"Bagpipe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... word for decay. - There will come an immediate decree In thy mind for the opposite party's decease, If he bends not an instant knee. Expunge it: extinguishing counts poor gain. And accept a mild word of police:- Be mannerly, measured; refrain From the puffings of him of the bagpipe cheeks. Our political, even as the merchant main, A temperate gale requires For the ship that haven seeks; Neither God of the winds nor ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... goo a gossipping. Your merry wives of Bentley will sometimes look in ye glass, chirpe a cupp merrily, yet not indecently. In the Peak they are much given to dance after the bagpipes—almost every towne hath a bagpipe in it." "The Chesterfield brank," says Mr. Llewellyn Jewitt, "is a remarkably good example, and has the additional interest of bearing a date. It is nine inches in height, and six inches and three-quarters across the hoop. It consists of a hoop of iron, hinged on either ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... reminded one of the zither of Tyrol, while the strange airs bore some similarity to the bagpipe music of Scotland, at least in time, which, like the piper, the old man beat with his foot. His blue eyes were fixed on the wall opposite, with a strange, weird, far-off look, and never for one moment did he relax his gaze. He seemed absolutely absorbed by his music, and ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... concludes with five stanzas on himself, 'the last and youngest of the noble line.' There is also a good deal about his maternal ancestors, in a poem on Lachion-y-Gair, a mountain, where he spent part of his youth, and might have learned that pibroach is not a bagpipe, any more than a ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... celebrated MS. (2 B. vii.) in the British Museum and other cognate sources we get a fair insight of the amusement afforded by these dancers and joculators. In the illustration (fig. 35) we get A and C tumblers, male and female; D, a woman and bear dance; and E, a dance of fools to the organ and bagpipe. It will be observed that they have bells on their caps, and it must have required much skill and practice to sound their various toned bells to the music as they danced. This dance of fools may have suggested or became eventually merged into the "Morris Dance" ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... seems reasonable; but then also, which is intolerable, every Arminian. Is philosophy able to account for this morbid affection, and particularly when it takes the restricted form (as sometimes it does, in the bagpipe case) of seeking furiously to kick the piper, instead of paying him? In this case, my brother was urgent with me to mount en croupe behind himself. But weak as I usually was, this proposal I resisted as an immediate suggestion of the fiend; for I had heard, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... did but hear the pedlar at the door, you would never dance again after a tabor and pipe; no, the bagpipe could not move you: he sings several tunes faster than you'll tell money: he utters them as he had eaten ballads, and all men's ears grew to ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... cut out his heart, and when she has touched it with that slender hand of hers, it would cry out, "Nencia, Nencia bella." But, after all, he is not to be despised: he is an excellent labourer, most learned in buying—and selling pigs, he can play the bagpipe beautifully; he is rich, is willing to go to any expense to please her, nay, even to pay the barber double that his hair may be nice and fuzzy from the crimping irons; and if only he were to get himself tight hose ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... We know what Scotland is. John," he exclaimed, suddenly turning toward the dark figure lying just inside the shadow, "you are a discord of the bagpipe and the harp: there's the trouble with you. Sometimes I can hear the harp alone in you, and then I like you; but when the bagpipe begins, you are worse than a big bumblebee with a ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... This is a wild, irregular species of music, peculiar to the Highlands of Scotland. It is performed on a bagpipe, and adapted to excite or assuage passion, and particularly to rouse a martial spirit ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... arcade of two lancet apertures, supported by four columns of serpentine. Within the vestry is a two-light lancet window; and let into the eastern wall is a small slab, having four grotesque figures, one blowing a kind of bagpipe, the others dancing. This is said to have been a portion of a "minstrel pillar," it is apparently Saxon, and is probably a relic from the original fabric. The chancel arch is of red and black bricks, in alternate bands, ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... to a partiality for the bagpipe on the ground that your true Briton "loves a grumbling noise," and he favours organs and the popular oratorios. But his "top talent ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... beautifully less,—now and then, it's true, roused by some momentary strain, it swelled upwards in full chorus, but gradually these passing flights grew rarer, and finally all ceased, save a long, low, droning sound, like the expiring sigh of a wearied bagpipe. His fingers still continued mechanically to beat time upon the table, and still his head nodded sympathetically to the music; his eyelids closed in sleep; and as the last verse concluded, a full-drawn snore announced that Monsoon, if not in the land of dreams, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the field of treasured gold! When the mighty heart of Scotland, all too big to slumber more, Burst in wrath and exultation, like a huge volcano's roar! There they stand, the batter'd columns, underneath the murky sky, In the hush of desperation, not to conquer but to die. Hark! the bagpipe's fitful wailing—not the pibroch loud and shrill, That, with hope of bloody banquet, lured the ravens from the hill— But a dirge both low and solemn, fit for ears of dying men, Marshall'd for their latest battle, never more to fight again. Madness—madness! Why this shrinking? ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... minstrels, Jerome Duigenan, Dominic Mongan, Denis Hempson, Charles Byrne, James Duncan, Arthur Victory, and Arthur O'Neill were celebrated as harpers. The Belfast meeting of 1792 revived the vogue of the national instrument. Nor was the bagpipe neglected. Even in America, in 1778, Lord Rawdon had a band of pipers, with Barney Thomson as Pipe Major. At home, Sterling, Jackson, MacDonnell, Moorehead, Kennedy, and Macklin sustained the ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... (pi'-brok). In Scotland, a Highland air played on the bagpipe before the Highlanders when they go out to battle.—-Doneuil Dhu, (donnil ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... agreeable passions. For the same combination of notes and tones do not excite devotion, love, or poetic melancholy in a native of Indostan and of Europe. And "the Highlander has the same warlike ideas annexed to the sound of a bagpipe (an instrument which an Englishman derides), as the Englishman has to that of a trumpet or fife," (Dr. Brown's Union of Poetry and Music, p. 58.) So "the music of the Turks is very different from the Italian, and the people of Fez and Morocco have again a different kind, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... doctor, the lovable parish priest who taught true religion to his flock, but "first he folwed it himselve"; the coarse but good-hearted Wyf of Bath, the thieving miller leading the pilgrims to the music of his bagpipe,—all these and many others from every walk of English life, and all described with a quiet, kindly humor which seeks instinctively the best in human nature, and which has an ample garment of charity to cover even its faults and failings. "Here," ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... not fear—he even ostentatiously displayed and seemed to revel in—the shrillness of the instrument; but in fire, speed, precision, evenness, and fluency; in linked agility of jimmy—a technical expression, by your leave, answering to warblers on the bagpipe; and perhaps, above all, in that inspiring side-glance of the eye, with which he followed the effect and (as by a human appeal) eked out the insufficiency of his performance: in these, the fellow stood without a rival. Harker listened: "The girl I left behind ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... intended no doubt for Alderman Wood, habited in a fool's cap and jester's dress, holds her by the hand; the lady who follows him, playing on the fiddle and wearing a Scotch bonnet, is meant for Lady Ann Hamilton (she is named "Lady Ann Bagpipe" in the sketch); Bergami (immediately behind) carries a banner inscribed "Innocence"; and next him, his fat sister, whom the queen had dignified with the title of a countess; Venus and Bacchus appear amongst the crowd, and are ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... barbaric grunts before I had the curiosity to rise. It came from somewhere in the gallery of the inn, and as I stuck my head out of my door I had a glimpse of Oliphant, nightcap on head and a great bagpipe below his arm, ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... death he made a death-like groan which awoke the Indian snake charmer who was asleep in one corner of the tent on a pile of rugs. The man took in the situation at a glance, and came to Billy's rescue, making the snake uncoil itself by playing on a kind of bagpipe, a queer, weird, monotonous piece of music. This charmed the snake and it uncoiled itself from Billy and, swaying its body, crawled toward the ...
— Billy Whiskers - The Autobiography of a Goat • Frances Trego Montgomery
... than any two books I ever read since, were "The Life of Hannibal" and "The History of Sir William Wallace." Hannibal gave my young ideas such a turn that I used to strut in raptures up and down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier; while the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins, which will boil along there till the floodgates of life shut in ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... Late-wake is a ceremony used at funerals: the evening after the death of any person, the relations and friends of the deceased meet at the house, attended by bagpipe or fiddle; the nearest of kin, be it wife, son, or daughter, opens a melancholy ball, dancing and greeting; i.e. crying violently at the same time; and this continues till daylight; but with such gambols and frolicks, among the younger ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... said Bartle Massey, contemptuously; "I've heard enough o' the Scotch tunes to last me while I live. They're fit for nothing but to frighten the birds with—that's to say, the English birds, for the Scotch birds may sing Scotch for what I know. Give the lads a bagpipe instead of a rattle, and I'll answer for it ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... of the country," says Newte, who travelled through the district in 1791, "venerating the memory of the bard, rose with one consent, and with bagpipe music carried the sacred dust away by force, and buried it on the top of Dunmore, in the centre of his father's fort." Burns visited Ossian's grave. Writing to his brother, on his return to Edinburgh from the North, he says—"Being warm from Ossian's country, ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... China or Japan, because it is so awfully solemn and slow. The Chinese and Japanese give you a lot of noise if they lack harmony, but when a Hindu band reaches a fortissimo passage it sounds exactly as if some child were trying to play a bagpipe for the ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... Bannockburn and the spirit is fired with patriotic devotion to native land. We hear the bagpipe and the drum and see the martial clans gathering in serried ranks and catch the glint of their arms and armor as they flash back the sunlight. We hear their lusty calls as they rush together to defend the hills and the homes they love. We see, again, the Wallace ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... percussion, of which the greatest boast was made of the psaltery,—a small triangular harp, or lyre, with wire strings, and struck with an iron needle or stick. Their sackbut was something like a bagpipe; the timbrel was a tambourine; and the dulcimer, a horizontal harp with wire strings, and struck with a ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... daughters to the instant year; Sit crowned with rose-buds and carouse, Till Liber Pater twirls the house About your ears, and lay upon The year, your cares, that's fled and gone. And let the russet swains the plough And harrow hang up resting now; And to the bagpipe all address Till sleep takes place of weariness. And thus, throughout, with Christmas plays, Frolic the full ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... thing in a charade is to try and puzzle your audience as much as you can. You must choose a word of two or more syllables, such as "Bagpipe." First you must act the word "Bag," and be sure that the word is mentioned, though you must be careful to bring it in in such a way that the audience shall not guess it is the ...
— My Book of Indoor Games • Clarence Squareman
... head awfully. "Mr. Pepper's voice is as sweet as a bagpipe! Ah! such a song would have been invaluable to 'The Asinaeum,' when I had the ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... again. The last proofs were now tried upon him, called the "five senses." For that of hearing he was made to listen to a jewsharp, which he calmly proclaimed to be the bagpipe; for that of touch, he was made to feel by turns a live fish, a hot iron and a little stuffed hedgehog. The last he took for a pack of toothpicks, and announced gravely, "It sticks me." The laughs broke out from all sides, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... closeness, due not alone, I believe, to the barred windows and the steaming radiator. The family resemblance that Mr. Lin Darton bore to Old Con threw into relief the former's honesty, and made more bearable his heavy sentimentalism, upon which Con had played as surely as on a bagpipe, sounding its narrow range with insistent evenness ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... irksome, and am in low spirits. People try to amuse me, and I have received many little presents of date-cakes and bazeen from them. Begin to relish this sort of food, and The Desert air sharpens the appetite. Yesterday, a slave of the ghafalah amused us with playing his rude bagpipe through these weary wastes. We are not very merry. There is very little conversation; we move on for hours in the most unbroken silence, nothing being said or whispered, no sound but the dull slow tread of the camel. Sometimes ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... second bar, and finished with a third above the key note. They sometimes varied, by suddenly running into the octave. Their strains were considered, by a Scotchman, a close resemblance to the Highland bagpipe. The stanzas they repeated again and again: none have been translated, for which, it ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... Eunuch, Capon, Dastard, fast and loose, Thou weathercocke of mutabilitie, White-livered Paisant, wilt thou vowe and sweare, Face and make semblance with thy bagpipe othes Of that thou never meanst to execute? Pure cowardice, for feare to cracke thy necke With the huge Caos of thy bodies waight, Hath sure begot this true contrition. Then fast and pray, and see if thou canst winne, A goodlie pardon for thy ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... ear a fiddle charms, A bagpipe 's her delight, But for the crooning o' her wheel She disna care a mite. The weary ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... where the Prince's monument now stands. Charles, with a small body of Macdonalds, was the first to arrive, early in the morning. He and his men rowed up the long narrow Loch Sheil. The valley was solitary—not a far-off bagpipe broke the silence, not a figure appeared against the skyline of the hills. With sickening anxiety the small party waited, while the minutes dragged out their weary length. At last, when suspense was strained to the utmost, about two in the afternoon, a sound of pipes ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... frequent, but usually take place with the consent of the parents on both sides, in order to avoid the expense of a regular wedding. The principal amusement on Sundays and holidays is the choro ([Greek: choros]), which is danced on the village green to the strains of the gaida or bagpipe, and the gusla, a rudimentary fiddle. The Bulgarians are religious in a simple way, but not fanatical, and the influence of the priesthood is limited. Many ancient superstitions linger among the peasantry, such as the belief in the vampire ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... splendid churches is, and the fountains playing grand, And the palace of PRINCE TORLONIA, likewise the Vatican; And there's the stairs where the bagpipe-men and the piffararys blow. And it's there I drove my lady and lord in the Park ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fields of France; And when at last our patient island race, By the attempted wrong Made fierce and strong, Flung back the challenge in the braggart's face, Oh then, while martial music filled the air, Clarion and fife and bagpipe and the drum, Calling to men to muster, march, and dare, Oh, then thy day, ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... &c., &c. It concludes with five stanzas on himself, 'the last and youngest of a noble line.' There is a good deal also about his maternal ancestors, in a poem on Lachin-y-gair, a mountain where he spent part of his youth, and might have learned that pibroch is not a bagpipe, any more than duet means ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... chac-chac, if music it can be called. Some power over the emotions it must have; for the Negroes are said to be gradually maddened by it; and white people have told me that its very monotony, if listened to long, is strangely exciting, like the monotony of a bagpipe drone, or of a drum. What more went on at the dance we could not see; and if we had tried, we should probably not have been allowed to see. The Negro is chary of admitting white men to his amusements; and no ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... musical soul supplied the deficiency in the sounds that entered his unwearied ears. And then he sang so loud himself, that he certainly could hear no one else, his voice being as monopolizing as the drone of a bagpipe—or as a violent advocate for free trade! Happy urchins when this was the case! for they were sure to be dismissed with the most flattering encomiums on their vocal powers, when, if truth must be told, the good old man had ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... who, with the aid of ropes, are pulling the boat, those two-legged horses, groan from exertion. The bagpipe player is making his gayest music, but in vain—he cannot allure the young people to dance; there is no place for dancing, the large deck of the boat is covered with human beings. Old men, and even women, are obliged to stand; the two long benches ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... Mr. Punch's sharp contemporary, the Lancet, the effect of bagpipe-playing upon the teeth is to blunt them; in fact, in course of time, to wear them away. To the auditor the music has a contrary effect. Mr. Punch is able to say, from experience, that he has never listened to the National instrument ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 5, 1890 • Various
... who performs very well on the violin, has an invincible antipathy to the sound of the Highland bagpipe, which sings in the nose with a most alarming twang, and, indeed, is quite intolerable to ears of common sensibility, when aggravated by the echo of a vaulted hall — He therefore begged the piper would have some mercy upon him, and dispense with this part of the morning ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... above two hours, when he was disturbed by such a variety of noises, as might have discomposed a brain of the firmest texture. The rumbling of carriages, and the rattling of horses' feet on the pavement, was intermingled with loud shouts, and the noise of fiddle, French horn, and bagpipe. A loud peal was heard ringing in the church tower, at some distance, while the inn resounded with clamour, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... elbows and the ends of his toes! This extraordinary feat brought down the house in the wildest enthusiasm, and the uproar of shouting and singing drowned all the instruments except the comb, which still droned away like a Scottish bagpipe in its last agonies! Such singing, such dancing, and such excitement, I had never before witnessed. It swept away my self-possession like the blast of a trumpet sounding a charge. At last, the man, after dancing successively with all the ladies in the room, stopped apparently exhausted—and ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan |
