (known to us in English as The Scrap of Paper) to the tremendous historic panorama of Patrie. When Sarah Bernhardt left the Comedie Francaise, Sardou followed in her footsteps, ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... following chapter, dear reader, you will see the end of this farcical adventure. In the mean time, let us take a ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... such things on Sunday, and now more people visit the Museum on Sunday than on all the other days of the week put together. The same is true of the public libraries. There is something to me infinitely pharisaical, hypocritical and farcical in this Sunday nonsense. The rich people who favor keeping Sunday "holy," have their coachman drive them to church and wait outside until the services end. What do they care about the coachman's soul? While they are at church their cooks are ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... obedience: a soldier is, of all descriptions of men, the most completely a machine; yet his profession inevitably teaches him something of dogmatism, swaggering, and sell-consequence: he is like the puppet of a showman, who, at the very time he is made to strut and swell and display the most farcical airs, we perfectly know cannot assume the most insignificant gesture, advance either to the right or the left, but as he is moved by his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... might have seemed something humorous in the situation—in its almost farcical complications and misunderstandings. But these two saw none; the issues were too deep, too serious; death was too near in ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... men, that they must take such pleasures as they may, in their waning years, he returns to the shades. The play ends with the undignified reappearance of Xerxes, and a melancholy procession into the palace of Susa. It was, perhaps, inevitable that this close of the great drama should verge on the farcical, and that the poltroonery of Xerxes should, in a measure, obscure Aeschylus' generous portraiture of Atossa and Darius. But his magnificent picture of the battle of Salamis is unequalled in the poetic annals of naval war. No account of the flight of the Armada, ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... teach and inculcate useful moral lessons. The moral philosophy of the Mime, Sophron, was so pure that Plato kept a book of his poems under his pillow when on his death-bed. Besides these Moralities, as they were termed, there were, in addition, light pieces of a farcical kind, in the portrayal of which the Mimes were equally as successful ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... close to her original, Mrs. Behn has dealt with the somewhat rude material in a very apt and masterly way: she has, to advantage, omitted the old King, Emanuel, King of Portugal, Alvero, father to Maria (Florella), and the two farcical friars, Crab and Cole; she adds Elvira, and whereas in Lust's Dominion the Queen at the conclusion is ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... Christendom it seems almost farcical to talk of a Christian Brotherhood. The baptismal membership of the Church of God has fallen into group organisations whose mutual antagonism is of the bitterest kind. The so-called "religious press" is perhaps the saddest picture of modern Christian ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... inquiry into the case of Gilbert and Vaucheray was becoming worse and worse, the days were slipping by, and not an hour passed without his asking himself, in anguish, whether all his efforts—granting that he succeeded—would not end in farcical results, absolutely foreign to the aim ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... were in the main as leisurely as those of idlers on Fifth Avenue or Broadway. They carried boards or stone as one would objects of great value. One could not help smiling at the incongruity of it; it was farcical. Finally gathering the full import of it all, I ventured to laugh, and he turned on me with a sharp and ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... valor? Very radiant indeed;—yet, it seems to me, gone somewhat into the phosphorescent kind; shining in the dark, as fish will do when rotten! War has actually its serious character; nor is Death a farcical transaction, however high your genius may go. But what then? it is the Marechal's trade to keep these poor people at the cutting pitch, on any terms that ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... I am a farcical character myself, after all. Don't touch a hair of that duck's head, HEDVIG. Come to my arms and all shall ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 30, 1891 • Various
... me go on. I want, among other things, to insist upon the fateful power of trivial incidents. No one has yet dared to do this seriously. It has often been done in farce, and that's why farcical writing so often makes one melancholy. You know my stock instances of the kind of thing I mean. There was poor Allen, who lost the most valuable opportunity of his life because he hadn't a clean shirt to put on; and ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... PASQUIN TURN'D DRAWCANSIR in two acts (Larpent 96) which is here reproduced in facsimile.[1] It is an interesting example of that mid-eighteenth-century phenomenon, the afterpiece, from a period when not only Shakespearean stock productions but new plays as well were accompanied by such farcical appendages.[2] This particular afterpiece is worth reproducing not only for its catalogue of the social foibles of the age, but as an illustration of satirical writing for the stage at a time when dramatic taste often wavered toward the sentimental. It appears that ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... officer certainly more than of the soldier, is impracticable before the enemy except under exceptional circumstances of picked officers, picked men, ground, distance, safety, etc. Even in maneuvers its execution is farcical. There is not an organization in which the soldiers do not hurry the command to fire in that the officers are so afraid that their men will anticipate the command that they give it as rapidly as possible, while the pieces are hardly in firing ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... infernal, diabolical—and farcical—if we look at the deeds that are done every day. Luckily we don't and mustn't, for we all know that there are things in the world a million times worse than death, and that there are future results to be ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... Tarkington's studies of boy life (especially Penrod), and of adolescence (especially Seventeen and Clarence). Judged by your own experience and observation, are they presented with true knowledge and humor, or are they a farcical skimming of surface eccentricities? Compare them with Mark Twain's books about boys and ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... nobles to desist from robbing the merchants, dealers, and the poor of their property. At this period the Fete des Fous, or feast of madmen was celebrated to its full extent, and anything more absurd, more farcical, or more irreverential cannot well be imagined. Dulaure, in his voluminous History of Paris, gives a most detailed account of this extraordinary mockery, of which I will give my ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... to Pump, the innkeeper, the gallant innkeeper who, against all opposition, keeps the flag flying and the flagon full. If the book is a little overdrawn it is, no doubt, because the subject is slightly farcical; the arguments of the Oriental are well put, and, if the discussion of the merits of vegetarianism are a little wearisome, the poetry of a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... of an interesting nature was pending, nothing could make her refrain from joining any company which might be in the house;—nothing;—not even O'Grady himself. At such times, too, she became strangely excited, and invariably executed one piece of farcical absurdity, of which, however, the family contrived to confine the exercise to her own room. It was wearing on her head a tin concern, something like a chimney-cowl, ornamented by a small weathercock, after the fashion of those which surmount ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... of a thing new to him. It was like him, too, to have conceived and risked all upon this last desperate and madcap scheme—this message to a poor, crazed fanatico cruising about with his grotesque uniform and his farcical title. But his companions had been at their wits' end; escape had seemed incredible; and now he was pleased with the success of the plan they had called crack-brained ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... gave before vast audiences all over the United Kingdom, and in his two visits to America. It is not surprising, either, to learn that upon the stage his preference was for melodrama and farce. His own serious writing was always dangerously close to the melodramatic, and his humor to the farcical. There is much false art, bad taste, and even vulgarity in Dickens. He was never quite a gentleman, and never succeeded well in drawing gentlemen or ladies. In the region of low comedy he is easily the most original, the most inexhaustible, the most wonderful ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... its source Is common life, must be a thing of course, Whereas there's nought so difficult, because There's nowhere less allowance made for flaws. See Plautus now: what ill-sustained affairs Are his close fathers and his love-sick heirs! How farcical his parasites! how loose And down at heel he wears his comic shoes! For, so he fills his pockets, nought he heeds Whether the play's ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... compel you to protest. All the same, however, when people won't make restoration, things must be taken from them. What worries me is that Bergaz should have sold himself just now. The public prosecutor will use that farcical burglary as a crushing argument when he asks the jury for ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... myself exactly what it is I am wanting in.... I am wanting, certainly, in something without which one cannot move men's hearts, or wholly win a woman's heart; and to sway men's minds alone is precarious, and an empire ever unprofitable. A strange, almost farcical fate is mine; I would devote myself—eagerly and wholly to some cause,—and I cannot devote myself. I shall end by sacrificing myself to some folly or other in which I shall not even believe.... Alas! at thirty-five to ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... then be asked, 'Why does Innocent Smith continue far into his middle age a farcical existence, that exposes him to so many false charges?' To this I merely answer that he does it because he really is happy, because he really is hilarious, because he really is a man and alive. ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... discovered in the Wicklow Mines,[G] which were worked some fifty years back, but which, for want of capital or perseverance, only furnished a few Cronobane halfpence, and materials for a musical farce to one of the most delightful farcical Irish writers of his time;[H] ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... plot several persons "of known credit, fortune and reputations, and of religious principles superior to a suspicion of being concerned in such detestable practices; at which the judges were very much astonished."[50] This farcical extreme at length persuaded even the obsessed magistrates to stop the ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... too mild for representation, and generously added a few more murders, rapes, and parricides, to that charnel-house of horrors[1]. His turn for comedy being at least equal to his success in the blood-stained buskin, Mr Ravenscroft translated and mangled several of the more farcical French comedies, which he decorated with the lustre of his own great name. Amongst others which he thus appropriated, were the most extravagant and buffoon scenes in Moliere's "Bourgeois Gentilhomme;" in which Monsieur Jourdain is, with much absurd ceremony, created a Turkish Paladin; ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... less known than it deserves to be. Only a Scotchman can thoroughly appreciate it. It is curious, and yet it is not curious, to find the pathos and the polish of one of the most touching and elegant of poets in the man who has with such irresistible humor, sometimes approaching to the farcical, delineated humble Scotch life. One passage in the book always struck me very much. We have in it the poet as well as the humorist and it is a perfect example of what I have been trying to describe in the pages which you have read. I mean the passage in which Mansie tells us of a sudden glimpse which, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... associates that can't be helped. Miss VERA GORDON'S Rosie is a good performance, and Miss JULIA BRUNS, the vampire, seemed to me to make with considerable skill and subtlety a real character (within the limits allowed by the farcical nature of the scheme) out of what might easily have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various
... Paris with each draught of beer. Fagerolles, very calm, retained his usual smile. He had accompanied them for the sake of amusement, for the singular pleasure which he found in urging his comrades into farcical affairs that were bound to turn out badly. At the very moment when he was lashing their spirit of revolt, he himself formed the firm resolution to work in future for the Prix de Rome. That day had decided him; he thought it idiotic to compromise ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... match when and with whom she chooses, who dominates the play; and though Loveworth, whom she finally permits to win her, is rather substantial than gay, she is gay enough for them both. The action, though somewhat farcical, has verve throughout, and the dialogue crackles. And, as regards the nature of comedy, Baker now knows where he stands. There is no character who could possibly be taken as an "example." On the contrary, whenever a pathetic or "exemplary" effect ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... condition he had scarcely qualified prior to the publication of "Creatures that once were Men." It was a bold venture, for all the former successes in shilling form were either sensationally melodramatic or frankly farcical. Encouraged by the huge demand for Maxim Gorky's book, Mr. Alston Rivers is publishing in the same form (1/- nett, paper, and 1/6 cloth) "Publican and Serf," by Skitaletz, a Russian Author, who, while by no means behind Gorky in point of realism, possesses in the opinion of ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... been noted as a droll. A grin was as much a part of his stock apparel as tow breeches or a palm-leaf hat. The negro, too, had from time immemorial been portrayed upon the stage and in fiction as an irrepressible and inimitably farcical fellow. But the "Southern gentleman" was a man of different kidney from either of these. A sardonic dignity hedged him about with peculiar sacredness. He was chivalrous and baronial in his instincts, surroundings, and characteristics. He was nervous, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... who Bob was, but at the moment she could think of nothing but the farcical complications arising from the idea of Mrs. Maper's providing Mr. Maper with a male companion secretly to improve his manners. Of course the two companions would fall in ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... watch still in his hand, advanced to the bridge table. Strolling from player to player he made mental photographs of each hand, then took his stand behind Penny's chair to observe the horribly farcical playing of it. Poor little Penny! he reflected. She hadn't had a chance against that dumb-bell across the table from her. Fancy anyone's doubling a little slam bid on a hand like Carolyn Drake's—or even calling an informatory double in the first place! Why hadn't she bid four Clubs after Karen's ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... imbittered domestic life and from his travels in Spain, Italy and Greece. This twofold character of the poet it is that is revealed in his best poems, "Childe Harold" and "Don Juan." He used both works as receptacles for the most incongruous ideas. "If things are farcical," he once said to Trelawney, "they will do for 'Don Juan'; if heroical, you shall have another canto of 'Childe Harold.'" This means of disposing of his poetic ideas accounts for the great volume of Byron's verse as well as for its inequality. ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... British, inasmuch as they held command over the lake for more than four months, during which time they could cooeperate with their army; while the Americans held it for barely two months and a half. In fact the conduct of the two fleets on Lake Ontario during the latter part of the war was almost farcical. As soon as one, by building, acquired the superiority, the foe at once retired to port, where he waited until he had built another vessel or two, when he came out, and the other went into port in turn. Under such circumstances it was hopeless ever to finish ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... comedy, this play of the "Taming of the Shrew." In the hands of a lesser author it would have lost its comedy and degenerated purely into farce, restricting itself to more ignoble aims and to a more indulgent public. For farce, after all, is farcical, and the mood for its appreciation is not one which is sympathetic to any great or moving thing. And in the hands of interpreters less than intelligently fine, the play may still descend into the lower class; but this cannot be done without degrading it beyond any ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... CRAMINATION. A farcical word, signifying the same as cramming; the termination tion being suffixed for ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... pathetic kind is interwoven with low comedy—the most lofty sentiments, the most exalted virtues, and heroism and magnanimity strained almost beyond the limits of probability, are checkered by uncouth pleasantries, and the most pathetic incidents intruded upon and interrupted by the farcical conundrums of MUG, a low cockney, who has become secretary of state to the king of the Mandingoes. Thus, oscillating between Kotesbue and O'Keefe, giving now a layer of exalted sentiment, and then a layer of mere farce, has Mr. C. raised a long ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... extravagance. A melodrama is a drama with a romantic story or plot, and sensational situations and incidents. An opera is a musical drama, the higher forms of which are known as grand opera, and the lower or farcical forms as ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... nature, connotes the habit of paying your pew-rent regularly and of changing your flannels on the proper date. However, I was telling you about Jasper Hardress—" And Charteris repeated the story of their imbroglio in such a fashion that it sounded farcical. ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... company, of several operas, which were again to be conducted by the royal conductor of the place. But in addition to these professional labours, I had to endure such a meagre, ill-provided and grievously farcical existence as was enough to disgust me, if not for ever, at any rate for the time being, with the wretched profession of a theatrical conductor. Yet I survived even this, and Magdeburg was destined to lead me eventually to the real glory of ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the relations between the Premier and the widow Pretty, which promised, as the title hinted, to be the main attraction, were such as never could have occurred on land or sea. It was impossible, with this farcical element always obtruding itself, to take the political features of the play seriously, as I gather that we were intended to do; and we got very little help from Mr. Bourchier's own performance, which was frankly humorous. In his brochure he tells us with great solemnity ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various
... For while the journalism of the States permits a pantomimic vulgarity long past anything English, it also shows a real excitement about the most earnest mental problems, of which English papers are innocent, or rather incapable. The Sun was full of the most solemn matters treated in the most farcical way. William James figured there as well as "Weary Willie," and pragmatists alternated with pugilists in the ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... trap-doors, through which the demons issue from their cave. When they have to rise into the air, little devils of stuffed brown cloth are substituted, or perhaps live chimney-sweeps, who swing suspended and smothered in rags. The accidents which happen are sometimes tragical, sometimes farcical. When the ropes break, then infernal spirits and immortal deities fall together, laming and sometimes killing each other. Add to all this the monsters which render some scenes very pathetic, such as dragons, lizards, tortoises, and large toads, which promenade the theatre with a menacing ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... of 1875 General Crook made several trips into the Black Hills to drive out the miners and maintain the government's faith, but while he made many arrests there was no punishment, and the whole proceeding became farcical. In August of the same year Custer City was laid out, and two weeks later it contained a population of six hundred souls. These General Crook drove out, but as he marched from the place others swarmed in and the population was ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... the blushing honours of Sonia still fresh upon him, has now turned his pen to a tale of farcical adventure, the result being Ninety-Six Hours' Leave (METHUEN), and I could find it in my heart to regret it. Because, to speak frankly, the present volume will do little to add to the reputation so deservedly won ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various
... very successful. They abounded in witty sallies and repartee, but the general plot was not humorous. The jollity was of a rough farcical character. It was said he left off writing for the stage when he should have begun. He took little care with his plays, and would go home late from a tavern, and bring a dramatic scene in the morning, written on the paper in which he ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... all rational common sense, in the vast numbers of persons deluded by such processes. In this aspect (the total absence of right reason and real religion demonstrated by these ludicrous and blasphemous juggleries in our Christian communities), that which was farcical in the lowest degree became tragical in the highest. I only witnessed this one mesmeric exhibition, on the occasion of this visit paid to us by Mr. Townsend and Alexis, until several years afterwards, in the house of my excellent friend Mr. Combe, in Edinburgh, when I was one ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... go as I am. (Gloomily) After all, I don't know why I should mind one more farcical touch to my situation. A grown man that doesn't know ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... international relations there is nothing more farcical than an international arbitration. It is always preceded by great popular excitement. A ship is seized, a boundary is run a few degrees north or south of the conventional line, something else equally trivial ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... Lewis, exhibits not only a faithful copy of the spirited, loose, and flowing versification of that singular author, but a very just representation of that mixture of extravagance and jocularity which has impressed most of his writings with the character of a sort of farcical horror."—JEFFREY, Edinburgh Review. ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... aside from these two figures, Beaumarchais, Marivaux, Becque, Brieux at his best, and Maurice Donnay occasionally, there has not been a single writer in the history of the French theatre so inevitably au courant with human nature. His form is frankly farcical and his plays are so funny, so enjoyable merely as good shows that it seems a pity to raise an obelisk in the playwright's honour, and yet the fact remains that he understands the political, social, domestic, amorous, ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... respectable; indeed, better dressed than Kearney had seen him since he left off his New Orleans "store" clothes. The Colossus was evidently an object of great interest to his new acquaintances; and, from the farcical look upon their faces, it was clear they had been doing their best to "draw" him. With what success Kearney could not tell; though, from the knowledge he had of his old comrade's cleverness, he suspected not much. There was ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... we generally anchored about two gun-shots from the shore, and in the evening the crew danced or got up a kind of farce, which was farcical enough. After seven long, lazy, tedious weeks, we were ordered to Plymouth to refit. We flew like a shovel-nosed barge against tide, and reached Hamoaze on the evening of the third day. Reader, I do not know whether you were ever at Plymouth. ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... whiskered senior and his small comrades there existed a freemasonry that made them all sense a thing beyond the ken of most of their elders. Perhaps this was because the elders, being blind in their superior wisdom, saw neither this thing nor the communion that flourished. They saw only the farcical joke. But His Honor, Judge Priest, to cite a conspicuous exception, seemed not to see the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... is a doomed man," commented Myra, with a mocking laugh. "But perhaps the fact that I do not love you will induce you to spare his life," she added hastily. "Don't you find it rather difficult to be melodramatic and to talk farcical nonsense ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... the luminousness of a frosted web. 'You see that dark opening in it near the Swan? There is a still more remarkable one south of the equator, called the Coal Sack, as a sort of nickname that has a farcical force from its very inadequacy. In these our sight plunges quite beyond any twinkler we have yet visited. Those are deep wells for the human mind to let itself down into, leave alone the human body! and think of the side caverns and secondary abysses to right and left as ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... a god of the garden, instead of the sovereign director of the universal forces, and stern master of the destinies of men. Chaumette's commemoration of the Divinity of Reason was a sensible performance, compared with Robespierre's farcical repartee. It was something, as Comte has said, to select for worship man's most individual attribute. If they could not contemplate society as a whole, it was at least a gain to pay homage to that faculty in the human rulers of the world, which had brought ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... are more sharp, in proportion as they are more polished. That reformers should abound in obscenities, as is the case of the two Roman poets, is surely an impropriety of the most extraordinary kind; the courtly Horace also sometimes sinks into mean and farcical abuse, as in the first lines of the seventh satire of the first book; but Boileau and Pope have given to their Satire the Cestus of Venus: their ridicule is concealed and oblique; that of the Romans ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... drama had made at least tolerable, and to turn to the uses of pure amusement the materials of a clearly defined form of art. We shall find the dramatization of the chatter of the street and the apparition of types familiar to the farcical comedies and operas bouffes of later days. In the washerwomen of Striggio we are not far from Madame Angot, and some of the personages whom Vecchi humorously treated in his "Amfiparnaso" are treading the stage of to-day. In these madrigal dramas, as we shall ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... any misgivings on record. They relate that during Xavier's sojourn in Bungo he had numerous public debates—one continuing for five days—with Buddhist priests, but even Fernandez not being available as an interpreter, these debates must have been either farcical or imaginary, though brilliant results are claimed for them by the Church historians. That Xavier himself was not satisfied is proved by his determination to transfer his ministrations to China, for he said, "if the Chinese adopt ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Rouen that actually saw Jeanne herself was the open space round the rising nave of St. Ouen, then called the Cemetery, where we have already watched the farcical royalty of the Revolte de la Harelle (p. 152). In thus tracing her footsteps, where we may still find them, I shall be showing you what little is left of the Rouen of the English occupation. Few of the towers and spires that rise now above ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... felt it was monstrous that the modern man, who was pre-eminently capable of realising the strangest and most contradictory beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic and the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcical bathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat. He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist in raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist. It is indeed difficult to account ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... that of the gay-coloured birds that flocked among the tree-fern or rose in frightened clouds as the waggons crashed by. And they discussed—together with the chances of the runners entered for the second Spring Meeting at Newmarket, and the merits of the problem play, and the newest farcical comedy—the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... like the St. Vitus disease. Tommies and Jocks saluted every subaltern with an automatic gesture of convulsive energy. Every subaltern acknowledged these movements and in turn saluted a multitude of majors, colonels, and generals. The thing became farcical, a monstrous absurdity of human relationship, yet pleasing to the vanity of men lifted up above the lowest caste. It seemed to me an intensification of the snob instinct in the soul of man. Only the Australians stood out against it, and went by ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... understanding of the nature of the game of life, the efforts of the government to preserve order in a row of this magnitude became almost farcical,—so long as the spirit of man was untouched and SUCCESS was admittedly the one glorious prize of ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... any reader of novels by the well-told career of George de Barnwell. One may say that to laugh Ivanhoe out of face, or to lessen the glory of that immortal story, would be beyond the power of any farcical effect. Thackeray in his Rowena and Rebecca certainly had no such purpose. Nothing of Ivanhoe is injured, nothing made less valuable than it was before, yet, of all prose parodies in the language, it is perhaps the most perfect. Every character ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... "If the character of Hamlet be entirely omitted, the play must suffer, even though Henry Irving himself be cast for the title-role." Anyone going to the theatre in this spirit would be likely to be less disappointed by performances that were comic or even frankly farcical. Latterly, when he grew slightly deaf, listening to any kind of piece became too much of an effort; nevertheless, he continued to the last the habit of going to ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... figure so often in his first novel, Kingsley always reflected some of his own happiness. It is not wit nor subtle humour, but a combination of pure mirth with the enthusiasm of warm friendship, that maintains one's interest in the simple life of the new Drumston. There is an abundance of farcical fun and playfulness which force laughter, and never approach an unkindness. The men avoid being smart at each other's expense; and if they cannot claim to be clever or heroic, they are at least good fellows, any one of whom might serve as a model ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... Hodgson,—I thank you for your song, or, rather, your two songs,—your new song on love, and your old song on religion. [1] I admire the first sincerely, and in turn call upon you to admire the following on Anacreon Moore's new operatic farce, [2] or farcical ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... keep up that pretense? It was a good line in last night's situation; but it becomes farcical when applied to ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... Reve's Tale. This, after making all allowance for the rude manners of Chaucer's age, is intolerable; and by indispensably softening down the incidents, he has killed the spirit of that humour, gross and farcical, that pervades the original. When the work was first mentioned to me, I protested as strongly as possible against admitting any coarseness and indelicacy, so that my conscience is clear of countenancing ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... dramas began to lag, current topics were introduced into the dialogue, and characters from real life appeared on the stage for the first time. Early in the sixteenth century John Heywood invented a farcical composition called The Interlude to relieve the tiresome monotony of existing plays. But it was in 1540 that the first comedy appeared, and it is not too much to say that this play marks the beginning of modern English drama. Nicholas Udall, head master of Eton ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... inventions of exquisite beauty that did not clash with the whole. They engrafted their genius on that of their first masters; there was the perpetuated tradition of an admirable conception, a perennial breath of the Holy Spirit. It was the interloper, the period of false and farcical Pagan art, that extinguished that pure flame, and annihilated the luminous truthfulness of the Mediaeval past, when God had dwelt intimately, at home, in souls; it substituted a merely earthly form of art for one ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... which dramatized the lives of saints. These were followed by the Moralities, plays in which were personified abstract virtues and vices. The first step in the creation of the regular drama was taken by Heywood, who composed some farcical plays called Interludes. The people of the sixteenth century were fond of pageants, shows in which classical personages were introduced, and Masques, which gradually developed from pageants into dramas accompanied with music. About the middle of the sixteenth century, rose the English drama,—comedy, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... only taken some soup, and a couple of eggs, and drank nothing but water; my tongue is discolored; and without medicine and tonics, whatever my farcical doctor may say, my ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... antiquity more or less remote. Thus it is easy to conceive the delight of the music-loving people of Naples when they found that the opera which they adored could be enjoyed in combination with a mirthful and even farcical story, interpreted by characters who might have stepped out of one of their own market-places. But, apart from the freedom and variety of the subjects with which it dealt, the development of opera buffa gave rise ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild |
