"Satire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... compilations in order to have bread, and twenty pamphleteers make excerpts from these compilations, or apology for them, or criticism and satire of them, also with the idea of having bread, because they have no other trade. All these persons go on Friday to the police lieutenant of Paris to ask permission to sell their rubbish. They have audience immediately after the strumpets who do not look at them because they ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... just so far from the fated grog-vessel that no one suspected his design. On reaching the spot his heart began to fail him, but not his wickedness; indeed, his was the very beau ideal of that character described in the satire of Junius, which, "without courage enough to resist doing a bad action, has yet virtue enough to be ashamed of it." Whether or not these mixed motives influenced old Jacko, I cannot pretend to say; but there he sat chattering, screaming, and trembling, as if the sergeant's cane had been ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... Conservative side of the House there are vestiges of the despotic leadership even now. A cynical politician is said to have watched the long row of county members, so fresh and respectable-looking, and muttered, "By Jove, they are the finest brute votes in Europe!" But all satire apart, the principle of Parliament is obedience to leaders. Change your leader if you will, take another if you will, but obey No. 1 while you serve No. 1, and obey No. 2 when you have gone over to No. 2. The penalty of not doing ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... cannot be called a poem. It would not be possible to write satire, epic, idyl, not even elegy, upon that "rat-hole philosophy," as Mr. Emerson once styled the new fetichism of the mahogany tables. It has not one element that asks the sense of beauty to incorporate it, or challenges the weapon of wit to transfix it. It is humiliating, but not pathetic, not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... was not always of the serious things of life. It very frequently partook of the playful, when the hearers would be kept amused with a humour and whimsicality, cauterized now and then with some biting touch of satire which showed that neither Swinburne nor ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... are troubled with weak eyes—walking along the streets with boards over their faces, as a protection from the rays of the sun. I don't believe that is the real reason of the thing, though my brother assures me that it is. I think, myself, that it is intended as a keen satire upon those young ladies who wear veils in the streets; but I never will yield my point. I will wear my veil, so long as I have a complexion worth protecting, and so long as there are gentlemen worth cutting. ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... one of the most acute students and critics of Shakespeare, of whose works he pub. two ed., the first in 1865, and the second (the Riverside) in 1883. He also wrote Words and their Uses, Memoirs of Shakespeare, Studies in Shakespeare, The New Gospel of Peace (a satire), The Fate ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... light. The question here is not of a difficulty between our servants, but of an insult which Spain has received from France in the face of all Rome. Yes, all Rome has witnessed this insult, and these miserable Romans have even dared to dishonor us with irony and satire, and to mock and deride Spain, while they overload ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... themselves with writing contemptible buffoon caricature parodies of the writings of the greatest men. The new comedy never could have raised its head, had the middle comedy continued to be supported by a succession of such wits as Aristophanes, with new supplies of envenomed personal satire. Fortunately, however, the stage was pretty well cleared of that pernicious kind of writing when Menander, the amiable and the refined, came forth ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... chord of pathos he can touch well. His degradation, as the old school thought it, of the drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and what they deemed his pandering to vulgar taste, brought upon him the bitter satire of Aristophanes. Yet he did not win many prizes. Perhaps the vast theatre and the grand choric accompaniments harmonised ill with his unheroic style. He is clearly connected with the Sophists, and with the generation the morality of ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... fairs, church music, fiddles, dancing, puppet shows, Whitsun ales—in short, everything wearing the attire of popular amusement and diversion. The rhyme recording Jack Horner's gloomy conduct was, in fact, a satire on Puritanical aversion ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... satire on Dewey's part, for just one second later the bridge under his feet leaped like a springboard as the great gun beneath it gave the signal. Scarcely had the shell left the muzzle when an answering roar came from the other ships. The battle had begun, the Spanish ships were riddled with ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... upon Mr. Ayrton's satire," said Ella. "It never misses the point in the harness. The barb of the dart is, I believe, Mr. Ayrton's, the feather at the ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... prodigious memory, stored with miscellaneous snatches and fragments of all tunes and songs, which he sometimes applied, with considerable address, as the vehicles of remonstrance, explanation, or satire. Davie was much attached to the few who showed him kindness; and both aware of any slight or ill usage which he happened to receive, and sufficiently apt, where he saw opportunity, to revenge it. The common people, who often judge hardly of each other, as well as of their betters, although they ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... and during several hours arrest the attention of their audience by the relation of wonderful and interesting adventures. There are also characters of humour amongst them who, by buffoonery, mimicry, punning, repartee, and satire (rather of the sardonic kind) are able to keep the company in laughter at intervals during the course of a night's entertainment. The assembly seldom breaks up before daylight, and these bimbangs ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... found in them was that of Francisco Barreto, a most experienced officer. This governor is chiefly known from his persecution of the poet Camoens, whom he sent to the little island of Macao as a punishment for a satire he had written on the pride and immorality of the officials at Goa. But Barreto was a very vigorous governor. He did much to strengthen the various Portuguese fortresses throughout Asia, and showed himself a skilful ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... and the next two in trochaic septenarii, iambic senarii, and hexameters. Books xxvi.-xxix. were published first, then Book xxx. In Book xxvi. Lucilius states his views of life, his poetic principles, what led him to write satire, etc. Cf. l. 3, ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... that one dress, or equipage, or instrument, which is fit for the hour and the need; so Plato, in his plenty, is never restricted, but has the fit word. There is, indeed, no weapon in all the armory of wit which he did not possess and use,—epic, analysis, mania, intuition, music, satire, and irony, down to the customary and polite. His illustrations are poetry and his jests illustrations. Socrates' profession of obstetric art is good philosophy; and his finding that word "cookery," and "adulatory art," for rhetoric, in the Gorgias, does us a substantial service still. No orator ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... through the whole course of his life[3]. In 1643, being then master of arts, he was, among many others, ejected his college, and the university; whereupon, retiring to Oxford, he settled in St. John's College, and that same year, under the name of a scholar of Oxford, published a satire entitled the Puritan and the Papist. His zeal in the Royal cause, engaged him in the service of the King, and he was present in many of his Majesty's journies and expeditions; by this means he gained an acquaintance and familiarity with ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... the line of the Upper Douro: he blamed them next for the evacuation of Tudela, and summed up the situation by stating that "all the Spanish forces are not able to overthrow 25,000 French in a reasonable position"—adding, with stinging satire: "In war men are nothing: it is ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Matthieu de Montmorency, complained, in a drawing-room of the party, that the Liberals had no love for legitimacy. A person present defended himself from this reproach. "Yes," said M. de Montmorency, with thoughtless candour, "you love legitimacy as we do the Charter." A keen satire on the false position of both parties under the government of the Charter and ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... among them the Candidate, had laughed loudly at Emelie's descriptions; but the Judge had not once moved his lips, and replied, when she had done, with an earnestness that confounded even her satire. ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... honest compiler, save his own. Wherefore, the choice of these selections, like kissing, went by favor. As to the arrangement of them, every compiler will tell you that Classification is Vexation. And why not? When many a poem may be both Parody and Satire,—both Romance and Cynicism. Wherefore, the compiler sorted with loving care the selections here presented striving to do justice to the verses themselves, and taking a chance on the tolerant good nature ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... South had affirmed that "his mind was made up." The doctrine that the interest of the South is identified with the foreign competitor of the Northern manufacturer, he denounced as in conflict with the whole history of our Revolutionary War, and a satire on our institutions. If it should prove true that these interests were so irreconcilable as to cause a separation, as some Southern statesmen contended, after such separation the same state of irreconcilable interests would continue, and "with redoubled aggravation," ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... it may be asserted once for all that it was she who first gave vogue to the greeting, "Doodledo," an abbreviated form of "How d'you do," though others have been given the credit for that sparkling pleasantry. In the art of "setting down" she is unapproachable, combining gentle courtesy with fine satire and mordant epigram, as on the occasion when a certain pushing and impossible outside person claimed her acquaintance in public with a loud "How are you?" With her own look and smile she turned and gave him his coup de grace—"Not any the better for seeing you!"—at which an exalted foreign Personage, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... me—is, I am sorry to say it, in very fact not so much so as in prudence she ought. I will not use the name of love on this occasion; for I have applied it too often to transient whims and fancies to escape your satire, should I venture to apply it now. For it is a phrase, I must confess, which I have used—a romancer would say, profaned—a little too often, considering how few years have passed over my head. But seriously, the fair chaplain of Brokenburn ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... A clever satire on the adventures of a New York lawyer seeking rest and diversion in the northwoods. Instead of rest he finds trouble in the person of his host's wife—young, pretty ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... qu'il a fauche du troupeau des humains Avant que l'envoye de la nuit eternelle Vint sur son tertre vert l'abattre d'un coup d'aile, Et sur son coeur de fer lui croiser les deux mains? Clouerons-nous au poteau d'une satire altiere Le nom sept fois vendu d'un pale pamphletaire, Qui, pousse par la faim, du fond de son oubli, S'en vient, tout grelottant d'envie et d'impuissance, Sur le front du genie insulter l'esperance, ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... his complete confidence in the theory. It needed confidence little short of sublime to challenge Proudhon in the audacious manner of this scintillating critique. The torrential eloquence, the scornful satire, and fierce invective of the attack, have rather tended to obscure for readers of a later generation the real merit of the book, the importance of the fundamental idea that history must be interpreted in the light of economic development, that economic evolution determines social life. The book ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... naturae, et mas occasionatus, et per accidens generatur; atque ideo est monstrum." For other instances see Bayle s. v. Gediacus (Revd. Simon of Brandebourg) who in 1695 published a "Defensio Sexus muliebris," a refutation of an anti-Socinian satire or squib, "Disputatio perjucunda, Mulieres homines non esse," Parisiis, 1693. But when Islam arose in the seventh century, the Christian learned cleverly affixed the stigma of their own misogyny upon the Moslems ad captandas foeminas and in Southern Europe the calumny ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... out schemes with which he was unacquainted, and to which he was vowed; he mourned over the helpless peoples of the world, for whom a new community was needed to fight, as the Knights of St. John fought for Christendom; and he painted with delicate satire that love of ease which leads heroes to desert the greater work for the lesser on the plea of the higher life. Selfishly she sought rest, relief for the taxing labors, anxieties, and journeys of fifteen years, and not the will of God, as ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... brilliant and frolicsome than at the breakfast-table that morning. Never had poor McAllister been more at his wits' end to know how to reply to her bewildering sallies of good-natured badinage. Every vulnerable point of Northern character received her delicate satire. Lane himself did not escape her light shafts. He made no defence, but smiled or laughed at every palpable hit. The girl's pallor troubled him, and something in her eyes that suggested suffering. There came a time when he could scarcely think of that day without tears, believing that no soldier ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... The fine satire which, gleaming through every playful word, renders some of these recent stories as attractive to the old as to the young, seems to me no less to unfit them for their proper function. Children should laugh, but not mock; and when they laugh, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and the "barbarians," as they called the theologians and monkish writers. An eminent Hebrew scholar, Reuchlin, had become involved in a bitter controversy with the Dominican professors of the University of Cologne. His cause was championed by the humanists, who prepared an extraordinary satire upon their opponents. They wrote a series of letters, which were addressed to one of the Cologne professors and purported to be from his former students and admirers. In these letters the writers take ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... retired, received them not, nor went. For well he knew the purport of their suit Was this—that he should fight beside the Ford His former fellow-pupil and his friend. Then Mave,[35] the queen, her powerful druids sent, Armed not alone with satire's scorpion stings, But with the magic power even on the face, By their malevolent taunts and biting sneers, To raise three blistering blots[36] that typified Disgrace, dishonour, and a coward's shame, Which with ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... their meaner companionships; when we compared the peaceful serenity of our hearts with their perplexities and anxieties, we were filled with inexpressible sympathy. We no longer pierced them with the arrows of satire and wit because they accepted lower standards and found pleasure in things essentially pleasureless; they had not lived in Arden, and why should we berate them for not possessing that which had never been within their reach? We saw ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... quarter. When I consider the exceeding Candour and Good-nature of our Author, (which inclin'd all the gentler Part of the World to love him; as the Power of his Wit obliged the Men of the most delicate Knowledge and polite Learning to admire him;) and that he should throw this humorous Piece of Satire at his Prosecutor, at least twenty Years after the Provocation given; I am confidently persuaded it must be owing to an unforgiving Rancour on the Prosecutor's Side: and if This was the Case, it were Pity but the Disgrace of ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... Die Laune des Verliebten ("The Lover's Caprices"), is based on his own relations to Kaethchen Schoenkopf, and is cast in the form of a pastoral drama, written in Alexandrines after the fashion of the time.[42] The theme is a satire on his own wayward conduct towards Kaethchen, as he has depicted it in his Autobiography. The plot is of the simplest kind. Two pairs of lovers, Egle and Lamon, and Amine and Eridon, the first pair happy in ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... truth in such a way as to influence belief, he will at once understand that a debater should always maintain toward his opponents the attitude of one who is trying to change another's belief, the attitude of friendship, fairness, and respect. Such a point of view precludes the use of satire, invective, or harsh epithets. These never carry conviction; in fact, they invariably destroy the effect that an otherwise good argument might produce. Ridicule and bluster may please those who already agree with the speaker, but with these people he should be ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... theological, and those of amorous metaphysics, were rendered through allegory into art. Against these high conceptions, and the overstrained sentiment connected with them, the positive intellect and the mocking temper of France reacted; a literature of satire arose. By degrees the bourgeois spirit encroached upon and overpowered the chivalric ideals. At length the mediaeval conceptions were exhausted. Literature dwindled as its sources were impoverished; ingenuities and technical ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... collection already referred to is a proverb which, although somewhat personal, is too good to omit. It is doubtful how it took its origin, whether as a satire against the decanal order in general, or against some obnoxious dean in particular. These are the terms of it: The deil an' the dean begin wi' ae letter. When the deil has the dean the kirk ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... I suppose the Senator from Pennsylvania introduced this amendment rather as a satire upon the bill itself, or if he had any serious intention it was only a mischievous one to injure the bill; but it will not probably have that effect, for I suppose nobody will vote for it except the Senator himself, who can hardly avoid it, and I, who ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... written with an almost Lutheran freedom about abuses in the Church, and had extolled the life of simple Christianity. This was a book to appeal at once to the Brethren. Another of his works which may have had its effect in attracting them was the Julius Exclusus. This exquisitely witty satire dealt freely with the Pope and his office, the Pope whom the Brethren accounted no more than a simple priest; and though its licence was too bold for Erasmus ever to admit its authorship—indeed, ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... 309. A beautiful satire is contained in the account of the traitors—tradition, human wisdom, and man's invention. This picture is drawn by an inimitable artist. Nor have we seen anything more admirably adapted to the present state of our Tractarian times. Vol. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the salient points of characterisation which stand out in this powerful book. La Espuma was a cry from the desert to those who wear soft raiment in king's palaces. It was the ruthless tearing aside of the conventions by a Knox or a Savonarola. It was stringent satire, yet tempered with an artist's moderation, ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... propriety, and a total absence of those arts which sometimes characterise those to whom the accident of birth has given importance. With unerring discrimination, she drew the exact line between vivacity and satire, true religion and its semblance. She saw through and pitied those who, pluming themselves on the faults of others, and imparting to the outward man the ascetic inflexibility of the inner one, would fain propagate on all sides their rigid creed, forbidding the more favoured commoners of nature ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... the Spanish writer, Cervantes (1547-1616 A.D.), is a famous satire on chivalry. Our American "Mark Twain" also stripped off the gilt and tinsel of chivalry in his amusing story entitled A Connecticut Yankee at ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... reads the whole poem will see the force of the London Spectator's opinion that it is a "satire of the American selfishness which is the main strength of the cry against the cheap labour of the Chinese,'' and that "it would not be easy for a moderately intelligent man to avoid seeing that Mr. Bret Harte wished to delineate the Chinese ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... catch. There are various other appliances used for fish capture in different parts of the world, such as the purse-seine net, the trammel net, the otter-trawl net, &c.; and, as I have already pointed out, the most scathing satire on our fisheries is to find all these necessary means for catching fish regarded as curiosities. When they are no longer considered so, it will be ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... species of composition in either way was probably some general, indefinite topic of praise or blame, expressed in a song or hymn, which is the most common and simple kind of panegyric and satire. But as nothing tended to set their hero or subject in a more forcible light than some story to their advantage or prejudice, they soon introduced a narrative, and thus improved the composition into a greater variety of pleasure to the hearer, and to a ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice,—take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,—which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... when Pao-ch'ai entered unannounced, and began to gibe Pao-y, with trenchant irony: how that on the fifteenth of the first moon, he had shown ignorance of the allusion to the green wax; and the three of them then indulged in that room in mutual poignant satire, for the sake of fun. Pao-y had been giving way to solicitude lest Tai-y should, by being bent upon napping soon after her meal, be shortly getting an indigestion, or lest sleep should, at night, be completely ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... in himself, and frankly admitted that he was nothing if not critical, and that it was his nature to spy into abuses. In these admissions he characteristically exaggerated his fault, as plain-dealers are apt to do; and he was liked none the less for it, seeing that his satire was humorous, that on serious matters he did not speak lightly (III. iii. 119), and that the one thing perfectly obvious about him was his honesty. 'Honest' is the word that springs to the lips of everyone who speaks of him. It is applied to him some fifteen times ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... concentration needed for his meditative life, had bereft his eyes of the audacious pride which is so attractive in some faces, and which had so shocked our masters. Peaceful mildness gave charm to his face, an exquisite serenity that was never marred by a tinge of irony or satire; for his natural kindliness tempered his conscious strength and superiority. He had pretty hands, very slender, and almost always moist. His frame was a marvel, a model for a sculptor; but our iron-gray uniform, with gilt buttons ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... But, though there was a certain amount of satire in the exclamation, it had been ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... melodramatic Balzac, with frowning brows and goitrous throat, wrapped in shapeless dressing-gown, that stood that spring in the centre of the sculpture court at the New Salon, and the summing up was in verse only a Frenchman could write, the satire the more bitter because ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... to make any part of my writing a satire upon the women; nor, indeed, does the extravagance either of dress or house-keeping, lie all, or always, at the door of the tradesmen's wives—the husband is often the prompter of it; at least he does not let his wife into the detail of his circumstances, he does not make her mistress of her own ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... have here a flame, bright only in its own innocence, that kindles nothing but a generous thought: which though it may warm the blood, the fire at highest is but Platonic; and the commotion, within these limits, excludes danger. For the satire, it was of purpose borrowed to feather some slower hours; and what you see here is but the interest: it is one of his whose Roman pen had as much true passion for the infirmities of that state, as we should have pity to the distractions of our own: honest—I am sure—it is, ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... his first name was Joseph instead of James. She did not own that she had always thought it odd he should be willing to remain in a place like Hatboro', and that it must argue a strangely unambitious temperament in a man of his ability. She diverted the impulse to a general satire of village life, and ended by saying that she was getting to be a ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... however, to the praise and practice of Raleigh: his high standing and character would have sufficed to introduce still more novel customs. The weed once inhaled, the habit once acquired, its seductions would not allow it to be easily laid aside; and we accordingly find that royal satire, public odium, and ruinous cost were alike inadequate to restrain its rapidly increasing consumption. Somewhere about the year 1600 or 1601 tobacco was carried to the East, and introduced among the Turks and Persians,—it is not known by whom: the devotion of modern Mussulmans ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... a contemptuous glance at Raskolnikov. "There was a scandal the other day in a restaurant, too. An author had eaten his dinner and would not pay; 'I'll write a satire on you,' says he. And there was another of them on a steamer last week used the most disgraceful language to the respectable family of a civil councillor, his wife and daughter. And there was one of them turned out of a ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... something of force and spontaneous charm was lacking in Daudet's books. He continued, however, the adventures of Tartarin, first with unabated gusto in the Alps, then less happily as a colonist in the South Seas. He wrote, in the form of a novel, a bitter satire on the French Academy, of which he was never a member; this was "L'Immortel" of 1888. He wrote romances, of little power, the best being "Rose et Ninette" of 1892, but his imaginative work steadily declined in value. He published in ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... of my imprudent conduct. As for the consequences of this untoward event, it proved the mean of revealing what I had hitherto concealed—procuring for me a sort of local popularity little to be envied. I made the best improvement of it, as I then thought, that lay in my power—by writing a satire upon myself. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... edition of 1744, p. 206, &c. The affair of Loudun took place in the reign of Louis XIII.; and Cardinal Richelieu is accused of having caused this tragedy to be enacted, in order to ruin Urban Grandier, the cure of Loudun, for having written a cutting satire against him. ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... book, a piece of work which, though inordinately versed, contained, he thought, some rather excellent political satire. "The Faerie Queene" by Edmund Spenser lay before him under the tremulous candle-light. He had ploughed through a canto; he ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... personage of a good deal more than middle age, his face marked with strong manly furrows, records of hard thinking and square stand-up fights with life and all its devils. There is a slight touch of satire in his discourse now and then, and an odd way of answering one that makes it hard to guess how much more or less he means than he seems to say. But he is honest, and always has a twinkle in his eye to put you on ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... hours. Sadie's tongue was sharp and she was accustomed to a wholesome attitude of fear among the scholars, but her first thrusts at Jake had aroused a demon of which she had little dreamed. Jake had no foolish pride and would admit his faults so guilelessly that her satire fell to the ground. He was an entirely new sort to the spiteful child. The terrible advantage the person who will admit his faults cheerfully has over the one who has pride and evades was never more manifest. Jake Ransom pointed out to a credulous following the causes ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... a year and a tun of wine; there was Henry of Avranches, the "archipoeta," who wrote a song on the rusticity of the Cornishmen, to which a valiant Cornishman, Michael Blampayne, replied in a Latin satire, politely describing the arch-poet as having "the legs of a sparrow, the mouth of a hare, the nose of a dog, the teeth of a mule, the brow of a calf, the head of a bull, the color of a Moor!" There was poor Ribault the troubadour, whose ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... refreshing the mind by the ear's delight. Although the poet is appointed as a pleader of lovely causes in the ear of princely dames, young ladies, gentlewomen, and courtiers,[407] none the less much poetry has a didactic purpose. Satire was first invented to administer direct rebuke of evil, comedy to amend the manners of common men by discipline and example, tragedy to show the mutability of fortune and the just punishment of God in revenge of a vicious and evil life, pastoral to inform moral discipline, for the amendment ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... is, when Sir Robert maketh a speech at Saint Stephen's—he useth his strength at the beginning, only, and the end. He gallopeth at the commencement; in the middle he lingers; at the close, again, he rouses the House, which has fallen asleep; he cracketh the whip of his satire; he shouts the shout of his patriotism; and, urging his eloquence to its roughest canter, awakens the sleepers, and inspires the weary, until men say, What a wondrous orator! What a capital coach! We will ride henceforth in ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... methodically, one after another, with hope flaming in his breast, only to be disappointed time after time. They had merely served to increase the unhappy number which vainly swarmed about her, and to make Bernie himself the target of her satire. Popularity had not spoiled the girl, however; her attitude toward marriage was very sensible beneath the surface, and Bernie's anxious efforts at matchmaking, instead of relieving their financial distress, merely served to keep ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... interpret the sculptured symbols on the capitals, such as the two griffins of Marigny pecking at a tree in blossom; Pecuchet read a satire in the singers with grotesque jaws which terminate the mouldings at Feugerolles; and as for the exuberance of the man that covers one of the mullions at Herouville, that was a proof, according to Bouvard, of our ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... in six months! He sank into a kind of torpor, from which he was roused by the sound of applause and enthusiastic bravos. It was decidedly a great success—this play Revolt. There were some passages of strength and satire, and the violent tirades, a trifle over-emphatic but written with youth and sincerity, excited the audience after the idyllic calm of the opening. Jansoulet in his turn wished to hear and see. This theatre belonged to ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... seize the occasion, checking and baffling those that used the abuse, but privately speaking seriously to his friend, and reminding him, that he ought to be more careful if for no other reason than to take off the edge of his enemies' satire. He will say, "How can they open their mouths against you, or what can they urge, if you give up and abandon what you get this bad name about?" Thus pain comes only from abuse, but profit from reproof. And some correct their friends more ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... which he makes not so much our pleasant vices as our little almost-virtues into whips to scourge us with. All this has been wrung from me by the perusal of Mr. Teddy (FISHER UNWIN). Even now I can't make up my mind whether I like it or not. The first half, which might be called a satire on the folly of being forty and not realising it, depressed me profoundly. I need not perhaps enlarge upon the reason. Later, Mr. BENSON made a very clever return upon the theme; and, with a touch of real beauty, brought ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... Coleridge's lighter contributions to the Morning Post. The most successful of these, however, from the journalistic point of view, is in a literary sense the less remarkable. One is indeed a little astonished to find that a public, accustomed to such admirable political satire as the Anti-Jacobin, should have been so much taken as it seems to have been by the rough versification and somewhat clumsy sarcasm of the Devil's Thoughts. The poem created something like a furore, and sold a large reissue of the number of the Morning Post in which ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... Legislature upon the bill dividing the city into municipalities, Marigny, then a member, exerted himself against the bill. He viewed it as the destruction of the property of the ancient population in value, and their consequent impoverishment, and threw much of his wit and satire at those who were its prominent supporters. Among them was Thomas Green Davidson, a distinguished member of Congress, (still living, and long may he live!) Robert Hale, and myself. Ridicule was Marigny's forte. Upon the meeting of the House, and before ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... multifarious fancies—must of necessity, if honest, pourtray all the wanings and waxings of an ever-changing lunar disposition: so, haply you shall turn from a play to a sermon, from a novel to a moral treatise, from a satire or an epigram to a religious essay. Such and so inconsistent is authorial man. Here then, in somewhat of order, should have followed lengthily various other writings of serious import, half-fashioned, and from conflicting reasons ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Bertha Schimpfelheim—some call her Big Bertha—slipped and fell in a waltz, injuring the knee of her companion. To my surprise the brainiest of these working-folk saw the satire in which they were taking part, and entered into it with all the more spirit because ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... double-edged sword, that cut with equal keenness the Colonist and the Democrat. While he has no liking for the United States politically, he is very glad to make their enterprise and industry put to shame the slow wits of his countrymen; and the quiet satire of United States institutions and character which he displays by letting Slick run to the end of his rope is curiously mingled with the contempt which he lets the same character express for Nova Scotians, and in which it is plain ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Rome her Juvenal; Spain has had her Cervantes; France her Rabelais, her Moliere, her Voltaire; Germany her Jean Paul, her Heine; England her Swift, her Thackeray; and America has her Lowell. By the side of all those great masters of satire, though kept somewhat in the rear by provincialism of style and subject, the author of the "Biglow Papers" holds his own place distinct from each and all. The man who reads the book for the first time, and is capable of understanding it, has received ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... Steve's incautious satire suddenly precipitated the crisis he feared. The girl's eyes flashed a hot look of resentment. He was laughing at her. She was in no mood to be made sport of, or to have her words made sport of. She sat up with a start and leant forward ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... as a kind of cowardly corroboration. Nor are our other novelists much better. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible "points of view" his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire. Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his voice. He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says. Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding. He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... by the clever use he made of his gift for writing. The wit he showed in taking revenge for a social slight by a satire on the Grigsbys, who had failed to invite him to a wedding, made a lasting impression in Gentryville. That he was able to write so well that he could humiliate his enemies more deeply than if he had resorted to the ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... teaches children, as it does their grown-up brethren, some of the facts and proportions of life. What keener teacher is there than the kindly satire? What more penetrating and suggestive than the humour of exaggerated statement of familiar tendency? Is there one of us who has not laughed himself out of some absurd complexity of over-anxiety with a sudden recollection of "clever Alice" and her fate? In our household clever ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... at fools, even the most elevated, by holding with them a language which had no sense. His manners were measured, reserved, gentle, even respectful; and from his low and honeyed tongue, came piercing remarks, overwhelming by their justice, their force, or their satire, composed of two or three words, perhaps, and sometimes uttered with an air of naivete or of distraction, as though he was not thinking of what he said. Thus he was feared, without exception, by everybody, and with many acquaintances ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... meaningless mask of the Austrian noble lay a heart which had never quivered with any profound emotion, or beat high with any generous impulse. He was hostile to nobility of thought, action, and art, for he had intelligence enough to discern in these a living satire upon himself, his life, his aims. He despised history, for history is the tragedy of Humanity; and he mocked at philosophy. But he patronized Schlegel, for his watery volumes were easy reading, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... the persons who with some pleasantry ridicule their own country. It is very common among us to cast sarcasms on a neighbouring nation, to which we have no other reason to bear an antipathy than what is more usual than justifiable, because we have injured it; but sure such general satire is not founded on truth; for I have known gentlemen of that nation possessed with every good quality which is to be wished in a man or required in a friend. I remember a repartee made by a gentleman of this ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... of Almanzor is well known as the original of Drawcansir, in "The Rehearsal," into whose mouth parodies of some of Dryden's most extravagant flights have been put by the duke of Buckingham. Shaftesbury also, whose family had smarted under Dryden's satire, attempts to trace the applause bestowed on the "Conquest of Granada" to what he calls "the correspondence and relation between our Royal Theatre and popular Circus, or Bear-Garden. For, in the former of these ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... been payin' 'tention as you ought to be you'd have jest seen us squirtin'," replied the foreman of the Ancients with quiet satire. "And when we squirt, ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... belongs purely to didactic art, and from all the novels I have read (and I have read thousands) stands in a place by itself. Here is a Nathan for the modern David; here is a book to send the blood into men's faces. Satire, the angry picture of human faults, is not great art; we can all be angry with our neighbour; what we want is to be shown, not his defects, of which we are too conscious, but his merits, to which ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is a severe satire upon the judgment of the multitude; indeed, it seems intended to show, that when the passions are appealed to, the judgment is not much consulted; and therefore, that little reliance ought to be placed on ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... know I'm only a tender, teething infant," the young man answered, with masterly satire. "Well, now, as long's you got that bank roll you jest look out fur cupboard love—the kind the old cat has when she comes rubbin' up against your leg and purrin' like you ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... literature, art, or so much as commerce,—we have no recognized dispenser of national reputations like London or Paris. In a country richer in humor, and among a people keener in the sense of it than any other, we cannot produce a national satire or caricature, because there is no butt visible to all parts of the country at once. How many men at this moment know the names, much more the history or personal appearance, of our cabinet ministers? But the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... remains of the acrid flavour in their mouths, is scarcely to be imagined. They were good and true in their inmost hearts; but it does appear that some of the tricks of which they were guilty left them less honest human creatures. There was a strong dash of satire in Sam's fun afterwards; there was a sharpness in Clary's temper, and a despotism in her dignity. To be sure, Clary always liked Sam's irony a thousand times better than another man's charity, and Sam ever thought Clary's impatient, imperious ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... slanders. Not but that he praised oftener than he censured, but the thorn of censure pricks deeply, and the rose of praise but gently diffuses its fragrance to be wafted away on the passing breeze. The sharp satire attracted attention to the Messenger, as attested by the rapid growth of ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... bristling with pungent satire, this is an epitome of Artemus Ward's most genial humour and of his keenly sarcastic truth. The doings of the Fenians have hitherto been sufficiently ludicrous to merit the ridicule which Artemus has added to the ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... not alone, two of his acquaintances were there—a divine veering towards the modern school, and a poet—the ordinary poet of satire and Mr. Besant's novels, with an eye-glass, who held that the whole duty of poets at least was to transfer the meanderings of the inner life, or as much of them as were in any degree capable of transmission, to immortal foolscap..Unfortunately, as he observed with a mixture of ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... observed by one of his biographers, "exhibit a nicer perception, or more delicate delineation of life and manners. Wit, humor, and sentiment pervade every page; the vices and follies of the day are touched with the most playful and diverting satire; and English characteristics, in endless variety, are hit off with ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... at all," said Pope[1] and meant it for satire. Shakspeare, who knew man and woman much better, saw that it, in fact, was the perfection ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... more than a match for the Englishman's instincts of defence. The General did not mean to give himself away; he intended, indeed, precisely the contrary; but, after every round of conversation Miss Boyson felt herself more and more richly provided with materials for satire at the expense of England and the English tourist, his invincible conceit, insularity, and condescension. She was a clever though tiresome woman; and expressed herself best in letters. She promised herself to write a "character" of General Hobson in her next letter to an intimate friend, which ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sweep between, as if demons were flinging snowdrifts at each other, in mid-air. Look next into the street, where we have seen an amusing parallel to the combat of those fancied demons in the upper regions. It is a snow-battle of school-boys. What a pretty satire on war and military glory might be written, in the form of a child's story, by describing the snowball-fights of two rival schools, the alternate defeats and victories of each, and the final triumph of one party, or perhaps of ...
— Snow Flakes (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of him as a new species of man—a hermit of the world. He knew the world and did not hate it. His satire was rarely quite ungentle. He did not strike her as a disappointed man who fled to solitude in bitterness of spirit, but rather as an imaginative man with an unusual feeling for romance, and perhaps a desire ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... whereof the latter, who obscured his colleague and survived him long, was named the "Philosopher," who, as he excelled all the rest in learning, so he excelled them likewise in perfection of all royal virtues; insomuch as Julianus the emperor, in his book entitled Caersares, being as a pasquil or satire to deride all his predecessors, feigned that they were all invited to a banquet of the gods, and Silenus the jester sat at the nether end of the table and bestowed a scoff on everyone as they came in; but when Marcus Philosophus came in, Silenus was ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... soon cure her, I warrant you.' He then approached to make his declaration, when, being exceedingly provoked at his slighting expressions, which I had overheard, I gave him such an explosion of satire, spleen, and ill-nature, as he had never probably heard before. I ridiculed his pretensions, scoffed at his person, despised his offers, and defied his power, until he could stand it no longer. Stamping his foot on the floor, waving his hand, and muttering some ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... penalty of an audacity which, a priori, its most unfavourable critics would indignantly deny to be a fault. It begins instead of ending with the marriage-bells; and though critic after critic of novels has exhausted his indignation and his satire over the folly of insisting on these as a finale, I doubt whether the demand is not too deeply rooted in the English, nay, in the human mind, to be safely neglected. The essence of all romance is a quest; the quest most perennially ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... ventured to express even a moderate admiration for French culture incurred the risk of being stigmatised as a traitor to his country and a renegade to the national faith. But this patriotic fanaticism soon evaporated, and exaggerations of the ultra-national party became the object of satire and parody. When the political danger was past, and people resumed their ordinary occupations, those who loved foreign literature returned to their old favourites—or, as the ultra-patriots called ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... well as by his own senses. Now, when the distance between them was in some respects diminishing, she seemed even further away from him. In her presence he felt himself a plain, unpolished man, and knew he would never shine in the light play of wit and satire which characterized the society for which she was fitted. He decided, also, that she had probably remained unmarried because she could find no one who came up to her standard, and feared that he himself would come very far ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... he possessed boundless influence. His employments towards the close of 1642 have been described by Denham in some lines which, though intended to be sarcastic, convey in truth the highest eulogy. Hampden is described in this satire as perpetually passing and repassing between the military station at Windsor and the House of Commons at Westminster, as overawing the general, and as giving law to that Parliament which knew no other law. It was at this time that he organized that celebrated association of counties to which ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... All these simple things, so well known and customary, astonished him at first, and once—in a brief moment of forgetting that he was done with writing—he thought that if he had known them and written of them, how like a satire the plainest relation of them must have seemed! Strangest of all to him was the vehement and sincere patriotism. On every side he heard it—it was a permeation; the newest school-child caught it, though just from Hungary and learning ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... the matter of his mouthpiece. This time he was represented by a dustman; and for once Mr. SHAW consented to temper his wisdom to the limitations of its repository. His Alfred Doolittle (father of the flower-girl) threw off a little cheap satire on the morality of the middle-classes, yet admitted the drawbacks of unauthorised union (as practised by himself), since a man's wife is there to be kicked, whereas a mistress is apt to be more exigent of the amenities; you must adopt a more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... rank. When Hamlet mentions, as something which he had 'for three years taken note of,' that 'the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier,' it was probably intended by Shakspeare as a satire on his own times; but it expressed a principle which is working at all times in which society makes any progress. I believe that a century ago the improvement in most country parishes began with the clergy; and that in those days a rector who chanced to be a gentleman ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... called old, Those other eyes look back to catch a trace Of what was once their own unshadowed grace. But here in our dear poet both are blended— Ripe age begun, yet golden youth not ended;— Even as his song the willowy scent of spring Doth blend with autumn's tender mellowing, And mixes praise with satire, tears with fun, In strains that ever delicately run; So musical and wise, page after page, The sage a minstrel grows, the bard a sage. The dew of youth fills yet his late-sprung flowers, And day-break glory haunts his evening hours. Ah, ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... godsend for M. Dumas, an admirable peg upon which to hang his quaint conceit and sly satire; and he is accordingly frequently introduced in the course of the three volumes. We must make room for one more extract, in which he figures in conjunction with his friend the sbirro or gendarme, who ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... passion had gone, and a deathly look replaced it. He was robbed, utterly and cruelly. He could no longer believe in a God, or how could such things be? Manhood was denied him. The last torture was not denied him—namely, that he saw the full satire of his position, saw that it was his own love that had destroyed them both. Out of his complete ruin he arose joyless, hopeless, but great in a tenderness so vast and selfless that it almost took the place of what ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... when translated into Italian, became the neatest epigrams in the world. His suggestions as to the best mode of elevating and enriching the country were considered by one set as the profoundest philosophy, and by another as the keenest satire. They were determined to lionize him. It was a new sensation to the Senator. He desired to prolong it. He recalled the lines of the ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... Translations from Homer, Virgil, Horace, Boccace, and Chaucer. Instances of that public abuse are triumphantly inserted by Warburton in his Edition of Pope's works. See Appendix to the Dunciad. It is re-published there, to justify some of the personal severities of Pope's celebrated Satire. ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... some pain, not doubting but that our modern landscape painters were severely handled in an ironical satire; and we determined to defend them. "Their superiority to all the ancient masters"—that was too hard a hit to come from any but an enemy! We must measure our man—a graduate of Oxford! The "scholar armed," without doubt. He comes, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... employment and in town, his money generally goes freely. As a class, the lumbermen are intelligent. They are strong talkers, for they put in a good many of the larger sort of words; and from their pungent satire and sledge-hammer style of reasoning, are by no means very facile disputants. They are preeminently jokers. This is as they appear on their way to the woods. During the season of their active labor they usually spend the evening, after a day of hard work, in storytelling or in ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... resentment against it. His pictures look like a visible reductio ad absurdum of it all. That is how men look, he seems to say, when they are fighting in modern war; and, being men, they ought not to look so. That, at least, is the effect the pictures produce on us. They are a bitter satire on all the modern power of man and the uses to which he has put it. He has allowed it to make him its slave and to set him to a business which has no purpose whatever, which is as blind as the process of ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... Sir Thopas," as it is generally called, is introduced by Chaucer as a satire on the dull, pompous, and prolix metrical romances then in vogue. It is full of phrases taken from the popular rhymesters in the vein which he holds up to ridicule; if, indeed — though of that there is no evidence — it be not actually part of an old romance which Chaucer selected and reproduced ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... Emphatic pathos, incomprehensible even to the diviner himself; this is a satire on the obscure style of the oracles. Bacis was a ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... Elm," the "Fourth of July Ode," and the Agassiz elegy are English provincial poetry, most of us need a new map and a new vocabulary. Of both series of "Biglow Papers" we may surely exclaim, as did Quintilian concerning early Roman satire, "This is wholly ours." It is true that Lowell, like every young poet of his generation, had steeped himself in Spenser and the other Elizabethans. They were his literary ancestors by as indisputable ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... courts and cloisters. But the jokes took their most permanent form in the fable of "Reyneke de Vos," first published in the year 1498. Written in Low-German by Nicholas Bauman, under the pseudonym of Hinrek van Alkmer, the satire did a similar work to that done by Rabelais, and Boccaccio, and Piers Plowman. It has since been translated into many languages, and as Goethe at last thought it worth putting into German hexameters, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... opinion it had been to our disadvantage: for to go no farther, we have three nations about us as clear from mixtures of blood as any in the world, and I know not which of them I could wish ourselves to be like; I mean the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish; and if I were to write a reverse to the Satire, I would examine all the nations of Europe, and prove, that those nations which are most mix'd, are the best, and have least of barbarism and brutality among them; and abundance of reasons might be given for it, too long to bring ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... She did her best to console herself with Sir John's affectionate loquacity, or with the sharp remarks of Lady Flora Hastings, one of her maids of honour, who had no love for the Baroness. The subject lent itself to satire; for the pastor's daughter, with all her airs of stiff superiority, had habits which betrayed her origin. Her passion for caraway seeds, for instance, was uncontrollable. Little bags of them came over to her from Hanover, ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... lady Hamilton, as seen on the London copper-plates, places her hand on her heart, and seems to look at the Emperor of Russia. It is incomprehensible how the Berlin police could permit the circulation of so base a satire. At all events, the shade of Frederick cannot have contemplated this scandalous scene but with indignation and disgust. His mind, his genius, his wishes, belong to the French nation, which he esteemed so highly, ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... not wish us to take him seriously, nor could we, if he did. Thus in their very attitude toward the ills and vexations of life, there appears a most essential difference between Lenau and Heine. Auerbach aptly remarks: "Spott und Satire verkleinern, Zorn und Hass vergroessern das Object."[215] And Lenau knew no satire; where Heine scoffed and ridiculed, he hated and scorned, with a hatred that only contributed to his own undoing. With Heine the satire's the thing, whether of ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... palliates the "strong propensity" of Knox "to indulge his vein of humour," when describing, with ghoul-like mirth, the festive circumstances of the murder and burial of Cardinal Beaton. The odious part of his satire, Scott says, is confined to "the fierce and unreasonable set of extra-Presbyterians," Wodrow's High Flyers. "We have no delight to dwell either upon the atrocities or absurdities of a people whose ignorance and fanaticism were rendered frantic ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... "than the court of a Sicilian tyrant." In order to render herself attractive, she exhausted all the arts of cosmetics and elaborate hair-dressing; she delighted in magical incantations and love-potions. In the bitter satire of Juvenal we get an impression most melancholy ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... in gay humour and deft satire to any of its predecessors, and no holiday will be so gay but this volume will make it gayer.... It is a book of rollicking good humour that will keep you chuckling long ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... our day. I remember the delight with which he came to my hotel and said: "You must dine with me to-day; I want to introduce you to a person you will much like. His greatest fault is one you possess yourself, a turn for satire, which sometimes makes him enemies." On the same morning he had announced to his friend with beaming eyes, "My father is here;" and when the next day that same friend wished to engage him to an evening party, he replied: "You forget that I have a wild young father to take care of." Alluding ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... to the last phrase, as being low. JOHNSON. 'Sir, it is intended to be low: it is satire. The expression is debased, to ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell |
