"Merry-andrew" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a company of foot-soldiers formed a line across the stage, looking stern, grim, and terrible enough, to make it a pleasant consideration that they were but three inches high; and conspicuous above the whole was seen a Merry-Andrew, in the pointed cap and motley coat of his profession. All the inhabitants of this mimic world were motionless, like the figures in a picture, or like that people who one moment were alive in the midst of their business ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... humorist, wag, wit, reparteeist[obs3], epigrammatist, punster; bel esprit, life of the party; wit-snapper, wit- cracker, wit-worm; joker, jester, Joe Miller|!, drole de corps[obs3], gaillard[obs3], spark; bon diable[Fr]; practical joker. buffoon, farceur[French], merry-andrew, mime, tumbler, acrobat, mountebank, charlatan, posturemaster[obs3], harlequin, punch, pulcinella[obs3], scaramouch[obs3], clown; wearer of the cap and bells, wearer of the motley; motley fool; pantaloon, gypsy; jack-pudding, jack in the green, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... old parishioner of mine, James of Sandhurst, was once the hero of quarter-staff in the early part of the century. The whistling match was not so dangerous a contest; the prize was conferred upon the whistler who could whistle clearest, and go through his tune while a clown, or merry-andrew, made laughable grimaces ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... my calling," said he, one day, as he scrambled into the cart and drove off. "How can one play the merry-andrew under such circumstances? What will become of these poor creatures as winter comes on, even if they can last till then? It is impossible they should all escape from the country—they will have to conform after all, and had they ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... reflect, the more the difficulty opens on us of doing full justice to the mind of Hood. We soon discover that we are dealing, not with a mere punster or jester, not with a mere master of grimace or manufacturer of broad grins, not with an eccentric oddity in prose or verse, not with a merry-andrew who tickles to senseless laughter, not with a spasmodic melodramatist who writhes in fictitious pain, but that we are dealing with a sincere, truthful, and most gifted nature,—many-sided, many-colored, harmonious as a whole, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... other names, with the same characters, in the same order, and with the same sequel, for every common reader to find me out at the first sight for a plagiary, and cry, "This I read before in Virgil in a better language and in better verse." This is like Merry-Andrew on the low rope copying lubberly the same tricks which his master is so dexterously ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... energy of resolution which make her the worthy daughter of her father. Upon the whole she is the most lovable of all the heroines of Schiller. It is her tragedy of the heart which renders 'Wallenstein' perennially interesting to the young. And this is much; for does not Goethe's shrewd Merry-Andrew declare that the great object of dramatic art is to please the young,—that die Werdenden are the very ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... was the aureole which crowned the well-beloved. But that she should excite such heart-throbs, that she should evoke such fantoms with nothing but her beauty, her flowers, her motley costume, and a certain trick of turning she had learned from some merry-andrew; and that without a word, without a thought, without even appearing to know it! What was chaos if it required ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... don't like those visitors of yours well enough to see you turned into a merry-andrew ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Wiener Schub (Offscourings of Vienna) vociferously superintending games of chance. Ballad-singers brayed, Auctioneers grew hoarse; cheap New Wine (heuriger) flowed like water, still worse confounding the confusion; and high over all, vaulted, in ground-and-lofty tumbling, a particoloured Merry-Andrew, like the genius of the place and ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Wiener Schub (Offscourings of Vienna) vociferously superintending games of chance. Ballad-singers brayed, Auctioneers grew hoarse; cheap New Wine (heuriger) flowed like water, still worse confounding the confusion; and high over all, vaulted, in ground-and-lofty tumbling, a particolored Merry-Andrew, like the genius of the ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... producible, when you got Two literary fools; and, as if with Leyden-jars, positive and negative, brought their vanities to bear on one another. This sometimes happened, when Tobacco-Parliament was in luck. Friedrich Wilhelm had a variety of Merry-Andrew Raths of the Gundling sort, though none ever came up to Gundling, or approached him, in worth as ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle |
