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More "Clown" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... noise, the lights were turned out. The word "Johnnys" ran round the place, and there was a big rush for the door leading into Piccadilly Circus. Fortunately I got out at once, and I found myself marching clown Piccadilly in the second row of a procession. Foster was next to me, though how he got there I cannot conceive, and Ward and Dennison were in the front row. We sang as we walked, and people cleared out of our way. I heard one man who met us say "Poor fools!" and the fellow who ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... in the cloister-school again, with his smock up. 'Mea culpa, mea culpa! Hey, reverend father, have pity!' he began to roar. Dropping him at last, Richard tumbled him on to the bed. 'Blubber yourself to sleep, clown,' he told him. 'Blessed ass, I have heard you snoring these two hours, snoring and rootling over your jack-knife. Sleep, man. But if you rootle again I flog again: mind you that.' Gilles slept long, and was awoken in full light by ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... as a student of philology, I ought to know better. The greatest of Englishmen was so careless in the matter as to sign himself Shakspe, a fact usually emphasized by Baconian when speaking of the illiterate clown of Stratford-on-Avon. Equally illiterate must have been the learned Dr. Crown, who, in the various books he published in the latter half of the seventeenth century, spelt his name, indifferently Cron, Croon, Croun, Crone, Croone, Croune. The ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... was not a mere clown or blockhead; but beneath his "hodden gray" often carried good feeling, intelligence, and wit. He was rather humorous than ludicrous, and had some dignity of character. Since his time, consideration for the poor has greatly increased; we see it in the ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... stands amidst some bushes, holding a handsome leash of hounds; dead kangaroos and other Australian animals lie around him. Then follow more lancers. After this comes a huge car, two stories high, with all sorts of odd characters in it: a clown, with his "Here we are again!" playing pranks on two sedate-looking Chinamen; a little fairy boy or girl, flirting with a magician; dragons snapping; strange birds screeching; three bears, one playing a violin, but the tune it plays is drowned by ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... had made a rabbit out of one of the girl's handkerchiefs, and was springing it from his hand against the wall. He seemed to have a fair appreciation of the character of his associates for the evening; and though himself perfectly competent to behave well in the best society, chose to act the clown in this. ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... many blessings upon your head," said the Clown; "the one he bestowed on me was the ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... surmounted this by saying, "Ladies and genelmen, I want you to stick closer than brothers. When you hear me a-talkin' don' you go turnin' over your Baedekers and lookin' out of the window. If I didn't know a great big sight more about Versailles than Baedeker does I wouldn't be here makin' a clown of myself; an' I'll show you the view out of the window all in good time. You see that lady an' two genelmen over there? They're listenin' all right enough because they don't belong to this party an' they want to get a little information cheap price. All right—I let ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... primitive both in style and material; the trousers and caps being made of sheepskin and the tunic of plaited wheat-straw. In contradistinction to the Yuraks the settled inhabitants of the country are called Turks. That term, however, which means rustic or clown, is never used by the Turks themselves except in derision or disdain; they always ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... right when I was a reveryin'—right there, when we wuz a floatin' clown the still waters, their voices riz up in one of their inspired songs. They sung about their "Hard Trials," and how the "Sweet Chariot swung low," and how ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... as foreign to the object of lawyers, as the extirpation of the fox is to that of sportsmen. The sportsman, because he hunts the fox, sees in the summary destruction of the fox by the hand of a clown, an offence foul, strange, and unnatural, little short of murder. The lawyer treats crime in the same way: his business is the chase of it; but, that it may exist for the chase, he lays down rules protecting it against surprises and capture by any methods ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... but I see not what I see. Damsel and lover? hear not what I hear. My father hath begotten me in his wrath. I suffer from the things before me, know, Learn nothing; am not worthy to be knight; A churl, a clown!' and in him gloom on gloom Deepen'd: he sharply caught his lance and shield, Nor stay'd to crave permission of the King, But, mad for ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... to be wise; begin! he who defers the hour of living well is like the clown, waiting till the river shall have flowed out: but the river still flows, and will run on, with constant course, to ages without ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... you every one; Pray take your answer, and be gone." One swore he'd send 'em to the stocks; A third could not forbear his mocks; But bawl'd as loud as he could roar "You're on the wrong side of the door!" One surly clown look't out and said, "I'll fling the p—pot on your head: You sha'nt come here, nor get a sous! You look like rogues would rob a house. Can't you go work, or serve the King? You blind and lame! 'Tis no such thing. That's but a counterfeit sore leg! For shame! two sturdy rascals beg! If I come ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... dance, and incline your head gracefully, and don't act as if it were glued immovably onto your shoulders." Sahwah dutifully grinned from ear to ear, and Gladys shook her head again. "No, not like that, it makes you look like a clown. Just smile slightly and naturally; act as if you were enjoying yourself." Thus the lesson proceeded. Gladys had undertaken the task of teaching Sahwah fancy dancing, and drilled her every morning in the shack. Sahwah was eager ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... Lascaris just heard enough of the naval hero's harangue, to acquaint them with the new danger with which they might be assailed by the possible misdirection of the weapons, and, rushing clown towards the lists at the head of a crowd half-desperate with fear, they hastily propagated the appalling news, that the Latins were coming back from Asia with the purpose of landing in arms, pillaging, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... profess it in Mahomet or Moses or Boodh are obedient to their precepts, if not in certain points of morality, in all things else. Carlyle is a vigorous thinker, but a vile writer, worse than Bulwer. I breakfasted in company with him at Milman's. Macaulay was there, a clever clown, and Moore too, whom I had not seen till then. Between those two Scotchmen he appeared like a glow-worm between two thistles. There were several other folks, literary and half literary, Lord Northampton, &c., &c. I forgot Rogers. Milman ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... Regnier: "Le plaisir delicieux et toujours nouveau d'une occupation inutile." With Casella, he writes a musical "A la maniere de," parodying Wagner, d'Indy, Chabrier, Strauss and others most wittily. Something of Eric Satie, the clown of music, exists in him, too. And probably nothing makes him so inexplicable and irritating to his audiences as his ironic streak. People are willing to forgive an ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... and Melinda turned sharply upon him, with a look in her black eyes which made him wince as he replied: "Family interference—must have money, you know! But, zounds! don't I pity her!—tied to that clown, whom—" ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... Liston, having painted Fanny Kemble's face like a clown's, posted her at one of the stage side doors to confront her mother, poor Mrs. Stephen Kemble, entering at the opposite one to perform some dismally serious scene of dramatic pathos, who, on suddenly beholding this grotesque apparition of her ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... directions as to the way, a necessary proceeding in view of the fact that Selifan could hardly maintain his seat on the box. Twice Petrushka, too, had fallen headlong, and this necessitated being tied to his perch with a piece of rope. "What a clown!" had been Chichikov's ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... must suppose, lacking in balance and common sense. We are told that one winter Lord Chandos's players visited Evesham, and Jack Miller, our Fool, became greatly attached to the company and in particular to Grumball the clown; indeed, so greatly was he enamoured that he "swore he would goe all the world over with Grumball." The townspeople being loth to lose so popular a character, Jack was locked in a room at the back of the White Hart Inn from which he could see the players journeying ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... round red face and a bald pate whose curly fringe of grizzled, reddish hair made him look like a clown in a pantomime, motioned them with a surly thumb toward the back of the house, where clattering preparations for supper were audible and odoriferous. The old fellow sat in a splint-bottomed chair of extra size and with arms. This he had kicked back against ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... make or mar China issue from, or converge towards, the capital. There, on the dragon throne, beside, or rather above, the powerless and unhappy Emperor, the father of his people and their god, sits the astute and ever-watchful lady whose word is law to Emperor, minister and clown alike. There dwell the heads of the government boards, the leaders of the Manchu aristocracy, and the great political parties, the drafters of new constitutions and imperial decrees, and the keen-witted diplomatists who know so well how to play against ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... midnight. He asked to be allowed to see the patient, but Merril wouldn't let him go into the room. I thought he behaved to the captain like a clown.' ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... first act an order of the Prince of Dessau calls all the youngsters of Schilda to arms.—The chief magistrate with the characteristic name of Ruepelmei (RuepelClown), who has already given to the town so many wise laws, as for instance the one, which decrees that the Schilda maidens under thirty are not allowed to marry—now demonstrates to his two nieces, Lenchen and Hedwig, the benefit of his legislation, in as much ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... with quick movements and a breezy manner. He reminded one slightly of a clown leaping into the arena of a circus with the cry: Here we are again. His air seemed to indicate: What's all this nonsense about being ill? I'll soon put that right. He took his seat, asked if there were any old patients for him ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... rescuing party only three were citizens of Lawrence. Sam Wood was in his element. He was a man overflowing with patriotism, yet succeeded in doing more harm to his friends than to his enemies. He possessed unmistakable talent; he was a clown and a born actor, and as a public speaker was sure to bring down the house; he was a pronounced free State man; yet in this act he made himself the marplot ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... It was Fletcher's voice above her. "Leave him alone. He will soon come to his senses. Serves him right for acting the clown ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the dastard kestrel kite Aye hugs the earth in his stealthy flight. Hope gone! the pool at the otter's cave Will prove the Ladye Tomasine's grave. Ho! ho! see yonder comes rushing down A lithe young hind, though a simple clown— Off bonnet and shoes, and coat and vest, A plunge! and he holds her round the waist! Three strokes of his arm, with his beautiful prize All safe, although faint, on the bank she lies! A cottager's wife came running down, "Take care of the ladye," said the clown. He has donned his clothes, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... Says the Clown, when I tell him to do what he ought, "Sir, whatever your character be, To obey you in this I will never be brought, And it 's wrong to be meddling with me." Says my Wife, when she wants this or that for the house, "Our matters to ruin must go: Your reading and writing is not ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... benefit of that hoard of injurious language which he could not in decency bestow on his royal guest, even in his absence, and which was yet become too great to be altogether suppressed. The jests of the clown had some effect in tranquillizing the Duke's angry mood—he laughed loudly, threw the jester a piece of gold, caused himself to be disrobed in tranquillity, swallowed a deep cup of wine and spices, went to bed, ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... lives of many personally known to me. At the same time I cannot but observe how signally, as regards the production of anything beautiful, religion fails in other cases. Its professor and defender is sometimes at bottom a brawler and a clown. These differences depend upon primary distinctions of character which religion does not remove. It may comfort some to know that there are amongst us many whom the gladiators of the pulpit would call 'atheists' ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... said Colonel Laporte, "although I am old and gouty, my legs as stiff as two pieces of wood, yet if a pretty woman were to tell me to go through the eye of a needle, I believe I should take a jump at it, like a clown through a hoop. I shall die like that; it is in the blood. I am an old beau, one of the old school, and the sight of a woman, a pretty woman, stirs me to the tips of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... saunter through a wood! An old place, full of many a lovely brood, Tall trees, green arbours, and ground flowers in flocks; And Wild rose tip-toe upon hawthorn stocks, Like to a bonny Lass, who plays her pranks At Wakes and Fairs with wandering Mountebanks, When she stands cresting the Clown's head, and mocks The crowd beneath her. Verily I think, Such place to me is sometimes like a dream Or map of the whole world: thoughts, link by link Enter through ears and eyesight, with such gleam Of all things, that at last in fear I shrink, And leap ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... in a mountain town. The mountaineers swarmed from far and near, and lined the streets on every hand with open mouth and bated breath, as the grand procession, with band, and clown, and camels, and elephants, and lions, and tigers, and spotted horses, paraded in brilliant array. The excitement was boundless when the crowd rushed into the tent, and they left behind them a surging mass of humanity, unprovided with tickets, and ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... the rapid changes in religious thought betoken the early abrogation of all creeds. Lessing, the philosophers of the French revolution, James Mill, Schopenhauer and others fell into this error. They were not wiser than the clown of Horace, who seated himself by the rushing stream, thinking it must ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... English-reading world—judges on the bench and bishops in their studies, cobblers in their stalls and grooms in the stables—were all laughing over Pickwick, should have sued the Eatanswill Gazette for calling him a clown. Thackeray pronounces Cooper's Long Tom Coffin one of the prizemen of fiction. That is a final judgment by the chief-justice. But who knows what was the verdict in Cooper's lawsuits to vindicate himself, and who cares? When Cooper died there was a great commemorative meeting in New ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... Blackfriars Bridge; that it is straight, the AEginetan marbles; that it is retrousse, the dog in that Hogarth portrait. Suggest a cheerful countenance, and you stamp your subject for ever as a Shakespearian clown. So you must be content to know that Mr. Bradshaw was a good-looking young man, of dark complexion, and of rather over medium height and good manners. If he had not been, he would never, as an article ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... A, does not fulfil what its form requires. Nor does any mind ever think or form conceptions in accordance with this law, nor does any existence conform to it.' Wisdom of this sort is well parodied in Shakespeare (Twelfth Night, 'Clown: For as the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc, "That that is is"...for what is "that" but "that," and "is" but "is"?'). Unless we are willing ...
— Sophist • Plato
... could not recognise any one as she looked round upon Turks, clowns, Indians, the tinselled, sequined, beaded, ragged flutter of the room, then from the coloured and composite clothing of a footballer, clown or jockey grinned the round face and owlish eyes of little Duval, who flew to her at once to whisper compliments and stumble on the swelling fortress of her white skirt. She realised dimly from him that ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... shall I fancie, Amidst these gloomy dayes? Shall I goe court brown Nancy? In a countrey town They'l call me clown, If I sing them my outlandish playes. Let me inform their nodle with my heroick spirit, My language and worth besides transcend unto merit; They'l not believe one word, what mortal flesh can bear it? Alas! poor ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... actors are ashamed of being funny?—Why, there are obvious reasons, and deep philosophical ones. The clown knows very well that the women are not in love with him, but with Hamlet, the fellow in the black cloak and plumed hat. Passion never laughs. The wit knows that his place is at the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his suit to her? And has she ever so much as vouchsafed to look at Henry Howard, who is upon the point of being the first duke in England, and who is already in actual possession of all the estates of the house of Norfolk? I confess that he is a clown, but what other lady in all England would not have dispensed with his stupidity and his disagreeable person, to be the first duchess in the kingdom, ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... claims whatever beyond those assigned to it by the Patent of February 3rd, to which it owed its origin. In receiving the address of the Chambers, the King, while expressing a desire to see the Constitution further developed, repeated the principle already laid clown by his Ministers, and refused to acknowledge any obligation outside those which he ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... a cherished clown in that section of society in which the Newlyns had their being, was making believe to cry, his large mouth opened grotesquely, his ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... simple face Perennial youth possessed and winning grace; But who shall dare, in this refining age, With Nature's praise to soil his snowy page? What polish'd lover, unappall'd by sneers Dare court a beldame of six thousand years, When every clown with microscopick eyes The gaping furrows on her forehead spies?— 'Good sir, your pardon: In her naked state, Her wither'd form we cannot chuse but hate; But fashion's art the waste of time repairs, Each ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... overlook The nature of the office as laid down For Churches' guidance in the holy Book, And substitute opinions of their own. Such meet their fellow Christians with a frown If they insist upon the Scripture plan, And deem him little better than a clown Who has the courage their false views to scan: And should he not desist might place him ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... For that, or underneath his cloak He had concealed some grunting elf, Or was a real hog himself. A search was made—no pig was found— With thund'ring claps the seats resound, And pit, and box, and gall'ries roar With— "O rare! bravo!" and "encore." Old Roger Grouse, a country clown, Who yet knew something of the town, Beheld the mimic of his whim, And on the morrow challenged him Declaring to each beau and belle That he this grunter would excel. The morrow came—the crowd was greater— But prejudice and rank ill-nature Usurp'd the minds of men and wenches, Who came ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... Maria Colville found masks and dominoes filling the shop windows and dangling from the doors. A devil in red and a clown in white crossed the way in front of him from an intersecting street; several children in pretty masquerading dresses flashed in and out among the crowd. He hurried to the Lung' Arno, and reached the palace where Mrs. Bowen lived, with ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... both Houses of Parliament." Such weak and watery declamation won't do for a country that has had thirty-eight years of compulsory education. If our War Office wishes to rouse patriotic feeling, it should cease to contrast "the dull labour of the fields" with "the soft calm of Malta": the veriest clown would not be caught by such chaff. It would be more to the point to send gratuitous copies of The Barrack Room Ballads to all the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... excitement, returned a timid salute, while Juanito bowed profoundly, took off his hat, and made the same gesture as the celebrated clown and caricaturist Panza ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... to see this greeting, this common phrase, this bit of old ware, this antique, come upon a dramatic scene and pulverise it. Nothing remained but a ridiculous dust. Coke, glowering, with his lips still trembling from heroic speech, was an angry clown, a pantaloon in rage. Nothing was to be done to keep him from looking like an ass. He, strode toward the door mumbling ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... the ways of God are thus rich, and so far above the gold and rubies of the world, so also is that sanctified and gracious heart, without which no man can walk in this golden street. It is not every clown with his clumping dirty shoes that is admitted into kings' privy-chambers and private palaces; neither doth, or will God, at the day of New Jerusalem, suffer any to trace about this golden street, but such as have golden feet, and that beautified with goodly shoes. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... white. These horses were ridden by ladies in wonderful blue and silver and pink and gold habits, and by knights in armor, all of whom carried umbrellas also. Pages walked beside the horses, waving banners and shields with "Visit Currie's World-Renowned Circus" painted on them. A droll little clown, mounted on an enormous bay horse, made fun of the pages, imitated their gestures, and rapped them on the back with his riding-stick in a droll way. A long line of blue and ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... trumpets, opened the King's commission twice a year. There were the markets at which the corn, the cattle, the wool, and the hops of the surrounding country were exposed to sale. There were the great fairs to which merchants came clown from London, and where the rural dealer laid in his annual stores of sugar, stationery, cutlery, and muslin. There were the shops at which the best families of the neighbourhood bought grocery and millinery. Some of these places derived dignity from interesting ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... life, even though he made some enemies. But he had many friends. There was Helen Morton. Then there was Benny Turton, who did a "tank act," and was billed as a "human fish." Jim Tracy, the ringmaster, Bill Watson, the veteran clown, and his wife, the circus "mother," Tom Layton, the elephant man who taught the big creatures many tricks, were only a few of ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... got abroad that Apollo was come, And intended to be, for that evening, "at home;" And that cards would be issued, and tickets be given, To all scholars and wits, for a dinner at seven. So he'd scarcely sat clown, when a legion came pouring Of would-be-thought scholars, his favor imploring. First, Buller stept in, with a lengthy oration About "scandalous usage," and "hard situation:" And such treatment as never, since Eton ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... That a clown such as that could have any chance of leaving the ground alive never entered his head. But willingly as he would have encompassed his death in this manner, the knowledge that his secret would not die with Quennebert restrained him, for ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... "Confiteor Deo omnipotente beatae Mariae...." I have forgotten it all. It is thirty years since I have said a prayer. I must pray in the common tongue, like a clown begging in the market, like Teigue the Fool! [He prays.] Help me, Father, Son, ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... Flossy seemed to say as she sprang three times her length in the air, and turned head over heels like the clown in a circus. ...
— Crusoes of the Frozen North • Gordon Stables
... replaced by an enemy. 'Twas his fellow-feeling to me, both as a brother and a medicus, that made him declare me on the point of death when I was still as lusty as a false credo. For the rest, I had sufficient science to hold in my breath while the clown tied me with cords, else had I been too straitened to breathe. But thou needest a ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... sir, that you will oblige me very much by coming to see me sometimes: my husband is so ugly, so ill-behaved, and such a drunkard, that it is perfect martyrdom for me to be with him, and I ask you what pleasure one can have with such a clown ...
— The Jealousy of le Barbouille - (La Jalousie du Barbouille) • Jean Baptiste Poquelin de Moliere
... a modest request for a beggarly English clown!' cried the King, aiming a blow at the lad with his whip, and pushing on his horse, so as almost to throw him back on the heath. 'Ho! ho! fit him out for ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with which nature has provided them. In cultivating the ground, also, man can do nothing without a spade or a plow; nor can he reap what he has sown till he has shaped an implement with which to cut clown his harvest. But the inferior animals provide for themselves and their young without any ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... inability—for all the rest of Maelzel's automata are evidence of his full ability to copy the motions and peculiarities of life with the most wonderful exactitude. The rope-dancers, for example, are inimitable. When the clown laughs, his lips, his eyes, his eye-brows, and eyelids—indeed, all the features of his countenance—are imbued with their appropriate expressions. In both him and his companion, every gesture is so entirely easy, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... men of mode, and which I cannot but look upon as very extraordinary. It was certainly one of the first distinctions of a well-bred man, to express every thing that had the most remote appearance of being obscene, in modest terms and distant phrases; whilst the clown, who had no such delicacy of conception and expression, clothed his ideas in those plain homely terms that are the most obvious and natural. This kind of good-manners was perhaps carried to an excess, so as to make conversation too stiff, ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... suspecting what had really happened. But Mrs. Grivois, rather surprised than uneasy at her pug-log's insensibility to her affectionate appeals, and believing him to be sullenly crouching beneath the seat, stooped clown to take him up, and feeling one of his paws, drew it impatiently towards her whilst she said to him in a half-jesting, half angry tone: "Come, naughty fellow! you will give a pretty notion of your temper ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... lamb flies the wolf, or a dove the hawk. It is for love I pursue you. You make me miserable, for fear you should fall and hurt yourself on these stones, and I should be the cause. Pray run slower, and I will follow slower. I am no clown, no rude peasant. Jupiter is my father, and I am lord of Delphos and Tenedos, and know all things, present and future. I am the god of song and the lyre. My arrows fly true to the mark; but alas! An arrow more fatal than mine ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown,'" ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... the famous Doctor Gall [Franz Joseph Gall, founder of the system of phrenology. Born in Baden, 1758; died in Paris, 1825] was illustrated. I saw a troop passing the Place du Carrousel, composed of clowns, harlequins, fishwives, etc., all rubbing their skulls, and making expressive grimaces; while a clown bore several skulls of different sizes, painted red, blue, or green, with these inscriptions: Skull of a robber, skull of an assassin, skull of a bankrupt, etc.; and a masked figure, representing Doctor Gall, was seated on an ass, his head turned to the animal's tail, and receiving from the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... PAIN. "Oh, I must buy that!" she exclaimed. "I've seen him so often in the Pantomime at Drury Lane! And fancy his being an Author, too! But I don't so much wonder at it, because I remember that, when I was a little girl, there was a celebrated Shakspearian Clown at Astley's called BARRY, and he sailed in a tub drawn by geese down the Thames, and there was a wonderful Pantomime actor of the name of PAIN. And now this talented gentleman turns out to be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 25, 1893 • Various
... first bein' that he was the most dignified and solemn guy I ever seen in my life. Stories that would put a victim of lockjaw in hysterics couldn't coax a snicker from that undertaker's face of his which would have made a supreme court justice look like a clown. In fact, if he'd been a judge and I ever come up before him, I would have took one flash at that face and asked him to gimme life and let it go at that! His favorite smokin'-room story was what causes spots on the sun or somethin' equally excitin', and ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... he proved to be a clown belonging to Bisset's habitation. His panic and surprise on seeing me made him aghast. In my present garb I should not have easily been recognised by my nearest kinsman, and much less easily by one who had ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... laugh was mostly out of register also. It had a sad lack of relevancy. He laughed on principle rather than provocation. Some sort of secret comedy of which the world knew nothing, was passing in his mind; it seemed to have its exits and its entrances, its villain, its clown and its miser who got all ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... striking originality of conception has crowned him with a thin yellow wig, in colour precisely like Dyson's, in curl and quantity resembling Mrs. Professor's, his Limbs rather stout, about such a man as my Brother or Rickman—but no Atlas nor Hercules, nor yet so bony as Dubois, the Clown of Sadler's Wells. This was judicious, taking the spirit of the story rather than the fact: for doubtless God could communicate national salvation to the trust of flax and tow as well as hemp and cordage, and could draw down a Temple with a golden tress as soon as with all the cables of the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... fascinating, cruel—a fanatic who neither feared God nor regarded man—an infinite egotist. The fires of a great distorted soul smoldered in his eyes. The broad, lofty forehead proclaimed a mind that might have placed him among the rulers of men—but instead he was little above the level of a clown. The destinies of a nation might have rested in the hands that he turned only to selfish fantasy. The whole appearance of him, arresting and almost awe-inspiring as it undoubtedly was, had in it the ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... the journals which cut her up, her nervous attacks and torrents of tears when they gave her parts with only fifteen lines in a new piece, had begun to annoy Amedee, when chance gave him a new rival in the person of Gradoux, an actor in the Varietes, the ugly clown whose chronic cold in the head and ugly face seemed for twenty years so delicious to the most refined public in the world. Relieved of a large number of bank-notes, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... seemed to be enjoying himself so. Boaler has given warning, but we can't think why. We have been out nearly every evening—once to Hengler's and once to the Christy Minstrels, and last night to the Pantomime, where papa was so pleased with the clown that he sent round afterwards and asked him to dine here on Sunday, when Sir Benjamin and Lady Bangle and Alderman Fishwick are coming. Won't it be jolly to see a clown close to? Should you think he'd come in his evening dress? Miss Mangnall has ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... in such true salt, that we did doubt In which Scene we laught most two shillings out. Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lyes I'th Ladies questions, and the Fooles replyes; Old fashioned wit, which walkt from town to town In turn'd Hose, which our fathers call'd the Clown; Whose wit our nice times would obsceannesse call, And which made Bawdry passe for Comicall: Nature was all his Art, thy veine was free As his, but without his scurility; From whom mirth came unforced, no jest perplext, But without labour cleane, chast, and unvext. Thou wert not like some, ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher
... and beaten, on the deck. Neither the sailors nor the Captain knew what to do with him. Presently up came the Commander's jester or clown, a man whose business it was to make the officers laugh. 'What,' said he, 'can't you make that Quaker work? Do you want him to draw ropes for you and he won't? Why you are going the wrong way ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... CLOWN. Come, fear not you; good counsellors lack no clients: though you change your place you need not change your trade; I'll be your tapster still. Courage; there will be pity taken on you: you that have worn your eyes almost out in the service, you ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... to the palace as if he were flying, and going up the stairs he found the King, who was still paying compliments to the country clown. When the man saw the dog with the letter in his mouth, he ordered it to be taken from him; but the dog would not give it to any one, and bounding up to Menechella he placed it in her hand. Then Menechella rose ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... instruction of common people. Even amid the pathos of divine suffering the peasants must be amused. Care was taken that the character of Judas should meet this demand. So Judas was made at once a traitor and a clown. His pathway was beset by devils of the most ridiculous sort. And when at last he hung himself on the stage, his body burst open, and the long links of sausages which represented intestines were devoured ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... The deliberate clown Can never beat love's barriers down: 'Tis better to be like the owl, Comic because so grave a fowl. From him we well may take our cue— By him be taught, to ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... be more abject than the union of elaborate and recherche arrangements with an old and obvious point? The clown with the red-hot poker and the string of sausages is all very well in his way. But think of a string of pate de foie gras sausages at a guinea a piece! Think of a red-hot poker cut out of a single ruby! Imagine such fantasticalities ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... "Boys, jes' think of a real circus, with all the women folk, an' the tarletan, an' the spangles, an' the pink lemonade, an' the little fellers slipping under the ropes, an' the Grand Parade coming in, an' the big tent so hot everybody's fanning with their hats—Oh, Lord!" "Yes, and the clown—and the ring master—" "What d'ye think of our ring master?" "Who d'ye mean? Him? Think of him? I think he's a damned clown! Don't they call ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... dress you may have for half de monish," Rafael replied; "there's a splendid clown for eight bob; but for dat Spanish dress, selp ma Moshesh, Mistraer Lint, ve'd ask a guinea of any but you. Here's a gentlemansh just come to look at it. Look 'ear, Mr. Brownsh, did you ever shee a nisher ting dan dat?" So ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... capacity?' he persisted. 'Will ye risk your crowns in defence of King James's one, or will ye strike in, hit or miss, with these rogues of Devon and Somerset? Stop my vital breath, if I would not as soon side with the clown as with the crown, with all due ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Cupid, manage wily art? Whate'er stupidity we may discern, His pupils more within a day can learn, Than MASTERS knowledge in the schools can gain, Though they in study should ten years remain; The lowest clown he presently inspires, With ev'ry tendency that love requires; Of this our present tale's a proof direct, And none that ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... away on their lives and worrying themselves with themselves, cutting a wide swath of misery wherever they go, have suddenly stopped in a book—have purged away jealousy and despair and passion and nervous prostration in it. A paper-person with melancholia is a better cure for gloom than a live clown can be—who merely goes about reminding ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... badly dressed man with long hair, who, under his dusty coat, resembled a clown, inspired so little confidence in him that he suspected a snare, perhaps ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... before. Oh again bade him chop wood, but again he went to sleep. Then Oh again tied him to the wood and burnt him and scattered the ashes to the four winds and sprinkled the remnant of the coal with living water, and instead of the loutish clown there stood there such a handsome and stalwart Cossack[3] that the like of him can neither be imagined nor described but only told of ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous
... be to exhibit the "Yankee" character in its traditional deformities of stupidity and meanness,—otherwise denominated simplicity and shrewdness. Mr. Jonathan Slick is in no respect different from the ordinary fabulous Yankee. An illiterate clown he is, who, visiting New York, contrives by vice of impudence, to interfere very seriously with certain conventionalities of the metropolis. He overthrows, by his indomitable will, a great many ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... man of impious and scandalous habits, a wild, drunken, unmannerly clown, more inclined to look into the wine can than into the Bible. He would prefer drinking brandy two hours to preaching one; and when the sap is in the wood his hands itch and he wants to fight whomsoever he meets. The commandant at Fort Casimir, Jean Paulus Jacqet, brother-in-law of ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • J. F. Jameson, Editor
... degrading to man, derogatory to God.' As I have lately seen the remark quoted with approbation, it is worth noticing the argument by which Darnley supports it. He says that an honest able man is nobler than an honest man, and Aristides with the genius of Homer nobler than Aristides with the dulness of a clown. Undoubtedly! But surely a man might say that English poetry is the noblest in the world, and yet admit that Shakespeare was a nobler poet than Tom Moore. Because honesty is nobler than any other quality, it does not follow that all honest men are on a par. This bit of cavilling reminds one of De ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... remember Hans Andersen's clown Punchinello," said Erica. "He never laughed and joked so gayly as the night when his love died and his own heart ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... the galleries looked down, Village belle and country clown, Men with honest labour brown, Far removed ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... or of his verses, made, however, a grimace which he meant to be very sly and insinuating, but which was simply ugly and awkward; he fancied that the expression of his mouth, twisted about like a monkey's, conveyed, "Ah! who can resist your Eminence?" But his Eminence only read there, "I am a clown who knows nothing of the great world"; and, without changing his voice, he suddenly said, taking up ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... things in the room again presented their funny side to me and set me off laughing more furiously than ever. The bookcase was ludicrous, the arm-chair a perfect clown, the way the clock looked at me on the mantelpiece too comic for words; the arrangement of papers and inkstand on the desk tickled me till I roared and shook and held my sides and the tears streamed down my cheeks. And that footstool! Oh, ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... leads to the keeping of a debt and credit account with heaven; and to the saints is attributed the power of buying up a stock of works of supererogation, by which they acquire a mediatory power in themselves. Human reason has been likened to a drunken clown, who if you help him up on one side of his horse, falls over on the other. To deter men from the presumptuous sin of attributing merit to their actions, the reformers, and also individuals and even orders in the church, have labored to prove that man acts only in obedience to preordained ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... blurted in your face, There Yates with justice strict attention draws, Acts truly from himself, and gains applause. But when, to please himself or charm his wife, He aims at something in politer life, 360 When, blindly thwarting Nature's stubborn plan, He treads the stage by way of gentleman, The clown, who no one touch of breeding knows, Looks like Tom Errand[28] dress'd in Clincher's clothes. Fond of his dress, fond of his person grown, Laugh'd at by all, and to himself unknown, Prom side to side he struts, he smiles, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... 'No, sir.' 'Then learn this of me,' he makes reply, 'to have is to have; for all your writers do consent that ipse is he. Now you are not ipse, for I am he. He, sir, that hath married this woman. Therefore, you clown, abandon, which is—,' &c., &c. What a ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... still bubbling, giggled outright, and Peter's cheeks grew pink. He was innocently elated with this new role of clown. ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... is named Calico, because he is marked so queerly. His hair grows in such funny little streaks and stripes and patches that he looks as if he had been painted that way on purpose. He was a clown pony in a circus one time, and is supposed to know a lot of tricks. Joyce wanted him because he is so gentle, and she had never ridden any before. She didn't mind his ridiculous looks. So Lad fell to my share,—a pretty brown one that is as easy as a rocking-horse after the stiff-jointed ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Horse for ditto (if possible). 1 Goat to do Alpine feats of daring. 1 Donkey to play see-saw. 2 White pigs—one to be Learned, and the other to play with the clown. Turkeys, as many as possible, because they can make a noise that The dogs, for any odd parts. 1 Large black pig—to be the Elephant in the procession. Calves (several) to be camels, ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... as happy as a clown in a circus," declared Andy, and, in high spirits, he began a jig and ended by turning a flip-flap over one of the beds. Then he and his twin indulged in a pillow fight, ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)
... I am happy ... but how does one know one is happy? I suspect my happiness. It is a clown's suit in which my mourning disguises itself. Mallare has fallen out of his black heaven. And he picks himself up like a good burgher. He grunts and chuckles and looks at the skies, alas, without curiosity. Lucifer, ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... listening. But then suddenly his face beamed with felicity, his whole figure contracted in a frenzy of delight, one foot clutched at the air as though bewitched, as though he were playing a harp with his toes—Master Andres was all at once a musical idiot and a musical clown. And smack! the knife flew to the ground and he had the great tin cover in his hand— chin-da-da-da chin-da-da-da! Suddenly by a stroke of magic the flute had turned ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... mummers cry, Throughout old Torksey town; "We'll hasten!" they answer, joyfully, The gossip and the clown. ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... Bixiou with a kick for every one, like Pierrot at the Funambules. Bixiou had the whole history of his own times at his finger-ends, more particularly its scandalous chronicle, embellished by added waggeries of his own. He sprang like a clown upon everybody's back, only to do his utmost to leave the executioner's brand upon every pair ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... nothing but contempt and loathing for the mass of mankind, the aristocrat who in a dozen plays sneers at the greasy caps and foul breaths of the multitude, fell in love with Dogberry, and Bottom, Quickly and Tearsheet, clod and clown, pimp and prostitute, for the laughter they afforded. His humour is rarely sardonic; it is almost purged of contempt; a product not of hate but of love; full of sympathy; summer-lightning ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... country clown; We've better things to note in town. What's Nature's lore compared ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... O'Donnell's vengeance fled into Clanrickarde. Here he announced himself by a poem addressed to de Burgh, imploring his protection, setting forth the claims of the Bardic order on all high-descended heroes, and contending that his fault was but venial, in killing a clown, who insulted him. O'Donnell pursued the fugitive to Athenry, and de Burgh sent him away secretly into Thomond. Into Thomond, the Lord of Tyrconnell marched, but O'Brien sent off the Bard to Limerick. The enraged Ulsterman appeared at the gates ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... tried to throw the ball around the left end. Wadleigh, Hudson, Darrin and Prescott, backed by quarter and left half, presented such a stubborn block that the ball did not get another yard clown the field in two plays. But Pike, who was a hammerer, made a third attempt around that left end. This time he gained but two feet, and the ball ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... before uneducated and ignorant men, then we shall set before them profits, emoluments, pleasures, and the means of escaping pain; we shall also introduce the mention of insult and ignominy; for no one is such a clown, as not (even though honour itself may have no influence on him) to be greatly moved by insult ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... Oberon, seeing a clown near her who had lost his way in the wood and was likewise asleep, "This fellow," said he, "shall be my Titania's true love"; and clapping an ass's head over the clown's, it seemed to fit him as well as if it had grown upon his own shoulders. ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... just now in a place not calculated to develope or cultivate the finer part of a man's nature. My associates, without an exception, are boors and donkeys, not unfrequently combining the agreeable properties of both in one anomalous animal yclept a clown. With them my days, for the greater part, are spent; and my nights in a series of calculations almost equally extinguishing to any brightness of mind or spirit. The consequence is I feel my light put out! — not hid under a bushel, but absolutely ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... The heaven looked clown on the young maiden mildly, but smilingly; soft rain-drops sprinkled her forehead; and all nature around her stood silent, and, as it were, in sorrow. This sorrowing calm operated on Susanna like the tenderly ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... to God.' As I have lately seen the remark quoted with approbation, it is worth noticing the argument by which Darnley supports it. He says that an honest able man is nobler than an honest man, and Aristides with the genius of Homer nobler than Aristides with the dulness of a clown. Undoubtedly! But surely a man might say that English poetry is the noblest in the world, and yet admit that Shakespeare was a nobler poet than Tom Moore. Because honesty is nobler than any other quality, it does not follow that all honest men are on a par. This bit of cavilling reminds one ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Daniel. A man could do no less than bristle a little, under the circumstances; could do no less than challenge the torpedoes, like Farragut in Mobile Bay. Whether the game was worth the candle, I was not to be bullied out of my privileges by a clown swash-buckler who aped the characteristics of a ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... and wasted and almost motionless a long time; but slowly, as the springtime drew near, and the snows on the lower hills loosened, and the abounding waters coursed green and crystal clear clown all the sides of the hills, Findelkind revived as the earth did, and by the time the new grass was springing and the first blue of the gentian gleamed on ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... him, and asked him what he was. He informed me that he was a lawyer, and ready to be pantaloon to my clown, if ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... completely of one of those "gorgeous processions" in Eastern "spectacles" at home, that we wonder for a moment whether it be "part of the play," or tangible, sober reality. Yes! placed upon a scarlet cushion lies an enormous gilt key (such a one as clown in the pantomime might open his writing-desk with, or such as hangs over a locksmith's door), and above it glistens a golden legend to the effect that the treasure beneath was presented to "William of Prussia by his loving cousin, Nicolas, Emperor of all the Russias," and is no less a prize ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... while the fete is going on. Or he may be the peasant at the fete who comes on the stage to swell the drinking chorus, and who, it may be observed, always turns his glass upside down before he begins to drink out of it. Or he may be the clown who takes away the doorstep of the house where the evening party is going on. Or he may be the gentleman who issues out of the house on the false alarm, and is precipitated into the area. Or, if an actress, she may be the fairy who resides for ever in a revolving star with an occasional visit ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... throngs to laugh and applaud," says some advertisement: yes, and I knew a very clever clown-dog once. His feet were blistered with the hot irons on which he had been taught to dance; his teeth had been drawn lest he should use his natural weapons against his cowardly tyrants; his skin beneath ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... it? I've actually deserted my dressing-table, and the perfume I used lies all forsaken and forlorn. Fresh water, plenty of fresh water ... that's what I like. I'm a long way from the Leonora who had to paint herself every night like a clown before she could appear before an audience. Take a good look at me! Well ... what do you think? You might mistake me for one of your vassals almost, eh? I'll bet that if I had gone out this morning to join your demonstration at ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... myself, but tall and lithe, and yet exceedingly muscular. There was grace in his every movement, while refinement was stamped upon his handsome face. I could not help feeling the contrast between us. I was a great boorish country clown, he was as handsome as a Greek god. Surely, too, there was a look of malicious satisfaction on my mother's face as she saw the difference between us. He seemed to change the very atmosphere of the house. Everything had a new meaning when associated with him. ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... one aim To get a laugh by keeping up the game, Lends him seven hundred, gives him out of hand Seven more, and leads him on to buy some land. 'Tis bought: to make a lengthy tale concise, The man becomes a clown who once was nice, Talks all of elms and vineyards, ploughs and soil, And ages fast with struggling and sheer toil; Till, when his sheep are stolen, his bullock drops, His goats die off, a blight destroys his crops, One night he takes a waggon-horse, and ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... was thus thrown into the worst of company, and learned many sorts of wickedness. He was already a thief, and of no small proficiency in his art. Though village-bred, he could pick a pocket more sensitive than a clown's. Small and deft, he had never stood before a magistrate. He was a miserable creature, bare-footed and bare-legged; about eight years of age, but so stunted that to the first glance he looked less than ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... she could: however, that is over now. As to Sophie [young Sister just betrothed to the eldest Margraf whom you know], she also is no longer the same; for she approves all that the Queen says or does; and she is charmed with her big clown (GROS NIGAUD) of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... ruined her reputation by a base and cowardly plot concocted with a wicked old woman, who would blast the whole family if she could, because M'Loughlin transported her felon son; you, now, like a paltry clown as you are, skulk out of the consequences of your treachery, and refuse to give satisfaction for the diabolical injury you have ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... a small, up-country town, When we were boys at school, There came a circus with a clown, Likewise a bucking mule. The clown announced a scheme they had Spectators for to bring— They'd give a crown to any lad Who'd ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... it, poor fellow; he goes trampling about with his big feet upon everybody's toes, and never is a bit the wiser. Here he is—he is coming in with your father. I suppose there must be a great deal in race," she added with a soft little sigh, "Clarence looks a clown, and your father such a gentleman. I suppose I show just the same when ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... see her little hands and fingers, and the mould of her dainty limbs. No Scottish fisher clown was her father, I dare be sworn. Her skin is as fair and fine as my Humfrey's, and moreover she has always been in hands that knew how a babe should be tended. Any woman can tell ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... over men. The rough common sense, the rough moral sense of careless men makes them reject it and treat it as a subject of jest. When men can stupidly laugh together over jests about hell-fire, when the devil is presented as a clown in the pantomime it indicates something very wrong in the teaching. No doctrine has any real hold on the crowd when they can lightly jest about it. And because of their unbelief in this false notion of ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... Fortune, glutted on easy thrones, Stealing from feasts as rare to coneycatch, Privily in the hedgerows for a clown With that same cruel-lustful hand and eye, Those nails and wedges, that one hammer and lead, And the very gerb of long-stored lightnings ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... when the clown came tumbling into the ring to the blaring of the band that night, a girl with the green bow all askew upon her hat and her violet-blue eyes a shade darker and snapping with excitement was perched on ...
— Anything Once • Douglas Grant
... efficacy of peascods in the concerns of sweethearts is not yet forgotten among our rustic vulgar. The kitchen-maid, when she shells green peas, never omits, when she finds one having nine peas, to lay it on the lintel of the kitchen door; and the first clown who enters it is infallibly to be her husband, or ...
— Notes & Queries,No. 31., Saturday, June 1, 1850 • Various
... there, wherever they might begin. Such things, therefore, as other philosophers often attribute to various and contradictory causes, appeared to him uniform enough; all was done to fill up the time, upon his principle. I used to tell him that it was like the clown's answer in As You Like It, of "Oh, lord, sir!" for that it suited every occasion. One man, for example, was profligate and wild, as we call it, followed the girls, or sat still at the gaming-table. "Why, life must be filled ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... compound all around the cover channel. Now turn right side up and insert in the jar, taking care that the jar walls enter the cover channels at all points. Apply heat carefully to the edges of the cover and gently force cover clown. If too much compound has been used, so that it squeezes out around the cover, scrape off the excess with a hot knife while ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... much as vouchsafed to look at Henry Howard, who is upon the point of being the first duke in England, and who is already in actual possession of all the estates of the house of Norfolk? I confess that he is a clown, but what other lady in all England would not have dispensed with his stupidity and his disagreeable person, to be the first duchess in the kingdom, ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... to be a mannerist will take it to signify his leg, which is quite as good a piece of him, as his hand, and, if he be a dancer, a much better. My interpretation of this passage is strengthened by the usage of the clown in the dramatic entertainment entitled Mother Goose. When the late Mr. Lewis Bologna, as Pantaloon, proffered his hand in token of amity and forgiveness, Mr. Joseph Grimaldi protruded his foot into his master's palm. His reading was ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... power on earth could, have made a man again of him. She laughed, indeed, at his maudlin tales of past heroism and adventure in love and battle; to her he was a plaster hero, and she let him know it. She was "mated to a clown," and a drunken clown to boot—and, well, she would make the best of a bad bargain. If her husband was the sorriest lover who ever poured thick-voiced flatteries into a girl-wife's ears, there were ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... beldam of fourscore; instead of youthful, you shall seem just dropping into the grave; instead of eloquent, a mere stammerer; and in lieu of gende and complaisant, you shall appear like a downright country clown; it being so necessary that every one should think well of himself before he can expect the good opinion of others. Finally, when it is the main and essential part of happiness to desire to be no other than what we already are; this expedient is again wholly owing to self-love, ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... lay, bruised and beaten, on the deck. Neither the sailors nor the Captain knew what to do with him. Presently up came the Commander's jester or clown, a man whose business it was to make the officers laugh. 'What,' said he, 'can't you make that Quaker work? Do you want him to draw ropes for you and he won't? Why you are going the wrong way to work, ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... their harvests. Even the fat man was entertaining large audiences. The fellows had a thoroughly good time and took in almost every sight on the grounds. Judd had been kidded and made fun of until he was followed about by a troop of youngsters who thought he was a clown employed by the fair people. Judd was really ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... are ashamed of being funny?— Why, there are obvious reasons, and deep philosophical ones. The clown knows very well that the women are not in love with him, but with Hamlet, the fellow in the black cloak and plumed hat. Passion never laughs. The wit knows that his place is at the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... intellect and sensibilities inspired him with nothing but contempt and loathing for the mass of mankind, the aristocrat who in a dozen plays sneers at the greasy caps and foul breaths of the multitude, fell in love with Dogberry, and Bottom, Quickly and Tearsheet, clod and clown, pimp and prostitute, for the laughter they afforded. His humour is rarely sardonic; it is almost purged of contempt; a product not of hate but of love; full of sympathy; summer-lightning ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... haven't been here before. Ring. While I am waiting for some one to appear, face rises at window—the measly boy! Confound these terrace-houses, all alike! This time I don't wait—I bolt. They will think I am a clown out for a holiday, but I can't ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... their dulness; but such negative genius cannot detain us long; we shall return to Chaucer still with love. Some natures, which are really rude and ill-developed, have yet a higher standard of perfection than others which are refined and well balanced. Even the clown has taste, whose dictates, though he disregards them, are higher and purer than those which the artist obeys. If we have to wander through many dull and prosaic passages in Chaucer, we have at least the satisfaction of knowing that it is not an artificial dulness, but too easily matched ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... common people for the instruction of common people. Even amid the pathos of divine suffering the peasants must be amused. Care was taken that the character of Judas should meet this demand. So Judas was made at once a traitor and a clown. His pathway was beset by devils of the most ridiculous sort. And when at last he hung himself on the stage, his body burst open, and the long links of sausages which represented intestines were devoured by the imps amid the laughter and delight of the peasant audience. Now all this ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... is of Dutch origin, taken from the word boomken, meaning "a sprout," "a fool." It signifies a loutish person, and is applied to a country clown, ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various
... This here's what I once heard a clown say, 'It's dangerous to be safe.' I say, figgerhead, arn't there ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... Set consists of a drop painted to represent the interior of a wood or forest, with wings painted in the same style. It is used for knock-about acts, clown acts, bicycle acts, animal turns and other acts that require a deep stage and can play ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... Jumbo, Samson symbolical! Come and see Slivers, Clown really comical! Come and see Zip, the foremost of freaks! Come and see Palestine's Sinister Sheiks! Eager Equestriennes, each unexcelled, Most mammoth menagerie ever beheld, The Giant, the Fat Girl, the Lion-faced Man, Aerial Artists from ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... aware of the sorry tragedy in his voice that contrasted so sharply with the banality of his words. He felt that he was but a pitiful jester who was like a clown, compelled to play a merry part when there was anguish in his ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... countrymen ever laughed more heartily at the ancient jokes of a clown than did the five Indians when the boy disappeared under the water, his eyes staring with the shock of affright which came with his sudden contact with ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... Nautilus floated in these brilliant waves, and our admiration increased as we watched the marine monsters disporting themselves like salamanders. I saw there in the midst of this fire that burns not the swift and elegant porpoise (the indefatigable clown of the ocean), and some swordfish ten feet long, those prophetic heralds of the hurricane whose formidable sword would now and then strike the glass of the saloon. Then appeared the smaller fish, the balista, the leaping mackerel, wolf-thorn-tails, and a hundred others which striped ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... some directions as to the way, a necessary proceeding in view of the fact that Selifan could hardly maintain his seat on the box. Twice Petrushka, too, had fallen headlong, and this necessitated being tied to his perch with a piece of rope. "What a clown!" ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... as the upshot of these apparently aimless or sportive touches, we recognize that the beneficent Creator of all things, working through His handmaiden whom we call Nature, has deigned to mingle a charm of divine gracefulness even with so earthly an institution as a boundary-fence. The clown who wrought at it little dreamed what fellow-laborer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... silver bright; The doe awoke, and to the lawn, Begemmed with dew-drops, led her fawn; The gray mist left the mountain-side, The torrent showed its glistening pride; Invisible in flecked sky The lark sent clown her revelry: The blackbird and the speckled thrush Good-morrow gave from brake and bush; In answer cooed the cushat dove Her notes of peace and ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... bright as a silver dollar. In the book we can smell the sawdust, hear the flapping of the big white canvas and the roaring of the lions, and listen to the merry "hoop la!" of the clown. ...
— The Rover Boys in the Air - From College Campus to the Clouds • Edward Stratemeyer
... at once, the things in the room again presented their funny side to me and set me off laughing more furiously than ever. The bookcase was ludicrous, the arm-chair a perfect clown, the way the clock looked at me on the mantelpiece too comic for words; the arrangement of papers and inkstand on the desk tickled me till I roared and shook and held my sides and the tears streamed down my cheeks. And that footstool! Oh, ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... I met you, of all men, I've been going round and round ever since,' said Jack. 'A clown or pantaloon would have given me balance. Say no more. You couldn't help it. We met because we were the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... out one of the tribe, in as good, homely, rustic English as ever came out of the mouth of a clown. "If he's our friend, why did he send the artillery and horse down to Hudson?—and why has he had Big Thunder up afore his infarnal ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... integuments, the stately form of Widdicomb, cased in martial apparel, advancing towards the centre of the ring, and commanding—with imperious gesture, and some slight flagellation in return for dubious compliment—the double-jointed clown to assist the Signora Cavalcanti to her seat upon the celebrated Arabian. How lovely looks the lady, as she vaults to her feet upon the breadth of the yielding saddle! With what inimitable grace does she whirl these tiny banners around her head, as winningly as a ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... mistake in the world. I've got a clown rig and I'm going down there myself after a while." He turned to Butterfield. "Better change your mind ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... hatch clanged. DeCastros, that gross, terrifying clown of a man, clumped down the ladder from the bridge to defeat the enchantment of the moment. DeCastros held sway. He was captain. He did not want Mr. Wordsley to forget that he ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... clown, n. buffoon, jester, merry-andrew, zany, harlequin, droll, punch, mime, farceur, scaramouch, grimacier jackpudding; boor, lout, gawk, gawky, lubber, put, bumpkin, churl, carl, tike; rustic, hind, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... whip which had made such havoc among the flowers, "lead Black Caesar to the stable again! and hark you! when I bid you bring him out in the early morning another time, lead him to me unbridled and unsaddled, with only a halter on his head, that I may ride as a clown, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... The young clown entreats that he may take this adventure, and notwithstanding the wonder and misgiving of all, the armor is found to fit him well, and when he had put it on, "he seemed the goodliest man in all the company, and was well ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... love not him] By crosses he means money. So in As you like it, the Clown says to Celia, if I should bear you, I ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... I departed from Versailles, I determined, cost what it would, to see Agnes once again. So I wrote her a note. Such a blunt and clumsy billet as only a love-sick soldier or a country clown could have written. It craved pardon for the heat and the haste displayed by me when we parted at Sceaux; it implored one last interview before I left the colonies forever. I had not the art to conceal or veil my meaning, but told it out and plainly. Such a note ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... material; the trousers and caps being made of sheepskin and the tunic of plaited wheat-straw. In contradistinction to the Yuraks the settled inhabitants of the country are called Turks. That term, however, which means rustic or clown, is never used by the Turks themselves except in derision or disdain; they always ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... to cheer himself and Wido; for is it not related that once, when a clerk was singing the 'Allelulia' in the emperor's presence, Charles turned to one of the bishops, saying, 'My clerk is singing very well,' whereat the rude bishop replied, 'Any clown in our countryside drones as well as that to his oxen at their ploughing'?[6] It is certain too that Bodo agreed with the names which the great Charles gave to the months of the year in his own Frankish tongue; for he called ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... years had passed, Jasmin, being a spirited fellow, was allowed to accompany his father at night in the concerts of rough music. He placed a long paper cap on his head, like a French clown, and with a horn in his hand he made as much noise, and played as many antics, as any fool in the crowd. Though the tailor could not read, he usually composed the verses for the Charivari; and the doggerel of the father, mysteriously fructified, afterwards became ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... close! But the truth is in you, Tho you have rhymed and rammed it down, Hid it with honey-words that win you Wreaths that you know bedeck the clown. Kings they will call you and uplifters Of your kind? Lord save the mark, That we are still for fire dependent On so false ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... so deep in melancholy that I could not hold my wrath. "Was it a gentleman's part to lead me on to play the clown?" I asked. "I ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... and a sad clown. The Saint Vincent de Paul of the loosened string, the Saint Francis of Assisi of the London Streets. Everything is gesticulation, and the gesticulations are ambiguous. When we think he is going to weep, he laughs; when we think he is going to laugh, he cries. A remarkable genius who does ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... derogate from the genius of Elia. Jaques, it will be remembered, after hearing the "motley fool" moral on the time, declared that "motley's the only wear"; and I opine that Lamb would consider it no small praise to be likened, in wit, wisdom, and eloquence, to Touchstone, or to the Clown in "Twelfth Night." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... and bells: The conventional dress of the court fool, or jester, of the Middle Ages, and, after him, of the stage clown, consisted of the "fool's cap" and suit of motley, ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... go on, So hark 'ye friend; his grandfather I say,"— "Poh, poh,"—cried Gilbert, as he turn'd away. Her eyes were fix'd, her story at a stand, The snuff-box lay half open'd in her hand; "You great ill-manner'd clown! but I must bear it; You oaf; to ask the news, and then won't hear it!" But Gilbert had gain'd forty paces clear, When the reproof ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... on a tragical ending to a comedy which is incorporated in the play. The comedy is a familiar one among the strolling players who perform at village fairs in Italy, in which Columbina, Pagliaccio, and Arlecchino (respectively the Columbine, Clown, and Harlequin of our pantomime) take part. Pagliaccio is husband to Colombina and Arlecchino is her lover, who hoodwinks Pagliaccio. There is a fourth character, Taddeo, a servant, who makes foolish love to Columbina and, mingling imbecile stupidity ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... has to sell to another, are no longer surprised at his trying to regulate the weather by exploding powder in the air. Our Mark Twains and Bill Nyes are flat indeed, when compared to that straight-faced clown, the American legislator, who would give an unchangable value to either the shoes we wear or the money ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... still a thing of this world, 'in its habit as it lived,' or no remoter acquaintance than a witch or a fairy. Its lowest depths (unless Dante suggested them) were the cellars under the stage. Caliban himself is a cross-breed between a witch and a clown. No offence to Shakespeare; who was not bound to be the greatest of healthy poets, and to have every morbid inspiration besides. What he might have done, had he set his wits to compete with Dante, I know not: all I know is, that in the infernal line he did nothing ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the day, which shows Folly and Wisdom side by side, just as we find them in Calderon's and Shakespeare's dramas, Lucretia presented the costly robe which she wore when she offered up her prayer, to one of her court fools, and the clown ran merrily through the streets of Rome, bawling out, "Long live the illustrious Duchess of Ferrara! Long live Pope Alexander!" With noisy demonstrations the Borgias and their retainers ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... example in "Le Gendre," in some respects one of the most objectionable of De Bernard's novels, certainly not well suited for a birth-day present to misses in their teens. A seemingly tame, insipid clown of a husband counteracts the base manoeuvres of a dashing Paris roue; and finally, after refusing to fight the would-be seducer, whom he has ascertained to be an arrant swindler, takes truncheon in hand, and belabours him in presence of his intended victim and of a roomful of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... soldiers who should quit the service of the usurper and enlist under his banners, might depend upon receiving their pardon and arrears; and that the foreign troops, upon laying clown their arms, should be paid and transported to their respective countries. He solemnly protested that he would protect and maintain the church of England, as by law established, in all her rights, privileges, and possessions: he signified his ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... fresh ones in their places. I inquired after them among readers and booksellers, but I inquired in vain; the memorial of them was lost among men, their place was no more to be found; and I was laughed to scorn for a clown and a pedant, devoid of all taste and refinement, little versed in the course of present affairs, and that knew nothing of what had passed in the best companies of court and town. So that I can only avow in general to your Highness that we do abound in learning and wit, but to fix upon ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... to the state of the weather—and was on the jump all day long to keep out of the way of the energetic workmen. He had seen Marceline at the Hippodrome on one memorable occasion. Somehow he reminded himself of the futile but nimble clown, who was always in the way and whose good intentions invariably were ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... unless he were a professor like himself. A stroke of wit will sometimes produce this effect, but there is no such power or superiority in sense or reasoning. There is no complete mastery of execution to be shown there; and you hardly know the professor from the impudent pretender or the mere clown. ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... that Cathy had been carrying a lipstick of shiny gold-colored metal. "Don't tell me you've taken to using lipstick! You trying to look like a clown?" ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... muster'd, escaped from the plains, Of sight-loving lasses and holiday swains: Bob Bantam push'd forward and strutted before; Will Woodpecker modestly tapp'd at the door; Poor Robin, the rustic, a countrified clown, As he blush'd, look'd too simple by half for the town, There were scores in brown mantles, black, yellow, or green, From the villages round, and among them were seen, Luke Linnet, Sam Swallow, Mat Martin, and then, ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... the middle of his fifth year he never knew what his life was missing. To be sure, it was exasperatingly monotonous, this being rolled about the world in stuffy, swaying cage-cars, and dancing in the ring, and playing foolish tricks with a red-and-white clown, and being stared at by hot, applauding, fluttering tiers of people, who looked exactly the same at every place he came to. His memory of that first walk down the mountain, at his great mother's heels, had been laid to sleep ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... comedians that were hated, or scorned, pitied, embraced, conventionalized. There's not a notion in this book that has a more frightful, or ridiculous, mien than had the notion of human footprints in rocks, when that now respectabilized ruffian, or clown, was first heard from. It seems bewildering to one whose interests are not scientific that such rows should be raised over such trifles: but the feeling of a systematist toward such an intruder is just about what anyone's would ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... shoulders, and a tall silk hat that had grown old with the wearer. But for his nose he might have been an undertaker. It was an impossible nose, the shape and size of a potato, and the colour of pickled cabbage—the nose for a clown in the Carnival of Venice. Its marvellous shape was none of Dad's choosing, but the colour was his own, laid on by years of patient drinking as a man colours a favourite pipe. Years ago, when he was a bank manager, his heart ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... Hang him, rook! he! why he-has no more judgment than a malt horse: By St. George, I wonder you'd lose a thought upon such an animal; the most peremptory absurd clown of Christendom, this day, he is holden. I protest to you, as I am a gentleman and a soldier, I ne'er changed with his like. By his discourse, he should eat nothing but hay; he was born for the manger, pannier, or pack-saddle. He has not so much as a good phrase in ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... gates of the town to the other side of the stream; at the head of the river of Rhine, is a small sea, called of the Switzers the Black Sea, twenty thousand paces long, and fifty hundred paces broad. The town Costnitz took the name of this; the emperor gave it a clown for expounding of his riddle: wherefore the clown named the town Costnitz, that is in English, ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... what tricks, by the pale moonlight, Are played by me, the merry little Sprite, Who wing thro' air from the camp to the court, From king to clown, and of all make sport; Singing, I am the Sprite Of the merry midnight, Who laugh at weak mortals and love ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... I really thought—I made an impression. Poor things! poor things! They can't help themselves. We courtiers really ought to be very careful not to abuse our power. It is positive cruelty. The contest is too unequal. It makes one inclined sometimes to put on the manners of a clown, so as to give them a chance. Nay, nay, you might as well ask the Ethiopian to change his skin as a courtier his fine manners. By all the saints! here ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... partly in profile against the sky, with his back bent and his hands upon his knees, watching me with an occasional approving nod of his big head. He looked so funny standing there on his little seven-by-nine world, like a clown on a performing ball, that, despite my terrible situation, I shook my sides with laughter. There was no echo in ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... commands are required to be made personally, solemnly, prayerful. To 'prove all things,' and 'hold fast' and obey 'that which is good,' is a precept, equally binding upon the clown, as it is upon the philosopher. Satisfied from our observations of nature, that there is a God; our next inquiry is into the revelation of his will: which, when understood, must be implicitly obeyed, in defiance of any usages of society, and of every erroneous pre-conceived opinion. In this important ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... to remain with her over Christmas. I longed to see the pantomime, having heard much from my cousins and from Leo of its delights—and of the harlequin, columbine, and clown. But my father wanted to be at home again, and he took me and Rubens and Nurse Bundle with him at the ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... be a clown, Playing tricks around the town, Turning somersaults and springs, As if they were easy things, Laughing morning, noon and night, Being such ...
— Songs for Parents • John Farrar
... Circus come around, He hitch'd his sleek old horses; And in his rattling wagon took His dimpl'd household forces— The boys to wonder at the Clown, And think his ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... Mahatmas—and how they can travel through space in astral bodies, and produce matter out of nothing at all. (Here the group endeavour to look as if these facts were familiar to them from infancy, while the Comic Coachman assumes the intelligent interest of a Pantomime Clown in the price of a property fish.) Very well; but perhaps some of you may not be aware that at this very moment the air all around you ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 27, 1892 • Various
... and modified. There is acting and acting: the distinction is not merely in quality but also in kind. It would be difficult to define acting so as not to include the efforts of the music-hall artist, and even of the circus clown; any definition excluding them would be arbitrary, and also historically inaccurate. If, then, acting is to embrace these as well as the admirable performance of Mr Irving in Hamlet, disputes concerning the status of the actor as an artist must ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... "The Coward"; of the soldiers, in "The Cadets," "The Interrogation," "The Night Watch," "Delirium"; of the actors, in "How I Was an Actor" and "In Retirement." We have circus life in "'Allez!'" "In The Circus," "Lolly," "The Clown"—the last a one-act playlet; factory life, in "Moloch"; provincial life, in "Small Fry"; bohemian life, in "Captain Ribnicov" and "The River of Life"—which no one but Kuprin could have written. There are animal stories and flower stories; stories for children—and for neuropaths; ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... ere the honey-moon fled, They so quarrell'd some wives wou'd have struck him; But the baroness took up the lord of her bed, And over the chimney-piece stuck him. As the servant came in, said the baron, "you clown, Not a word when the guests come to sup: I have only been giving my wife a set-down, And she giving me a set-up." How I should ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... whispered to Lockwood, and smiled. "The face of a malignant Pierrette. A diabolic clown. Look at it. I saw it in the lightning outside. She wears a mask. Do you get her?" He paused mockingly. Lockwood shifted away from the woman. Erik was drunk. Or crazy. But the woman, thank God, had eyes only for him. She remained, as he talked, with her sulphurous eyes unwaveringly ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... common man differs from that of an educated Moslem as much as the eating of a clown and a gentleman. Moreover there are important technical differences between the Wuzu of the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... to distinguish those nice shades of manner which as effectually separate the gentleman from the clown with us as do these broader lines which mark these two classes among all other nations. They think that it is the grand characteristic of Columbia's children to be prejudiced, opinionated, selfish, avaricious, and unjust. It is vain to tell them that such are not specimens of American ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... soul!—looking over her spectacles at the infant dough, and saying to herself as she finishes skull by skull—"Ha! that will do for a pawnbroker;"—"That, as it's rather low and narrow, for a sharp attorney;"—"That for a parish constable;"—"That for a clown at a fair,"—and so on. And we can well imagine the astonishment of simple-hearted old Nature on getting a ticket for the gallery of the House of Commons (for very seldom, indeed, has she been known to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... Sons, To-day is a prodigious coxcomb, but To-morrow is a very poltroon, taking fright at the big words of his predecessor. To-day is the truculent captain of old world comedy, To-morrow the clown of ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... eye being off me for the moment, I edged my way out of the throng and so came to where a man stood mounted upon a cart. Beside him was a fellow in a clown's habit who blew loudly three times upon a trumpet, which done, the man took off his hat and began to harangue the ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... and then with a more piercing note, vanity bounded on the stage of consciousness. She a dupe! she helpless! she to have betrayed herself in seeking to betray her husband! she to have lived these years upon flattery, grossly swallowing the bolus, like a clown with sharpers! she—Seraphina! Her swift mind drank the consequences; she foresaw the coming fall, her public shame; she saw the odium, disgrace, and folly of her story flaunt through Europe. She recalled the scandal she had ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tools than those with which nature has provided them. In cultivating the ground, also, man can do nothing without a spade or a plow; nor can he reap what he has sown till he has shaped an implement with which to cut clown his harvest. But the inferior animals provide for themselves and their young ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... face, And forehead fit to wear a crown, How brilliant might have been her place, Had she not mated with a clown,— ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... days a Clown in the East, on a visit to a city kinsman, while at dinner, pointed to a burning candle and asked what it was. The City Man said, in jest, it was a sunling, or one of ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... horses were ridden by ladies in wonderful blue and silver and pink and gold habits, and by knights in armor, all of whom carried umbrellas also. Pages walked beside the horses, waving banners and shields with "Visit Currie's World-Renowned Circus" painted on them. A droll little clown, mounted on an enormous bay horse, made fun of the pages, imitated their gestures, and rapped them on the back with his riding-stick in a droll way. A long line of blue and red wagons closed ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... conscience-ridden generations, however little they may understand him. The world has always delighted in the man who is delivered from conscience. From Punch and Don Juan down to Robert Macaire, Jeremy Diddler and the pantomime clown, he has always drawn large audiences; but hitherto he has been decorously given to the devil at the end. Indeed eternal punishment is sometimes deemed too high a compliment to his nature. When the late Lord Lytton, in his Strange Story, introduced a character personifying the joyousness ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... massacre? What altar and what hearthstone had they not profaned? What fatigue, what danger, what crime, had ever checked them for a moment? And for all this obedience, labor, and bloodshed, were they not even to be paid such wages as the commonest clown, who only tore the earth at home, received? Did Philip believe that a few thousand Spaniards were to execute his sentence of death against three millions of Netherlanders, and be cheated ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... it too, And such a dance as ne'er was known For twenty miles on end lead down? Did they not lay their heads together, And gain your art to tar and feather, When Colonel Nesbitt, thro' the town, In triumph bore the country-clown? Oh! what a glorious work to sing The veteran troops of Britain's king, Adventuring for th'heroic laurel With bag of feathers and tar-barrel! To paint the cart where culprits ride, And Nesbitt marching at its side. Great executioner ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... reader, to Bartlemy fair? If you have, you may have seen—nay, you must have seen—Richardson's immortal show. You must have seen a tall platform in front of the migratory edifice, and on that platform you must have delighted your visual orb with the clown, the pantaloon, the harlequin, the dancing ladies, the walking dandy, the king with his crown, the queen in her rabbit-skin robes, the smock-frocked countryman, the top-booted jockey, and all the dramatis person of the performance that every moment ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... appeal to him for plenty of meat and bread, but with the Negro it was a scathing indictment of a Christian earthly master who muzzled those who produced the food. "He Paid Me Seven" is a mock at the white man for failing to practice his own religion but the clown mask is there to be held up for safety to any who may see the real ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... wantonly scorned and insulted him should beg to be forgiven. As he was turning sadly away, to seek his solitary chamber in the upper branch of a bachelor's button, on the other side of the brook, the elf-clown Puck stood before him, looking as demure ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... 'way up front just as I left the stage—to make a quick change, you know. I came back—in tights, playing a big trombone, prancing round and making an awful noise. Lady Webling gave a little scream; nobody heard her because I made a loud blat on the trombone in the ear of the black-face clown, and he gave a shriek and did a funny ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... a versatile and omniscient dilettante, war-lord and peacemaker, Mohammedan and Christian—always a comedian, yet always in earnest. And we all know how the heir to the throne is the reverse of the Kaiser, and how this Crown Prince, with the fancies of a degenerate, has deserved to be called the "Clown Prince." ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... to do it. I made up bouquets for her, over and over again, chosen from the best flowers in our neglected garden; but invariably with the same result. I hated the harlequin who presumed to put his arm about her waist. I envied the clown, whom she condescended to address as Mr. Merriman. In short, I was so desperately in love that I even tried to lie awake at night and lose my appetite; but, I am ashamed to own, failed ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... turned into a bat, a skin-winged creature that flies by night, and had disappeared in the darkness! Of all possible mockeries, for her to steal out at night to the embraces of a fool! a wretched, weak- headed, idle fellow, whom every clown called by his Christian name! an ass that did nothing but ride the country on a horse too good for him, and quarrel with his mother from Sunday to Saturday! For such a man she had left him, Godfrey ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... word," said Colonel Laporte, "I am old and gouty, my legs are as stiff as two sticks, and yet if a pretty woman were to tell me to go through the eye of a needle, I believe I should take a jump at it, like a clown through a hoop. I shall die like that; it is in the blood. I am an old beau, one of the old regime, and the sight of a woman, a pretty woman, stirs me to the tips ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... taxing my invention to produce the most terrible illusion that was ever witnessed? Will you let a clown like Spavinger—a well-born stable-boy—baulk us of our triumph? I am sending to Paris for a powder to burn in a corner of the room, which will throw the ghastliest pallor upon your countenance. When I devise a ghost, it shall be no impromptu spectre in yellow ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... tow'ring fabric, or the dome's loud roar, And stedfast columns, may astonish more, Where the charm'd gazer long delighted stays, Yet trac'd but to the architect the praise; Whilst here, the veriest clown that treads the sod, Without one scruple gives the praise to GOD; And twofold joys possess his raptur'd mind, From gratitude and ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... in my life the day before yesterday. Then if I trust to the ordinary Christmas Cards of commerce, I am often at a loss to select an appropriate recipient for a nestful of owls, or the picture of a Clown touching up an elderly gentleman of highly respectable appearance with a red-hot poker! If I get a representation of flowers, the chances are ten to one that the accompanying lines are of a compromising character. It ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., January 3, 1891. • Various
... the most complete champion that ever I heard!—Steel, if thou turn the edge, or cut not out the burly-boned clown in chines of beef ere thou sleep in thy sheath, I beseech God on my knees thou mayst be turn'd to hobnails.—[Here they fight. Cade falls.] O, I am slain! famine and no other hath slain me; let ten thousand ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... Thackeray's Journey from Cornhill, etc. and The testimony to the Truth. That last is indeed a book after my own heart. I do like the mind it discloses—it is of a fine and high order. Alexander Harris may be a clown by birth, but he is a nobleman by nature. When I could read no other book, I read his and derived comfort from it. No matter whether or not I can agree in all his views, it is the principles, the feelings, the heart of ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... all at once I knew the black speck was Corney, and I gave a cry. But with that the black speck began to grow thin, and it grew thin and thin till all at once I could see it no more, and the same instant Corney stood beside me with a smile on his face, and the tears running clown his cheeks. I stretched out my arms to him, and he caught me up in his, and then it was all right; I was Corney's keeper, and Corney was my keeper, and God was all of us's keeper. And it was then I woke, ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... dear to you. I should be sorry to shake hands even with Jawkins for the last time. I think a well-constituted convict, on coming home from transportation, ought to be rather sad when he takes leave of Van Diemen's Land. When the curtain goes down on the last night of a pantomime, poor old clown must be very dismal, depend on it. Ha! with what joy he rushes forward on the evening of the 26th of December next, and says—'How are you?—Here we are!' But I am growing too sentimental:—to ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... by such an excess of words, figures and ornaments as to be ridiculous and disgusting. It is like a circus clown dressed up in gold tinsel Dickens gives a fine example of it in Sergeant Buzfuz' speech in the "Pickwick Papers." Among other varieties of style may be mentioned the colloquial, the laconic, the concise, the diffuse, the abrupt the flowing, the quaint, the epigrammatic, the flowery, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... a show of anger and agitation, exclaimed, "God's life! Don Stockfish, soul of a mortar, stone of a date, more obstinate and obdurate than a clown asked a favour when he has his mind made up, if I fall upon you I'll tear your eyes out! Do you fancy, Don Vanquished, Don Cudgelled, that I died for your sake? All that you have seen to-night has been make-believe; I'm not the woman to let the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... A proverbial saying, the exact force of which we cannot determine. The reading of H. 1. 13 may be translated, 'No fool on a board (or shield ?),' that is, a clown or tumbler (?). ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... afternoon I was standing in the door of my house, when I marked a person passing close to the edge of the bank that was in front. His pace was a careless and lingering one, and had none of that gracefulness and ease which distinguish a person with certain advantages of education from a clown. His gait was rustic and awkward. His form was ungainly and disproportioned. Shoulders broad and square, breast sunken, his head drooping, his body of uniform breadth, supported by long and lank legs, were the ingredients of his frame. His garb was not ill adapted to ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... As the bewildered and astonished clown Who held the plough (the thunder storm o'erpast) There, where the deafening bolt had beat him down, Nigh his death-stricken cattle, wakes aghast, And sees the distant pine without its crown, Which he saw clad in leafy honours last; So ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... and calm, the perjured varlet Stands on strongly-planted heel, In his left a strip of scarlet, In his right a streak of steel; Ah! the monster topples over, Till his haunches strike the plain!— Low-born clown and lying lover, ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... pitch on the greensward opposite to the theatre we had seceded from. Spencer, I ought to mention here, was "the great man of strength;" Buckley, the "marvellous jumper;" while I myself filled a double role—being both the "clown" and "cashier" of the establishment. The latter is generally a safe post to hold. Spencer would willingly allow a stone to be broken on his chest with a sledge hammer, bend bars of iron across his arm, and the like; and Buckley would volunteer to jump over ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... that brute! I to be reconciled to that clown! Never! It shall not be, it shall not be!" Ivan Ivanovitch was in a remarkably determined ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... have heard some talk of a swaggering braggart, prodigal in valiant promise, but very huckster in a pitiful performance; in a word, a clown whose attempt to ape the courtier has ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... subject? but I see not what I see. Damsel and lover? hear not what I hear. My father hath begotten me in his wrath. I suffer from the things before me, know, Learn nothing; am not worthy to be knight; A churl, a clown!' and in him gloom on gloom Deepen'd: he sharply caught his lance and shield, Nor stay'd to crave permission of the King, But, mad ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death. Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him. Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid clown his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him; how dwelleth the love of God in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... a jeweller accompanied by his clown. Nor have I any party-colour in my armoires. But since I have exerted myself to borrow this toggery,—and a fine, big lass is the owner, so I think it ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... bed—the boisterous wind rattled clown the chimney and shook the ill-fitting casement in its rotting frame. The clothes he had last worn were thrown carelessly about, unsmoothed, unbrushed; the scanty articles of furniture were out of their proper places; slovenly ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... sister, whom he had driven out of her own house to die at the inn. He had on his new blue frock-coat, and a buff waistcoat with gilt buttons, over which his watch-chain was gracefully arranged. His pantaloons were strapped clown very tightly over his polished boots; a shining new silk hat was on one side of his head; and in his hand he was dangling an ebony cane. In spite, however, of all these gaudy trappings, he could not muster up an easy air; and, ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... the table by which I stood; I pulled at the hat I held; my colour came and went; I looked at her furtively from under bent brows, and I thanked God that her back being towards me she might not see the clown I must ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... vivid and terrifying narrative the partners made out that while Licorice Stick was on his way to embellish the wayside in strict accordance with instructions, he had encountered a spirit from the other world in the form of the carnival clown whom we have ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... sculpture was the face of the clown in a pantomime, some twelve feet high from brow to chin, which face, being moved by the mechanism which is our pride, every half minute opened its mouth from ear to ear, showed its teeth, and revolved its eyes, the force of these periodical seasons of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... painfully. Altogether it was not a sight to arouse much enthusiasm in the heart of a boy, accustomed to seeing the outside glitter of a circus, with prancing steeds, gay colors, music, and the humorous antics of the clown. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... in the field, yon red-cloaked clown, Of thee from the hilltop looking down; The heifer that lows in the upland farm, Far heard, lows not thine ear to charm, The sexton, tolling his bell at noon, Deems not that great Napoleon Stops his horse, and lists with delight, Whilst ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... sofa under a canopy with the baroness while the fete is going on. Or he may be the peasant at the fete who comes on the stage to swell the drinking chorus, and who, it may be observed, always turns his glass upside down before he begins to drink out of it. Or he may be the clown who takes away the doorstep of the house where the evening party is going on. Or he may be the gentleman who issues out of the house on the false alarm, and is precipitated into the area. Or, if an actress, she may be the fairy who resides for ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... him from head to foot with big, bright, red spots, he was as gaudy as a circus clown, and as nimble and ...
— Denslow's Humpty Dumpty • William Wallace Denslow
... all of one's eyes. Teddy sat spellbound for a while, but found time at last to draw a long breath. "Cousin Derry, that is the funniest clown—" ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... Paris, this style of entertainment having gone completely out of fashion in France. The papa of the farce (who was also the Jack Tar of the drama) reappears in the pantomime as Pierrot, the white-faced clown; and tremendously funny is he. There is a weird, elastic harlequin in a ghastly mask which he never lifts; and an amazing notary in an astounding nose, who proves to be Monsieur Goosequill. There is a humpback of hideous deformity and a Columbine of seraphic loveliness; and all Monsieur ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... brains of his. And there was Walt, whom I chivvied and battered from place to place, and made a paralytic of him: and him, too, I labelled offensive and lewd and lascivious and indecent. Then later there was Mark, whom I frightened into disguising himself in a clown's suit, so that nobody might suspect him to be a maker of literature: indeed, I frightened him so that he hid away the greater part of what he had made until after he was dead, and I could not get at him. That was a disgusting trick to play on me, I consider. Still, these are the only ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... Clown, who had lost his Mare, To his Neighbour, a Wit, did repair, And begg'd him with him to go To the famous Doctor Foreknow, A Conjurer powerful and strong, Who would tell who had done the Wrong. ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... instance, a country that St. Paul never seemed to have visited, which, to say the least, was strange. Whereupon a long talk began about Paul and Jesus, Mr. Walter Poole maintaining that Paul's teaching was identical with that of Jesus, and that Peter was a clown despised by Paul ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... wretch ordain'd by fate, Neal Gahagan, Hibernian clown, With hatchet blunter than thy pate, To hack my ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... from care, the wider lot Of humble life affords for studious thought To scan the maze of Nature; therefore stamp'd The glaring scenes with characters of scorn, As broad, as obvious, to the passing clown, As to the letter'd sage's ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... Mr. Sleary, who was troubled with asthma, and whose breath came far too thick and heavy for the letter s, 'Your thervant! Thith ith a bad piethe of bithnith, thith ith. You've heard of my Clown and hith dog being thuppothed ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... Their heads were covered by enormous green masks, from which floated triangular red flags, and they, too, carried tambourines. Making a diabolical din, they whirled and danced about the gods seated on the ground. Two big fellows accompanying them, who were dressed in tight clown costumes, executed all kinds of grotesque contortions and acrobatic feats, by which they won plaudits and shouts of laughter ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... twitched convulsively and her terrible eyes were like the vent-holes of internal fires; but she managed her rage with a skill that was high tribute to her will-power. "You are right in selecting this clown—this tag-rag," said she. "You and he, I see, are peculiarly suited to each other....My only regret is that in my blind affection I have wasted all these years and all those thousands of dollars on you." ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... abilities, or we shall do nothing with grace. A clown, whatever he may do, will never pass for ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... of the weak and coward with the strong," he cried, "when there's any pleasant charge, you send the other servants, but when it's a question of seeing any one home in the dark, then you ask me, you disorderly clown! a nice way you act the steward, indeed! Do you forget that if Mr. Chiao Ta chose to raise one leg, it would be a good deal higher than your head! Remember please, that twenty years ago, Mr. Chiao Ta wouldn't even so much as look ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... change was worked in Ellis. He no longer looked like the same boy. The alteration in his appearance was almost as striking as that which takes place in a country clown caught by a recruiting sergeant, half drunk at a fair, as he rolls on, looking every moment as if he was going to topple over, from public-house to public-house, and when he has been under the drill-sergeant's hands for a couple of years, and is turned into the trim, active, intelligent soldier. ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... next moment, revealing the spectacle on stage and floor in all its tinsel magnificence—snow-nymphs, polar-bears, all capering madly until an unearthly shriek heralded the coming of a favorite clown, who tumbled all the way down the stage steps and continued hysterically turning flip-flaps, cart-wheels, and somersaults until he landed with a crash at the foot of the ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... susceptible material. It grows as it is trained. It will be rude, if it is left rude, and fine only as it is wrought finely. Educate a boy to tumbled hair and grimy hands, and he will go tumbled and grimy to his grave. Put a hundred boys together where they will have the appurtenances of a clown, and I do not believe there will be ten out of the hundred who will not become precisely to that degree clownish. I am not battling for the luxuries of life, but I am for its decencies. I would not turn boys into Sybarites, but neither would I let them riot into Satyrs. The effeminacy of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... communicative, however, than the stranger. Still his head and heart, alike, were full, and he talked more freely than was altogether consistent with his Yankee character. He told of Ralph's predicament, and the clown sympathized; he narrated the quest which had brought him forth, and of his heretofore unrewarded labors; concluded with naming the ensuing Monday as the day of the youth's trial, when, if nothing in the meantime could be discovered ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... sculpture, you are to learn what a "Master" is. Here was one man at least, who knew his business, once upon a time! Unaccusably;—none of your fool's heads or clown's hearts can find a fault here! "Dog-fancier,[49] cobbler, tailor, or churl, look here"—says Master Jacopo—"look! I know what a brute is, better than you, I know what a silken tassel is—what a leathern belt is—Also, what a woman ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Highness the Princess Dowager of Wales Song ('Let School-masters,' &c.) Epilogue to 'She Stoops to Conquer' Retaliation Song ('Ah, me! when shall I marry me?') Translation ('Chaste are their instincts') The Haunch of Venison Epitaph on Thomas Parnell The Clown's Reply Epitaph on Edward Purdon Epilogue for Lee Lewes Epilogue written for 'She Stoops to Conquer' (1) Epilogue written for 'She Stoops to Conquer' (2) The Captivity. An Oratorio Verses in Reply to an Invitation to Dinner Letter in Prose ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... "don't let's spoil a jolly evening. What I say is, let's do something for the company tonight. Not blacking faces or sitting on hats, if you don't like those—but something of the sort. Why couldn't we have a proper old English pantomime—clown, columbine, and so on. I saw one when I left England at twelve years old, and it's blazed in my brain like a bonfire ever since. I came back to the old country only last year, and I find the thing's extinct. Nothing ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... too great liberality. The sole object seems to be to exhibit the "Yankee" character in its traditional deformities of stupidity and meanness,—otherwise denominated simplicity and shrewdness. Mr. Jonathan Slick is in no respect different from the ordinary fabulous Yankee. An illiterate clown he is, who, visiting New York, contrives by vice of impudence, to interfere very seriously with certain conventionalities of the metropolis. He overthrows, by his indomitable will, a great many social follies. He eats soup with a knife and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... upon as very extraordinary. It was certainly one of the first distinctions of a well-bred man, to express every thing that had the most remote appearance of being obscene, in modest terms and distant phrases; whilst the clown, who had no such delicacy of conception and expression, clothed his ideas in those plain homely terms that are the most obvious and natural. This kind of good-manners was perhaps carried to an excess, so as to make conversation ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... muttered despairingly, as he looked above him again, and, as he did so, saw that the men were laughing at his predicament, for, as Touchstone the clown told the shepherd, he was "in ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... moves me to tears," said Mr. Amarinth musingly. "There is nothing so absolutely pathetic as a really fine paradox. The pun is the clown among jokes, the well turned paradox is the polished comedian, and the highest comedy verges upon tragedy, just as the keenest edge of tragedy is often tempered by a subtle humour. Our minds are shot with moods ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... of Foscari which would lead us to expect anything particularly noble in his face; but I trust, nevertheless, it has been misrepresented by this despicable carver; for no words are strong enough to express the baseness of the portraiture. A huge, gross, bony clown's face, with the peculiar sodden and sensual cunning in it which is seen so often in the countenances of the worst Romanist priest; a face part of iron and part of clay, with the immobility of the one, and the foulness of the other, double chinned, blunt-mouthed, bony-cheeked, with ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... ablution of a common man differs from that of an educated Moslem as much as the eating of a clown and a gentleman. Moreover there are important technical differences between the Wuzu of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... to some boy. It seems to me you are too big a toy for a little girl," said the Calico Clown to ...
— The Story of a Stuffed Elephant • Laura Lee Hope
... building. The window at the rear end of it overlooked the roof of the back kitchen. This window was open, and when Ruth reached the corridor Bella was going head-first through the open window, like a circus clown diving through a hoop. ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... hunchback, who is present as a familiar clown or merrymaker, and dances and laughs to please the company, at the same time snapping his fingers. Two other illustrations of this action, the middle finger in one leaving and in the other having left the thumb and passed to its base, are ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... Cathy had been carrying a lipstick of shiny gold-colored metal. "Don't tell me you've taken to using lipstick! You trying to look like a clown?" ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... with all the attention he had been able to pay to the Lord-General's speech, had got so much confused among the various clauses of the harangue, that his brain was bewildered, like that of a country clown when he chances to get himself involved among a crowd of carriages, and cannot stir a step to get out of the way of one of them, without being in danger of being ridden over by ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... of woman are a theme on which men, from the sage to the clown, have at all times been eloquent. Her natural coquetry in dress, her maternal vanity, her devotion to the little elegancies of the home, to clean windows and fresh curtains, are inexhaustible sources of masculine merriment or abuse. What ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... Don set out to ring all the bells of merriment, he was followed by one clown. Charles Courtier on the other hand had always been accompanied by thousands, who really could not understand the conduct of this man with no commercial sense. But though he puzzled his contemporaries, they did not exactly laugh at him, because it was reported ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... kindness did not stop there, nor with his brothers and sisters in white. He recognized his close relationship with the black man, and the bitterest name his enemies called him—worse in their minds than "fool," "clown," "imbecile" or "gorilla"—was a "Black Republican." That terrible phobia against the negro only enlisted Abraham Lincoln's sympathies the more. He appeared in court in behalf of colored people, time and again. The more bitter the ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... To get a laugh by keeping up the game, Lends him seven hundred, gives him out of hand Seven more, and leads him on to buy some land. 'Tis bought: to make a lengthy tale concise, The man becomes a clown who once was nice, Talks all of elms and vineyards, ploughs and soil, And ages fast with struggling and sheer toil; Till, when his sheep are stolen, his bullock drops, His goats die off, a blight destroys his crops, One night he takes ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... the clown's absurd story, with the still more ridiculous application, made me sick at heart a second time. It was not because I thought my illustrious friend was the Devil, or that I took a fool's idle tale ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... are all dingy and dusty. Yet but a few days, Bob, and flakes of paint will have cracked off the fairy flower-bowers, and the revolving temples of adamantine lustre will be as shabby as the city of Pekin. When you read this, will Clown still be going on lolling his tongue out of his mouth, and saying, "How are you to-morrow?" To- morrow, indeed! He must be almost ashamed of himself (if that cheek is still capable of the blush of shame) for asking the absurd question. To-morrow, indeed! ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... of harmonies has more life, a larger being, than the soul consumed of cares; the sage is a larger life than the clown; the poet is more alive than the man whose life flows out that money may come in; the man who loves his fellow is infinitely more alive than he whose endeavour is to exalt himself above him; the man who strives to be better, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... to do for the best. And then what happens? To begin with, one's public is ignorant, boorish. I give them the very best operetta, a dainty masque, first rate music-hall artists. But do you suppose that's what they want! They don't understand anything of that sort. They want a clown; what they ask for is vulgarity. And then look at the weather! Almost every evening it rains. It started on the tenth of May, and it's kept it up all May and June. It's simply awful! The public doesn't ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... out to ask what was the matter with the circus, and whether the clown were lost, while others demanded "The lady!" Johnston turned to Miss Marvin, and there was a hush as the slight girlish figure—and she seemed very young—stood upright before us. She thrust back the unlovely bonnet, and her thin face was flushed; but when, clenching nervous fingers upon the dowdy ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... people's delight, or their fooling. For, as Aristotle says rightly, the moving of laughter is a fault in comedy, a kind of turpitude that depraves some part of a man's nature without a disease. As a wry face without pain moves laughter, or a deformed vizard, or a rude clown dressed in a lady's habit and using her actions; we dislike and scorn such representations which made the ancient philosophers ever think laughter unfitting in a wise man. And this induced Plato to esteem of Homer as a sacrilegious person, because he presented the gods ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... of all, The Clown, making mirth for all the town, With his lips curved ever upward and his eyebrows ever down, And his chief attention paid to the little mule that played A tattoo on the dashboard with his heels, in ...
— Riley Child-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... Indeed, all the inferior classes possess an innate self-respect, and a natural gravity of deportment, which differs as far from the suppleness of a Hindustani as from the awkward rusticity of an English clown." ... "Even children," he continues, "in Mahomedan countries have an unusual degree of gravity in their deportment. The boy, who can but lisp his 'Peace be with you,' has imbibed this portion of the national character. In passing through a village, these little men will place their hands ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... viewest, beholdest: suruayest, or seest. But to the place Where? It standeth North North-east and by East from the West corner of thy curious knotted garden; There did I see that low spirited Swaine, that base Minow of thy myrth, Clown. Mee? Ferd. that vnletered small knowing soule, Clow Me? Ferd. that shallow vassall Clow. Still mee?) Ferd. which as I remember, hight Costard, Clow. O me) Ferd. sorted and consorted contrary to thy established proclaymed Edict and Continent, Cannon: Which with, o with, but with this ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... anew at the foot of the altar. Christian priests were its reformers, its guardians and its actors. Designed for the amusement as well as the instruction of the gaping multitudes, it was necessarily a pretty crude affair. Satan was introduced as the clown, and laughter was provoked at his discomfiture when routed, or at the destruction of those who wilfully cast themselves into his clutches. It is not strange that the pious and learned St. Augustine, in the fourth century, regretted the polished dramatic ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown; Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home, She stood in ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... to hear how I came to cut my own throat?" snarls the boy, with white, haggard anger alternating with red misery and shame in his young, handsome face; "because if you do, leave off playing the funny clown and listen." ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Zerlina was the principal figure; the climax of the drama was not the final Statue scene, but "Batti, batti"; Leporello's part was exaggerated until the Statue scene became a pantomime affair with Leporello playing pantaloon against Giovanni's clown. Such an opera could interest none but an Elephant and Castle audience, and probably only the beauty of the music prevented it reaching the Elephant and Castle long ago. So low had "Don Giovanni" fallen, when, quite recently, serious artists like Maurel tried to take it more seriously and restore ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... luck!" he muttered. "I'll have to have a string tied about my neck like a poodle dog. What a clown I was to go it blind! But Nellie's cry for help made me forget everything else. Poor girl! I do hope she is safe. If that redskin—gosh! ...
— The Boy Land Boomer - Dick Arbuckle's Adventures in Oklahoma • Ralph Bonehill
... be known to be obeyed. Born tyrannical, the characterless submission of his wife had nourished the tyrannical in him. Now, all at once, a daughter, the ugly one, from whom no credit was to be looked for, dared to defy him for a clown figuring in a worn-out rag of chieftainship—the musty fiction of a clan—half a dozen shepherds, crofters, weavers, and shoemakers, not the shadow of a gentleman among them!—a man who ate brose, went with ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... paper these words may seem cold; but there, before the whole Chamber, that man's defence seemed to be instinct with an eloquent and imposing serenity, which aroused astonishment at first, coming from that clown, that upstart, unread, uneducated, with his Rhone boatman's voice and his street porter's bearing, and afterward moved his auditors strangely by its unrefined, uncivilized character, utterly at variance ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... an honour to be Neptune's child, A grace to be so near with Jove allied. But yet, sweet nymph, with this be not beguiled; Where nature's graces are by looks decried, So foul, so rough, so ugly as a clown, And worse than this, a monster with one eye! Foul is not graced, though it wear a crown, But fair is beauty, ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... same in all ranks; that being so, the ranks which are most numerous deserve most respect. Before one who reflects, all civil distinctions vanish: he marks the same passions and the same feelings in the clown as in the man covered with reputation; he can only distinguish their speech, and a varnish more or less elaborately laid on. Study people of this humble condition; you will perceive that under another sort of language, they have as much ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... still sleeping, and Oberon, seeing a clown near her who had lost his way in the wood and was likewise asleep, "This fellow," said he, "shall be my Titania's true love"; and clapping an ass's head over the clown's, it seemed to fit him as well as if it had grown upon his own shoulders. Though Oberon fixed the ass's head on ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... suppose, lacking in balance and common sense. We are told that one winter Lord Chandos's players visited Evesham, and Jack Miller, our Fool, became greatly attached to the company and in particular to Grumball the clown; indeed, so greatly was he enamoured that he "swore he would goe all the world over with Grumball." The townspeople being loth to lose so popular a character, Jack was locked in a room at the back of the White Hart ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... that this young clown, without in the least intending to be offensive, was listening to me with a ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... here; and we are surprised to find many writers looking upon this "Cogito, ergo sum" as constituting the great idea in his system. Surely it is only a statement of universal experience—an epigrammatic form given to the common-sense view of the matter. Any clown would have told him that the assurance of his existence was his consciousness of it; but the clown would not have stated it so well. He would have said, "I know I exist, because I ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... us to remain with her over Christmas. I longed to see the pantomime, having heard much from my cousins and from Leo of its delights—and of the harlequin, columbine, and clown. But my father wanted to be at home again, and he took me and Rubens and Nurse Bundle with him at the ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... with excitement, returned a timid salute, while Juanito bowed profoundly, took off his hat, and made the same gesture as the celebrated clown and caricaturist ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... humiliating effects. Gilles believed himself a boy in the cloister-school again, with his smock up. 'Mea culpa, mea culpa! Hey, reverend father, have pity!' he began to roar. Dropping him at last, Richard tumbled him on to the bed. 'Blubber yourself to sleep, clown,' he told him. 'Blessed ass, I have heard you snoring these two hours, snoring and rootling over your jack-knife. Sleep, man. But if you rootle again I flog again: mind you that.' Gilles slept long, and was awoken in full light by the sound of King ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... out. Assent being given, Ashbead was taken there, and placed upon the ground, after which the arquebussiers and their leader marched off; while Bess, kneeling down, supported the head of the wounded man upon her knee, and Demdike, taking a small phial from his doublet, poured some of its contents clown his throat. The wizard then took a fold of linen, with which he was likewise provided, and, dipping it in the elixir, applied it to ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... him with the suddenness of lightning-"Ruler over Kalorama, for a day." "Heaven be with me," he sighed; "for now my poverty is perfect. And who would envy my fate, here in a desert, without a friend, and in the raiment of a priest, which if I cast off I shall look like a clown, which will not do for the man who has ruled a kingdom. Therefore, I say, seeing that it is good to be an honest man, that if heaven spare me and get me safely out of this snare, I will go to my home, and there live so good a man that the neighbors shall say, Roger Potter is ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... of Elia. Jaques, it will be remembered, after hearing the "motley fool" moral on the time, declared that "motley's the only wear"; and I opine that Lamb would consider it no small praise to be likened, in wit, wisdom, and eloquence, to Touchstone, or to the Clown in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... from the plains, Of sight-loving lasses and holiday swains: Bob Bantam push'd forward and strutted before; Will Woodpecker modestly tapp'd at the door; Poor Robin, the rustic, a countrified clown, As he blush'd, look'd too simple by half for the town, There were scores in brown mantles, black, yellow, or green, From the villages round, and among them were seen, Luke Linnet, Sam Swallow, Mat Martin, ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... little gloved hand through his arm, and drawn very near to him, moved by tender thoughts of the past. He looked clown at her with eyes from which all anger had vanished. There was only love in them—deep love; love such as a very affectionate brother might perchance give his only sister—but it must be owned that brothers capable of ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... disproportionately powerful influence. The Bible was paramount. Aristotle dominated the whole mental horizon of the schoolmen. Alfred of Beverley tells us that Geoffrey of Monmouth's book "was so universally talked of that to confess ignorance of its stories was the mark of a clown."[1] So great was the influence of Piers Plowman, that from it were taken watchwords at the great rising of the peasants.[2] The power of such works could not be wholly hemmed in by the barrier of manuscript: ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... child's natural sense of values. He is certain to see that the Frog is foolish in competing with the Ox in size, and certain to recognize the common sense of the Country Mouse. He will no more be deceived by a fable than he will by the painted clown in a circus. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... ne'er was blundering clown Upon the boards more promptly hooted down; The sister flowers began ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Acts truly from himself, and gains applause. But when, to please himself or charm his wife, He aims at something in politer life, 360 When, blindly thwarting Nature's stubborn plan, He treads the stage by way of gentleman, The clown, who no one touch of breeding knows, Looks like Tom Errand[28] dress'd in Clincher's clothes. Fond of his dress, fond of his person grown, Laugh'd at by all, and to himself unknown, Prom side to side he struts, he smiles, he prates, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... he had lost repute. He had suffered much in pocket, but more in prestige. He had been a successful player in the Columbia country, too much so for the good of scores of comrades, but especially himself. He could have found it in his heart to throttle that guffawing clown, whose rude bellow of rejoicing over Case's brilliant bluff and his own defeat, had brought even the dago and his fellows in staring wonderment to the open door. He would have pledged another month's pay could ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... place for their sons in the seminary of this fortunate teacher. [In pencil on opposite page—Mr. Pearson.] In the solitude of Grasmere, while living as a married man in a cottage of 8l. per annum rent, I often used to smile at the tales which reached me of the brilliant career of this quondam clown—for such in reality he was, in manners and appearance, before he was polished a little by attrition with gentlemen's sons trained at Hawkshead, rough and rude as many of our families were. Not 200 yards from the cottage in Grasmere just mentioned, to which I retired, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... interloping—(against which the priests seem to have fought hard and yet in vain) the most ludicrous images were mixed with the most awful personations; and whatever the subject might be, however sublime, however pathetic, yet the Vice and the Devil, who are the genuine antecessors of Harlequin and the Clown, were necessary component parts. I have myself a piece of this kind, which I transcribed a few years ago at Helmstadt, in Germany, on the education of Eve's children, in which after the fall and repentance ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... scene, in which the loving prince takes leave of his mistress, and another where, after much weeping and flirtation, she throws herself into his arms, were sufficiently intelligible to us; but some, in which the jokes of the clown formed the leading feature, were quite lost upon those who did not understand the language. The place chosen for the representation was a spot of ground outside of our houses, the heat being very great; and here a circle ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... [crosses love not him] By crosses he means money. So in As you like it, the Clown says to Celia, if I should bear you, I ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... bristle a little, under the circumstances; could do no less than challenge the torpedoes, like Farragut in Mobile Bay. Whether the game was worth the candle, I was not to be bullied out of my privileges by a clown swash-buckler who aped the ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... by the violent sobs of little Alice. In his earnestness he had neglected to soften clown the narrative so that it might not terrify the heart of this unworldly infant. Since Grandfather began the history of our chair, little Alice had listened to many tales of war. But probably the idea had never really impressed itself upon her mind that men have shed the blood of ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... able to feel towards this cold strange man, as a father and a comforter. For the first time he saw tears in the cold eyes of his son, and could feel the joy of wiping them away. He seized the opportunity at once, and bending clown over the groaning form, kissed his forehead, raised him from the ground and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... object is not to excite fear of supernatural things in my reader, but to show the effect of such fear upon the agents of the story—one a man in sense and firmness, one a man unhinged by remorse, one a stupid, unenquiring clown, one a learned ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... joke brought the Mormons to compromise and surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation.... But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the barber-surgeons laughed at Harvey—and how vainly! What clown ever brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Jenner? Or Lincoln? Or Darwin?... They are laughing at ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... Second Clown. I tell thee, she is; therefore make her grave straight. The crowner hath set on her and finds it ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... greater reliance common to our sex in the general tender-heartedness of pretty women. But I confess I was alarmed. Yet, with a feeble smile, I tried to introduce the subject with classical ease and lightness. I even said, "If Shakspeare's Athenian clown, Mrs. Brown, believed that a lion among ladies was a dreadful thing, what must"—But here I broke down; for Mrs. Brown, with the awful intuition of her sex, I saw at once was more occupied with my manner than my speech. So I tried a business ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... the police reports, in the Sunday papers; he had heard a street preacher declaim against it, and warn young women of the serpent-like wiles of tempters of the Stratton variety. But even now Jack failed to recognize Stratton as a serpent, or indeed anything but a blundering cheat and clown, who had left his dirty 'prentice work on his (Jack's) hands. But the girl was helpless and, it seemed, homeless, all through a certain desperation of feeling which, in spite of her tears, he could not but respect. That momentary shadow of death had exalted her. He stroked ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... life, and a love to win. No! no! the dastard kestrel kite Aye hugs the earth in his stealthy flight. Hope gone! the pool at the otter's cave Will prove the Ladye Tomasine's grave. Ho! ho! see yonder comes rushing down A lithe young hind, though a simple clown— Off bonnet and shoes, and coat and vest, A plunge! and he holds her round the waist! Three strokes of his arm, with his beautiful prize All safe, although faint, on the bank she lies! A cottager's wife came running down, "Take care of the ladye," said the clown. He has donned his ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... had been a sister to the Earl of Derby, who lived at the time of which I am now writing. The earl had a son, James, who was heir to the title and to the estates of his father. The son was a dissipated, rustic clown—almost a simpleton. He had the vulgarity of a stable boy and the vices of a courtier. His associates were chosen from the ranks of gamesters, ruffians, and tavern maids. Still, he was a scion of one of the greatest families ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... characteristic of good-breeding, a very necessary knowledge in our intercourse with men; for one of inferior parts, with the behaviour of a gentleman, is frequently better received than a man of sense, with the address and manners of a clown. Ignorance and vice are the only things we need be ashamed of; steer clear of these, and you may go into any company you will; not that I would have a young man throw off all dread of appearing ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... Laporte, "I am old and gouty, my legs are as stiff as two sticks, and yet if a pretty woman were to tell me to go through the eye of a needle, I believe I should take a jump at it, like a clown through a hoop. I shall die like that; it is in the blood. I am an old beau, one of the old regime, and the sight of a woman, a pretty woman, stirs me to the tips ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... other side of the stream; at the head of the river of Rhine, is a small sea, called of the Switzers the Black Sea, twenty thousand paces long, and fifty hundred paces broad. The town Costnitz took the name of this; the emperor gave it a clown for expounding of his riddle: wherefore the clown named the town Costnitz, that is in English, "Cost ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... asserting himself, as he had been doing since the day I reached St. Augustine; but though he seems a pretty clever substitute for the chat in the chat's absence, his light is quickly put out when the clown himself steps into the ring. Ground doves cooed, cardinals whistled, and mocking-birds sang and mocked by turns. Orchard orioles, no unworthy companions of mocking-birds and cardinals, sang here and there from a low treetop, especially in the vicinity of houses. ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... 17th, repeatedly visited the continent, bringing with them the repertory of the Elizabethan theatre. From those actors Ayrer learned how to enliven his dramas with sensational incidents and spectacular effects, and from them he borrowed the character of the clown. His plays, however, are in spite of his foreign models, hardly more dramatic, in the true sense of the word, than those of Hans Sachs, and they are inferior to the latter in poetic qualities. The plots of two of his comedies, Von der schoenen Phoenicia and Von ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... in the wet grass and her pasty little face will blink its dull eyes over a grave. Like a little clown in her curling cotton suit, her lumpy shoes, her idiotic hat, she will offer her tears to the pitiless silence of trees, wind, rain and ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... by the darkies, I remember but two other bits of amusement we had while at Florence. One of these was in hearing the colored soldiers sing patriotic songs, which they did with great gusto when the weather became mild. The other was the antics of a circus clown—a member, I believe, of a Connecticut or a New York regiment, who, on the rare occasions when we were feeling not exactly well so much as simply better than we had been, would give us an hour or two of recitations of the drolleries with which he was wont to set the crowded canvas in ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... the trodden ground beneath With smashed incisors, like the teeth, The dragon's tusks of ancient ken From which sprung hosts of armed men. Such pastime was a frequent thing, The entertainment of the ring, Without equestrian or clown Was often seen in Cork's own town, And best, for impecunious boys Who boasted few of modern joys, Who daily went to see the play Had no admission fee to pay. But gone is Corkstown, vanished too The whitewashed shanty from our view, Where once the minstrel's youthful ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... Bartlemy fair? If you have, you may have seen—nay, you must have seen—Richardson's immortal show. You must have seen a tall platform in front of the migratory edifice, and on that platform you must have delighted your visual orb with the clown, the pantaloon, the harlequin, the dancing ladies, the walking dandy, the king with his crown, the queen in her rabbit-skin robes, the smock-frocked countryman, the top-booted jockey, and all the dramatis person of the performance that every moment of every day, during every fair, is for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... social powers, act the obedient servant before them, and if you produce something be sure that it does not run against the grain of your "superiors," or say adieu to success, reputation and recompense. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, prejudices which they hold as righteousness and falsehoods which they hold as truths. Paint the whole, crown it with regard for good manners, for ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... wonderful exploit?" asked one of the young maidens, with a smile. "Any clown in the ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... curse o' class distinctions from our shoulders shall be hurled, An' the influence of woman revolutionize the world; There'll be higher education for the toilin' starvin' clown, An' the rich an' educated shall be educated down; An' we all will meet amidships on this stout old earthly craft, An' there won't be any friction 'twixt the classes fore-'n'-aft. We'll be brothers, fore-'n'-aft! Yes, an' sisters, fore-'n'-aft! ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... Greece has given the poet the picture of the sweet country school-girls working at one flower, warbling one song, growing together like a double cherry. Of England, is the picture of the hounds with "ears that sweep away the morning dew"; from England, all this out-door woodland life, the clown's play and the clowns themselves,—Bottom with his inimitable conceit, and his fellows, Snug, Quince, and the rest. English is all Puck's fairy lore, the cowslips tall, the red-hipt humble-bee, Oberon's bank, the pansy love-in-idleness, and all the ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... with clean pages before him—young, emotional, without a doubt intellectual. But for his awful clothes he was well enough to look upon, he had no affectations, his instincts were apparently correct. His manners were hoydenish, but there was nothing of the clown about him. She asked him a ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... South teems with events; convulsing ones: The Briton, there, plays at no mimic war; With gallant face he moves, and gallantly is met. Brave spirits, rous'd by glory, throng our camp; The hardy hunter, skill'd to fell the deer, Or start the sluggish bear from covert rude; And not a clown that comes, but from his youth Is trained to pour from far the leaden death, To climb the steep, to struggle with the stream, To labour firmly under scorching skies, And bear, unshrinking, winter's roughest blast. This, and that heaven-inspir'd ...
— Andre • William Dunlap
... until they were very merry. Two rang bells, two played castanets, and two sang. One carried a tray behind his back laden with good things, so that all could help themselves; some smoked water-pipes; another acted like a clown; others played various tunes on different ...
— The Cat and the Mouse - A Book of Persian Fairy Tales • Hartwell James
... and pink and gold habits, and by knights in armor, all of whom carried umbrellas also. Pages walked beside the horses, waving banners and shields with "Visit Currie's World-Renowned Circus" painted on them. A droll little clown, mounted on an enormous bay horse, made fun of the pages, imitated their gestures, and rapped them on the back with his riding-stick in a droll way. A long line of blue and red wagons ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... in the flower's sides, because legitimate feasting was made too difficult for the poor little things. The ruby-throated hummingbird, hovering a second above the tube, drains it with none of the clown-like performances exacted from the bumblebee. Pilfering ants find death as speedy on the sticky surfaces here ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... you all that Lucilla can tell. Permit me to reappear in these pages. Shall I say, with your favorite English clown, reappearing every year in your barbarous English pantomime, "Here I am again: how do you do?" No—I had better leave that out. Your clown is one of your national institutions. With this mysterious source of British amusement let no ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... would teach men to aspire he writes "Excelsior" and so causes them to know that only he who aspires really lives. They see the groundling, the boor, the drudge, and the clown content to dwell in the valley amid the loaves and fishes of animal desires, while the man who aspires is struggling toward the heights whence he may gain an outlook upon the glories that are, know the throb and thrill of new life, and experience the swing and sweep of spiritual impulses. ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... gone on writing steadily, though there was battle all about him.... He settled himself to write, though he had no plan in his mind, and as he wrote, he felt that the story, whatever it might grow to be, must be comic. "I feel like a clown making jokes in the circus while his wife is dying," he ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... see. That makes three men; and the clown and policeman will make five. Thats why you wanted five men ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... impression. Poor things! poor things! They can't help themselves. We courtiers really ought to be very careful not to abuse our power. It is positive cruelty. The contest is too unequal. It makes one inclined sometimes to put on the manners of a clown, so as to give them a chance. Nay, nay, you might as well ask the Ethiopian to change his skin as a courtier his fine manners. By all the saints! here ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... was notable for its corrections and remodellings, reducing the grandeur of the originals to the levels of the critics. Lord Lansdowne degraded Shylock into the clown of the play; it was "furnished with music and other ornamentation, enriched with a musical masque, 'Peleus and Thetis,' and with a banqueting scene in which the Jew," dining apart from the rest, drinks to his God, Money. Gildon mangled "Measure for Measure" and provided it with ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... their equal in this respect, it has a large repertoire of weird, uncanny cries all its own — a power of throwing its voice, like a human ventriloquist, into unexpected corners of the thicket or meadow. In addition to its extraordinary vocal feats, it can turn somersaults and do other clown-like stunts as well as any variety actor ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... one clown to me, "I seed my ole 'ooman go down afore my eyes, and I felt that grieved a'most as if I was agoin' down myself, and I chewed a bit ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... the peasant O Moreno who knows the dances of Beira, the negro chattering in his pigeon-Portuguese 'like a red mullet in a fig-tree,' the deceitful negro expressing the strangest philosophy in Portuguese equally strange, the rustic clown Gon[c,]alo with his baskets of fruit and capons, who when his hare is stolen turns it like a canny peasant to a kind of posthumous account: leve-a por amor de Deos pola alma de meus finados, the Jew Alonso Lopez who had formerly been prosperous in Spain but is now a poor new Christian cobbler ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... noticed than he was ever before in his life, was conducted down below to the servants' quarters. Although they were town servants, and would certainly have disdained to speak to a mere beggar-boy, or to a young country clown, there was something in Dermot's unaffected manner and appearance which won their regard, and they treated him with far more kindness and attention than would otherwise have been ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston
... no two pillars were alike, and in the dress of a mediaeval crowd was captured the colours of the rainbow. With an odd result. Men laughed at the devil in the freedom of their souls. They tweaked his tail on carven misericords, and in the mystery play he was invariably cast for the clown. ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... champagne flowed in streams. At a garden table under an orange tree one could see a powerfully limbed peasant, his hawthorn stick between his knees, devouring a plateful of caviare, while his neighbor, a circus clown, ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... you were going to give a magic lantern show. Or is it for some new kinds of moving pictures? Say, do you remember the time we gave a show in the barn, and charged a nickel to come in? You were the clown, and—" ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... to Khamoor, and several of them are amusing. Says Mrs. Burton in one of them, [255] "Khamoor was charming at the theatre. I cried at something touching, and she, not knowing why, flung herself upon my neck and howled. She nearly died with joy on seeing the clown, and said, 'Oh, isn't this delightful. What a lovely life!' She was awfully shocked at the women dancing with 'naked legs,' and at all the rustic swains and girls ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a London street. Upon anyone who feels this nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the abiding spirit of pantomime. Of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said (with no darker meaning) that he realizes one of our visions. And it may be noted here that this internal quality in pantomime is perfectly symbolized and preserved by that commonplace or cockney landscape and architecture which characterizes pantomime ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... men. This accounted for the remarkable panic of his jailer, who, when he looked into, and even entered his dungeon, failed to see him; it explained why the soldiers had permitted him to leave the building unmolested, why the horseman had nearly ridden over him, and why the clown who had just passed had, without knowing it, nearly ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... words of the rubric. A little carven image of an acolyte—a weird boy who seemed to move by springs, whose hair had all the semblance of painted wood, and whose complexion was white and red like a clown's—did not make matters more ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... will this never be done?" cries the Master. "Quel lourdaud! But why do I trouble you with French expressions, which are lost on such an ignoramus? A lourdaud, my dear brother, is as we might say a bumpkin, a clown, a clodpole: a fellow without grace, lightness, quickness; any gift of pleasing, any natural brilliancy: such a one as you shall see, when you desire, by looking in the mirror. I tell you these things for your good, I assure you; and besides, Square-toes" (looking at me and stifling a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his family rather surprised him; he seemed to think it a joke that all these children should belong to him. As the younger ones slipped up to him in his retreat, he kept taking things out of his pockets; penny dolls, a wooden clown, a balloon pig that was inflated by a whistle. He beckoned to the little boy they called Jan, whispered to him, and presented him with a paper snake, gently, so as not to startle him. Looking over the boy's head he said to me, "This one is ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... disarm his adversary in the twinkling of an eye, unless he were a professor like himself. A stroke of wit will sometimes produce this effect, but there is no such power or superiority in sense or reas hardly know the professor from the impudent pretender or the mere clown.(1) ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... sayst thou, clown?" quoth one of the men "Why, I tell thee that this is that same rogue that men ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... present instance to do none, was seen among docks and nettles, solacing himself with the few gooseberries which remained on some moss-grown bushes. To him Mr. Touchwood called loudly, enquiring after his master; but the clown, conscious of being taken in flagrant delict, as the law says, fled from him like a guilty thing, instead of obeying his summons, and was soon heard hupping and geeing to the cart, which he had left on the other ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... chatelaines with which young ladies love to adorn themselves at present. Files of patients kept streaming into the already crowded room, and one gentleman, reversing the order assigned to him by nature, walked gravely in on the palms of his hands, with his legs elevated in air. He had been a clown at a theatre, and still retained some of the proclivities of the boards. A wizen-faced man, who seemed to have no name beyond the conventional one of "Billy," strutted in with huge paper collars, like the corner man in a nigger ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... all ye that can pray, tell all the Lord's people to try, by mourning and prayer, if ye can taigle him, taigle him especially in Scotland, for we fear, he will depart from it." This is the theology of a savage, in the style of a clown, but it is quoted by Walker as Mr. Alexander Peden's.' Mr. John Menzie's "Testimony" (1670) is all about "hardened men, whom though they walk with you for the present with horns of a lamb, yet afterward ye may hear them speak ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... He is far from prepossessing in personal appearance, and his voice is disagreeable; and yet he wins attention and good-will from the start. He indulges in no flowers of rhetoric, no eloquent passages. He is not a wit, a humorist, or a clown; yet so fine a vein of pleasantry and good-nature pervades what he says, gliding over a deep current of poetical arguments, that he keeps his hearers in a smiling mood, ready to swallow all he says. His sense of the ludicrous is very ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... and Oberon, seeing a clown near her who had lost his way in the wood and was likewise asleep, "This fellow," said he, "shall be my Titania's true love"; and clapping an ass's head over the clown's, it seemed to fit him as well as if it had grown upon his own ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... I suppose, is intended for our ears by the Duke of Styria. He probably wishes us to know that he is against us," said Charles. "He wanted our daughter for his clown of a son, and our contempt for his claims rankles in his heart. He cannot inflame Wuertemberg, and Wuertemberg cannot influence the ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... better if it were, it is so ugly and worn. It is too bad to expect Mr and Mrs Thornton to do all the hard, depressing work of the parish and keep bright and cheerful themselves, when their home is enough to give the blues to a clown! It looks as if it hadn't ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the work was, Bodo sang lustily to cheer himself and Wido; for is it not related that once, when a clerk was singing the 'Allelulia' in the emperor's presence, Charles turned to one of the bishops, saying, 'My clerk is singing very well,' whereat the rude bishop replied, 'Any clown in our countryside drones as well as that to his oxen at their ploughing'?[6] It is certain too that Bodo agreed with the names which the great Charles gave to the months of the year in his own Frankish tongue; for he called January 'Winter-month', ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... and some of the men limped painfully. Altogether it was not a sight to arouse much enthusiasm in the heart of a boy, accustomed to seeing the outside glitter of a circus, with prancing steeds, gay colors, music, and the humorous antics of the clown. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... but even comically excusable. Who were all these pompous preposterous people with their footmen and their foot-scrapers, their chimney-pots and their chimney-pot hats, that they should prevent a poor clown from getting sausages if he wanted them? One would suppose that property was a serious thing. I had reached, as it were, a higher level of that mountainous and vapourous visions, the heaven of ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... carelessly or dishonestly employed. And when a man has had any actual experience of this, and at all perceived how far this mischief reaches, he is sometimes almost tempted to say with Shakespeare, 'Out, idle words, servants to shallow fools'; to adopt the saying of his clown, 'Words are grown so false I am loathe to prove reason with them.' He cannot, however, forego their employment; not to say that he will presently perceive that this falseness of theirs whereof he accuses them, this cheating power, is not of their proper ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... such as has been described. But, to reduce this to a common-sense view, it is only saying,—what no one will deny,—that a man of education and refinement has not only more, but higher, pleasures of the mind than a mere clown. ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... a rush what kind of vessel this coaster was, whether old or new, bound on a cruise to New Orleans or Baffin's Bay; nor did I care whether the captain was a gentleman or a clown; a worthy man or an ignorant bully. I was anxious to obtain the vacant situation, and feared that the captain, following the fashion of the Long Island farmers, would not like the cut of my jib. I learned, however, that the schooner was a comfortable vessel, about a hundred tons burden, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... schoolmaster, a most worthy King Log, whom Ben dumbfounds twenty times a day. He is a great ornament of the cricket-ground, has a real genius for the game, and displays it after a very original manner, under the disguise of awkwardness—as the clown shows off his agility in a pantomime. Nothing comes amiss to him. By the bye, he would have been the very lad for us in our present dilemma; not a horse in England could master Ben Kirby. But we are ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... emancipated bagman, or contemptible chevalier d'industrie. Of this we have an example in "Le Gendre," in some respects one of the most objectionable of De Bernard's novels, certainly not well suited for a birth-day present to misses in their teens. A seemingly tame, insipid clown of a husband counteracts the base manoeuvres of a dashing Paris roue; and finally, after refusing to fight the would-be seducer, whom he has ascertained to be an arrant swindler, takes truncheon in hand, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Marcelline, the clown at the Hippodrome—always pretending to help, but forever keeping underfoot. When it becomes necessary I raise the money ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... by chariot-horses, of which a representation has been already given. It is cut square with two drooping lappets, and covers the greater part of the body. Occasionally it is united to a sort of breastplate which protects the neck, descending about halfway clown the chest. The material may be supposed to have been thick felt or leather, either of which would have been a considerable protection ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... sought to beguile themselves—each for the sake of the other—with all the tricks and chimeras of optimism, but that was only the masquerade of the clown who laughs while his heart is sick and under whose toy-bright paint is the gray pallor ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... who become more serious as they approach the holy city, that he commences, for the good of their souls, his ample "meditation." The coarse story told by the miller had been justified by excuses no less appropriate to the person and to the circumstances; the person was a clown, and chanced to be drunk; now the person is a saint, and, as it happens, they are just nearing the place ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... his sympathy by laughing aloud. "I say, you look just like a clown; doesn't he, Padger, with his eye all sorts of colours and his cheek like ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... fellow-feeling to me, both as a brother and a medicus, that made him declare me on the point of death when I was still as lusty as a false credo. For the rest, I had sufficient science to hold in my breath while the clown tied me with cords, else had I been too straitened to breathe. But thou needest a biscuit with ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... this passes all patience!" he cried wrathfully. "If this ship of yours must needs dance and skip like a clown at a kermesse, then I pray you that you will put me into one of these galeasses. I had but sat down to a flask of malvoisie and a mortress of brawn, as is my use about this hour, when there comes a cherking, and I find my wine ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... up-country town, When we were boys at school, There came a circus with a clown, Likewise a bucking mule. The clown announced a scheme they had Spectators for to bring— They'd give a crown to any lad Who'd ride him ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... and taking off his soft hat he began to beat it impatiently against his leg as he walked. "Why shouldn't she take me seriously?" he demanded sharply. "Am I a comedian, a clown, a jack-in-the-box? Why shouldn't she? You Creoles! I have no patience with you! Am I always to be regarded as a feature of an amusing programme? I hope Mrs. Pontellier does take me seriously. I hope she has discernment enough to find in me something besides the blagueur. ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... young spark named Amoretto, with whom he had been intimate at college; two others endeavour to gain a subsistence by successively appearing as physicians, actors, and musicians: but the Man of Genius is disregarded, and at last prosecuted for his productions; the benefice is sold to an illiterate clown; and in the end three of the scholars are compelled to submit to a voluntary exile; another returns to Cambridge as poor as when he left it; and the other two, finding that neither their medicines nor their music would support them, resolve to turn shepherds, and ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... phalanx falter? To the rescue, at the need, The clown was ploughing Persia, clearing Greek earth of weed, As he routed through the Sakian ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... each other recklessly. Marie wanted it, too, and she kept making signals to Frank, which he took a sour pleasure in disregarding. He didn't see the use of making a fuss over a fellow just because he was dressed like a clown. When the turquoise went to Malvina Sauvage, the French banker's daughter, Marie shrugged her shoulders and betook herself to her little tent of shawls, where she began to shuffle her cards by the light of a tallow ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... a rabbit out of one of the girl's handkerchiefs, and was springing it from his hand against the wall. He seemed to have a fair appreciation of the character of his associates for the evening; and though himself perfectly competent to behave well in the best society, chose to act the clown in this. ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... understand his gabble, took the larger portion for read, after muttering the first words of the rubric. A little carven image of an acolyte—a weird boy who seemed to move by springs, whose hair had all the semblance of painted wood, and whose complexion was white and red like a clown's—did not make matters more intelligible by ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... wine and white wine until they were very merry. Two rang bells, two played castanets, and two sang. One carried a tray behind his back laden with good things, so that all could help themselves; some smoked water-pipes; another acted like a clown; others played various tunes ...
— The Cat and the Mouse - A Book of Persian Fairy Tales • Hartwell James
... characters being chosen from the class who appear as supers in Pan; subjects or retainers of the all-powerful Trader Mack. It is as if the sub-plots in one of Shakespeare's plays had been taken out for separate presentment, and the clown promoted to be hero in a play of his own. The cast is increased, the milieu lightly drawn in Pan is now shown more comprehensively and in detail, making us gradually acquainted with a whole little community, a village world, knowing little of any world beyond, ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... sowed the trodden ground beneath With smashed incisors, like the teeth, The dragon's tusks of ancient ken From which sprung hosts of armed men. Such pastime was a frequent thing, The entertainment of the ring, Without equestrian or clown Was often seen in Cork's own town, And best, for impecunious boys Who boasted few of modern joys, Who daily went to see the play Had no admission fee to pay. But gone is Corkstown, vanished too The whitewashed ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... player in an orchestra can enjoy such music only as would deafen common ears by its crash of sounds, in which they perceive no connection or harmony; while the simple rustic listens to the rude notes of a flageolet in the hands of a clown with feelings of ineffable delight. Nature, if the seekers after luxurious and exciting pleasures could but understand her language, would say to them, "Except ye become as this simple rustic, ye ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... in the very worst of taste from his scarfpin to his boots, he had evidently just been too carefully shaved, for there were scratches on his wide, ludicrous face, and his smile was as rueful as a clown's. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... Northern Farmer: "Doan't thou marry for money, but go where money is." An admirable piece of advice. Well, Maud made a mistake, let us say. Dolomore is a clown, and now she knows it. Why, if she had waited, she might have married one of the leading men of the day. She is fit to be a duchess, as far as appearance goes; but I was never snobbish. I care very little about titles; what I look to is ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... thou shalt lower to his level day by day, What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay. As the husband is the wife is; thou art mated with a clown, And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down. He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, Something better than his dog, a ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... augmented gayety. There were no more telephone messages, nor was there any definite foundation for the rumor that was presently stealthily circulating. Women, powdering their noses as they waited for their wraps, murmured it in the dressing-rooms; a clown, smoking in the hall, confided it to a Mephistopheles; a pastry cook, after his effusive good-nights, confirmed it as he climbed into the motorcar that held the Pierrette who was his wife: "Dead, ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... gave the necessary orders. He lost no time about it, but returned panting, and lay down in a hollow behind us with cartridges in either fist and a grin on his face that would have done credit to a circus clown. I never, anywhere, saw any one more pleased than Kazimoto at ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... sticks with all their might, making a most unearthly racket. The whole being a fit emblem of what is going on in the other world of unclean spirits. Those forming the circle, kept going around shouting and kicking, with all the actions and paraphernalia of a clown in a pantomine, only not ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney
... said the princess, 'and undoubtedly, if I had to deal with a clown, or a man who lacked good sense, I should feel myself very awkwardly situated. "A princess must keep her word," he would say, "and you must marry me because you promised to!" But I am speaking to a man of the world, of the greatest good sense, and I am sure that he will listen to reason. As ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... a bit last week because the village clown was on his home leave. He is a lad of twenty-three with a young wife and a little three-year-old girl, who has learned to talk since "dada" saw her, and is her father right over—full of fun, ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... which reminds us so completely of one of those "gorgeous processions" in Eastern "spectacles" at home, that we wonder for a moment whether it be "part of the play," or tangible, sober reality. Yes! placed upon a scarlet cushion lies an enormous gilt key (such a one as clown in the pantomime might open his writing-desk with, or such as hangs over a locksmith's door), and above it glistens a golden legend to the effect that the treasure beneath was presented to "William of Prussia by his loving cousin, ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... and Wisdom side by side, just as we find them in Calderon's and Shakespeare's dramas, Lucretia presented the costly robe which she wore when she offered up her prayer, to one of her court fools, and the clown ran merrily through the streets of Rome, bawling out, "Long live the illustrious Duchess of Ferrara! Long live Pope Alexander!" With noisy demonstrations the Borgias and their retainers ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... Smith slowly said— "Let us plan to carry out the crowning farce, May it serve to charm the haughty Powhatan, As it pleases England's monarch for the time. Yes, the scarlet robe will dazzle Indian chief, An' it is your wish to make of him a clown. 'Tis a trifling matter that; more serious far Charges given you by the London Company, Who from distant lands know naught, in truth, Of the frontier hardships, of the settler's needs. Can you not inform them in the plainest terms Of the falseness ...
— Pocahontas. - A Poem • Virginia Carter Castleman
... class distinctions from our shoulders shall be hurled, An' the influence of woman revolutionize the world; There'll be higher education for the toilin' starvin' clown, An' the rich an' educated shall be educated down; An' we all will meet amidships on this stout old earthly craft, An' there won't be any friction 'twixt the classes fore-'n'-aft. We'll be brothers, fore-'n'-aft! Yes, an' sisters, fore-'n'-aft! ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... dramatized—not a girl you take out to supper only to find that she has no wit, no charm, no anything but a monstrous appetite for indigestible food and a silly ambition to play roles the gods never intended her to play. In that pantomime she was a frolic, the clown's daughter, and, though nobody saw it, she was the whole piece, the elusive sprite that could evoke laughter and tears by a gesture, a lifting of the brows, a grimace. By utterly different methods in 'Honourable Women' she proved her wide range of appeal. The chap who produced 'Honourable Women' ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... could have made Trannel's behavior a cause of quarrel, but the other Kentons made it a cause of coldness which was quite as effective. In Lottie this took the form of something so active, so positive, that it was something more than a mere absence of warmth. Before she came clown to breakfast the next morning she studied a stare in her mirror, and practised it upon Trannel so successfully when he came up to speak to her that it must have made him doubt whether he had ever had her acquaintance. In his doubt he ventured to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... recipient of Macaire's jokes, and makes vicarious atonement for his crimes, acting, in fact, the part which pantaloon performs in the pantomime, who is entirely under the fatal influence of clown. He is quite as much a rogue as that gentleman, but he has not his genius and courage. So, in pantomimes, (it may, doubtless, have been remarked by the reader,) clown always leaps first, pantaloon following after, more clumsily and timidly than his bold and ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Spain outshines Upon a fairer town Than Penafiel, or endows More richly farming clown; Nowhere a broader square reflects Such brilliant mansions, tall,— Away, ye ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... dressing-table, and the perfume I used lies all forsaken and forlorn. Fresh water, plenty of fresh water ... that's what I like. I'm a long way from the Leonora who had to paint herself every night like a clown before she could appear before an audience. Take a good look at me! Well ... what do you think? You might mistake me for one of your vassals almost, eh? I'll bet that if I had gone out this morning to join your demonstration ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Yet but a few days, Bob, and flakes of paint will have cracked off the fairy flower-bowers, and the revolving temples of adamantine lustre will be as shabby as the city of Pekin. When you read this, will Clown still be going on lolling his tongue out of his mouth, and saying, "How are you to-morrow?" To- morrow, indeed! He must be almost ashamed of himself (if that cheek is still capable of the blush of shame) for asking the absurd question. ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... America, when somewhere to the southward of the latitude of Demerara it came on to blow very hard from the north and west. The clouds came rushing along the sky like a mass of people all hurrying to see the king open parliament, or a clown throw a summersault at a fair, or anything of that sort, while the wind howled and screeched in the rigging as I have heard wild beasts in the woods in Africa, and the sea got up and tumbled and rolled as if the waves were dancing for their very lives. You need not believe it, but the ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... to be a champion and a high up man that had died for her sake. It is what broke her down in the latter end, hearing him to be no big man at all, but a clown! ...
— Three Wonder Plays • Lady I. A. Gregory
... dreadful, dismal, dirty hole, Seems more adapted for a mole Than 'tis for you; Oh! could you see My residence, how charm'd you'd be. Instead of bringing up your brood In wind, and wet, and solitude, Come bring them all at once to town, We'll make a courtier of a clown. I think that, for your children's sake, 'Tis proper my advice to take." "Well," said his host, "I can but try, And so poor quiet hole ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... sea-water, the clock to point to all hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a London street. Upon anyone who feels this nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the abiding spirit of pantomime. Of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said (with no darker meaning) that he realizes one of our visions. And it may be noted here that this internal quality in pantomime is perfectly symbolized and preserved by ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... whar they wuz havin' the cirkus doin's, and I guess us two old codgers jist about busted our buttins a-laffin at that silly old clown. Wall, he cut up a lot of didos, then he went out and sot down right alongside of Aunt Nancy Smith; and Nancy she'd like to had histeericks. She sed, "You go 'way from me you painted critter," and that ...
— Uncles Josh's Punkin Centre Stories • Cal Stewart
... story of The Vagabonds is the story of a husband and of a young wife who does not love him, but discovers that she loves another man—a story as old as the hills and common to every rank and every calling. Mrs. Woods has made the husband a middle-aged clown, the wife a girl with strict notions about respectability, and the lover, Fritz, a handsome young German gymnast. But there was no fundamental reason for this choice of professions. The tale might be every bit as true of a grocer, and a grocer's ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... not laugh if you do not want to," said Cutter. "I am used to being thought dull. Your gravity would not wound me though I were chief clown to the whole universe, and yours were the only grave face in the world. By the by, you are laughing, I see. I am much obliged for the appreciation. Shall I go on ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... of gorgeous spectacle, there should re-appear in our midst a revival of the ancient Pierrot who pantomimed himself into public favour with the Parisians towards the close of the seventeenth century. Red-hot poker, sausages, and filching Clown have had their day, and lo! when everyone said we were tired of the "comic business" of Pantomime, here in our midst re-appear almost in their habits as they lived, certainly with their white faces and black skull-caps "as they ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... footsteps in the sea, We whose great souls have risen so far above the creeds That we can jest at Christ and leave Him where He bleeds, A legend of the dark, a tale so false or true That howsoe'er we jest at Him, the jest sounds new. (Our weariest dinner-tables never tire of that! Let the clown sport with Christ, never the jest falls flat!) Poor fools, we dare not dream a dream so strange, so great, As on this ball of dust to found one "world-wide state," To float one common flag above our little lands, And ere our little sun grows cold to clasp our hands In friendship ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... to have survived only in the performances of circuses and menageries. Between acts the extravaganzaist in cork and wool would appear, and to the song of "Coal-Black Rose," or "Jim along Joe," or "Sittin' on a Rail," command, with the clown and monkey, full share of admiration in the arena. At first he performed solus, and to the accompaniment of the "show" band; but the school was progressive; couples presently appeared, and, dispensing with the aid of foreign instruments, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... 'do it: be not too wise; Seeing that ye are wedded to a man, Not all mismated with a yawning clown, But one with arms to guard his head and yours, With eyes to find you out however far, And ears to hear you even in ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... "Simus," literally, fiat-nosed, was a cant word, used for a clown; Galba being jeered for his rusticity, in consequence of his long retirement. See c. viii. Indeed, they called Spain ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... his faith in the child, who had seen the image of Pegasus in the water, and in the maiden, who had heard him neigh so melodiously, rather than in the middle-aged clown, who believed only in cart-horses, or in the old man, who had forgotten the beautiful things of ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... experiences of the Bad Boy and his Dad during their travels with a Circus. The Bad Boy gets his Dad in hot water in every conceivable way, and plays jokes and pranks on everyone, from the Clown to the Manager, and from the Monkey to the Elephant. Rip-roaring, side-splitting fun from beginning ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... Whitmania—all the movements and sensations of the day, social, political, and artistic, in so far as they are follies—have been shot at as they rose. And having conquered his position, Punch has known how to retain it. "The clown," says Oliver Wendell Holmes, "knows his place to be at the tail of the procession." It is to Punch's honour that with conscious dignity—and, of course, with conscious impudence—he took his place at its head. And there he has stayed; and transforming ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... on which sorrow and sickness had entered the Hoogstraten mansion, was followed by a beautiful morning. Holland again became pleasant to the storks, that with a loud, joyous clatter flew clown into the meadows on which the sun was shining. It was one of those days the end of April often bestows on men, as if to show them that they render her too little, her successor too much honor. April can boast that in her house is born the spring, whose vigor is only strengthened ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was to a very popular song of the period called 'The Bull in the China Shop,' words by C. Dibdin, Junior, and music by W. Reeve. Produced about 1808, it was popularized by the celebrated clown ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... Harlequin; not your spangled Harlequin into which modern degeneracy has debased that first-born of Momus, but the genuine original zany of the Commedia, ragged and patched, an impudent, cowardly, blackguardly clown." ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... laughing-stock to the community. The effect this has upon him will depend upon his temperament. Very sensitive and fine natures often instinctively seek to cover the real trouble by exaggerating the defects in every way possible,—making believe they do it all on purpose, and acting the clown and the ruffian, giving way to the irritability natural to the condition with a sort of reckless despair which is sure to be misunderstood and censured by those he loves best. When this stage is reached, ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... a very small boy back before the war, a circus came to town. I remember the clown, whose name was Gullins. My father, John Mappin, was so much like the clown in his ways and sayings, that afterwards everyone started calling him Gullins. This soon became a sort of nickname. Some years after when slaves were freed, they were all registered, most of them taking the family ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... another, riding this way; We soon shall know what he has to say. Courier! what are the tidings to-day? "Christ is arisen!" Whence come you? "From town." Then I do not believe it; away with you, clown. ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Come, look you now, Stead, 'tis not only being tired of service and sharp words, and nips and blows, but I don't like being mocked for having a clown and a lubber for my sweetheart. Oh yes! they do, and there's a skipper and two mates, and a clerk, and a well-to-do locksmith, besides gentlemen's valets and others, I don't account of, who would all cut off their little fingers if ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I see not what I see. Damsel and lover? hear not what I hear. My father hath begotten me in his wrath. I suffer from the things before me, know, Learn nothing; am not worthy to be knight; A churl, a clown!' and in him gloom on gloom Deepen'd: he sharply caught his lance and shield, Nor stay'd to crave permission of the King, But, mad ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... accompanying photograph will appear as if the person photographed is wearing a false face or has his face painted like a clown. On close observation you will notice that the face is made on the bald head of the person sitting behind the table. The eyes, nose and mouth are cut from black paper and pasted on the bald spot. The subject's face is horizontal and resting upon ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... of Prodigal Sons, To-day is a prodigious coxcomb, but To-morrow is a very poltroon, taking fright at the big words of his predecessor. To-day is the truculent captain of old world comedy, To-morrow the clown of modern pantomime. ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... Tom, waving his hand at the man. "How are we to-morrow, as the clown in the circus ...
— The Rover Boys in Camp - or, The Rivals of Pine Island • Edward Stratemeyer
... gen'lemen in dey conve'sition, you Yankee clown? Do you igno' dad you 'ave insult ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... whip, and out from a side place, back of a big screen, came Jack Hopkins dressed like a real clown, leading our old friend Frisky, ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Country • Laura Lee Hope
... to be a clown, Playing tricks around the town, Turning somersaults and springs, As if they were easy things, Laughing morning, noon and night, Being such ...
— Songs for Parents • John Farrar
... deformed in figure—a caricature of a man, His Grace of Richmond was the last degenerate scion of the Stuarts of Richmond-d'Aubigny, a man of depraved tastes and besotted brain, the butt and the clown of Charles's Court. That this middle-aged buffoon should aspire to the hand of the loveliest and most elusive woman in England was only less amazing than that she should smile on his suit. The Court was struck with ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... characterized by such an excess of words, figures and ornaments as to be ridiculous and disgusting. It is like a circus clown dressed up in gold tinsel Dickens gives a fine example of it in Sergeant Buzfuz' speech in the "Pickwick Papers." Among other varieties of style may be mentioned the colloquial, the laconic, the concise, the diffuse, the abrupt the flowing, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... you are to learn what a "Master" is. Here was one man at least, who knew his business, once upon a time! Unaccusably;—none of your fool's heads or clown's hearts can find a fault here! "Dog-fancier,[49] cobbler, tailor, or churl, look here"—says Master Jacopo—"look! I know what a brute is, better than you, I know what a silken tassel is—what a leathern ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... is not to excite fear of supernatural things in my reader, but to show the effect of such fear upon the agents of the story—one a man in sense and firmness, one a man unhinged by remorse, one a stupid, unenquiring clown, one a learned and worthy but ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... could not but ensue. This curiosity was full of kindness; their hearts were a little touched by the ploughman, by his glowing eyes, and by the strange sight of him there among them in the midst of their high civilisation, a rustic clown who knew nothing better than a thatched cottage and a clay floor. No doubt they had the sincerest desire that he should be made to understand how much he was deficient, what a great deal he had to learn, and be ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... with them. When the day for signing arrived, the bridegroom-elect demurred at first to the stringency of the provisions of the marriage-contract; but as upon this point Mr Dutton was found to be inflexible, the handsome, illiterate clown—he was little better—gave up his scruples, the more readily as a life of assured idleness lay before him, from the virtual control he was sure to have over his wife's income. These were the thoughts which passed across ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... the Euryalus brought up above the Third Cataract, don't you? and eighty-one-ton guns at Jakdul? Now, I'm quite satisfied with my breeches.' He turned round gravely to exhibit himself, after the manner of a clown. ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... to London one morning in Spring, Hey derry, ho derry, fal de rai la, Took a fat pig to market, his leg in a string, Hey derry, ho derry, fal de rai la; The clown drove him forward, while piggy, good lack! Lik'd his old home so well, he still tried to ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... another. Nor are sentiments of elevation in themselves turgid and unnatural. Nature is never more truly herself than in her grandest forms. The Apollo of Belvedere (if the universal robber has yet left him at Belvedere) is as much in Nature as any figure from the pencil of Rembrandt or any clown in the rustic revels of Teniers. Indeed, it is when a great nation is in great difficulties that minds must exalt themselves to the occasion, or all is lost. Strong passion under the direction of a feeble reason feeds a low fever, which serves ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Aunt Abby," she said; "you can't go that way. It would be all right to go with Ferdinand, of course, but what could you do when you, reached Newark? Race about on foot, following up this clown, ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... and we are surprised to find many writers looking upon this "Cogito, ergo sum" as constituting the great idea in his system. Surely it is only a statement of universal experience—an epigrammatic form given to the common-sense view of the matter. Any clown would have told him that the assurance of his existence was his consciousness of it; but the clown would not have stated it so well. He would have said, "I know I exist, because I feel ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... illustrations, to the horror of the big-worded Sophists, from dogs, kettles, fishwives, and what not which is vulgar and commonplace? Or did I, in my clumsy attempt to imitate him, make use of a single argument which does not lie, developed or undeveloped, in the Common Sense of every clown; in that human Reason of his, which is part of God's image in him, and in every man? And has not my complaint against Mr. Windrush's school been, that they will not do this; that they will not accept the ground which is common to men as men, but disregard that part of the 'Vox ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... perfectly all right; most natural mistake in the world. I've got a clown costume and I'm going down there myself after a while. Silly idea for a man of my age." He turned to Butterfield. "Better change your mind and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... to throw the ball around the left end. Wadleigh, Hudson, Darrin and Prescott, backed by quarter and left half, presented such a stubborn block that the ball did not get another yard clown the field in two plays. But Pike, who was a hammerer, made a third attempt around that left end. This time he gained but two feet, and ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... be no bearing him. But the truth is, the young man's success and dashing manners pleased his elder companion. He liked to see Pen gay and spirited, and brimful of health, and life, and hope; as a man who has long since left off being amused with clown and harlequin, still gets a pleasure in watching a child at a pantomime. Mr. Pen's former sulkiness disappeared with his better fortune: and he bloomed as the sun ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... one that is foolish, proud, positive, testy; or with a superior, or a clown, in matter ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... Vice represented the leading spirit of evil in any particular play, sometimes Fraud, Covetousness, Pride, Iniquity, or Hypocrisy. It was the business of the Vice to annoy the Virtues and to be constantly playing pranks. The Vice was the predecessor of the clown and the fool upon the stage. The Vice also amused the audience by tormenting the Devil, belaboring him with a sword of lath, sticking thorns into him, and making him roar with pain. Sometimes the Devil would be kicked down Hell Mouth by the offended ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... hands loudly together in protest. "Ay, by the gods, much better. She is far too fair for the first sweetness of her youth to be wasted on a clumsy clown. We are ourselves indifferent good at this taming and the rest, and, like a loyal subject, I will gladly serve the King in this." He advanced towards Perpetua, but Robert instantly came ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... ruffians, or wandering comedians that were hated, or scorned, pitied, embraced, conventionalized. There's not a notion in this book that has a more frightful, or ridiculous, mien than had the notion of human footprints in rocks, when that now respectabilized ruffian, or clown, was first heard from. It seems bewildering to one whose interests are not scientific that such rows should be raised over such trifles: but the feeling of a systematist toward such an intruder is just about what anyone's would be if ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... Brother North Wind had blown away enough of the snow to make walking fairly easy. They soon found that their hope that they would find some of their neighbors too weak to escape was quite in vain. When jolly, round, red Mr. Sun dropped clown behind the Purple Hills to go to bed, their stomachs were quite as empty as when ...
— Old Granny Fox • Thornton W. Burgess
... you think you are made of—india-rubber? Did you suppose that you would drop on to the deck and bounce up again, to come down then on your feet and strike an attitude like a clown in a pantomime? ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... were an English lady. I asked myself what was the right thing to do, and I decided that though you would consider me an ill-mannered, churlish clown, I would refuse those gracious, charming advances which you in your charity made. Our paths in life were destined to be utterly apart and divided, and what could it matter to you—the behavior of an insignificant ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... Hugh, because you gave Nick such a beautiful trouncing the other night, so I was told. It was hard luck that I could only catch a word now and then, for some of the boys were calling out to each other; and that silly clown, Claude Hastings, had begun to sing one of his comic songs, while he capered around like a baboon. But I did hear Nick say the words: 'Get even,' 'show him who's who in this burgh,' and 'Belgian hares.' Do they put you ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... from this ambition. When the first negro minstrel show visited Hannibal and had gone, he yearned for a brief period to be a magnificent "middle man" or even the "end-man" of that combination; when the circus came and went, he dreamed of the day when, a capering frescoed clown, he would set crowded tiers of spectators guffawing at his humor; when the traveling hypnotist arrived, he volunteered as a subject, and amazed the audience by the marvel of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... some high, some low, some red, some green, or yellow as it chanced, with horses few or many, often superior animals—stylish, fast, and sound; and again, the most diminutive of ponies, such as Monsieur the Clown drives into the ring of his canvass coliseum when he utters the pleasant salute of "Here I am, with all my little family?" This morning we have the old, familiar stage-coach of Yankee land—red, picked out with yellow; high, narrow, iron steps; broad thoroughbraces; ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... continued Abel, with what would be called in animals an ugly expression—"Belch is the clown, and they left him off easy. The Party is like the old kings, it keeps a good many fools to make ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... than he was ever before in his life, was conducted down below to the servants' quarters. Although they were town servants, and would certainly have disdained to speak to a mere beggar-boy, or to a young country clown, there was something in Dermot's unaffected manner and appearance which won their regard, and they treated him with far more kindness and attention than would ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston
... son) is really an exquisite droll, and I don't remember to have seen him in better form. He has some of the authentic ingredients of the old circus clown—a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... buffoon appears on the stage with head shaved close. "Why is the clown mourning?" "Because oil is so dear." "Why is oil dear?" "On account of the Jews. On the Sabbath day they consume everything they earn during the week. Not a stick of wood is left to make fire whereby to cook their meals. They are forced to burn their beds for fuel, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... her court; though he did certainly flatter her after a fashion in which few queens can be flattered. His description of the belligerent old Gorgon as the "Fair Vestal throned by the West" seems like the poetry and fancy of the beautiful Fairy Queen wasted upon the half-brute clown:— ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... the English Fairy court was the celebrated Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, who to the elves acted in some measure as the jester or clown of the company—(a character then to be found in the establishment of every person of quality)—or to use a more modern comparison, resembled the Pierrot of the pantomime. His jests were of the most simple and at the same time the broadest comic character—to ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... hands to heaven. The three of us went out of the door and walked. There was a snowy place in front of the church all party-colored like a clown's coat,—scarlet capotes, yellow capotes, and blue capotes, and bright silk handkerchiefs. They surrounded the Colonel. Pardieu, what was he to do now? For the British governor and his savages were coming to take revenge on them because, in their ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... child[4] Has been known to run wild At his too near approach, Her fear of him such, And to shriek and to howl And return scowl for scowl. Indeed few dare him face, And all shun his embrace; For though pleasant his smile, Yet one thinks all the while Of that terrible frown, Which the hardiest clown, Though a stout hearted man, Will avoid if he can. And though many maintain That he gives needless pain, I confess I admire This venerable sire. True his language is harsh, And his conduct oft rash, ...
— The Kings and Queens of England with Other Poems • Mary Ann H. T. Bigelow
... was a beautiful Queen mated with James VI, a pedant and a clown. On the other side were, first the Bonny Earl, then the Earl of Gowrie, both young, brave, handsome, both suddenly slain by the King's friends: none knew why. The opinion of the godly, of the Kirk, of the people, and even of politicians, leaped to the erroneous conclusion ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... abject than the union of elaborate and recherche arrangements with an old and obvious point? The clown with the red-hot poker and the string of sausages is all very well in his way. But think of a string of pate de foie gras sausages at a guinea a piece! Think of a red-hot poker cut out of a single ruby! Imagine such fantasticalities ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... That love their voices more than duty, learn With whom they deal, dismiss'd in shame to live No wiser than their mothers, household stuff, Live chattels, mincers of each other's fame, Full of weak poison, turnspits for the clown, The drunkard's football, laughing-stocks of Time, Whose brains are in their hands and in their heels, But fit to flaunt, to dress, to dance, to thrum, To tramp, to scream, to burnish, and to scour For ever slaves at ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... the rolling eyes and gait and deathly treacherous knife, philogynist sans phrase; and Pedro, their groom, a reincarnated Caliban. It may also be noted that Heyst has a freak servant, the disappearing Wang, whom the adapter uses, I suppose legitimately, as a kind of clown. And then, finally, there is a charming and unusual heroine, Lena, still in her teens, but of real flesh and blood, innocent and persecuted, daughter of a drunken fiddler (deceased), herself fiddling in a tenth-rate orchestra at Schomberg's hotel, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... thine To save a life, and a love to win. No! no! the dastard kestrel kite Aye hugs the earth in his stealthy flight. Hope gone! the pool at the otter's cave Will prove the Ladye Tomasine's grave. Ho! ho! see yonder comes rushing down A lithe young hind, though a simple clown— Off bonnet and shoes, and coat and vest, A plunge! and he holds her round the waist! Three strokes of his arm, with his beautiful prize All safe, although faint, on the bank she lies! A cottager's wife came running down, "Take care of the ladye," said the clown. He has donned his clothes, and away ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... Plays were grotesque enough—made by common people for the instruction of common people. Even amid the pathos of divine suffering the peasants must be amused. Care was taken that the character of Judas should meet this demand. So Judas was made at once a traitor and a clown. His pathway was beset by devils of the most ridiculous sort. And when at last he hung himself on the stage, his body burst open, and the long links of sausages which represented intestines were devoured by the imps amid the laughter and delight of ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... elemental forces, we see a dark mass, that glows dully. We can hardly believe that here is the origin of the explosions that shake the island, and are inclined to consider the demon of the volcano rather as a mischievous clown than a thundering, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... the evening. He was somewhat limp after a day of mea culpas! and she, a quarter of an hour before the time for his reappearance, had powdered her nose—which, she knew, gave her an expression half amusing, half piteous, just like that of the clown who is playing his tricks at the circus while his little daughter is dying at home. "Hello, Goosie," she said breathlessly (also she had rubbed a trace of rouge under her eyes); "hello, just in time for dinner! Made a fine chocolate cake. ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... Memory of Her Late Royal Highness the Princess Dowager of Wales Song ('Let School-masters,' &c.) Epilogue to 'She Stoops to Conquer' Retaliation Song ('Ah, me! when shall I marry me?') Translation ('Chaste are their instincts') The Haunch of Venison Epitaph on Thomas Parnell The Clown's Reply Epitaph on Edward Purdon Epilogue for Lee Lewes Epilogue written for 'She Stoops to Conquer' (1) Epilogue written for 'She Stoops to Conquer' (2) The Captivity. An Oratorio Verses in Reply to an Invitation to Dinner Letter in Prose and Verse to Mrs. Bunbury ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... Fitzjames, 'can fail to be touched' when he sees an eminent lawyer 'bending the whole force of his mind to understand the confused, bewildered, wearisome, and half-articulate mixture of question and statement which some wretched clown pours out in the agony of his terror and confusion.' The latitude allowed in such cases is highly honourable. 'Hardly anything short of wilful misbehaviour, such as gross insults to the court or abuse of a witness, will draw upon (the prisoner) the ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... their actions, and by their bravery of mind, that it is life that is a calamity to men, and not death; for this last affords our souls their liberty, and sends them by a removal into their own place of purity, where they are to be insensible of all sorts of misery; for while souls are tied clown to a mortal body, they are partakers of its miseries; and really, to speak the truth, they are themselves dead; for the union of what is divine to what is mortal is disagreeable. It is true, the power of the soul is great, even when it is imprisoned in a mortal body; for by moving ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... hand, of which there exists a cast, without perceiving at once its capabilities. It was indeed small, but at the same time it was thin, light, delicately articulated, and, if I may say so, highly expressive. Chopin's whole body was extraordinarily flexible. According to Gutmann, he could, like a clown, throw his legs over his shoulders. After this we may easily imagine how great must have been the flexibility of his hands, those members of his body which he had specially trained all his life. Indeed, the startlingly wide-spread ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... The conventional dress of the court fool, or jester, of the Middle Ages, and, after him, of the stage clown, consisted of the "fool's cap" and suit of motley, ornamented with ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... were going to give a magic lantern show. Or is it for some new kinds of moving pictures? Say, do you remember the time we gave a show in the barn, and charged a nickel to come in? You were the clown, and—" ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... Flemish clown, noble sir," answered Dennis, as much overjoyed as if he had obtained some important advantage; "but I must needs say he is as stout and true as any whom you might trust; and, besides, his own shrewdness will teach him there is more to be gained by defending such a castle as this, ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... goes a-tumbling through the hollow And trackless empyrean like a clown, Head pointed to the earth where weaklings wallow, Feet up toward the stars; not such renown Even our lord himself, the bright Apollo, Gets in his gilded car. For one bob down You shall behold the thing." "Right-o," I said, Clapping the old brown ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various
... out of a fourteenth century book, but dad looked like a clown in a circus. One of dad's calves made him look as though he had a milk leg, cause the padding would not stay around where the calf ought to be, but worked around towards his shin. We went to Marlboro House in a hansom cab, and all the way there the driver kept looking down from the hurricane ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... was playing execrably on Mademoiselle de Longueville's guitar. Surrounding were the younger courtiers and ladies, who also were enjoying the affair. There are few things which amuse young people as much as the sight of an elderly, dignified man making a clown ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... she could not recognise any one as she looked round upon Turks, clowns, Indians, the tinselled, sequined, beaded, ragged flutter of the room, then from the coloured and composite clothing of a footballer, clown or jockey grinned the round face and owlish eyes of little Duval, who flew to her at once to whisper compliments and stumble on the swelling fortress of her white skirt. She realised dimly from him that her dress was as beautiful ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... for these tidings. Now have I put on a fool's cap that these Genoese may have wherewith to rack their wits. Next I will shave my head, that they may play Merry Andrew to my Clown. How did the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... most complete champion that ever I heard!—Steel, if thou turn the edge, or cut not out the burly-boned clown in chines of beef ere thou sleep in thy sheath, I beseech God on my knees thou mayst be turn'd to hobnails.—[Here they fight. Cade falls.] O, I am slain! famine and no other hath slain me; let ten thousand devils come against me, and give ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... the audience was actually fooled into holding its breath. Then Bob's pet collie did an act, and the juggler juggled, in his turban, and some gym "stars" did turns on bars and swings. And there was an abundance of peanuts and pink lemonade, and a clown and a band; and Emily's introductions were alone well worth the ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... gross absurdities, how all their plays be neither right tragedies nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in the clown by head and shoulders to play a part in majestical matters, with neither decency nor discretion; so as neither the admiration and commiseration, nor the right sportfulness, is by their mongrel tragi-comedy obtained. I know Apuleius did somewhat ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
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