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More "Irony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... discovered by chance a strain which would yield three hundred pounds more of seed cotton per acre than any other sort within his knowledge, and he alluringly named it Accidental Poor Land Cotton. John Farrar of the new railroad town Atlanta was thereby moved to irony. "This kind of cotton," he wrote in a public letter, "would run a three million bale crop up to more than four millions; and this would reduce the price probably to four or five cents. Don't you see, Mr. Miller, that we had better let you keep and plant your seed? You say that you had rather plant ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... new scheme. Greatly to her annoyance, Wharton came forward to her help, guaranteeing the solvency and permanence of her new partnership in glib and pleasant phrase, wherein her angry fancy suspected at once the note of irony. But Mrs. Jellison held firm, embroidering her negative, indeed, with her usual cheerful chatter, but sticking to it all the same. At last there was no way of saving dignity but to talk of something else and go—above ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... consequently, sounded all the more as if they were uttered at random by a man bereft of his reason. But his looks, the looks of those pale, cold, clear, blue eyes, were certainly not those of a madman. They clearly expressed menace, yes, menace, as well as irony, and, above all, implacable ferocity, and their glance was like a flash of lightning, ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... irony of chance, had been so fortunate as to discover the wonderful lost Mariposa, the Veiled Mariposa; but although a vast fortune lay before his eyes, within his grasp, he was withheld from profiting by this strange ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... feeling came gradually over the watching multitude. The face of the giant was indeed that of a god in the noble, irony-tinged serenity of his calm features. It was if a further world had opened, and one of divinity had stepped down; a further world of kindness and fellow-love, where were none of the discords that bring conflicts and slaughterings ...
— A Scientist Rises • Desmond Winter Hall
... a mill? A wrinkle appears on your forehead, your eyebrows are drawn together; you lay down my letter for a moment; you attempt to penetrate this mystery by the unaided power of your imagination. Suddenly a playful expression beams upon your countenance; your mouth expresses the irony of a wise man tempered by the indulgence of a friend; you have caught a glimpse, through an opera-comique cloud, of a miller's pretty wife with powdered hair, a waist all trimmed with gay ribbons, a light and short skirt, and stockings with gilded clocks; in short, one of those ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... carried along by a tendency which no individuality can resist or greatly modify. Both unsubstantial rumor and incautious personal utterance have suggested an impatient desire in Mr. Gladstone to be rid of the occupation of Egypt; but scarcely has his long exclusion from office ended when the irony of events signalizes his return thereto by an increase in the force of occupation. Further, it may be noted profitably of the chain just cited, that the two extremities were first possessed—first India, then Gibraltar, far later Malta, Aden, Cyprus, Egypt—and ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... insatiable explorer of the earth has disappeared from it except in his own writings. The only monument to his memory existing is a shabby little marble shaft erected on the southerly summit of Star Island, one of the Isles of Shoals. By a kind of irony of fortune, which Smith would have grimly appreciated, the only stone to perpetuate his fame stands upon a little heap of rocks in the sea; upon which it is only an inference that he ever set foot, and we can almost hear him say ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... subject better adapted far the indulgence of personal feeling, or for those sentimental confidences between the reader and the poet, in which the modern muse so much delights, could not be imagined. But what do we find? The theme is treated in the most general manner. Though emphasizing the irony of his reflection by the beautiful touch of memory in the second stanza, the poet speaks throughout as a moralist or spectator; from first to last he seems to lose all thought of himself in contemplating the tragedies he foresees for others; the subject is in fact handled ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... philosophy, usually in ironical form, appended to each date; and the judge thought that these quips and fancies of Wilson's were neatly turned and cute; so he carried a handful of them around one day, and read them to some of the chief citizens. But irony was not for those people; their mental vision was not focused for it. They read those playful trifles in the solidest terms, and decided without hesitancy that if there had ever been any doubt that Dave Wilson was a pudd'nhead—which there hadn't—this revelation removed that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... may offend again, and I warn you of it. But the next time I offend, tell me so plainly and frankly like a lady, and don't lacerate my heart and bludgeon my vanity with imaginary faults of your own and purely gratuitous penance. I might suspect you of irony! ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... French alliance, while Henry was engaged in treasonable intrigues with Scottish nobles, and in fomenting border troubles. But the truce was renewed in 1533, and a more definite peace was made in 1534. Henry now attempted to enlist James as an ally against Rome, and, by the irony of fate, offered him, as a temptation to become a Protestant, the hand of the Princess Mary. James refused to break with the pope, and negotiations for a meeting between the two kings fell through—fortunately, ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... him any message?" Cecil asked with faint irony. "He will no doubt be up with the fish later in ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "Irony is not your forte; and, Merton, I beg you to recollect that I detest bantering,—it is so excessively ungenteel. No wonder you look nervous and ashamed, after your recent very surprising manifestation of—well, I might as well say what ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... of insolence, the chorus close their ode and announce the arrival of a messenger from Troy. Talthybius, the herald, enters as spokesman of the army and king, describing the hardships they have suffered and the joy of the triumphant issue. To him Clytemnestra announces, in words of which the irony is patent to the audience, her sufferings in the absence of her husband and her delight at the prospect of his return. He will find her, she says, as he left her, a faithful watcher of the home, her loyalty sure, her honour undefiled. Then follows another choral ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... how they can blame you for the trouble of last night," Bradley said, and Ned caught a tone of irony in his voice. ...
— The Boy Scout Camera Club - The Confession of a Photograph • G. Harvey Ralphson
... really cannot, even if they wished it, enter into any of his views, or comprehend his most ordinary feelings; and, therefore, they cannot believe in the sincerity of the impressions he describes. The candour which he expresses, and evidently feels, they mistake for irony, or totally distrust; his unwillingness to give pain to persons from whom he has received kindness, they scornfully reject as affectation; and, although they must know right well, in their own secret ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... had thus brought his speech to its proper, and what would have been a perfect close, he suddenly changed his tone, and, in a strain of consummate and powerful irony, began to rally his antagonist. He assented to the gentleman's eulogium upon Lord Mansfield. It was deserved. He acknowledged the justice of his remarks in relation to himself (Hamilton) and his ephemeral fame; but he did not see why the gentleman should have included himself in the same ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... scepticism to the assurances of those who say that right conduct will survive though religion be surrendered. It has perhaps not been generally observed that just as the virtuous agnostic is generally the child of Christian parents, so by a seeming irony he is {179} often found to be the father of Christian children: there is hardly a genuine case on record where "free-thought," Agnosticism, Rationalism, has descended from parents to children to the third or fourth ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... to decide—and the thing was discussed at a little family conference—where they should send their wives and children. And one of these Frenchmen, the one who had been most ferocious in his condemnation of the German barbarian, said quite naively and with no sense of irony or paradox: "Of course, if we could find an absolutely open town which would not be defended at all the women folk and children would be all right." His instinct, of course, was perfectly just. The German "savage" had had ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... had rebelled, we were punished by being rusticated or sent into the country to board. I went to Professor Dodd to receive my sentence, and in a grave voice, in which was a faint ring as of irony, and with the lurking devil which always played in his great marvellous mysterious black eyes, he said, "If you were any other student, I would not send you to the city, and so reward your rebellion with a holiday. But as ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... asked Kate. She was capable, wit and social strategist that she was, of assuming all this interest by way of leading an inept youth to make a fool and a braggart of himself for her amusement. But she showed not a glimmer of irony, neither in her mouth nor in her green-grey eyes. She spoke with the straight, sincere interest of a dairymaid listening to the self-told heroisms of ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... time he had signed himself thus: and the envelope was addressed 'Miss Maurice'! The irony of it cut her to the quick. Tears of self-pity, flooding her eyes, startled her back to reality; and sent her stumbling towards her own room. But before she could reach it, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... between ill-concealed art and as ill-concealed irony had been practised with impunity by the Marquess for a fortnight, and the lady's imagination began to revel in the delights of a triumph, when a really respectable offer was made to Miss Harris by a neighbor of her father's in the country—one she would rejoice to ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... unknown, it is doubtful whether Maurel, of all men, would have allowed of the loss of a fat line. (2) As Canio is chief of the company it is eminently proper that he should make the announcement to the crowd. (3) The ghastly irony is accentuated by the speech when it comes ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... him to know then, that this child of the wilderness had given him her love, unsought. She had loved him, and she had died for him, whilst a man who had loved her, now wept over her poor body. The tragedy of it all shook him, and the irony of Jean Benard's grief was almost beyond endurance. A great humility filled his heart, and whilst he acquitted himself of blame, he regretted deeply his vehemence of repudiation. All her words came back to him in a flood. She must have guessed that he loved Helen; yet in the greatness of ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... so sure, so contented, isn't it?" the youth demanded of her, whether in innocence or irony she could not tell. "People are trained, or they train themselves, by the millions, to think of things in exactly one way." He who had once been "Gargoyle" looked piercingly into the eyes of this one being to whom at least he was not afraid ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... was unpleasant, not a doubt; but since you ask me for advice, can't you think of some way to make Sundays and holidays endurable to Ned, bless his big heart! Be a little easy on him, a little careless about his ways. Ned is such a simple fellow! Hard words, irony and sarcasm, complainings and scoldings cut him very deeply! Don't be offended, but don't you think that perhaps you could manage it to somehow keep Ned from flinging out of the house desperate and foolish every once in a while, ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... doubt be grateful for your sympathy," the young woman answered, flinging a queer little look of irony at him. ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... nothing against me," the Professor repeated in a tone of irony. "You only want to drag me through the village before the squire. Tell the squire to come here ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... the Governor to his staff, "but young, quite young." And they smiled approvingly at the grim irony of ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... greatest of Roman Epicureans, the materialist, whose maxim was: enjoy the present for there is no God, and no to-morrow, speaks despairingly of that drop of bitterness, which rises in the fountain of Delight and brings torture, even amid the roses of the feast. It is with mocking irony that Dante places Epicurus in the furnace-tombs of his Inferno amid those heresiarchs who denied the immortality of the soul. Hafiz was an Epicurean without the atheism or the despair of Epicurus. The roses in his feast are ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... who are submerged. These books are the record of what a clear-eyed, sane, vigorous, sympathetic, humorous man knows about life; a man too conscious of things as they are to wish grossly to exaggerate or to disguise them; and at the same time so entirely aware how much poetry as well as irony God has mingled in the order of the world as to be incapable of concealing that fact either. He is of such ample intellectual frame that he makes the petty contentions of literary schools appear foolish. I find a measure of Hardy's ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... sky without a cloud, completed the bitter irony of the spectacle. All this ruin, desolation, and wretchedness were the outward and visible signs of a series of revolutions. At St. Catherine the French travellers had been witnesses of the declaration of Brazilian independence; on the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... I discovered that young Wintermill couldn't be depended upon to rescue his best friend, I stepped into the arena, so to speak," said Mr. Thorpe with fine irony. "I sensed the situation perfectly. Percy was young and strong and enduring. He would be a long time dying in the natural order of things. What Anne was looking for—now, keep your seat, my boy!—what she wanted was ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... between thy husband and his rights," whispered Alan Rookwood, in a tone of horrible irony; "it is not too late to repair ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... is an ingenious way of accounting for Wordsworth's neglect of our luminous pages. Yet it rather sounds like irony, coming from Mr. Walter Savage Landor to the editor of "The ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... of the poetry of the moment—felt nothing of its pathetic irony in view of the deed she was half-unconsciously designing. She saw only, at first dimly, then distinctly, that here were the means by which mamma's enemy might be punished and swept from mamma's place, and that if she failed her opportunity now she would be a traitor and a coward, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... a tone of irony.) When I see a young man spending his time at the theatre, in search of good morals, I think he "pays too ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... whole time I was with them, I never heard them indulge in a joke, or other levity, and the practice of it is apt to give offence: they are so accustomed to take what is said in its literal meaning, that irony was always considered a falsehood, in spite of explanation. They could not see the propriety of uttering what was not strictly true, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... times in succession, while Woloda, who was dozing on a settee in the drawing-room, kept addressing no one in particular as he muttered, "Lord! how she murders it! WHAT a musician! WHAT a Beethoven!" (he always pronounced the composer's name with especial irony). "Wrong again! Now—a second time! That's it!" and so on. Meanwhile Katenka and I were sitting by the tea-table, and somehow she began to talk about her favourite subject—love. I was in the right frame of mind to philosophise, and began by loftily defining love as the wish to acquire ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... with gallant irony, bowing with a chivalrous humility that drove her nearly mad, but he ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... remarkable for the mildness of his temper and the amenity and grace of his manner, but whose society was courted in the most distinguished circles of Paris on account of his accomplishments. He perceived in Bonaparte a kind of acerbity and bitter irony, of which he long endeavoured to discover the cause. 'I believe,' said Albert one day to my mother, 'that the poor young man feels keenly his dependent situation.'" ('Memoirs of the Duchesse d'Abrantes, vol. i. p. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... standard of living that prevailed among the mass of the people was only what it was, even in those countries which we termed wealthy, it seems at first sight an utterly astonishing anomaly that at frequent intervals large numbers of competent and industrious work-people should find no work to do. The irony of the situation cannot be more tersely expressed than in the words, which a man is supposed to have uttered as he watched a procession of unemployed men: "No work to do. Set them to rebuild their ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... might well have mistaken the identity of the boy's father. For he stood now, holding the Master's arm; while a few paces above them was the little man, pale but determined, the expression on his face betraying his consciousness of the irony of ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... were gone. Lash was correct in his idea of finding more horses loose in the fields. The men soon rounded up eleven of the whites, all more or less frightened, and among the number were Queen and Blanca Mujer. The raiders had been unable to handle more than one horse for each man. It was bitter irony of fate that Belding should lose his favorite, the one horse more dear to him than all the others. Somewhere out on the trail a raider was fighting ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... their consciences alone could explain. But for this unjust, vulgar, and degrading interpretation of his own act of expiation, he was totally unprepared. It completely crushed whatever sentiment remained of that act in the horrible irony of finding himself put upon his defence before the world, without being able now to offer the real cause. The anguish of that night had gone forever; but the ridiculous interpretation of it had survived, and would survive it. In the eyes of the man before him he was not ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... in silence, suffered from the irony of Pascal, the full bitterness of which she divined. She, who usually took M. Bellombre's part, felt a protest rise up within her. Tears came to her eyes, and she answered simply in a ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... the author of the plays. This is untrue. We have more than one reference by his contemporaries, identifying the actor with the poet, some so strong that the Baconians themselves can explain them away only by assuming that the writer is speaking in irony or that he willfully deceives the public. By assumptions like that, any one ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... not yet again the great soul of the hero!" put in Basset with grim irony. "If he lie abed i' th' day for a wound to his wrist, what shall he do for a stab to his feelings? You shall drive him to drown him in salt water; and that were cruelty unheard-of, for it should make his eyes smart. I tell thee what, Jack Enville—there ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... eyes searched the other's impassive face for some trace of the irony he suspected. They were as wide asunder as the poles, these two, in their political views; and mistrusted as Andre-Louis was by all his colleagues of the Literary Chamber of Rennes, he was by none ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... altar raised to the goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction, to set off the meanest things. The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity, is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The little is made great, and the great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or weep. It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis of foppery and folly. It is the perfection of the mock-heroic! ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... them it seemed that to know and meet evil was a far better thing than the innocence of such ignorance. To Gilbert, still under the shock of a knowledge compared with which "these two Cambridge gentlemen knew about as much of real evil as two babies in the same perambulator," the exquisite irony of this remark suggested a thought. Why not a whole comedy of cross purposes based on the notion of a priest with a knowledge of evil deeper than that of the criminal he is converting? He carried out this idea in the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the children gather about you, reminding you that in Italy even the oldest places—S. Paolo al Orto, for instance, with its beautiful old tower that is now a dwelling—are put to some use, and are really living still like the gods who have taken service with us, perhaps in irony, to console themselves for our treachery in ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... good enough to ask me to share your fly," the man observed, with a rather aggressive touch of irony, "I may as well let you know who I am. My name is ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... shown under a glass cover on the wall by the staircase in the entrance hall, and a model of that ancient fortress of tyranny, made from a block of stone from the renowned French prison, sent over in 1793, stands in happy irony in the banquet hall. A bedchamber on the second floor is pointed out as the room in which Lafayette slept. It ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... of his sufficed to restrain Vinicius or urge him to something. At present there remained nothing of that; such was the change that Petronius did not try his former methods, feeling that his wit and irony would slip without effect along the new principles which love and contact with the uncomprehended society of Christians had put in the soul of Vinicius. The veteran sceptic understood that he had lost the key to that soul. This knowledge ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... James Moore, whose fathers had for generations owned and farmed the land they now leased at the hands of the Sylvesters—there in the old hall they were assembled, a mighty host. And apart from the others, standing as though in irony beneath the frown of one of those steel-clad warriors who held the door, was little M'Adam, puny always, paltry ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... nature and atrocious English against the temptation of writing as he ought, Kinglake commenced author with a respect for "composition," ingrained perhaps by his Public School and University training. Borrow arrays his page by instinct, Kinglake by study. His irony (as in the interview with the Pasha) is almost too elaborate; his artistic judgment (as in the Plague chapter) almost too sure; the whole book almost too clever. The performance was wonderful; the ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... build a shack out here an' live in it, I am!" exploded Hopalong in withering irony as he dug the sand out of his ears and also from his sixshooter. "I just nachurally dotes ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... regarding our memory with the severity of citizens called to sit in judgment on an affair concerning the state, will allude to us with the scathing irony of a ruined son, when he speaks of the father who has squandered ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... understand the irony of his temporary rescue, and had little experience of commercial integrity, so called, was intent on fulfilling his part of the understanding with Carmen. This could best be effected by a return dinner to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... have gone some way since these words were written in our Old Age Pensions.] Here he puts his finger on the very spot where one thoughtless cruelty of bureaucratic legislation is most shown. For many faithful servants of the State come in their last extremity to this destiny. This irony of legislation shone out lately in its true colours when it was discovered that, of over a thousand survivors of the Indian Mutiny, a large proportion, who were invited to the demi-centenary celebration dinner, came out of workhouses where they, who had served their country so well in ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... and a favourite theory, with the Europeans," he said, with a sort of bitter irony, "that all the animals of this hemisphere have less gifted natures than those of the other; nor is it a theory of which they are yet entirely rid. The Indian was supposed to be passionless, because he had self-command; and what in the European would be thought ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... played a part in one of his stories O. Henry wrote: "Formerly it was a resort of interesting Bohemians; but now only writers, painters, actors, and musicians go there." The same topsy-turvical irony might have been directed with equal happiness at the cafe of the Brevoort, or the Black Cat on West Broadway, or Gonfarone's at the corner of Eighth and MacDougal Streets, or at old Maria's. Whatever else it may be Bohemia is a democracy, and regardless ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... gave a low laugh. "What irony! Well, that will last till Friday. But you must try and get more then. I will be here at the same time; no, the tide will not suit—at 8 a.m. We can come inside then. Did you ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... an excellent irony in the refrain: "Salute me, all the company," whose double interpretation must not be missed, though it may ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... become the martyr for his ideal. But the delicate hands are not the hands of an empire-breaker. This portrait will probably find its last resting-place in the National Gallery, where, with a curious irony, the Government places the portraits of the dead rebels who gave its statesmen many an anxious day and many a nightmare; and so it will go on, perhaps, until the contemplation of these pictures inspires some boy with an equal or better head and a ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... Bertram) was complete, being prepared for matrimony by a hatred of home, restraint and tranquillity, by the misery of disappointed affection and contempt of the man she was to marry; the rest might wait." This is not the touch of Gerard Douw. An undertone of irony, never obtrusive but everywhere perceptible, shows that the artist herself knew very well that she was not painting gods and Titans, and keeps everything ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... later the elk had to be destroyed. In a fit of exceptional moroseness it had killed the Bickelbys' German governess. It was an irony of its fate that it should achieve popularity in the last moments of its career; at any rate, it established, the record of being the only living thing that had ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... Woods, too, had gained my suspicions, and yet he was miles away from the murder. I realized suddenly that I had been refusing to look at the obvious in order that I might place the guilt where I wanted to believe it lay. Yet it did seem the irony of fate that the two men benefiting by Jim's death should have had nothing to ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... and a persecutor, yet suffered in silence, if he might protect his king. Before he died, Louvois had undermined his credit even with the king, and his funeral at night, to avoid a mob, was a pathetic fact. France has now reinstated him, say modern men—but that is the irony ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... to some extent partakers of it. Columbus was eager to make his great discovery pay well, to preserve the means of continued exploration. In one hand he lifted high the banner of possession with its promise of a cross, which direful irony fulfilled; with the other he kept feeding the ravenous nation with gold, to preserve its sympathy and admiration, that the supply of men and vessels should not fail. Las Casas himself, a just and noble man, the first advocate of the natural rights of men in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... analytical faculty. Uses: Separation of compound or general ideas into those that are elementary or more simple; knowledge of characteristic differences and discrepance. Abuses: A disposition to jest or ridicule; irony, sarcasm, and satire, without respect to truth, or the circumstances of person, place, or time. Organ, on the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... with Dr. Sitgreaves, that no species of knowledge was to be despised; and, consequently, he was an empiric in everything but his profession. At first, indignation at the irony of his comrade kept him silent; but, suddenly changing his purpose, he answered the applicant with ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... by invitation, and to speak now would be beyond pardon. In his heart was no room for humor, and yet a comic side of the situation in which he found himself was undeniable. The contrast it afforded to former opportunities was absurdly sharp and determined, and the irony of the little god's way of ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... him with sublime pity in her eyes. 'I do not conceal from you,' she said, 'that I love you very much. I, too, have suffered, and I had thought for one moment that fate had vouchsafed me happiness; but, as you would say—the irony of life.' ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... Atterson's front hall (the young men boarders gave her that appellation in irony) the ghosts of many ancient boiled dinners met you with—if you were sensitive and unused to the odors of ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... the whole story. Is it possible, I asked myself, that the writer of that article, whoever he may be, could have meant its title in anything but irony? Yet, there it stood on the front page of a most respectable journal, indorsed by an editor of the highest reputation. To my way of thinking, the wife was accessory to the crime; had no womanly self-respect, no delicacy, no Christian ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... picture of justice blinded, he exclaims: "What mocking irony in judicial pose of blind goddess poising nicely adjusted balance, whose crude, arbitrary registers reckon not of ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... By the irony of fate it was Dort—the possessor of Terween's carving of the Triumph of Charles V. (a pendant to the Triumph of the Church and the Eucharist)—that, in 1572, only a few years after the carving was made, held the Congress which virtually decided the ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... address to the Almighty, he adds, "On voit, au reste, par la, que Barrow etoit un pauvre philosophe; car il croyait en l'immortalite de l'ame, et en une Divinite autre que la nature {161} universelle."[351] This is irony, not an expression of opinion. In the book of mathematical recreations which Montucla constructed upon that of Ozanam,[352] and Ozanam upon that of Van Etten,[353] now best known in England by Hutton's similar treatment of Montucla, there is an amusing chapter on the quadrators. Montucla ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... also in German script, "Good people—they give everything!" and on several were orders to leave those within alone. And there was a curious and touching irony in that phrase: "Gute Leute— Schoenen!" chalked in stiff script by those now fighting for their lives to the north of us and likely never to ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... with fine irony, "will be pleased to see you, as he retired early; in fact he has ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... masque and music, of dreams like foam-white swans On lakes of hyacinthus? Must Love seek Great allies, Beauty sound her arriere-bans That all her splendours betray us to this bleak Simplicity whereto blind satyrs run?"— The irony seems ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... the vision of the angels on Mt. Sinai, and the celestial Sidonia who talks about the "Sublime and Solacing Doctrine of Theocratic Equality,"—all these are passages where we wonder whether the author sneered or blushed when he wrote. Certainly what has since been known as the Disraelian irony stings as we turn ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... surprise; but with all these unhoped-for favors of fortune, which did not give him the power to repair his misfortune, the noble poet deeply realized that riches and glory were not equal to a great love or a beautiful dream, and, completely upset by the irony of his fate, he broke into a harsh burst ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... dispute these dates, as was the case with Chopin, for Old Fogy will be soon forgotten. It is due to the pious friendship of the publisher that these opinions are bound between covers. They are the record of a stubborn, prejudiced, well-trained musician and well-read man, one who was not devoid of irony. Indeed, I believe he wrote much with his tongue in his cheek. But he was a stimulating companion, boasted a perverse funny-bone and a profound sense of the importance of being Old Fogy. And this is all I ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... its mill, which like an automatic machine ground him relentlessly since the end of the month of June. Not the least but one of the cruellest and most ironical phases — and nearly every clause of this Act teems with irony — is the Schedule or appendix giving the so-called Scheduled Native Areas; and what ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... ease, in congenial society, he displayed his mastery of irony and banter, neither hesitating to air his opinion of persons nor shrinking from admissions which were candid to the verge of cynicism. At such times he had not veiled his intense dislike of the Administration. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... no doubt about it, there was certainly a touch of cruel irony in Hyde's soft voice. Her breath came fast. "Why do you say that": she cried—"say it ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... from him, and the handkerchief with which she offers to bind his brow is secured by Iago. Left with his chief, Iago fans the rising flame of jealousy, and the act ends with Othello's terrific appeal to Heaven for vengeance upon his wife. In the third act, after an interview of terrible irony and passion between Othello and Desdemona, in which he accuses her to her face of unchastity, and laughs at her indignant denial. Cassio appears with the handkerchief which he has found in his chamber. Iago ingeniously contrives ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... a blessed thing to have a brother!" observed Bertram with irony. "Well!—and what news, sweet ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... slyly, silently, she managed to get rid of all my friends. We had not made any difference in our talk because of * her presence. We talked as we always had done in the past, but she never understood the irony or the fantasy of our artistic exaggerations, of our wild axioms, or paradoxes, in which-an idea is travestied only to figure more brilliantly. It only irritated and puzzled her. Seated in a quiet corner of the drawing-room, she listened ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... I'll send you assistance, for I see you require it," shouted Captain Hemming, with a touch of irony in his tone, as the ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... of those things publicly accounted good, true, and just which will win them public approval and increase their own wealth or power and position. Plato, in the Republic, pictures the type with magnificent irony: ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... Neptune explained the perturbations of the adjacent planets. Nothing ever gravitates towards nothing; and it must be an unseen orb that so draws our yearning souls. If it be not so, then what terrible contradictions stagger us, and what a chilling doom awaits us! Oh, what mocking irony then runs through the loftiest promises and hopes of the world! Just as the wise and good have learned to live, they disappear amidst the unfeeling waves of oblivion, like snow flakes in the ocean. "The super earthly desires ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... eight books, the first of which, in irony of some histories which had previously been published, gives a description of the world and a history of its creation, and in brief, the story of Noah and the discovery of America, and a dissertation on the origin of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... took this to be bitter irony, which means saying the exact opposite of what you mean in order to make yourself disagreeable; as when you happen to have a dirty face, and someone says, 'How ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... effrontery; but it is needless to say that the author of the joke remained unknown save to a few of his comrades; and the great ruler of Hindostan was forced to rest content and ponder over the hidden sarcasm and bitter irony addressed to one in ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... way, and highly approved by the local health authorities. This one was on the subject of pure milk. Its association with the excerpt from the Areopagitica (which, having been set for a standing head, was not cut out by the "Killed") set the final touch of irony upon the matter. Even ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... not so beautiful!" she moaned as the first pale streaks of light in the east told her that day had finally dawned, and she crept stealthily back to bed again. Of course Jack, the wretch, was sleeping peacefully—that was the irony of fate! What did he know of suffering? But he would pay ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... thick in her streets. All the opposing forces of Church and State, of theology and politics, of philosophy and science, of literary and social and economic theory, have contended for mastery in the place which Matthew Arnold, with fine irony, described as "so unruffled by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!" Every succeeding generation of Oxford men has borne its part in these ever recurring strifes. To hold aloof from them would have ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... universities should strive with each other for the honour of his education, but it is certain the world have not coincided with this opinion of Mr. Welsted; who, by the way, can hardly be thought the author of such an extravagant self-approbation, unless it be an irony, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... think I was?' he asked, and there was a tender irony in his voice which made the playful question almost pathetic. 'If I had been a good child I should have been content and had no roving disposition, and have found my home and my world at Hampstead, instead of straying ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... Christ spoke publicly on the mount, yet no one said aught until He had finished His discourse. How shall the hearer be otherwise than ridiculous? Nay, he will be deemed a flatterer and his praise no better than irony, when he declares that the teacher spoke beautifully; but what he said, this he cannot tell. This has all the appearance of adulation. For when, indeed, one has been hearing minstrels and players, it is no wonder if such has been the case with him, seeing he ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... she begged. "Throw the key into the sea, or whatever oblivion you choose to conjure up. Moments such as those have no place in my life. There is one purpose there more intense than anything else, that very purpose which by some grim irony of fate it seems to be within your ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 'Characteristics,' in his exquisite vein of irony sneers at Christianity for taking no cognizance of friendship either in its precepts or in its promises. Jeremy Taylor, however, speaks of this feature of Christianity as among the manifest tokens of its divine origin, and Soame Jenyns takes the same ground in a treatise ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... present to feed his pride of superiority; as in his first speech, act II. sc. 1. Shakspeare here, as in all his great parts, developes in a tone of sublime morality the dreadful consequences of placing the moral, in subordination to the mere intellectual, being. In Richard there is a predominance of irony, accompanied with apparently blunt manners to those immediately about him, but formalized into a more set hypocrisy towards the people as represented ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... last," he returned, while the points of blue light seemed to pierce Stephen like arrows—no, like gimlets, "well, you're wrong about one part of it—for if that ever happens, I'll laugh with you because of the sheer rotten irony." ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... cried I afterwards, "another newspaper praise for you now, 'Mr. Windham, with his usual vein of irony."' ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... that look, mingled of feeling and irony, which was very perplexing. The tone in which he spoke was really so full of tenderness for the girl, that Hope, who heard every word and felt every tone, was sure that Lawrence Newt pitied the ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... work, whether poetry or prose, his plays, his novels, his letters, his conversations, are richly bestrewn with the luminous sentences of a keen-eyed, steadfast, patient, indefatigable watcher of human life. He deals gravely and sincerely with men. He has none of that shallow irony by which small men who have got wrong with the world seek a shabby revenge. He tells us the whole truth. He is not of those second-rate sages who keep their own secrets, externally complying with all the conventions ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... is with adamantine chains to his rock, and bound, as it might seem, for ever. When Napoleon said of Count Lobau, whose proper name was Mouton, 'Mon mouton c'est un lion,' it was the same instinct at work, though working from an opposite point. It made itself felt no less in the bitter irony which gave to the second of the Ptolemies, the brother-murdering king, ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... qualities are concerned, then, Locke is as thoroughgoing a realist as St. Anselm. In Berkeley, on the other hand, we have as complete a representative of the nominalists and conceptualists—an intellectual descendant of Roscellinus and of Abelard. And by a curious irony of fate, it is the nominalist who is, this time, the champion of orthodoxy, and the realist ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... "Pharaoh! although I am a descendant of Jacob, whose sons sold their brother Joseph into Egypt, I do not deserve your irony. We are poor people, but the child is ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... "Jury" on their papers obeyed. They were a motley crew, some being Fifth-form boys, some Shell-fish, and some Babies. And by the odd irony of fate, the one who had drawn the "foreman's" ticket was Jukes, ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... is a description of Shelley himself following Byron and Moore—the "Pilgrim of Eternity," and Ierne's "sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong"—to the couch where Keats lies dead. There is both pathos and unconscious irony in his making these two poets the chief mourners, when we remember what Byron wrote about Keats in "Don Juan", and what Moore afterwards recorded of Shelley; and when we think, moreover, how far both Keats and Shelley have outsoared Moore, and disputed with Byron ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... week was passed by Jeanne in an agony of doubts and fears. Then one evening, Julien watched her all through dinner with an amused smile on his lips, and evinced towards her a gallantry which was faintly tinged with irony. After dinner they walked up and down the baroness's avenue, and he whispered in ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... Times.—"His real hard work, for which no emolument would be a fitting reward, is distilling sunshine. This new book is full of it—the sunshine of humour, the thin keen sunshine of irony, the mellow evening sunshine ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... are not the essential characteristics. I am convinced that there is another Montaigne who has nothing in common with the Montaigne of convention and tradition. I am convinced that the scepticism, the Conservatism, the irony, the moderation, the affectation of humility, frivolity, pedantry, and innocent candour, are only a mask and disguise which Montaigne has put on to conceal his identity, that they are only so many tricks and dodges to lead the temporal and spiritual powers off the track, and to reassure ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... poet.... In 'The Wandering Soul,' the verse describing Socrates has that highest note of critical poetry, that in it epigram becomes vivid with life, and life reveals its inherent paradox. It would be difficult to describe the famous irony of Socrates in more poetical and more accurate words than by saying that he doubted men's doubts away."—Spectator, February ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... level of irony there are undoubtedly exalted patches of more than merely verbal humour, such as, for example, Sir Charles Repton's jolly speech at the Van Diemens meeting, in which he outlines with enormous gusto the principles of procedure of modern finance. (It will be remembered ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... kind. Young Gilding's lounge suit is quite as "handsome" as his dinner clothes, and he tubs and shaves and changes his linen when he puts it on. His wife wears a tea gown, which is classified as a neglige rather in irony, since it is apt to be more elaborate and gorgeous (to say nothing of dignified) than half of the garments that masquerade these days as evening dresses! They wear these informal clothes only if very intimate friends are coming to dinner ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... satires the vices and prejudices of his fellow-citizens, in a forcible and elegant style; and Parini, the great satirist of the eighteenth century, founded a school of satire, which proved most beneficial to the country. His poem, "The Day," is distinguished by fine irony and by the severity with which he attacks the effeminate habits of his age. He lashes the affectations and vices of the Milanese aristocracy with a sarcasm worthy of Juvenal. The satires of D'Elei, Guadagnali, and others are characterized by wit and beauty of versification. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... then come you, whose pores are running over as with streams, fountains, cataracts, and tell me such words as those which you have said to me. I find it difficult to think that this is not the purest irony, and I must recall your friendship in order to believe that you have not been cutting a joke at my expense after all. This is a peculiar story, dearest friend; believe me, I am not up to much. I really begin to think that Reissiger ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... strange irony of fate this man, who was by nature one of the most peaceable and peace-loving of men, singularly calm and dispassionate, not prone to disputation or given to wrangling, acquired the reputation of being perhaps the most ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... to say that. She had meant to say that it was impossible, out of the question. But her heart was running away with her, goaded on by the irony of it all. A veil seemed to have fallen from before her eyes, and she knew now why she had been drawn to Jimmy from the very first. They were mates, and she ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... had snapped out. "You'll end by hanging me before you've done! It won't be any good then saying 'Oh, I didn't know,' 'Oh, I didn't mean to!'" He mimicked with savage irony her frightened accents. And then, as she had burst into tears, he had ordered her up here, out ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... his greatest feats in the kind of irony that appeals to a jury. And the audience deemed that the case was already ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... your friend waiting, Dorothy," said Mrs, Garrison, with blasting irony. "Give him my compliments and say that we trust he may come every day. He affords us a subject for pleasant discussion, and I am sure Prince Ugo will be as charmed to meet him here as he ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... rested on Saint-Prosper for a moment, but told nothing beyond the slight touch of irony in his words and then shifting to the young girl, it lingered upon each detail of costume and outline of feature. Before she could reply, Barnes cracked his whip, the horses sprang forward, and the stable boy, a confused tangle of legs and arms, was shot ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... Tarrant; and the gay vibration of her voice as she uttered this simple ejaculation was the last that Ransom heard of her. Miss Chancellor swept her out of the room, leaving the young man to extract a relish from the ineffable irony with which she uttered the words "even a woman." It was to be supposed, on general grounds, that she would reappear, but there was nothing in the glance she gave him, as she turned her back, that was an earnest of this. He stood there a moment, wondering; ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... but a laughing matter, and yet, despite the gravity of the situation, I keenly appreciated the humor and irony that it involved. Arsene Lupin seized and bound like a novice! robbed as if I were an unsophisticated rustic—for, you must understand, the scoundrel had deprived me of my purse and wallet! Arsene Lupin, a ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... official visitations, used to cry out, "Fellow-citizens, I'm coming among you;" and the anecdote never recurs to my mind, without bringing Marble back to my recollection. When in spirits, he had much of this bitter irony in his manner; and his own early experience had rendered him somewhat insensible to professional suffering; but, on the whole, I always thought him a ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... situation indeed! To be occupying the most expensive suite in the hotel of a man who wished to lend him money, to be unable to pay one day's rent therefore, and yet to be stopped from accepting aid. There was a grim irony about it, for a fact. Then, too, the seed he had sown in banking circles, and his luncheon with the mayor! Haviland had a sense of humor; it would make a story too good to keep—the new oil operator, the magnificent and mysterious New York ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... lifting herself with a spring and raising her hand, while lightning flashed from eyes where twenty chaste years shone—"judge of the impression the love of a man like Michel must have made upon me. But by some irony of fate—or was it the hand of God?—well, he died; died in saving the life of, whom do you suppose? of Monsieur de Cadignan. Are you now surprised to ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... save in the ironical form. Whenever he addressed her he gave her pleasure; but she had to cut her pleasure out of the piece, as it were. There were portions left over, light remnants and snippets of irony, which she never knew what to do with, which seemed too delicate for her own use; and yet Catherine, lamenting the limitations of her understanding, felt that they were too valuable to waste and had a belief that if they passed over her head they yet contributed ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... day, not without a touch of irony, "how far have you got? Have you made a good bag? Anything mysterious? ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... thus exercised his authority, he turned to one of his companions, and, with an air of disdainful ridicule, told him he was like to have had an affair with a bourgeois; adding, by way of heightening the irony, "Egad! I believe he is ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... accompany the sung seguilla, which the beggars of Spain throw, like a slight irony into this lukewarm breeze, above the dead. And boys and girls think of the fandango of to-night, feel ascending in them the desire ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... with what actually is. The mere thought of these protagonists of the century working in harmony to one great purpose, without distrust of each other's motives, and with no necessity for anyone's dodging political foul play, summons the smile of irony. Mutual trust was never so much a suggestion to laugh down. The mere hint that it might be possible would make one a target for the wit ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... careless way. It is most extraordinary. To amuse a parcel of bored gentlefolk dozens of first-rate actors, singers and lecturers are engaged, but for the people a lecturer like myself is quite good enough." Schafroff smiled at his own bland irony. "Everybody's quite satisfied. What ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... upon a grave and sensible though unsuspecting individual, he felt quite delighted at the feat; and took the person thus imposed upon into the number of his favorites. It was upon this principle among others that Norton, who pretended never to see through his flimsy irony, contrived to keep in his favor, and to shape him according to his wishes, whilst he made the weak-minded young man believe that everything he did and every step he took was the result of his own deliberate opinion, whereas in fact he was ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... followed, Lenox looked blankly round the empty room:—the room where they should have spent their first evening together. Then the irony, the finality of it all, overwhelmed him, and he sank upon the nearest chair. "What have I done? . . . My God, what have I done?" he breathed aloud. And it is characteristic of the man that, for all his grinding sense of injury, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... complicity, of cunning, perhaps of irony, passed through the dealer's cynical and sad eyes. But he bowed ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... with unmixed sadness; the irony of that fate seemed so cruel which allowed the fearless lion to succumb to the gnawing of a rat! Ah! had Armand's life not been at stake! ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... curious irony of fate, the same influence which led me to put as little faith in modern speculations on this subject, as in the venerable traditions recorded in the first two chapters of Genesis, was perhaps more potent than any other in keeping alive a sort of pious conviction that ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... he acquired a reputation almost as gigantic as his stature, and as brilliant as his coat covered with spangles. This was the part in which BELLECOURT excelled, and which had been respected even by MOLE. The latter at length appeared in it; but irony, which is the basis of this character, was not his talent: yet MOLE having seen the court, and knowing in what manner noblemen conducted themselves, BAPTISTE had an opportunity of correcting himself by him in ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... tough and stubborn race. The arrow that is to fly far must be discharged from a well distended bow: if, therefore, anything is necessary for greatness, it is a fierce and tenacious opposition, an opposition either of open contempt, or of malicious irony, or of sly silence, or of gross stupidity, an opposition regardless of the wounds it inflicts and of the precious lives it sacrifices, an opposition that nobody would dare to attack who was not prepared, like the Spartan of old, to ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... girls, I wonder?" inquired the proprietor of the arm-chair, with cutting irony. "Whiney piney, whiney piney. I wish there were no such things as ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... great celebration; in fact, it was a gala day in Melbourne, and their journey through the settled districts one triumphant march. Their purpose was to cross to Carpentaria. Fate seemed so propitious that one would think in irony she laughed, as she ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... abominable dogkennels called houses was the group known as the Cit des Kroumirs, in the 13th arrondissement, which, by a strange irony, was built on land belonging to the Department of Public Assistance, which was let out by that body to a rich tenant, who sublet it to these lodging-house owners. This veritable den of infection and misery has now been demolished; but there are plenty of others quite ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... and the absence of any sign of wind induced the party to vote the mast and sails a useless encumbrance, and they were accordingly left ashore, and a spare pair of oars taken in their place. The irony of fate left it to Dick's lot to see the anchor was in proper trim and firmly secured—a task which he discharged with ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... you shouldn't," said Mrs. Morel, and she returned to her book. He winced from his mother's irony, frowned irritably, thinking: "Why can't I do as ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... peddled his etchings from door to door, he could have foreseen the great army of admirers who three centuries later should outbid each other at auctions, and make war in print over his experimental plates, his failures and his trial-proofs—now often exalted into "states"—the very irony of the thing would surely have brought him genuine satisfaction ...
— Rembrandt and His Etchings • Louis Arthur Holman
... master of his country, after one of the fiercest campaigns on record. Pompeius distinguished himself when very young, but it is thought that the title of "the Great" was conferred upon him by Sulla in a spirit of irony. The late Sir William Napier, who ought to have been a good judge, said that he was a very great general, and in a purely military sense perhaps greater than Caesar. He was fifty-eight in the campaign of Pharsalia, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... dead; but the signification of the word remains the same: The bodiless spirits were called giants, because they were objects of terror to the living; comp. remarks on Ps. lxxxviii. 11. The word is, in ver. 14, used [Pg 154] with a certain irony.—"Light" is equivalent to "salvation." The Plural signifies the fulness of light or salvation. The complete fulfilment which the words, "Thy dead shall live," will find in the resurrection of the body, affords a guarantee for the fulfilment of the ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... has said with pungent irony, "Who knows but that one of these days a powerful microscope may detect globules of ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... enough. In both of these books, as in Criquette (M. Halevy's only other novel), as in A Marriage for Love, and the twoscore other short stories he has written during the past thirty years, there are the same artistic qualities, the same sharpness of vision, the same gentle irony, the same constructive skill, and the same dramatic touch. It is to be remembered always that the author of L'Abbe Constantin is also the half-author of "Froufrou" and of "Tricoche et Cacolet," as well as of the librettos of "La Belle Helene" ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... time to change your mind and advise your mother," Lady Loring remarked with grave irony ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... am the essence of discretion, and ask no awkward questions; but when a customer cannot look me in the eye, he has to pay for it." The dealer once more chuckled; and then, changing to his usual business voice, though still with a note of irony, "You can give, as usual, a clear account of how you came into the possession of the object?" he continued. "Still your uncle's cabinet? A ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... became grave. His irony vanished. In his face was a flicker almost of consternation at this follow-up murder. He might have been asking himself how much ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... were also hit, and the only field gun taken. The retiring Boers were swiftly followed up by Thorneycroft's column, however, and the gun was retaken, together with twenty of Kritzinger's men. It must be confessed that there seems some irony in the fact that, within five days of the British ruling by which the Boers were no longer a military force, these non-belligerents had inflicted a loss of nearly six hundred men killed, wounded, or taken. Two small commandos, that of Koch in the Orange River Colony, and that ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pressed on him, assailed him, like two accomplices of the immovable and mute woman before his eyes. He was suddenly vanquished. He was shown his impotence. He was soothed by the breath of a corrupt resignation coming to him through the subtle irony ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... to Mrs. Archer. "If Louisa's health allowed her to dine out—I wish you would say to Mrs. Lovell Mingott—she and I would have been happy to—er—fill the places of the Lawrence Leffertses at her dinner." He paused to let the irony of this sink in. "As you know, this is impossible." Mrs. Archer sounded a sympathetic assent. "But Newland tells me he has read this morning's Times; therefore he has probably seen that Louisa's relative, the Duke of St. Austrey, arrives next week on the Russia. He is coming to ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... eye For all the mockeries of life, Beware, in this dark masque of things that seem, Lest even that tragic irony, Which you discern in this our mortal strife, Trick you and trap you, also, ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... Jewish reader, considering that Punch's expression bordered upon rudeness, and that the sufferance which was his tribal badge need not under the circumstances seal his lips, wrote to protest against the "malice and grossness of language"—for he had failed to appreciate Punch's robust irony and too carefully veiled championship. Then, in one of those generous moods which often directed Jerrold's pen, Punch explained. (Vol. VI., 1844, p. 106.) He pointed out how his article had been directed against the "bygone bigotry and present ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... over these pages than over the grotesque absurdities that abounded in the former collection of sketches, we are the more fascinated by the quiet subtlety of their humour, their irony and pathos."—Evening ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... car effectively unsealed Sir Richmond's mind. Hitherto Dr. Martineau had perceived the possibility and danger of a defensive silence or of a still more defensive irony; but now that Sir Richmond had once given himself away, he seemed prepared to give himself away to an unlimited extent. He embarked upon an apologetic ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... his wife and children. His teachings were but vaporing talk to her small mind and to those of many of the people. And the keen questions with which he convicted so many of ignorance, and the sarcastic irony with which he wounded their self-love, certainly did not make him friends among this class. In truth, he made many enemies. One of these was Aristophanes, the dramatist, who wrote a comedy in which he sought to make Socrates ridiculous. This turned many of the audiences ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... feeling, or for those sentimental confidences between the reader and the poet, in which the modern muse so much delights, could not be imagined. But what do we find? The theme is treated in the most general manner. Though emphasizing the irony of his reflection by the beautiful touch of memory in the second stanza, the poet speaks throughout as a moralist or spectator; from first to last he seems to lose all thought of himself in contemplating the tragedies he foresees for others; the subject ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... Maigre'. Success in this field was yet decidedly doubtful when 'Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard' appeared in 1881. It at once established his reputation; 'Sylvestre Bonnard', as 'Le Lys Rouge' later, was crowned by the French Academy. These novels are replete with fine irony, benevolent scepticism and piquant turns, and will survive the greater part of romances now read in France. The list of Anatole France's works in fiction is a large one. The titles of nearly all of them, arranged in chronological order, are as follows: 'Les Desirs de Jean ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... Thornton, was the best house and the most fertile farm in all the wild surrounding country, and irony crept into his smile with the thought that it was a place he could not enter save under an anonymous ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... laughter of an unaffected nature, the effervescence of a sparkling and overflowing brain, in such poems as Up at a Villa—Down in the City, or Pacchiarotto, or Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis. Fra Lippo Lippi leans to this category, though it is infused with biting wit and stinging irony; for it is first and foremost the bubbling-up of a restless and irrepressibly comic nature, the born Bohemian compressed but not contained by the rough rope-girdle of the monk. He is Browning's finest figure of comedy. Ned Bratts is another admirable creation of true humour, tinged with ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... with the simpler sort, he might, should he choose to keep the whole thing down, just take her mild attention for a part of her general business. As soon as he heard her voice, however, the gap was filled up and the missing link supplied; the slight irony he divined in her attitude lost its advantage. He almost jumped at it to get there before her. "I met you years and years ago in Rome. I remember all about it." She confessed to disappointment—she had been so sure he didn't; and to prove how well he did he began to pour forth ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... a long year since my dear friend Messer Guido dei Cavalcanti died of that disastrous exile to which, by the cynical irony of fate, my other dear friend, Messer Dante dei Alighieri, was foredestined to doom him. That sadness has nothing to do with this sadness, and I here give it the go-by. But at nights when I lie awake in my cell—a thing which, I thank my stars happens but rarely—or ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... a walk after dinner, thereby missing a call from Yorke (who came thus early to prevent Gulian's intended interview), it would be vain to speculate; but when the maid returned, feeling more like her old happy self than she had done in weeks, the irony of fate prompted an encounter with her brother-in-law at the ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... student, an enigma among men of the world, and a stumbling-block to the politician of the clubs. Beyond this, we find that certainty and decision of judgment, that crisp concentration of phrase, that grave and deliberate irony and that mastery of subtlety, allusion, and wit, which make his interpretation an adventure and ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... cool irony, "is doubtless a charming thing for digestive purposes, but it is a luxury too expensive for me. The gods in this country bid for shams, and shams I purpose giving them. I am not sure I shall not go into chromos eventually. I don't enjoy this especially, but after ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... to Evelyn to admire; and Caroline was, to her inexperience, a brilliant and imposing novelty. Sometimes Miss Merton's worldliness of thought shocked Evelyn; but then Caroline had a way with her as if she were not in earnest,—as if she were merely indulging an inclination towards irony; nor was she without a certain vein of sentiment that persons a little hackneyed in the world and young ladies a little disappointed that they are not wives instead of maids, easily acquire. Trite as this vein of sentiment was, poor Evelyn thought ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book I • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... civilization, slavery in America. He spoke and wrote in behalf of the abolitionists at a time when the anti-slavery men were openly despised as heartily in the North as they were feared and detested in the South. He wrote with a pen which never faltered, and satire, irony, and fierce invective accomplished their work with a will, and moved many a heart, almost ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... a show of irony. "Your congratulations overwhelm me. You look as if you were about to begin the reading ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... the verge of Vanity Fair, he had looked curiously down at the feverish whirl, the gilded shams, the maddening, murderous conflict for place,—the empty mocking pageantry of the victorious, the sickening despair and savage irony of the legions of the defeated; and after the roar and shout and moan of the social maelstrom, as presented in the great city where his studies had been pursued, it was pleasant this afternoon to watch the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... seized the pen and wrote her name as with her life-blood—great veins starting out on her white forehead, her eyes dim and blurred, her heart beating so that she scarce could trace the words that seemed an irony: ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... impression. How easily Stillman must have seen through Claire's muteness and the elder woman's eager craving for an audience! And all the time Mrs. Condor had been laughing, not ill-naturedly, but with the irony of an experienced woman possessing a sense ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... man;—but really nothing gave more surprise to everybody here, than to find him the supreme head of your ecclesiastical affairs. The rest is of course. Your Assembly addresses a manifesto to France, in which they tell the people, with an insulting irony, that they have brought the church to its primitive condition. In one respect their declaration is undoubtedly true; for they have brought it to a state of poverty and persecution. What can be hoped for after ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... instance of the irony of fate that Queen Adelaide should have thus been supposed to desire to take an active part in politics. It is obvious, from her letters, that she had practically no political views at all, except a gentle ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... The hideous irony of this statement made poor Geoffrey gasp. He gripped the wooden framework of the room so ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... and not to be convinced, till too late, I replied to his peaceful overture by the most insulting irony: "You were not afraid to fire at a poor boy in the water," said I, "though you do not like to stand a shot in return. Come, come, take your ground, be a man, stand ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... contemplate for a moment the desertion of his colours. Still his heart often yearned towards those engaged in what then appeared so unequal a struggle on shore, and he could scarcely help expressing satisfaction at any success they met with. Poor Mercer had to endure a great deal of irony and abuse on the subject, but while he defended the rebels, and asserted their right to take up arms in the defence of their liberties, he acknowledged that his own duty was to remain loyal to his sovereign. The dispute ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... first notes about The Queen Pedauque is the fact that in this ironic and subtle book is presented a story which, curiously enough, is remarkable for its entire innocence of subtlety and irony. Abridge the "plot" into a synopsis, and you will find your digest to be what is manifestly the outline of a straightforward, plumed ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... is still extant from Sir Philip Hoby requesting permission from the King's agent to purchase stone from the Abbey ruins for building, and there can be little doubt that this house was constructed of the same material. By the "irony of fate" this mansion, born of the spoliation of that institution, in its turn fell a prey to the destroyer, and fragments of carved stones telling of Elizabethan days may be found in these and other farm buildings within the area ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... expresses, and evidently feels, they mistake for irony, or totally distrust; his unwillingness to give pain to persons from whom he has received kindness, they scornfully reject as affectation, and although they must know right well, in their own secret ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the world seems, indeed, to be penetrated by a good-natured irony; it is as if the Power controlling us saw that, like children, we must be tenderly wooed into doing things which we should otherwise neglect, by a sense of high importance, as a kindly father who is doing accounts keeps his children quiet by letting one hold the blotting-paper and ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Love, or Gawtrey, with a singular mixture of irony and compassion in his voice; "and it was hunger, then, that terrified you at last even more ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... commenting upon fine ladies, who expressed great anxiety to help others, but must have the plates cleaned before they could wash or wipe them, and supposed they must have people to sweep the way before them, others to hand their food to their mouths. In fact, the irony ran so high, and was felt so sorely, that a private petition was sent in to have it stopped. This I was most glad to do, for our meals had been rendered a little unpleasant by mortified tears bedewing the face of the gentle Zoe, ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... little by little an intolerable sadness is expressed in those large eyes with their empty sockets—for, at this moment, the ultimate secret, that which the Sphinx seems to have known for so many centuries, but to have withheld in melancholy irony, is this: that all these dead men and women who sleep in the vast necropolis below have been fooled, and the awakening signal has not sounded for a single one of them; and that the creation of mankind—mankind that thinks and suffers—has had no rational explanation, and that our poor aspirations ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... only were not so beautiful!" she moaned as the first pale streaks of light in the east told her that day had finally dawned, and she crept stealthily back to bed again. Of course Jack, the wretch, was sleeping peacefully—that was the irony of fate! What did he know of suffering? But he would ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... Finnegan. You are small potatoes and few in the hill; you are shamefully drunk, and your nose bleeds; you are stricken with Spanish mildew, and you smell vilely—but you are immortal. You have been a disgrace to the service, but Fate in her gentle irony has redeemed you, permitting you, in one brief moment of your misspent life, to save to your country the command of the seas—to guide, with your subconscious intelligence, the finest battle-ship the science of the world has constructed to glorious victory, through the fiercest ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... his wife often had a tone which he found inscrutable he could not tell for his life whether she was in jest or in earnest. The truth is that circumstances had done much to cultivate in Mrs. Tristram a marked tendency to irony. Her taste on many points differed from that of her husband, and though she made frequent concessions it must be confessed that her concessions were not always graceful. They were founded upon a vague project she had of some day doing something very positive, ...
— The American • Henry James
... abortion grips our nation. Abortion is either the taking of a human life or it isn't. And if it is—and medical technology is increasingly showing it is—it must be stopped. It is a terrible irony that while some turn to abortion, so many others who cannot become parents cry out for children to adopt. We have room for these children. We can fill the cradles of those who want a child to love. And tonight I ask you in the Congress ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan
... cried, with a certain tone of irony in his voice, "that you think I am a mere society butterfly. What do you think I care for all the scented drawing-rooms in the world, for polo, for Hurlingham, for a stuffy reception in some great house in town? Nothing—nothing! Give me the open prairie ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... Was this the keenest irony, or was it the wandering of a weary mind? We cannot tell; but if the latter, it was the only occasion on which Jeanne's mind wandered; and there was method and meaning in the ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... battle, with the detachment of a non-combatant marvelling at the irony of two lines of men engaged in an effort at mutual extermination, I have caught myself thinking with the other side. I knew why my side was busy at killing. Why was the other? For the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... good reason for your being so happy," remarked the doctor, with a tinge of irony in ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... have no sense of humor and irony, the essay 'Of Love' unquestionably gives countenance to the theory that Francis Bacon was cold and passionless in all that concerned woman. Of the many strange constructions put upon this essay, not the least amusing ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... for the weak, for the victims of the deceptions of society, for the sufferings of the obscure. If the successful adventurer, Lesable, and the handsome Maze are the objects of his veiled irony, he maintains, or feels a sorrowful, though somewhat disdainful tenderness, for poor old Savon, the old copying clerk of the Ministry of Marine, who is the drudge of the office and whose colleagues laugh at him because his wife deceived ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... If there was any irony in his heart, his tongue did not show it. Indeed his manner betrayed little. Immobility had again replaced all tokens of anger, and immobility which only yielded now and then to a slight contortion more expressive of physical pain than of mental agitation. ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... moral. Not only the strong appeal of old affection, entwined with the earliest associations, was at work, but the appeal of womanhood itself:—the grey sad story of a woman's life, bare and dumb and pathetic in its irony and pain: the injury from without, and then the self-injury, its direct offspring; unnecessary, yet inevitable; the unconscious thirst for the sacrifice of others, the hungry claims of a nature unfulfilled, the groping instinct to bring the balance of renunciation to the level, and indemnify ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... those of many deformed persons, turned from right to left of the face instead of dividing it down the middle. The mouth, contracted at the corners, like that of a Sardinian, was always on the qui vive of irony. His hair, thin and reddish, fell straight, and showed the skull in many places. His hands, coarse and ill-joined at the wrists to arms that were far too long, were quick-fingered and seldom clean. Goupil wore boots only fit for the dust-heap, and raw silk stockings now of a ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... that expressed irony qualified by enjoyment, the creditor replied: "'T is a pleasure to aid a man to whom I am ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... into the soft valley soil. The trees closing overhead made long tunnels through which the sunshine worked in blobs and patches. Down in the tunnels were bars of sand and gravel, old roots and trunks covered with moss or painted red by the irony water; foxgloves growing lean and pale towards the light; clumps of fern and thirsty shy flowers who could not live away from moisture and shade. In the pools you could see the wave thrown up by the trouts as they charged hither and yon, and the pools were joined to each other—except ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... moved into Happy Valley I was struck with the remarkable infelicity of its title. Generous as Californians are in the use of adjectives, this passed into the domain of irony. But I was inclined to think it sincere,—the production of a weak but gushing mind, just as the feminine nomenclature of streets in the vicinity was evidently bestowed by one in habitual communion with ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... Napoleon's Dalmatia into a province of the Habsburgs? And the list is endless. Jella[vc]i['c] was very probably deceived by Francis Joseph, who kept dangling before his eyes a vision of a "Greater Croatia." But, by an irony of history, this hope of union of the Southern Slavs was for the time flung very much into the background by the action of the Tzar, who rescued Austria when in 1849 she was again at variance with the Magyars. Kossuth had been furious at the Constitution ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... wise birth-controller will not (like the deliciously absurd suffragette of old-time) imagine that birth-control for all means a New Heaven and a New Earth, but will, rather, appreciate the delightful irony of the Biblical legend which represented a world with only four people in it, yet one of them a murderer. Still, it may be pointed out, that was a state of things much better than we can show now. The world would count itself happier if, during the Great War, only twenty-five per cent of the ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... who spoke a little English, picked up, like Yaigok's, from American whalemen at East Cape. Professor Nordenskjold's ship the Vega wintered here some years ago, and the natives showed us souvenirs of the Swedish explorer's visit in the shape of clasp-knives and tin tobacco-boxes. The irony of fate and obstinacy of pack-ice are shown by the fact that all on board the Vega were expecting an easy passage through Bering Straits to the southward, and yet within twenty-four hours were compelled to remain for another ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... gentleness towards others, and her continual subordination of herself and of her own troubles, appeared on her face blended in a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, had no trace in it of irony, save for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow upon them passionate caresses. The torments inflicted on her by ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... could. His Majesty"—Andrew Forbes said the two last words with bitter irony in his ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... of bitterness in the displeased tone of Fernanda, whilst that of the count was calm and ceremonious, although slightly dashed with irony. ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... sight with a look as regretful as if he were witnessing the departure of his dearest friend. Then he turned his attention again to his surroundings, and a sigh welled up from his heart. "And this is Mt. Hope," he repeated. A note in his voice indicated that he fully appreciated the spirit of keen irony in which the place ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... the eve of his departure he had sent the following brilliant document to the Emperor-elect as a reply to an attempt to entrap him to Peking, a document the meaning of which was clear to every educated man. Its exquisite irony mixed with its bluntness told all that was necessary to tell—and forecasted the inevitable fall. ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... form rather than the right one, that of a professed and regular disquisition. And because the coarse buffoonery and broad laugh of the old and rude adversaries of the Christian faith would offend the taste, perhaps, rather than the virtue, of this cultivated age, a graver irony, a more skilful and delicate banter is substituted in its place. An eloquent historian, beside his more direct, and therefore fairer, attacks upon the credibility of Evangelic story, has contrived to weave into his narration ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... victory gave a new complexion to English naval warfare. Rodney and Howe were Hawke's pupils, Nelson himself, who was a post-captain when Hawke died, learned his tactics in Hawke's school. No sailor ever served England better than Hawke. And yet, such is the irony of human affairs, that on the very day when Hawke was adding the thunder of his guns to the diapason of surf and tempest off Quiberon, and crushing the fleet that threatened England with invasion, a London mob was ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... said the musketeer, continuing his imperceptible tone of irony, "I had no idea at all ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... softly, and with no trace of his wonted irony, but Theydon was aware that once more the little detective had peered into his ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... of the vessel. The lieutenant's tact let him see that Senor Montefalderon was a person of a very different calibre from Spike, as well as of different habits; and he did not choose to indulge in the quiet irony that formed so large an ingredient in his own character, with this new acquaintance. He spoke Spanish himself, with tolerable fluency, and a conversation now occurred between the two, which was maintained for some time with spirit and a ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... 'Powers' of the hospital—all were sorry; yet they could not understand to the point of quite forgiving their vagaries. The twain were outcast, wandering each in a dumb world of his own, each in the endless circle of one or two hopeless notions. It was irony—or the French system—which had ordered the Breton Roche to get well in a place whence he could see nothing flatter than a mountain, smell no sea, eat no fish. And God knows what had sent Gray there. His story was too vaguely understood, ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... call it? The damned, cynical irony of this whole passion-driven puppet-show—that's what it shows! The man who is loved cannot marry the woman he loves lest they both starve; the man who can give a woman half the world is loathed for ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... toilet are minutely described, and all the mistakes the poor countrified Backfisch makes the first morning. She actually gets out of bed before she puts on her clothes, and has to be driven behind the bed curtains by her aunt's irony. This is an incident that is either out of date or due to the genius and imagination of the author, for I have never seen bed curtains in Germany. However, Gretchen is taught to perform the early stages of her toilet behind them, and then to wash for the first time ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... in front of the furious warrior, without any weapon with which to defend himself. Not only that, he folded his arms over his breast and with biting irony added: ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... insured his life when he was twenty would have made money on the transaction regardless of rate. Yet he was the hero of sixty-seven battles on land and sea, and engaged in more than two hundred personal encounters, where rifles, pistols, stilettos, swords or cudgels played their part. Behold the irony of Fate! ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... the North took the form of a sudden exaltation of the personality of Lincoln, bringing out characterizations of the man far different from those which had been his earlier in the war. The presence of a "rural attorney" in the Presidential office had seemed like the irony of fate in the great crisis of 1861. Even so acute an observer as Lyons could then write, "Mr. Lincoln has not hitherto given proof of his possessing any natural talents to compensate for his ignorance of everything but Illinois village politics. He seems to be well meaning and conscientious, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... it that he had the courage to address the queen in behalf of his faith. He laments plaintively that despite his sixty years he has not been able to eradicate all traces of his descent (reato de su origen), and turns his irony against himself: ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... only my emphatic way of speaking." "Of course, you meant figuratively," said Mr. Balch, in a tone of irony; mentally adding, "as I hope you may ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... the Queen was with the Lady Mary, once more in her chamber, having come down as before, from the chapel in the roof, to pray her submit to her father's will. Mary had withstood her with a more good-humoured irony; and, whilst she was in the midst of her pleadings, a letter marked most pressing was brought to her. The Queen opened it, and raised her eyebrows; she looked down at the subscription and frowned. Then she cast it upon ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... massacred by his comrades. On the other hand, there was the liability of being ourselves shot by the Carlists. How were they to distinguish a neutral or a sympathizer from their foes? I confess I could not help smiling as the thought occurred to me what a piece of irony in action it would be if Barbarossa were to be helped to a morsel of lead by his friends, the enemy. With a cheerful equanimity I contemplated the prospect of his receiving a very slight contusion from a spent bullet on a soft part ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... gods,"— things that they never possessed nor could hope to have any interest in. "Not one among many, many Romans," said he, "has a family altar or an ancestral tomb. They have fought to maintain the luxury of the great, and they are called in bitter irony the 'masters of the world' while they do not possess a clod of earth that they may ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... exceedingly glad that Adamson had to stay in town to play for the South against the North, or Fred would not have come. On that tour I played very badly and Fred very well, which is what some people would call the irony of fate. But I must say in excuse for myself that more difficult people to get hold of than those Swansea, Newport and Cardiff three-quarters I cannot conceive, and I had no end of chances of trying to collar them. How many of those chances ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... without asking my advice, you will see how you will get through. Faust is so strange an individual that only few can sympathize with his internal condition. Then the character of Mephistopheles is, on account of his irony, and also because he is a living result of an extensive acquaintance with the world, also very difficult. But you will see what lights open upon you. Tasso, on the other hand, lies far nearer the common feelings of mankind, and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... question, Chevalier! Most willingly I will aid you in anything proper for a lady to do!" added she, with a touch of irony. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... alluding to the Spectator's critiques of Shakespeare, Milton, and Chevy Chase, and near the end of the first number slides into a remark that "one of the Scribleri, a descendant of the famous Martinus, has expressed his suspicions of the text being corrupted." A page or two of irony concerning the "plain and simple" opening of the poem seems to hark back to something more subtle in the Augustans than the Wagstaffian derision, no doubt to Pope's victory over Philips in a Guardian ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... of the greatest objects, and capable of a steady and cool comprehension of them. He had wit at will. He had humor that, when he pleased, was delicate and delightful. He had a satire that was good-natured or caustic, Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais, at his pleasure. He had talents for irony, allegory, and fable, that he could adapt with great skill to the promotion of moral and political truth. He was master of that infantine simplicity which the French call naivete, which never fails to charm, in Phaedrus ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those who have been wise in their own esteem, ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and suddenly Porfiry Petrovitch looked with obvious irony at him, screwing up his eyes and, as it were, winking at him. But perhaps it was Raskolnikov's fancy, for it all lasted but a moment. There was certainly something of the sort, Raskolnikov could have sworn he winked ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the Peninsular War, Sir William Butler was great both as a soldier and as a writer. His autobiography sparkles with humour, irony, and felicitous diction; but it was in his Life of Gordon of Khartoum that he rose to his full stature as a contributor to the ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... rage, hate, irony, the terrors of remorse, the bitterness of disappointment, were not the only dramatic means in the possession of that artist whom Madame Sontag proclaimed as "the greatest known singer." None could express as did Delsarte, contemplation, serenity, tenderness—the dreams ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... But they had to decide—and the thing was discussed at a little family conference—where they should send their wives and children. And one of these Frenchmen, the one who had been most ferocious in his condemnation of the German barbarian, said quite naively and with no sense of irony or paradox: "Of course, if we could find an absolutely open town which would not be defended at all the women folk and children would be all right." His instinct, of course, was perfectly just. The German "savage" had had three quarters of a million people in his absolute power in Brussels, and ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... a shack out here an' live in it, I am!" exploded Hopalong in withering irony as he dug the sand out of his ears and also from his sixshooter. "I just nachurally dotes on ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... by tears and then dried by the panting, anguished breathings of beings fashioned in the image of their Creator, as they toiled and died under the brutal hands of their savage task-masters—the civilian officials of that cruel "System" which, by the irony of fate, the far-seeing, gentle, and tender-hearted Arthur Phillip, the founder of Australia, ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... the joint in the armour of this extraordinary Midland personage. With all his irony, with all his violent humour, with all his just and unprejudiced perceptions, he had a tenderness for the Institution of which he was the dictator. He loved it. He could laugh like a god at everything in the Five Towns except this one thing. He would try to force himself to regard even this with ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... subject of prosecution, and but for the keen scent of the Association, the rank and huge sedition contained in the New Year's Address might have lain in its covert undetected and undisturbed. But to drop this irony and be serious, the law officers of the crown are fully adequate to their duties, and Carlile's shop was as well known to the Attorney General as St. Paul's to you. For years he has not had his eyes off it. ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... stricken, and her sufferings were all the more intense because she had to hide them from every one, especially from her husband, and they made a marked contrast, by the irony of fate, with the pleasures and amusements that surrounded her. She was too clear-sighted and intelligent to proceed to question the Emperor. She feared light and dreaded the truth. She hesitated before the abyss that awaited her, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... Mackinder looked at the galaxy in the evening sky with laughter and with pride. It had played its part with Fate against Constantine Jopp and the little widow at Jansen. It had never shone so brightly as on the night when Vigon struck oil on O'Ryan's ranch. But Vigon had no memory of that. Such is the irony of life. ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... quickly, "And I will leave a note for Madame Eversham at the desk to inform her of your destination and to express my regret that she is not here to accept the invitation." His voice was flavored with droll irony. "In ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... yet again the great soul of the hero!" put in Basset with grim irony. "If he lie abed i' th' day for a wound to his wrist, what shall he do for a stab to his feelings? You shall drive him to drown him in salt water; and that were cruelty unheard-of, for it should make his eyes smart. I tell thee what, Jack ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... far better not to respect me at all," said the queen, with a chilling irony of manner. "It would be far better if you were not innocent. Do you presume to suppose that I should be satisfied simply to leave you unpunished if ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... meaning that, unless within forty-eight hours the Emperor consented to arbitration, American battleships, already coaled and cleared, would sail for Venezuelan waters. The hint was sufficient. The Kaiser accepted the proposal and the President, with the fine irony of diplomacy, complimented him publicly on "being so stanch an advocate of arbitration." In terms of the Monroe Doctrine this action meant that the United States, while not denying the obligations of debtors, would not permit any ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... her hand as if to check him with a warning gesture. "Yes, dear," she said suddenly, lifting her musical voice, with a mischievous side-glance at Paul, as if to indicate her conception of the irony of a possible application, "this way. Here we are waiting for you." Her listening ear had detected Milly's step in the passage, and in another moment that cheerful young woman discreetly stopped on the threshold of the room, with every expression of apologetic indiscretion ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... into a short grim laugh. The idea of Beatrice languishing for Owen Davies, indeed the irony of the whole position, was too much for his sense ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... realism of Thackeray's study to the scornful amenity of the other's—as you have but to contrast the elaborate and extravagant cruelty of Thackeray's Alcide de Mirobolant with the polite and half-respectful irony of Disraeli's treatment of the cooks in Tancred—to perceive that in certain ways the advantage is not with 'the greatest novelist of his time,' and that the Monmouth produces an impression which is more moral because more kindly and humane ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... watch the sale, and mayhap make a bid for a purchase on her own account; the rich Roman matrons with large private fortunes and households of their own, imperious and independent, were the object of grave deference and of obsequious courtesy—not altogether unmixed with irony, on the part of the young men ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... gales with sails close-reefed and hatches battened, and came {5} out with only one of his three ships left, the first English keel to cleave the waters of the Pacific. In honour of the feat Drake renamed his ship the Golden Hind. Perhaps there was jocose irony in the suggestion of gold and speed. Certain it is, the crew of the Golden Hind were well content with the possession of both gold and speed before advancing far up the west coast of ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... remnants of his men. Their adventures during that prodigious night are not to be described. They did not know whether they were going towards or away from the enemy. Not knowing where they themselves were, or where their opponents were, it was mere irony to ask where was the rest of their army. For a thing had descended upon them which London does not know—darkness, which was before the stars were made, and they were as much lost in it as if they had been made before the stars. Every now and then, as those frightful ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... proof of love to him that hath redeemed us, but not to recommend us to his favour. The picture of such a feast drawn by John Bunyan must make upon every reader a deep, a lasting, an indelible impression. How bitter and how true is the irony, when the Pharisee is represented as saying, "I came to thy feast out of civility, but for thy dainties I need them not, I have enough of my own; I thank thee for thy kindness, but I am not as those that stand in need of thy provisions, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... causes his own death in turn through the greed of Attila. There was originally, according to Boer, no question of revenge, except the revenge of fate, the retribution which overtakes the criminal. This feeling for the irony of fate was lost when the motive, that Hagen kills Siegfried because of his treasure, was replaced by the one that he does it at the request of Brunhild. This leads Boer to the conclusion, that Brunhild did not originally belong to the Siegfried ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... let themselves go—"for the sake of happiness," as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated—and who had continually on their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led, IRONY was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the "noble," with a look that said plainly enough "Do not dissemble before me! here—we are equal!" ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... see?—a second Tolstoy. . . . As for Schopenhauer and Spencer, he treats them like small boys and slaps them on the shoulder in a fatherly way: 'Well, what do you say, old Spencer?' He has not read Spencer, of course, but how charming he is when with light, careless irony he says of his lady friend: 'She has read Spencer!' And they all listen to him, and no one cares to understand that this charlatan has not the right to kiss the sole of Spencer's foot, let alone speaking about him in that tone! Sapping the foundations of civilisation, of authority, of other people's ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... down and then up; and the other, the falling circumflex, in which the voice slides upward and then downward on the same vowel. They may both be denoted by the same mark, thus, (^). The circumflex is used chiefly to indicate the emphasis of irony, ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... flaying irony and blundering invective, however, Joe Lathrop never for a moment lost sight of the fact that there were some men upon the finishing floor whom it was far better for him to let alone. With all his ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... at Mr. Tape, as if he suspected some lurking irony beneath the bland innocence of his words. Perceiving, as usual, nothing in the speaker's countenance, Mr. Smith—blowing at the same time a tremendous cloud to conceal a faint blush which, to my extreme astonishment, I observed ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... life than others, he realized that he did not know much. He criticized freely the prevailing beliefs, customs, and religious practice. For this he was accused of impiety, and forced to drink the hemlock. With an irony in manner and thought, Socrates introduced the problem of self-knowledge; he hastened the study of man and reason; he instituted the doctrine of true manhood as an essential part in the philosophy of ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... and nervous exaltation Sadie never lost consciousness of the gravity of the situation. If her sense of humor enabled her to see one side of its grim irony; if she experienced a wicked satisfaction in accepting the admiration and easy confidence of the high-born guests, knowing that her cousin had assisted in preparing the meal they were eating, she had never lost sight of the practical effect of the discovery ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... of quiet irony accompanied the words. As it curved her lips alluringly, Lord Hurdly felt himself touched with the sudden sense of her powerful charm. No one else on earth would have dared to say this to him, or anything remotely comparable with it. There was something very ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... acute critics as Chesterfield and Warburton thought the performance serious. Rousseau, whose famous discourse on the evils of civilization had appeared six years before, would have read Burke's ironical vindication of natural society without a suspicion of its irony. There have indeed been found persons who insist that the Vindication was a really serious expression of the writer's own opinions. This is absolutely incredible, for various reasons. Burke felt now, as he did thirty years later, that civil institutions cannot wisely or safely be measured ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... with joy or irony," and said, "Well, I cautioned you, and told you that my name would almost damn ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... look of anxious indecision in Fabian's countenance, he added, with that bitter irony which formed a part of his character; "But after all, if this duty is so repugnant to you, I shall undertake it; for not having the least ill will against Cuchillo, I can bang him without a scruple. You will see, Fabian, that the knave will not testify any surprise ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... which taught or preached so absurd and unfair a doctrine. "I wish I could go to the other side of the world," he said, "and live among heathens who know no such dreams. I, Frederick Brent, son of Tom Brent, temperance advocate, sometime drunkard and wife-beater." There was terrible, scorching irony in the thought. There was a pitiless hatred in his heart ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... not what we are accustomed to. I suspect, on the contrary, that there are not unfrequently substantial reasons underneath for customs that appear to us absurd; and if I were ever again to find myself amongst strangers, I should be solicitous to examine before I condemned. Indiscriminating irony and faultfinding are just sumphishness, and that is all. Anne is now much better, but papa has been for near a fortnight far from well with the influenza; he has at times a most distressing cough, and ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... a lady of quite mature appearance, the remark was not without its little irony. The other man blew his horn by way of grace, at which Liza called out ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham
... Plato glories in this impartiality of the dialectical method, which places birds in juxtaposition with men, and the king side by side with the bird-catcher; king or vermin-destroyer are objects of equal interest to science (compare Parmen.). There are other passages which show that the irony of Socrates was a lesson which Plato was not slow in learning—as, for example, the passing remark, that 'the kings and statesmen of our day are in their breeding and education very like their subjects;' or the anticipation that ...
— Statesman • Plato
... a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction, to set off the meanest things. The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity, is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The little is made great, and the great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or weep. It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... to quarrel with it on that account," said Matt, with the philosophical serenity which might easily be mistaken for irony in him. "The book we get our religion from teaches leniency in ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... world knows that nothing is so useless as a general maxim. If it be very moral and very true it may serve for a copy to a charity boy." So the very moral and the very true are not for the statesman but for the charity-boy. This perhaps may be defended as irony; hardly, but even so, in such irony the character appears as plainly as in volumes of solemn rant. To us it stands out clearly as the characteristic attitude of the English Government. The English people are used to it, ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... Lucilla, her lips trembling with bitter irony. 'Now I know what you all are made of. We are obliged for your offered exertion, but we are not inclined to ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to Lydia Meredith that the girl showed no sign of her night's adventure when she came in to breakfast on the following morning. She looked bright. Her eyes were clear and her delicate irony as pointed as though she had ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... and my recognition of the civility from every one which had so ineffectively abetted my search. Simple and gentle, how hospitable they had all been to my vain inquiry, and how delicately they had forborne to visit the stranger with the irony of the average American who is asked anything, especially anything he does not know! I went thinking that the difference was a difference between human nature long mellowed to its conditions, and human nature rasped on its ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... than the adventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerant mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, and installed without preparation as one of the hereditary legislators of a great country. It is with a very bitter irony that the paper, on which all this depends, is left to float for years at the will of wind and tide. What, again, can be finer in conception than that voice from the people heard suddenly in the House of Lords, in solemn ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Remark the irony of fate. This affair had no sooner been settled, Mr. Gurr's claims cut at the very root, and the Treasury regulation apparently set beyond cavil, than the Chief Justice pulled himself together, and, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a pretty irony; "well, then, of co'se, sisteh or no sisteh, you muz' instan'ly go!" The steady tinkle of the sister's laughter as she passed with a chair provoked her own: "Yes, go! Me, I'll rimmain with her till Joy"—the ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... man who deals in oracular utterances acquires instinctively a mode of speech which may shift its colour with every change of light. The texture of Disraeli's writings is so ingeniously shot with irony and serious sentiment that each tint may predominate by turns. It is impossible to suppose that the weaver of so cunning a web should never have intended the effects which he produces; but frequently, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... mute tribute to the trouble he was powerless to relieve. It roused, too, the drugged pulses of his own grief: he was touched by the chance propinquity of two alien sorrows in a great city throbbing with multifarious passions. It would have been more in keeping with the irony of life had he found himself next to a mother singing her child to sleep: there seemed a mute commiseration in the hand that had ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... exposed the bourgeoisie and made an end of its moral prestige. That was enough: like Darwin he had for the moment the World Will by the ear. Marx had, too, what Darwin had not: implacability and a fine Jewish literary gift, with terrible powers of hatred, invective, irony, and all the bitter qualities bred, first in the oppression of a rather pampered young genius (Marx was the spoilt child of a well-to-do family) by a social system utterly uncongenial to him, and later on by exile and poverty. Thus Marx and Darwin between them toppled ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... harder, the cruel sea, spotted here and there with black patches between which splashes of light revealed the wild waves throwing high their curd in the cold, argent glimmer. One of these illuminating dashes, as if in a spirit of irony, moved toward the ship, almost enveloped it and showed suddenly a number of mad, leaping human figures issuing with horrible cries ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... messenger from Troy. Talthybius, the herald, enters as spokesman of the army and king, describing the hardships they have suffered and the joy of the triumphant issue. To him Clytemnestra announces, in words of which the irony is patent to the audience, her sufferings in the absence of her husband and her delight at the prospect of his return. He will find her, she says, as he left her, a faithful watcher of the home, her loyalty sure, her honour undefiled. Then follows another choral ode, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... tossed her pretty bead, saying, "Let me tell you, Caroline, that little girls are sometimes as wise as their elders, and I shall give you a proof of my superior wisdom, by not returning irony for irony. Perhaps it may be you who is to be married—perhaps it may be both of us. There are more crowns in Europe than one. But hark! there sounds the clock. ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... action being so slight, this is brought out and made manifest by means of a subtile analysis, and by the language chosen to express the emotions, both which may in the translation be lost. There is, besides, in my novel a certain irony, good-humored and frank, and a certain humor, resembling rather the humor of the English than the esprit of the French, which qualities, although happily they do not depend upon puns, or a play upon words, but are in the ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... in his idea of finding more horses loose in the fields. The men soon rounded up eleven of the whites, all more or less frightened, and among the number were Queen and Blanca Mujer. The raiders had been unable to handle more than one horse for each man. It was bitter irony of fate that Belding should lose his favorite, the one horse more dear to him than all the others. Somewhere out on the trail a raider was fighting the iron-jawed ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... said Saxham, with rather heavy irony, "that you acquainted them with your opinion of them ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... immutable. His revenge is furious as a tempest, or a tornado; but his corruption is a monsoon; a trade-wind, blowing uniformly from one point of the compass, and wafting the wealth of India to the same port, in one certain direction." In his speech, however, in indulging his wit and irony, Sheridan gave vent to some sallies, which showed that he was convinced that Hastings had not received the presents for himself, but for his employers. Describing the accommodating morality of the court of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... need hardly say is not shared by the large majority of Chinese. Persons who have committed political offenses in their own country find protection not only in America but in all countries in Europe, Japan, and other civilized lands. It is an irony of fate that since the establishment of the Chinese Republic, Manchu and other officials under the old regime, now find secure asylums in Hongkong, Japan, and Tsingtao, while hundreds of ex-Manchu officials have fled to the ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... this that saved the day. The leader tapped with his violin bow on the tin shade over his electric light and the dazed musicians came to attention. They began on the number the girl had been singing. It was like the irony of fate to hear the strains of a sentimental song when the poor girl was in danger of death. But the music quieted the audience. Men and women sank back in their seats, watching with fear-widened eyes the actions ...
— Andy at Yale - The Great Quadrangle Mystery • Roy Eliot Stokes
... his throat, Owen ran into the sitting-room where the weapons taken from the men had been piled. They were not there. He picked up the rifle. By some peculiar irony the lock worked all right for him now, but a quick look told him there were no more cartridges in the magazine. He dropped the rifle and looked wildly around for ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... continuous rhetorical display; and yet, while the attention was closely held by the even flow of lucid reasoning, the emotions and passions were from time to time deeply aroused and strongly excited. In many passages of direct retort Mr. Webster used an irony which he employed always in a perfectly characteristic way. He had a strong natural sense of humor, but he never made fun or descended to trivial efforts to excite laughter against his opponent. He was not a witty man or a maker of epigrams. But he was a master in the use of a cold, dignified ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... coming across honest enthusiastic David with little remarks, each skillfully discordant with the rising sentiment. Was he droll, Talboys did a bit of polite gravity on him; was he warm in praise of some gallant action, chill irony trickled on him ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... Sir Kasimir, with a shade of irony in his tone. "It would be a troublesome siege; but the League numbers 1,500 horse, and 9,000 foot, and, with Schlangenwald's concurrence, you would ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Prince pronounced the word Madame, there was a shadow of fine irony, which Aminta could not but observe. She blushed slightly, for she thought the stranger alluded to her recent marriage; and though shocked at his familiarity, Aminta was satisfied with replying politely, that she would be happy if the visitor would remain ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... prison? Go. Are you tired of going? Sit. They robbed you? Keep still. They beat you? Bear it. They have killed you? Stay dead. That's certain. And I'll carry off Savka; I'll carry him off!" His curt, barking phrases, full of good-natured irony, perplexed the mother. But his last words aroused envy ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... house. But to her surprise, her coming had evidently been anticipated by them, and they were actually—and unexpectedly—awaiting her behind the low whitewashed garden palings! As she neared them they burst into a shrill, discordant laugh, so full of irony, gratified malice, and mean exaltation that Cissy was for a moment startled. But only for a moment; she had her father's reckless audacity, and bore them down with a display of such pink cheeks and flashing eyes that their laughter ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... verses, or had me otherwise than wholly on trust from Lowell; but he leaned over towards his host, and said, with a laughing look at me, "Well, James, this is something like the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands." I took his sweet and caressing irony as he meant it; but the charm of it went to my head long before any drop of wine, together with the charm of hearing him and Lowell calling each other James and Wendell, and of finding them still ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... children cheered, seemingly with no intent of irony.) He added that, in his opinion, kind hearts were, if he might so put ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... the temperament of violent force, and in such types the reaction is always tremendous. The indomitable activity of the last twenty months had bred weariness of spirit. The nemesis of a career of strenuous Will in large natures is apt to be a sudden sense of the irony of things. In Danton, as with Byron it happened afterwards, the vehemence of the revolutionary spirit was touched by this desolating irony. His friends tried to rouse him. It is not clear that he ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... for securing better and more equitable conditions of labor. The talk about preserving to the misery-hunted beings who make contracts for such service their "liberty" to make them, is either to speak in a spirit of heartless irony or else to show an utter lack of knowledge of the conditions of life among the great masses of our fellow-countrymen, a lack which unfits a judge to do good service just as it would unfit ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... passion, that was creeping into all his veins, poisoning and crippling all his vitalities, he was still independent enough of it to be able to handle it with the irony it deserved. For it was almost as ludicrous as it was pitiable. He did not want any man of the world, any Harding Watton, to tell ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... flowed musically from the throat of the fair singer at the piano, were inflected with a subtle irony, which caused the frown to deepen upon the brow of the tall, scholarly, though somewhat morose-looking man who had entered the parlor soon after the singer had begun, and who, without glancing in her direction, ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... that the problem in its new guise should still be glossed over in the old way. In neither era, consequently, could an honest novelist freely follow his observations upon Southern life in general. The mind of the herd bore down upon him and crushed him into the accepted molds. It seems a curious irony that the Negroes who thus innocently limited the literature of their section should have been the subjects of a little body of narrative which bids fair to outlast all that local color hit upon in the South. Joel Chandler Harris is not, strictly speaking, a contemporary, but Uncle ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... It is a masterpiece, I know; but it is a little masterpiece; they are very careful not to mention the great ones."[*] This, which is the best known and most generally admired of Balzac's novels, is dedicated by a strange irony of fate to Maria, whose identity has never been discovered; the only fact really known about her being her pathetic request to Balzac, that he would love her just for a year, and she would love him for all eternity. She did not, however, have undisputed ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... has found it necessary to appeal to his friends in a very touching way. The friends of the divine are requested to return "Colenso on the Pentateuch," and another volume which they have borrowed. The advertisement has none of that irony which finds play in the notice, "The Gentleman who took a brown silk umbrella, with gold crutch handle, and left a blue cotton article, is asked to restore the former." The advertiser seems to speak more in sorrow and in hope than in anger, and we sincerely trust that he ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... with the heads of governors of provinces." For in fact it is related as true, that Anaxarchus seeing a present of small fishes, which the king sent to Hephaestion, had used this expression, in a sort of irony, and disparagement of those who undergo vast labors and encounter great hazards in pursuit of magnificent objects, which after all bring them little more pleasure or enjoyment than what others have. From what I have said upon this subject, it is apparent that Alexander in ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... He wanted to know something about the settler's grant. He said: "Of course you know after a chap has been out here in the open, it will be impossible to go back again to office life." I boosted Canada and suddenly the irony of the situation occurred to me. Here we were lying down in a road quite close to the German lines, so close that it would be suicide to even stand up, and yet here we were calmly discussing the merits of Canadian ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... faith in miracles, fondness for drink or gambling, sycophancy to the rich, or "getting on in the world." This is a very important distinction and one which illuminates the connection between the drama and the mores. Socrates was an etholog, although not an actor. He spent sarcasm, irony, and humor on the ways of the Athenians of his time.[2037] Aristophanes was another, Rabelais was another, Erasmus was an inferior one. In his Colloquies and Praise of Folly he is more of a preacher, but his aim is to influence by graphic satirical ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... had been possible; and I now saw that in coming at all I ought to have come accompanied by a squad of police with authority to search the whole place, from end to end and top to bottom. And I reflected, with a grim sense of the irony of it, that to do that would have been a fine long job for a dozen men—what, then, was it that ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... so coloured by pleasantries, so accentuated by ridicule, that the silent and stodgy men, who are apt to represent a nation's real strength, hardly know where to turn for a little saving dulness. A deep vein of irony runs through every grade of society, making it possible for us to laugh at our own bitter discomfiture, and to scoff with startling distinctness at the evils which we passively permit. Just as the French monarchy under Louis the Fourteenth was wittily defined as despotism ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... the ships of Hoche's unlucky expedition; he landed with Humbert in Donegal, and saw the Race of Castlebar; he had some marvellous experiences in the West Indies, and everywhere the devotion of women facilitated his hairbreadth escapes. There need be no irony in repeating that avowed fiction can have no chance at all in competition with literature ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... have been good enough to ask me to share your fly," the man observed, with a rather aggressive touch of irony, "I may as well let you know who I am. My name is ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... superficial but rather subtle qualities by which he has achieved success, it seems a sort of irony to think what he might have done and did not do for the country of his birth. What did he ever do for Canada? Before the war—nothing. He made huge fortunes here. He created mergers here. He started consolidated ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... allow the Bond, as an organisation, to commit itself to any overt opposition to the principle of a contribution to the British Navy—an attitude which would have been obviously inconsistent with the Bond's profession of loyalty—and with characteristic irony the third reading of the Navy Contribution Bill was eventually passed, a year later, without a division in the Legislative Assembly by a Ministry[34] placed in office by Bond votes for the declared purpose of opposing the policy of the Imperial Government on the one question—the ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... Swift's exposure of the corrupt bishops, the "holy Persons" in the House of Lords (Travels, II, vi). Believing that Swift's pungent satire on the church hierarchy is good and true, he makes the dean himself the target of a playful bit of raillery, a type of irony for which Swift ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... Ariosto has already been mentioned.[4] But the stuff of the old Charlemagne epos is sophisticated in the brilliant pages of Ariosto, who follows Pulci and Boiardo, if not in burlesquing chivalry outright, yet in treating it with a half irony. Tasso is serious, but submits his romantic matter—Godfrey of Boulogne and the First Crusade—to the classical epic mould. It was pollen from Italy, but not Italy of the Middle Ages, that fructified English poetry in the sixteenth century. Two indeed ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... manner of box it was," said Lady Dorinda with irony, though a dull red was startled ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... highly approved by the local health authorities. This one was on the subject of pure milk. Its association with the excerpt from the Areopagitica (which, having been set for a standing head, was not cut out by the "Killed") set the final touch of irony upon the matter. Even in his fury ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and has been aptly called "a land of unrest." In the eighteen-forties the country witnessed many plans, "pronunciamientos" and revolutions, which could not escape the vigilant mind of Madame Calderon, who often refers to them with a spice of delicate satire and irony which is not unkindly. After the long period of peaceful if unexciting viceregal rule, the government of the new republic had become the prey of political groups, headed by men who coveted the presidency chiefly impelled ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... persuasive manner, and his scholastic acquirements were great advantages. He soon obtained considerable influence among the respectable old gentlemen who at that time sat as judges in the one court and magistrates in the other. His intense love of fun, and his powerful irony, made these courts, instead of dull and dreary places, lively and cheerful. Many droll stories are told of him, one of the best of which relates to his cross-examination of a pompous witness. Edmonds began ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... straits. He narrowly escaped capture after the parade the other day. I managed to get him smuggled out of the city in the same ambulance that carried Father's horse. The horse was drunk and Quim was sober. Wasn't that an irony of fate? But I promised to tell you how I became associated ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... years have blown away, a sentimental reminiscence of what the enigmatical gods have had their jest with, leaving only its gallant memory behind. The whole Conradean system sums itself up in the title of "Victory," an incomparable piece of irony. Imagine a better label for that tragic record of heroic and yet bootless effort, that matchless picture, in microcosm, of the relentlessly cruel ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... that never be!" exclaimed the artist, in the common Italian phrase, but with a little irony. "But as for the responsibility, I do not know whose it was. It was certainly not I who invited the young lady ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... preached in the black gown; while every ambitious cleric who could put a thesis together could flaunt his red and black in the Vice-Chancellor's procession on Sundays in the University church. The face was one of mingled irony and melancholy, and there came from it sometimes the ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the fine comb and passed it repeatedly through her hair; but he had only combed it three or five times, when he perceived Ch'ing Wen hurriedly walk in to fetch some money. As soon as she caught sight of them both: "You haven't as yet drunk from the marriage cup," she said with a smile full of irony, "and have you already put ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... disdain; believing that the faith which he had just embraced contained the pure truth. He despised all the attacks which could be made against it, and laughed already at the irresistible arguments which he was to find in the works of the Eagle of Meaux. But his mistrust and irony soon gave place to wonder first, and then to admiration: he thought that the cause pleaded by such an advocate must, at least, be respectable; and, by a natural transition, came to think that great geniuses would only devote themselves to that ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... attack our national character, we have two well-known essays in our ethical and casuistical literature that may with perfect safety be pitted against anything that either France or Italy has produced. Even if they are but a master's irony, let all ambitious men keep Of Cunning and Of Wisdom for a Man's Self under their pillow. Let all young men who would toady a great man; let all young ministers who would tune their pulpit to king, or court, or society; let all tradesmen and merchants who prefer their profits to their ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... indulge in fretful regrets over her broken health. When I remember, too, how lonely your days are, and think of your husband and what he might make of them, then I cannot help realising with absolute vividness the supreme irony of fate. Here am I, craving for nothing so much on earth as the sympathy, the affection of—shall I say such a woman as you? And your husband, who might have the best, remains utterly indifferent, content with something far below the ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... asked me to help him do that infernal deed. I could not understand it then, but it is plain enough now. He is my son! And I have not only transmitted a tainted life to him, but helped to damn him in its possession! God! what irony! Of course the quack never knew that I, too, am living under a false name! I wonder if it is too late to stop him? Yes—it's done, and he is miles away! It's almost daybreak now! Whewwwh! ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... other artistic absorptions, because it seems literally to check the growth of other qualities and interests. In fact, in many ways Lestrange was like a pious child. He was apt to be snubbed by Father Payne, but he was wholly indifferent to all irony. I used to listen to him playing the organ in the evenings, and a language of emotions and visions certainly streamed from his fingers which he was never able to put into words. Father Payne treated him as one might treat an inspired fool, with a ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... indeed, actually sent in his resignation,—when news came of the doings of another John Brown at Harper's Ferry. The resignation was instantly recalled, with the remark that it was not a time for Browns to seem to be backward on the question of slavery. Such is the irony ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... And then the Judge, looking up, saw what no one else in the court had seen—that the Colonel was sincere and in earnest; that what he had conceived to be the pleader's most perfect acting, and most elaborate irony, were the deep, serious, mirthless convictions of a man without the least sense of humor. There was a touch of this respect in the Judge's voice as he said to him, gently, "You may ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... There was the irony in it that so puts up a boy's dander. "Dinna think," said Tommy, hotly, "that I'm fleid at you, though I have no beard—at least, I ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... point Mendoza had preserved that tone of elaborate irony which, it will be remembered, was so disconcerting to English audiences, and stood so much in the way of his popularity. But now his manner changed. Becoming more serious, and I fear I must add, more dull ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... to this in a tone of savage irony. "You are a minister of religion, and you are an old man. Two privileges—and you presume on ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... received from them, had deprived them of all claim even on the pity of those who had triumphed in spite of them. At any rate, Franklin insisted, and it was the utmost to which he would assent,—his irony and sarcasm in making the offer showing the depth of his bitterness on the subject,—that a balance should be struck between the losses of the Loyalists and those of the Colonists in the conflagration of their sea-ports ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... naturalists, so long may we gratefully remember that this man to his death bore upon him all the signs of a martyr, so long shall we point to him as one of the witnesses who have fought for us and for the liberty of science." Verily these words from Virchow's lips sound like the bitterest irony; for was not Lorenz Oken one of the foremost and most zealous champions of that monistic doctrine of development against which Rudolf Virchow at this day is most violently striving? Did not Oken himself proceed farther in the construction ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... Embankment, Robert Hardrow, with a cynical smile on his lips, listened to the splendid irony ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... then, that they would believe you, and spare me?" I asked, with unconcealed irony, forcing myself even against my will, to render my ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... the sublime irony of the figure he made, continued to plead. "Natalie, don't turn away from me! You took me for better or worse, remember! You found me at a disadvantage to-day; I don't look like this ordinarily. And ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... that "the only author to whom he could be compared in English, lost a bishopric for his wittiest performance." In later years Lord Murray[58] said, "After Pascal's Letters, it is the most instructive piece of wisdom in the form of Irony ever written." Macaulay declared that Sydney Smith was "universally admitted to have been a great reasoner, and the greatest master of ridicule that has appeared among us since Swift." Even now, after a century of publishing, Peter Plymley's ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... have left her long ago under such tongue-lashing, but old Dewey could not leave, because to leave is an act. There were no verbs in his vocabulary comprehending possibilities of usefulness within range of the present tense. What an irony ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... decent sort yourself," returned Myner, with more than his usual flippancy of manner, but, as I was gratefully aware, not a trace of his occasional irony of meaning. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hold the poseetion a 'm in withoot anxieties. Noo there wes the 'Eruption' in '43"—it could not be ignorance which made John cling to this word, and so we supposed that the word was adopted in the spirit of historical irony—"that wes a crisis. Did a' ever tell ye, Rebecca, that there wes juist ae beadle left the next morning tae cairry on ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... him regularly during his absence, curt, businesslike epistles, which always terminated on a grim note of irony: "Your faithful steward, N. V. West." He never varied this joke, and Babbacombe usually noted it with a faint frown. The fellow was not a bad sort, he was convinced, but he would always be more or less of an ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... inundar to inundate. inusitado unusual. inutil useless. invadir to invade. invasor m. invader. inventar to invent. invierno winter. invitar to invite. ir to go; vr. to go away, depart; ir (with present part.), to go on —ing. iris m. rainbow. ironia irony. ironico ironic. irrealizable unrealizable. irritar to irritate. isla island. islamita m. Mohammedan. Italia Italy. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... and amazement, and that Belle had stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth to prevent laughter, a spark of anger glittered in his eyes. His first thought was that Mr. Jocelyn was indulging in unexpected irony at his expense, and the ready youth whose social habits had inured him to much chaffing was able to reply, although a little stiffly and awkwardly, "I suppose most young men have ambitious hopes ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... in your irony! for I see that Mrs. Grey looks quizzical expectation. Well, I will. In fact, I'm as well prepared as a man whose health is drunk at a dinner given to him, and who is unexpectedly called upon for a speech,—or as Rosina, when ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... invisible gobbosity; the nose, crooked and out of shape like those of many deformed persons, turned from right to left of the face instead of dividing it down the middle. The mouth, contracted at the corners, like that of a Sardinian, was always on the qui vive of irony. His hair, thin and reddish, fell straight, and showed the skull in many places. His hands, coarse and ill-joined at the wrists to arms that were far too long, were quick-fingered and seldom clean. Goupil wore boots only fit for the dust-heap, and raw silk stockings now of a russet black; ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... and prosperity, he fell finally under the weight of accumulated misfortunes. Nobody who heard him declare that "he accepted the Cincinnati Convention and its consequences," but must be struck by the illustration of what is called "the irony of fate," which nearly everything that occurred afterwards affords. His nomination, from whatever point of view we look at it, was undoubtedly a high honor. The manner in which it was received down to the Baltimore Convention was very flattering. Whether it ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... paid a small rent to the manor, to save trouble, and to satisfy his conscience of the mineral deposit. By right of discovery, lease, and user, this became entirely his, as nobody else had ever heard of it. So by the fine irony of facts it came to pass, first, that the squanderer of three fortunes united his lot with a Jewess; next, that a great "cosmopolitan" hugged a strict corner of jealous monopoly; and again, that a champion of communism ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... would not have come here without some excellent reason—perhaps he wants to pay up part of his debt to me, or maybe he has some scheme with money in it to unfold. He'll certainly try to overreach me again; but then once bitten twice shy. I'll be on my guard." Then with an attempt at irony ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... were not so beautiful!" she moaned as the first pale streaks of light in the east told her that day had finally dawned, and she crept stealthily back to bed again. Of course Jack, the wretch, was sleeping peacefully—that was the irony of fate! What did he know of suffering? But he would pay ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... greater freedom and daring. Both were handsome, dashing, fearless, swaggering, gaily-dressed boys, and many were the girls within the palace, and the town which lay around it, who cast loving eyes upon them. Awang, however, cared little for this, for, by the irony of that Fate which always directs that men should fall in love with the wrong women, and vice versa, his heart was eaten up with a fiery desire for a girl who was a jamah-jamah-an, or casual concubine of the King, and who resolutely declined ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... be—strong enough to fill this town hall to overflowing because a teacher has been wrongly—yes, and iniquitously—dismissed from the lower school." (Here there was a considerable stir, and many wondered whether Miss Lucretia was aware of the irony in her words.) "I say wrongly and iniquitously, because I have had the opportunity in Boston this winter of learning to know and love that teacher. I am not given to exaggeration, my friends, and when I tell you that I know her, that her character is as high ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... should have explained, and not insinuated so gross a reflection on a great majority of the House of Commons, who first passed this law, and have ever since opposed all attempts to repeal it; these are the gentleman whom, in sarcasm and irony, he is pleased to call the "worthy," that is, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... critical moment had, in the eyes of the discontented, turned success into failure and left behind a bitter feeling of resentment at the treacherous dexterity of the government. The men, in whose imagined interests the people had been defrauded of their coveted land, had by a singular irony of fortune been driven ignominiously from Rome and were now the victims of graver suspicions on the part of the government than on that of the Roman mob. The effect of the late senatorial diplomacy had been to create ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... replied, 'Honores mutant mores'—Honours change manners. Sir Thomas's humour was what may be called quiet, because its effect did not immediately show itself in boisterous merriment, but would undoubtedly remain long in the remembrance of those to whom it was addressed. Made with as much courtesy as irony, is it likely his keeper in the Tower would ever forget his remark? "Assure yourself I do not dislike my cheer; but whenever I do, then spare not to thrust me out of your doors." Nor did his quaint humour desert him at the scaffold: "Master Lieutenant," said he, "I pray you see me safe up; for ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... are going to release this prisoner. If your heart dictates you to deliver Seldon also, I declare to you I will not oppose it the least in the world." Aramis accompanied this remark with a smile, the irony of which effectually dispelled Baisemeaux's confusion of mind, and ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... two make four," she said with that irony for which she was feared and famous. "Now for your guess. I hope it ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... his kindred, and his children could grow up far from the barbarous laws that crushed out the spirit of the ancient clans. Along the banks of the Monongahela those Scotch and Irish settlers built their rude cabins under the guns of Fort Pitt, guarded—strange irony of fate—from a savage enemy by the very flag which flaunted oppression in their native Britain and Ireland. That they learned to love their adopted land who can question? A Virginian cavalier, accustomed to the graces and politesse of a ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... had been subjected by turns to all the varied and cruel tortures of nature. He had conquered his isolation, conquered hunger, conquered thirst, conquered cold, conquered fever, conquered labour, conquered sleep. A dismal irony was then the end of all. Gilliatt climbed to the top of the rock and gazed wildly into space. He had no clothing. He stood naked in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... was alone when he received the latter of these letters. At first, a look divided between irony and melancholy passed over his face, as he read his sister's preface and her hearsay evidence, but, as he went farther, his upper lip curled, and a sudden gleam, as of exultation in a verified prophecy, lighted his eye, shading off quickly, however, and giving ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hypothesis. Mrs. Westgate did it justice; she greeted it with a smile and pronounced it most brilliant, while, in reality, she felt that the young girl's skepticism, or her charity, or, as she had sometimes called it appropriately, her idealism, was proof against irony. Bessie, however, remained meditative all the rest of that day and well on ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... her hands and sank back slackly in his chair. "Victory!" he said, a note of inextinguishable irony in his voice. "A victory I'd have given five years of my life for last March. Yet I could go on winning them—a whole succession of them—and they could lead me to nothing ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... trouble has come," answered Ferris, with a shade of irony in his voice, "through following the advice that I have already given you, I shall endeavour, as well as I am able, to help you out ...
— From Whose Bourne • Robert Barr
... O irony too deep for mirth! O posturing apes that rant, and dare This antic attitude! O Earth, With your wild jest ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... Lance felt almost like hurling himself through the window. Then, he straightened up. His mouth compressed into a thin line. "If I must face the facts, I must. But," his tone edged off into irony, "it sure isn't easy. You'll have ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke
... homecoming he had dreamed of in the unfathomable reaches of space. Hilary thought bitterly. Five short years and he was already forgotten. Then the irony of it struck him, and ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... "doctor" I looked at him more warmly, and I saw then what was plain enough to see but for the dim light of the little place,—the thin flush on the cheek, the hopeful mind, the contrast of the will to live and the need to die, God's little irony on man, it was all there plain enough to read. The "spell" for which the little druggist was going is that which is written in letters of sorrow over the sunlit desolation of Arizona and ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... the irony of progress, the orthodox churches are gradually coming around to the one much-despised Platonic conception of the naturally Immortal Immaterial Soul—the "pagan and heathen" idea, so much at variance with the opposing doctrine of the ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... overhanging and alarming, till you chanced on those diminutive features. It was as if his growth had been terminated before it reached the expressive parts. He had an elaborate manner—a reticence, a drawl, and a chronic irony. Across half of his chest there streaked a rainbow of color; gay little ribbons of decoration, orange and ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... hard work, for which no emolument would be a fitting reward, is distilling sunshine. This new book is full of it—the sunshine of humour, the thin keen sunshine of irony, the mellow ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... trait more striking than another, it was her perfect, simple faith in what people said; irony was a mystery to her; lying, a myth,—something on a par with murder. She thought Kate meant so; and reaching out for the pretty wicker-flask that contained her daily ration of old Scotch whiskey, she dropped a little drop into a spoon, diluted it with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... schemer, but a grave and blameless presbyter of Alexandria. Arius was a disciple of the greatest critic of his time, the venerated martyr Lucian of Antioch. He had a name for learning, and his letters bear witness to his dialectical skill and mastery of subtle irony. At the outbreak of the controversy, about the year 318, we find him in charge of the church of Baucalis at Alexandria, and in high favour with his bishop, Alexander. It was no love of heathenism, but a real difficulty of the gospel which led him to form a new ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... society is the organ whose function it should be to keep us constantly in mind that, as Lassalle said, "the sword is never right," and to shudder with him at the fact that "the Lie is a European Power"? In no previous war have we struck that top note of keen irony, the closing of the Stock Exchange and not of the Church. The pagans were more logical: they closed the Temple of Peace when they drew the sword. We turn our Temples of Peace promptly into temples of war, and exhibit our parsons as the ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... Secretary of State, he had aided the Federalists in establishing the new government. When at length they were driven from power in the executive and legislative branches of the government, he was chosen for their last stronghold, the Supreme Court. By historic irony he administered the oath of office to his bitterest enemy, Thomas Jefferson; and, long after the author of the Declaration of Independence had retired to private life, the stern Chief Justice continued to announce the old Federalist ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... she turned on him. "You think you are sure of me, don't you?" she cried. And in her tone at once were defiance and irony. ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... apparent coldness of restraint; the baldness, the laconism of a spirit that abhorred loose, ungainly manners of speech. Even the frenetic and orgiastic finales of the "Harold" and "Fantastic" symphonies are tempered by an athletic steeliness and irony, are pervaded, after all, by the good dry light of the intellect. The greater portion of the "Harold" is obviously, in its coolness and neatness and lightness, the work of one who was unwilling to dishevel himself in the cause of expression, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Laumieres, who was very much touched by this story and whose nerves were rather highly strung, was drying her tears behind her open fan, suddenly the harsh and shrill voices of the fast women who were returning from the Casino, by the strange irony of fate, struck up an idiotic song which was then in vogue: "Oh! the poor, oh! the poor, oh! ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... and le Plus beau diner du monde, betrayed a singularly inventive and keenly bantering mind. The whole order of contemporary and utilitarian ideas, the whole commercialized baseness of the age were glorified in stories whose poignant irony transported ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... and opulent young Guardsmen; but what, Paul reflected with a qualm, would the kind lady say if she learned the real state of his present fortunes? He thought of the guinea that lay between him and starvation, and was amused by the irony of her proposition. Miss Winwood evidently took it for granted that he was in easy circumstances, living on the patrimony administered during his boyhood by a careless guardian. He shrank from undeceiving her. His dream ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... great deal, I remember, but everybody in the Convent was kind, and when, of my own choice, I returned to the girls at recreation, the sinister sense of dignity which by some strange irony of fate comes to all children when the Angel of Death is hovering over them, came to me also—poor, helpless innocent—and I felt a ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... trade has well been called the systematic plunder of a continent. But in the irony of fate those Africans who lent their hands to the looting got nothing but deceptive rewards, while the victims of the rapine were quite possibly better off on the American plantations than the captors who remained in the African jungle. The only ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... Critias and Critobulus; some were politicians, in the worst sense of that word, as Glaucon; and some were young men of fashion, as Euthydemus and Alcibiades. These were all alike delighted with his inimitable irony, his versatility of genius, his charming modes of conversation, his adroitness of reply; and they were compelled to confess the wisdom and justness of his opinions, and to admire the purity and goodness ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... mill? A wrinkle appears on your forehead, your eyebrows are drawn together; you lay down my letter for a moment; you attempt to penetrate this mystery by the unaided power of your imagination. Suddenly a playful expression beams upon your countenance; your mouth expresses the irony of a wise man tempered by the indulgence of a friend; you have caught a glimpse, through an opera-comique cloud, of a miller's pretty wife with powdered hair, a waist all trimmed with gay ribbons, a light and short skirt, and ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... not to burden my friends,' she added, drawing her mantle round her and speaking in a tone of irony. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... dressing in nautical style, and assuming airs foreign to me," I thought to myself, though I could not help fancying that there was some quiet irony in the old man's tone. His plan did not at all suit my notions. I was already beginning to feel very uncomfortable, bobbing and tossing about among the ships; and I expected to be completely upset, unless ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... was—let drop an oath. "Are you doing anything at all?" he asked savagely, dropping the thin veil of irony that shrouded his temper. "That is the question. ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... nothing of the sort," replied Etta. "Of course I know that all that you say about position and work is mere irony. Paul thinks there is no one in the world ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... said with an accent of bitter irony. "And what could we tell the lawyer? That Sarah Brandon has made an old man, the Count Ville-Handry, fall madly in love with her? That is no crime. That she has made him marry her? That was her right. That the count has launched forth in speculations? She opposed it. That he understood nothing ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... will fit in when it comes to the sacrifices this afternoon? I imagine the Korinos ought to feel like dying when they are to have such an unusual funeral procession?" Harry said this with a bit of irony, as he turned to George ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... subjunctive for an imperative. [294] 'Assuredly this clemency of yours will end in misery.' Respecting nae, see Zumpt, S 360; and on the transitive sense of vertere, S 145. [295] The sentence beginning with scilicet is again ironical. The sense, without the irony, is: 'Nor can it be supposed that you consider the matter indeed difficult, but that you are without fear. You are, on the contrary, full of fear, but you hesitate.' [296] Immo vero, 'oh no; on the contrary.' ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... still in the same condition," said Reine, "neither better nor worse, and, with the illness which afflicts him, the best I can hope for is that he may remain in that condition. But," continued she, with a slight inflection of irony; "doubtless it is not for the purpose of inquiring after my father's health that you have come all ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... her head and gave her merry, ringing laugh. "What delicious irony! Germany defeated by its women! When I think of your august papa, dear Gisela! That kulturistically typical, that naive yet Jovian symbol of all the arrogance and conceit, the simple creed of Kaiserism ueber alles, and will-to-rule, ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... and her sufferings were all the more intense because she had to hide them from every one, especially from her husband, and they made a marked contrast, by the irony of fate, with the pleasures and amusements that surrounded her. She was too clear-sighted and intelligent to proceed to question the Emperor. She feared light and dreaded the truth. She hesitated before the abyss ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... kill and slay! Dem Spanish and Portuguese sailors were quite right in making slaves. I would do de same myself, suppose I were in dere place.' 'He is only a liberated!' is a favourite sneer at the new arrivals; so in the West Indies, by a curious irony of fate, 'Willyfoss nigger' is a term of abuse addressed to a Congo or Guinea 'recaptive.' But here all the tribes are bitterly hostile to one another, and all combine against the white man. After ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... He had not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance, He did not thereby mean to suggest that there really are some righteous persons who have no need of repentance; rather was He seeking by the keenness of His Divine irony to pierce the hard self-satisfaction of men whose need was greater just ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... saw that argument was useless, and then, in his grief and despair, he did for a time lose his self-control. Erica had often felt sorry for the poor creatures who had to bear the brunt of her father's scathing sarcasm. But platform irony was a trifle to the torrent which bore down upon her today. When a strong man does lose his restraint upon himself, the result is terrific. Raeburn had never sufficiently cared for an adversary as to be moved beyond an anger which could be restricted and held within due bounds; he of course cared ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... life, there is, from the mere terminology of official France, high or low—daily France—a gratuitous and uncovenanted smile to be had. With this the wit of the report of French literature has not little to do. Nor is it in itself, perhaps, reasonably comic, but the slightest irony of circumstance makes it so. A very little of the mockery of conditions brings out all the latent absurdity of the "sixieme et septieme arron-dissements," in the twinkling of an eye. So is it with the mere "domicile;" with the aid of but a little of the burlesque of life, the ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... me a strange specimen of a Church of England clergyman? Well, perhaps you are right! I believe I am rather different to my brethren." He said this with sharp irony. "Nevertheless, if you inquire concerning me in the neighbourhood, I think you will find that my moral conduct has never disgraced ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... Hellenic and Xenophontine religiousness. The incalculableness of human life: God fulfils himself in many unforeseen ways. N.B.—Irony also of the situation, since Cyrus doesn't intend the Armenian to triumph over the Chaldaean in the ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... attainments had been brought forward; the settled currents of years had been suddenly changed by the eddy and whirl of the moment; but never before had any eccentricity of political caprice gone so far as to suggest the bitterest antagonist of a party for its anointed chief. It was the irony of logic, and yet it came to pass by the progress of ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... that there's truth in your irony—as I remember him, however, he was not as you all ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... too much for her; she had overrated her strength about it, and the sustenance of irony. So at last she fell into my arms, which had long been waiting for her; and there she lay with no other sound, except a gurgling ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... visited him, he received this child who had been brought up at Bartres and had not yet been seen at Catechism, almost as sternly as the Commissary of Police had done; in fact, he refused to believe her story, and with some irony told her to entreat the Lady to begin by making the briars blossom beneath her feet, which, by the way, the Lady never did. And if the Abbe ended by taking the child under his protection like a good pastor who defends his ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Which, says he, they discovered the uselessness of things in Asia so long ago they've forgot when, and then they discovered the uselessness of the discovery. They discovered gunpowder, he says, long before we did, but they use it for fireworks in the interests of irony. They've forgotten more'n we ever knew, says he, the stuck-up little cast-eyed pig. Go on! I'm disgusted. Haven't I put on curry till it give me a furred mouth and dyspepsia of the ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... last he did fall asleep it was only to dream of Bela. By the irony of fate he saw Bela as she might have been, wistful, honest, and tender; anything but the sullen, designing liar his anger had built up in the daytime. In dreams she smiled on him, and soothed his weariness ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... at a banquet, Maitre Gambetta recently toasted our ex-President "as the great commander who had sacredly obeyed and preserved his country's laws." Whether this was said in irony or ignorance, had General Grant taken with him to Paris his late Secretary of the Interior, the accomplished Z. Chandler, the pair might have furnished suggestions to Marshal MacMahon and Fourtou that would have changed the dulcet ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... brought the cup. Tristan gazes rigidly into Isolde's eyes as she approaches him bearing it. "The voyage nears its end. In brief space we shall stand," her lip curls with irony, "before King Mark! As you lead me to him, should you not deem it an apt speech to make: My lord and uncle, look at her well! A meeker woman you could never hope to win. I slew her affianced, I sent home to her his head; the wound made by his weapon she graciously ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... for the irony of Fate! Among the stud thus sold, in a fit of pique, for "an old song" was Surplice, the winner of the next year's Derby and St Leger. Lord George had actually had the great prize in his hand and had ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... best of spirits. Now we have arrived and got the party in, it remains to themselves to get better. Plenty of exercise and fresh food ought to do miracles. We have been out 160 days, and done a distance of 1561 miles, a good record. I think the irony of fate was poor Smith going under a day before we got in. I think we shall all soon be well. Turned in 10.30 p.m. Before turning in Skipper shook us by the hand with great emotion, thanking us for ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... oratorical efforts. While he remained fond of telling funny stories in private conversation, they disappeared more and more from his public discourse. He would still now and then point his argument with expressions of inimitable quaintness, and flash out rays of kindly humor and witty irony; but his general tone was serious, and rose sometimes to genuine solemnity. His masterly skill in dialectical thrust and parry, his wealth of knowledge, his power of reasoning and elevation of sentiment, disclosed in language ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... to be the musical prophet of an evangelical bourgeoisie would be felt as a most comical irony, were it only something less of a mystery. Handel was brought up in the bosom of the Lutheran Church, and was religious in his way. But it was emphatically a pagan way. Let those who doubt it turn to his setting of "All we like sheep have gone astray," in ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... Dr. Sitgreaves, that no species of knowledge was to be despised; and, consequently, he was an empiric in everything but his profession. At first, indignation at the irony of his comrade kept him silent; but, suddenly changing his purpose, he answered the applicant with a ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... what her mother said to her a dozen times a day? Now be a good little girl and have a good time. How could you be a good little girl and have a good time at the same time? The irony of it, when anybody with a grain of sense would know that the two do not go hand in hand! If she had stayed home that afternoon, she would have been good, but she would not have had a good time. As ...
— The Hickory Limb • Parker Fillmore
... all of us were glad to find our return to the mother-country was at last arriving. So far away from the offence, we need not fear attainder if we confess, some few of us, that our hearts were not whole in their welcome of the long-deferred event. It belonged to the irony that waits on all lives which are not too dull a material for fortune's jests, that we should cease to desire our home just when long patience and often-thwarted ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... old story in every biography written or unwritten. It seldom fails to touch us, either in the way of sympathetic reminiscence, or if life should have gone somewhat too hardly with a man, then in the way of irony, which is not less real and poetic than the eironeia of a Greek dramatist, for being concerned ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... mangled earth, found that they had made another small salient, jutting out from their front in a V-shaped wedge, so that it was a death-trap for the men who had to hold it. This was done again and again, and I remember one distinguished officer saying, with bitter irony, remembering how many of his men had died, "Our generals must have their little V's at any price, to justify themselves at ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... bleeding hands. The old feeling of callousness and indifference to my fate was once more upon me, and as I gazed at the crazy-looking raft which I had constructed with such a lavish expenditure of painful toil, I smiled in grim irony of myself that I should have done so much to preserve that life which now seemed of such little worth, and which promised soon to become an unendurable burden to me. A reaction from the excitement that had sustained ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... Mr Mackay, smiling at the Irishman's irony at my expense, in return no doubt for my whimsical assumption of dignity when telling him who I was. "I suppose he's come to fill the place of young Rawlings, who, you may remember, cut and run from us at Singapore on ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... satirical chronicler. His style is not less lively than severe—not subtle enough for irony, but caustic, free, and full of earnest meaning. This volume is also an admirable manual, skilfully adapted to the purpose of diffusing a general knowledge of history and the working ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
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