"Satiric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Kavanagh to employ. Clare's father, till now, had not included Harlan in his feud with the grandfather. He had always treated him with a brusqueness that had a sort of good-humor beneath it. His discourse with the young man had been curt and satiric and infrequent, and consisted usually in mock messages of defiance which he asked to have delivered by word of mouth to the grandfather. But his tone now was crisp and it had a straight ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... frequently at the best of which their halting-place could boast. Here many visits were paid to him by the ministers and officers of the insurgent force. In his description of these interviews he displays a vein of satiric severity, admitting any kindness that was done to him with some qualifying souvenir of former harshness, and gloating over any injury, mistake, or folly, which it was his chance to suffer or to hear. He ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a——!'" "GRUMPER'S speech is strong; Flanders and screeds of old satiric song Blend in his vigorous diction. Around, in lounging groups or knots apart, Are lesser lights of thought, small stars of art, And petty ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... alive. The nun takes the child, and Ginx, in gratitude for her assurance that the child shall not be sent back to him, stands treat for the crowd. The child's life in the convent is material for some good satiric writing upon the question of his salvation. The picture is absurdly over-drawn so far as its effectiveness against conventional charity is concerned, but it touches the question of religious bigotry surely and strongly. Indeed the method of treatment ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... which had been left on the divan. One of the first things that caught her eye was an article headed "Roux on Tuft Hunters; The Advanced American Woman as He Sees Her; Aggressive, Superficial, and Insincere." The entire interview was nothing more nor less than a satiric characterization of Flavia, aquiver with irritation and vitriolic malice. No one could mistake it; it was done with all his deftness of portraiture. Imogen had not finished the article when she heard a footstep, ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... hardship was fond of wielding the satiric lash, and that spirit leads to exaggeration. Bacon was not the meanest of mankind, Pope himself did things that Bacon would never have stooped to. Nor was Bacon the wisest and brightest of mankind. A wiser and brighter ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... appeal to him when I let my charges understand that their own letters were but charming literary exercises. They were too beautiful to be posted; I kept them myself; I have them all to this hour. This was a rule indeed which only added to the satiric effect of my being plied with the supposition that he might at any moment be among us. It was exactly as if my charges knew how almost more awkward than anything else that might be for me. There appears to me, moreover, as I look back, no note in all this more ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... Then he caught Abel's satiric eye, and went all to pieces. He clutched at his first attitude—the business-like—and so began all over again, and managed to get through by not looking in Abel's direction, being upheld by the knowledge that his pockets were ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... and I repeatedly urged him to write of the capital as he talked of it to me, but he professed to have lost his desire to write, and though I did not believe this, I hated to hear him say it, for I valued his satiric humor and ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... sank. Was she? What real basis had all this sweet, disturbing dream? To write so to a man after seven years! It was not decent. She grew satiric. How embarrassing for him to read such a letter in the bosom of an affectionate, flaxen-haired family! At least, she would never know how he really felt, thank Heaven. And what was left for her ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam
... in the square, beneath our windows: Shelley read to us his "Ode to Liberty"; and was riotously accompanied by the grunting of a quantity of pigs brought for sale to the fair. He compared it to the 'chorus of frogs' in the satiric drama of Aristophanes; and, it being an hour of merriment, and one ludicrous association suggesting another, he imagined a political-satirical drama on the circumstances of the day, to which the pigs would ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... Vauxhall, where he was on terms of friendship with the great Simpson, and where he shook the principal comic singer or the lovely equestrian of the arena by the hand. And while he could watch the grimaces or the graces of these with a satiric humor that was not deprived of sympathy, he could look on with an eye of kindness at the lookers on too; at the roystering youth bent upon enjoyment, and here taking it: at the honest parents, with their delighted children laughing and clapping their hands at the show: at the ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Hispanic Museum proves. One of Goya's best portraits hangs in the Prado, the seated figure of his brother-in-law, the painter Bayeu. The Family of Charles IV, his patron and patroness, with the sheep-like head of the favourite De la Paz, is here in all its bitter humour; it might be called a satiric pendant to that other Familia, not many yards away, Las Meninas. There are the designs for tapestries in the basement; Blind Man's Buff and other themes illustrating national traits. The equestrian portraits ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... his recall, and the indignities which he received at the hands of the emperor, tells in itself a tale of outraged feeling that needs no comment. It has been truly said that ridicule is more bitterly resented and more rarely forgiven than injury. The indulgence of a satiric humor, in some words spoken in jest by Suwarrow, is said to have piqued Paul so much that he took a cruel revenge. The rage of the emperor for the introduction of German fashions was so great, that he determined to have the German uniform adopted in ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... Thence the queen inferred great intimacy, and thenceforwards Lord Chesterfield could obtain no favour from court- and finding himself desperate, went into opposition. My father himself long afterwards told me the story, and had become the principal object of the peer's satiric wit, though he had not been the mover of his disgrace. The weight of that anger fell more disgracefully on the king, as I shall ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... Georg Brandes he has noted, with that clairvoyance which marks some of his utterances about himself, the "full-blooded egotism" which developed in him during his last year of mental and moral starvation at Grimstad. Through the whole series of his satiric dramas we see the little narrow-minded borough, with its ridiculous officials, its pinched and hypocritical social order, its intolerable laws and ordinances, modified here and there, expanded sometimes, modernized and brought up to ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... or impertinent curiosity, but received me with all the obliging civility possible. I know no European court where the ladies would have behaved themselves in so polite a manner to a stranger. I believe in the whole, there were two hundred women, and yet none of those disdainful smiles, or satiric whispers, that never fail in our assemblies when any body appears that is not dressed exactly in the fashion. They repeated over and over to me, "Uzelle, pek uzelle," which is nothing but Charming, very charming.—The first ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... Paludan-Mller (q.v.; 1809-1876) developed, as a poet, a magnificent career, which contrasted in its abundance with his solitary and silent life as a man. His mythological or pastoral dramas, his great satiric epos of Adam Homo (1841-1848), his comedies, his lyrics, and above all his noble philosophic tragedy of Kalanus, prove the immense breadth of his compass, and the inexhaustible riches of his imagination. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... material interests. It is only the most perfect art that could have retained for this novel readers in every quarter of the world. The denouement is as perfect as with such materials it can be; and we feel that, instead of Voltaire's withering and satiric contempt of all humanity, an element of unfeigned good-humor lies in the background of the picture. How far inferior is Swift! and how utterly horrible is the abandoned humor of a despair that leaves all in ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... greatest writers of the age, by Butler, with characteristic brilliancy of wit, by Dryden, with even more than characteristic energy and loftiness, by both with all the inspiration of hatred. The sparkling illustrations of Butler have been thrown into the shade by the brighter glory of that gorgeous satiric Muse, who comes sweeping by in sceptred pall, borrowed from her most august sisters. But the descriptions well deserve to be compared. The reader will at once perceive ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... dealing with the warming pan topic is a truly admirable satiric touch, and not one bit far-fetched or exaggerated. Any one familiar with suspicious actions has again and again heard comments as plausible and as forced. "Don't trouble yourself about the warming pan! The warming ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... incongruous in a philosopher who was perpetually dwelling on the praises of poverty, and that even in his own age it attracted unfavourable notice, as we may see from the epithet Proedives, "the over-wealthy," which is applied to him alike by a satiric poet and by a grave historian. Seneca was perfectly well aware that this objection could be urged against him, and it must be admitted that the grounds on which he defends himself in his treatise On a Happy Life are not very conclusive ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... and Milton both had their schools, most of our seventeenth-century poetry fell into an almost complete oblivion. Dryden's satiric, and Milton's epic strains engrossed attention, and shaped the verses of an age. But the seventeenth century was extraordinarily wealthy in poetic kinds quite distinct from these: in metaphysic, and mysticism, in devotional ecstasy, and love-lyric, ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... it, Kate's thoughts were satiric these days. She was still bleeding from the wound which her father had inflicted, and she did not suspect that it was wounded affection rather than hurt self-respect which was tormenting her. She only knew that she shrank from men, and that at times she liked ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... has the mock heroics of their ineffective challenge on Benedicke's earnest championship of Hero? Is the Prince's satiric speech (V, i, 208-209) to be interpreted as complimentary to Benedicke? Notice Claudio's next speech in comment upon it, and ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... say, 'Are they his own?'—a piece of satiric innocency at which Miss Denham laughed softly as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... patriots are telling how short a time the prayers took to the killing of him. I have seen a crowd, when certain Dublin papers had wrought themselves into an imaginary loyalty, so possessed by what seemed the very genius of satiric fantasy, that one all but looked to find some feathered heel among the cobble stones. Part of the delight of crowd or individual is always that somebody will be angry, somebody take the sport for gloomy ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... the voice of this queer, kindly, satiric personality. London generally falls into the arms of those who flout her; and Mariette, with his militant Catholicism, and his contempt for our governing ideals, became the fashion. As for Anderson, the contact with English Ministers and men of affairs had but carried on the generous ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dainty and epicurean habits, her extraordinary anxiety about her health, and her capricious humors were the subject of much light badinage among her friends. The Grande Mademoiselle sketches these traits with a satiric touch in the "Princesse de Paphlagonie," where she introduces her with the Comtesse de Maure. "There are no hours when they do not confer together upon the means of preventing themselves from dying, and upon the art of rendering themselves immortal," she ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... ignorance of the common people, the criminal neglect of the gentry which made such ignorance possible, the imbecility of mere mob-rule, and the mischievousness of demagogic pedantry—these are the objects of the author's satiric lash. ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... curiously enough, are masculine. You don't often find women wraithed in smiles—perhaps because they resent being made ridiculous, even after they're dead. Or maybe the reason lies in the fact that men have written most of the comic or satiric ghost stories, and have chivalrously spared the gentler shades. And there are very few funny child-ghosts—you might almost say none, in comparison with the number of grown-ups. The number of ghost children of any or all types is small proportionately—perhaps because it seems an unnatural thing ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... And then again he would stir into a curious, arch, malevolent laugh, for all the world like a debauched old tom-cat. His narration was like this: either simple, bare, stoical, with a touch of nobility; or else satiric, malicious, with a strange, rather ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... cheer. All the orators he styled "the slaves of the people." Crowns were, he said, as brittle marks of glory as bubbles of water, which burst in the formation; that theatrical representations were the wonder of fools only. In a word, nothing escaped his satiric humor. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... my jeux de mot, No lip is loosed in laughter; I send them to the Press, but no Acceptance follows after; And if, as formerly, I try Satiric themes my gibe'll Be certain to be hampered by The common ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... knight, and cotempory the author of Hudibras. In a tract entitled Religio Vindicata a Calumniis Atheismi, he thus alludes to the spiritual Quixotism which induced Butler to "crack the satiric thong:" ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 55, November 16, 1850 • Various
... qualities that make Defoe's novels great, if little read, classics, how delightful are the little satiric touches that add grave weight to the story. Consider the following: "My good gipsy mother, for some of her worthy actions, no doubt, happened in process of time to be hanged, and as this fell out something too soon for me to be perfected in the strolling trade," ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... that the second book in the Latin language which I was summoned to study should have been Phaedrus—a writer ambitious of investing the simplicity, or rather homeliness, of Aesop with aulic graces and satiric brilliancy. But so it was; and Phaedrus naturally towered into enthusiasm when he had occasion to mention that the most intellectual of all races amongst men, viz., the Athenians, had raised a mighty statue to one who belonged to the same class in a social sense as himself, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... is nothing strange about this, unless it be that any one should deem himself quite above the class of blunders which he satirizes. It is less to be wondered at that one should continue to hurl his satiric javelins at those who commit the same class of errors with himself, since he seldom becomes aware of his own ridiculous mistakes. In regard to Germany, our people know but its grand divisions and its large cities; and of its people among us but their exterior distinctions, and mainly ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Maerlant attacked the French Romances of Chivalry was not that they were French, but that they were Romances. The characteristic of the early Flemish writers, apart from the satiric poetry of Willem, is the seriousness of their thought and purpose. They feel strongly their responsibility in influencing their contemporaries and seldom abandon the tone of the preacher or teacher. The most eloquent verses of van Maerlant may be found in Van den Lande van Oversee, ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... ambiguity, reversal, and obliquity. Under a tone of seeming innocence and good will, he credited his adversaries with an enviable capacity for satiric argument. In comradely fashion, he found precedent for his own rhetorical practice through a variety of historical and biblical analogies. But even more important for a contemporary audience, he again resorted to the device of invoking the authority ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... George found other disturbances to the friendship. Lucy was "too much the village belle," he complained; and took a satiric attitude toward his competitors, referring to them as her "local swains and bumpkins," sulking for an afternoon when she reminded him that he, too, was at least "local." She was a belle with older people as well; Isabel and Fanny were continually ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... days longer than they are at present, small was the amount of time really abstracted from that which he had disposable for general purposes; amongst which purposes ranked foremost his literary pursuits. And, however much he transcended the prevailing conception of his order, as sketched by satiric and often ignorant novelists, he might be regarded, in all that concerned the liberalization of his views, as pretty fairly representing that order. Thus, through every real experience, the crazy notion of a rural aristocracy flowing apart from the urban aristocracy, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... satiric poetry, says:—'Had I time I could enlarge on the beautiful turns of words and thoughts, which are as requisite in this as in heroic poetry itself; of which the satire is undoubtedly a species. With these beautiful turns I confess myself to have been unacquainted, till about twenty years ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... sake of such brilliant promise. Denzil had a small patrimony to lead off with, and that he dissipated before he left college; thenceforth he was dependent upon his admirer, with whom he lived, filling a nominal post of bailiff to the estates, and launching forth verse of some satiric and sentimental quality; for being inclined to vice, and occasionally, and in a quiet way, practising it, he was of course a sentimentalist and a satirist, entitled to lash the Age and complain of human nature. His earlier poems, published ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... by exposing the difference between my paper and their gold. The examination-week did arrive, of course, and I found that I was to be myself the examiner of my classes. Let not the reader think that I would be pleasantly satiric when I say that not till then did I fully awake to the fruitful meaning of the expression, "American independence." And neither let him infer that I take such a school to be a representative American ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... fortunate, however, for the interest of Gryll Grange that politics, in the strict sense, occupy so small a part of it; for of all subjects they lose interest first to all but a very select number of readers. The bulk of the satiric comment of the book is devoted either to purely social matters, or to the debateable land between these and politics proper. A little but not very much of this is obsolete or obsolescent. American slavery is no more; and the 'Pantopragmatic Society' ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... was in no hurry. He had not yet worked out an explanation for the strange whim that had sent him home after an absence of thirteen years and he wanted time to study over it. His lips took on a satiric curl as he meditated, riding slowly down into the valley. It was inexplicable, mysterious, this notion of his to return to a father who had never taken any interest in him. He could not account for it. He had not been sent for, he had not sent ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... he was compelled to make some similar apology for his misdemeanours. "I have often thought," Cibber writes, "that a good deal of the favour he met with was owing to this seeming humble way of waiving all pretences to merit, but what the town would please to allow him." A satiric poem, called "The Players," published in 1733, contains the following reference ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... however, whom I found at the encampment were a couple of insane fellows, determined to follow us—perhaps to show "by one satiric touch" what kind of madcap enterprise was ours. The first was a Neapolitan, who had dogged me all the while I was at Tripoli, pestering me to make a contract with him as servant. To humour his madness, ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... QUI RIT, it was Hugo's object to 'denounce' (as he would say himself) the aristocratic principle as it was exhibited in England; and this purpose, somewhat more unmitigatedly satiric than that of the two last, must answer for much that is unpleasant in the book. The repulsiveness of the scheme of the story, and the manner in which it is bound up with impossibilities and absurdities, discourage the reader at the outset, and it needs an effort to take ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... another visit to the prisoner, and this time Willy and Cuddy bring Alexis with them; perhaps Alexis is John Davies, of Hereford, another contributor to The Shepherd's Pipe. Roget starts his allegory again, in the same mild, satiric manner he had adopted, to his hurt, in Abuses stript and whipt. Wither becomes quite delightful again, when cheerfulness breaks through this satirical philosophy, ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... care he committed the forming of my heart, whose memory I shall ever hold in veneration. While a boy, I was enterprising in all the tricks of boys, and exercised my wit in crafty excuses; the warmth of my passions gave a satiric, biting cast to my writings, whence it has been imagined, by those who knew but little of me, I was a dangerous man; though, I am conscious, this ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... turn to be satiric. "Poor dear Byron must have had a row of rotten spots one of which was always in eruption. One may judge not so much by his achievements ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... conscience—your conscience!" repeated she with satiric emphasis; "your conscience is the scape-goat; I warrant it an able one—it will bear the burden of one of the best manors of the Abbey of Saint Mary of Kennaquhair", lately forfeited to our noble Lord the King, by the Abbot and community ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... ferret out the secret, and forgot all his sorrows for the time, as soon as he found a human being to whom he might do good. But Raphael was inexplicably wayward and unlike himself. All his smooth and shallow persiflage, even his shrewd satiric humour, had vanished. He seemed parched by some inward fever; restless, moody, abrupt, even peevish; and Synesius's curiosity rose with his disappointment, as Raphael went on obstinately declining to consult the very physician before whom he ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... the women are apt to be youngish, prettyish, and somewhat fond of music. Further, the conductorship of a choir involves many and various social encounters. Now Mary Morfe was jealous. Though Richard Morfe ruled his choir with whips, though his satiric tongue was a scorpion to the choir, though he never looked twice at any woman, though she was always saying that she wished he would marry, Mary Morfe was jealous. It was Mary Morfe who had created the institution of the Friday night, and she had created it in order ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... the less exalted way, the industrious man of all work, Nicholas Breton, whom we shall speak of more at length among the pamphleteers, and John Davies of Hereford, no poet certainly, but a most industrious verse-writer in satiric and other forms. Mass of production, and in some cases personal interest, gives these a certain standing above their fellows. But the crowd of those fellows, about many of whom even the painful industry of the modern commentator ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... of taking a liberty with him (except once a tipsy gentleman from York, and I am bound to own that my papa never forgave him): he set the humblest people at once on their ease with him, and brought down the most arrogant by a grave satiric way, which made persons exceedingly afraid of him. His courtesy was not put on like a Sunday suit, and laid by when the company went away; it was always the same; as he was always dressed the same, whether for a dinner by ourselves or for a great ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... De Quincey's work is now unreadable because it deals with political economy and allied subjects, in which he fancied he was an expert. He is a master only when he deals with pure literature, but he has a large vein of satiric humor that found its best expression in the grotesque irony of "Murder as One of the Fine Arts." In this essay he descants on the greatest crime as though it were an accomplishment, and his freakish wit makes this paper as enjoyable as Charles ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... "regimental stripes"; at any rate, it is designated with broad diagonal bands of colour: claret, gold, and blue. It was obvious to us that Pete Corcoran, or, to give him his proper name, Mr. Corcoran, had said what he did merely in a humorous way, or possibly satiric, implying that we are generally so hard up for something to write about that we would even undertake so trifling a subject as haberdashery; but as we went downstairs again to our kennel, au dixieme, as Mr. Wanamaker would call it, we ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... their aim and purpose. A set of severer Satires (for they are not so much Comedies, which they have been likened to, as they are strong and masculine Satires) less mingled with anything of mere fun, were never written upon paper, or graven upon copper. They resemble Juvenal, or the satiric ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... before him a keyboard made up of a series of I's. The lyric and satiric writers play in the purely human octave; the critic plays in the bookman's octave; the historian in the octave of the investigator. When an author writes of himself, perforce he plays upon his own "I," which is not exactly that contained in the octave of the sentimentalist nor yet in that ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... to Burbage, the chief tragic actor, of Shakespeare as a member of their company, who, AS AN AUTHOR OF PLAYS, "puts down" the University wits "and Ben Jonson too." The date is not earlier than that of Ben's satiric play on the poets, The Poetaster (1601), to which reference is made. Since Kempe is to be represented as wholly ignorant, his opinion of Shakespeare's pre-eminent merit only proves, as in the case of Gullio, that the University wits decried the excellences of ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... Fescennine poems," says Dunlop (History of Roman Literature), "leaves on our minds a stronger impression of the prevalence and extent of Roman vices than any other passage in the Latin classics. Martial, and Catullus himself elsewhere, have branded their enemies; and Juvenal, in bursts of satiric indignation, has reproached his countrymen with the blackest crimes. But here, in a complimentary poem to a patron and intimate friend, these are jocularly alluded to as the venial indulgence ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... authorship of the work is of little importance. It lives, not because of anything remarkable in the style or anything original in its author's point of view, but because of its satiric reflection of the background of its age. It is republished both because of its historical value and because of its peculiarly contemporary appeal today. Its satire needs no learned paraphernalia of footnotes; it can be readily understood and appreciated by readers in an age dominated ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... Very rarely have dramatic writers, even of the first rank, exhibited powers of equal rate, when out of the precincts of their own art; while, on the other hand, poets of a more general range, whether epic, lyric, or satiric, have as rarely succeeded on the stage. There is, indeed, hardly one of our celebrated dramatic authors (and the remark might be extended to other countries) who has left works worthy of his reputation in any other line; and Mr. Sheridan, perhaps, might only have been saved ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... he commonized the name to a satiric general term, is not to be written down, and needed ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... house, in the streets, we could hear the cries, "free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men!" Douglas looked annoyed, ironic lights passed across his face. He said in a satiric way: "Just listen to that." These cries could not be met by direct denial, by an epigrammatic retort. One could not so aptly say "slave banks, slave tariffs, slave labor conditions." These required arguments to expound. If labor ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... idiot quote A verse of Horace, learned by drote. He knew a hundred pleasing stories With all the turns of Whigs and Tories; Was cheerful to his dying day, And friends would let him have his way. He gave the little wealth he had To build a house for fools and mad; And showed by one satiric touch, No nation wanted it so much, That kingdom he has left his debtor, I wish it soon may have ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... theologian or metaphysician. But that sense of negation, of theoretic insecurity, was in the air, and conspiring with what was of like tendency in himself made of him a central type of disillusion. In him the passive ennui of Obermann became a satiric, aggressive, almost angry conviction of the littleness of the world around; it was as if man's fatal limitations constituted a kind of stupidity in him, what the French call betise. Gossiping friends, indeed, linked what was constitutional ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... ancient plays I know not. But in this I have ever feared to do ill, and indeed will not be persuaded to that undertaking.' So says Betterton. RUFUS is not so good; I am not pleased with RUFUS; plainly a RIFACCIMENTO of some inferior work; but there are some damned fine lines. As for the purely satiric ill-minded ABELARD AND HELOISE, another TROILUS, QUOI! it is not pleasant, truly, but what strength, what verve, what knowledge of life, and the Canon! What a finished, humorous, rich picture is the Canon! Ah, there was nobody like ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the satiric Byron; and it is the absolute fact that while thousands of mummies buried in common graves remain untouched even to the present day, the very grandeur of the pyramid builders' tombs attracted attention to them, caused the monuments to be opened, the sarcophagi ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... comedy—there had been nothing like Jonson's comedy since the days of Aristophanes. "Every Man in His Humour," like the two plays that follow it, contains two kinds of attack, the critical or generally satiric, levelled at abuses and corruptions in the abstract; and the personal, in which specific application is made of all this in the lampooning of poets and others, Jonson's contemporaries. The method of personal attack by ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... to Curio" is a masterpiece of vigorous composition, terse sentiment, and glowing invective. It gathers around Pulteney as a ring of fire round the scorpion, and leaves him writhing and shrivelled. Out of Dryden and Pope, it is perhaps the best satiric piece ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... tenant is a bachelor who lived here with his sister; he will scarcely realise, therefore, what happens at 5 P.M. every day, when there comes, as the satiric poet, LONGFELLOW, has so ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... his "Hundred Voices" has something of this satiric note. It is a blow against a worthless pretender of the art of verse, who courts popularity with strains not worthy of the sacred Muse. Palamas, acting with greater wisdom than Pope, does not give the ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... the European Magazine, Jan. 1786. BOSWELL. There we learn that he was in his time a grammar-school usher, actor, poet, the puffing partner in a quack medicine, and tutor to a youthful Earl. He was suspected of levying blackmail by threats of satiric publications, and he suffered from a disease which rendered him an object almost offensive to sight. He was born in 1738 or ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... be remembered that I had already perused Sterne, much of Swift, and far more comic and satiric literature than is known to boys, and, what is far more remarkable, had thoroughly taken it all into my cor cordium by ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Helen seldom wrote letters, and she never read anything, not even popular novels of the day. She was as absolutely ignorant of the West as the Englishman, who, she said, expected to hunt buffalo and fight Indians. Moreover, there was a satiric note in the letter that Madeline did not like, and which roused her spirit. Manifestly, Helen was reveling in the ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... entitled, Saint Louis, the rough drafts of several novels, Stenie or Philosophic Errors, Falthurne: the Manuscript of the Abbe Savonati, translated from Italian by M. Matricante, Primary School Principal, The Accursed Child, The Two Friends, a satiric sketch, The Day's Work of a Man of Letters, Some Fools, and, furthermore, fragments of a work on idolatry, theism and natural religion, a historic monograph on the Vaudois, some outlined letters on Paris, ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... antiquity; and Caius Cilnius Mcenas, a wealthy patron of letters, who had also been present when the negotiations were made previous to the peace of Brundusium, three years before. Probably the satiric poet Horace was also one of the group, for he gives, in one of his satires, an account of a journey from Rome to Brundusium, which he is supposed to have made at the time that Mcenas ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... faithful to the original, and the subtitle calls attention to the aptness of the Discourse as a defense of Pope's satiric practice.[25] It is so apt, indeed, that one could almost suspect Pope himself of making the translation and submitting it to Harte or his publisher. Pope had already invoked Boileau's name and precedent in the letter ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... people was an insult, which, added to the injury of their obstinate resistance, roused to fury the remnants of the Roman conservatives. The entanglement of Titus with the Jewish princess Berenice was the final outrage. The satiric poets Martial and Juvenal inserted frequent ribald references to Jewish customs; but the nature of their works precluded a serious criticism. Martial was a master of flouts, jeers, and gibes, and Juvenal was a soured and disappointed provincial, who delighted to hurl wild reproaches. ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... notice to remark that the programme includes a humorous extravaganza entitled The Quirks of Quilliam, in which a grotesque pas de quatre for the Deemster, the Doomster, the Boomster and the Scrabster, forms the central episode; and ends with a satiric sketch, The Golden Calf of Man, apparently aimed at the extravagance of Lancashire trippers, who are pursued by demons into Sulby Glen, and released, to the sound of sea-trumpets, by the beneficent intervention of Lord Greeba ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... keep this fact in mind when studying the different works which Anglo-Norman literature has left us. We will examine these works briefly, grouping them into narrative, didactic, hagiographic, lyric, satiric and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... panels there was a dainty bit of white note-paper, with these satiric words written across its surface ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... them. It is not our business here to analyse these compositions from the point of view of considering the amount of political usefulness they may have achieved. We must consider rather Mr. Belloc's fine, contented industry in his satiric task, the persistence with which he builds up his ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... hand and satirize him with the other. This letter was sent by Hamilton to Boileau, who answered him with great politeness; but, at the same time that he highly extolled the epistle to Grammont, he, very naturally, seemed anxious to efface any impression which such a representation of his satiric vein might make on the Count's mind, and accordingly added a few complimentary verses to him: this letter is dated, Paris, 8th February, 1705. About the same time, another letter was written to Hamilton ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... this new treatment, and the lady promised to have nothing more to do with him. The professor was not content to despise his opponent in silence. He had him cited before the Faculty of Medicine to be examined on his knowledge of the eye, and procured the insertion of a satiric article in the news on the new operation for replacing the crystalline humour, alluding to the wonderful artist then in Warsaw who could perform this operation as easily as a dentist could put in ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... not convinced of the higher spirituality of co-operative hermitages. He found it too heavy to believe that there was no Christendom outside the Charterhouse plot, and no way of salvation except for a handful of mannikins. Alexander, with stinging and satiric terms, left in a huff, followed by acrimonious epithets from his late brethren. He became a monk at Reading, and filled a larger part upon a more spacious stage, and yet would have most gladly returned; but the strait cell was shut to him relentlessly and for ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... are so exquisite, that all Europe, nay, the Pope would be inflamed to behold them. The passage is omitted, though worthy of the satiric vein of Mephistopheles. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... conceal and convey wit and wisdom in the semblance of folly and dulness, as is done in the Clowns and Fools, nay even in the Dogberry, of our Shakespeare, is doubtless a proof of genius, or at all events of satiric talent; but that the attempt to ridicule a silly and childish poem, by writing another still sillier and still more childish, can only prove (if it prove any thing at all) that the parodist is a still greater blockhead than the original writer, and, what is far worse, a malignant ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... immediately merges itself in another—a panorama of tall, pleasant, beautiful people, placed in becoming attitudes, in charming gardens, in luxurious rooms, so that I can scarcely tell which is the more definite, the impression satiric or the ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... satiric and facetious remarks, his half-brother paced up and down the glass parlour, scowling over the panes into the bank where the busy young clerks sate before their ledgers. At last he gave an "Ah!" as of satisfaction. Indeed, he had seen Sir Barnes ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... circuitous and secretive mind. It was a face full of that weary concern, that alert indifferency, which is companion to the spirit of repeated compromise. It was far from an open face: it seemed to betray only two things, tiredness and satiric intelligence. ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... that changes to all kinds of white, He proffers his defence, in tones subdued Near to mock-mildness now, so mournful seems The obtuser sense truth fails to satisfy; Now, moved, from pathos at the wrong endured, To passion.... Also his tongue at times is hard to curb; Incisive, nigh satiric bites the phrase. ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... happy period of its career Punch set itself a very high artistic standard. The paper intended to avail itself of the services of whatever artistic genius it could attach to itself by attractive emoluments. It then pieced out its satiric business among its distinguished staff, above everything else artists, perhaps not one of them animated with that fervour of attack which is the genius of foreign caricature. These men, by their several temperaments, founded the characteristics and traditions of Punch. They were perfectly ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... his friend, who was somewhat disposed to be satiric, "classically speaking, 'pulchra faciant te prole parentum.' Depend upon it this will be your initiation; you will surely, upon attendance there, be caught by the smiling graces of some pretty Venus—but, ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... style of much of his work is the style which his taste leads him to assume for satiric purposes. He feels that a clear, straightforward, everyday manner of speech would not suit a subject over which the gods themselves might hesitate whether to laugh or weep. As the poet of Stoicism, using the very words of Vergil, he calls upon a benighted race to acquaint itself with the causes ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... ponderous and awful blunders like this that the satiric power of the writer finds its favorite field ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various |
