"Comic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... How clearly he exposed their faults and failings! How thoroughly he knew the story of certain ruined gentry—the story of how, why, and through what cause they had fallen upon evil days! With what comic originality could he describe their little habits ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... has acquired celebrity by holding the mirror up to its own nature. The wonder was that Mr. Benson did not, following his precedent, write to the papers to say that Mr. Whitten was no gentleman. In the days before the Academy blended the characteristics of a comic paper with those of a journal of dogmatic theology, before it took to disowning its own reviewers, Mr. Whitten was the solid foundation of that paper's staff. He furnished the substance, which was embroidered by the dark grace of the personality ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... "Quite comic, isn't it, my dear? What foolish things mothers are, aren't they? Just as fond of their bairns ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... said Socrates, "that any one who should now hear us, even though he were a comic poet, would say that I am talking idly, or discoursing on subjects that do not concern me. If you please, then, we will examine into it. Let us consider it in this point of view, whether the souls of men who are dead exist in Hades, or not. This is an ancient saying, which we now call ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... there was complete silence in the room, which was broken in a rather unusual manner. A deep voice, more like a growl, although it had a queer strain of comic good-nature in it, began the proceedings with the remark: "Well now, say, what do you want of ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... music,—among these the very artistic one of Pagsanhan belonging to the escribano, Don Miguel Guevara,—swarms of Chinamen and Indians, who, with the curiosity of the former and the piety of the latter, awaited anxiously the day on which was to be celebrated the comic-mimic-lyric-lightning-change-dramatic spectacle, for which a large and spacious theater had been erected in ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Seasons; and includes the book-plate of Lord Prestongrange,—that "Lord Advocate Grant" of whom you may read in the Kidnapped of "R.L.S." Here again is an edition (the first) of Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Comic Writers, annotated copiously in MS. by a contemporary reader who was certainly not an admirer; and upon whom W.H.'s cockneyisms, Gallicisms, egotisms, and "ille-isms" generally, seem to have had the ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... child. You've retained from your old life certain conceptions of what's the thing which are—you'll forgive me for saying it—just a little like those of the comic papers. ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... do you know"—thus Sally, after many other matters had been disposed of—"there has been such an awful row between Tishy and her mother about Julius Bradshaw?" Sally is serious and impressed; doesn't see the comic side, if there is one. Her mother felt that if there was to be a volley of indignation discharged at Mrs. Wilson for her share in the row, she herself, as belonging to the class mother, might feel called on to support her, and was ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the whole action of the play. It was, therefore, to be a scene of which people did not easily tire and that remained interesting, unobtrusive and formally neat. To find such a scene it is necessary to refer back to days when the Comic and the Tragic scenes were architectural and permanent. This I did and, taking Palladio's magnificent scene at Vicenza, by a shameless process of reductio ad absurdum, evolved the scene that is now in use at Hammersmith. Palladio and Gay ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... weakness but baseness. Or rather, it would be baseness in a voluntary soldier; in the Germans it means only that the war is not their own war; that they are fighting as slaves, not as free men. The idea that we could ever live under the rule of these people is merely comic. To do them justice, they do not now entertain the idea, though they have dallied with ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... a mode of expression. Moreover, tragedy was the parent of comedy,—and since the Jews had not the first, we should hardly expect them to produce the last. It is not difficult to perceive how the Greeks could convert their goat to dramatic, or even to comic purposes; but the Jews could not deal so ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... of his presence and conversation, the invasion of his genius. Inexhaustible in arguments, matchless in the adaptation of ideas to circumstances, the most amiable and most imperious of interlocutors, stentorian and mild, tragic and comic by turns, the most eloquent of sophists and the most irresistible of fascinators, as soon as he meets a man face to face, he wins him, conquers him, and obtains the mastery.[51117] In effect, after seeing the Pope for six days, Napoleon obtains by persuasion what he could not obtain ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... amused them to see Wilfred sitting underneath. They simply roared every time he pushed up the keys. It was as good as a comic song. It really is tiresome, though, to have a piano like that at the school. John Crosby, the stonemason's little boy, sings very nicely, and I went so wrong in playing his accompaniment, through losing so many of the notes, that he finished half a verse ahead of me. I apologized ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... extravagance of imagery (though that is very Shakespearean), but a jagged energy in the very spelling. Say "chats" and "chiens" and it is not the same. Perhaps the old national genius has survived the urban enslavement most spiritedly in our comic songs, admired by all men of travel and continental culture, by Mr. George Moore as by Mr. Belloc. One (to which I am much ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... evidence the West India planters had been by no means spared. Cruel stories had been hastily and lightly told against them. Invidious comparisons had been made to their detriment. But it was well known, that one of our best comic writers, when he wished to show benevolence in its fairest colours, had personified it in the character of the West Indian. He wished the slave might become as secure as the apprentice in this country: but it was necessary that the alarms concerning the abolition ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... eager defense of her friend, and prevented the indignant words which were bubbling to Hester's lips, a gay voice was heard singing a comic song in the passage, the play-room door was flung open with a bang, and Miss Forest entered the room with a small girl seated on ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... only Scot who has lost his kilt in the war. One of the Royal Engineers gives a comic picture of a Highlander who appears to have lost nearly every article of clothing he left home in. When last seen by this letter writer he was resplendent in a Guardsman's tunic, the red breeches of a Frenchman, a pair of Belgian infantry ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... article proceeds; always in a tone of comic good-temper, but pointing to a very real grievance and point of dispute; and helping the reader to realise the long friction which went on, and finally resulted in the unanimity with which publishers and editors turned against Balzac after his famous lawsuit, and showed a vindictive ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... comic ditty of a convivial order. She put into it much vivacity, appealing to the audience to join in the chorus with a pleading, "Now all together, boys." She had tripping steps and dainty kicks that went well with ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... nonsense!" said Rosa, deliberately tearing the bold "geant" to pieces down to the bare stem, "unless he meant to be comic, and intimate that the gazer was so rash as to come too near the bush, and ran a thorn into ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... entertained Franklin, in the highest degree, with the literary gossip of London, and probably excited in his mind an intense desire to visit those scenes, which he himself was so calculated to enjoy and to embellish. On the journey he wrote the following comic letter to his wife. He had been disappointed in not receiving a line from her ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... Henrietta were momentarily united in their common amazement at the genuineness of this sorrow and to both there was something comic in the picture of the elderly Caroline, suffering from a chill and bemoaning the loss of an evening's pleasure. Henrietta cast a look of scornful surprise at her Aunt Sophia. Was the Battys' ball a matter for a broken heart? Rose said consolingly, 'It isn't till after Christmas. ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... more of the elements of comedy than anything else, and it is his own fault if he does not get off lightly. But if he cuts up rough, tries to strike or kick his drivers or tormentors, or if he goes in for a course of sulks, and flops himself down, refusing to be driven, then the comic element disappears from the scene. Out come the sjamboks, and he is treated precisely as a vicious or sulky horse would be treated under similar circumstances. As a rule, it does not take long to bring ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... come to this? Then, as now, nothing so common as that such mischances of marriage, heard of by the world, and the rather if published by the sufferers or one of them, should be received only as excellent amusement for people round about. It is as if the one thing intrinsically and unceasingly comic in the world, for most people, were the fact that it consists of man and woman, as if the institution on which human society is built and by which the succession of earth's generations is maintained, were the one only ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... looked so deplorably miserable, and at the same time so comic, that it was impossible to avoid smiling, and as he saw ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... succeeded character, comic and ridiculous like the bailiff and Grenicheux, imposing and winsome like the marquis and Germaine. The audience laughed heartily at the slap delivered by Gaspard and intended for the coward Grenicheux, which was ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... weekly comic paper, pointing to an article on one of its pages. Just as the visitors were coming in, Lebedeff, wishing to ingratiate himself with the great lady, had pulled this paper from his pocket, and presented it to her, indicating a few columns marked ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... paper in New York, the Courier des Etats-Unis, published the following instance of brave self-sacrifice by a Belgian comic singer named Martens, who at one time was in this country, and gave entertainments in the "Empire City." The scene in which he figures here as the hero is laid in Bucharest, the half-oriental capital of Wallachia, at the farther end ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... died in his thirty-fourth, and the queen in her seventieth year.—In a subject, her majesty's unseasonable love might have formed a comic, instead ...
— The Earl of Essex • Henry Jones
... Congreve's, Wycherley's, Vanbrugh's, Gibber's, or any Dramatic Works of the more modern Macklin, Garrick, Foote, Colman, or Sheridan. A good copy too of Moliere, in French, I much want. Any other good dramatic authors in that language I want also; but comic authors chiefly, though I should wish to have Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire too. I am in no hurry for all, or any of these, but if you accidentally meet with them ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Mr. CAINE'S work would be the better for a certain amount of condensation, but this is the only occasion on which he has really lost control of his pen. He has had the unfortunate idea of writing a comic Arabian Nights in close imitation of the style of the original translation, even to the insertion of short poems at every possible opportunity. Now, this is one of those ideas which at first blush would seem to contain all the elements of delightful humour; but it has the deadly flaw that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... a laughable side, even to the grimmest events, the comic element was supplied in this case by our professors of languages, drawing, and so forth, who had not dared to go back into Paris after leaving it on the 28th, on account of the fighting. When they had made up their minds to return on the 29th, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... sure that I agree that that's Hardy's philosophy. It's fair enough to say that Hardy's stories, and still more his poems, paint chiefly the gloomy and hopeless situations in life, just as Mark Twain and Aristophanes painted the comic ones. But Mark Twain was very far from thinking the world was a joke, and I doubt whether Hardy regards it at heart ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... themselves deserve. To a truly philosophic ken, there is no such thing as a trifle; the ridiculous is but skin-deep, papillae on the surface of society; cut a little deeper, you will find the veins and arteries of wisdom. Therefore will a sober man not deride the notion that comic almanacs, comic Latin grammars, comic hand-books of sciences and arts, and the great prevalence of comicality in popular views taken of life and of death, of incident and of character, of evil and of good, are, in reality, signs of the times. These ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... barrenness, insanity, infirmity, or misconduct of the first spouse. The temptation of a second dowry is still, however, operative with men of certain high castes in which bridegrooms require to be paid for. The writer well remembers the pitiful comic tale of a struggling brahman student of Bengal, whose home had been made unhappy by the advent of two stepmothers in succession alongside of his own mother. The young man did not blame his father, for his father disapproved of polygamy, ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... silver river will be quite content to reflect the glorious monuments of the past for some little time longer. The river, no doubt, could tell us a deal about the chances and changes of the mortals that lived on its banks; we have seen it reflect so many events, joyous, tragic, even comic. On the whole it wears a thoroughly contented look on its shining countenance—the look of one who knows he is thoroughly appreciated. And knowing this, the river has put up with all manner of trammels ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... venom, then strapping his spear to his hand, he encounters them boldly alone. The courtiers hide "like frightened little girls", and the king betakes him to a "narrow shelter", an euphemism evidently of Saxo's, for the scene is comic. The king comes forth when the hero is victorious, and laughing at his hairy legs, nick-names him Shaggy-breech, and bids him to the feast. Ragnar fetches up his comrades, and apparently seeks out the ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... was M. Baffo translated it in a whisper. Surprised at my knowledge, she rose from her chair to get a valuable gold watch and presented to my master, who, not knowing how to express his deep gratitude, treated us to the most comic scene. My mother, in order to save him from the difficulty of paying her a compliment, offered him her cheek. He had only to give her a couple of kisses, the easiest and the most innocent thing in good ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... any. But who the devil is Matthew of Westminster? You are as familiar with these antiquated monastics, as Swedenborg, or, as his followers affect to call him, the Baron, with his invisibles. But you have raised a very comic effect out of the true narrative of Matthew of Westminster. 'Tis surprising with how little addition you have been able to convert with so little alteration his incidents, meant for terror, into circumstances and food for the spleen. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... mimicry, and are acute in the observation of anything that appears to them absurd or ludicrous, the white man often becomes the object of their jests or quizzing. I have heard songs of this kind sung at the dances in a kind of comic medley, where different speakers take up parts during the breaks in the song, and where a sentence or two of English is aptly introduced, or a quotation made from some native dialect, other than that of the ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... Mr. Buckstone's management, comedy and farce were chiefly performed. The "Adelphi Theatre," in the Strand, near Southampton Street, was rebuilt in 1858, when it had for a quarter of a century been celebrated for melodramas, and for the attractiveness of its comic actors. The "Lyceum Theatre," or "English Opera House," at the corner of Wellington Street, Strand, was built in 1834 as an English opera-house, but its fortunes were fluctuating, and the performances not of a definite kind. This ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... music of Mendelssohn's comic opera "The Wedding of Camacho" given by Theodore Thomas, ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... manner. Dorfling put Schrotter on his right hand, and Wilhelm and Paul on his left; near Schrotter was Barinskoi and a friend of Dorfling's, named Mayboorn. This man was, like Dorfling, a Rhinelander, he combined a successful career as a writer of comic verses with a confirmed pessimism. When he had written one of his merriest couplets, he would stop his work and sigh with Dorfling over the tragedy of life. The papers treated his farces as rubbish, but the public ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... narratives of the return of spirits to earth have been accompanied by circumstances somewhat comic, it does not militate against the truth of the thing; since for one recital imprudently embellished by uncertain circumstances, there are a thousand written sensibly and seriously, and in a ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... flames, and sometimes hideous yellings and noises in imitation of the howlings and cries of wretched souls tormented by relentless demons. From this yawning cave the devils constantly ascended to delight the spectators and afford comic relief to the more serious drama. The three stages were not always used. Archdeacon Rogers, who died in 1595, left an account of the Chester play which he himself saw, and he wrote that the stage was a high scaffold with two rooms, a higher and a lower, upon four wheels. ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... and obscures ulterior interests. This tendency to promote dissoluteness is the most serious charge which Plato brings against the arts. After referring to the unseemly hilarity to which men are incited by the comic stage, he adds: ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... beginner—knew little of the trials and struggles of the ordinary student. Almost 'a royal road' was opened for him. So soon as he could draw and colour decently, patrons were ready for him. Mrs. Jordan sat—now as the Comic Muse—now as Hippolyte; a 'lady of quality' was depicted as a Bacchante. Then came portraits of the Duke and Duchess of York, the Prince of Wales, and the Duke of Clarence. He lived in Charles Street, close to Carlton House, and wrote himself 'Portrait painter to ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... King On Tuesdays at Tom's does appear, And when he does talk or does sing, To him ne'er a one can come near. For he talks with such ease and such grace, That all charm'd to attention we sit, And he sings with so comic a face That our sides are ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... Though he was naturally gay, even jovial, he was apt to give himself too important and pompous an air. He usually kept his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and only took them out to settle his eye-glasses on his nose, with a movement that was half comic, and which announced the coming of a keen observation or some victorious argument. His gestures, his loquacity, his innocent self-assertion, proclaimed the provincial lawyer. These slight defects ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... to exhibit many fine horses, and he had no reason to feel called upon to talk about anything more serious to a stranger at a house party. But it was the manner of the man, his whole personality. For Freddie was a man of fashion, with all the exaggerated and farcical mannerisms of the dandy of the comic papers. He wore a conspicuous and foppish costume, and posed with a little cane; he cultivated a waving pompadour, and his silky moustache and beard were carefully trimmed to points, and kept sharp by his active ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... go outside the field of general news. They go to the dazzling levels of society, to scandal and crime, to sports, pictures, actresses, advice to the lovelorn, highschool notes, women's pages, buyer's pages, cooking receipts, chess, whist, gardening, comic strips, thundering partisanship, not because publishers and editors are interested in everything but news, but because they have to find some way of holding on to that alleged host of passionately interested readers, who are supposed by some critics of the press ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... Socrates only, together with Aristophanes and Agathon, remained awake, and that, while he continued to drink with them out of a large goblet, he compelled them, though most reluctantly, to admit that it was the business of one and the same genius to excel in tragic and comic poetry, or that the tragic poet ought, at the same time, to contain within himself the powers of comedy. [1] Now, as this was directly repugnant to the entire theory of the ancient critics, and contrary to all their experience, it is evident ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... is hardly too much to say that this quality had been almost dormant—a sleeping beauty among the lively bevies of that literature's graces—ever since the Middle Ages, with some touches of waking—hardly more than motions in a dream—at the Renaissance. The comic Phantasy had been wakeful and active enough; the graver and more serious tragic Imagination had been, though with some limitations, busy at times. But this third sister—Our Lady of Dreams, one might call ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... were called into action in the primitive popular carnival, the comic dance or -satura-,(5) which beyond doubt reached back to a period anterior to the separation of the stocks. On such occasions song would never be wanting; and the circumstances under which such pastimes were exhibited, chiefly at public festivals and marriages, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... throw a mingled look of entreaty and menace across the table, when half-a-dozen others, rightly judging from the Doctor's tone and serio-comic expression, that his malady had many more symptoms of fun than suffering about it, called ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... atmosphere, the new conditions, do, however, make an immense superficial difference between the humour even of Mr. Bret Harte and that of English writers. His fun is derived from the vagaries of huge, rough people, with the comic cruelty of the old Danes, and with the unexpected tenderness of a sentimental time. The characters of the great Texan and Californian drama are like our hackneyed friends, the Vikings, with a touch, if we may use the term, of spooniness. Their humour is often nothing ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... idea of men of modern times, however, the grotesque plays an enormous part. It is found everywhere; on the one hand it creates the abnormal and the horrible, on the other the comic and the burlesque. It fastens upon religion a thousand original superstitions, upon poetry a thousand picturesque fancies. It is the grotesque which scatters lavishly, in air, water, earth, fire, those ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... desire to laugh. And she did laugh, loudly and unnaturally—laughed and pointed a shaking forefinger into the man's face: "You fool!" she screamed, hysterically, "you fool! I'm not afraid of you! You're not real! You can't be real! You remind me of comic opera!" ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... a comic poet, and a minute observer of manners and circumstances, that Chaucer excels. In serious and moral poetry he is frequently languid and diffuse, but he springs like Antaeus from the earth when his subject changes to coarse satire or merry narrative' ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... and I rode on. Rode on? I was dragged on by four stout horses through the village to the mountains, for in my heart I was calling to my mother, wishing that her gentle warnings had turned me back before I heard the voice of doom sounding from the depths of Mr. Pound; before I had seen the comic tragedy enacted by Squire Crumple; above all, before the man who saw through the top of his hat had uttered his enigmas ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... incidentally, the existence of a sort of comic spirit in these works which relieves the tragedy of the situations. In spite of their dark pessimism, the actors in these little dramas have an appearance of gaiety which deceives. It is by this popular humor that Gorky is the ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... fandango, and the extraordinary lightness which had become the physical property of every object in the new planet made the dancers bound to a height of thirty feet or more into the air, considerably above the tops of the trees. What followed was irresistibly comic. Four sturdy majos had dragged along with them an old man incapable of resistance, and compelled him, nolens volens, to join in the dance; and as they all kept appearing and disappearing above the bank of foliage, their grotesque attitudes, combined with the pitiable countenance of ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... no teeth, but a long mouth like a pipe; so you can be sure they eat only the smallest sea-creatures. To add to his odd look, the Seahorse moves his eyes in a comic fashion. One eye may roll round and look at you, while the other ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... had lighted his pipe, and as he gave two or three tremendous puffs he screwed his face into a profoundly serio- comic expression and winked his right eye ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... men and their motives after he reached maturity, we have but to read this drama; drama it is, but with what other character who shall say? For, like the world's pageant, it is neither tragedy nor comedy, but a tragi-comic history, in which the intrigues of amorous men and light-o'-loves and the brokerage of panders are mingled with the deliberations of sages and the strife and the death ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... at the appointed hour, the guests like ghosts flit to a gloomy gas-lit chamber. They are of various speech and race, preoccupied with divers interests and cares. Necessity and the waiter drive them all to a sepulchral syssition, whereof the cook too frequently deserves that old Greek comic epithet—hadou mageiros—cook of the Inferno. And just as we are told that in Charon's boat we shall not be allowed to pick our society, so here we must accept what fellowship the fates provide. An English spinster retailing paradoxes culled to-day from Ruskin's handbooks; an American ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... rebuke, but the odd manner in which they were said and the humorous twinkle in the minister's eyes did not well agree. He waited a moment for her answer, still holding her hand and looking down into her face with a serio-comic expression quite unlike a clergyman, until Dexie answered, in a ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... come says one of them, when those that suffer for their consciences and honour may be rewarded. Nobody who heard this from the stage in the days of Charles II. could feel that the day had come. Its comic Irishman kept the Committee on the stage, and in Queen Anne's time the thorough Tory still relished the stage caricature of the maintainers of the Commonwealth in Mr. Day with his greed, hypocrisy, and private incontinence; his wife, who had been cookmaid to a gentleman, but ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... have now to see what will become of a fat and prosperous country with a semi-obsolete fleet and a comic ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... present day,—a native of the picturesque village in which this anti-geologist resides,—describes in a recent work, with the enthusiasm of the poet, the noble mountains which rise around it. I know not, however, whether my admiration of the passage was not in some degree dashed by a few comic notions suggestive of an "imaginary conversation," in the style of Landor, between this popular author and his anti-geologic townsman, on the merits of hills in general, and in especial on the claims of those which encircle Comrie "as the mountains are round about Jerusalem." ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... strengthen them for the return journey. Ron's knowledge of the native dialect was so slight that he fell back upon the more stately phraseology of the early English poets, introducing a strange Scotch term now and again with irresistibly comic effect. ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... says: but when the Dialogue grew hot, then she could not help trying to get her hands free; and that, as the Previlles told her, sufficiently told her when Action should begin, and not till then, whether in Grave or Comic. This anecdote (told by Contat herself) has almost an exact counterpart in Mrs. Siddons' practice: who recited even Lear's Curse with her hands and arms close to her side like an Egyptian Figure, and Sir ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... unfailing verve and variety of its action: in the fine open-air atmosphere of the scenes, the sense of the stir of life they convey: most of all, in an indescribable manliness or humanness which bespeaks the true comic force—something of that same comic view that one detects in Shakspere and Moliere and Cervantes. It means an open-eyed acceptance of life, a realization of its seriousness yet with the will to take it with a smile: a large tolerancy which ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... Mercutio ... Sir Toby ... Cordelia ... Protean. Sir John Falstaff, who appears in Shakspere's King Henry IV, and again in the Merry Wives of Windsor, is generally regarded as the greatest comic character in literature.... Mercutio, the friend of Romeo; one of the most marvellous of all Shakspere's gentlemen. He is the Hotspur of comedy, and his taking off by Tybalt "eclipsed the gaiety of nations."... Sir Toby Belch is the genial character in Twelfth Night, fond of singing and drinking, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with which his age impregnated all thought and expression; but his leading characteristic, like that of his great namesake, Samuel, was a hearty common sense, which fitted him rather to be a great critic than a great poet. He had a keen and ready sense of the comic in situation, but no humor. Fletcher was as much a poet as fancy and sentiment can make any man. Only Shakspeare wrote comedy and tragedy with truly ideal elevation and breadth. Only Shakspeare had that true sense of humor which, like the universal solvent sought by the alchemists, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... with hem-stitched bands, poured in upon him. He burned with angry blushes when his mother, smiling meaningly, passed them over to him. "Put them away, mother; I don't want them," he would growl out, in a distress that was half comic and half pathetic. He would never taste of the tempting viands which were brought to him. "How you act, Thomas!" his mother would say. She was secretly elated by these feminine libations upon the altar of her son. They did not ...
— Evelina's Garden • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... into ecclesiastical erections in ages too little critical to distinguish between what the workman had purposed doing and what he had done, might come to be regarded, in a less earnest but more knowing age, as precedents for the introduction of the intentionally comic and grotesque. Innocent accidental monkeys in towels may have thus served to usher into serious neighborhoods monkeys in towels that were such with ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... it in four words. In them one would say that it is set forth. There was in London at that time popular a song, a comic, vulgar song of the 'Alls, 'The Cat Came Back'. You 'ave 'eard it? Yes? I 'eard it myself, and without emotion. It had no sinister warning for me. It did not strike me as omen. Yet, in those four ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... laughed. Kendrick's indignation was quite too comic, considering his own reputation. To this argument, those who held to the proprietor ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... The idea of anybody lending that sum of money, except on the very best security, was in itself extremely comic. ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... Scene 2. Enter Comic Villain. "I am just released from prison and must soon meet my wife." (Swears and smashes ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... friend, began to publish Salmagundi, a magazine containing humorous articles on the social life of New York. This became so popular that twenty numbers were issued. Having found so much of interest in the life of his native city, Irving next wrote a comic History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, dealing with the early period when the city was ruled by the Dutch. The novel way in which this work was announced would do credit to the most clever advertiser. About six weeks before the book was published, appeared ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... time to lower respect for woman. The bill-boards and the picture post-cards, the penny-in-the-slot machines and the motion pictures, the exhibits of quack doctors, vaudeville performances, many so-called comic operas, popular new songs, the dress of women approved by modern fashion,—these all help at times to prepare young people to fall before the special temptations that beset all commercial recreation centers. Especially dangerous are the ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... himself, and really commanded it by his striking propriety of manner. He was, as a dear friend once remarked, a "God-made" gentleman, untainted with the slightest approach to any thing like affectation or coxcombry: indeed he ridiculed the latter with much comic effect: and the words "Dandy Jack," would put him out of conceit with any article of apparel that drew forth the remark. He would answer the taunt with a face of grave rebuke, saying, "Bad Mam, bold ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... Inland Voyage. Bob's own disguises rarely got into print, but in Will Low's Chronicle of Friendships there is a photograph of him in his student days, figuring as a sort of brigand of old-fashioned comic opera, that shows he did not from the beginning shirk the obligations he imposed upon others. I remember a huge ring, inherited from his father to whom the Czar had given it for engineering services in Russia, which he kept for formal ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Ralph, in comic petulance; "you're the original laddie with a bucket of cold water. As we figured it out last night, we shall be far away from here on our way to the Esmeralda mine before Ramon and the real soldiers of fortune whose fame we have appropriated are ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... his back to the fire, and a look of concern thrown into his comic little mug, and his eyebrows raised, experienced a very pleasurable glow ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... character can never be a refined judge; never what the comic poet calls elegans formarum spectator. The excellence and force of a composition must always he imperfectly estimated from its effect on the minds of any, except we know the temper and character of those minds. The most powerful effects of poetry ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... famous comic poet and dramatist, author of the "Frogs," "Clouds," "Birds," and many other works, of which only eleven are now extant; born about 451 B.C., died not later ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... replied Craig with a gravely comic look, shrewdly adding, 'ask Mrs. Mavor'; and so the League Minstrel and Dramatic Company became an established fact, and proved, as Craig afterwards told me, 'a great means of grace ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... great store of gold concealed in a pit. Kallias now acted most cruelly and wickedly. He took the gold, and killed the poor man for fear that he should tell it to the others. It is said that ever afterwards the descendants of Kallias were jeered at by the comic poets, as being of the family of the man who found the ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... character, in the different phases of life, from the horrible to the grotesque, the grand to the comic, attest the versatility of his powers; and, whatever faults may be found by critics, the public will heartily render their quota of admiration to his magic touch, his rich and facile rendering of almost every thought that stirs, or lies yet ...
— The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete • Anonymous
... lectures, or little tiresome tracts, or sloppy yarns about "Joe Tomkins's Temperance Turkey," or effusive harangues by half-educated buffoons, will ever do any good, he must run along the ranks of my procession with me, and I reckon he may learn something. The comic personages who deal with the subject are cruelly useless; the very notion of making jokes in presence of such a mighty living Terror seems desolating to the mind; I could not joke over the pest of drink, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... bears one along like a fast-flowing river. And it is not without humour, a calm, detached humour, which, as the critic Bolinsky puts it, is not there merely "because Gogol has a tendency to see the comic in everything, but because it is true ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... stinging emphasis into rich and sonorous amplification. The analysis of Iago, and the analysis of the Weird Sisters, indicate, perhaps, the extremes of his manner. Throughout the volumes, whether the subject be comic or tragic, humorous or sublime, there is never any lack of verbal felicities. These seem to grow spontaneously in the soil of his mind; and there is no American writer whose style is more wholly free from worn and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... answered Fragoso, with comic gravity, "it appears that there is—or rather formerly was—a trunk of 'turuma,' which every year at the same time descended the Rio Negro, stopping several days at Manaos, and going on into Para, halting ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... boy of France who did the work, and the sight of him put the American into a friendly humor. He was everywhere, the little pantalon rouge, streaming the walks, dotting the cafes with red, and every wee piou-piou under the great big epaulettes of a great big comic opera generalissimo. His huge military coat fitted him awkwardly, and the crimson pompon cocked on his little fighting kepi was more often awry, and he could not by any effort achieve a strut. He was only bon enfant, this unconquered soldier lad; so ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... the comic picture, all the lights in the theater were turned on and a gentleman stepped on the stage to address ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)
... The comic poets will also occasionally borrow a classical allusion. The following is from Swift's "Description of ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... therefore debauchery is admirable, and because the Mississippi is long, therefore every American is God."*3* Notice, again, how well the defect of 'Paradise Lost' is pointed out: "And I forgive Thee, Milton, those thy comic-dreadful wars Where, armed with gross and inconclusive steel, Immortals smite immortals mortalwise And fill all heaven with folly."*4* Few better things have been said of Langland than this, — "That ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... could hardly have explained, master though he was of explanation of the feelings of man. It seemed to him that all the purity, and the beauty, and the whimsical unselfconsciousness, and the touchingness of youth that is divine, appeared in that little, almost comic action of the girl. He loved her for the action, because she was able to perform it just like that. And something in him, suddenly adored youth in a way that seemed ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... {206}[252] [A comic singer in the opera buffa. The Italians, however, distinguish the buffo cantante, which requires good singing, from the buffo comico, in which ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... quoted the charming lines of the poet, where the king of the pygmies is measured by the same standard. We have all read in Milton of the spear that was like "the mast of some tall admiral", but these images are surely likely to come to the comic poet originally. The subject is before him. He is turning it in a thousand ways. He is full of it. The figure suggests itself naturally to him, and comes out of his subject, as in that wonderful passage, when Gulliver's box having been dropped ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... far as to threaten to throw me overboard, and but for the firmness of Captain Judkins,{286} probably would have (under the inspiration of slavery and brandy) attempted to put their threats into execution. I have no space to describe this scene, although its tragic and comic peculiarities are well worth describing. An end was put to the melee, by the captain's calling the ship's company to put the salt water mobocrats in irons. At this determined order, the gentlemen of the lash scampered, and for the rest ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... with philosophic detachment. "Now I couldn't feel the slightest interest in a man in comic opera. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... mental insanities, strictly speaking, are, nevertheless, mental deformities, and their unfortunate victims are dwellers in the borderlands. Mild forms of these types of degeneration are very abundant. The effeminate, cigarette-smoking, soda-drinking young man of the comic weeklies, and the loud, horsy, slang-using, vulgar, masculine young woman are ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... the fire that night, under the leafy branches of the forest, and smoked their pipes in concert, while Wabisca busied herself in clearing away the remnants of their evening meal, they waxed communicative, and stories, pathetic, comic, and tragic, followed ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... if you had married him he would be better, and that's more to the purpose. Lionel is as idiotic as a comic song, but you have cleverness ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... wife of a Sir Everard Marshall, a comic scientist in perpetual flight from his overwhelming spouse, is one of the sort that finds a new religion every few months and is now in the first fast furious throes of her latest, which is some form of psychomania, whereof the high ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... piano failed to produce the full effect, Daniel helped out with his crow-like voice. It was the uncanny energy of expression that prevented his singing from having a comic effect. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann |
