"Drollery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to-night—with occasional, furtive glances at Weary's face; for he, also, had been quick to read those close-pressed lips, which did not soften in response to the ditty. Usually he laughed at Pink's drollery. ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... the keels and flats of the Ohio, they were a class unto themselves—"half horse, half alligator," a contemporary styled them. Rough fellows, much given to fighting, and drunkenness, and ribaldry, with a genius for coarse drollery and stinging repartee. The river towns suffered sadly at the hands of this lawless, dissolute element. Each boat carried from thirty to forty boatmen, and a number of such boats frequently traveled in company. After ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... writings. Coleridge often and repeatedly pressed me to settle him on a salary, and often and repeatedly did I try; but it would not do. Of politics he knew nothing; they were out of his line of reading and thought; and his drollery was vapid, when given in short paragraphs fit for a newspaper; yet he has produced some agreeable books, possessing a tone of humour and kind feeling, in a quaint style, which it is amusing to read, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... might be related of the peculiar wit, sarcasm, and drollery of this remarkable man. One more must suffice. When Newton County was first organized, it was made the duty of Dooly to hold the first court. There then lived and kept the only tavern in the new town of Covington, a man of huge proportions, named Ned Williams, usually called Uncle Ned—he, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... observations, and his drollery of style, Bewildered with that sorrowful serenity of smile— The eye's elusive twinkle, and the twitching of the lid, Like he didn't go to say it and was sorry that he did. O Artemus of Michigan! so worthy of the ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... his youth he was keen on the turf and in field sports; he subsequently found his chief entertainment in literary avocations. As a poet, he had been better known if his efforts had been of a less fragmentary character. The general tendency of his Muse was drollery, but some of his lyrics are ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... afternoon, Only-One-Eye brought us a little thin, lively, jumping, chattering girl, full of drollery, of that drollery which is the substitute for wit among the youthful male and female workpeople who have developed in the streets of Paris. She was nice looking without being pretty, the outline of a woman who had some of everything, one of those silhouettes which draftsmen draw in three ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... drollery of these madcaps to the attentions of our courtiers?" said Francis, more gently. ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... Josiah Dwight was the minister of Woodstock, Connecticut, about the year 1700. He was not old, it is true, but he must have caught the ways of the old ministers. The "sensational" pulpit of our own time could hardly surpass him in the drollery of its expressions. A specimen or two may dispose the reader to turn over the pages which follow in a good-natured frame of mind. "If unconverted men ever got to heaven," he said, "they would feel as uneasy as a shad up the crotch of a white-oak." Some of his ministerial associates took ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the author was present, they could not have more civilly accepted the toast; it was a bold kind of drollery in Mr. Burney, for I was fain to drink my own health in a bumper, which he filled ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... Europeans. One at least of those recorded by the first missionaries, on the Lower St. Lawrence, is still current among the tribes of the Upper Lakes. Many of them are curious combinations of beliefs seriously entertained with strokes intended for humor and drollery, which never fail to awaken peals of laughter in the lodge-circle. Giants, dwarfs, cannibals, spirits, beasts, birds, and anomalous monsters, transformations, tricks, and sorcery, form the staple of the story. Some of the Iroquois tales embody conceptions which, however preposterous, ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... I and one varlet in our travelling outfit, Maternus and six more habited as imitation Praetorians. Two of the ruffians had a pretty taste in drollery and amused the crowd with buffooneries. Strange to say the crowds seemed to think that they travestied Praetorians to a nicety whereas neither had ever set eyes on a Praetorian and their antics were the product of ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... his powers of drollery to enliven the miscellaneous meal, and Flora soon retired to rest, fully determined to bear the crosses of life with more ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... the vague of that far-off time another face and figure, as essentially New En&land as this, and yet so different, relieve themselves. Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as far as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized Yankee. He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking, and he so became a literary product of a rarer and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... His nose was shaped like the bill of a parrot; his face slightly pitted with the small-pox, with a dry perpetual bloom on it, like a frostbitten leaf in autumn. He had an eye of great quickness and vivacity, with a drollery and lurking waggery of expression that was irresistible. He was evidently the wit of the family, dealing very much in sly jokes and innuendoes with the ladies, and making infinite merriment by harping ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... the fate of the Bourbons; no one would have hesitated to make peace with Napoleon, if Napoleon would have accepted terms of peace. The manifesto was not, however, intended to meet a scientific criticism. In the English Foreign Office it was correctly described as a piece of drollery; and Metternich was too familiar with the language of principles himself to attach much meaning to it in the mouth of anyone else. Talleyrand, however, kept a grave countenance. With inimitable composure the old Minister of the Directory wrote to Louis XVIII. lamenting ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... ere long made his appearance in London and presented himself to his quasi-friend, Bathurst, who, with an eye to his own and his colleagues' interests, discouraged the idea of publishing an answer to Sir Walter Scott's book. Bathurst, in fact (with unconscious drollery), advised Lowe to hurry back to Ceylon without delay, lest meanwhile a vacancy of the governorship should occur and he might lose his opportunity. He was assured of the Government's appreciation of him as their most trusted and loyal public servant, ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... therefore, in a moment, from its bepuffed and distorted appearance, to an expression of arch and coquettish benignity, I gave my lady a pat on the one cheek, and a kiss on the other, and without saying one syllable (Furies! I could not), left her astonished at my drollery, as I pirouetted out of the room in a Pas ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of life to which it HAS pleased Heaven to call one,—the horror at her tricycle, the impossibility of improvement, the predilection for farmyard odours, the adherence to tumbledown dwellings, the contempt of drinking fountains,—all had their meed of exaggeration not without drollery. ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... actors were too good to be defeated by the authors; and the two couples—the Babes (Mr. STANLEY LUPINO as Horace and Mr. WILL EVANS as Flossie) and the Robbers (Messrs. EGBERT)—went far by their personal drollery and unflagging spirits to make up for any defect in the words. Each member of the two pairs played very loyally into the other's hands. Mr. ALBERT EGBERT indeed played into his brother's feet with equal devotion; and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... with florid face, and powdered hair, his raised and clasped hands,—rushing out of the lockup-house scene in all the fervid extasy of a father rejoicing at the escape of his son from destruction. In Crack, Dozey, Nipperkin, and other drunken characters, his drollery was irresistible. His intoxication displayed as much discrimination as his pathetic performances. Who can forget his stare in being detected in his fuddling as Dozey, and his plea for drinking to "wa-ash down your honour's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... song and only one that I ever heard, and he was always called upon for it at harvest suppers and other jollifications; it was not a classic, but he rendered it with characteristic drollery, and always brought down the house. I conclude my sketch of him by mentioning it because it is almost my last impression of his vivid personality, trotted out with great energy at my farewell supper, a day or ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... and repressing all emotion, the unchangeable coolness of Dagobert never failed him; and, though few were less given to drollery, he was now and then highly comic, by reason of the imperturbable gravity ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... to upset my gravity entirely to see a crowd of grave and dignified Captains, Majors and Colonels going through this nonsensical drollery with all the abandon of ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... looked at her and Mr. Phillips glared so sternly that Ruby began to cry. Gilbert had whisked the pin out of sight and was studying his history with the soberest face in the world; but when the commotion subsided he looked at Anne and winked with inexpressible drollery. ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... listened to John Smith, and had been magnetized by the inimitable wit and wisdom of that marvelous man, and their hearts had drawn heroic courage from his heart. Others still had been captivated by the boyish and unstudied drollery of Walter Scott, only to be swept away by a whirlwind of passionate appeal and terrible invective, or to be melted with the tenderness of his portrayal of the love of Jesus. And all these came to Kansas bearing a great cause in their hearts, and determined to ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... expressed his delight in the prospect, and kissed the Prioress's hand, but the heavy door was already being opened, and with an expressive look of drollery and resignation, the good lady withdrew her hand, hastily brought her Benedictine hood and veil closely over her face, and rode into the court, followed by her suite. Anne had time to let her hand be kissed ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bushes, and the woods rang, not only with songs some shrill, some as sweet as honey, but with a grotesque yet beautiful electric merriment of birds that can only be heard in this land of wonders. The pen can give but a shadow of the drollery and devilry of the sweet, merry rogues that hailed the smiling morn. Ten thousand of them, each with half a dozen songs, besides chattering and talking and imitating the fiddle, the fife and the trombone. Niel gow! niel gow! ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... competent staff. I asked what he thought of Lincoln. "He is a beast." This was all he would say of him. I knew, of course, that he meant bete in the French sense, and not in the offensive English sense of the word. The truth was, that Gurowski had little relish for humor, and the drollery which formed so prominent a part of Lincoln's external character was unintelligible and offensive to him. At a later period, as I judge from his Diary, he understood the President better, and did full justice ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... development of music is of the first importance. Whatever his works may "mean," they contain a rhythmic vitality which will keep them alive for ever, and their "child-like cheerfulness and drollery" will charm away care and sorrow as long ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... grew rich, and died in 1772, bequeathing L22,289 to Chichester, 10 guineas to Garrick, and merely setting apart L10 for his funeral, only vain fools, as he said, spending more. We can fancy the great actors of that day seated on Hardham's tobacco-chests discussing the drollery of Foote or ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... this eligible literary property my friend Honeyman, with his wheedling tongue, induced me to purchase." Here is the history of Thackeray's money, told by himself plainly enough, but with no intention on his part of narrating an incident in his own life to the public. But the drollery of the circumstances, his own mingled folly and young ambition, struck him as being worth narration, and the more forcibly as he remembered all the ins and outs of his own reflections at the time,—how he had meant to enchant the world, and make ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... The remedy of love Englished. As also The loves of Hero and leander, amock poem: together with choice poems, and rare pieces of drollery. London, printed in ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... bitter nor rhetorical, he is apt to drop into mere mechanical flatness. But nobody has described more vigorously all the meaner forms of selfishness, stupidity, and sycophancy engendered under 'that fatal drollery,' as Tancred describes it, 'called a parliamentary government.' The pompous dulness which affects philosophical gravity, the appetite for the mere dry husks and bran of musty constitutional platitude which takes the airs ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... but in his own country, says the experience of histories: —[No man is a hero to his valet-de-chambre, said Marshal Catinat]—'tis the same in things of nought, and in this low example the image of a greater is to be seen. In my country of Gascony, they look upon it as a drollery to see me in print; the further off I am read from my own home, the better I am esteemed. I purchase printers in Guienne; elsewhere they purchase me. Upon this it is that they lay their foundation who conceal themselves present and living, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... lucid ingenious talk and logic, in all manner of brilliant utterance and tongue-fence, I have hardly known his fellow. So ready lay his store of knowledge round him, so perfect was his ready utterance of the same,—in coruscating wit, in jocund drollery, in compact articulated clearness or high poignant emphasis, as the case required,—he was a match for any man in argument before a crowd of men. One of the most supple-wristed, dexterous, graceful and successful fencers in that kind. A man, as ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... had two faces, and for once was minded to let both be seen, enjoyed the Frenchman's perplexity. He wished to stand well with Flavia, and here was a rare opportunity of exhibiting at once his friendliness and his powers of drollery. He was surprised, therefore, and taken aback, when a grave ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... of settled gloom, which had taken possession of the squatter's countenance, lighted for an instant with a look of dull drollery, as he answered— ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... a very emphatic little man, but his emphasis only roused the idea of drollery in the minds of those whom he addressed, and rather influenced ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... said Mrs. Edmonstone, in her quiet way; and Guy with an expression between drollery and simplicity, said, 'Then there ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and created a clatter with basin and hot water can. Millicent, forcing herself to eat quickly, continued to gaze after the pair. The description of Stampa's employer interested her. His drollery evidently consisted in hiring a ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... belongings of a person whose high spirit appeared to have no taint either of fastness, as they said in England, or of subversive opinion, and whose mouth had charming lines, should not be a little more distinguished. There was an effect of drollery in her behaviour to these subjects of her zeal, whom she seemed to regard as a care, but not as an interest; it was as if they had been entrusted to her honour and she had engaged to convey them safe to ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... curiously mistaken. She was exceedingly humorous, and had a great delight in humour. Cheerfulness was habitual with her, she was very ready at a sally or a reply, and in her laugh (as I remember well) there was an unusual vivacity, enjoyment, and sense of drollery. She was perfectly unconstrained and unaffected: as modestly silent about her productions, as she was generous with their pecuniary results. She was a friend who inspired the strongest attachments; she was a finely ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... if there were a certain drollery of art which leads men who think they are doing one thing to do another and very different one. Thus, men have set up in their painted church-windows the symbolisms of virtues and graces, and the images of saints, and even of Divinity itself. Yet ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... quarter way 'round the track 'fore he c'n pull up." They all laughed except Miss Verjoos, whose gravity was unbroken, save that behind the dusky windows of her eyes, as she looked at John, there was for an instant a gleam of mischievous drollery. ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... shame, inseparable except to the habitually hard-goer, for the events thus dimly pictured, the racking headache and intense thirst, with the horror of the potation recently indulged in: the recurring sense of the fun or drollery of a story or an incident which provokes us again to laugh despite the jarring of our brain from the shaking. All this and more most men have felt, and happy are they when their waking thoughts are limited to such, at such times as these—the ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... speedily distanced or lost to sight; so the ensemble was constantly shifting. And then the rolling and tossing of the cargoes and packages on the backs of the animals, and the streaming out of curtains, scarfs, shawls, and loose draperies of every shape and color, lent touches of drollery and bright contrasts to the scene. One instant the spectator on the hill was disposed to laugh, then to admire, then to shiver at the immensity of a danger; over and over again amidst his quick variation of feeling, he repeated the exclamation: "These ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... of mood which distinguishes those whom no ennui annoys, because they expect no interest. He was generally gay, his caustic spirit caught the ridiculous rapidly and far below the surface at which it usually strikes the eye. He displayed a rich vein of drollery in pantomime. He often amused himself by reproducing the musical formulas and peculiar tricks of certain virtuosi, in the most burlesque and comic improvisations, in imitating their gestures, their movements, in counterfeiting their faces with a talent which instantaneously depicted ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... or immaterial to our main issue. Harwood was admitted to practice in the United States courts midway of his third year in Bassett's office. The doors of the state courts swing inward to any Hoosier citizen of good moral character who wants to practice law,—a drollery of the Hoosier constitution still tolerated. The humor of being a mere "constitutional" lawyer did not appeal to Harwood, who revered the traditions and the great names of his chosen profession, and he had first written his name on the rolls of the ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... political friends did not altogether throw him over. In the first place, the time might come when he would be again useful, and then he had managed to acquire that air and tact which make one official man agreeable to another. He was always good-humoured; when in earnest, there was a dash of drollery about him; in his most comic moods he ever had some serious purpose in view; he thoroughly understood the esoteric and exoteric bearings of modern politics, and knew well that though he should be a model of purity before the public, it did not behove him to be very strait-laced with his ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Deacon asked his question without moving a muscle, and took no cognizance whatever of the young man's tone and smile. First-class humorists are, as is well known, remarkable for the immovable solemnity of their features. Clement promised himself not a little amusement from the curiously sedate drollery of the venerable Deacon, who, it was plain from his conversation, had cultivated a literary taste which would make him a more agreeable companion than the common ecclesiastics of his ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... all things. After all, life has something serious in it. It cannot be all a comic history of humanity. Some men would, I believe, write a Comic Sermon on the Mount. Think of a Comic History of England, the drollery of Alfred, the fun of Sir Thomas More, the farce of his daughter begging the dead head and clasping it in her coffin on her bosom. Surely the world will be sick of this blasphemy." John Sterling, in a like spirit, ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... strive to reverence man as man, irrespective of his birthplace. A stranger in a strange land is always to me an object of sympathy and interest. Amidst all his apparent gayety of heart and national drollery and wit, the poor Irish emigrant has sad thoughts of the "ould mother of him," sitting lonely in her solitary cabin by the bog-side; recollections of a father's blessing and a sister's farewell are haunting him; a grave mound in a distant churchyard ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... trinkajxo. Drinkable trinkebla. Drip guteti. Drive away (expel) forpeli. Drive (in carriage) veturi. Drive back (repel) repeli, repusxi. Drivel (to slaver) kracxeti. Driver (car, etc.) veturisto. Droll ridinda, sxerca. Drollery sxerco—ado. Dromedary unugxiba kamelo. Drone burdo. Droop (pine) malfortigxi. Drop guto. Dropsy akvosxvelo. Dross metala sxauxmo. Drought senpluveco. Drove (cattle) bestaro, brutaro. Drown droni. Drown ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... appeared in a farce called "The Emperor of the Moon" without a mask. Colley Cibber says of this performance "That when he (Penkethman) first played Harlequin in 'The Emperor of the Moon' several gentlemen (who inadvertently judged by the rules of nature) fancied that a great deal of the drollery, and spirit of his grimace was lost by his wearing that useless, unmeaning mask, therefore insisted that the next time of his acting that part he should play without it. Their desire was accordingly complied with, ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... the onely drinking: and for thy walles a pretty slight Drollery, or the Storie of the Prodigall, or the Germane hunting in Waterworke, is worth a thousand of these Bed-hangings, and these Flybitten Tapistries. Let it be tenne pound (if thou canst.) Come, if it were not for thy humors, there is not a better Wench in England. ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... moment; after which she said: 'He's younger than me, too.' I know not what drollery there was in this but it was unexpected and it made me laugh. Neither do I know whether Miss Mavis took offence at my laughter, though I remember thinking at the moment with compunction that it had brought a certain colour to her cheek. At all events she got up, gathering ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... fable among us boys; for our one-eyed shoemaker and our corpulent grocer, like many other country wits to fortune and to fame unknown, surpassed either Douglas Jerrold or Sydney Smith in quip and drollery. And I did not omit George Lenox, for all Belfield except his wife was in the secret of his affairs, and they were our crowning joke, in which poor George himself joined merrily, although the story ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... hand sharply, by way, as well as I remember, of indignant protest; and, in the act, the packet slipped from my fingers, glanced between the railings, and fell and sunk in the river. I stood a moment petrified, and then, struck by the drollery of the incident, gave way to peals of laughter. I was still laughing when my stepmother reappeared, and the maid, who doubtless considered me insane, ran off to join her; nor had I yet recovered my gravity when I presented myself before the lawyer to solicit ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Margat could not leave her bed and Loo was barely able to walk around the house. She was a brave girl with a fund of drollery which did much toward keeping up all their spirits, but her merriest jokes fell ghastly from her wan, pinched face. Thor, though weak and ill, was the strongest and did for the others, cooking and serving each day a simple meal, for they could eat very little, fortunately, perhaps, as there was ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... regulations and defying discipline were as original as they were persevering, and could the third-story room of the building occupied by the subject of this sketch be given tongue, it would tell a tale of frolic and drollery that would only find parallel in the inimitable pages of Marryatt. Convenient apparatus for the stewing or roasting of oysters, poaching of eggs, or the mixing of refreshing drinks, could be readily stowed away from the inspecting ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... black trousers. Going from stall to stall, followed by a servant bearing a large basket in which purchases were carried home, he would joke with the butchers, fish-mongers, and green-grocers with a grave drollery of which his biographers, in their anxiety to deify him, have made no mention. He always liked to have a friend of two at his dinner- table, and in inviting them, sans ceremonie, he would say, in his deep, cheery voice, "Come and dine with me to-morrow. ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... have this morning witnessed. And yet," continued he, "if it were not for his cruelty to the men, he is the most amusing liar I ever heard. I am often more inclined to laugh than to be angry at him; he has a vein of wit and rich humour that runs through his composition, and never quits him. There is drollery even in his malice, and, if we cannot get clear of him, we must ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Farmer, the head of Emanuel College, Cambridge, Prebendary of Canterbury, and afterwards of St. Paul's, or Westminster, used to frequent a club in London, to which I belonged. He was at first reserved and silent: but his forte was humour and drollery. At Cambridge he neglected forms and ceremonies in his college too much: and was in all his glory when in dishabille in his study, with his cat by his side, and his Shakspeare tracts about him. He found no literature at Canterbury, and was disgusted with his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... has always hitherto been with heroes of romance and high comedy. The theatre-going public and his admirers—the terms are synonymous—may breathe again. ALEXANDER is surprisingly good as Dr. Bill, and the serious earnestness with which he invests the part intensifies the drollery of the complications. And to think that the adapter of this gay and festive piece should be none other than the sentimental troubadour, song-writer and composer, author of a Lyceum Tragedy and other similar trifles, Mr. HAMILTON AIDE!! "Sir," in future ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... and turned quickly. John Gay's kindly eyes were beaming upon her. He had come with Jemmy Spiller, and with a stout man from whose broad red face a look of drollery was rarely absent. This was Hippisley, a comedian with a natural humour which was wont to set an audience ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... the pleasure of using it. Similar doubts abide in all my special memories of him. There was an evening when he seemed to lose control over himself—but did he really lose it? There were only four people at dinner: my host, his wife, their nephew (a young man famous for drollery), and myself. Towards the end of dinner the conversation had turned on early marriages. 'I,' said the young man presently, 'shall not marry till I am seventy. I shall then marry some charming girl of seventeen.' His aunt threw up her hands, exclaiming, 'Oh, Tom, what a perfectly horrible ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... drollery concluded with his announcement of place and date of his lecture, with still further gaiety at the end. Nothing short of a seismic cataclysm—an earthquake, in fact—could deter a San Francisco audience after that. Mark Twain's farewell ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... jokes and unmerciful "guying" are the characteristic wit, and such smart tricks as bumping an unsuspecting comrade's head against the wall are applauded with shrieks of admiring laughter. The onlookers may be excused for their tacit countenance of the rudeness, since some element of drollery—that might have been wit, under better conditions—compels a smile, in spite of a dignified disapproval of the performance. A young student, unused to such scenes, standing a little apart from such a group once remarked judicially to a lady near him, "I do not care for such dare-devil sociability." ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... the country called for. When he was at home, all was fun and merriment and noise—walks and rides on fine days, battledore and shuttlecock on wet ones, music, singing, paper games, giggling and making giggle, and sometimes dancing in the hall—Mr. Frank Fordyce joining with all his heart and drollery in many of these, like ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fond of jokes and had the manner of conducting his affairs as if they were a game in which he took a detached and whimsical interest. If there was sentiment in his nature, an emotional feeling towards the work he was doing, it was well concealed, first with drollery, and then with scientific application. So far as any one could observe the daily routine, there was nothing, at least in the surgical side of the hospital, that was not coldly scientific. As Renault had said, "We do what we can with every instrument known to man, every device, drug, ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... at the charming child, to whom Lord Petherton was talking with evident kindness and gaiety—a conjunction that evidently excited Mitchy's interest. "May WE then know her?" he asked with an effect of drollery. "May I—if HE may?" ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... Jonathan" is an allegory, conveying in a strain of fatiguing drollery the history of the relations between Great Britain and the United States previous to the war of 1812, and reflecting the popular feeling with regard to some of the English tourists who overran us after the conclusion of peace. In this ponderous travesty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... way. Amongst them Wright and Paul Bedford. Such companions as these are not to be met with twice, each with his individuality, while the two in combination were incomparable. They kept one in a perpetual state of laughter. Paul was irresistible in his drollery, and whether it was mimicry or original humour, you could not but revel in ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... hawthorn bush where Emlyn had been found. For Stead and Ben were alike in feeling the bright, merry, capricious, laughing, teasing Emlyn the charm and delight of home. In trouble, or for real aid, they went to Patience, but who was like Emlyn for drollery and diversion? Who ever made Stead laugh as she could, or who so played with Ben, and never, like Rusha, tried to be ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Anna responded. Playing with one hand he turned on his stool to glance at her. Instinctively she had fallen into the posture of the poster, her hands behind her, her head bent slightly forward, her chin uplifted, her eyes bright with the drollery of the song. Mr. Earles closed the piano with a ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... terror for her, naturally, in beautifully husbanding his resources for him—dangled, naturally, with no small vividness, before the wistful gentlewomen, to whom, if he had but had the initiative, he might have made the most princely presents. Such was the oddity, not to say the rather tragic drollery, of the situation: that Henry's idea of a present was ten cents' worth of popcorn, or some similar homely trifle; and that when one had created for him a world of these proportions there was no honest way of inspiring him to write cheques for hundreds; all congruous though these would ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... a day's study, and unfortunately are not to be had in photography, for some reason or other no photographs being permitted. Here the spirit of the Renaissance has had full play, and you find comedy mixed with pathos, practical good sense with Biblical solemnity, quaintness, beauty, grace, drollery, all in one. The middle statues in bold relief are those of the early Kings of France and the Abbots of St. Claude, besides many noteworthy saints and martyrs, among these St. Denis with his head in his hand, St. Sebastian pierced with ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... times to the latter as a near relation to Mephistopheles. But his "mockery" is as accidental and naif as that of Jewish Young Germany is keen and deliberate; and the former differs from the latter as the drollery of Abraham a Santa Clara differs from the brilliant satire ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... his reply. 'Our Lord made that promise long before the discovery of America and the establishment of the peculiar institutions of this country. If he had lived at this day, I reckon,' he continued with a look of drollery, 'he would have said "Ask and ye shall receive—if you aint a nigger." I can't take you into my school because you are black, but I'll send you down to the American Missionary school at Chattanooga. You can ask and receive there whether ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 42, No. 3, March 1888 • Various
... duchess's connections, and probable interests. Mr. Gibson made his mouth up into a droll whistle when he came home at night, and found himself in a Towers' atmosphere. Molly saw the shade of annoyance through the drollery; she was beginning to see it oftener than she liked, not that she reasoned upon it, or that she consciously traced the annoyance to its source; but she could not help feeling uneasy in herself when she knew her father was in ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Hessian boots; his shooting-jacket was somewhat the worse for wear; and his hat, which had been eminently respectable at first starting, had acquired a sort of brigandish air; and to add to the drollery of his general appearance, the excellent little Servian horse he rode was not high enough for ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... theatre of dissipation; surely not so bad as other forms of dissipation, but yet so distinctly marked, and so pernicious in its influence, as to be comparatively unworthy of general support. Let it not, however, be inferred that wit, humor, and drollery even, are to be excluded from the lecture-room; but they should always be employed as means by which information is communicated. Between lecturers equal in other respects, one with the salt of humor, native to the soil, should be preferred; but it is a sad reflection ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... Harry had told him about the starving party, which he related with so much humor and drollery that Lady Harriet could not help laughing; so then he saw that a victory had been gained, and ran to the nursery for the ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... and went as if the domestic administration were some automatic machine, and the exquisite appointments of the board, all exercised a powerful moral influence upon him; and though they did not wholly suppress him, they toned him down, so that he really talked well. He had a fund of small wit and drollery that was sufficient, at least, for a single dinner; and, as it was quaint and fresh, the guests were not only amused, but pleased. In the first place, much could be forgiven to the man who owned Palgrave's Folly. No ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... Swift. The nature of Voltaire was, indeed, not inhuman; but he venerated nothing. Neither in the masterpieces of art nor in the purest examples of virtue, neither in the Great First Cause nor in the awful enigma of the grave, could he see anything but subjects for drollery. The more solemn and august the theme, the more monkey-like was his grimacing and chattering. The mirth of Swift is the mirth of Mephistopheles; the mirth of Voltaire is the mirth of Puck. If, as Soame Jenyns oddly imagined, a portion of the happiness ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in the Shakspeare Gallery), overflows with elvish fun and imaginative drollery. It professes to embody that portion of the first scene in the fourth act where the spell-blinded queen caresses Bottom the weaver, on whose shoulders Oberon's transforming wand has placed an ass' head. Titania, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... and to the people of consequence that were about him I also presented some article or other. There were great numbers of children and, as I took notice of the little ones that were in arms and gave them beads, both small and great, but with much drollery and good humour, endeavoured to benefit by the occasion. Boys of ten and twelve years old were caught up in arms and brought to me, which created much laughter; so that in a short time I got rid of all I ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... of old Scottish humour have come down to us in ballad form, some of them made more familiar to our ears in modernised versions or paraphrases in which, along with the roughnesses, much of the force and quaint drollery of the originals has been smoothed away. Of such is The Wyf of Auchtermuchty, a Fife ballad, full of local colour and character, the production of 'Sir John Moffat,' a sixteenth century priest, who loved a merry jest, and of whom we know ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... however, be noticed that a good many members of the Bradshaw family possess a keen and rather sinister sense of the humorous, inherited doubtless from their great ancestor, the dry wag who wrote that monument of quiet drollery, Bradshaw's Railway Guide. So with the hero ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... come Mr. Battersby; and we falling into a discourse of a new book of drollery in verse called Hudebras,[33] I would needs go find it out, and met with it at the Temple: cost me ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... the floor. The grated window, his only medium of intercourse with the world, serves but to admit additional vexations. Every few moments the steps of the passengers are heard to pause, and some well-known face appears in the free sunshine behind the iron bars, brimful of mirth and drollery, the owner whereof stands on tiptoe to tickle poor Dr. Bullivant with a stinging sarcasm. Then laugh the little boys around the prison door, and the wag goes chuckling away. The apothecary would fain retaliate, but all his quips and repartees, and sharp ...
— Dr. Bullivant - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a people have necessarily a great variety: the color and the perfume of life are in them. Listen to the mocking, railing drollery of "There cam' a young man," the sly humor of the "Laird o' Cockpen," or "Hey, Johnnie Cope!" and you may understand one side of Scottish character. The Border ballads, that go lilting along to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... bow of perfect good-humour, and even some sly drollery, "you mistake: I never begged in my life: I'm a person of independent property, which consists of my head and my two hands, out of which I hope to realise a large ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... are toast-master or the last speaker to try to hold the waning crowd at midnight, be as original as you can. How is it possible to summarize the qualities that go to make up the good after-dinner speech, when we remember the inimitable serious-drollery of Mark Twain, the sweet southern eloquence of Henry W. Grady, the funereal gravity of the humorous Charles Battell Loomis, the charm of Henry Van Dyke, the geniality of F. Hopkinson Smith, and the all-round delightfulness ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... bass), and Vaughan. In "Bombastes Furioso," King Artaxomines was personated by Mr. Richmond; Fusbos by Mr. Clay; General Bombastes by Mr. J. H. Parr, who elicited shouts of laughter by his drollery and admirable acting. Miss Grant, of the Theatre Royal Company, played Distaffina. The house was crowded in every part, the whole town seemed to take an interest in the matter, and every nerve was strained to command success. In fact so well did those who had undertaken the disposal ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... said Mr. Shortreed, his companion in all these Liddesdale raids, "sic an endless fund of humour and drollery as he had then wi' him. Never ten yards but we were either laughing or roaring and singing. Wherever we stopped, how brawlie he suited himsel' to everybody! He aye did as the lave did; never made himsel' the great man or took ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... qualities necessary to fill up the harmony of life. As a general thing, the Irish servants are perhaps more honest, and dull as they seem, have more head; but the negro has more heart. His nature is irrepressible and joyous; he is full of comicality and drollery, of fun, jeers, jokes, yah-yas, and merriment; and this element will be needed in our midst to temper our puritan and national seriousness. He loves music whether sad, burlesque, or gay; is devoted to those who treat him worthily, his affections being easily won; and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... fireworks were equally successful whether they blazed splendidly or fizzled ingloriously. It was enough for the boys that Troy Gilbert was doing the act; they whooped at every figure, and whooped again at Troy's unaccustomed drollery. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... of the play is capped by the presence of a particularly clever fool whose function of making every one the butt of his wit makes one of the least important of the characters represent the special drollery of the whole play. The only grudge he bears is against the man who does not appreciate fun—who calls him a 'barren rascal.' Describe the passages in which he particularly shines. Of the minor characters the fool is minor only through his station and unimportance in the plot; ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... us, one wants to describe, and praise, and purchase them all! A KEENE drawing, almost any KEENE drawing, is "a thing of beauty and a joy for ever" to everyone who has an eye for admirable art and adorable drollery. And good as is the fun of these drawings, the graphic force, and breadth, and delicacy, and freshness, and buoyancy, and breeziness, and masterly ease, and miraculous open-airiness, and general delightfulness of them, are yet more marked and marvellous. Time would fail ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... to make them real and how to carry them through moving and thrilling scenes with unconscious heroism and often with equally unconscious dry drollery."—The Outlook. ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... characters, a circumstance which an imaginative boy of ten, named John Milton, was not to forget. "Pan's Anniversary," late in the reign of James, proclaimed that Jonson had not yet forgotten how to write exquisite lyrics, and "The Gipsies Metamorphosed" displayed the old drollery and broad humorous stroke still unimpaired and unmatchable. These, too, and the earlier years of Charles were the days of the Apollo Room of the Devil Tavern where Jonson presided, the absolute monarch ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... to say, with a feeling of satisfaction, that the young mind was then "cradled amidst the simplicities of the uninstructed intellect; and she was held to be the best nurse who had the most copious supply of song, and tale, and drollery, at all times ready to soothe and amuse her young charges. There were, it is true, some disadvantages in the system; for sometimes superstitious terrors were implanted, and little pains were taken to distinguish between what tended to ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... mixture of drollery and defiance appears in the justly celebrated "Address to the Deil," which, mainly whimsical, is relieved by touches oan in the conception of such a being straying in lonely places and loitering among trees, or in the familiarity with which the poet lectures so ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... was still room for excitement and drollery in the perennial question of the seats. Mr. Chamberlain is not a man to whom people are inclined to make concessions; he is so little inclined to give up anything himself; and, accordingly, there arose a very serious question as to the first seat on the third bench below ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... apish drollery and humour which exhibited itself in the lad, and a liking for some of the old man's pursuits, the first of the twins was the grandfather's favourite and companion, and would laugh and talk out all his infantine heart to the old gentleman, to whom the younger had seldom a word to say. George was ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Hubert O'Grady. They were impersonators of what were known as "Irish parts," and being genuine Irish Nationalists, as well as actors, did much to elevate the character of such performances. For with them, all the wit and drollery were retained, while they helped, by their example, to banish the buffoonery that used to ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... his address before the fight at Camperdown. He had just overtaken the Dutch fleet under Admiral de Winter. "Gentlemen," says he, "you see a severe winter approaching; I have only to advise you to keep up a good fire." Somewhat of this same spirit of adamantine drollery must have supported him in the days of the mutiny at the Nore, when he lay off the Texel with his own flagship, the VENERABLE, and only one other vessel, and kept up active signals, as though he had a powerful fleet in the offing, to intimidate ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... asked Mary for an account of her wanderings. She gave it. Many of the experiences, that had been hard and dangerous enough when she was passing through them, were full of drollery when they came to be told, and there was much quiet amusement over them. The sunlight faded out, the cicadas hushed their long-drawn, ear-splitting strains, and the moon had begun to shine in the shadowy garden when Dr. Sevier at length let Alice down and rose to ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... spirit moved no one to open his mouth. I judged at last that the horses had been baited sufficiently, silently showed my watch to the postilions, who, with ourselves, got up and went away without a word having been said to mar the quaint drollery of the incident. ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... falls asleep, the music hints his nodding off graphically. The entrance of the Lilliputians is perhaps the happiest bit of the whole delicious work. By adroit devices in instrumentation, their tiny band toots a minute national hymn of irresistible drollery. The sound of their wee hammers and the rest of the ludicrous adventures are carried off in unfailing good humor. The scene finally changes to the rescuing ship. Here a most hilarious hornpipe is interrupted by the distant call of Gulliver's aria, and the ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... frost, was glowing like crimson, while the broad beaver hat that overshadowed it, and the feathers with which the beaver was edged, were incrusted with the snow that was rapidly forming a pyramid on its crown, imparting to his whole aspect a drollery at which I could have laughed heartily, had not his well-known acuteness and ferocity awed me into a becoming gravity of demeanor; and delivering my dispatch with a tolerably good grace, I reined back my horse to await any reply he might ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... of beauty, but, at the back of his unflinching gaze, humor in some spritely and satanic shape was always disporting itself, and there was, as Lincoln Lang described it, "a certain built-in look of drollery in his face," which made ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... pulling off the injured head-piece, and looking at it gravely, declared he would always thenceforward wear his hat with a high crown; for, said he, had this one been half an inch lower, the bullet must have struck the head:—which drollery, in consideration of the circumstances, was allowed to pass ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... were given to him when they were leverets, as a hare is called during the first year of its life, and he named them Puss, Bess, and Tiney. He built them houses to sleep in, and always kept them near him. Bess, who died soon after he was full grown, "was," writes Cowper, "a hare of great humor and drollery. Puss was tamed by gentle usage; Tiney was not to be tamed at all." Once poor Puss was sick. His master nursed him with the greatest care. He says: "No creature could be more grateful than my patient after his recovery—a sentiment which he most significantly expressed by licking my hand, ...
— Harper's Young People, January 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... of Grammont may be considered as unique there is nothing like it in any language. For drollery, knowledge of the world, various satire, general utility, united with great vivacity of composition, Gil Blas is unrivalled: but, as a merely agreeable book, the Memoirs of Grammont perhaps deserve that character more than any which was ever written: it is pleasantry ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... to be the guest of this earthen hospitality,—how much beauty, love, and heartbreak are to be covered in that pit of clay. All we remember of Ophelia reacts upon us with tenfold force, and we recoil from our amusement at the ghastly drollery of the two delvers with a shock of horror. That the unconscious Hamlet should stumble on this grave of all others, that it should be here that he should pause to muse humorously on death and decay,—all this prepares us for the revulsion of passion in the next scene, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... unworthy as it is, may doubtless be combined with wit, drollery, fancy, and even humour; and we have only to regret the misalliance; but that the latter are quite distinct from the former, may be made evident by abstracting in our imagination the morality of the characters of Mr. Shandy, my Uncle Toby, and Trim, which are all antagonists to this spurious ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "could smell popery at five hundred miles distance better than fanaticism under his nose," became the recipient of one of the most amusing and yet most virulent attacks which even that controversial age produced. "The whole pamphlet," Mr. Collins truly says, "is inimitable. Its irony, its humour, its drollery, are delicious." ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... so much, that she would have spoken to him as to a brother of the nature of her quarrel with Mrs. Houghton, only that, even to a brother, she would not have mentioned her husband's folly. When he spoke of her crying, or laughing, or sneezing, she liked the little attempt at drollery. She liked to know that he had found her charming. Where is the woman who does not wish to charm, and is not proud to think that she has succeeded with those whom she most likes? She could not rebuke him. She could ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope |
