"Humourist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into the audacity of this experiment by consideration of a fact which hitherto does not seem to have been taken into consideration by any translator of the half divine humourist in whose incomparable genius the highest qualities of Rabelais were fused and harmonized with the supremest gifts of Shelley: namely, that his marvellous metrical invention of the anapaestic heptameter was almost exactly reproducible ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... liked nothing better than to talk with him from the beginning to the end of her dinner. Tall, slender, bald-headed, awkward, and stammering with his elaborate British stammer whenever it suited his convenience to do so; a sharp observer who had wit which he commonly concealed; a humourist who was satisfied to laugh silently at his own humour; a diplomatist who used the mask of frankness with great effect; Lord Skye was one of the most popular men in Washington. Every one knew that he was a ruthless critic of American manners, but he had the art to combine ridicule ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... humourist, better known by his nom de plume of THOMAS INGOLDSBY, was born at Canterbury on the 6th of December 1788. At seven years of age he lost his father, who left him a small estate, part of which was the manor of Tappington, so frequently ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... had stood at first uncertain whether to advance or retreat, now resolved to enter for the moment into the whim of the scene, though internally fretting at Mac-Morlan for sending him to consult with a crack-brained humourist. He therefore advanced with three profound congees, and craved permission to lay his credentials at the feet of the Scottish monarch, in order to be perused at his best leisure. The gravity with which he accommodated himself to the humour of the moment, and the deep and ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... more entire than is possible for ordinary minds, of the whole mechanism of humanity, and seeing also the manner, the outward mode or fashion, always in strict connection with the spiritual condition which determined it, a humourist such as Charles Lamb anticipates the enchantment of distance; and the characteristics of places, ranks, habits of life, are transfigured for him, even now and in advance of time, by poetic light; justifying what some might condemn as mere sentimentality, in the effort to hand on ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... which a multitude believed, although only two-thirds of them saw what must, if real, have been equally obvious to all, may be compared with the exploit of the humourist, who planted himself in an attitude of astonishment, with his eyes riveted on the well-known bronze lion that graces the front of Northumberland House in the Strand, and having attracted the attention of those who looked ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... on earth has been more misrepresented and miswritten-up than the Village. Its eccentricities, harmless or otherwise, are sufficiently conspicuous to furnish targets both for the unscrupulous fiction-monger and the professional humourist. Sometimes when the fun is clever enough and true enough no one minds, the Village least of all; humour is their strong point. But they are quite subtle souls with all their child-like peculiarities; there is, in their acceptance of ridicule, a shrewd undercurrent suggestive ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... an old baronet, a great humourist, without any very near relations, who had been a godson of Mr. Temple's grandfather. He had never invited or encouraged any intimacy or connection with the Temple family, but had always throughout life kept himself aloof from any acquaintance with them. Mr. Temple ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... broken off in the middle, or it is a story told by some Jewish humourist in ridicule of Joshua's pretended mission from God, and the compilers of the Bible, not perceiving the design of the story, have told it as a serious matter. As a story of humour and ridicule it has a great deal of point; for it pompously introduces an angel in the figure of a man, with ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... marrying this famous termagant, and taming her into a meek and manageable wife. And truly none was so fit to set about this herculean labour as Petruchio, whose spirit was as high as Katharine's, and he was a witty and most happy-tempered humourist, and withal so wise, and of such a true judgment, that he well knew how to feign a passionate and furious deportment, when his spirits were so calm that himself could have laughed merrily at his own angry feigning, for his natural temper was careless and easy; the boisterous ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... his shroud. In his memoirs, published by his children, you may see the picture, grimly truthful: and bearing the legend, He sang the Song of the Shirt. You may discover in what he drew, as well as in what he wrote, many indications of the humourist's perverted taste: and no doubt the knowledge that mortal disease was for years doing its work within, led his thoughts oftentimes to what was awaiting himself. He could not walk in an avenue of elm-trees, without fancying that one of them might furnish his coffin. When in his ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... amateur reciter and skirt dancer, an owner of a lock of Paderewski's hair—torn fresh from the head personally at a concert—an admirer of George Bernard Shaw as a thinker but a hater of him as a humourist, a rationalist and reader of Punch, an atheist and table-turner, a friend of all who think that women don't desire to be slaves, a homoeopathist and Sandowite, an enemy of babies—as if all women didn't worship them!—a lover of cats—as ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... attain their effects by bad spelling, and a simple transliteration reveals the poverty of their wit. There is but one author who represents with any clarity the spirit of his country, and that author is Mark Twain. Not Mark Twain the humourist, the favourite of the reporters, the facile contemner of things which are noble and of good report, but Mark Twain, the pilot of the Mississippi, the creator of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. He is national as Fielding is national. Future ages will look upon Huck Finn as we look upon ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... Museum.—The frost has broken up. Mr. Butler is restored to literature. Mr. Mudie may make himself easy. England will still boast a humourist; and the late Mr. Darwin (to whose posthumous machinations the removal of the book was owing) will ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... without any apparent sense or understanding of one of its most important as well as richest elements. A man without the perception of humour taking English prose literature in hand, can of course set about it only in one way. Accordingly, in Mr. Taine's decisive judgments of our last great humourist, which proceed upon a principle of psychological analysis which it is only fair to say he applies impartially to everybody, Pickwick, Oliver Twist, and The Old Curiosity Shop are not in any manner even named or alluded to; Mrs. Gamp is only once mentioned as ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... to his friend, "you must meet the celebrities. Here's George Bagby, our choicest humourist; Trav. Daniel, artist, poet and musician; Jim Pegram, Innes Randolph, and ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... analogy with Theophile Gautier, was, in these days, a humourist as well as a poet. In the midst of his mad fancies and rare melodies he is laughing at himself, as Theophile mocked at Les Jeunes France. The psychological position is, therefore, one of the rarest. Mr. Stoddart was, first of all and ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... I would name my seconds and select weapons. There was something operatic about the matter to my mind, although they appeared to be in earnest, and I could not help reminding my two visitors of the proposal of a famous American humourist regarding a choice of weapons in such a case—"brick-bats at half-a-mile, or gatling-guns," or something of that nature. However, they would not be turned from their purpose even when I seriously asked if they really desired the shedding ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... remembered the humourist in all his departed glory, and still venerated him as a temple where the deity yet breathed, though the altar was overthrown, made to this extraordinary remonstrance no other reply than a long whiff, and a "Well, Russelton, dash my wig (a favourite oath ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... like the mass of authors, for the literary class—for all who have the sense of style, the delight in the best language. He will endure while English literature endures, while English civilisation lasts. We cannot expect all the world to share our affection for this humourist whose mirth springs from his melancholy. His religion, his education, his life in this unsatisfying world, are not the life, the education, the religion of the great majority of human kind. He cannot reach so many ears and hearts as Shakespeare or ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... enemy of the Empire, republican humourist of the Marseillaise, and the lukewarm socialist of the Mot d'Ordre, who could answer to the judge who demanded his name, "I am Henri Rochefort, Comte de Lucey," has been reproached by some with his titles ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... that fortune had been extraordinarily kind to his niece. The stranger, he thought, must be both wealthy and generous, and such an offer was not to be despised, though made by a humourist, and one of ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... Humourist, who is liberal of Talk in his Wine, I must confess, sometimes lets his Vain-Glory bring his Discourse under some Suspitions; especially, when upon the Strain of his Intimacy with King Charles. He tells how that Prince, seeing ...
— The Theater (1720) • Sir John Falstaffe
... the proportion of shade trees to cacao is high. Leguminous trees are preferred because they conserve the nitrogen in the soil. Hence in Trinidad the favourite shade tree is Erythrina or Bois Immortel (so called, a humourist suggests, because it is short-lived). It is also rather prettily named, "Mother of Cacao." Usually the shade trees are planted about 40 feet apart, but there are cacao plantations which might cause a stranger to enquire, "Is this an Immortel plantation?" ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... the Spectator's Club, the dramatis personae introduced in the Tatler do not occupy a very prominent place in the development of the work. Isaac Bickerstaff himself, an old man of sixty-four, "a philosopher, an humourist, an astrologer, and a censor," is rather vaguely sketched, and his familiar, Pacolet, is made use of chiefly in the earlier numbers. The occasional references to Bickerstaff's half-sister, Jenny Distaff,[13] and her husband, Tanquillus, and ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken |
