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More "Farcical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... web, and out of his thought makes something that shall instruct or thrill us. To protect our 'bone,' we have the police, invented for the express purpose. To protect the book, we have none but farcical means. Place a few bricks one atop the other; join them with mortar; and the law will defend your wall. Build up in writing an edifice of your thoughts; and it will be open to any one, without serious impediment, ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... discerning in them all the powers which afterwards produced "Evelina" and "Cecilia"; the quickness in catching every odd peculiarity of character and manner; the skill in grouping; the humour, often richly comic, sometimes even farcical. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... like Kelly, with old jeu-d'esprits, Like Dibdin, may tell of each farcical frolic; Or kindly inform us, like Madame Genlis,[1] That gingerbread-cakes always ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the beast's mouth. The lion's smile was not, properly speaking, a smile at all, chevalier; it was the torture which came of snuff getting into its nostrils, and when the beast made that uncanny noise and snapped its jaws together, it was simply the outcome of a sneeze. The thing would be farcical if it were not that tragedy hangs on the thread of it, and that a life, a useful human life, was destroyed by means of it. Yes, it was clever, it was diabolically clever; but you know what Bobby Burns says about the best laid schemes of mice and men. There's ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... of my art, unless I were to omit some annoying incidents which have happened in the course of my troubled career. One of these, which I am about to describe, brought me into the greatest risk of my life. I have already told the story of the artists' club, and of the farcical adventures which happened owing to the woman whom I mentioned, Pantasilea, the one who felt for me that false and fulsome love. She was furiously enraged because of the pleasant trick by which I brought Diego to our banquet, and she swore to be revenged on me. How she did so is mixed ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... historians and dramatists and satirists. He loves a monologue that passes from mockery to regret, that gathers up by the way anecdote and history and essay and foolery, that is half a narrative of things seen and half an irresponsible imagination. He can describe a runaway horse with the farcical realism of the authors of Some Experiences of an Irish R.M., can parody a judge, can paint a portrait, and can steep a landscape in vision. Two recent critics have described him as "the best English prose writer since Dryden," but that only means that Mr. Belloc's rush ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... although it violates that most necessary rule of dramatic art, declaring no play should contain an effect, a line, a scene or an act which does not bear on the end in view by developing either the characters or the action. The entire second act, containing the farcical examination-scene, is useless. Robertson again sinned in this way in the Nightingale: although it had no effect on the plot, although it was entirely unnecessary, he introduced a pretty tableau representing the heroine, a lovely prima-donna, singing under the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... gospels. St. Matthew would as soon have thought of applying such adjectives to Judas Maccabeus as to Jesus; and even St. Luke, who makes Jesus polite and gracious, does not make him meek. The picture of him as an English curate of the farcical comedy type, too meek to fight a policeman, and everybody's butt, may be useful in the nursery to soften children; but that such a figure could ever have become a centre of the world's attention is too absurd ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... up the spring of my spirits, and sometimes fear that I cannot go through with the engagements of the winter. But I have never stopped yet in fulfilling what I have undertaken, and hope I shall not be compelled to now. How farcical seems the preparation needed to gain a few moments' life; yet just so the plant works all the year round for ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... in Hamlet when there has been no love. And he had always held his uncle in slight esteem—foreboded something from his smiling insincerity. He never mentions him without an expression of contempt, hardly acknowledges him as king; he is a thing—of nothing—a farcical monarch—"a peacock"—and, in this particular act, no dread usurper, but a "cut-purse of the realm." Whether he designed to wait or was prepared to strike, his future was still intact, his energy unimpaired. His mother remained to him, now doubly dear and doubly great, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... arms compelled his nobles to desist from robbing the merchants, dealers, and the poor of their property. At this period the Fete des Fous, or feast of madmen was celebrated to its full extent, and anything more absurd, more farcical, or more irreverential cannot well be imagined. Dulaure, in his voluminous History of Paris, gives a most detailed account of this extraordinary mockery, of which I will give my readers a ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... to the core of her being and had to hold more tightly to the rope to support herself. The two wise guys mocked openly. To the wise guys, expert connoisseurs of swat, the thing had appeared richly farcical. They seemed to consider the blow, administered to a third party and not to themselves, hardly worth calling a blow at all. Two more, landing as quickly and neatly as the first, left them ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... growing up almost unnoticed beside classical Hebrew literature, we find popular plays, comedies, chiefly farces for the Purim carnival. The first of them, "The Sale of Joseph" (Mekirath Yoseph, 1710), treats the biblical narrative in the form and spirit of the German farcical clown dialogues, Pickelhering (Merry-Andrew), borrowed from the latter, being Potiphar's servant and counsellor. No dramatic or poetic value of any kind attaches to the play. It is as trivial as any of its models, the German clown comedies, and possesses interest ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... by man's complex actions, no longer merely by his gestures. We instinctively feel that the usual devices of comedy, the periodical repetition of a word or a scene, the systematic inversion of the parts, the geometrical development of a farcical misunderstanding, and many other stage contrivances, must derive their comic force from the same source,—the art of the playwright probably consisting in setting before us an obvious clockwork arrangement of human events, while carefully ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... me go on. I want, among other things, to insist upon the fateful power of trivial incidents. No one has yet dared to do this seriously. It has often been done in farce, and that's why farcical writing so often makes one melancholy. You know my stock instances of the kind of thing I mean. There was poor Allen, who lost the most valuable opportunity of his life because he hadn't a clean shirt to put on; and Williamson, who would probably have married that rich girl but for the grain ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... to his influence that plain citizens hymned the glories of "Guillotina, the Tenth Muse," and fell down in worship before a Phrygian cap. It was due to his influence that in 1793 the death of Louis XVI. was celebrated throughout the American continent with grotesque symbolism and farcical solemnity. A single instance is enough to prove the malign effect of Jefferson's teaching. At Philadelphia the head of a pig was severed from its body, and saluted as an ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... ventured out of an antiquity more or less remote. Thus it is easy to conceive the delight of the music-loving people of Naples when they found that the opera which they adored could be enjoyed in combination with a mirthful and even farcical story, interpreted by characters who might have stepped out of one of their own market-places. But, apart from the freedom and variety of the subjects with which it dealt, the development of opera buffa gave rise to an art-form which is of the utmost importance to the ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... still in his hand, advanced to the bridge table. Strolling from player to player he made mental photographs of each hand, then took his stand behind Penny's chair to observe the horribly farcical playing of it. Poor little Penny! he reflected. She hadn't had a chance against that dumb-bell across the table from her. Fancy anyone's doubling a little slam bid on a hand like Carolyn Drake's—or even ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... razor, it turned out, was untempered and dull and was used to imbue boy apprentices with the confidence of the experienced barber. Hence it was in a sheath and, for the reason given above, the servant was not alarmed when the blade was snatched nor did Eumolpus break in upon this farcical ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... change of background the photoartists also gained a rapidity of motion which leaves actual men behind. He needs only to turn the crank of the apparatus more quickly and the whole rhythm of the performance can be brought to a speed which may strikingly aid the farcical humor of the scene. And from here it was only a step to the performance of actions which could not be carried out in nature at all. At first this idea was made serviceable to rather rough comic effects. The policeman climbed up ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... the local bore, in the hope that she may end his career. Once started on the wrong tack, he works out his evidence with convincing logic, and ties up the whole neighbourhood in the toils of his misconception. The book is full of the wittiest dialogue and the most farcical situations. It will be as certain to please all lovers of Irish humour as the immortal "Experiences of ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... Christmas Eve party, and heard six people relate their adventures with spirits, you do not require to hear any more ghost stories. To listen to any further ghost stories after that would be like sitting out two farcical comedies, or taking in two comic journals; the repetition ...
— Told After Supper • Jerome K. Jerome
... make her refrain from joining any company which might be in the house;—nothing;—not even O'Grady himself. At such times, too, she became strangely excited, and invariably executed one piece of farcical absurdity, of which, however, the family contrived to confine the exercise to her own room. It was wearing on her head a tin concern, something like a chimney-cowl, ornamented by a small weathercock, after the fashion of those which surmount ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... being able to raise the money to send her to the south of France without delay. The author mentioned that Mathias had a sick wife, but that was all. The whole treatment of the story in fiction form, moreover, was farcical, such names as "Mr. Parker" being intermingled with those of the well-known characters, "Mathias," "Christian," and "Annette," while the wealthy, dignified Polish Jew was turned into a typical East-side clothing merchant. The real fault lay with the producer who, ignoring the ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... allowed to be known to the commanding general or the most responsible staff officer. Grant made the sensible suggestion that the key be given to military officers only, and be kept from the civilian operators; but Mr. Stanton adhered to the farcical notion of carrying on a cipher correspondence which should be open to the irresponsible transmitter, but secret as to the responsible commanding general to whom it was addressed. If it were meant for a system of espionage upon the general by thus inseparably tying to him ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... table rappings, and such things, because they were undignified, because the ghosts cracked jokes or waltzed with dinner-tables. I do not share this objection in the least. I wish the spirits were more farcical than they are. That they should make more jokes and better ones, would be my suggestion. For almost all the spiritualism of our time, in so far as it is new, is solemn and sad. Some Pagan gods were lawless, and some Christian saints were a little too serious; but the spirits of modern spiritualism ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... will say request. As I tell you, your presence in this community is distasteful to me, and your farcical marriage stands directly opposed to my plans. But I would not violate the law and commit a misdemeanor to drive you off. You have reasons for believing that ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... quite settle this question; for there is wit which makes us laugh, and there is humor which does not. On the whole, it is as to what is purely wit that we are ever the most at fault. Certain phases of humor we cannot mistake,—especially those which are broadly comic or farcical. But sometimes we meet with incidents or scenes which have more in them of the pathetic than the comic, that we must still rank with the humorous. Here is a case in point. A time was when it was a penal offence in Ireland for a priest to say Mass, and under particular circumstances a capital felony. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... fellow," said Moore, quite coolly and dryly; "you don't care for showing me that you are a double-dyed hypocrite, that your trade is fraud. You expect indeed to make me laugh at the cleverness with which you play your coarsely farcical part, while at the same time you think you are deceiving the men ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Mr. Machin's room?" he continued, imitating with a broad farcical effect the acute Kensingtonianism of Mr. Marrier's tones. "Is Miss Ra-ose Euclid there? Oh! She is! Well, you tell her that Sir John Pilgrim's private secretary wishes to speak to her? Thanks. All right. I'll hold ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... the solitary poet in hell, the strange shapes pass. The conclusion of this singular poem is entirely farcical. The devil is ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Continent—wild, desolate stretches where a man can disappear without leaving the faintest trace of the manner of his presumed death, while in German East there were unscrupulous despots—the disciples of atrocious kultur—only too ready to condemn an Englishman without even the farcical formality of a court-martial. ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... all their extravagances of expression and questionable taste, the numerous stories which Southey delighted to versify on themes demoniac and diabolical, from the Devil's Walk to the True Ballad of St Antidius, are fraught with farcical import, and have an individual ludicrousness all their own. That he could succeed tolerably in the mock-heroic vein, may be seen in his parody on Pindar's ariston men hydor, entitled Gooseberry Pie, and in some of the occasional pieces called Nondescripts. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... "Bataille de dames" and those other plays, his was the feminine part. The working up of the dramatic conception, the contrast of political and social antagonisms, the "characters," if we may call them so, of Henri and Montrichard, the farcical caricature of De Grignon, these are all Scribe's, and they make up the skeleton, perhaps even the flesh and blood, of the comedy: but its spirit, its soul, lies in the delicate touches that give a sympathetic charm to the conquest of De Grignon's timidity by his love; it lies ...
— Bataille De Dames • Eugene Scribe and Ernest Legouve
... many farcical features, and Miss Todd had unwittingly been so much to blame for it, that one can easily see that it might have had considerable influence on the relations of the two young people. However that may be, something had ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... have been remunerated like the managers of a steel trust? Would the paper have been so precious and costly? Would the illustrations have so enriched photographers? And would the amanuensis have made L350 more out of the thing then Mr. Murray himself? The price was not extortionate. But it was farcical. The entire rigmarole combines to throw into dazzling prominence the fact that modern literature in this country is still absolutely undemocratic. The time will come, and much sooner than many august mandarins anticipate, when such a book as the "Letters of Queen Victoria" will be issued ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... dictate, and I know that the tempers of you men of Theos are easily kindled. Nicholas of Reist brings to-day a forgotten descendant of the Tyrnaus family, and with your consent would make him King. I say with your consent, because the House of Laws is nothing to-day but a farcical assembly, and they will do what Reist bids them. The real decision rests with you. Listen. Russia will refuse to recognize this man. If you accept him her restraining hand upon Turkey will be removed. Russia herself may not think it worth while to move against you, but even now in secret ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... must suffer, even though Henry Irving himself be cast for the title-role." Anyone going to the theatre in this spirit would be likely to be less disappointed by performances that were comic or even frankly farcical. Latterly, when he grew slightly deaf, listening to any kind of piece became too much of an effort; nevertheless, he continued to the last the habit of going to one pantomime ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... of Punch," was Lemon's;[29] but neither then nor after did he write much for it, though he still contributed a certain amount of graceful, serious verse, under the title of "Songs for the Sentimental," with a farcical last line which affects the reader suddenly like a cold douche. He wrote, as well, many short epigrams, paragraphs, and the like, besides being a fairly prolific suggestor of the cartoons; but the sum of his literary ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... were never still. It was like the St. Vitus disease. Tommies and Jocks saluted every subaltern with an automatic gesture of convulsive energy. Every subaltern acknowledged these movements and in turn saluted a multitude of majors, colonels, and generals. The thing became farcical, a monstrous absurdity of human relationship, yet pleasing to the vanity of men lifted up above the lowest caste. It seemed to me an intensification of the snob instinct in the soul of man. Only the Australians stood out against it, and went by all officers except their ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... on in terse military German which eighty per cent. of all Russian officers know and the trend of which is never misunderstood. I pointed out that any further encroaching would be resented in a most drastic and sudden manner. The usual farcical exchange of cards, permitting all sorts of bluffs, does not impress a Russian, but the imminent chance of blows from fists does. A pair of astonished bulging eyes, a muttered ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... on the great occasion. All the scenes came from Shakespeare's repertory, and it is reasonable to infer that they were drawn from Love's Labour's Lost, which was always popular in later years at Elizabeth's Court, and from The Comedy of Errors, where the farcical confusions and horse-play were after the queen's own heart and robust taste. But nothing can be stated with absolute certainty except that on December 29 Shakespeare travelled up the river from Greenwich to London with a heavier ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... still retained the trace of that extraordinary symmetry he had once possessed, and his features were yet handsome, though the complexion had grown coarse and florid, and the expression had settled into a broad, hardy, farcical mixture of ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Ramsgate sands looking for Toole. I did not really expect to see him, and I had no reason to believe he was in Ramsgate, but I thought if providence were kind to him it might throw him in my way. I wanted to do him a good turn. I had written a three-act farcical comedy at the request of an amateur dramatic club. I had written out all the parts, and I think there were rehearsals. But the play was never produced. In the light of after knowledge I suspect some of those actors must have been of quite professional calibre. You understand, therefore, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... cling to an ideal and fight for it, could not she, who had all the world esteemed worth while, be woman enough to do the same? The direction of her thought seemed to have changed. She had been ready for rebellion. Three months of the old life had shown her that for her it was empty, vain, farcical, without one redeeming feature. The naked truth was brutal, but it cut clean to wholesome consciousness. Such so-called social life as she had plunged into deliberately to forget her unhappiness had ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... and unlawful arts, and condemned and executed. In that play there can be little hesitation in ascribing to Heywood the scenes in which Mr. Generous and his wife are the interlocutors, and to Broome, Heywood's coadjutor, the subordinate and farcical portions. It is a very unequal performance, but not destitute of those fine touches, which Heywood is never without, in the characters of English country gentlemen and the pathos of domestic tragedy. The following scene, which I am tempted to extract, though very ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... which are most like a very shuffling anapaest—the verse which appears in the comedies of Udall and Still—held its ground. We have it in the morality of the New Custom, printed in 1573, but no doubt written earlier, in the Interlude of The Trial of Treasure, in the farcical comedy of Like Will to Like, a coarse but lively piece, by Ulpian Fulwell (1568). In the very curious tragi-comedy of Cambyses this doggerel appears partly, but is alternated with the less lawless but scarcely more suitable "fourteener" (divided ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... was allowed to look for himself. He was conducted to the great vaulted rooms of the Temple, to the vast ballrooms of the Palais Cond, where herded the condemned and those still awaiting trial; he was allowed to witness there the grim farcical tragedies, with which the captives beguiled the few hours which ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... The Story of this farcical ballad has long been popular in many lands, European and Oriental, and has been introduced as an episode in English, French, and German plays. A close parallel to the ballad may be found in Straparola, Day ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... later General Arnold's home on the Schuylkill. In the centre of a large lawn stood a double mansion of stone, and a little to each side were seen outhouses for servants and kitchen use. The open space toward the water was extensive enough to admit of the farcical tilting of the afternoon. A great variety of evergreen trees and shrubs gave the house a more shaded look than the season would otherwise have afforded. Among these were countless lanterns illuminating the grounds, and ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... Sarum, with all its grand recollections, is but a collection of mounds and hollows,—as much a tomb of its past as Birs Nimroud of that great city, Nineveh. Old Sarum is now best remembered by its long-surviving privilege, as a borough, of sending two members to Parliament. The farcical ceremony of electing two representatives who had no real constituency behind them was put an end to by ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... noted as a droll. A grin was as much a part of his stock apparel as tow breeches or a palm-leaf hat. The negro, too, had from time immemorial been portrayed upon the stage and in fiction as an irrepressible and inimitably farcical fellow. But the "Southern gentleman" was a man of different kidney from either of these. A sardonic dignity hedged him about with peculiar sacredness. He was chivalrous and baronial in his instincts, surroundings, and characteristics. He was nervous, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... their limited opportunities to judge correctly, the appropriations had not been judiciously made during the past few years, determined to appoint this Committee from among the Pastors. The Elders, well knowing that the farcical proceeding would in time come to naught, concluded to offer no opposition to the movement. The Committee was accordingly appointed and proceeded to the discharge of its duties. At the first meeting, however, it was found that the Committee was unable to proceed ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... boisterous kind was needed, and this was supplied by Eaton Stannard Barrett, who, in 1813—five years before Northanger Abbey appeared—published The Heroine or The Adventures of Cherubina. In this farcical romance it is clearly Barrett's intention to make so vigorous an onslaught that "the Selinas, Evelinas, and Malvinas who faint and blush and weep through four half-bound octavos" shall be, like Catherine Morland, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... called "Lulu; oder, Die Zauberflote," written by Liebeskind, but published by Wieland in a volume of Orientalia entitled "Dschinnistan." He had got pretty deep in his work when a rival manager brought out an adaptation of the same story, with music by Wenzel Muller. The farcical character of the piece is indicated by its title, which was "Kasper, der Fagottist; oder, Die Zauberzither"; but it made so striking a success that Schikaneder feared to enter the lists against it with an opera drawn from the same ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... on. It is a favorite piece for charitable benefits, and a number of well-known performers often volunteer to figure as "Gentlemen of the Jury." Buzfuz has been often played by Mr. Toole, but his too farcical methods scarcely enhanced the part. The easiness of comedy is essential. That sound player Mr. James Fernander is the best ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... cover her from the gaze of men. She upbraided herself for her blindness to the most obviously important aspect of the situation. Now that she saw it, her zeal to "pay," by doing penance in public, became tragic and farcical at once. The absurdity of making satisfaction to Mrs. Rodman and Mrs. Clay, to Fanny Burnaby and the Brown girls, by calling in the law, when less suffering—to her father at least—would give them actual cash, was not the least element ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... private meeting to attend to-night. Should he attend it or not? His situation had become farcical. Was it not his plain duty to withdraw at once from the political contest, that a serious candidate might as soon as possible take his place? Where could he discern even the glimmer of a hope in this sudden darkness? His heart was ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... (DUCKWORTH) Mr. MAURICE BARING travels by an easy road to humour, and he does not pound it with too laborious feet. This is perhaps a fortunate thing, for a farcical reconstruction of history in the light of modern sentiment and circumstances might easily tire; a Comic History of England, for instance, is stiffer reading to-day than GARDNER or GREEN. Sometimes, however, Mr. BARING seems to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various
... des Academistes; these and other follies of the time are presented with spirit in Desmaret's remarkable comedy, Les Visionnaires. If we add, for sake of its study of the peasant in the character of Mathieu Gareau, the farcical Pedant Joue of Cyrano, we have named the most notable comedies of the years which preceded Les ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... spirit of good-will, the grace of universal sympathy, was really growing in the world, and that it was only our awkwardness that, by striving to cram it all for a year into twenty-four hours, made it seem a little farcical. And everybody knows that when goodness becomes fashionable, goodness is likely to suffer a little. A virtue overdone falls on t'other side. And a holiday that takes on such proportions that the Express companies and the Post-office cannot handle it is in danger of a collapse. In consideration ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... they have been drugging the public mind of their section for more than thirty years, and until at length they have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the Government the day after some assemblage of men have enacted the farcical pretense of taking their State out of the Union who could have been brought to no such ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... at the irony of the argument, and their laugh did much to do away with the constraint, the tension of their mood. More gayly she mentioned certain farcical incidents. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... and the character interest carried on too far not to be seen to be inconsistent interests? Or is the secret of the Art of the Play the reconciliation and harmony of the farcical and ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... hardly tell which way to move.—However, I shall not devote myself to his affairs to-day; therefore I am at your service; and as time is but short with us, let us make good use of it. The tragedy of the duel having ended most comically, I am prepared for any thing farcical; therefore say the word, and I am your man for a toddle, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... from "a couple of years with the pork-and-beaners in California," as he explained, but with a magnificent body. He also lived at the Annexe, and did his training in the garden under Afa's clever hands. The Dummy must have admired him, for he would watch him exercising and boxing for hours, and make farcical sounds and grotesque gestures to indicate his understanding of the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... day the peace Congress was opened at Prague. Its proceedings were farcical from the outset. Only Anstett and Humboldt, the Russian and Prussian envoys, were at hand; and at the appointment of the former, an Alsatian by birth, Napoleon expressed great annoyance. The difficulties about the armistice ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... there was a "gala" performance at the Royal Opera, the play presented being, of all things in the world, Auber's "Bronze Horse," which is a farcical Chinese fairy tale set to very light and pleasing music. The stage setting was gorgeous, but the audience was still more so, delegates from all the greater powers of the world being present, including the heirs to the British and Italian thrones, the Grand Duke Constantine of Russia, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... monstrous that the modern man, who was pre-eminently capable of realising the strangest and most contradictory beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic, and the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcical bathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat. He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist in raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist. It is indeed difficult to account for the clinging curse ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... every night in the theatres oldfashioned farcical comedies, in which a bedroom, with four doors on each side and a practicable window in the middle, was understood to resemble exactly the bedroom in the flats beneath and above, all three inhabited by couples consumed with jealousy. When these people came home drunk at night; mistook ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... Gilbert and Vaucheray was becoming worse and worse, the days were slipping by, and not an hour passed without his asking himself, in anguish, whether all his efforts—granting that he succeeded—would not end in farcical results, absolutely foreign to the aim which ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... days since the funeral and two days since Mike Prim bent listening with such furious excitement at the keyhole of Judge Regis's office. Jordantown had become the stage upon which a mystery play was being enacted with all the farcical features of a comedy. Every man, especially, was doing exactly what he would have done and said if there had been footlights and an audience in front, only not one of them knew that this was so. Providence is the Great ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... both in its puns and in its situations. The plays on words can seldom be adequately reproduced in translation, but the situations are independent of language. And Shudraka's humor runs the whole gamut, from grim to farcical, from satirical to quaint. Its variety and keenness are such that King Shudraka need not fear a comparison with the greatest ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... be asked, 'Why does Innocent Smith continue far into his middle age a farcical existence, that exposes him to so many false charges?' To this I merely answer that he does it because he really is happy, because he really is hilarious, because he really is a man and alive. He is so young that climbing garden trees and playing ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... the most pathetic kind is interwoven with low comedy—the most lofty sentiments, the most exalted virtues, and heroism and magnanimity strained almost beyond the limits of probability, are checkered by uncouth pleasantries, and the most pathetic incidents intruded upon and interrupted by the farcical conundrums of MUG, a low cockney, who has become secretary of state to the king of the Mandingoes. Thus, oscillating between Kotesbue and O'Keefe, giving now a layer of exalted sentiment, and then a layer of mere farce, has Mr. C. raised a ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... her her letters (I heard the men in that lonely ship were dying of fever at the rate of three a day) and went on. We called at some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... madness, rank lunacy!' Stafforth was saying vehemently. 'Illegal and impossible, it will spell disgrace and misfortune to us all. The Emperor will interfere, for this is going too far. We must hinder this farcical ceremony; his Highness cannot marry two wives! It will be Moempelgard over again! Think how absurd, Graevenitz! Cannot you see that this ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... There is something absolutely farcical in Stanley's logic. While he was praying to God, millions of other persons were engaged in the same occupation. Agonised mothers were beseeching God to spare their dear children; wives were imploring him to restore the bread-winner of the family ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... thank you for your song, or, rather, your two songs,—your new song on love, and your old song on religion. [1] I admire the first sincerely, and in turn call upon you to admire the following on Anacreon Moore's new operatic farce, [2] or farcical ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... is nothing, a mere tempest in a tea-pot. Whom do they hope to humbug in this way? The disgrace is nameless, only they are callous enough not to feel it. Their cheeks can no more redden.... However, Stanton is not so optimist. It would look so farcical if it were not so deadly to witness. Hooker groping his way after Lee; Lincoln and the all-knowing head-quarters in the utmost darkness about Lee, his army, his movements, and his plans. And all this while the country, ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... of the author's versatility is this farcical, humorous satire on the art nouveau of to-day, Mr. Chambers, with all his knowledge of the artistic jargon, has in this little novel created a pious fraud of a father, who brings up his eight lovely daughters in the Adirondacks, where they wear pink pajamas and ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... youth, with all its capacity for enthusiasm and unworn emotions—it seems rather ludicrous, but still it may be; certainly the interior should be in some degree a match for that marvellously restored face and body—but the whole thing is made farcical by the fact that she never can have children. And what else does youth in women ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... incognito for any but the simplest and most innocent of objects. The actual impossibility of the Prince of Wales escaping from his entourage, his identity, and his surroundings, were sufficient to make Continental fictions and foreign fancies about him absolutely farcical to those who knew something of his daily life—aside altogether from those who knew and ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... noble and the other so common, and making game of each other to the great entertainment of the crowd, there was a moment when the Count found himself wavering between the sublime and its parody, the farcical extremes of human life. Ignoring the chain of incredible events which had brought them to this smoky den, he believed himself to be the plaything of some strange hallucination, and thought of Gambara and Giardini as ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... the once well-known farcical writer, (now chiefly remembered from Boswell's Life of Johnson), opened the Old House in the Haymarket, and, in order to overrule the opposition of the magistrates, announced his entertainments as 'Mr Foote's giving tea to ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... up of his oration made him reach out another clutching hand to the vanished reporter. "But it's farcical, father, to be always interviewed by ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... of incidents which threw the House into convulsions of rancorous scorn and farcical laughter. Earlier in the evening there had been a speech by Mr. Kenyon. Words fail to describe the kind of speech Mr. Kenyon delivers. Sometimes one is doubtful as to the sex of the speaker, for he moans out his lamentations over "the dear old Church of England" exactly as one would ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... turn now to laugh. The very thought of it was farcical in its very odiousness. Merri, who had embarked on his proposal with grandiloquent phraseology, suddenly paused, almost awed ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... was odiously farcical. Richard groaned under it; he longed to leap forward and denounce the humbug. And the humbug himself? Do you fancy he was easier in his mind? I am sure, on the other hand, that he was actually miserable; and he betrayed his sufferings by a perfectly silly and undignified access of temper, during ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... because the term had been popular ever since the struggle with Spain. As a designation for movements aimed at securing rotation in office, and hence control of the treasury, it was appropriate enough! At all events, whether serious or farcical, the commotions often involved an expenditure in life and money far beyond the value of the interests affected. Further, both the prevalent disorder and the centralization of authority impelled the educated and well-to-do classes to take up their residence at the seat of government. Not a few of ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... those, who began by deriding her pretensions, ended by acknowledging her merit; she became a great favourite and constant writer for the stage, and an intimate friend of Farquhar and Steele. There is an absence of indelicacy in her plays, but not a little farcical humour, especially in the character of "Marplot" in "The Busybody," and of rich "Mrs. Dowdy" with her vulgarity and admirers in "The Platonic Lady." She often adopts the tone of the day in ridiculing learned ladies. In one ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... wives or between lovers. Such gushing terminations as Your Own Darling, Your own Dovey and other pet and silly endings should be avoided, as they denote shallowness. Love can be strongly expressed without dipping into the nonsensical and the farcical. ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... forgive' proclamation—which proclamation, by-the-bye, had already begun to prove itself an awkward weapon placed in the hands of his enemies by President Kruger himself—had been exposed and denounced as farcical, and it now required but little to convince the once admiring world of the President's real character and intentions. That little was forthcoming in a touch of ridicule more potent than ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... threw out his hand with an impetuous gesture—"that considering all the abominable, farcical tricks women play nowadays, it is simply amazing to find one who is contented with a simple life like this, and who manages to make that simple life so ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... widow is a charmingly wicked person. The stories are well written, with a pleasant humour of a farcical sort; ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... us—notwithstanding the accumulation of learning which has been spent upon it, one-half of the wit of Aristophanes is altogether lost to the moderns. Nothing but the incredible acuteness and vivacity of the Athenian intellect could make it conceivable that these comedies which, with all their farcical drolleries, do, nevertheless, all the while bear upon the most grave interests of human life, could ever have formed a source of popular amusement. We may envy the poet who could reckon on so clever and accomplished a public; but this was in truth a very dangerous advantage. Spectators ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... these thirty years is soon told. What a fantastic mode of life it seems, how farcical, grotesque, in its dull routine, for a genius who was at work steadily building up new art-forms. Haydn, we are told, rose every morning at six, carefully shaved and dressed, drank a cup of black coffee, and worked ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... transfer instantly his interest to the study of a thing new to him. It was like him, too, to have conceived and risked all upon this last desperate and madcap scheme—this message to a poor, crazed fanatico cruising about with his grotesque uniform and his farcical title. But his companions had been at their wits' end; escape had seemed incredible; and now he was pleased with the success of the plan they had called ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... applies it for his benefit in the man-market. Hence, where the means for exercising the mind upon the right is forbidden-where ignorance becomes the necessary part of the maintenance of a system, and religion is applied to that end, it becomes farcical; and while it must combine all the imperfections of the performer, necessarily tends to confine the ignorance of those it seeks to degrade, within the narrowest boundary. There are different ways of destroying the rights of different ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... himself to the only person of ultimate importance—namely, Mrs. Cole. He lay down on all fours, looked up directly into her face, bared his teeth this time in a smile and not in a growl, and wagged his farcical tail. ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... Italy and Greece. This twofold character of the poet it is that is revealed in his best poems, "Childe Harold" and "Don Juan." He used both works as receptacles for the most incongruous ideas. "If things are farcical," he once said to Trelawney, "they will do for 'Don Juan'; if heroical, you shall have another canto of 'Childe Harold.'" This means of disposing of his poetic ideas accounts for the great volume of Byron's verse as well as for its inequality. ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... Pascoe rose. "My Lord," he said, "it must be clear to you that the ends of justice have been defeated by the dramatic power of this tale. It would be farcical to ask this jury to deliver an impartial verdict now. This new evidence must be weighed and sifted with calm minds. I request that you declare ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... "French Charlie" died. Their quest is vain. Another daughter of the Paphian divinity presides at the shrine of rouge et noir. The blood-stains are effaced from the floor. A fresh red mound in the city cemetery is the only relic of French Charlie. Philip Hardin, released upon heavy bail, awaits a farcical investigation. After a few days he bears no legal burden of this crime. Only the easy load upon his conscience. Although the mark of Cain sets up a barrier between him and his fellows, and the murder calls for the vengeance of God, Philip ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... arguments often plausible and sometimes forcible. These I dealt with on various occasions, but especially in a speech before the State Senate in 1865, in which was shown the character of the interested opposition, the farcical equipment of the People's College, the failure of the State Agricultural College, the inadequacy of the sectarian colleges, even though they called themselves universities; and I did all in my power to communicate to my colleagues something of my own enthusiasm ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... of a free, happy people prospering and blessed when the tyrant was overthrown—I thought I could help on this glorious time; and what happens? I am struck down by the hand of a friend in a miserable squabble; inglorious, farcical!—O Ireland, Ireland! the follies of your own children may be a greater curse to you in the days to come than have been the crimes of the stranger who has ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... "The farcical comedy is over, Blanquette," said he gently, "I'm a Monsieur no longer, do you see? We are going to live just as we did before you went away in the summer, and I am not going to be married. I am going to live with ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... him he should add something, such as to wish her happiness—but such words would be meaningless and farcical and they would both ...
— —And Devious the Line of Duty • Tom Godwin
... Smoke Bellew staked the farcical town-site of Tra-Lee, made the historic corner of eggs that nearly broke Swiftwater Bill's bank account, or won the dog-team race down the Yukon for an even million dollars, that he and Shorty parted company on the Upper Klondike. Shorty's task was to return down the Klondike to Dawson to record ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... severity of her aspect, and turned for relief to more than usual levity and mockery. Hence the perpetual interruption of the serious and affecting, and sometimes even awful, interest which belongs to the main argument of the piece, by scenes of farcical and extravagant caricature which might be pleasant enough as varieties in that farce of unreason with which he usually entertains us, but which, coming upon the mind in a state of serious emotion, are offensive and disagreeable. ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... to conceal from McNiven and his innocence transpired through all his bewilderment. He told just what had happened in its farcical-funeral details. McNiven did not smile. Jim finished with ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... popular interest in these dramas began to lag, current topics were introduced into the dialogue, and characters from real life appeared on the stage for the first time. Early in the sixteenth century John Heywood invented a farcical composition called The Interlude to relieve the tiresome monotony of existing plays. But it was in 1540 that the first comedy appeared, and it is not too much to say that this play marks the beginning of modern English drama. Nicholas Udall, head master of Eton College, being ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... those ridiculous lenses coming to a sharp bright focus with tiny livening flecks in the gray of the iris; and the way the change lifted his features from mediocrity to the alertness of a terrier. It was absurd, it was farcical ... and it was ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... Creation around us is not a caprice or a farce. It is designed for a Cause and moves steadily towards that Cause. There may be—no doubt there are—many men who elect to view life from a low, material, or even farcical standpoint—nevertheless, life in itself is ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Mr. Tarkington's studies of boy life (especially Penrod), and of adolescence (especially Seventeen and Clarence). Judged by your own experience and observation, are they presented with true knowledge and humor, or are they a farcical skimming of surface eccentricities? Compare them with Mark Twain's books about boys and with ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... farcical tragedies, or what shall I call them—speaking pantomimes have we not of late seen?. . . The piece pleases our critics because it talks Old English; and it pleases the galleries because it has ribaldry. . . A prologue generally precedes ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... strong, full-blooded, often reckless and ruthless men, gradually welled to the surface. She was possessed by a savage desire for life, a bitter inordinate passion for life. Why not, when life might be extinguished at any moment? What was there in life but life? Farcical that anything else could ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... thought he, sorrowfully. "We must either retreat or advance. This war is a miserable failure—the impotent effort of a shattered old man whose head is powerless to plan, and his hand to execute. How often since I entered upon this farcical campaign, have I ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... stronger than themselves makes it impossible for half of them to keep. Strength of character must decide the question of place in a household as it does elsewhere; and it is surely folly to require, and useless to insist on, the submission of the strong to the weak. The marriage oath is farcical. A woman is made to swear to love a man who will probably prove unlovable, to honour a man who is as likely as not to be undeserving of honour, and to obey a man who may be incapable of judging what is best either for himself ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... him seemed equally ridiculous. Either alternative, upon reflection, appeared the very essence of absurdity: and, having ample time to reflect, while awaiting the signal, I could not help thinking how farcical ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... express poetic passions—how many of us are, if it comes to that?—or to sustain their onslaught with dignity. Emotion seemed to have bloated him with unshed tears. There was nothing noble in his distress—only a farcical appearance of wretchedness. ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... living wife, sometimes with her consent, sometimes without it. One old gentleman, whose name is not to be mentioned, was sealed thus for eternity to Martha Washington and to Empress Josephine. It sounds farcical and foolish in the extreme; fit only to be counted as a silly joke, unworthy the attention of a sane soul for a minute; but it is terribly sober when it is remembered that there are hundreds of thousands of innocent, honest, and unsuspecting Mormons who ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... never be recognized in such a garb. The tongue of Burns can be spoken only by a born Scot; and our Yankee, which is rather a grotesque English than a dialect, is unfortunately so associated with the coarse and the farcical—Lowell's little poem of "'Zekel's Courtship" being the single exception—that it seems hardly adapted to the simple and tender fancies of Hebel. Like the comedian whose one serious attempt at tragic acting was greeted with roars of laughter, as an admirable burlesque, the reader ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... that I witnessed to-night! how truly French! Spite of myself and all my melancholy musings, and all my philosophic allowances for the difference of national character, I was irresistibly compelled to smile at some of the farcical groups we encountered. In the most crowded parts of the Champs Elysees this evening (Sunday), there sat an old lady with a wrinkled yellow face and sharp features, dressed in flounced gown of dirty ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... startlingly new way, about the difficulties of marriage and the conventional hypocrisies that hedge round that honourable institution, but just forgot that serious argument cannot easily be conveyed through the medium of fantastically impossible and uninteresting people in an extravagantly farcical situation. The play was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... feature of the season, but one which had beneficial results, was the strike of the Detroit players, entailing the staging of a farcical game in Philadelphia between the Athletics and a team of semi-professionals. This incident grew out of an attack on a New York spectator by Ty Cobb while in uniform and the immediate suspension of the ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... that Miss Morrison got hold of a humorous book called 'The Brass Bottle,' a fantastic, farcical thing, about a genie who had been sealed up in a bottle for a thousand years getting out and causing the poor devil of a hero no end of worry by heaping riches and honours upon him in the most embarrassing manner. It happened that on the ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... has spoken to one of those Bocchesi or Dalmatian volunteers who were at that time in Montenegro will quite believe that they applauded the result, but to pretend that they drove the Skup[vs]tina with bayonets to do what every reasoning creature would have done is so farcical that one might have thought it would not even form (as it did form) the subject for questions in the British House of Commons.... The only part played by bayonets was when on November 7 (one day previous to that fixed for the elections) a detachment of the Italian army landed at Antivari ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... and in his two visits to America. It is not surprising, either, to learn that upon the stage his preference was for melodrama and farce. His own serious writing was always dangerously close to the melodramatic, and his humor to the farcical. There is much false art, bad taste, and even vulgarity in Dickens. He was never quite a gentleman, and never succeeded well in drawing gentlemen or ladies. In the region of low comedy he is easily ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... out there. With perfectly farcical unexpectedness he yelled shrilly: "Oh, you deceitful wretch! You won't escape me! I will have you. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... that he took me for an emissary of the great Blenheim. Exasperation overwhelmed me; would these farcical complications never cease? ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... should so like to take myself and my troubles seriously once in a while. No sooner do I try, but something perfectly farcical is sure to happen. If I tell you this, promise me you won't laugh. It's indecent for me to laugh; mamma would never forgive me. The old dear! I'm ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... long been noted as a droll. A grin was as much a part of his stock apparel as tow breeches or a palm-leaf hat. The negro, too, had from time immemorial been portrayed upon the stage and in fiction as an irrepressible and inimitably farcical fellow. But the "Southern gentleman" was a man of different kidney from either of these. A sardonic dignity hedged him about with peculiar sacredness. He was chivalrous and baronial in his instincts, surroundings, and characteristics. He was nervous, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... her confidence, and plainly tell me that my attentions were untimely and improper? And now she would have me dance attendance to her decision in favour of Beauman—Insulting! Let Beauman and she make, as they have formed, this farcical decision; I absolutely will never attend it.—But stop: I have engaged to see her at an appointed time; my honour is therefore pledged for an interview; it must take place. I shall support it with becoming dignity, and I will convince Melissa and Beauman that I am not ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... Ah, well, I am a farcical character myself, after all. Don't touch a hair of that duck's head, HEDVIG. Come to my arms and all ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 30, 1891 • Various
... national honor. What, then, will we arbitrate? Every case in which a favorable award is assured us. If we want Texas, we send an army after it. Every case that does not rouse our anger. Let the Maine blow up and we fight. A treaty with an elastic exception like this is a farcical sham and a delusion. ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... and Ale,' by M. G. Lewis, exhibits not only a faithful copy of the spirited, loose, and flowing versification of that singular author, but a very just representation of that mixture of extravagance and jocularity which has impressed most of his writings with the character of a sort of farcical horror."—JEFFREY, Edinburgh Review. ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... a single star performer, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt. Under the influence of Eugene Scribe, Sardou began his career at the Theatre Francais with a wide range of well-made plays, varying in scope from the social satire of Nos Intimes and the farcical intrigue of Les Pattes de Mouche (known to us in English as The Scrap of Paper) to the tremendous historic panorama of Patrie. When Sarah Bernhardt left the Comedie Francaise, Sardou followed in her footsteps, and afterwards ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... come suddenly. With the swiftness of lightning they descend upon the world, often in the very midst of fancied peace and security,—and the farcical, grinning, sneering apes of humanity, for whom even the idea of a God has but furnished food for lewd jesting, are scattered into terror-stricken hordes, who are forced to realise for the first time in their lives, that whether they believe in Omnipotence or no, an evident ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... I want, among other things, to insist upon the fateful power of trivial incidents. No one has yet dared to do this seriously. It has often been done in farce, and that's why farcical writing so often makes one melancholy. You know my stock instances of the kind of thing I mean. There was poor Allen, who lost the most valuable opportunity of his life because he hadn't a clean shirt to put on; and Williamson, who would probably have married that rich girl but ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... is not wit nor subtle humour, but a combination of pure mirth with the enthusiasm of warm friendship, that maintains one's interest in the simple life of the new Drumston. There is an abundance of farcical fun and playfulness which force laughter, and never approach an unkindness. The men avoid being smart at each other's expense; and if they cannot claim to be clever or heroic, they are at least good fellows, any one of whom might serve as a ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... A farcical comedy in 3 acts. By Ian Hay and Stephen King-Hall. Produced originally at the Times Square Theatre, New York. 9 males, 6 females. Modern costumes and naval uniforms. 2 ...
— The Ghost of Jerry Bundler • W. W. Jacobs and Charles Rock
... page a letter from the editor of our most artistic illustrated weekly: "Allow me to congratulate you; keep pegging away. The Royal Academy of Arts (plural) is nonsense; it is, as you say, a Royal Academy of oil. If the R.A. had done their duty years ago, we would not see such farcical statues in the streets, nor should I (as at present moment employed) be writing to Berlin and Vienna for assistance in matters where skill and taste are required by art workmen." The President of a certain Royal Academy wrote: "I have just read your 'Royal Academy Antics,' ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... in long scarlet coats who went in front of the trumpeters, prepared to clear the way if necessary (though a gust of shrewd wind would have blown them off their feet), by means of the long-poled halberts they carried; but this impression of the farcical was modified by the nature of the body whereof they were the pioneers or advance guard. Sleek magistrates and councillors in unaccustomed black suits and silver-buckled shoes, the provost ermined ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... 1518. I think he has more wit than Maillard, and occasionally displays a brilliant imagination; with the same singular mixture of grave declamation and farcical absurdities. He is called in the title-page the golden-tongued. It runs thus, Predicatoris qui lingua aurea, sua tempestate nuncupatus est, Sermones quadragesimales, ab ipso olim ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... conventionalism. Pardon me, reader, if I use a coarse word and a malignant word, which I should abhor to use unless where, as in this case, I seek to rouse the vigilance of the inattentive by the apparent intemperance of the language. Pope, in too many instances, for the sake of some momentary and farcical effect, deliberately assumes the license of a liar. Not only he adopts the language of moral indignation where we know that it could not possibly have existed, seeing that the story to which this pretended ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... and the medallion together on the table, and sat for a few minutes considering how he could extricate himself from an affair so truly farcical in itself, but which might be productive of a very distressing consequence ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... misgivings on record. They relate that during Xavier's sojourn in Bungo he had numerous public debates—one continuing for five days—with Buddhist priests, but even Fernandez not being available as an interpreter, these debates must have been either farcical or imaginary, though brilliant results are claimed for them by the Church historians. That Xavier himself was not satisfied is proved by his determination to transfer his ministrations to China, for he said, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... spirited incidents of a cleverly sustained masquerade. I had never seen before anything in the least comparable to this magnificent fete. I moved along, indolently, in my domino and mask, loitering, now and then, to enjoy a clever dialogue, a farcical song, or an amusing monologue, but, at the same time, keeping my eyes about me, lest my friend in the black domino, with the little white cross on his breast, should ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... all this as it may, it is doubtful if anything so ludicrously farcical is known to history as the mortal terror of this man's influence, living or dead. The very name of him, animate or inanimate, made thrones rock and Ministers shiver. Such was their terror, that the ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... Express is of special interest because it was written during Williamson's A. Merritt "kick," when he was writing little else but, and it gave the earliest indication of a more general capability. The lightness of the handling is especially modern, barely avoiding the farcical by the validity of the notion that wireless transmission of matter is the next big transportation frontier to be conquered. It is especially important because it stylistically forecast a later trend to accept the background for granted, regardless of the quantity of wonders, and proceed ...
— The Cosmic Express • John Stewart Williamson
... Christ, the divine tragedy, is the tragedy of the Cross. Pilate, the sceptic, the man of culture, by making a mockery of it, sought to convert it into a comedy; he conceived the farcical idea of the king with the reed sceptre and crown of thorns, and cried "Behold the man!" But the people, more human than he, the people that thirsts for tragedy, shouted, "Crucify him! crucify him!" And the human, the intra-human, tragedy is the tragedy ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... order of entertainments which have gone on increasing in favor up to the present day of universally triumphant parody and burlesque, by no means as laughable and by no means as unobjectionable. Indeed, farcical to the broadest point as was that mythological travesty of "The Danaides," it was the essence of decency and propriety compared with "La grande Duchesse," "La belle Helene," "Orphee aux Enfers," "La Biche ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... for that moment of clear vision and high resolve he might be to-day even as these who had won such clear title to his contempt, who stultified themselves with vain imaginings and the everlasting concoction of schemes whose sheer intrinsic puerility foredoomed them to farcical failure. ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... astonishing. They left more than fifty-two printed plays, and all of these show an extraordinary power of invention; the most diverse passions, characters, and situations enter into the work, their stories stimulate our curiosity, and their characters appeal to our sympathies. Especially in half-farcical, half-pathetic comedy they have no superior; their wit and spirit here find freest play. Despite much coarseness, their work is full of delicate sensibility, and suffused with a romantic grace of form and a tenderness of expression that endears them to our hearts, and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... and desertion would succeed these busy scenes. At a new projected town on the way, of which Catharine had, with much ceremony, laid the first stone, Joseph was asked to lay the second. He did so, afterwards saying of the farcical proceeding, "The Empress of Russia and I have finished a very important business in a single day: she has laid the first stone of a city, and I have laid the last." He had no doubt that, when they had gone, ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... hardly possible to help laughing at the mock solemnity with which Shelley charges the Quarterly Review for having murdered his friend with—a critique![N] If criticism killed the disciples of that school, Shelley would not have been alive to write an Elegy on another:—but the whole is most farcical from a pen which on other occasions, has treated of the soul, the body, life and death agreeably to the opinions, the principles, and the practice of Percy Bysshe Shelley.—The ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... for digging up the bed of the river, but if it could be insinuated out of the water into a drowsy angler's leg it would probably make him sit up. As the paddle is as long as the fish the creature presents a really farcical appearance. The species runs to a hundredweight, ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... do so and turned a deaf ear to his arguments, losing all self-control, he flung his felt hat on the floor, continued to rage and rail against me, and, no result coming of it, dashed at last, in a towering passion, out through the door, which he slammed behind him. There was a farcical ending to the scene, since he was obliged to ring at the door again for his hat, which, in his exasperation, he had forgotten. This was a kind of private prologue to the ecclesiastical drama which from the year 1871 upwards was enacted ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... was anonymous. But those, who began by deriding her pretensions, ended by acknowledging her merit; she became a great favourite and constant writer for the stage, and an intimate friend of Farquhar and Steele. There is an absence of indelicacy in her plays, but not a little farcical humour, especially in the character of "Marplot" in "The Busybody," and of rich "Mrs. Dowdy" with her vulgarity and admirers in "The Platonic Lady." She often adopts the tone of the day in ridiculing learned ladies. In one ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... includes the mordant satire of the Renard poetry and of Jean de Meun, and the gross realistic humour of the Fabliaux. The mediaeval drama, in whose complex development we have to trace many strands, probably represents in its oldest forms the coarse farcical buffoonery which may be related to the last fashions of the ancient world; it received a new impulse from the dramatization of scripture history in the twelfth century; but in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... evident from the opening scene, that Shakespeare, even in dealing with classical subjects, laughed at the classic fear of putting the ludicrous and sublime into juxtaposition. After the low and farcical jests of the saucy cobbler, the eloquence of Marullus 'springs upwards ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... true sovereignty. That was what kings were once—giants of brain and brawn. King—one who knows, one who can! Headship is for the head. What is this mock dignity that stands on the lying breaths of winking courtiers? What is this farcical, factitious glamour that will not bear the light of day? The Grace of God? Ay, give me god-like manhood, and I will bend the knee. But to ask me to worship a stuffed purple robe on a worm-eaten throne! 'Tis an insult to ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the core of her being and had to hold more tightly to the rope to support herself. The two wise guys mocked openly. To the wise guys, expert connoisseurs of swat, the thing had appeared richly farcical. They seemed to consider the blow, administered to a third party and not to themselves, hardly worth calling a blow at all. Two more, landing as quickly and neatly as the first, left ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... ones, at least, we still find a tendency to introduce extraneous elements. Thus Gl' Intricati, printed in 1581, and acted a few years before at Zara, the work of Count Alvise, or, it would appear, more correctly Luigi, Pasqualigo, contains a farcical and magical part combined with some rather coarse jesting between two rogues, one Spanish and one Bolognese, who speak in their respective dialects. Another play in which a comic element appears is Bartolommeo Rossi's Fiammella (1584), which ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... example of the author's versatility is this farcical, humorous satire on the art nouveau of to-day, Mr. Chambers, with all his knowledge of the artistic jargon, has in this little novel created a pious fraud of a father, who brings up his eight lovely daughters in the ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... general or the most responsible staff officer. Grant made the sensible suggestion that the key be given to military officers only, and be kept from the civilian operators; but Mr. Stanton adhered to the farcical notion of carrying on a cipher correspondence which should be open to the irresponsible transmitter, but secret as to the responsible commanding general to whom it was addressed. If it were meant for a system of ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... The actual impossibility of the Prince of Wales escaping from his entourage, his identity, and his surroundings, were sufficient to make Continental fictions and foreign fancies about him absolutely farcical to those who knew something of his daily life—aside altogether from those who knew and understood ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... music of the solitary poet in hell, the strange shapes pass. The conclusion of this singular poem is entirely farcical. The devil is resolved ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... her own apartments, whenever any affair of an interesting nature was pending, nothing could make her refrain from joining any company which might be in the house;—nothing;—not even O'Grady himself. At such times, too, she became strangely excited, and invariably executed one piece of farcical absurdity, of which, however, the family contrived to confine the exercise to her own room. It was wearing on her head a tin concern, something like a chimney-cowl, ornamented by a small weathercock, after the fashion of those which surmount church-steeples; this, she declared, influenced her health ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... thing possible: he disregarded entirely the general company and addressed himself to the only person of ultimate importance—namely, Mrs. Cole. He lay down on all fours, looked up directly into her face, bared his teeth this time in a smile and not in a growl, and wagged his farcical tail. ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... same day the peace Congress was opened at Prague. Its proceedings were farcical from the outset. Only Anstett and Humboldt, the Russian and Prussian envoys, were at hand; and at the appointment of the former, an Alsatian by birth, Napoleon expressed great annoyance. The difficulties about the armistice also gave him the opportunity, which he undoubtedly sought, ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the dividends on stock of the several kinds were quite complicated, and, under the light of after events, seem farcical; but the constitution makers believed they were arranging matters not only for the Brook Farm experiment, but for all who might adopt the social life of the Phalanxes, present and future. Looking at it in this light, the constitution might ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... been of farcical ease. Not her prospective millions nor her conquering loveliness, either of which might eventually have gained the entree for her, would have sufficed to set her on the throne. Shrewd social critics ascribed her effortless success to what Lord ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... sustained, his sense of humour is highly capricious. It is impossible for even his most intimate friends to guess beforehand what will amuse him and what will not; and he has a most disconcerting habit of taking a comic story in grim earnest, and arguing some farcical fantasy as if it was a serious proposition of law or logic. Nothing funnier can be imagined than the discomfiture of a story-teller who has fondly thought to tickle the great man's fancy by an anecdote which depends for its ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... but the usual farcical compliance with the law which nobody regards and which nobody executes. Women were there in plenty—mostly old, unkempt women, wearing but a bodice and skirt and boots. The kitchen was a bare, blue-washed apartment, the floor sanded, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... sarcastic remark of Beau Brummell's on the cut of his coat. Humour, Satire, Irony, pounce on it altogether as their common prey. The Comic spirit eyes but does not touch it. Put into action, it would be farcical. It is ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the parlour, the ground glass of the door, the tumblers and bottles on the table, the sharp features and strained, farcical eyes of Malkiel framed in the matted, curling hair. Then all was not over yet. There was something still in store for him. He sat up, pushed the creaming four-shilling foam out of his sight, turned to his interlocutor, and with a great ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... itself was destined to mark an epoch in the life of a man in the theater. Through Elizabeth Marbury, who had just launched herself as play-broker in a little office on Twenty-fourth Street, around the corner from Charles Frohman's, his attention was called to a French farcical comedy called "The Masked Ball," by Alexandre Bisson and Albert Carre. Frohman liked the story and wanted it adapted for American production. It was the beginning of his ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... free, happy people prospering and blessed when the tyrant was overthrown—I thought I could help on this glorious time; and what happens? I am struck down by the hand of a friend in a miserable squabble; inglorious, farcical!—O Ireland, Ireland! the follies of your own children may be a greater curse to you in the days to come than have been the crimes of the stranger who ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... was greeted with loud laughter. He good-naturedly said that he was well aware of the cause of hilarity, but that he was ready to sacrifice his pleasure to the general good. Sir Allan MacNab, the leader of the Opposition, moved a farcical amendment, under which every member was to sign a pledge of abstinence, and to be disqualified if he broke it. Brown made an earnest speech in favour of the motion, in which he remarked that Canada then contained nine hundred and thirty-one whiskey shops, fifty-eight ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... revelation enough had Mary Coombe heard it. But she did not hear it; this new aspect of the situation had seemed to her so farcical that her laughter threatened to become hysterical. "Oh, it's so ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... is something visibly farcical in the whole operation of loaning. It is scarcely more than four years ago that such a rot of bankruptcy spread itself over London, that the whole commercial fabric tottered; trade and credit were at a stand; and such was the state of things that, to prevent or ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... oddities, the scholar, the monk, the inquisitor, Maupertuis, Pompignan, Nonotte, Freron, King David, and countless others who appear before us, capering and gesticulating in their harlequin attire.—When a farcical talent is thus moved to tell the truth, humor becomes all-powerful; for it gratifies the profound and universal instincts of human nature: to the malicious curiosity, to the desire to mock and belitte, to the aversion to being in need or under constraint, those sources of bad moods which task convention, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... affairs had little interest for the man who was always a law unto himself. Yet by some extraordinary prescience, some inexplicable presentiment, the approaching catastrophe cast its shadow over his mind and he felt vaguely that the life-journey of genius would be incomplete and farcical without the final tragedy: whoever lives for the highest must ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... benefit in the man-market. Hence, where the means for exercising the mind upon the right is forbidden-where ignorance becomes the necessary part of the maintenance of a system, and religion is applied to that end, it becomes farcical; and while it must combine all the imperfections of the performer, necessarily tends to confine the ignorance of those it seeks to degrade, within the narrowest boundary. There are different ways of destroying the rights of different classes; and as many different ways, after they ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... one age is often mere weariness to the next; and farcical comedy is, of all the forms of literature, perhaps the least adapted for permanence. It would be affectation to claim that Plautus is nowadays widely read outside of the inner circle of scholars; and there he is read ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... and disease. They appear to have left their physical interests to the doctors, with much the same spirit of cynical resignation with which they turned over their souls to the care of the clergy. Nowadays a system of education would be thought farcical which did not impart a sufficient knowledge of the general principles of physiology, hygiene, and medicine to enable a person to treat any ordinary physical disturbance without recourse to a physician. It is perhaps not too much ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... of these courts is simple. There are not many rules or technicalities. The judges are patient, hard working, understanding, and efficient. The trouble is with the laws they are called upon to administer: Laws which are as absurd, as farcical, and as impracticable as the plot of the lightest ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... Lunet), to whom he is assigned as champion in the adventure of the Lady of Sinadowne, objects only to his novelty of knighthood and is converted by his first victory. The course of the adventures is, however, different from that which some people know from Malory, and many from Tennyson. One of them is farcical: the Fair Unknown rescues a damsel at her utmost need from two giants, a red and a black, one of whom is roasting a wild boar and uses the animal as a weapon, with the spit in it, for the combat. Moreover, he falls a victim to the wiles of a ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... Fyne," I said. "I didn't know I was expected to be serious as well as sagacious. No. That science is farcical and therefore I am not serious. It's true that most sciences are farcical except those which teach us ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... the Middle Ages fell foul of the systematic and hostile indifference of an impious people was the death-day of the soul in France. All we can do now is fold our arms and listen to the wild vagaries of society, which by turns shrieks with farcical ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... people as nomadic now in the property of their persons as their forefathers were in their real estate. A man adopts another to-day to unadopt him to-morrow and replace him by somebody else the day after. So profoundly unimportant to them is their social identity, that they bandy it about with almost farcical freedom. Perhaps it is fitting that there should be some slight preparation in this world for a future transmigration of souls. Still one fails to conceive that the practice can be devoid of disadvantages even to its beneficiaries. ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... once more recalled, and once more weakly lent himself to what was rapidly becoming a farcical procedure. The King, without ceremony, presented himself to the National Assembly and announced that in view of the events of the day before he had recalled his minister, and ordered Besenval's troops to be withdrawn. ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... no one, not even the wizened old man who was obviously the humorist of the tribune, had seen anything farcical. To be too hot—to be too cold! this is a serious matter in France. A jury surely has a right to protect itself against cold, against la migraine, and the devils of rheumatism and pleurisy. There is nothing ridiculous in twelve men sitting in judgment ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... of ideas, who tissues a book, that other Spider's web, and out of his thought makes something that shall instruct or thrill us. To protect our 'bone,' we have the police, invented for the express purpose. To protect the book, we have none but farcical means. Place a few bricks one atop the other; join them with mortar; and the law will defend your wall. Build up in writing an edifice of your thoughts; and it will be open to any one, without serious impediment, ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... uttered: do not overwork the pause. To do so will make your speech heavy and stilted. And do not think that pause can transmute commonplace thoughts into great and dignified utterance. A grand manner combined with insignificant ideas is like harnessing a Hambletonian with an ass. You remember the farcical old school declamation, "A Midnight Murder," that proceeded in grandiose manner to a thrilling climax, and ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... Citizen-Deputy was allowed to look for himself. He was conducted to the great vaulted rooms of the Temple, to the vast ballrooms of the Palais Cond, where herded the condemned and those still awaiting trial; he was allowed to witness there the grim farcical tragedies, with which the captives beguiled the few hours ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... afterpiece[obs3], exode[obs3], farce, divertissement, extravaganza, burletta[obs3], harlequinade[obs3], pantomime, burlesque, opera bouffe[Fr], ballet, spectacle, masque, drame comedie drame[Fr]; melodrama, melodrame[obs3]; comidie larmoyante[Fr], sensation drama; tragicomedy, farcical-comedy; monodrame monologue[obs3];duologue trilogy; charade, proverbs; mystery, miracle play; musical, musical comedy. [movies] western, horse opera; flick [coll.]; spy film, love story, adventure ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... beasts of burden, up once more to that hell of blood and mud, of nerve-shattering shell, of blinding glare and ear-bursting roar of gun fire, and, worse than all, to the place where, crouching in the farcical deceptive shelter of the sandbagged trench, their fingers gripping into the steel of their rifle hands, they would wait for the zero hour. But as the weeks passed and the orders failed to come they passed from that bewildering and subconscious anxious ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... letter than a man. Next to receiving them she loved to answer them. She was a good and even a brilliant letter writer, but often and often she would tear up what she had written and begin again. There was not much news in Bryngelly; it was difficult to make her letters amusing. Also the farcical nature of the whole proceeding seemed to paralyse her. It was ridiculous, having so much to say, to be able to say nothing. Not that Beatrice wished to indite love-letters—such an idea had never crossed her mind, but rather to write as they had talked. Yet when she ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... family, and seeing that I can do nothing? I seem always gay; but do not be deceived; I have two kinds of gayety, Jeanne; my gayety gay, and my gayety sad. I have neither the strength nor the courage to be bad, angry, nor malicious, as others are, that always passes over with me in words more or less farcical. My cowardice and my weakness of body have prevented me from becoming worse than I am. It needed the chance of this lonely hut, where there was neither cat, nor, above all, a dog, to have urged me to steal. And then, again, it chanced to be a fine moonlight night; for alone, and in ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... duel had so many farcical features, and Miss Todd had unwittingly been so much to blame for it, that one can easily see that it might have had considerable influence on the relations of the two young people. However that may be, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... the world does so, we should not. Nevertheless I mean to see to it that this subject becomes part of the Eugenic campaign which will yet dominate and mould the future. For surely the present spectacle has elements in it which would be utterly farcical if they were not so tragic. Here we have life present and life to come being destroyed for lack of knowledge. These horrible diseases, ravaging the guilty and the innocent, equally and indifferently, are at present allowed to do so with scarcely a voice raised ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... don't think that President Krueger and his friends realise the gravity of the situation. Even now the State Secretary is doing things which would be almost farcical if the times were ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... kind is interwoven with low comedy—the most lofty sentiments, the most exalted virtues, and heroism and magnanimity strained almost beyond the limits of probability, are checkered by uncouth pleasantries, and the most pathetic incidents intruded upon and interrupted by the farcical conundrums of MUG, a low cockney, who has become secretary of state to the king of the Mandingoes. Thus, oscillating between Kotesbue and O'Keefe, giving now a layer of exalted sentiment, and then a layer of mere ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... the frame of this picture have tried to bribe the Mayor to go away just to save his infernal biography from being wasted? You simply can't have a convincing colloquy on these lines between the tragic figure of the disillusioned and embittered hero and this farcical jackanapes. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various
... the capitals of these countries to find prominent men who, at one time or other, have not been Cabinet Ministers or held other important State office. This gives—to the foreigner at least—a somewhat farcical impression of the life of the community, but, at any rate, it may be conceded that the Republican method gives nearly all good citizens "a show," to use an Americanism, in the ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... to raise the money to send her to the south of France without delay. The author mentioned that Mathias had a sick wife, but that was all. The whole treatment of the story in fiction form, moreover, was farcical, such names as "Mr. Parker" being intermingled with those of the well-known characters, "Mathias," "Christian," and "Annette," while the wealthy, dignified Polish Jew was turned into a typical East-side clothing merchant. The real fault lay with the producer who, ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... by romances. Ridicule of a more blatant and boisterous kind was needed, and this was supplied by Eaton Stannard Barrett, who, in 1813—five years before Northanger Abbey appeared—published The Heroine or The Adventures of Cherubina. In this farcical romance it is clearly Barrett's intention to make so vigorous an onslaught that "the Selinas, Evelinas, and Malvinas who faint and blush and weep through four half-bound octavos" shall be, like Catherine Morland, "humbled to the dust." Sometimes, indeed, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... explanation possible of my course, out of reciprocal honor and respect for the motives which lead you to think differently from me.) My dear father, think how, for twenty years, through poverty, through pain, through weariness, through sickness, through the uncongenial atmosphere of a farcical college and of a bare army and then of an exacting business life, through all the discouragement of being wholly unacquainted with literary people and literary ways — I say, think how, in spite of all these depressing circumstances, ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... Tarkington's studies of boy life (especially Penrod), and of adolescence (especially Seventeen and Clarence). Judged by your own experience and observation, are they presented with true knowledge and humor, or are they a farcical skimming of surface eccentricities? Compare them with Mark Twain's books about boys and with Howells's ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... them without discerning in them all the powers which afterwards produced Evelina and Cecilia, the quickness in catching every odd peculiarity of character and manner, the skill in grouping, the humor, often richly comic, sometimes even farcical. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... away all this seemed from the brazen declamation, the monotonous reiterations of the reading-clerk, and from the sharp clank of the speaker's gavel! His ear wearied, his heart sick of the whole life of the farcical legislature, with its flood of corrupt bills, got back serenity and youth and repose in the presence of the snows, ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... members of Wattier's Club was Bligh, a notorious madman, of whom Mr Raikes relates:—'One evening at the Macao table, when the play was very deep, Brummell, having lost a considerable stake, affected, in his farcical way, a very tragic air, and cried out—"Waiter, bring me a flat candlestick and a pistol." Upon which Bligh, who was sitting opposite to him, calmly produced two loaded pistols from his coat pocket, which he placed ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... inexorable logic of existence could not be so easily placated, its rhyming of cause and effect defeated. All that he had told Susan Brundon recurred strengthened to an immovable conviction. The thought of marrying Essie was intolerable, farcical; to the woman herself it would mean utter boredom. Such a thing must lead inevitably to a greater misfortune than any of the past. Susan, in her resplendent ignorance of facts, failed to realize the impossibility of what she upheld. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... for there is wit which makes us laugh, and there is humor which does not. On the whole, it is as to what is purely wit that we are ever the most at fault. Certain phases of humor we cannot mistake,—especially those which are broadly comic or farcical. But sometimes we meet with incidents or scenes which have more in them of the pathetic than the comic, that we must still rank with the humorous. Here is a case in point. A time was when it was a penal offence in Ireland for a priest to say Mass, and under particular circumstances ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... verdict and the prisoner was invited to acknowledge the regularity of the proceedings in the farcical trial by signing the record. To this Rizal demurred, but after a vain protest, ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... light of this understanding of the nature of the game of life, the efforts of the government to preserve order in a row of this magnitude became almost farcical,—so long as the spirit of man was untouched and SUCCESS was admittedly the one glorious prize of ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... Thus ended this farcical demonstration on the part of the government —a war without a battle! There was, perhaps, no genuine basis of necessity upon which to organize the expensive and disastrous expedition against the Mormons. The real cause, perhaps, should be attributed to the ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... bureau is kept by fat gray lizards in company with a screech-owl. As for the railroads, I noticed that all the excellent Corsicans to whom I mentioned them, replied with cunning smiles, disconnected phrases, full of mystery; and not until this morning did I obtain the exceedingly farcical explanation of ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... English that abounds in humor, by means of the textual notes. The notes are bad enough, in all conscience, but the teacher's lack of humor piles Ossa upon Pelion. The solemnity that pervades such mechanical teaching would be farcical were it not so pathetic. The teacher who cannot indulge in a hearty, honest, ringing laugh with her pupils in situations that are really humorous is certain to be laughed at by her pupils. In her work, as in Lincoln's, a sense of humor ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... shades. The play ends with the undignified reappearance of Xerxes, and a melancholy procession into the palace of Susa. It was, perhaps, inevitable that this close of the great drama should verge on the farcical, and that the poltroonery of Xerxes should, in a measure, obscure Aeschylus' generous portraiture of Atossa and Darius. But his magnificent picture of the battle of Salamis is unequalled in the poetic annals of naval war. No account of the flight ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... Harness Success of the satire The author's regret in having written it Refusal to republish it Attempted publication of Englishman, Otway's three requisites for an Envy Ephesus, ruins of EPIGRAM on Moore's Operatic Farce, or Farcical Opera Erskine, Lord, his eloquence his famous pamphlet See, also Essex (George-Capel), fifth Earl of Euxine, or Black Sea, description of Ewing, Dr. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... public mind of their section for more than thirty years, and until at length they have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the Government the day after some assemblage of men have enacted the farcical pretense of taking their State out of the Union who could have been brought to no such thing ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... the sound of Commodore Preble's guns a strange, almost farcical, intervention in the Tripolitan War was preparing. The scene shifts to the desert on the east, where William Eaton, consul at Tunis, becomes the center of interest. Since the very beginning of the war, this energetic and enterprising Connecticut Yankee had taken a lively interest in ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... Sunday, and now more people visit the Museum on Sunday than on all the other days of the week put together. The same is true of the public libraries. There is something to me infinitely pharisaical, hypocritical and farcical in this Sunday nonsense. The rich people who favor keeping Sunday "holy," have their coachman drive them to church and wait outside until the services end. What do they care about the coachman's soul? While they are at church their cooks are ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... go as I am. (Gloomily) After all, I don't know why I should mind one more farcical touch to my situation. A grown man that doesn't know how to earn ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... known as "the Murchison letter," did a great deal to impress thoughtless voters that Mr. Cleveland was "un-American." The incident was dramatic and farcical to a degree. The Murchison letter, which interested the entire country for two or three weeks, purported to come from a perplexed Englishman, addressing the British Minister at Washington, Lord Sackville-West. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... been so precious and costly? Would the illustrations have so enriched photographers? And would the amanuensis have made L350 more out of the thing then Mr. Murray himself? The price was not extortionate. But it was farcical. The entire rigmarole combines to throw into dazzling prominence the fact that modern literature in this country is still absolutely undemocratic. The time will come, and much sooner than many august mandarins anticipate, when such a book as the "Letters of Queen Victoria" will be issued ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... kindled. Nicholas of Reist brings to-day a forgotten descendant of the Tyrnaus family, and with your consent would make him King. I say with your consent, because the House of Laws is nothing to-day but a farcical assembly, and they will do what Reist bids them. The real decision rests with you. Listen. Russia will refuse to recognize this man. If you accept him her restraining hand upon Turkey will be removed. Russia ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... comedy, The Journalists, which appeared in 1853, that Freytag displays his humor to its best advantage. Some of the situations themselves, without being farcical, are exceedingly amusing, as when the Colonel, five minutes after declaiming against the ambition of journalists and politicians, and enumerating the different forms under which it is concealed, lets his own ambition run away with him and ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... (I heard the men in that lonely ship were dying of fever at the rate of three a day) and went on. We called at some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... her smooth cheeks. She was all smiling, and presently, as the breeze dimpled her, all a "snicker" up into the roots of her hair, up among her forest-tresses. Mollychunkamug! Who could be aught but gay, gay even to the farcical, when on such a name? Is it Indian? Bewildered Indian we deem it,—transmogrified somewhat from aboriginal sound by the fond imagination of some lumberman, finding in it a sweet memorial of his Mary far away in the kitchens ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... smiling, to see my charmer, like a farcical dean and chapter, choose what was before chosen for her; and sagaciously (as they go in form to prayers, that Heaven would direct their choice) pondering upon the different proposals, as if she would make me believe she had a mind for some other? The dear sly rogue looking upon me, too, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... McElwin, softening, "we will say request. As I tell you, your presence in this community is distasteful to me, and your farcical marriage stands directly opposed to my plans. But I would not violate the law and commit a misdemeanor to drive you off. You have reasons ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... came quickly, he changed that plan very decidedly. Nightmare Abbey is the shortest, as Melincourt is the longest, of his tales; and as Melincourt is the most unequal and the most clogged with heavy matter, so Nightmare Abbey contains the most unbroken tissue of farcical, though not in the least coarsely farcical, incidents and conversations. The misanthropic Scythrop (whose habit of Madeira-drinking has made some exceedingly literal people sure that he really could not be intended for the water-drinking Shelley); his yet gloomier ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... restless spirits, who fancied that, as seen from their limited opportunities to judge correctly, the appropriations had not been judiciously made during the past few years, determined to appoint this Committee from among the Pastors. The Elders, well knowing that the farcical proceeding would in time come to naught, concluded to offer no opposition to the movement. The Committee was accordingly appointed and proceeded to the discharge of its duties. At the first meeting, however, it was found that the Committee was unable to ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... garden, instead of the sovereign director of the universal forces, and stern master of the destinies of men. Chaumette's commemoration of the Divinity of Reason was a sensible performance, compared with Robespierre's farcical repartee. It was something, as Comte has said, to select for worship man's most individual attribute. If they could not contemplate society as a whole, it was at least a gain to pay homage to that faculty in the human rulers of the world, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... than to hold himself upright, avoid nonsense, and do what chores lie in his way, acknowledging every moment that primal truth, which no fact exhibits, nor, if pressed by too warm a hope, will even indicate. I think, indeed, it is part of our lesson to give a formal consent to what is farcical, and to pick up our living and our virtue amid what is so ridiculous, hardly deigning a smile, and certainly not vexed. The work is done through all, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the mausoleum of the first Stovik, his ancestor. No royal name was cut, but the place of his burial was deeply graved in the hearts of all present. Had he lived he had been a farcical king, but dead he was as imposing as the grandest monarch of ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... Upon the farcical trial that resulted in the predetermined sentence of death, Miss Cavell courageously and freely admitted her assistance in the specified cases of escape. When she was asked why she did it, she declared ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... properly speaking, musical farce, is becoming more and more popular in both Europe and America it is also becoming proportionately more farcical; although in many theaters it is staged as often as the more serious drama, in some having exclusive dominion; and although theater managers find that these plays draw bigger crowds and fill their houses better than ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... Gosse, Omphalos, London, 1857, p. 5, and passim; and for a passage giving the keynote of the whole, with a most farcical note on coprolites, see pp. ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... represented assuming a character that does not belong to them, and aping people whom they falsely suppose to be their betters; whereas the genuine Paul paints the Parisian tradesmen without any affectation at all. Ours are made laughable by the common farcical attributes of all pretensions, great or small; while real unsophisticated shopkeeping (French) nature is the staple of Paul's character-sketches, and they are more valuable, and in the end more interesting, accordingly. Who cares for the exaggerated efforts of a Manchester ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... are recorded. He himself wrote in 1775 concerning the running away of some British soldiers, "we laugh at his idea of chasing the Royal Fusileers with the stores. Does he consider them as inanimate, or as treasure?" When the British in Boston sent out a bundle of the king's speech, "farcical enough, we gave great joy to them, (the red coats I mean), without knowing or intending it; for on that day, the day which gave being to the new army, (but before the proclamation came to hand,) we had hoisted the union flag ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... satin, the cheap cabinets, and the ready-made black and gilt overmantel, with its panels of swans, hawthorn-blossom, and landscapes sketchily daubed on dead gold—surely it had all been transferred bodily from the stage of some carelessly mounted farcical comedy! ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... sense; and she refused to be bandied from one to another. Both got upon their knees to her; and the upshot of the matter for that while was that she showed both of them the door. That was in August; dear me! the same year I came from college. The scene must have been highly farcical." ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was Irene at feud with everybody? As for Una Meredith being hateful to anybody, the idea was so farcical that Rilla had much ado to keep from laughing in ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... far too much, confidence in the sacredness of treaty stipulations and the solemnly pledged words of the great Christian nations of the world to imagine that their own whole national existence and liberty could be jeopardized overnight, and on a pretext so shallow and farcical as to excite world-wide ridicule. Their disillusionment came too late. The trap had been unwittingly set by hands that made unexpected moves on the European chessboard, and the Bear's paw had this time been skilful enough to spring it at ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... stage and criticism of the drama had frequently been given place in the Port Folio, and Brown's Literary Magazine had published a farcical account of a "Theatrical Campaign" by Dick Buckram (Vol. I, p. 222), but the first magazine in America that attempted to take the theatre for its province was the Theatrical Censor, By a Citizen, first published in Philadelphia, December 9, 1805, and continued ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... to a corner of the king's own box, where sat she who had once been a laughing maid by his side and with whom he had played that diverting pastoral, called "First Love." It was only an instant's return into the farcical but joyous past, and a moment later he was sharply recalled into the arid present by the words ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... case, Tony is a doomed man," commented Myra, with a mocking laugh. "But perhaps the fact that I do not love you will induce you to spare his life," she added hastily. "Don't you find it rather difficult to be melodramatic and to talk farcical nonsense before breakfast, ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... simple taste, ever rare at Paris, was the happy portion of the genius of this Frenchman. Hence he delighted to try his farcical pieces, for we cannot imagine that they were his more elevated comedies, on his old maid-servant. This maid, probably, had a keen relish for comic humour, for once when Moliere read to her the comedy of another writer ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... time, the prospect of liberating the "Pioneer" was seen to be farcical, and all the officers and men from the "Resolute" returned to their ship, although parties of novices would walk down constantly to see the first ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... presented by two popular actors—the nurse undoubtedly acted by a man. If we examine the structure of the play very closely, we notice that these two figures and the elements touching them, appear only as farcical interludes, which, with our love of the logical and harmonious, must strike us ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... issue from their cave. When they have to rise into the air, little devils of stuffed brown cloth are substituted, or perhaps live chimney-sweeps, who swing suspended and smothered in rags. The accidents which happen are sometimes tragical, sometimes farcical. When the ropes break, then infernal spirits and immortal deities fall together, laming and sometimes killing each other. Add to all this the monsters which render some scenes very pathetic, such as dragons, lizards, tortoises, and large toads, which promenade the theatre with a ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... the strong personality of Francia dominated the Junta. The history of Paraguay at this period differs widely from those of the more progressive nations surrounding it. In Paraguay a certain opera bouffe element, together with a series of grimly farcical incidents, continually mingled themselves with some of the darkest tragedies that have been known in any age. From the very start something of the kind had become evident. The members of the Junta, for instance, finding their own means ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... us, like Kelly, with old jeu-d'esprits, Like Dibdin, may tell of each farcical frolic; Or kindly inform us, like Madame Genlis,[1] That gingerbread-cakes ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... bull's-eye lantern, deftly managed by invisible hands, while it left the intruders in shadow, completely illuminated the faces and figures of the passengers. In spite of the majestic obscurity and silence of surrounding nature, the group of humanity thus illuminated was more farcical than dramatic. A scrap of newspaper, part of a sandwich, and an orange peel that had fallen from the floor of the coach, brought into equal prominence by the searching light, completed ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... would arrive, the men who had been counted upon to give character to the gathering remained notably absent. The delegates prudently refrained from counting their meager number, and after preliminaries of a more or less farcical nature, voted for a platform differing little from that afterward adopted at Baltimore, listened to the reading of a vehement letter from Wendell Phillips denouncing Mr. Lincoln's administration and counseling ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... certain legacies, and leaving an honourable and high-minded family dependent upon her bountiful consideration. "I could relate some very extraordinary anecdotes arising out of that circumstance," said Crony; "but you must be content with one, farcical in the extreme, which fully displays the lady's affection for her former profession, and shows she is a perfect mistress of stage effect. On the removal of the shrivelled remains of the old dotard for interment, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... from her, the benefit to England will be second only to our own. This might strike us strangely, but 'tis true, not the less true because the English people could hardly understand or appreciate it now. The military defence of Ireland is almost farcical. A free Ireland could make it a reality—could make it strong against invasion. This would secure England from attack on our side. No one is, I take it, so foolish as to suppose, being free, we would enter ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... but in the nature of things the line of demarcation cannot be drawn with entire satisfaction to all. About twenty years ago an itinerant dealer was arrested in a New Jersey town for selling a certain book. I was present at the trial, which was somewhat farcical. The defendant had gathered together a large number of catalogues to show that the book had been sold by the most reputable dealers in the country; and that it was included in the catalogues of most of the public ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... from the Transvaal) got word of the plot they wired urgent messages to their friends in Parliament that Mr Redmond's selection was the only one that could give the leadership anything better than a farcical character. Result—Mr Redmond was elected by a very considerable majority, and Mr Dillon had further reason for having his knife in his former ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... saluted every subaltern with an automatic gesture of convulsive energy. Every subaltern acknowledged these movements and in turn saluted a multitude of majors, colonels, and generals. The thing became farcical, a monstrous absurdity of human relationship, yet pleasing to the vanity of men lifted up above the lowest caste. It seemed to me an intensification of the snob instinct in the soul of man. Only the Australians stood out ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... of the season, but one which had beneficial results, was the strike of the Detroit players, entailing the staging of a farcical game in Philadelphia between the Athletics and a team of semi-professionals. This incident grew out of an attack on a New York spectator by Ty Cobb while in uniform and the immediate suspension of the ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... Stokes never said a word she did not have a right to utter, but her message opened the eyes of the people. That must be suppressed. That voice must be silenced. Her trial in a capitalist court was very farcical. What chance had she in a corporation court with a put-up jury and a corporation tool on ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... more properly speaking, musical farce, is becoming more and more popular in both Europe and America it is also becoming proportionately more farcical; although in many theaters it is staged as often as the more serious drama, in some having exclusive dominion; and although theater managers find that these plays draw bigger crowds and fill their houses better than any other, in the large ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... his hand with an impetuous gesture—"that considering all the abominable, farcical tricks women play nowadays, it is simply amazing to find one who is contented with a simple life like this, and who manages to make that simple life so gracious ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... or between lovers. Such gushing terminations as Your Own Darling, Your own Dovey and other pet and silly endings should be avoided, as they denote shallowness. Love can be strongly expressed without dipping into the nonsensical and the farcical. ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... you compel you to protest. All the same, however, when people won't make restoration, things must be taken from them. What worries me is that Bergaz should have sold himself just now. The public prosecutor will use that farcical burglary as a crushing argument when he asks the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... moral philosophy of the Mime, Sophron, was so pure that Plato kept a book of his poems under his pillow when on his death-bed. Besides these Moralities, as they were termed, there were, in addition, light pieces of a farcical kind, in the portrayal of which the Mimes were equally as successful as in the ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... rural mask, a god of the garden, instead of the sovereign director of the universal forces, and stern master of the destinies of men. Chaumette's commemoration of the Divinity of Reason was a sensible performance, compared with Robespierre's farcical repartee. It was something, as Comte has said, to select for worship man's most individual attribute. If they could not contemplate society as a whole, it was at least a gain to pay homage to that faculty in ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... Menander, as Caesar called him, though he won himself a great name with the cultured classes by the purity and elegance of his Latin and the fine drawing of his characters, was a failure with popular audiences owing to his lack of broad farcical humour. Plautus with his coarse geniality and lumbering wit made a greater success. He had grafted the festive spirit of Roman farce on to the more artistic comedy of Athens. Tragedy obtained but a passing vogue. ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... down, smoothed his hat, and then with an engaging smile that showed his excellent teeth, began: "I've come—it sounds rather farcical, ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... visits to America. It is not surprising, either, to learn that upon the stage his preference was for melodrama and farce. His own serious writing was always dangerously close to the melodramatic, and his humor to the farcical. There is much false art, bad taste, and even vulgarity in Dickens. He was never quite a gentleman, and never succeeded well in drawing gentlemen or ladies. In the region of low comedy he is easily the most original, the most inexhaustible, the most wonderful ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... been noted as a droll. A grin was as much a part of his stock apparel as tow breeches or a palm-leaf hat. The negro, too, had from time immemorial been portrayed upon the stage and in fiction as an irrepressible and inimitably farcical fellow. But the "Southern gentleman" was a man of different kidney from either of these. A sardonic dignity hedged him about with peculiar sacredness. He was chivalrous and baronial in his instincts, surroundings, and characteristics. He was nervous, excitable, and bloodthirsty. He ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... one, not even the wizened old man who was obviously the humorist of the tribune, had seen anything farcical. To be too hot—to be too cold! this is a serious matter in France. A jury surely has a right to protect itself against cold, against la migraine, and the devils of rheumatism and pleurisy. There is nothing ridiculous in twelve ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... be as abusive as Horace upon the occasion—but if there is no catachresis in the wish, and no sin in it, I wish from my soul, that every imitator in Great Britain, France, and Ireland, had the farcy for his pains; and that there was a good farcical house, large enough to hold—aye—and sublimate them, shag rag and bob-tail, male and female, all together: and this leads me to the affair of Whiskers—but, by what chain of ideas—I leave as a legacy in mort-main ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... Republican device, known as "the Murchison letter," did a great deal to impress thoughtless voters that Mr. Cleveland was "un-American." The incident was dramatic and farcical to a degree. The Murchison letter, which interested the entire country for two or three weeks, purported to come from a perplexed Englishman, addressing the British Minister at Washington, Lord Sackville-West. It sought ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... respect for the motives which lead you to think differently from me.) My dear father, think how, for twenty years, through poverty, through pain, through weariness, through sickness, through the uncongenial atmosphere of a farcical college and of a bare army and then of an exacting business life, through all the discouragement of being wholly unacquainted with literary people and literary ways — I say, think how, in spite of all these depressing ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... Cris Rock it was, clean shaven, and looking quite respectable; indeed, better dressed than Kearney had seen him since he left off his New Orleans "store" clothes. The Colossus was evidently an object of great interest to his new acquaintances; and, from the farcical look upon their faces, it was clear they had been doing their best to "draw" him. With what success Kearney could not tell; though, from the knowledge he had of his old comrade's cleverness, he suspected not much. There was just time for him to note ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... of Wattier's Club was Bligh, a notorious madman, of whom Mr Raikes relates:—'One evening at the Macao table, when the play was very deep, Brummell, having lost a considerable stake, affected, in his farcical way, a very tragic air, and cried out—"Waiter, bring me a flat candlestick and a pistol." Upon which Bligh, who was sitting opposite to him, calmly produced two loaded pistols from his coat pocket, which he placed on the table, and said, "Mr Brummell, ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... vain hope that more delegates would arrive, the men who had been counted upon to give character to the gathering remained notably absent. The delegates prudently refrained from counting their meager number, and after preliminaries of a more or less farcical nature, voted for a platform differing little from that afterward adopted at Baltimore, listened to the reading of a vehement letter from Wendell Phillips denouncing Mr. Lincoln's administration and counseling the choice of Fremont ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... be fraudulent, farcical, upon closer inspection. For one thing, its crudeness was more glaring, and its unpainted board fronts looked flimsy, transient. Compared to the substantial buildings of the East, Manti's structures were hovels. Here ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... most lofty sentiments, the most exalted virtues, and heroism and magnanimity strained almost beyond the limits of probability, are checkered by uncouth pleasantries, and the most pathetic incidents intruded upon and interrupted by the farcical conundrums of MUG, a low cockney, who has become secretary of state to the king of the Mandingoes. Thus, oscillating between Kotesbue and O'Keefe, giving now a layer of exalted sentiment, and then a layer of mere farce, has Mr. C. raised a long ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... to God the same oaths they have a thousand times sworn to men and a thousand times broken. Now, if I were in God's place, I would not accept these wavering saints. For my part I hate these pale, tearful, sighing, self-destroying beauties, and the farcical exhibition of their sufferings would never ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... sighed, "I should so like to take myself and my troubles seriously once in a while. No sooner do I try, but something perfectly farcical is sure to happen. If I tell you this, promise me you won't laugh. It's indecent for me to laugh; mamma would never forgive me. The old dear! I'm so fond ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... I stayed on, as every one knows, when the Lyceum as a personal enterprise of Henry's was no more—when the farcical Lyceum Syndicate took over the theater. I played a wretched part in "Robespierre," and refused L12,000 to go to America with ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... this farcical demonstration on the part of the government —a war without a battle! There was, perhaps, no genuine basis of necessity upon which to organize the expensive and disastrous expedition against the Mormons. The real cause, perhaps, should be attributed to the clamour of other religious ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... ten inches long. This weapon is used for digging up the bed of the river, but if it could be insinuated out of the water into a drowsy angler's leg it would probably make him sit up. As the paddle is as long as the fish the creature presents a really farcical appearance. The species runs to a hundredweight, I believe, in ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... is vain. Another daughter of the Paphian divinity presides at the shrine of rouge et noir. The blood-stains are effaced from the floor. A fresh red mound in the city cemetery is the only relic of French Charlie. Philip Hardin, released upon heavy bail, awaits a farcical investigation. After a few days he bears no legal burden of this crime. Only the easy load upon his conscience. Although the mark of Cain sets up a barrier between him and his fellows, and the murder calls for the vengeance of God, Philip Hardin goes his way with unclouded brow. His eyes ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... asked, 'Why does Innocent Smith continue far into his middle age a farcical existence, that exposes him to so many false charges?' To this I merely answer that he does it because he really is happy, because he really is hilarious, because he really is a man and alive. He is so young that climbing garden trees and playing silly practical jokes are still to him what ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... was not allowed to be known to the commanding general or the most responsible staff officer. Grant made the sensible suggestion that the key be given to military officers only, and be kept from the civilian operators; but Mr. Stanton adhered to the farcical notion of carrying on a cipher correspondence which should be open to the irresponsible transmitter, but secret as to the responsible commanding general to whom it was addressed. If it were meant for a system of espionage upon the general by thus inseparably tying to him a civilian ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... of this farcical ballad has long been popular in many lands, European and Oriental, and has been introduced as an episode in English, French, and German plays. A close parallel to the ballad may be found in ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... money in his pocket and youth in his heart. The day was waning as he rode up the street and in the sunlight the shadows of himself and his horse were attenuated to farcical lengths. Little dust whirls rose in the road, spun round in inverted cones like huge tops, and scurried out of sight across the prairie. Horses drowsed lazily in front of Tolleson's, anchored to the spot by the simple process of throwing the bridle to the ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... felt it was monstrous that the modern man, who was pre-eminently capable of realising the strangest and most contradictory beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic and the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcical bathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat. He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist in raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist. It is indeed difficult to account for the clinging curse ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... her Potterism (COLLINS) "a tragi-farcical tract" Miss ROSE MACAULAY disarms our criticism that she conducts too heavy a discussion from too light a platform. I don't think the author of What Not is likely to write anything dull, anything I shan't be pleased to read. She has a keen eye, a candid soul, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... break the farcical silence he said in a voice too loud for the small library. "Well, what is it about socialism that you don't just know? Mrs. Dwight told me you had ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... recollections, is but a collection of mounds and hollows,—as much a tomb of its past as Birs Nimroud of that great city, Nineveh. Old Sarum is now best remembered by its long-surviving privilege, as a borough, of sending two members to Parliament. The farcical ceremony of electing two representatives who had no real constituency behind them was put an end to by the ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... and he put up his compass & magnet. they were now much more complisant, tho the women and children were yet so much allarmed that they took refuge in their beads and behing the men who were seting opposite to Capt. C. during the whole of this farcical seen an old man who was seting by continued to speak with great vehemence apparently imploring his god for protection. Capt. C. gave them an adiquate compensation for their roots and having lighted his pipe smoaked with the men. they appeared in a great measure to get the better of their allarm ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... of his oration made him reach out another clutching hand to the vanished reporter. "But it's farcical, father, to be always interviewed by ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... Foote, the once well-known farcical writer, (now chiefly remembered from Boswell's Life of Johnson), opened the Old House in the Haymarket, and, in order to overrule the opposition of the magistrates, announced his entertainments as 'Mr Foote's giving tea to ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... in these dramas began to lag, current topics were introduced into the dialogue, and characters from real life appeared on the stage for the first time. Early in the sixteenth century John Heywood invented a farcical composition called The Interlude to relieve the tiresome monotony of existing plays. But it was in 1540 that the first comedy appeared, and it is not too much to say that this play marks the beginning ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... Jonson"; he wrote at least sixteen plays, among them "Every Man is his Humour" (1598), in which Shakespeare acted, "The Poetaster" (1601), which vexed Dekker, the tragedy of "Sejanus" (1603), "The Silent Woman" (1609), a farcical comedy, Dryden's favourite play, and his most elaborate and masterly work, "The Alchemist" (1610); he wrote also thirty-five masques of singular richness and grace, in the production of which Inigo ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... divine tragedy, is the tragedy of the Cross. Pilate, the sceptic, the man of culture, by making a mockery of it, sought to convert it into a comedy; he conceived the farcical idea of the king with the reed sceptre and crown of thorns, and cried "Behold the man!" But the people, more human than he, the people that thirsts for tragedy, shouted, "Crucify him! crucify him!" And the human, the intra-human, tragedy is the tragedy of Don Quixote, whose face was daubed with ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... moment that these regrettable surroundings have in the smallest degree impaired the exquisite and waxen bloom of our author's sympathetic characters. Far from it. Of the young and oh-so-good-looking millionaire (weary of pleasures and palaces, too weary even to dismiss his preposterous and farcical butler—lacking, in effect, the definite object); of the heroine's young brother, crook in embryo, but reclaimable by influence of hero; and of the peach-like leading lady herself, I can only say that each is worthy of the rest, and all of a creator who must surely (I like to think) have laughed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... had always held his uncle in slight esteem—foreboded something from his smiling insincerity. He never mentions him without an expression of contempt, hardly acknowledges him as king; he is a thing—of nothing—a farcical monarch—"a peacock"—and, in this particular act, no dread usurper, but a "cut-purse of the realm." Whether he designed to wait or was prepared to strike, his future was still intact, his energy unimpaired. His mother remained to him, now doubly dear ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels. St. Matthew would as soon have thought of applying such adjectives to Judas Maccabeus as to Jesus; and even St. Luke, who makes Jesus polite and gracious, does not make him meek. The picture of him as an English curate of the farcical comedy type, too meek to fight a policeman, and everybody's butt, may be useful in the nursery to soften children; but that such a figure could ever have become a centre of the world's attention is ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... himself. Yet by some extraordinary prescience, some inexplicable presentiment, the approaching catastrophe cast its shadow over his mind and he felt vaguely that the life-journey of genius would be incomplete and farcical without the final tragedy: whoever lives for the ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... brains, one so noble and the other so common, and making game of each other to the great entertainment of the crowd, there was a moment when the Count found himself wavering between the sublime and its parody, the farcical extremes of human life. Ignoring the chain of incredible events which had brought them to this smoky den, he believed himself to be the plaything of some strange hallucination, and thought of Gambara and Giardini ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... included the absurd demand for annual Parliaments? None the less Pitt was answerable for the action of the Home Minister in referring the sentences back to the judges who inflicted them—a course of conduct at once cowardly and farcical. Pitt's speech also proves him to have known of the irregularities that disgraced the trials. But he, a lawyer, condoned them and applauded the harsh and vindictive sentences. In short, he acted as an alarmist, not as a ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... suddenly. With the swiftness of lightning they descend upon the world, often in the very midst of fancied peace and security,—and the farcical, grinning, sneering apes of humanity, for whom even the idea of a God has but furnished food for lewd jesting, are scattered into terror-stricken hordes, who are forced to realise for the first time in their lives, that whether they believe in Omnipotence or no, an evident Law of Justice exists, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... in Hamlet, but not so grim. I have heard a country undertaker describe the details of the least attractive branch of his uncomfortable business with a pride and self-satisfaction that would have been farcical had not the subject been so depressing. This would have been matter for Hardy's pen. There are few scenes in his books more telling than that which shows the operations in the family vault of the Luxellians, when John Smith, Martin ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... Andronicus" too mild for representation, and generously added a few more murders, rapes, and parricides, to that charnel-house of horrors[1]. His turn for comedy being at least equal to his success in the blood-stained buskin, Mr Ravenscroft translated and mangled several of the more farcical French comedies, which he decorated with the lustre of his own great name. Amongst others which he thus appropriated, were the most extravagant and buffoon scenes in Moliere's "Bourgeois Gentilhomme;" in which ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... passed a gunsmith's, and stood looking fascinated at the shining barrels. Then he moved away, shaking his head, his eyes gleaming as though the spectacle of himself had long ago passed the bounds of tragedy—become farcical even. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in her own apartments, whenever any affair of an interesting nature was pending, nothing could make her refrain from joining any company which might be in the house;—nothing;—not even O'Grady himself. At such times, too, she became strangely excited, and invariably executed one piece of farcical absurdity, of which, however, the family contrived to confine the exercise to her own room. It was wearing on her head a tin concern, something like a chimney-cowl, ornamented by a small weathercock, after the fashion of those which surmount church-steeples; this, she declared, influenced her ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... Paramore's disease while it is the most farcical thing in the play is also the most philosophic and important. The rest of the figures, including the Philanderer himself, are in the full sense of those blasting and obliterating words "funny without being vulgar," that is, ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... was destined to mark an epoch in the life of a man in the theater. Through Elizabeth Marbury, who had just launched herself as play-broker in a little office on Twenty-fourth Street, around the corner from Charles Frohman's, his attention was called to a French farcical comedy called "The Masked Ball," by Alexandre Bisson and Albert Carre. Frohman liked the story and wanted it adapted for American production. It was the beginning of his ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... of these thirty years is soon told. What a fantastic mode of life it seems, how farcical, grotesque, in its dull routine, for a genius who was at work steadily building up new art-forms. Haydn, we are told, rose every morning at six, carefully shaved and dressed, drank a cup of black coffee, and worked till noon. Then he ate, and in the afternoon he worked again, and ate and ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... use unless where, as in this case, I seek to rouse the vigilance of the inattentive by the apparent intemperance of the language. Pope, in too many instances, for the sake of some momentary and farcical effect, deliberately assumes the license of a liar. Not only he adopts the language of moral indignation where we know that it could not possibly have existed, seeing that the story to which this pretended indignation is attached was to Pope's knowledge ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... Perrot, convened a parliament in Ireland. There was something farcical as well as grim in calling together a parliament under such conditions, when the delegates were supposed to be convened that they might give frank and sincere advice to the representative of the sovereign. Some of the Irish chieftains who had given their allegiance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... sharp, in proportion as they are more polished. That reformers should abound in obscenities, as is the case of the two Roman poets, is surely an impropriety of the most extraordinary kind; the courtly Horace also sometimes sinks into mean and farcical abuse, as in the first lines of the seventh satire of the first book; but Boileau and Pope have given to their Satire the Cestus of Venus: their ridicule is concealed and oblique; that of the Romans ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... life, must be a thing of course, Whereas there's nought so difficult, because There's nowhere less allowance made for flaws. See Plautus now: what ill-sustained affairs Are his close fathers and his love-sick heirs! How farcical his parasites! how loose And down at heel he wears his comic shoes! For, so he fills his pockets, nought he heeds Whether the play's a failure ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... actual living wife, sometimes with her consent, sometimes without it. One old gentleman, whose name is not to be mentioned, was sealed thus for eternity to Martha Washington and to Empress Josephine. It sounds farcical and foolish in the extreme; fit only to be counted as a silly joke, unworthy the attention of a sane soul for a minute; but it is terribly sober when it is remembered that there are hundreds of thousands of innocent, honest, and unsuspecting Mormons who really and truly believe this ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... book is the poetry that the Irish captain recites to Pump, the innkeeper, the gallant innkeeper who, against all opposition, keeps the flag flying and the flagon full. If the book is a little overdrawn it is, no doubt, because the subject is slightly farcical; the arguments of the Oriental are well put, and, if the discussion of the merits of vegetarianism are a little wearisome, the poetry of a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... People, President of the German Republic,—there's the only true sovereignty. That was what kings were once—giants of brain and brawn. King—one who knows, one who can! Headship is for the head. What is this mock dignity that stands on the lying breaths of winking courtiers? What is this farcical, factitious glamour that will not bear the light of day? The Grace of God? Ay, give me god-like manhood, and I will bend the knee. But to ask me to worship a stuffed purple robe on a worm-eaten throne! 'Tis an insult to manhood and reason. Hereditary kingship! When you can breed ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... career. Once started on the wrong tack, he works out his evidence with convincing logic, and ties up the whole neighbourhood in the toils of his misconception. The book is full of the wittiest dialogue and the most farcical situations. It will be as certain to please all lovers of Irish humour as the immortal "Experiences ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... the mysterious death of their chief in Amprior's house of Leny before Prestonpans (1745). Glenbuckie was mysteriously pistolled in the night. "The style and tone is unlike that of the Iliad ... It is rather akin to comedy of a rough farcical kind." But it was time for "comic relief." If the story of Dolon be comic, it is comic with the practical humour of the sagas. In an isolated nocturnal adventure and massacre we cannot expect the style of an heroic ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... informed me—which was your duty as a friend—of this curmudgeon's boast that he would have me horsewhipped if I dared venture into England. You will readily conceive that any gentleman of self-respect cannot permit such farcical utterances to be delivered without appending a gladiatorial epilogue. Well! what are ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... persuade everybody that the invasion of Pennsylvania is nothing, a mere tempest in a tea-pot. Whom do they hope to humbug in this way? The disgrace is nameless, only they are callous enough not to feel it. Their cheeks can no more redden.... However, Stanton is not so optimist. It would look so farcical if it were not so deadly to witness. Hooker groping his way after Lee; Lincoln and the all-knowing head-quarters in the utmost darkness about Lee, his army, his movements, and his plans. And all this while the country, the people, is kept officially ignorant ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... Farcical Romance"? The immediate reply is that The Amazons, by Mr. PINERO, is a specimen of the genus. To see The Amazons ought to supply the terms of the required definition. I have seen it, and yet the definition ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... election to the chair, but when Mr O'Brien and Mr Davitt (who had returned from the Transvaal) got word of the plot they wired urgent messages to their friends in Parliament that Mr Redmond's selection was the only one that could give the leadership anything better than a farcical character. Result—Mr Redmond was elected by a very considerable majority, and Mr Dillon had further reason for having his knife in his former ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... abstracted look, the eyes beneath those ridiculous lenses coming to a sharp bright focus with tiny livening flecks in the gray of the iris; and the way the change lifted his features from mediocrity to the alertness of a terrier. It was absurd, it was farcical ... and it was ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... nor were any 'fossil remains' of the noble animal discovered in the Wicklow Mines,[G] which were worked some fifty years back, but which, for want of capital or perseverance, only furnished a few Cronobane halfpence, and materials for a musical farce to one of the most delightful farcical Irish writers of ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... If it fail—and God forbid!—then the whole world will lie in the grip of Flint and Waldron! With our other centers broken up and under espionage, our press forced into impotence—save our underground press—and political action now rendered farcical as ever it was in Mexico, when Diaz ruled, we have ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... looked at it I asked myself the questions that I have asked here; what was the soul in all those stones? They were varied, but it was not variety; they were solemn, but it was not solemnity; they were farcical, but it was not farce. What is it in them that thrills and soothes a man of our blood and history, that is not there in an Egyptian pyramid or an Indian temple or a Chinese pagoda? All of a sudden the vans I had mistaken for cottages began to move away to the left. ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... and bad pieces without selection; that they were subject and subordinate both to the police and to the public; that they were as indifferent to aesthetical requirements as their audience, and to please the latter, lowered the originals to a farcical and vulgar tone—are objections which apply rather to the whole manufacture of translations than to the individual remodeller. On the other hand we may regard as characteristic of Plautus, the masterly handling of the language and of the varied rhythms, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... thirties, red-headed and inclined to be podgy. He was not built to express poetic passions—how many of us are, if it comes to that?—or to sustain their onslaught with dignity. Emotion seemed to have bloated him with unshed tears. There was nothing noble in his distress—only a farcical appearance ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... this glorious Creation around us is not a caprice or a farce. It is designed for a Cause and moves steadily towards that Cause. There may be—no doubt there are—many men who elect to view life from a low, material, or even farcical standpoint—nevertheless, life in ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... in terse military German which eighty per cent. of all Russian officers know and the trend of which is never misunderstood. I pointed out that any further encroaching would be resented in a most drastic and sudden manner. The usual farcical exchange of cards, permitting all sorts of bluffs, does not impress a Russian, but the imminent chance of blows from fists does. A pair of astonished bulging eyes, a muttered apology and ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... devices to set and frame, so to speak, a court ball had been known and practised in varying degrees of elaboration long before his time. But Jonson gave dramatic value to the masque, especially in his invention of the antimasque, a comedy or farcical element of relief, entrusted to professional players or dancers. He enhanced, as well, the beauty and dignity of those portions of the masque in which noble lords and ladies took their parts to create, by their gorgeous costumes and artistic grouping and evolutions, a sumptuous show. On the ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... and criticism of the drama had frequently been given place in the Port Folio, and Brown's Literary Magazine had published a farcical account of a "Theatrical Campaign" by Dick Buckram (Vol. I, p. 222), but the first magazine in America that attempted to take the theatre for its province was the Theatrical Censor, By a Citizen, first published in ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... irony of the argument, and their laugh did much to do away with the constraint, the tension of their mood. More gayly she mentioned certain farcical incidents. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... and although it violates that most necessary rule of dramatic art, declaring no play should contain an effect, a line, a scene or an act which does not bear on the end in view by developing either the characters or the action. The entire second act, containing the farcical examination-scene, is useless. Robertson again sinned in this way in the Nightingale: although it had no effect on the plot, although it was entirely unnecessary, he introduced a pretty tableau representing the heroine, a lovely prima-donna, singing under the silver moonbeams ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... day are repeated against the republicans and the legitimists by the Younger Branch, flourished in the speech. These trite commonplaces, which might have some meaning under a fixed government, seem farcical in the mouth of administrators of all epochs and opinions. A saying of the troublous times of yore is still applicable: "The label is changed, but the wine is the same as ever." The public prosecutor, ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... end to the discussions before the public are fatigued; and, the music sounding, the performers of the national dance appear, and take the place of the two advocates for a time. These combatants soon re-commence their struggle; and, at length, the judge is called upon to pronounce between them. A farcical kind of consultation ensues between the judge and the ministers around, who are supposed to send messengers even to the king himself by ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... of the poems which stirred their own tenderness or filial piety, and carry them to make their first acquaintance with great men, great works, or solemn crises through the medium of some miscellaneous burlesque which, with its idiotic puns and farcical attitudes, will remain among their primary associations, and reduce them throughout their time of studious preparation for life to the moral imbecility of an inward giggle at what might have stimulated their high emulation or fed the fountains of compassion, trust, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... following chapter, dear reader, you will see the end of this farcical adventure. In the mean time, let us take a ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... because some great principle was actually at stake but because the term had been popular ever since the struggle with Spain. As a designation for movements aimed at securing rotation in office, and hence control of the treasury, it was appropriate enough! At all events, whether serious or farcical, the commotions often involved an expenditure in life and money far beyond the value of the interests affected. Further, both the prevalent disorder and the centralization of authority impelled the educated and well-to-do classes to take up their residence at ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... they have to rise into the air, little devils of stuffed brown cloth are substituted, or perhaps live chimney-sweeps, who swing suspended and smothered in rags. The accidents which happen are sometimes tragical, sometimes farcical. When the ropes break, then infernal spirits and immortal deities fall together, laming and sometimes killing each other. Add to all this the monsters which render some scenes very pathetic, such as dragons, lizards, tortoises, ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... and ransacking the sugar factories. The Governor, Maciel, appears to have behaved very badly, and with no little treachery towards his fellow-countrymen. Nassau, when Maciel surrendered, treated him with contempt, and imprisoned him. The situation had now become grimly farcical. In Europe the Dutch were supplying the Portuguese with arms and stores, and acting in general as their allies; while in Brazil the two nations were openly at war, and the Dutch were sending hostile ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... we arbitrate? Every case in which a favorable award is assured us. If we want Texas, we send an army after it. Every case that does not rouse our anger. Let the Maine blow up and we fight. A treaty with an elastic exception like this is a farcical sham and ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... abound in the 'Two Gentlemen,' but passages of high poetic spirit are not wanting, and the speeches of the clowns, Launce and Speed—the precursors of a long line of whimsical serving-men—overflow with farcical drollery. The 'Two Gentlemen' was not published in Shakespeare's lifetime; it first appeared in the folio of 1623, after having, in all probability, undergone ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... illustrated, as he proceeded, by H. K. Browne (Phiz). The work met and has retained an unprecedented popularity. Caricature as it was, it caricatured real, existent oddities; everything was probable; the humor was sympathetic if farcical, the assertion of humanity bold, and the philosophy of universal application. He had touched our common nature in all ranks and conditions; he had exhibited men and women of all types; he had exposed the tricks of politics and the absurdity ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... This incident is unsatisfactorily treated. We never know how Waka circumvented Malio and restored her grandchild to the husband designed for her. The whole thing sounds like a dramatic innovation with farcical import, which appeared in the tale without motivation for the reason that it had none in its inception. The oral narrator is rather an actor than a composer; he may have introduced this episode as a surprise, and its success as farce ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... can thoroughly appreciate it. It is curious, and yet it is not curious, to find the pathos and the polish of one of the most touching and elegant of poets in the man who has with such irresistible humour, sometimes approaching to the farcical, delineated humble Scotch life. One passage in the book always struck me very much. We have in it the poet as well as the humorist; and it is a perfect example of what I have been trying to describe in the pages which you have rend. I mean the passage in ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... waning years, he returns to the shades. The play ends with the undignified reappearance of Xerxes, and a melancholy procession into the palace of Susa. It was, perhaps, inevitable that this close of the great drama should verge on the farcical, and that the poltroonery of Xerxes should, in a measure, obscure Aeschylus' generous portraiture of Atossa and Darius. But his magnificent picture of the battle of Salamis is unequalled in the poetic annals of naval war. No account of the flight of ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... of the world does so, we should not. Nevertheless I mean to see to it that this subject becomes part of the Eugenic campaign which will yet dominate and mould the future. For surely the present spectacle has elements in it which would be utterly farcical if they were not so tragic. Here we have life present and life to come being destroyed for lack of knowledge. These horrible diseases, ravaging the guilty and the innocent, equally and indifferently, are at present allowed to do so with scarcely a voice raised against ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... Mandane to the fire, and with farcical reverence requested her to be seated on her throne—an empty color cask, for she suffered under the strange permanent delusion that she was the wife of the Mukaukas George. They laughingly did her homage, craved some favor or made enquiries as ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Mrs. Fyne," I said. "I didn't know I was expected to be serious as well as sagacious. No. That science is farcical and therefore I am not serious. It's true that most sciences are farcical except those which teach us how to ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... feud with everybody? As for Una Meredith being hateful to anybody, the idea was so farcical that Rilla had much ado to keep from laughing in ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Certainly, classical English would not answer; the individual soul of the poems could never be recognized in such a garb. The tongue of Burns can be spoken only by a born Scot; and our Yankee, which is rather a grotesque English than a dialect, is unfortunately so associated with the coarse and the farcical—Lowell's little poem of "'Zekel's Courtship" being the single exception—that it seems hardly adapted to the simple and tender fancies of Hebel. Like the comedian whose one serious attempt at tragic acting was greeted with roars of laughter, as an admirable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... Everybody knew, meantime, that the spirit of good-will, the grace of universal sympathy, was really growing in the world, and that it was only our awkwardness that, by striving to cram it all for a year into twenty-four hours, made it seem a little farcical. And everybody knows that when goodness becomes fashionable, goodness is likely to suffer a little. A virtue overdone falls on t'other side. And a holiday that takes on such proportions that the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... alleged cynicism, to a corner of the king's own box, where sat she who had once been a laughing maid by his side and with whom he had played that diverting pastoral, called "First Love." It was only an instant's return into the farcical but joyous past, and a moment later he was sharply recalled into the arid present by the ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... more strikingly the farcical nature of public meetings, and the hollowness, worthlessness, and accidental character of popularity, than the circumstances of Durham's arrival here. He has done nothing in Canada, he took himself off just ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... the property of their persons as their forefathers were in their real estate. A man adopts another to-day to unadopt him to-morrow and replace him by somebody else the day after. So profoundly unimportant to them is their social identity, that they bandy it about with almost farcical freedom. Perhaps it is fitting that there should be some slight preparation in this world for a future transmigration of souls. Still one fails to conceive that the practice can be devoid of disadvantages even to ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... Schuylkill. In the centre of a large lawn stood a double mansion of stone, and a little to each side were seen outhouses for servants and kitchen use. The open space toward the water was extensive enough to admit of the farcical tilting of the afternoon. A great variety of evergreen trees and shrubs gave the house a more shaded look than the season would otherwise have afforded. Among these were countless lanterns illuminating the grounds, and from the windows on all sides a blaze of light ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... to the Stick'ems; but as a last word I would say, in all seriousness, that wildly farcical though that celebrated utterance may be, there underlies it an absolutely true valuation of the fundamental bed-rock of war. To emulate the deeds of others and go one better, to put the men in good heart with their tails up, that is the secret ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... of my mouth as it seemed of their own volition. I was tired of this farcical bargaining, and determined to put an end to it, once for all. I stood up and faced his blank stare of amazement, without at ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and satirists. He loves a monologue that passes from mockery to regret, that gathers up by the way anecdote and history and essay and foolery, that is half a narrative of things seen and half an irresponsible imagination. He can describe a runaway horse with the farcical realism of the authors of Some Experiences of an Irish R.M., can parody a judge, can paint a portrait, and can steep a landscape in vision. Two recent critics have described him as "the best English prose writer since Dryden," ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... own happiness. It is not wit nor subtle humour, but a combination of pure mirth with the enthusiasm of warm friendship, that maintains one's interest in the simple life of the new Drumston. There is an abundance of farcical fun and playfulness which force laughter, and never approach an unkindness. The men avoid being smart at each other's expense; and if they cannot claim to be clever or heroic, they are at least good fellows, any one of whom might serve as a ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... to find himself in the same boat as both the local Governor and the Chief of Gendarmery: with the result that the whole trio were reduced to a frame of mind in which they were only too glad to turn to him (Samosvitov) for advice. The ultimate and farcical upshot was that report came crowding upon report, and that such alleged doings were brought to light as the sun had never before beheld. In fact, the documents in question employed anything and everything as material, even to announcing that such and such ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... seem ridiculous, and yet the articles and addresses and ceremonies with which the new Governor-General and his wife have been received look as if the Minister had determined, before he died, to have the best laugh of his farcical career over the barbarians who have called him in to rule over them. A court is a very delicate thing, and a strong capacity for enjoying it does not of itself make good courtiers. In England the reasons which ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... is here reproduced in facsimile.[1] It is an interesting example of that mid-eighteenth-century phenomenon, the afterpiece, from a period when not only Shakespearean stock productions but new plays as well were accompanied by such farcical appendages.[2] This particular afterpiece is worth reproducing not only for its catalogue of the social foibles of the age, but as an illustration of satirical writing for the stage at a time when dramatic taste often wavered toward the sentimental. ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... generously peppered about the dialogue and recited in the purest of English accents, can persuade you to believe that you are getting the real local stuff. At the same time you accept cheerfully the most farcical conditions on the vague assumption that all things may ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... appears that Miss Morrison got hold of a humorous book called 'The Brass Bottle,' a fantastic, farcical thing, about a genie who had been sealed up in a bottle for a thousand years getting out and causing the poor devil of a hero no end of worry by heaping riches and honours upon him in the most embarrassing manner. It happened that on the night ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... Saint-Evremond satirised literary affectations in La Comedie des Academistes; these and other follies of the time are presented with spirit in Desmaret's remarkable comedy, Les Visionnaires. If we add, for sake of its study of the peasant in the character of Mathieu Gareau, the farcical Pedant Joue of Cyrano, we have named the most notable comedies of the years ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... away, and changing to the barren wild of age and sorrow. The poor reflection of having served your king will yield you no consolation in your parting moments. He will crumble to the same undistinguished ashes with yourself, and have sins enough of his own to answer for. It is not the farcical benedictions of a bishop, nor the cringing hypocrisy of a court of chaplains, nor the formality of an act of Parliament, that can change guilt into innocence, or make the punishment one pang the less. You ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Success of the satire The author's regret in having written it Refusal to republish it Attempted publication of Englishman, Otway's three requisites for an Envy Ephesus, ruins of EPIGRAM on Moore's Operatic Farce, or Farcical Opera Erskine, Lord, his eloquence his famous pamphlet See, also Essex (George-Capel), fifth Earl of Euxine, or Black Sea, description of Ewing, Dr. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... single star performer, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt. Under the influence of Eugene Scribe, Sardou began his career at the Theatre Francais with a wide range of well-made plays, varying in scope from the social satire of Nos Intimes and the farcical intrigue of Les Pattes de Mouche (known to us in English as The Scrap of Paper) to the tremendous historic panorama of Patrie. When Sarah Bernhardt left the Comedie Francaise, Sardou followed in ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... traditional methods of teaching and discipline as will retain all the youth under educational influences until they are equipped to be masters of their own economic and social careers. The ideal may seem remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of education is a farcical yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and more dominates our public system of education. The same principle has application on the side of the considerations which concern the relations of one nation to another. It is not enough to teach the horrors of war and to avoid everything ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... valiantly by him, and his face revealed nothing of the humiliation he must feel in playing out his farcical role of friendship before the eyes of the man to ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... who Bob was, but at the moment she could think of nothing but the farcical complications arising from the idea of Mrs. Maper's providing Mr. Maper with a male companion secretly to improve his manners. Of course the two companions would fall ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... prosecuting attorneys, sheriff and drawers of jurors, and every other of court of law are in the hands of a despotic cabal who excessively tax, and whose courts convict all those who oppose them, and exonerate by trial the most farcical, the vilest criminal, rob and murder in broad day light, often at the bidding of their protectors. Such a status for a people claiming to be civilized seems difficult to conceive, yet the above was not an hypothesis of condition, but the ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... scene a child, in the next is an old man, and so forth. These plays are of very ancient composition, and their stories cast in remote times. They appeared to me very dull, on the whole, but were relieved by startling mechanical contrivances, and a kind of farcical broad humour, and detached passages of great vigour and power expressed in language highly poetical, but somewhat overcharged with metaphor and trope. In fine, they seemed to me very much what the plays of Shakespeare seemed to a Parisian in the time of Louis XV., or perhaps to an Englishman ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... heart beat—as strong, he thought, as a bell. In a way Emmy had deceived him —she probably had always been fragile, but was careful to conceal it from him at their marriage. It was unjust to him. He wished that she would take her farcical meals in her room, and not sit here—a skeleton at the feast. Positively it made him nervous to see ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... be entirely omitted, the play must suffer, even though Henry Irving himself be cast for the title-role." Anyone going to the theatre in this spirit would be likely to be less disappointed by performances that were comic or even frankly farcical. Latterly, when he grew slightly deaf, listening to any kind of piece became too much of an effort; nevertheless, he continued to the last the habit of going to ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... genre classique et heroique," and was almost the first of an order of entertainments which have gone on increasing in favor up to the present day of universally triumphant parody and burlesque, by no means as laughable and by no means as unobjectionable. Indeed, farcical to the broadest point as was that mythological travesty of "The Danaides," it was the essence of decency and propriety compared with "La grande Duchesse," "La belle Helene," "Orphee aux Enfers," "La Biche au Bois," "Le petit Faust," and all the vile succession of indecencies ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... them at school—substituting, in this case, home for school, and a mother for a school-mistress—is not absolutely new or original; but, again, what matters this to anyone, so long as the new shape given to the old material is genuinely amusing? So "farcical" goes with "original." But now, as to its being a "Romance?" Would not the term "burlesque" be a better term than "Farcical Romance?" The characters of the three adventurous lovers are not less burlesque than were those of the three Knights in ALBERT SMITH'S romantic Extravaganza, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... was to Mr. Pickwick's watch, that we owe the diverting and farcical incident of the double bedded bedroom—and indeed we have here all the licensed improbabilities of a Farce. To forget his watch on a hotel table was the last thing a staid man of business would do. How could he be made to forget it? "By winding ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... the young lady's name nor any of the circumstances which made it my duty to watch over her welfare. All the same I said nothing about the aroph or the share I had taken in its exhibition. The incident appeared to me too farcical for a serious drama, but I confessed that I had procured the girl drugs in the hope of relieving her ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... doesn't think so now, but at the time he had a notion that the public would find something humorous and attractive in the spectacle of a popular actress's leg swathed in several layers of stocking. So he made a show of Blanche Bates. The public refused to be amused at the farcical study in comparative anatomy, and when Mr. Belasco's friends began to fault him for having pandered to a low taste, and he felt the smart of failure in addition, he grew heartily ashamed of himself. His ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... lunacy!' Stafforth was saying vehemently. 'Illegal and impossible, it will spell disgrace and misfortune to us all. The Emperor will interfere, for this is going too far. We must hinder this farcical ceremony; his Highness cannot marry two wives! It will be Moempelgard over again! Think how absurd, Graevenitz! Cannot you see that this farce ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... was becoming rather a farcical dissertation upon the relations that should obtain between states, irrespective of size, when it was broken off by a cry from Tambi, who, with another lantern hanging overside at the end of his arm had made ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... lacks a sense of humor to teach a bit of English that abounds in humor, by means of the textual notes. The notes are bad enough, in all conscience, but the teacher's lack of humor piles Ossa upon Pelion. The solemnity that pervades such mechanical teaching would be farcical were it not so pathetic. The teacher who cannot indulge in a hearty, honest, ringing laugh with her pupils in situations that are really humorous is certain to be laughed at by her pupils. In her work, as in Lincoln's, a sense of humor will often ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... As she refused to do so and turned a deaf ear to his arguments, losing all self-control, he flung his felt hat on the floor, continued to rage and rail against me, and, no result coming of it, dashed at last, in a towering passion, out through the door, which he slammed behind him. There was a farcical ending to the scene, since he was obliged to ring at the door again for his hat, which, in his exasperation, he had forgotten. This was a kind of private prologue to the ecclesiastical drama which from the year 1871 upwards was enacted in most of the pulpits of ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... completely a machine; yet his profession inevitably teaches him something of dogmatism, swaggering, and sell-consequence: he is like the puppet of a showman, who, at the very time he is made to strut and swell and display the most farcical airs, we perfectly know cannot assume the most insignificant gesture, advance either to the right or the left, but as he is moved by ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... burletta^, harlequinade^, pantomime, burlesque, opera bouffe [Fr.], ballet, spectacle, masque, drame comedie drame [Fr.]; melodrama, melodrame^; comidie larmoyante [Fr.], sensation drama; tragicomedy, farcical-comedy; monodrame monologue; duologue trilogy^; charade, proverbs; mystery, miracle play; musical, musical comedy. [movies] western, horse opera; flick [Coll.]; spy film, love story, adventure film, documentary, nature film; pornographic film, smoker, skin flick, X-rated ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... leaving an honourable and high-minded family dependent upon her bountiful consideration. "I could relate some very extraordinary anecdotes arising out of that circumstance," said Crony; "but you must be content with one, farcical in the extreme, which fully displays the lady's affection for her former profession, and shows she is a perfect mistress of stage effect. On the removal of the shrivelled remains of the old dotard for interment, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... which makes us laugh, and there is humor which does not. On the whole, it is as to what is purely wit that we are ever the most at fault. Certain phases of humor we cannot mistake,—especially those which are broadly comic or farcical. But sometimes we meet with incidents or scenes which have more in them of the pathetic than the comic, that we must still rank with the humorous. Here is a case in point. A time was when it was a penal offence in Ireland for a priest to say Mass, and under particular circumstances ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... Quarterly Review for having murdered his friend with—a critique![N] If criticism killed the disciples of that school, Shelley would not have been alive to write an Elegy on another:—but the whole is most farcical from a pen which on other occasions, has treated of the soul, the body, life and death agreeably to the opinions, the principles, and the practice of ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
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