"Burlesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the cubic contents of anything? The inference is easy: reduce all objects to forms which can be bounded by planes and defined by straight lines and angles; make their cubic contents measurable to the eye; transform drawing into a burlesque of solid geometry; and you have, at once, attained to the highest art. The Futurist, on the other hand, maintains that we know nothing but that things are in flux. Form, solidity, weight are illusions. ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... of the whole gloomy affair,' he answered, with burlesque gravity. 'It's in the depraved nature of men to keep secrets from their wives, especially about money. To tell the truth, I'm hanged if I know why I didn't tell you before our marriage. The infamous step was taken not very long before, ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... had no sooner recover'd, and had heard of the Menaces of Caesar, but he called his Council, who (not to disgrace them, or burlesque the Government there) consisted of such notorious Villains as Newgate never transported; and, possibly, originally were such who understood neither the Laws of God or Man, and had no sort of Principles to make them worthy the Name of Men; but at the very Council-Table ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... a Bird, I. Fellow Travellers with a Bird, II. Children in Midwinter That Pretty Person Out of Town Expression Under the Early Stars The Man with Two Heads Children in Burlesque Authorship Letters The Fields The Barren Shore The Boy Illness The Young Children Fair and ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... a literary game popular in the 17th and 18th centuries—the rhymed words at the end of a line being given for others to fill up. Thus Horace Walpole being given, "brook, why, crook, I," returned the burlesque verse— "I sits with my toes in a Brook, And if any one axes me Why? I gies 'em a rap with my Crook, 'Tis ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... remaining fine, under penalty of his head, for the slightest contrary wind might capsize the ship and drown the Doge, with all the most serene noblemen, the ambassadors, and the Pope's nuncio, who is the sponsor of that burlesque wedding which the Venetians respect even to superstition. To crown the misfortune of such an accident it would make the whole of Europe laugh, and people would not fail to say that the Doge of Venice had gone at last to consummate ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... new character and a more scientific music [9],—gradually, in Attica, it gave way before the familiar and fantastic humours of the satyrs, sometimes abridged to afford greater scope to their exhibitions—sometimes contracting the contagion of their burlesque. Still, however, the reader will observe, that the tragedy, or goatsong, consisted of two parts—first, the exhibition of the mummers, and, secondly, the dithyrambic chorus, moving in a circle round the altar of Bacchus. It appears on the whole most ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... indignation; but, suddenly recovering his calmness, he turned to me with his grave smile. "I am ashamed, Marston, of thus betraying a temper which time ought to have cooled. But, after all, what is public life but a burlesque; a thing of ludicrous disappointment; a tragedy, with a farce always at hand to relieve the tedium and the tinsel; the fall of kingdoms made laughable by the copper lace of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... specimen of this kind he gives the Aeolosikon, one of Aristophanes' latest works. This description coincides with the idea of parody, which we placed foremost in our account of the Old Comedy. Platonius adduces also another instance in the Ulysses of Cratinus, a burlesque of the Odyssey. But, in order of time, no play of Cratinus could belong to the Middle Comedy; for his death is mentioned by Aristophanes in his Peace. And as to the drama of Eupolis, in which he described what we call an Utopia, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... to the light amusement of the hour, frail child of Cytherea and the Graces, what relentless fate has conducted thee to the shambles? Butterfly of the summer, why should a nation rise to break thee upon the wheel? A sense of the mockery of such an execution, of the horrible burlesque that would sacrifice to the necessities of a mighty people so slight an offering, made itself felt among the crowd. There was a low murmur of shame and indignation. The dangerous sympathy of the mob ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in these resolutions privately, are, no doubt, secret friends, needing a little more courage to face the pro-slavery feeling and sentiment which are all about them. Some one who read these resolutions suggested the idea of their being a burlesque. I repudiated the idea at once. They will commend themselves to you, dear Aunty, I am sure, as ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... present of the Ancients in Poetry, Painting, Oratory, History, Architecture, and all the noble Arts and Sciences which depend more upon Genius than Experience, we exceed them as much in Doggerel, Humour, Burlesque, and all the trivial Arts of Ridicule. We meet with more Raillery among the Moderns, but more ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Return'd the tribute of as many hands! Rude were his guests; he never made his bow To such an audience as salutes us now. He lack'd the balm of labour, female praise. Few Ladies in his time frequented plays, 35 Or came to see a youth with awkward art And shrill sharp pipe burlesque the woman's part. The very use, since so essential grown, Of painted scenes, was to his stage unknown. The air-blest castle, round whose wholesome crest, 40 The martlet, guest of summer, chose her nest— The forest walks of Arden's fair domain, Where Jaques fed his solitary vein— No pencil's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Haydon's Picture of the Mock Election in the King's Bench Prison—or rather the first of a series of pictures to illustrate the Election, the subject of the present notice being the Second, or the Chairing of the Members, which was intended for the concluding scene of the burlesque. It will, therefore, be unnecessary for us here to give any additional explanation of the real life of these paintings, except so far as may be necessary to the explanation ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... the face. Vice has never before been so harshly arraigned. This art makes of Hogarth a pleasing preacher, so drastic is it, so deliberately searching in its insults. And never the faintest exaggeration or burlesque. These brigands and cut-throats, pimps and pickpurses are set before us without bravado, without the genteel glaze of the timid painter, without an attempt to call a prostitute a cocotte. Indeed, persons are called by their true names in these hasty sketches of Lautrec's, and so clearly sounded ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... chance have dreamed of that stately honor. His ambitions did not lie in the direction of mental achievement. It is true that now and then, on Friday at school, he read a composition, one of which—a personal burlesque on certain older boys—came near resulting in bodily damage. But any literary ambition he may have had in those days was a fleeting thing. His permanent dream was to be a pirate, or a pilot, or a bandit, or a trapper-scout; something gorgeous and active, where his word—his nod, even—constituted ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Ridiculousness. — N. ridiculousness &c. adj.; comicality, oddity &c. adj.; extravagance, drollery. farce, comedy; burlesque &c. (ridicule) 856; buffoonery &c. (fun) 840; frippery; doggerel verses; absurdity &c. 497; bombast &c. (unmeaning) 517; anticlimax, bathos; eccentricity, monstrosity &c. (unconformity) 83; laughingstock &c. 857. V. be ridiculous &c. adj.; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... early escapade is perhaps to be connected what seems to have been one of Fielding's earliest literary efforts. This is a modernisation in burlesque octosyllabic verse of part of Juvenal's sixth satire. In the "Preface" to the later published Miscellanies, it is said to have been "originally sketched out before he was Twenty," and to have constituted ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... few days, or even hours. While a few gained a competence, many gained only a bare subsistence; thousands lost their health, and not a few their lives. It was a strange play that men enacted there, embracing all the confusion, glitter, rapid change of scene, burlesque, and comedy of a pantomime, with many a dash of darkest tragedy intermingled. Tents were pitched in all directions, houses were hastily run up, restaurants of all kinds were opened, boats were turned ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... its way to France. The Marquis de Chastellux, an author himself, took an especial interest in American literature. He wrote to congratulate Trumbull upon his excellent poem, and took the opportunity to lay down "the conditions prescribed for burlesque poetry." "These, Sir, you have happily seized and perfectly complied with.... I believe that you have rifled every flower which that kind of poetry could offer.... Nor do I hesitate to assure you that I prefer it to every work of the kind,—even to Hudibras." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... was afraid of her dreams: she would recount them at length to Christophe; for hours she would try to recollect some detail that she had forgotten; she never spared him one; absurdities piled one on the other, strange marriages, deaths, dressmakers' prices, burlesque, and sometimes, obscene things. He had to listen to her and give her his advice. Often she would be for a whole day under the obsession of her inept fancies. She would find life ill-ordered, she would see things and people rawly and overwhelm Christophe with her jeremiads; and it seemed ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... have thought either that Marbodius, or even Virgil, could have known the Etruscan tombs of Chiusi and Corneto, where, in fact, there are horrible and burlesque devils closely resembling those of Orcagna. Nevertheless, the authenticity of the "Descent of Marbodius into Hell" is indisputable. M. du Clos des Lunes has firmly established it. To doubt it would be ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... imagine of very little to himself—that is to say if he knows himself, personally, as well as I have the honor of knowing him. The first misrepresentation is contained in this sentence:—'This letter is a keen burlesque on the Aristotelian or Baconian methods of ascertaining Truth, both of which the writer ridicules and despises, and pours forth his rhapsodical ecstasies in a glorification of the third mode—the noble art of guessing.' What I really say is this:—That there is no absolute certainty ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... in the crowded house. The ruffling of the face of the sea before a storm. The Sisters Sigsbee, Coon Delineators and Unrivalled Burlesque Artists, have finished their dance, smiled, blown kisses, skipped off, skipped on again, smiled, blown more kisses, and disappeared. A long chord from the orchestra. A chord that is almost a wail. A ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... my hands trembled. In what burlesque comedy is there a jealous lover so stupid as to inquire what has become of a cup? Why seek to discover whether Smith and Madame Pierson had drunk from the same cup? ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Dick, 'we are a united family—we are, we are, we are!'—a vulgar refrain he had picked up at one of the burlesque theatres he was only too fond ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... who is put forward as a substitute for argument on this question, and whose sole merits consisted in his having a taste for nature and his being a respectable citizen, the trumping him up into an authority and a kind of saint is a burlesque. He was a writer of conventionalities; who, having comfortably feathered his nest, as he thought, both in this world and in the world to come, concluded he had nothing more to do than to amuse himself by putting worms on a hook, and fish into his stomach, and so go to heaven, chuckling and singing ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... issues had made the Republican party, by 1897, the party of organized business. For twelve years the alliance had grown steadily closer. Marcus A. Hanna was its spokesman. The burlesque of his sincere and kindly face, drawn by a caricaturist, Davenport, for Eastern papers, created for the popular eye the type of commercialized magnate, but it did him great injustice. Self-respecting and direct, he believed it to be the first ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... consequently, of inferior manners, whereas the grave romance sets the highest before us: lastly, in its sentiments and diction; by preserving the ludicrous instead of the sublime. In the diction, I think, burlesque itself may be sometimes admitted; of which many instances will occur in this work, as in the description of the battles, and some other places, not necessary to be pointed out to the classical reader, for whose entertainment those parodies or ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... bring reproach home to you; let that, ladies, lie between yourselves and conscience. I only draw your attention to the facts; which have been sufficiently patent to the world, whatever Lord Hartledon may think. And now I have said my say, and leave you; but I declare that were I performing this burlesque of a marriage, as that young clergyman is about to do, I should feel my prayers for the divine blessing to attend it ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... burned, is quite equal to stone. In a wooden structure one may play with his fancy in the way of color, minding in the operation, that he does not play the mountebank, and like the clown in the circus, make his tattooed tenement the derision of men of correct taste, as the other does his burlesque visage the ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... making it a club of the lowest species. Here, in advance, we contemplate the ways of the future revolutionary inquisition. They welcome burlesque denunciations; enter into petty police investigations; weigh the tittle-tattle of porters and the gossip of servant-girls; devote an all-night session to the secrets of a drunkard.[2218] They enter on their official report and without any disapproval, the petition ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the West Somerset on Wednesday! Were you in at the death of that big fox at Coulson's Corner? Ought the new vintages of Madeira to be bottled direct or sent round the Cape like the old ones? Capital burlesque at the Gaiety, but very slow at the Lyceum. Who will go to the Duchess of Dorsetshire's dance on the twentieth:—and so forth for ever. Their own petty round of selfish pleasures from week's end to week's end—no thought of anybody ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... there entered a huntsman with a fox and a cat bound at the end of a staff. He was followed by nine or ten couple of hounds, who hunted the fox and the cat to the glowing horns, and killed them beneath the fire. After dinner, the Constable Marshal called a burlesque Court, and began the Revels, with the help of the Lord of Misrule. At seven o'clock in the morning of St. John's Day, December the 27th (which was a Saturday in 1561) the Lord of Misrule was afoot with power to summon men to breakfast with him ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... violent convulsions on the part of young women, fond to excess of music, which have no other origin than the prayer of the Hebrews in the third act, with its superb change of key.'" Thus by a stroke of genius, a scene which first impressed the audience as a piece of theatrical burlesque, was raised to sublimity by the solemn music ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... from a Princess to a Shop-Lifter and was assigned to Cissy St. Vitus, late of a Burlesque Bunch known ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... grow rough. He thought of Paris, of that life which, she said, would civilize him; he tried in vain to form an image of the cafes and little carriages, the bare-necked women drinking champagne. He recalled a burlesque show he had once seen in Stenton, called "The French Widows"; the revealed amplitude of the "widows" had been clad in vivid, stained pink tights; the scene in which they disported with a comic Irishman, a lugubrious Jew, was set with gilded palms, a saloon bar on ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 1875.—We dined at the Embassy for the Jour de l'an. While there rain fell and the streets were covered with verglas. I walked with great difficulty to Thiers's at the Hotel Bagration, three doors off, where the scene was burlesque. Not a carriage could move; not a horse could stand; and the company walked home with napkins tied round their feet. [But Mrs. Reeve, who was at the dinner, wrote: Our fiacre managed to crawl home with Hopie and me. Henry, who had gone to the ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... nothing but a deal of learned dust, raised by collecting and removing a great deal of learned rubbish, could have prevented our laborious critics from seeing through, lies on the face of it (to say nothing of the burlesque air which is scarcely disguised throughout) in the repetition of a few obsolete words, and in the mis-spelling ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... itself whether discipline be not the final cause of the universe, and whether Nature outwardly exists. The frivolous make themselves merry with the ideal theory as if its consequences were burlesque, as if it affected the stability of Nature. It surely does not. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... highest, is wanting in their pictures. More: in their faithful reproduction of everything, even the ugly, and especially the ugly, they end by exaggerating even that, making defects into deformities and portraits into caricatures; they calumniate the national type; they give a burlesque and graceless aspect to the human countenance. In order to have the proper background for such figures, they are constrained to choose trivial subjects: hence the great number of pictures representing beer-shops, and drinkers with grotesque, stupid faces, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... As is the temper of his spirit, so is, MUST be, the temper of his Art product.* It is hard to believe, almost impossible to believe, that 'Titus Andronicus' could have been written by Shakespeare, the external testimony to the authorship, notwithstanding. Even if he had written it as a burlesque of such a play as Marlow's 'Jew of Malta', he could not have avoided some revelation of that sense of moral proportion which is omnipresent in his Plays. But I can find no Shakespeare in 'Titus Andronicus'. ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... apprenticeship at it, during which most of my labour was in the field of comedy—"walking gentleman," burlesque, and low comedy parts—the while my soul was yearning for high tragedy. I did my best with all that I was cast for, however, and the unpleasant experience did me a world of good. Had I followed my own bent, I would have been, long ago, a ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... fanciful to-day, my pet," he said at last. "You've been tiring yourself too much. You must rest. You'd better not go to the Brilliant Theatre to-night—it's only a burlesque, and is sure to be vulgar and noisy. We'll stop at home and spend a quiet evening ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... began to be known in the neighbourhood as a maker of rhymes. The first of my poetic offspring that saw the light was a burlesque lamentation on a quarrel between two reverend Calvinists, both of them dramatis personae in my "Holy Fair". I had a notion myself that the piece had some merit; but, to prevent the worst, I gave a copy of it to a friend, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... long letter without a full stop, which is as full of substance as one of his essays. His technique is so incredibly fine, he is such a Paganini of prose, that he can invent and reverse an idea of pyramidal wit, as in this burlesque of a singer: 'The shake, which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite through the composition; so that the time, to a common air or ballad, keeps double motion, like the earth—running the primary ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... carriage, quarrelled rhythmically with one another; the mendicants, lying everywhere in wait for charity, murmured a modulated appeal; if you heard shouts or yells afar off they died upon your ear in a strain of melody at the moment when they were lifted highest. I am aware of seeming to burlesque the operatic fact which every one must have noticed in Naples; and I will not say that the neglected or affronted babe, or the trodden dog, is as tuneful as the midnight cat there, but only that they approach ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... [27] A burlesque on an association of students known as the Milicia Angelica, organized by the Dominicans to strengthen their hold on the people. The name used is significant, "carbineers" being the local revenue officers, notorious in their later days for ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... present day. Here, as so often before, Germany affords us a warning example of the dangers consequent upon the recognition of class distinctions. The comparatively harmless practice of Deposition—a burlesque student-initiation which sprang up in the sixteenth century and obtained a quasi sanction from no less a person than Luther—degenerated in the seventeenth century into Pennalisimus. Newly-matriculated students, called Pennalists (the modern term is Fuechse), were maltreated by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... wonderful, now charming improvisations quickened the brains and made supple the legs of our performers. He led them as he pleased and made them pass, according to his fancy, from the droll to the severe, from the burlesque to the solemn, from the graceful to the passionate. We improvised costumes in order to play successively several roles. As soon as the artist saw them appear, he adapted his theme and his accent in a marvellous manner to their respective characters. This went on for ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the same style as their mother, had an unpleasant lisp, and yet they always took part in every play and were always doing something for charity—acting, reciting, singing. They were very serious and never smiled, and even in burlesque operettas they acted without gaiety and with a businesslike air, as though they ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... no restraint in consequence of his marriage. He is adored by a certain class of burlesque actresses. He flatters them by adoring himself. He owns a small house in Belgravia, but he frequently lives elsewhere. No pigeon-shooting matches, and few poker parties, amongst a certain set, are complete without him. Having benefited only to a limited extent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... history. But not only his coloring and drawing rendered him unequal to the task; the genius that had entered so feelingly into the calamities and crimes of familiar life deserted him in a walk that called for dignity and grace. The burlesque turn of his mind mixt itself with the most serious subjects. In his "Danae," the old nurse tries a coin of the golden shower with her teeth to see if it is true gold; in the "Pool of Bethesda," a servant of a rich ulcerated lady beats back a poor man that sought the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... Too much modulation produces an unpleasant effect of artificiality, like a mature matron trying to be kittenish. It is a short step between true expression and unintentional burlesque. Scrutinize your own tones. Take a single expression like "Oh, no!" or "Oh, I see," or "Indeed," and by patient self-examination see how many shades of meaning may be expressed by inflection. This sort of common-sense practise will ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... Madame Montoni to stop. If any thing could have made Emily smile in these moments, it would have been this speech of her aunt, delivered in a voice very little below a scream, and with a vehemence of gesticulation and of countenance, that turned the whole into burlesque. Emily saw, that her misfortunes did not admit of real consolation, and, contemning the commonplace terms of superficial comfort, she was silent; while Madame Montoni, jealous of her own consequence, mistook this for the silence of indifference, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... unknown origin, probably coined in burlesque imitation of scholastic Latin, as "hocus-pocus" or "panjandrum"), originally a term meaning whim, fancy or ridiculous idea; later applied to a pun or play upon words, and thus, in its usual sense, to a particular form of riddle in which the answer depends on a pun. In a transferred sense ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... another of these landholders you may find our old friend, the truck system, in full operation. Men live there, year in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in supplies. The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper they will fall in debt - a burlesque injustice in a new country, where labour should be precious, and one of those typical instances which explains the prevailing discontent and the ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with such wild bounds of delight that I had to call hold, lest his great paws play havoc with my fine Paris clothes that I had donned in mademoiselle's honor. And to quiet him I said in a high, small voice, in palpable burlesque of mademoiselle: ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... and then, as civilization advanced, in the legislatures and the courts. But the corruption even of these methods was far surpassed when the era of consolidation came, and the necessity for statutes and verdicts and decisions became more stringent. Then we had such a burlesque of—" ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... merriment, and to whom the child's poverty and friendless position made as powerful an appeal as her budding beauty and her modesty. It was a very tender heart that beat in the pain-racked, paralysed body of the "father of French burlesque"; and within a few days of first setting eyes on his "little Indian girl," as he called her, he asked her to marry him. "It is a sorry offer to make you, my dear child," he said, "but it is either ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... of Serapsis, Anubis and Isis, he had not the faintest odor of myth about him; absolutely bourgeois, he lacked even that atmosphere of burlesque that surrounded Claud; he was not even vicious. But he was a soldier, a brave one; and if, with the acquired economy of a subaltern who has been obliged to live on his pay, he kept his purse-strings tight, they were ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... that Hans Breitmann is an embodied satire on everything German, has found very few supporters, and it is with the greatest gratification that he has learned that educated and intelligent Germans regard Hans as a jocose burlesque of a type which is every day becoming rarer. And if Teutonic philosophy and sentiment, beer, music, and romance, have been made the medium for what many reviewers have kindly declared to be laughter-moving, let the reader ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... subject and the style, making gods speak like common men and common men like gods. While parody (q.v.), also based on imitation, relies for its effect more on the close following of the style of its counterpart, burlesque depends on broader and coarser effects. Burlesque may be applied to any form of art, and unconsciously, no doubt, may be found even in architecture. In the graphic arts it takes the form better known as "caricature" (q.v.). Its particular sphere is, however, in literature, and especially ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... on, he removed his hat and bowed with an attempt at stateliness which held a pathos of burlesque. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... the Viceroy; with Jimmy Finnigan in the close proximity of professional jealousy, advertising five complete novelties for the same evening. It made a cheerful note which appealed to them both; it was a pictorial combination, Hilda and Jimmy Finnigan and the Viceroy, there was something of gay burlesque in the metropolitan posters against the crumbling plaster of the outer mosque wall where Mussulmans left their shoes. Talking of Hilda they smiled; it was a way her friends had, a testimony to the difference of her. ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... the difficulties of interpreting aright my clumsy, circumlocutory phrases in attempting to describe shawls, gowns, and bonnets; and taught me the exact millinery language which I ought to have made use of with an arch expression of triumph and a burlesque earnestness of manner, that always enchanted me. At that time, every word she uttered, no matter how frivolous, was the sweetest of all music to my ears. It was only by the stern test of after-events that I learnt ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... then Paris awakes, rubs its eyes, says: "How stupid I am!" and bursts out laughing in the face of the human race. What a marvel is such a city! it is a strange thing that this grandioseness and this burlesque should be amicable neighbors, that all this majesty should not be thrown into disorder by all this parody, and that the same mouth can to-day blow into the trump of the Judgment Day, and to-morrow into the reed-flute! Paris has a sovereign joviality. Its gayety ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... constant attention to points of etiquette cannot be too earnestly emphasized. The long lecture of instruction to the little Ruggles', preparatory to their visit to the Birds, is a comical—if burlesque—illustration of the emergency that sometimes faces some people, that of suddenly preparing to "behave themselves" on a great occasion. Although the little Ruggles' were fired with ambition to do themselves credit, their crude preparation was not equal ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... pellucid mountain-rill pours its refreshing waters. Among the remembrances of former days, is the effigy of a guardian 'lion,' (which, under the name of a 'bear,' has been noted by an author whom we have quoted;) the melancholy quadruped is now considerably "used up," and excites a laugh at the burlesque on the monarch of the forest, which his attenuated figure and shrivelled hide present. Plas-Newydd is unquestionably a delightful residence; and its adjacent pleasure grounds and gardens afford most inviting facilities for those who love to make a ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... "epitaphs," "odes," and "stanzas." [14] Coleridge soon came to recognise the weakness of his juvenile verses, and parodied himself—and incidentally Bowles—in three sonnets printed at the end of Chapter I. of the "Biographia Literaria," designed to burlesque his own besetting sins, a "doleful egotism," an affected simplicity, and the use of "elaborate and swelling language and imagery." He never attained much success in the use of the sonnet form. A series of twelve sonnets in his first collection ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... that of earnest and submissive contemplation, declares itself in prayers, hymns, and "the dim religious light" of cathedrals. The second mood, that of playful and erratic fancy, is conspicuous in the buffoonery of Miracle Plays, in Marchen, these burlesque popular tales about our Lord and the Apostles, and in the hideous and grotesque sculptures on sacred edifices. The two moods are present, and in conflict, through the whole religious history of the human race. ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... which he meant to finish at one time or another; yet, at the bottom of his heart, he knew that he would never finish it. But, then, deuce take posterity! for to have written the best comedy, the best farce, and the best burlesque as well, that England had ever known, was a very prodigal wiping-out of every obligation toward posterity. Boys thought a deal about posterity, as he remembered; but a sensible man would bear in mind that ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... moved. To try them in a court of justice (should anything go wrong), would be simply ridiculous—a farce. And if every one of our deeds is fixed, what better are men than mere automata? To try them, to judge them, and to award praise and blame for what was done, would be to burlesque justice. The judgment day, therefore, and foreordination of all things cannot stand in the same category. If we hold by the one we must give up the other. God foreknows all things, but foreordains only what He himself brings to pass. Man will be judged, condemned, or rewarded, according ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... and subtle are the toils of this hunter, that on the very next night after that, I was again entrapped, where no vestige of a spring could have been apprehended by the timidest. It was a burlesque that I saw performed; an uncompromising burlesque, where everybody concerned, but especially the ladies, carried on at a very considerable rate indeed. Most prominent and active among the corps of performers was what I took ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... whose name has ever before been associated with charity; I mean the charity that has no relation to advertisement! You are silent! You say"—glancing over the unfinished article—"that 'this was a capricious burlesque of true philanthropy.' I reply that it served its purpose—of proclaiming my arrival in London and of clearly demonstrating the purpose of my coming! You ask who are my accomplices! I answer—they are as the sands of the desert! You ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... took Dorry's outstretched hand with nonsensical grace, and so dancing to the fireplace together, in a sort of burlesque minuet, they brought back with them two little mahogany and hair-cloth foot-benches, ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... Miss Swan saying, "Must you go, Mr. Berry? So soon!" and saw her giving the student her hand, with a bow of burlesque desolation. ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... limits. "As a matter of fact," he writes, "we do not occupy the territory, and cannot give foreigners the necessary protection, because Mataafa and his people can at any moment forcibly interrupt me in my jurisdiction." Yet in the eyes of Anglo-Saxons the severity of his code appeared burlesque. I give but three of its provisions. The crime of inciting German troops "by any means, as, for instance, informing them of proclamations by the enemy," was punishable with death; that of "publishing or secretly distributing anything, whether ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... humorist of irresistible high spirits and rare spontaneity and freshness. By this rollicking collection of 'Nonsense Novels,' in tabloid form, he not only confirms the excellent impression of his earlier work, but establishes his reputation as a master of the art of literary burlesque. The whole collection is a sheer delight, and places its author in the front ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... would desire to ridicule him? would he not presently acquire the name of the mad parson, and be thought by all men worthy of Bedlam? or would he not be treated as the Romans treated their Aretalogi,[Footnote: A set of beggarly philosophers who diverted great men at their table with burlesque discourses on virtue.] and considered in the light of a buffoon? But why should I mention those places of hurry and worldly pursuit? What attention do we engage even in the pulpit? Here, if a sermon be prolonged a little ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... hillside, again and again; and so completely absorbed and lulled was I by the gradual obsession of being in the midst of a northern scene, that the sound caused not the slightest excitement, even internally and mentally. But the sympathetic spirit who was directing this geographic burlesque overplayed, and followed the soft curve of audible wistfulness with an actual bluebird which looped across the open space in front. The spell was broken for a moment, and my subconscious autocrat thrust into realization the instantaneous report—apparent bluebird call is the note ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... and facial expression, he was able to imitate any peculiarities which were to be observed either in Dons or Undergraduates, in Presidents or Scouts. He could sit down at his piano, and give you - after the manner of Theodore Hook, or John Parry - a burlesque opera; singing high up in his head for the prima donna, and going down to his boots for the basso profondo of the great Lablache. He could also draw corks, saw wood, do a ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... virgin was of the highest interest. It was reserved for a countryman of Joan of Arc's (Du Bellay) to invent a legend to disprove the fact; and to the everlasting shame of French literature, Voltaire adopted the lying calumny in his licentious burlesque-heroic poem, La ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... always sick; a lady of honour having her appearance will make a contrast with her office. As to the other, she still has beauty and elegance; but do you imagine, Sire, that the Court of Bavaria and the Court of France have forgotten, in so short a time, the pleasant and burlesque name of the ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... are the subjects of the next two cuts. In the former, Death has assumed the mitre and the crosier of his victim, and drags him off with such an expression of fun and burlesque pomp as we sometimes see in the face of a mischievous boy who mocks his betters. In the companion group his look is that of a demon; and with his head fantastically dressed, he drags the Abbess off by the scapulary which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... Robert Howard. The handbill excited some amusement, by reason of its novelty, for in itself it was but a simple and useful intimation. In ridicule of this proceeding, Bayes, the hero of the Duke of Buckingham's burlesque, "The Rehearsal," is made to say: "I have printed above a hundred sheets of paper to insinuate ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... lady," said he, "I know it is an age of burlesque. But let us spare the sacraments, and the ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... was a Saracen maiden, Brunette, statuesque, The reverse of grotesque; Her pa was a bagman at Aden, Her mother she played in burlesque. ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... others held the same opinion; They took it up when my days grew more mellow, And other minds acknowledged my dominion: Now my sere Fancy "falls into the yellow Leaf,"[232] and Imagination droops her pinion, And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk Turns what was once romantic to burlesque. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... appear, however, to belong to a later date; and the quaint stanza, afterwards employed in a modified form with such effect by Fergusson and Burns, is that used by Alexander Scot in The Justing at the Drum, and in other burlesque pieces of the early or middle period of ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... of, that band of desperate men, who were in a conspiracy to make Kansas a slave State at whatever cost of blood, of fraud, or violence. Here the Territorial Legislature met to enact their bloody code of laws, and here the Territorial Judges held their courts, which were a burlesque on the very name of a civilized and Christian jurisprudence; and here, also, were kept the treason prisoners, while atrocious murderers were not molested, because they were "sound on the ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... my impressions I finally got upstairs again to bed. It was four o'clock in the morning. I laughed all the way up—at the grotesque banisters, the droll physiognomy of the staircase window, the burlesque grouping of the furniture, and the memory of that outrageous footstool in the room below; but nothing more happened to alarm or disturb me, and I woke late in the morning after a dreamless sleep, none the worse for my experiment except for ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... he said, with burlesque gravity, turning toward the sick man. "Is this the girl you love? They haven't succeeded in changing her, have they? Then give her your hand, stupid! What are you doing there, staring at ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... flashed behind the face-plate. He clicked his heels and bowed stiffly from the waist, in a fine burlesque of an ancient courtier. He stalked past Hoskins and punched the button ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... guard would prop up the lid of his imperial and get inside for shelter. On one occasion when the mail arrived at Liverpool the guard was found imprisoned in his letter-box. The lid had fallen and fastened in the male travesty of "Ginevra." Fortunately for him it was a burlesque and not a tragedy. Bags thrown to the guards at wayside stations not unfrequently got under the wheels of the train and the contents were cut to pieces. On one occasion, on the Grand Junction, an ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... This burlesque poem is preserved in the Bannatyne MSS. It is in the same strain with the verses concerning the Gyre Carline (Vol. II.) As the mention of Bettokis Bowr occurs in both pieces, and as the scene of both ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... serious blow when a London alderman entered the circle clothed in a suit of the same tartan. The portly figure and civic dignity of Sir William Curtis gave to the costume too much the appearance of a burlesque to pass unnoticed either by the Sovereign or his loyal admirers, and it was some time before they recovered their gravity. On the 24th, the magistrates of "the gude town" entertained the King with a banquet in the Parliament House, in the course of which his Majesty gave ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... like any nursery maid and her young man, while her groom stood at the brougham door in the bridle-path beyond. He had broken off a sprig of the box one day and given it to her, and she had kissed it foolishly, and laughed, and hidden it in the folds of her riding-skirt, in burlesque fear lest the guards should arrest them for breaking the ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... the thing that pleased me most was a gay little piece of burlesque by Mr. ARTHUR CHESNEY as the red-haired shop assistant who was not a pacifist. Mr. CHARLES GLENNEY so thoroughly enjoyed the robustious sea-captain that we had to enjoy it too—a sound notion of entertainment, that. Mr. SEBASTIAN SMITH played chief rabbit with considerable skill and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... one day and talked about the Grand National for half an hour by the clock. Well, she asked me to come again next day, and I went, and told her all about the last burlesque and—and so on, you know. And then I asked her to ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... and did not tire of gazing at the mighty beast. I was struck by the strange caprice with which the great Being we call Nature goes to work, or, more correctly, by the contrast between the human point of view and Nature's mode of operations. To us, the elephant's trunk was burlesque, its walk risibly clumsy; the eagle and the kite seemed to us, as they sat, to have a severe appearance and a haughty glance; the apes, picking lice from one another and eating the vermin, were, to our eyes, contemptible and ridiculous at the same time; but Nature took everything equally ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... made between church and opera-house in the adaptation of attire. Very estimable, and, we trust, very religious young women sometimes enter the house of God in a costume which makes their utterance of the words of the litany and the acts of prostrate devotion in the service seem almost burlesque. When a brisk little creature comes into a pew with hair frizzed till it stands on end in a most startling manner, rattling strings of beads and bits of tinsel, mounting over all some pert little hat with a red or green feather standing saucily upright in front, she may look exceedingly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... In writing of his old associates satirically, he was not indulging in any rage of anger, but he would hardly have felt the impulse to give his pen such liberty unless grievances had still rankled in his memory. The scene he sets forth is one of burlesque, done like fiction. "On ascending the steps you would discern," he says, "a row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... barbarously murdered in the tragedy. This was, indeed, novelty to me. It was a peep into another planet. I gazed and listened with intense curiosity and enjoyment. They had a thousand odd stories and jokes about the events of the day, and burlesque descriptions and mimickings of the spectators who had been admiring them. Their conversation was full of allusions to their adventures at different places, where they had exhibited; the characters they had met with in different ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... with one of our daily newspapers gave the following amusing burlesque on the trials ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... had not a sufficient force to subdue them; and, as De Monts was obliged to return to France, De Poutrincourt and his companions established themselves again at Port Royal. Here, to while away the long winter, the gay adventurers established a burlesque court, which they christened "L'Ordre de Bon Temps"; and of the merry realm each of the fifteen principal persons of the colony became supreme ruler in turn. As the Grand Master's sway lasted but a day, each one, as he assumed that august position, prided ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... owing to the indisposition of the young lady, Miss Beatrice Franklin and her father are unable to appear to-night. I have pleasure in announcing an extra turn, namely the Sisters De Vere in their wonderful burlesque act." ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... good in them be speedily extinguished but the evil would be intensified beyond all calculation. And I think such effects are reckoned upon, and expected, by the advocates of eternal torment. What a burlesque that seems to be on the beneficent purpose of God. Far easier is it to believe that a state of education and discipline is ordained, whereby the good that God Himself has created will be ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... mishaps of the gentle, noble-minded, kind-hearted old Don, as well as the delusions, simplicity, and selfishness of the devoted squire, will never lose their power to amuse. It may be extravagant, but it is not a burlesque. The strong character painting, the ideas, situations, and language, clothed in such simplicity that at times it becomes almost solemn, give it a grandeur that no other book, considered as a romance, possesses. The old ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... had heard so much, of this horrid society I did not feel positive it was certain that its alleged blood rites were fictitious. Of one thing I am sure—that the dreadful picture is no joke, and was not meant for a burlesque, though it might possibly be expected to perform the office of a scarecrow. It cannot be doubted that there are oath-bound secret societies that are regarded by the Spaniards as fanatical, superstitious, murderous and ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... in a Bill for reforming us. You can't make us go by decimals. You can't increase our consumption by lowering our taxation. I wish you had gone back to some Board." This she said looking up into his face with an anxiety which was half real and half burlesque. ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... one leg over the other with the toe of the carpet slipper touching the walk, in the manner of a burlesque actor, took the cigarette out of his mouth with a little flourish, ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... abnormal shapes as she struggled to cry out. "Hamoud!" she screamed at last, raising her arms as high as she could, and trying to tear her gaze away from that spectacle. The Arab's pose, as he bent over his enemy, was a frightful burlesque of solicitude. How many times had she not seen him bending thus over David, maybe to smooth his pillow? And now, against the colonnade of gloomy trees, there was something sacrificial in that tableau—the blue ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... was Eddie Brandes; his first fortune of three dollars was amassed at craps; he became a hanger-on in ward politics, at race-tracks, stable, club, squared ring, vaudeville, burlesque. Long Acre attracted him—but always the gambling end of ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... child! What a silly you were not to come! How's your headache?... I do wish your father would have those stairs altered. It's like the ascent of Mount Parnassus." Buckstone was presenting a burlesque of that name just then, and her ladyship may have had it running in ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... lines—giving an admirable burlesque imitation of herself, and her own gestures, and her own singing in the part she was ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... The principal burlesque epic in Greek, the Bactrachomyomachia, or Battle of Frogs and Mice, is attributed to Homer, but only some 300 lines of this work remain, showing what it ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... agriculturist of the Seine-et-Marne, whom I could name, and who for perhaps the first time in his life takes an interest in the sunset; in those of the young middle-class Parisian who had seemed incapable of speech save in terms of unbelief and burlesque; in those of the artist who utters his emotion in poetry and lifts it up to the heights of stoical philosophy. Through all unlikenesses, in the hearts of all—peasant, citizen, soldier, German schoolmaster—one prevailing thought is revealed; the living man, passing ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... Barbee together dragged Royce away, letting Blenham lie there. Both men were naked to their waists, their shirts and undershirts in rags and strips hanging grotesquely about their hips; Royce looked like some hideously painted burlesque of a ballet-dancer in a comic skirt. Only there was nothing of burlesque or comedy in ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... gallantry, it was hoped I would do my utmost to maintain it; after which I was dismissed. I soon found that my exploit had placed me upon quite a different footing in the ship from that which I had occupied before. The men treated me with real respect, instead of the good-humoured burlesque thereof which they had accorded me hitherto; and my fellow-mids at once received me into the berth upon a footing of perfect equality with themselves, each one striving to do me some little kindness or show me some little attention, in place of playing off disagreeable practical ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... as a worthy astronomer, received by all the world, and the envied husband of Viviette, the present imputation was humiliating. The glorious light of this tender and refined passion seemed to have become debased to burlesque hues by pure accident, and his aesthetic no less than his ethic taste was offended by such an anti-climax. He who had soared amid the remotest grandeurs of nature had been taken to task on a rudimentary question of morals, which had never been a question with him at all. This ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... suited to dancing? That they should dance was the acme of tragedy. Stockings fell down in creases about the ankles. Women commenced to jig their Boche babies in their arms; consumptive men and ancients waved their sauce-pans and grotesque bundles of umbrellas. The sight was damnable. It was a burlesque. It pierced the heart. What right had the Boche to leave these people so comic after he had squeezed the life-blood out ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... his angular shoulders by suspenders of alarming frailty. His legs were lost in gum boots, also loose and cavernous, and his entire costume looked relaxed and flapping, so that he gave the impression of being able to shake himself out of his raiment, and to rise like a burlesque Aphrodite. His face was overgrown with a grizzled tangle that looked as though it had been trimmed with button-hole scissors, while above the brush heap grandly ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... next Saturday afternoon, and we juniors usually help out in the scheme, you see. We try to arrange a part of it for you and help you out in some of the details. The whole thing is 'horse play,' just a sort of burlesque, and the more ridiculous you ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... weepers (praefiicae), paid for uttering cries, tearing their hair, singing notes of lamentation, extolling the dead man, mimicking despair, "and teaching the chambermaids how to best express their grief, since the funeral must not pass without weeping and wailing." All this makes up a melancholy but burlesque din, which attracts the crowd and swells the procession, to the great honor of the defunct. Afterward come the magistrates, the decurions in mourning robes, the bier ornamented with ivory. The duumvir Lucius Labeo (he is the person whom they are burying) ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... court did not sit until July of the next year, and their decision is not known. Col. Butler died Sept. 7, 1805. Out of the arrest and persecution of this sturdy veteran, Washington Irving (Knickerbocker) has worked up a fine piece of burlesque, in which Gen. Wilkinson's character is inimitably delineated in that of the vain ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... But Bonaparte undertook the task; and, as if by the aid of a magic rod, the ancient order of things was restored in the twinkling of an eye. The distinctions of rank—orders—titles, the noblesse—decorations—all the baubles of vanity—in short, all the burlesque tattooing which the vulgar regard as an indispensable attribute of royalty, reappeared in an instant. The question no longer regarded the form of government, but the individual who should be placed at its head. By restoring the ancient order of things, the Republicans had themselves ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... would give him the appearance of a figure in a hairdresser's window, if his countenance possessed the thought which is communicated to those waxen caricatures of the human face divine. He is a militia-officer, and the most amusing person in the House. Can anything be more exquisitely absurd than the burlesque grandeur of his air, as he strides up to the lobby, his eyes rolling like those of a Turk's head in a cheap Dutch clock? He never appears without that bundle of dirty papers which he carries under his left arm, and which are generally supposed to be the miscellaneous estimates for ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... our sensibilities; it seemed to us that he who first invented this parody [Footnote: Parody: a burlesque or mimicking of something, usually written.] upon one of the most touching incidents in nature must have been a man without a heart. A somewhat burlesque circumstance occurred one day to modify the indignation with which this ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... nor Ben-Zayb, nor Padre Irene, nor Padre Camorra knew it, so they begged for the story, some in jest and others from genuine curiosity. The priest, adopting the tone of burlesque with which some had made their request, began like an old tutor relating a ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... "Salmagundi," Irving, in connection with his brother Peter, projected the work that was to make him famous. At first nothing more was intended than a satire upon the "Picture of New York," by Dr. Samuel Mitchell, just then published. It was begun as a mere burlesque upon pedantry and erudition, and was well advanced, when Peter was called by his business to Europe, and its completion was fortunately left to Washington. In his mind the idea expanded into a different conception. He condensed the mass ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... No. 11 will be commenced a new burlesque serial, "The Mystery of Mister E. Drood," written expressly for this paper by the celebrated ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... Shakspeare, a Pitt, a Newton, or any of those illustrious men by whose superior intelligence society has so greatly profited?" The obvious truth is, that such "celebrations" are not to our taste, that there is something burlesque, to our ideas, in this useless honour; and that we think a bonfire, a discharge of squibs, or even a discharge of rhetoric, and a display of tinsel banners and buffoonery, does not supply the most natural way of reviving the memory ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... me fixedly for some seconds. And then a very odd thing occurred. Suddenly she squinted—squinted horribly; not with the familiar convergent squint which burlesque artists imitate, but with external or divergent squint of extreme near sight or unequal vision. The effect was quite startling. One moment both her eyes were looking straight into mine; the next, one of them rolled round until it looked out ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... was obliged then to cultivate French; but the language was neither noble nor regular. The syntax was left to caprice. The genius for conversation being turned to pleasantries, the language became very fertile in burlesque and naive expressions, and very sterile in noble and harmonious terms: from this it comes that in rhyming dictionaries one finds twenty terms suitable for comic poetry, for one for more exalted use; and it is, further, a reason why Marot never ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... it out with pathos, paused, and was theatrically distressed. Buckingham was seated in one of the boxes. He rose, all eyes were fixed upon a face well known in all gay assemblies, in a tone of burlesque he answered— ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... as follows: "Flashy people may burlesque these things, but when hundreds of the most sober people in a country, where they have as much mother-wit certainly as the rest of mankind, know them to be true, nothing but the absurd and froward spirit of Sadduceeism can question them. I have ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... the unfairness of which we were guilty when we were less conversant with the higher inspirations of his muse. To Mr. Coleridge, and others of our originals, we must also do a tardy act of justice, by declaring that our burlesque of their peculiarities has never blinded us to those beauties and talents which are beyond the reach ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... One way or the other. Either go back to the old life or start a new one. What we are living now is a horrible burlesque." ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... appeared a long narrow box containing a fountain pen. Then came Mr. Howells's "A Foregone Conclusion," which Katy had never seen; then a box of quinine pills; then a sachet for her trunk; then another burlesque poem; last of all, a cake of delicious violet soap, "to wash the sea-smell from her hands," the label said. It grew to be one of the little excitements of ship life to watch for the arrival of these daily gifts; and "What did the mail bring for you this time, Miss Carr?" ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... about Miss Owens to one of the somewhat older married ladies who were kind to him, the wife of one of his colleagues. She ought to have burnt his letter, but she preserved it to kindle mild gossip after his death. It is a burlesque account of his whole adventure, describing, with touches of very bad taste, his disillusionment with the now maturer charms of Miss Owens when her sister brought her back to New Salem, and making comedy of his own honest bewilderment and his mingled relief and mortification when she at last ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... evolution. He was a man who had spent a lifetime in the show business, running first a concert hall that "broke into the papers" every Sunday morning with an account of from two to seven fights the night before, then an equally disreputable "burlesque" house, the broad attractions of which appealed to men and boys only. To this, as he made money, he added the cheapest and most blood-curdling melodrama theater in town, then a "regular" house of the second grade. In his ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... are new and surprising, have seldom anything in them that can be called wit. Mr. Locke's account of wit, with this short explanation, comprehends most of the species of wit, as metaphors, similitudes, allegories, enigmas, mottoes, parables, fables, dreams, visions, dramatic writings, burlesque, and all the methods of allusion: as there are many other pieces of wit, how remote soever they may appear at first sight from the foregoing description, which upon examination will be ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... floor made me bend down hastily with a stern: "Don't laugh," for in his grotesque, almost burlesque discourses there seemed to me to be truth, passion, and horror enough to move ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... the duties of friendship is the last word on that subject. He was visited unexpectedly at his office one day by a group of friends. With much ceremony, they presented him with a placque—an amusing plaster burlesque of the real article. He had the Californian sense of humor and he thoroughly enjoyed the situation. Admitting that the joke was on him, he celebrated according to time-honored rites. After his friends had ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... with the thundering vaunts of this Scythian Shepherd. He comes in drawn by conquered kings, and reproaches these pampered jades of Asia that they can draw but twenty miles a day. Till I saw this passage with my own eyes, I never believed that it was anything more than a pleasant burlesque of mine Ancient's. But I can assure my readers that it is soberly set down in a play, which their ancestors took ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... 530 At pleasure the play of either pupil —Very like, by her hands' slow fanning, As up and down like a gor-crow's flappers They moved to measure, or bell-clappers. I said, "Is it blessing, is it banning, 535 Do they applaud you or burlesque you Those hands and fingers with no flesh on?" But, just as I thought to spring in to the rescue, At once I was stopped by the lady's expression: For it was life her eyes were drinking 540 From the crone's wide pair above unwinking, —Life's pure fire received without ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... ingenuity with which the English writer had illustrated the place by his text, as if the houses were so many pictures to which he had appended a story, Clive, the wag, who was always indulging his vein for caricature, was proposing that that they should take the same place, names, people, and make a burlesque story: "What would be a better figure," says he, "than Pliny's mother, whom the historian describes as exceedingly corpulent, and walking away from the catastrophe with slaves holding cushions behind her, to shield her plump person ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was now afforded by these two races, the phlegmatic, plodding German and the vibrant Irish, a contrast in American life as a whole which was soon represented in miniature on the vaudeville stage by popular burlesque representations of both types. The one was the opposite of the other in temperament, in habits, in personal ambitions. The German sought the land, was content to be let alone, had no desire to command ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... is sometimes played as a burlesque, for which it is well adapted. The parallel suggested between the Caliph and a robber may remind the reader of the interview between Alexander the Great and the Robber, in "Evenings at Home." One cannot help sympathising with ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... that admires, and from the heart is attached to national representative assemblies, but must turn with horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque and abominable perversion of that sacred institute? Lovers of monarchy, lovers of republics, must alike abhor it. The members of your Assembly must themselves groan under the tyranny of which they have all the shame, none of the direction, and little of the profit. I am sure many of the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... may enjoy all the triumph and all the comfort. If that is his idea of a woman's place, all right, but he must get some other girl to marry him. "Some girls will,"' Helena went on, breaking irreverently into a line of a song from a burlesque, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... that Thackeray's natural turn for comic burlesque, which comes out so plainly in his drawings, had become ingrained and inveterate by early practice, and certainly his immoderate delight in setting snobs and flunkeys on a pillory became a flaw in the perfection of his higher composition. It might well produce, among foreigners ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall |
