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Clown   Listen
noun
Clown  n.  
1.
A man of coarse nature and manners; an awkward fellow; an ill-bred person; a boor.
2.
One who works upon the soil; a rustic; a churl. "The clown, the child of nature, without guile."
3.
The fool or buffoon in a play, circus, etc. "The clown shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickle o'the sere."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Clown" Quotes from Famous Books



... the most complete champion that ever I heard!—Steel, if thou turn the edge, or cut not out the burly-boned clown in chines of beef ere thou sleep in thy sheath, I beseech God on my knees thou mayst be turn'd to hobnails.—[Here they fight. Cade falls.] O, I am slain! famine and no other hath slain me; let ten thousand ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]

... Thackeray's Journey from Cornhill, etc. and The testimony to the Truth. That last is indeed a book after my own heart. I do like the mind it discloses—it is of a fine and high order. Alexander Harris may be a clown by birth, but he is a nobleman by nature. When I could read no other book, I read his and derived comfort from it. No matter whether or not I can agree in all his views, it is the principles, the feelings, the heart of ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... all at once I knew the black speck was Corney, and I gave a cry. But with that the black speck began to grow thin, and it grew thin and thin till all at once I could see it no more, and the same instant Corney stood beside me with a smile on his face, and the tears running clown his cheeks. I stretched out my arms to him, and he caught me up in his, and then it was all right; I was Corney's keeper, and Corney was my keeper, and God was all of us's keeper. And it was then I woke, ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... dear to you. I should be sorry to shake hands even with Jawkins for the last time. I think a well-constituted convict, on coming home from transportation, ought to be rather sad when he takes leave of Van Diemen's Land. When the curtain goes down on the last night of a pantomime, poor old clown must be very dismal, depend on it. Ha! with what joy he rushes forward on the evening of the 26th of December next, and says—'How are you?—Here we are!' But I am growing too sentimental:—to ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray

... by such an excess of words, figures and ornaments as to be ridiculous and disgusting. It is like a circus clown dressed up in gold tinsel Dickens gives a fine example of it in Sergeant Buzfuz' speech in the "Pickwick Papers." Among other varieties of style may be mentioned the colloquial, the laconic, the concise, the diffuse, the abrupt the flowing, the quaint, the epigrammatic, the flowery, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin

... a show of anger and agitation, exclaimed, "God's life! Don Stockfish, soul of a mortar, stone of a date, more obstinate and obdurate than a clown asked a favour when he has his mind made up, if I fall upon you I'll tear your eyes out! Do you fancy, Don Vanquished, Don Cudgelled, that I died for your sake? All that you have seen to-night has been make-believe; I'm not the woman to let the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... A proverbial saying, the exact force of which we cannot determine. The reading of H. 1. 13 may be translated, 'No fool on a board (or shield ?),' that is, a clown or tumbler (?). ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown

... afternoon I was standing in the door of my house, when I marked a person passing close to the edge of the bank that was in front. His pace was a careless and lingering one, and had none of that gracefulness and ease which distinguish a person with certain advantages of education from a clown. His gait was rustic and awkward. His form was ungainly and disproportioned. Shoulders broad and square, breast sunken, his head drooping, his body of uniform breadth, supported by long and lank legs, were the ingredients of his frame. His garb was not ill adapted to ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... As the bewildered and astonished clown Who held the plough (the thunder storm o'erpast) There, where the deafening bolt had beat him down, Nigh his death-stricken cattle, wakes aghast, And sees the distant pine without its crown, Which he saw clad in leafy honours last; So ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... and calm, the perjured varlet Stands on strongly-planted heel, In his left a strip of scarlet, In his right a streak of steel; Ah! the monster topples over, Till his haunches strike the plain!— Low-born clown and lying lover, ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon

... pitch on the greensward opposite to the theatre we had seceded from. Spencer, I ought to mention here, was "the great man of strength;" Buckley, the "marvellous jumper;" while I myself filled a double role—being both the "clown" and "cashier" of the establishment. The latter is generally a safe post to hold. Spencer would willingly allow a stone to be broken on his chest with a sledge hammer, bend bars of iron across his arm, and the like; and Buckley would volunteer to jump over ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End

... that brute! I to be reconciled to that clown! Never! It shall not be, it shall not be!" Ivan Ivanovitch was in a remarkably determined ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... have heard some talk of a swaggering braggart, prodigal in valiant promise, but very huckster in a pitiful performance; in a word, a clown whose attempt to ape the courtier has ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... subject? but I see not what I see. Damsel and lover? hear not what I hear. My father hath begotten me in his wrath. I suffer from the things before me, know, Learn nothing; am not worthy to be knight; A churl, a clown!' and in him gloom on gloom Deepen'd: he sharply caught his lance and shield, Nor stay'd to crave permission of the King, But, mad ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death. Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him. Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid clown his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him; how dwelleth the love of God in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England

... a jeweller accompanied by his clown. Nor have I any party-colour in my armoires. But since I have exerted myself to borrow this toggery,—and a fine, big lass is the owner, so I think it ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle

... bed—the boisterous wind rattled clown the chimney and shook the ill-fitting casement in its rotting frame. The clothes he had last worn were thrown carelessly about, unsmoothed, unbrushed; the scanty articles of furniture were out of their proper places; slovenly ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... sister, whom he had driven out of her own house to die at the inn. He had on his new blue frock-coat, and a buff waistcoat with gilt buttons, over which his watch-chain was gracefully arranged. His pantaloons were strapped clown very tightly over his polished boots; a shining new silk hat was on one side of his head; and in his hand he was dangling an ebony cane. In spite, however, of all these gaudy trappings, he could not muster up an easy air; and, ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... the table by which I stood; I pulled at the hat I held; my colour came and went; I looked at her furtively from under bent brows, and I thanked God that her back being towards me she might not see the clown I must ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini

... vivid and terrifying narrative the partners made out that while Licorice Stick was on his way to embellish the wayside in strict accordance with instructions, he had encountered a spirit from the other world in the form of the carnival clown whom we have ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... sculpture was the face of the clown in a pantomime, some twelve feet high from brow to chin, which face, being moved by the mechanism which is our pride, every half minute opened its mouth from ear to ear, showed its teeth, and revolved its eyes, the force of these periodical seasons of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... painfully. Altogether it was not a sight to arouse much enthusiasm in the heart of a boy, accustomed to seeing the outside glitter of a circus, with prancing steeds, gay colors, music, and the humorous antics of the clown. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren

... in the field, yon red-cloaked clown, Of thee from the hilltop looking down; The heifer that lows in the upland farm, Far heard, lows not thine ear to charm, The sexton, tolling his bell at noon, Deems not that great Napoleon Stops his horse, and lists with delight, Whilst ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various

... sofa under a canopy with the baroness while the fete is going on. Or he may be the peasant at the fete who comes on the stage to swell the drinking chorus, and who, it may be observed, always turns his glass upside down before he begins to drink out of it. Or he may be the clown who takes away the doorstep of the house where the evening party is going on. Or he may be the gentleman who issues out of the house on the false alarm, and is precipitated into the area. Or, if an actress, she may be the fairy who resides for ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... him from head to foot with big, bright, red spots, he was as gaudy as a circus clown, and as nimble and ...
— Denslow's Humpty Dumpty • William Wallace Denslow

... all of one's eyes. Teddy sat spellbound for a while, but found time at last to draw a long breath. "Cousin Derry, that is the funniest clown—" ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey

... Paris, this style of entertainment having gone completely out of fashion in France. The papa of the farce (who was also the Jack Tar of the drama) reappears in the pantomime as Pierrot, the white-faced clown; and tremendously funny is he. There is a weird, elastic harlequin in a ghastly mask which he never lifts; and an amazing notary in an astounding nose, who proves to be Monsieur Goosequill. There is a humpback of hideous deformity and a Columbine of seraphic loveliness; and all Monsieur ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various

... brains of his. And there was Walt, whom I chivvied and battered from place to place, and made a paralytic of him: and him, too, I labelled offensive and lewd and lascivious and indecent. Then later there was Mark, whom I frightened into disguising himself in a clown's suit, so that nobody might suspect him to be a maker of literature: indeed, I frightened him so that he hid away the greater part of what he had made until after he was dead, and I could not get at him. That was a disgusting trick to play on me, I consider. Still, these are the only ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell

... Clown, who had lost his Mare, To his Neighbour, a Wit, did repair, And begg'd him with him to go To the famous Doctor Foreknow, A Conjurer powerful and strong, Who would tell who had done the Wrong. ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)

... instance, a country that St. Paul never seemed to have visited, which, to say the least, was strange. Whereupon a long talk began about Paul and Jesus, Mr. Walter Poole maintaining that Paul's teaching was identical with that of Jesus, and that Peter was a clown despised by Paul ...
— The Lake • George Moore

... wretch ordain'd by fate, Neal Gahagan, Hibernian clown, With hatchet blunter than thy pate, To hack my ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... from care, the wider lot Of humble life affords for studious thought To scan the maze of Nature; therefore stamp'd The glaring scenes with characters of scorn, As broad, as obvious, to the passing clown, As to the letter'd sage's ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside

... Mr. Sleary, who was troubled with asthma, and whose breath came far too thick and heavy for the letter s, 'Your thervant! Thith ith a bad piethe of bithnith, thith ith. You've heard of my Clown and hith dog being thuppothed ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*

... Their heads were covered by enormous green masks, from which floated triangular red flags, and they, too, carried tambourines. Making a diabolical din, they whirled and danced about the gods seated on the ground. Two big fellows accompanying them, who were dressed in tight clown costumes, executed all kinds of grotesque contortions and acrobatic feats, by which they won plaudits and shouts of laughter ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch

... twitched convulsively and her terrible eyes were like the vent-holes of internal fires; but she managed her rage with a skill that was high tribute to her will-power. "You are right in selecting this clown—this tag-rag," said she. "You and he, I see, are peculiarly suited to each other....My only regret is that in my blind affection I have wasted all these years and all those thousands of dollars on you." ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... abilities, or we shall do nothing with grace. A clown, whatever he may do, will never pass for ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston

... of the weak and coward with the strong," he cried, "when there's any pleasant charge, you send the other servants, but when it's a question of seeing any one home in the dark, then you ask me, you disorderly clown! a nice way you act the steward, indeed! Do you forget that if Mr. Chiao Ta chose to raise one leg, it would be a good deal higher than your head! Remember please, that twenty years ago, Mr. Chiao Ta wouldn't even so much as look ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... bright as a silver dollar. In the book we can smell the sawdust, hear the flapping of the big white canvas and the roaring of the lions, and listen to the merry "hoop la!" of the clown. ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope

... change was worked in Ellis. He no longer looked like the same boy. The alteration in his appearance was almost as striking as that which takes place in a country clown caught by a recruiting sergeant, half drunk at a fair, as he rolls on, looking every moment as if he was going to topple over, from public-house to public-house, and when he has been under the drill-sergeant's hands for a couple of years, and is turned into the trim, active, intelligent soldier. ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston

... next moment, revealing the spectacle on stage and floor in all its tinsel magnificence—snow-nymphs, polar-bears, all capering madly until an unearthly shriek heralded the coming of a favorite clown, who tumbled all the way down the stage steps and continued hysterically turning flip-flaps, cart-wheels, and somersaults until he landed with a crash at the foot of the ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers

... susceptible material. It grows as it is trained. It will be rude, if it is left rude, and fine only as it is wrought finely. Educate a boy to tumbled hair and grimy hands, and he will go tumbled and grimy to his grave. Put a hundred boys together where they will have the appurtenances of a clown, and I do not believe there will be ten out of the hundred who will not become precisely to that degree clownish. I am not battling for the luxuries of life, but I am for its decencies. I would not turn boys into Sybarites, but neither would I let them riot into Satyrs. The effeminacy of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... communicative, however, than the stranger. Still his head and heart, alike, were full, and he talked more freely than was altogether consistent with his Yankee character. He told of Ralph's predicament, and the clown sympathized; he narrated the quest which had brought him forth, and of his heretofore unrewarded labors; concluded with naming the ensuing Monday as the day of the youth's trial, when, if nothing in the meantime could be discovered ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... sculpture, you are to learn what a "Master" is. Here was one man at least, who knew his business, once upon a time! Unaccusably;—none of your fool's heads or clown's hearts can find a fault here! "Dog-fancier,[49] cobbler, tailor, or churl, look here"—says Master Jacopo—"look! I know what a brute is, better than you, I know what a silken tassel is—what a leathern belt is—Also, what a woman ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... Highness the Princess Dowager of Wales Song ('Let School-masters,' &c.) Epilogue to 'She Stoops to Conquer' Retaliation Song ('Ah, me! when shall I marry me?') Translation ('Chaste are their instincts') The Haunch of Venison Epitaph on Thomas Parnell The Clown's Reply Epitaph on Edward Purdon Epilogue for Lee Lewes Epilogue written for 'She Stoops to Conquer' (1) Epilogue written for 'She Stoops to Conquer' (2) The Captivity. An Oratorio Verses in Reply to an Invitation to Dinner Letter in Prose ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith

... "don't let's spoil a jolly evening. What I say is, let's do something for the company tonight. Not blacking faces or sitting on hats, if you don't like those—but something of the sort. Why couldn't we have a proper old English pantomime—clown, columbine, and so on. I saw one when I left England at twelve years old, and it's blazed in my brain like a bonfire ever since. I came back to the old country only last year, and I find the thing's extinct. Nothing ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... too great liberality. The sole object seems to be to exhibit the "Yankee" character in its traditional deformities of stupidity and meanness,—otherwise denominated simplicity and shrewdness. Mr. Jonathan Slick is in no respect different from the ordinary fabulous Yankee. An illiterate clown he is, who, visiting New York, contrives by vice of impudence, to interfere very seriously with certain conventionalities of the metropolis. He overthrows, by his indomitable will, a great many social follies. He eats soup with a knife and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... upon as very extraordinary. It was certainly one of the first distinctions of a well-bred man, to express every thing that had the most remote appearance of being obscene, in modest terms and distant phrases; whilst the clown, who had no such delicacy of conception and expression, clothed his ideas in those plain homely terms that are the most obvious and natural. This kind of good-manners was perhaps carried to an excess, so as to make conversation ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various

... muttered despairingly, as he looked above him again, and, as he did so, saw that the men were laughing at his predicament, for, as Touchstone the clown told the shepherd, he was "in ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn

... moves me to tears," said Mr. Amarinth musingly. "There is nothing so absolutely pathetic as a really fine paradox. The pun is the clown among jokes, the well turned paradox is the polished comedian, and the highest comedy verges upon tragedy, just as the keenest edge of tragedy is often tempered by a subtle humour. Our minds are shot with moods ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens

... of Foscari which would lead us to expect anything particularly noble in his face; but I trust, nevertheless, it has been misrepresented by this despicable carver; for no words are strong enough to express the baseness of the portraiture. A huge, gross, bony clown's face, with the peculiar sodden and sensual cunning in it which is seen so often in the countenances of the worst Romanist priest; a face part of iron and part of clay, with the immobility of the one, and the foulness of the other, double chinned, blunt-mouthed, bony-cheeked, with ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin

... ablution of a common man differs from that of an educated Moslem as much as the eating of a clown and a gentleman. Moreover there are important technical differences between the Wuzu of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... to some boy. It seems to me you are too big a toy for a little girl," said the Calico Clown to ...
— The Story of a Stuffed Elephant • Laura Lee Hope

... building. The window at the rear end of it overlooked the roof of the back kitchen. This window was open, and when Ruth reached the corridor Bella was going head-first through the open window, like a circus clown diving through a hoop. ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson

... hunchback, who is present as a familiar clown or merrymaker, and dances and laughs to please the company, at the same time snapping his fingers. Two other illustrations of this action, the middle finger in one leaving and in the other having left the thumb and passed to its base, are ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery

... Cathy had been carrying a lipstick of shiny gold-colored metal. "Don't tell me you've taken to using lipstick! You trying to look like a clown?" ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson

... with all the attention he had been able to pay to the Lord-General's speech, had got so much confused among the various clauses of the harangue, that his brain was bewildered, like that of a country clown when he chances to get himself involved among a crowd of carriages, and cannot stir a step to get out of the way of one of them, without being in danger of being ridden over by ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... of woman are a theme on which men, from the sage to the clown, have at all times been eloquent. Her natural coquetry in dress, her maternal vanity, her devotion to the little elegancies of the home, to clean windows and fresh curtains, are inexhaustible sources of masculine merriment or abuse. What ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various

... Don set out to ring all the bells of merriment, he was followed by one clown. Charles Courtier on the other hand had always been accompanied by thousands, who really could not understand the conduct of this man with no commercial sense. But though he puzzled his contemporaries, they did not exactly laugh at him, because it was reported ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... kindness did not stop there, nor with his brothers and sisters in white. He recognized his close relationship with the black man, and the bitterest name his enemies called him—worse in their minds than "fool," "clown," "imbecile" or "gorilla"—was a "Black Republican." That terrible phobia against the negro only enlisted Abraham Lincoln's sympathies the more. He appeared in court in behalf of colored people, time and again. The more bitter the ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple

... To get a laugh by keeping up the game, Lends him seven hundred, gives him out of hand Seven more, and leads him on to buy some land. 'Tis bought: to make a lengthy tale concise, The man becomes a clown who once was nice, Talks all of elms and vineyards, ploughs and soil, And ages fast with struggling and sheer toil; Till, when his sheep are stolen, his bullock drops, His goats die off, a blight destroys his crops, One night he takes ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... the clown's absurd story, with the still more ridiculous application, made me sick at heart a second time. It was not because I thought my illustrious friend was the Devil, or that I took a fool's idle tale ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg

... are all dingy and dusty. Yet but a few days, Bob, and flakes of paint will have cracked off the fairy flower-bowers, and the revolving temples of adamantine lustre will be as shabby as the city of Pekin. When you read this, will Clown still be going on lolling his tongue out of his mouth, and saying, "How are you to-morrow?" To- morrow, indeed! He must be almost ashamed of himself (if that cheek is still capable of the blush of shame) for asking the absurd question. To-morrow, indeed! ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray

... of harmonies has more life, a larger being, than the soul consumed of cares; the sage is a larger life than the clown; the poet is more alive than the man whose life flows out that money may come in; the man who loves his fellow is infinitely more alive than he whose endeavour is to exalt himself above him; the man who strives to be better, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald

... to do for the best. And then what happens? To begin with, one's public is ignorant, boorish. I give them the very best operetta, a dainty masque, first rate music-hall artists. But do you suppose that's what they want! They don't understand anything of that sort. They want a clown; what they ask for is vulgarity. And then look at the weather! Almost every evening it rains. It started on the tenth of May, and it's kept it up all May and June. It's simply awful! The public doesn't ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... out to ask what was the matter with the circus, and whether the clown were lost, while others demanded "The lady!" Johnston turned to Miss Marvin, and there was a hush as the slight girlish figure—and she seemed very young—stood upright before us. She thrust back the unlovely bonnet, and her thin face was flushed; but when, clenching nervous fingers upon the dowdy ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... people's delight, or their fooling. For, as Aristotle says rightly, the moving of laughter is a fault in comedy, a kind of turpitude that depraves some part of a man's nature without a disease. As a wry face without pain moves laughter, or a deformed vizard, or a rude clown dressed in a lady's habit and using her actions; we dislike and scorn such representations which made the ancient philosophers ever think laughter unfitting in a wise man. And this induced Plato to esteem of Homer as a sacrilegious person, because he presented the gods ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson

... of all, The Clown, making mirth for all the town, With his lips curved ever upward and his eyebrows ever down, And his chief attention paid to the little mule that played A tattoo on the dashboard with his heels, in ...
— Riley Child-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley

... Indeed, all the inferior classes possess an innate self-respect, and a natural gravity of deportment, which differs as far from the suppleness of a Hindustani as from the awkward rusticity of an English clown." ... "Even children," he continues, "in Mahomedan countries have an unusual degree of gravity in their deportment. The boy, who can but lisp his 'Peace be with you,' has imbibed this portion of the national character. In passing through a village, these little men will place their hands ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... viewest, beholdest: suruayest, or seest. But to the place Where? It standeth North North-east and by East from the West corner of thy curious knotted garden; There did I see that low spirited Swaine, that base Minow of thy myrth, Clown. Mee? Ferd. that vnletered small knowing soule, Clow Me? Ferd. that shallow vassall Clow. Still mee?) Ferd. which as I remember, hight Costard, Clow. O me) Ferd. sorted and consorted contrary to thy established proclaymed Edict and Continent, Cannon: Which with, o with, but with this ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... anew at the foot of the altar. Christian priests were its reformers, its guardians and its actors. Designed for the amusement as well as the instruction of the gaping multitudes, it was necessarily a pretty crude affair. Satan was introduced as the clown, and laughter was provoked at his discomfiture when routed, or at the destruction of those who wilfully cast themselves into his clutches. It is not strange that the pious and learned St. Augustine, in the fourth century, regretted the polished dramatic ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore

... I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown; Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home, She stood in ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis

... to hear how I came to cut my own throat?" snarls the boy, with white, haggard anger alternating with red misery and shame in his young, handsome face; "because if you do, leave off playing the funny clown and listen." ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... Zerlina was the principal figure; the climax of the drama was not the final Statue scene, but "Batti, batti"; Leporello's part was exaggerated until the Statue scene became a pantomime affair with Leporello playing pantaloon against Giovanni's clown. Such an opera could interest none but an Elephant and Castle audience, and probably only the beauty of the music prevented it reaching the Elephant and Castle long ago. So low had "Don Giovanni" fallen, when, quite recently, serious artists like Maurel tried to take it more seriously and restore ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... luck!" he muttered. "I'll have to have a string tied about my neck like a poodle dog. What a clown I was to go it blind! But Nellie's cry for help made me forget everything else. Poor girl! I do hope she is safe. If that redskin—gosh! ...
— The Boy Land Boomer - Dick Arbuckle's Adventures in Oklahoma • Ralph Bonehill

... be known to be obeyed. Born tyrannical, the characterless submission of his wife had nourished the tyrannical in him. Now, all at once, a daughter, the ugly one, from whom no credit was to be looked for, dared to defy him for a clown figuring in a worn-out rag of chieftainship—the musty fiction of a clan—half a dozen shepherds, crofters, weavers, and shoemakers, not the shadow of a gentleman among them!—a man who ate brose, went with ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... paper these words may seem cold; but there, before the whole Chamber, that man's defence seemed to be instinct with an eloquent and imposing serenity, which aroused astonishment at first, coming from that clown, that upstart, unread, uneducated, with his Rhone boatman's voice and his street porter's bearing, and afterward moved his auditors strangely by its unrefined, uncivilized character, utterly at variance ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... an honour to be Neptune's child, A grace to be so near with Jove allied. But yet, sweet nymph, with this be not beguiled; Where nature's graces are by looks decried, So foul, so rough, so ugly as a clown, And worse than this, a monster with one eye! Foul is not graced, though it wear a crown, But fair is beauty, ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher

... same in all ranks; that being so, the ranks which are most numerous deserve most respect. Before one who reflects, all civil distinctions vanish: he marks the same passions and the same feelings in the clown as in the man covered with reputation; he can only distinguish their speech, and a varnish more or less elaborately laid on. Study people of this humble condition; you will perceive that under another sort of language, they have as much ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... still sleeping, and Oberon, seeing a clown near her who had lost his way in the wood and was likewise asleep, "This fellow," said he, "shall be my Titania's true love"; and clapping an ass's head over the clown's, it seemed to fit him as well as if it had grown upon his own shoulders. Though Oberon fixed the ass's head on ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... suppose, lacking in balance and common sense. We are told that one winter Lord Chandos's players visited Evesham, and Jack Miller, our Fool, became greatly attached to the company and in particular to Grumball the clown; indeed, so greatly was he enamoured that he "swore he would goe all the world over with Grumball." The townspeople being loth to lose so popular a character, Jack was locked in a room at the back of the White Hart ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New

... that this young clown, without in the least intending to be offensive, was listening to me with a ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu

... here; and we are surprised to find many writers looking upon this "Cogito, ergo sum" as constituting the great idea in his system. Surely it is only a statement of universal experience—an epigrammatic form given to the common-sense view of the matter. Any clown would have told him that the assurance of his existence was his consciousness of it; but the clown would not have stated it so well. He would have said, "I know I exist, because I ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... us to remain with her over Christmas. I longed to see the pantomime, having heard much from my cousins and from Leo of its delights—and of the harlequin, columbine, and clown. But my father wanted to be at home again, and he took me and Rubens and Nurse Bundle with him at the ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... with excitement, returned a timid salute, while Juanito bowed profoundly, took off his hat, and made the same gesture as the celebrated clown and caricaturist ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... humiliating effects. Gilles believed himself a boy in the cloister-school again, with his smock up. 'Mea culpa, mea culpa! Hey, reverend father, have pity!' he began to roar. Dropping him at last, Richard tumbled him on to the bed. 'Blubber yourself to sleep, clown,' he told him. 'Blessed ass, I have heard you snoring these two hours, snoring and rootling over your jack-knife. Sleep, man. But if you rootle again I flog again: mind you that.' Gilles slept long, and was awoken in full light by the sound of King ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett

... out. Assent being given, Ashbead was taken there, and placed upon the ground, after which the arquebussiers and their leader marched off; while Bess, kneeling down, supported the head of the wounded man upon her knee, and Demdike, taking a small phial from his doublet, poured some of its contents clown his throat. The wizard then took a fold of linen, with which he was likewise provided, and, dipping it in the elixir, applied it to ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... him with the suddenness of lightning-"Ruler over Kalorama, for a day." "Heaven be with me," he sighed; "for now my poverty is perfect. And who would envy my fate, here in a desert, without a friend, and in the raiment of a priest, which if I cast off I shall look like a clown, which will not do for the man who has ruled a kingdom. Therefore, I say, seeing that it is good to be an honest man, that if heaven spare me and get me safely out of this snare, I will go to my home, and there live so good a man that the neighbors shall say, Roger Potter is ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"

... of Elia. Jaques, it will be remembered, after hearing the "motley fool" moral on the time, declared that "motley's the only wear"; and I opine that Lamb would consider it no small praise to be likened, in wit, wisdom, and eloquence, to Touchstone, or to the Clown in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... from the plains, Of sight-loving lasses and holiday swains: Bob Bantam push'd forward and strutted before; Will Woodpecker modestly tapp'd at the door; Poor Robin, the rustic, a countrified clown, As he blush'd, look'd too simple by half for the town, There were scores in brown mantles, black, yellow, or green, From the villages round, and among them were seen, Luke Linnet, Sam Swallow, Mat Martin, ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset

... little gloved hand through his arm, and drawn very near to him, moved by tender thoughts of the past. He looked clown at her with eyes from which all anger had vanished. There was only love in them—deep love; love such as a very affectionate brother might perchance give his only sister—but it must be owned that brothers capable of ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon

... disproportionately powerful influence. The Bible was paramount. Aristotle dominated the whole mental horizon of the schoolmen. Alfred of Beverley tells us that Geoffrey of Monmouth's book "was so universally talked of that to confess ignorance of its stories was the mark of a clown."[1] So great was the influence of Piers Plowman, that from it were taken watchwords at the great rising of the peasants.[2] The power of such works could not be wholly hemmed in by the barrier of manuscript: ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage

... child's natural sense of values. He is certain to see that the Frog is foolish in competing with the Ox in size, and certain to recognize the common sense of the Country Mouse. He will no more be deceived by a fable than he will by the painted clown in a circus. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... ne'er was blundering clown Upon the boards more promptly hooted down; The sister flowers began ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... Acts truly from himself, and gains applause. But when, to please himself or charm his wife, He aims at something in politer life, 360 When, blindly thwarting Nature's stubborn plan, He treads the stage by way of gentleman, The clown, who no one touch of breeding knows, Looks like Tom Errand[28] dress'd in Clincher's clothes. Fond of his dress, fond of his person grown, Laugh'd at by all, and to himself unknown, Prom side to side he struts, he smiles, he prates, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... he had lost repute. He had suffered much in pocket, but more in prestige. He had been a successful player in the Columbia country, too much so for the good of scores of comrades, but especially himself. He could have found it in his heart to throttle that guffawing clown, whose rude bellow of rejoicing over Case's brilliant bluff and his own defeat, had brought even the dago and his fellows in staring wonderment to the open door. He would have pledged another month's pay could ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King

... place for their sons in the seminary of this fortunate teacher. [In pencil on opposite page—Mr. Pearson.] In the solitude of Grasmere, while living as a married man in a cottage of 8l. per annum rent, I often used to smile at the tales which reached me of the brilliant career of this quondam clown—for such in reality he was, in manners and appearance, before he was polished a little by attrition with gentlemen's sons trained at Hawkshead, rough and rude as many of our families were. Not 200 yards from the cottage in Grasmere just mentioned, to which I retired, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... interloping—(against which the priests seem to have fought hard and yet in vain) the most ludicrous images were mixed with the most awful personations; and whatever the subject might be, however sublime, however pathetic, yet the Vice and the Devil, who are the genuine antecessors of Harlequin and the Clown, were necessary component parts. I have myself a piece of this kind, which I transcribed a few years ago at Helmstadt, in Germany, on the education of Eve's children, in which after the fall and repentance ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge

... scene, in which the loving prince takes leave of his mistress, and another where, after much weeping and flirtation, she throws herself into his arms, were sufficiently intelligible to us; but some, in which the jokes of the clown formed the leading feature, were quite lost upon those who did not understand the language. The place chosen for the representation was a spot of ground outside of our houses, the heat being very great; and here a circle ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various

... [crosses love not him] By crosses he means money. So in As you like it, the Clown says to Celia, if I should bear you, I ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson

... bristle a little, under the circumstances; could do no less than challenge the torpedoes, like Farragut in Mobile Bay. Whether the game was worth the candle, I was not to be bullied out of my privileges by a clown swash-buckler who aped the ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... by the violent sobs of little Alice. In his earnestness he had neglected to soften clown the narrative so that it might not terrify the heart of this unworldly infant. Since Grandfather began the history of our chair, little Alice had listened to many tales of war. But probably the idea had never really impressed itself upon her mind that men have shed the blood of ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... able to feel towards this cold strange man, as a father and a comforter. For the first time he saw tears in the cold eyes of his son, and could feel the joy of wiping them away. He seized the opportunity at once, and bending clown over the groaning form, kissed his forehead, raised him from the ground and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... soldiers who should quit the service of the usurper and enlist under his banners, might depend upon receiving their pardon and arrears; and that the foreign troops, upon laying clown their arms, should be paid and transported to their respective countries. He solemnly protested that he would protect and maintain the church of England, as by law established, in all her rights, privileges, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... object is not to excite fear of supernatural things in my reader, but to show the effect of such fear upon the agents of the story—one a man in sense and firmness, one a man unhinged by remorse, one a stupid, unenquiring clown, one a learned ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... joke brought the Mormons to compromise and surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation.... But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the barber-surgeons laughed at Harvey—and how vainly! What clown ever brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Jenner? Or Lincoln? Or Darwin?... They are laughing at ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken

... Second Clown. I tell thee, she is; therefore make her grave straight. The crowner hath set on her and finds it ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... greater reliance common to our sex in the general tender-heartedness of pretty women. But I confess I was alarmed. Yet, with a feeble smile, I tried to introduce the subject with classical ease and lightness. I even said, "If Shakspeare's Athenian clown, Mrs. Brown, believed that a lion among ladies was a dreadful thing, what must"—But here I broke down; for Mrs. Brown, with the awful intuition of her sex, I saw at once was more occupied with my manner than my speech. So I tried a business ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte

... the police reports, in the Sunday papers; he had heard a street preacher declaim against it, and warn young women of the serpent-like wiles of tempters of the Stratton variety. But even now Jack failed to recognize Stratton as a serpent, or indeed anything but a blundering cheat and clown, who had left his dirty 'prentice work on his (Jack's) hands. But the girl was helpless and, it seemed, homeless, all through a certain desperation of feeling which, in spite of her tears, he could not but respect. That momentary shadow of death had exalted her. He stroked ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... life, and a love to win. No! no! the dastard kestrel kite Aye hugs the earth in his stealthy flight. Hope gone! the pool at the otter's cave Will prove the Ladye Tomasine's grave. Ho! ho! see yonder comes rushing down A lithe young hind, though a simple clown— Off bonnet and shoes, and coat and vest, A plunge! and he holds her round the waist! Three strokes of his arm, with his beautiful prize All safe, although faint, on the bank she lies! A cottager's wife came running down, "Take care of the ladye," said the clown. He has donned his ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton

... had been a sister to the Earl of Derby, who lived at the time of which I am now writing. The earl had a son, James, who was heir to the title and to the estates of his father. The son was a dissipated, rustic clown—almost a simpleton. He had the vulgarity of a stable boy and the vices of a courtier. His associates were chosen from the ranks of gamesters, ruffians, and tavern maids. Still, he was a scion of one of the greatest families ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major

... characteristic of good-breeding, a very necessary knowledge in our intercourse with men; for one of inferior parts, with the behaviour of a gentleman, is frequently better received than a man of sense, with the address and manners of a clown. Ignorance and vice are the only things we need be ashamed of; steer clear of these, and you may go into any company you will; not that I would have a young man throw off all dread of appearing ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore

... Laporte, "I am old and gouty, my legs are as stiff as two sticks, and yet if a pretty woman were to tell me to go through the eye of a needle, I believe I should take a jump at it, like a clown through a hoop. I shall die like that; it is in the blood. I am an old beau, one of the old regime, and the sight of a woman, a pretty woman, stirs me to the tips ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant

... other side of the stream; at the head of the river of Rhine, is a small sea, called of the Switzers the Black Sea, twenty thousand paces long, and fifty hundred paces broad. The town Costnitz took the name of this; the emperor gave it a clown for expounding of his riddle: wherefore the clown named the town Costnitz, that is in English, "Cost ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various

... asserting himself, as he had been doing since the day I reached St. Augustine; but though he seems a pretty clever substitute for the chat in the chat's absence, his light is quickly put out when the clown himself steps into the ring. Ground doves cooed, cardinals whistled, and mocking-birds sang and mocked by turns. Orchard orioles, no unworthy companions of mocking-birds and cardinals, sang here and there from a low treetop, especially in the vicinity of houses. ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey

... 17th, repeatedly visited the continent, bringing with them the repertory of the Elizabethan theatre. From those actors Ayrer learned how to enliven his dramas with sensational incidents and spectacular effects, and from them he borrowed the character of the clown. His plays, however, are in spite of his foreign models, hardly more dramatic, in the true sense of the word, than those of Hans Sachs, and they are inferior to the latter in poetic qualities. The plots of two of his comedies, Von der schoenen Phoenicia and Von ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... in the wet grass and her pasty little face will blink its dull eyes over a grave. Like a little clown in her curling cotton suit, her lumpy shoes, her idiotic hat, she will offer her tears to the pitiless silence of trees, wind, rain and ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht

... by the darkies, I remember but two other bits of amusement we had while at Florence. One of these was in hearing the colored soldiers sing patriotic songs, which they did with great gusto when the weather became mild. The other was the antics of a circus clown—a member, I believe, of a Connecticut or a New York regiment, who, on the rare occasions when we were feeling not exactly well so much as simply better than we had been, would give us an hour or two of recitations of the drolleries with which he was wont to set the crowded canvas in ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... the trodden ground beneath With smashed incisors, like the teeth, The dragon's tusks of ancient ken From which sprung hosts of armed men. Such pastime was a frequent thing, The entertainment of the ring, Without equestrian or clown Was often seen in Cork's own town, And best, for impecunious boys Who boasted few of modern joys, Who daily went to see the play Had no admission fee to pay. But gone is Corkstown, vanished too The whitewashed shanty from our view, Where once the minstrel's youthful ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett

... Bartlemy fair? If you have, you may have seen—nay, you must have seen—Richardson's immortal show. You must have seen a tall platform in front of the migratory edifice, and on that platform you must have delighted your visual orb with the clown, the pantaloon, the harlequin, the dancing ladies, the walking dandy, the king with his crown, the queen in her rabbit-skin robes, the smock-frocked countryman, the top-booted jockey, and all the dramatis person of the performance that every moment of every day, during every fair, is for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... social powers, act the obedient servant before them, and if you produce something be sure that it does not run against the grain of your "superiors," or say adieu to success, reputation and recompense. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, prejudices which they hold as righteousness and falsehoods which they hold as truths. Paint the whole, crown it with regard for good manners, for ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... wonderful exploit?" asked one of the young maidens, with a smile. "Any clown in the ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various

... curse o' class distinctions from our shoulders shall be hurled, An' the influence of woman revolutionize the world; There'll be higher education for the toilin' starvin' clown, An' the rich an' educated shall be educated down; An' we all will meet amidships on this stout old earthly craft, An' there won't be any friction 'twixt the classes fore-'n'-aft. We'll be brothers, fore-'n'-aft! Yes, an' sisters, fore-'n'-aft! ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson

... Greece has given the poet the picture of the sweet country school-girls working at one flower, warbling one song, growing together like a double cherry. Of England, is the picture of the hounds with "ears that sweep away the morning dew"; from England, all this out-door woodland life, the clown's play and the clowns themselves,—Bottom with his inimitable conceit, and his fellows, Snug, Quince, and the rest. English is all Puck's fairy lore, the cowslips tall, the red-hipt humble-bee, Oberon's bank, the pansy love-in-idleness, and all the ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan

... clown's costume and carried over his shoulder Mole's wooden legs, in case any thing happened to the cork ones he was walking ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng

... with clean pages before him—young, emotional, without a doubt intellectual. But for his awful clothes he was well enough to look upon, he had no affectations, his instincts were apparently correct. His manners were hoydenish, but there was nothing of the clown about him. She asked him a ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim

... see her little hands and fingers, and the mould of her dainty limbs. No Scottish fisher clown was her father, I dare be sworn. Her skin is as fair and fine as my Humfrey's, and moreover she has always been in hands that knew how a babe should be tended. Any woman can ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... South teems with events; convulsing ones: The Briton, there, plays at no mimic war; With gallant face he moves, and gallantly is met. Brave spirits, rous'd by glory, throng our camp; The hardy hunter, skill'd to fell the deer, Or start the sluggish bear from covert rude; And not a clown that comes, but from his youth Is trained to pour from far the leaden death, To climb the steep, to struggle with the stream, To labour firmly under scorching skies, And bear, unshrinking, winter's roughest blast. This, and that heaven-inspir'd ...
— Andre • William Dunlap

... until they were very merry. Two rang bells, two played castanets, and two sang. One carried a tray behind his back laden with good things, so that all could help themselves; some smoked water-pipes; another acted like a clown; others played various tunes on different ...
— The Cat and the Mouse - A Book of Persian Fairy Tales • Hartwell James

... and pink and gold habits, and by knights in armor, all of whom carried umbrellas also. Pages walked beside the horses, waving banners and shields with "Visit Currie's World-Renowned Circus" painted on them. A droll little clown, mounted on an enormous bay horse, made fun of the pages, imitated their gestures, and rapped them on the back with his riding-stick in a droll way. A long line of blue and red wagons ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge

... in the flower's sides, because legitimate feasting was made too difficult for the poor little things. The ruby-throated hummingbird, hovering a second above the tube, drains it with none of the clown-like performances exacted from the bumblebee. Pilfering ants find death as speedy on the sticky surfaces here ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... you all that Lucilla can tell. Permit me to reappear in these pages. Shall I say, with your favorite English clown, reappearing every year in your barbarous English pantomime, "Here I am again: how do you do?" No—I had better leave that out. Your clown is one of your national institutions. With this mysterious source of British amusement let no ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins

... would teach men to aspire he writes "Excelsior" and so causes them to know that only he who aspires really lives. They see the groundling, the boor, the drudge, and the clown content to dwell in the valley amid the loaves and fishes of animal desires, while the man who aspires is struggling toward the heights whence he may gain an outlook upon the glories that are, know the throb and thrill of new life, and experience the swing and sweep of spiritual impulses. ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson

... gone on writing steadily, though there was battle all about him.... He settled himself to write, though he had no plan in his mind, and as he wrote, he felt that the story, whatever it might grow to be, must be comic. "I feel like a clown making jokes in the circus while his wife is dying," he ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine

... see. That makes three men; and the clown and policeman will make five. Thats why you wanted five men ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw

... impression. Poor things! poor things! They can't help themselves. We courtiers really ought to be very careful not to abuse our power. It is positive cruelty. The contest is too unequal. It makes one inclined sometimes to put on the manners of a clown, so as to give them a chance. Nay, nay, you might as well ask the Ethiopian to change his skin as a courtier his fine manners. By all the saints! here ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris

... was notable for its corrections and remodellings, reducing the grandeur of the originals to the levels of the critics. Lord Lansdowne degraded Shylock into the clown of the play; it was "furnished with music and other ornamentation, enriched with a musical masque, 'Peleus and Thetis,' and with a banqueting scene in which the Jew," dining apart from the rest, drinks to his God, Money. Gildon mangled "Measure for Measure" and provided it with ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith

... their equal in this respect, it has a large repertoire of weird, uncanny cries all its own — a power of throwing its voice, like a human ventriloquist, into unexpected corners of the thicket or meadow. In addition to its extraordinary vocal feats, it can turn somersaults and do other clown-like stunts as well as any variety actor ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan

... one clown to me, "I seed my ole 'ooman go down afore my eyes, and I felt that grieved a'most as if I was agoin' down myself, and I chewed a bit ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... the peasant O Moreno who knows the dances of Beira, the negro chattering in his pigeon-Portuguese 'like a red mullet in a fig-tree,' the deceitful negro expressing the strangest philosophy in Portuguese equally strange, the rustic clown Gon[c,]alo with his baskets of fruit and capons, who when his hare is stolen turns it like a canny peasant to a kind of posthumous account: leve-a por amor de Deos pola alma de meus finados, the Jew Alonso Lopez who had formerly been prosperous in Spain but is now a poor new Christian cobbler ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente

... noticed than he was ever before in his life, was conducted down below to the servants' quarters. Although they were town servants, and would certainly have disdained to speak to a mere beggar-boy, or to a young country clown, there was something in Dermot's unaffected manner and appearance which won their regard, and they treated him with far more kindness and attention than would otherwise have been ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston

... no two pillars were alike, and in the dress of a mediaeval crowd was captured the colours of the rainbow. With an odd result. Men laughed at the devil in the freedom of their souls. They tweaked his tail on carven misericords, and in the mystery play he was invariably cast for the clown. ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... champagne flowed in streams. At a garden table under an orange tree one could see a powerfully limbed peasant, his hawthorn stick between his knees, devouring a plateful of caviare, while his neighbor, a circus clown, ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg

... you were going to give a magic lantern show. Or is it for some new kinds of moving pictures? Say, do you remember the time we gave a show in the barn, and charged a nickel to come in? You were the clown, and—" ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton

... to Khamoor, and several of them are amusing. Says Mrs. Burton in one of them, [255] "Khamoor was charming at the theatre. I cried at something touching, and she, not knowing why, flung herself upon my neck and howled. She nearly died with joy on seeing the clown, and said, 'Oh, isn't this delightful. What a lovely life!' She was awfully shocked at the women dancing with 'naked legs,' and at all the rustic swains and girls ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a London street. Upon anyone who feels this nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the abiding spirit of pantomime. Of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said (with no darker meaning) that he realizes one of our visions. And it may be noted here that this internal quality in pantomime is perfectly symbolized and preserved by that commonplace or cockney landscape and architecture which characterizes pantomime ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

... men. This accounted for the remarkable panic of his jailer, who, when he looked into, and even entered his dungeon, failed to see him; it explained why the soldiers had permitted him to leave the building unmolested, why the horseman had nearly ridden over him, and why the clown who had just passed had, without knowing it, nearly ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin

... words of the rubric. A little carven image of an acolyte—a weird boy who seemed to move by springs, whose hair had all the semblance of painted wood, and whose complexion was white and red like a clown's—did not make matters more ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... will this never be done?" cries the Master. "Quel lourdaud! But why do I trouble you with French expressions, which are lost on such an ignoramus? A lourdaud, my dear brother, is as we might say a bumpkin, a clown, a clodpole: a fellow without grace, lightness, quickness; any gift of pleasing, any natural brilliancy: such a one as you shall see, when you desire, by looking in the mirror. I tell you these things for your good, I assure you; and besides, Square-toes" (looking at me and stifling a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson

... his family rather surprised him; he seemed to think it a joke that all these children should belong to him. As the younger ones slipped up to him in his retreat, he kept taking things out of his pockets; penny dolls, a wooden clown, a balloon pig that was inflated by a whistle. He beckoned to the little boy they called Jan, whispered to him, and presented him with a paper snake, gently, so as not to startle him. Looking over the boy's head he said to me, "This one is ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather

... disarm his adversary in the twinkling of an eye, unless he were a professor like himself. A stroke of wit will sometimes produce this effect, but there is no such power or superiority in sense or reas hardly know the professor from the impudent pretender or the mere clown.(1) ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt



Words linked to "Clown" :   whiteface, Emmett Kelly, jest, Weary Willie, clown around, clowning, Kelly, buffoon, sap, zany, clown anemone fish, jester, fool, merry andrew, goofball, tomfool, muggins, comedian, motley fool, comic, pantaloon, joke, antic



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