"Comic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thoroughly conventional in nature, is omitted here. In it Gally, following Casaubon,[2] theorizes that the character evolved out of Greek Old Comedy. The Augustans saw a close connection between drama and character-writing. Congreve (Dedication to The Way of the World, 1700) thought that the comic dramatist Menander formed his characters on "the observations of Theophrastus, of whom he was a disciple," and Budgell, who termed Theophrastus the father of modern comedy, believed that if some of Theophrastus's characters "were well worked ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... he played "jacks" with her and cut pictures out of the comic supplements. By the end of the month he was thinner and more "peaked," if anything, than she. Unshaven, unshorn, unpressed was he, but he was too full of joy to give heed to his own ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... both hands at his skinny but very straight neck, a dressing-gown of light silk with violet dots, in which he had enveloped himself like a bonbon in its paper wrapper. The most salient feature in that heroi-comic countenance was a great arched nose shining with cold cream, and a keen, piercing eye, too youthful, too clear for the heavy, wrinkled lid that covered it. All of Jenkins' patients had that ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... opportunity of knowing what true comedy was. It had had farces in abundance, not only of home growth, but imported, and from Italy in particular. When Moliere came before the public with his homogeneous and well-trained company, and his repertory of excellent character-sketches and comic situations, the prevailing sentiment was expressed by a member of the audience which listened to the first production of his Precieuses Ridicules: "Courage, Moliere; this ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... was persuaded to confess the humble little role for which the eminent actors who had consented to be his colleagues had cast him. He was to be the comic boy of a pastry-cook's man, and his distinguished part in the action of the piece was to come in at a certain moment with the pie that had been ordered, and, as he delivered it, he was to remark, "That's a pie as is a pie, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... Ivanitch as he read this article. Afterwards he learned that a daughter had been born to him; two months later he received a notification from his steward that Varvara Pavlovna had asked for the first quarter's allowance. Then worse and worse rumors began to reach him; at last, a tragic-comic story was reported with acclamations in all the papers. His wife played an unenviable part in it. It was the finishing stroke; Varvara Pavlovna had become ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... see blackguards; but these men were something worse. There is a comic side, more or less appreciable, in all blackguardism: here there was nothing but tragedy—mute, weird tragedy. The quiet in the room was horrible. The thin, haggard, long-haired young man, whose sunken ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... the others realised to the untiring and selfless zeal of the Irish mother, a plucky, practical woman, and a noble one if ever such existed on this earth. The way she contrived would fill a book; her economies, so clever they hardly betrayed themselves, would supply a comic annual with material for years, though their comedy involved a pathos of self-denial and sleepless nights that only those similarly placed could have divined. Herself a silent, even inarticulate, woman, she never spoke of them, least of all to her husband, whose mind ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... only falls into a continual watching of him, and the consciousness that he is watched destroys in him all elasticity of spirit, all confidence, all originality. The police shadow of control obscures all independence and systematically accustoms him to dependence. As the tragi-comic story of Peter Schlemihl shows, one cannot lose his own shadow without falling into the saddest fatalities; but the shadow of a constant companion, as in the pedagogical system of the Jesuits, undermines all naturalness. And if one endeavors too strictly to guard against that which is evil and forbidden, ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... are intended for comic interlocutions. In March, 1502—3, Elizabeth of York, consort of Henry VII, made an oblation of six shillings and eightpence to "oure lady of Walsingham" (Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York, edited by Nicolas, p. 3). This offering may not appear very large, but ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... torment was the "trapper-boys," and other youngsters with whom he came into contact. He was a newcomer, and so they hazed him; moreover, he had an inferior job—there seemed to their minds to be something humiliating and comic about the task of tending mules. These urchins came from a score of nations of Southern Europe and Asia; there were flat-faced Tartars and swarthy Greeks and shrewd-eyed little Japanese. They spoke a compromise language, consisting mainly of English curse words and obscenities; ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... Deathshead, and lost no time in securing this acquisition; but on Diggory's arrival, Mr Glowry was horror-struck by the sight of a round ruddy face, and a pair of laughing eyes. Deathshead was always grinning,—not a ghastly smile, but the grin of a comic mask; and disturbed the echoes of the hall with so much unhallowed laughter, that Mr Glowry gave him his discharge. Diggory, however, had staid long enough to make conquests of all the old gentleman's maids, and left him a flourishing colony of young Deathsheads to join chorus ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... malice lurked on Charles's lips. This discomfiture of the truculent Rufus supplied for him the comic element of his entertainment, and came just in the nick of time to prevent its heroics and ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of perception; always they show the play of the seeing eye, the ruling sense of reality which shaped his life; it is this visible actuality that best marks them off from the non-Shaksperean figures around them. And in the wonderful figures of Falstaff and his group we have a roundness of comic reality to which nothing else in modern literature thus far could be compared. But still this, the most remarkable of all, remains comic reality; and, what is more, it is a comic reality of which, as in the rest of ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... a pair of low shoes, Kartaphalos? A pair of 'socks'? [Footnote: a low-heeled shoe worn by comic actors.] You have plenty of cothurns, I see, but the 'sock' has ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... the feet to add to the illusion. There used to be a saying that cross-eyed people could not be honest. Similarly, perhaps, Newman thought the appearance of bow-legs would increase the villainy of his pirate. Certainly, no such blood-curdling ruffian has been seen out of comic opera. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... the religious purposes which were at the foundation of the Greek drama. It turned upon parodies, in which the adventures of the gods are introduced by way of sport, like the appetite of Hercules, or the cowardice of Bacchus. Then the comic authors entertained spectators by fantastic and gross displays; by the exhibition of buffoons and pantomimes. But the taste of the Athenians was too severe to relish such entertainments, and comedy passed into ridicule of public men and measures, and ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Doggett, an excellent comic actor, who was for many years joint-manager with Wilkes and Cibber, died in 1721, and bequeathed the Coat and Badge that are rowed for by Thames Watermen every first of August, from ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... me of a picture I saw once in one of the comic papers. An old feller from the backwoods somewheres—good deal like me, he was, and just about as green—was pictured standin' along with his city nephew in the gallery of the Exchange. And the nephew says, 'Uncle,' says he, 'do you realize that a seat down there's wuth seventy-five ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... used to make animals out of heather roots. Wherever he could find four legs, he was pretty sure to find a head and a tail. His beasts were a most comic menagerie, and right fruitful of laughter. But they were not so grotesque and extravagant as Lina and her followers. One of them, for instance, was like a boa constrictor walking on four little stumpy legs near its tail. About the same distance from its head were two little wings, which it was forever ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... with comic fervor. Henry laughed. But Jael only stared, rather stupidly. By-and-by she said she must ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... of the most grimy comic scenes I have ever taken part in—the concoction of a big, written lie, bolstered with evidence, to soothe The Boy's people at Home. I began the rough draft of a letter, the Major throwing in hints here and there while he gathered up all the stuff that The Boy had written and burnt it in ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... expected; but I confess I was a little shocked when Hamlet's mother became Pantaloon, and was instantly knocked down by Clown Claudius. Grimaldi is getting a little old now, but for real humour there are few clowns like him. Mr Shuter, as the gravedigger, was chaste and comic, as he always is, and the ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... said Rosa, deliberately tearing the bold "geant" to pieces down to the bare stem, "unless he meant to be comic, and intimate that the gazer was so rash as to come too near the bush, and ran a ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... invent on Sundays. See with what ardour they rush home of a night! See how they seize a half-holiday, like hungry dogs a bone! They don't want golf, bridge, limericks, novels, illustrated magazines, clubs, whisky, starting-prices, hints about neckties, political meetings, yarns, comic songs, anturic salts, nor the smiles that are situate between a gay corsage and a picture hat. They never wonder, at a loss, what they will do next. Their evenings never drag—are always too short. You may, indeed, catch them at twelve ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... much as usual. It is a strange little world in itself. The comic and the tragic are blended weirdly together, and nature is unimaginably beautiful. I wish you could see this snow. It has an attraction for me, and I am sure it would have for you. I think you understand more about the meaning of beauty than I do. When I see a magnificent landscape, I want ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... the last I see of J. Bayard he was driftin' through the door, gazin' absentminded at the envelope, like he was figurin' on how much he could grab off at the first swipe. I gazes after him thoughtful until the comic side of it ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... of the Gracchi must have been something such a woman!" he said with an indescribable grave comic mien;—"and the other Roman mother that saved Rome and lost her son! Or that lady of Sparta who made the affectionate request to her son about coming home from the battle on his shield! I thought ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... Mrs. Piper, says in amicable conversation with that excellent woman. The coroner is to sit in the first-floor room at the Sol's Arms, where the Harmonic Meetings take place twice a week and where the chair is filled by a gentleman of professional celebrity, faced by Little Swills, the comic vocalist, who hopes (according to the bill in the window) that his friends will rally round him and support first-rate talent. The Sol's Arms does a brisk stroke of business all the morning. Even children so require sustaining under the general excitement ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... vol. ii. p. 69. There is a curious account in the Quarterly Journal of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, July, 1862, p. 165, of a comic playbill, issued for a Kilkenny theatre, in May, 1793. The value of the tickets was to be taken, if required, in candles, bacon, soap, butter, and cheese, and no one was to be admitted into the boxes without shoes and stockings; which leads one to conclude that the form of ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... The good-humour of the poet upon occasion of this parody has been noticed in the Preface. "It's all very well for once," said he afterwards, in comic confidence, at his villa at Petersham, "but don't do it again. I had been almost forgotten when you revived me; and now all the newspapers and reviews ring with this fashionable, trashy author.'" The sand ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... or the domestic ballad; from the strains that enliven the harvest-home and festival, to the love- ditties which the country lass warbles, or the comic song with which the rustic sets the village hostel in a roar. In our collection are several pieces exceedingly scarce, and hitherto to be met with only in broadsides and chap-books of the utmost rarity; in addition to which we have given several others never before in print, and obtained by the ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... concert is a failure. If it were not a failure, Madame Foa would not be so sympathetic. She is more subtle even than Madame Piriac. I shall never be subtle like that. I wish I could be. I wish I was at Moze. I am too Essex for all this. And Winnie here is too comic ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... old Poet)—Ver. 7. He alludes to Luscus Lanuvinus, or Lavinius, a Comic Poet of his time, but considerably his senior. He is mentioned by Terence in all his Prologues except that to the Hecyra, and seems to have made it the business of his life to run down his productions ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... Russia in a troika, with Selifan the coachman as a sort of Russian Sancho Panza, gives Gogol a magnificent opportunity to reveal his genius as a painter of Russian panorama, peopled with characteristic native types commonplace enough but drawn in comic relief. "The comic," explained the author yet at the beginning of his career, "is hidden everywhere, only living in the midst of it we are not conscious of it; but if the artist brings it into his art, on the stage say, we shall roll about with laughter and only wonder we ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... once occur. In these "Traditions" his great creative power is conspicuous; about two hundred different characters are introduced, no one of which reminds the reader of another, while there is abundant diversity of both heroic and comic incident and adventure. A gentleman, after reading the "Traditions," remarked that for invention he scarcely knew Mr Roby's equal. All these characters, it should be stated, are creations: not one is an idealised portrait. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... in the habit of excepting, it sounds as though they were hiccoughing. "Overruled"; "I except"; "Allowed"; "I except"; "Denied"; "I except"; "Granted"; "I except." It becomes a custom as constant as the refrain in a comic opera. ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... Gawler and all, and how happy Mrs. Crump was! She kissed her daughter between all the acts, she nodded to all her friends on the stage, in the slips, or in the real water; she introduced her daughter, Mrs. Captain Walker, to the box-opener; and Melvil Delamere (the first comic), Canterfield (the tyrant), and Jonesini (the celebrated Fontarabian Statuesque), were all on the steps, and shouted for Mrs. Captain Walker's carriage, and waved their hats, and bowed as the little pony-phaeton drove away. Walker, in his ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Lloyd was called the dancing man (practically the Chief's handsome son) of Vailima; he was also, in his character I suppose of overseer, compared to a policeman - Belle had that day been the almoner in a semi-comic distribution of wedding rings and thimbles (bought cheap at an auction) to the whole plantation company, fitting a ring on every man's finger, and a ring and a thimble on both the women's. This was very much in character with her native name TEUILA, ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... something—of any description whatever—asks them in turn, "What is my thought like?" Not having the faintest idea what the thought is they reply at random. One may say, "Like a dog"; another, "Like a saucepan"; a third, "Like a wet day"; a fourth, "Like a comic opera." After collecting all the answers the player announces what the thought was, and then goes along the row again calling upon the players to explain why it is like the thing named by them. The merit of the game lies in these explanations. Thus, perhaps the thing ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... to come to my aunt Rosine's, who was then living at 6 Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin. He was on friendly terms with Rossini, who lived at No. 4 in the same street. He often brought him in, and Rossini made me laugh with his clever stories and comic grimaces. ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... conditions, do, however, make an immense superficial difference between the humour even of Mr. Bret Harte and that of English writers. His fun is derived from the vagaries of huge, rough people, with the comic cruelty of the old Danes, and with the unexpected tenderness of a sentimental time. The characters of the great Texan and Californian drama are like our hackneyed friends, the Vikings, with a touch, if we may use the term, of spooniness. Their humour is often nothing more than a disdainful ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... says that all the labels have been mixed up now. And what are all the Russian enthusiasms worth? The war has wearied us, Bulgaria has wearied us till we can only be ironical about it. Zucchi has wearied us and so has the comic opera. ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... out "round the sixth, and last." There is refreshing novelty in Mr. COPLAND's impersonation of Isaac of York, who might be taken for Shylock's younger brother who has been experimenting on his beard with some curious kind of hair-dye. This comic little Isaac will no doubt grow older during the run of the piece, but on the first night he neither looked nor behaved like Rebecca's aged and venerable sire, nor did Miss MACINTYRE—who, by the way, is charming as Rebecca, and who is so nimble in skipping about the stage when avoiding ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... to show how hard up we are for comic stuff in the Corrugated Trust these days when we can squeeze a laugh out of such a serious-minded party as Hartley. But you know how it is. I expect some of them green-eyed clerks on the tall stools started callin' him that when the ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... de Blacas did not receive me, and I only had the honour of speaking to his secretary, who, if the fact deserve to be recorded, was an abbe named Fleuriel. This personage, who was an extraordinary specimen of impertinence and self-conceit, would have been an admirable study for a comic poet. He had all the dignity belonging to the great secretary of a great Minister, and, with an air of indifference, he told me that the Count was not there; but M. de Blacas was ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... had executed a picturesque Indian dance, the manager would strongly recommend the people to "Come forward, ladies and gentlemen, the show's just a-going to begin." The performance consisted of a short play, a comic song by "Billy," and a portion of the pantomime, "Jack and the Beanstalk," the whole lasting under half-an-hour. We gave about a score performances a day: it was very hard work, and, what was more, hot weather. I don't want to figure in these pages ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... was as lean as her mistress was stout. Her hair was magnificent in quality and quantity, but, alas! was of the unpopular tint called red; not auburn, or copper hued, or the famous Titian color, but a blazing, fiery red, which made it look like a comic wig. Her face was pale and freckled, her eyes black—in strange contrast to her hair, and her mouth large, but garnished with an excellent set ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... triumphs; it is to his delineations, from the moralist's point of view, of vulgarity and vice,—of the "rank life of towns," with all its squalid tragedy and comedy. Here he finds his strongest ground, and possibly, notwithstanding his powers as a comic artist and caricaturist, ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... death of Fionn's father Cumal, are Fionn, his son Oisin, his grandson Oscar, his nephew Diarmaid with his ball-seire, or "beauty-spot," which no woman could resist; Fergus famed for wisdom and eloquence; Caoilte mac Ronan, the swift; Conan, the comic character of the saga; Goll mac Morna, the slayer of Cumal, but later the devoted friend of Fionn, besides a host of less important personages. Their doings, like those of the heroes of saga and epos everywhere, are mainly hunting, fighting, and love-making. They embody much ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... in a roar of laughter at his jokes and the stories he told of the genuine Yankees whom he had seen in New England, and the Johnny Bulls he had encountered in England, and whose peculiarities of voice and expression he imitated perfectly. Then he recited poetry, comic and tragic and descriptive; and was so entertaining and brilliant, and so very courteous and gentlemanly in all he did and said, that Bessie was enraptured and showed it in her speaking face, which Neil knew always told the truth, and when ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... was produced at Drury Lane. Oroonoko was created by Verbruggen, Powell acted Aboan, and the beautiful Mrs. Rogers Imoinda. The play has some magnificent passages, and long kept the stage. Southerne had further added an excellent comic underplot, full of humour and the truest vis comica. It is perhaps worth noting that the intrigues of Lucy and Charlotte and the Lackitt menage were dished up as a short slap-bang farce by themselves with, curiously enough, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... - piethe of comic infant bithnith,' said Sleary. 'There'th a property-houthe, you thee, for Jack to hide in; there'th my Clown with a thauthepan-lid and a thpit, for Jack'th thervant; there'th little Jack himthelf in a thplendid thoot of armour; there'th two comic black thervanth ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... comic ditty of a convivial order. She put into it much vivacity, appealing to the audience to join in the chorus with a pleading, "Now all together, boys." She had tripping steps and dainty kicks that went well with the melody. When she went off half a dozen ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... proceeds; always in a tone of comic good-temper, but pointing to a very real grievance and point of dispute; and helping the reader to realise the long friction which went on, and finally resulted in the unanimity with which publishers and editors ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... (ii. 449) gives a tradition of the Prophet, "Whoso is in love, and acteth chastely, and concealeth (his passion) and dieth, dieth a martyr." Sakar is No. 5 Hell for Magi Guebres, Parsis, etc., it is used in the comic Persian curse, "Fi'n-nari wa Sakar al-jadd w'al-pidar"ln Hell and Sakar his grandfather and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... than put us in rising spirits. It convinced the Armenians! That foolish jargon, picked up from comic papers and the penny dreadfuls, convince more firmly than any written proof the products of the mission schools, whose one ambition was to be American themselves, and whose one pathetic peak of humor was the occasional ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... such a labourer worthy of his hire?" replied his employer with enthusiasm, and producing from his pocket the purse which Lysbeth had given Adrian, with a smile of peculiar satisfaction, for really the thing had a comic side, he counted a handsome sum into the hand ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... this oppressive feeling may have weighed upon you in watching this old-fashioned family life on the banks of the Floss, which even sorrow hardly suffices to lift above the level of the tragi-comic. It is a sordid life, you say, this of the Tullivers and Dodsons, irradiated by no sublime principles, no romantic visions, no active, self-renouncing faith; moved by none of those wild, uncontrollable ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... not forbear saying, that she rejoyced in the Tears he had shed for Clarissa. And, Sir, (continued she) 'I am convinced, that those whose Eyes melt not at Scenes of well-wrought Distress, cannot properly be said to laugh, from a liberal and chearful Spirit, at the true Scenes of comic Humour.' ...
— Remarks on Clarissa (1749) • Sarah Fielding
... you a chronic disinclination to take me seriously, Louis. It is really—to an Englishman—almost painful. Is there something inherently comic about me or the ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... dress-suit at the Wallacetown "movies" was comic to the last degree, but the merciless Austin jumped ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... Home," whenever he lectured upon any special subject. In relating a case, he was seen at times to be quite fatigued with the contortions into which he threw his body and limbs; and the stories he would tell of his consultations, with the dialogue between his patient and himself, were theatrical and comic ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... occasion when it would have been boorish in me to refuse to meet them halfway. I even told them an excellent wheeze I had long known, which I thought they might not, have heard. It runs: "Why is Charing Cross? Because the Strand runs into it." I mean to say, this is comic providing one enters wholly into the spirit of it, as there is required a certain nimbleness of mind to get the point, as one might say. In the present instance some needed element was lacking, for they actually drew aloof from me and conversed in low tones among themselves, ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... who nourishes his mighty soul on the blood of his fellow-men, and undertakes to right a private wrong by running amuck against society in another part of the world, is a figure upon which we decline to waste our sympathy. We have no place for him in our scheme of art unless it be in comic opera or in the penny dreadful. Emotionally we have lost touch with him as we have with Byron's Corsair. When he stalks across the serious stage and rages and fumes and wipes his bloody sword, we are inclined to smile or to yawn. As for the villain Franz, with his abysmal depravity, and Amalia, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... beautiful piece (a very Hans Sacks beatified, both in character and style), which we wish there was any possibility of translating.' The reader will be aware that Hans Sachs was the celebrated Minstrel- Cobbler of Nuremberg, who Wrote 208 plays, 1700 comic tales, and between 4000 and 5000 lyric poems. He flourished throughout almost the whole of ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... followed at the next halt and at the next; so that when the Prussians reached the Frenchward end of Vaudere there were twenty-three Prussians and ten Frenchmen in the file. To Fevrier's thinking it was sufficiently comic. There was ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... power and glory of Pericles were at their height that he formed that memorable attachment to Aspasia, a Milesian woman, which furnished a fruitful subject for the attacks of the comic poets. She was the most brilliant and intellectual woman of the age, and her house was the resort of the literary men and philosophers and artists of Athens until the death of Pericles. He formed as close a union with her as the law allowed, and her influence ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... music to celebrate coffee. Brittany has its own songs in praise of coffee, as have other French provinces. There are many epics, rhapsodies, and cantatas—and even a comic opera by Meilhat, music by Deffes, bearing the title, Le Cafe du Roi, produced at the Theatre Lyrique, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... they insisted upon his company. "I am really touched," he wrote afterward to the parents of two of the visiting boys, "at the way in which your children as well as my own treat me as a friend and playmate. It has its comic side. They were all bent upon having me take them; they obviously felt that my presence was needed to give zest to the entertainment. I do not think that one of them saw anything incongruous in the President's getting as bedaubed with ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... worn 'em, Miss Faith—and I can't keep this!" said Sam surveying the cake with a very serio-comic face. ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... book—that which Mr. Merrick calls "The Tragedy of a Comic Song"—is in my view the funniest story of this century: but I don't ask or expect the Magazine Enthusiast to share this view or to endorse that judgment. "The Tragedy of a Comic Song" is essentially one ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... The Italian influence remained strikingly visible. Blasius Darxich, Sigismund Menze, Mauro Vetranich, and Stephen Gozze (ob. 1576), are mentioned as the first Dalmatian poets. The latter wrote a comic epic, the Dervishiade, which met with great success. A poem of the same kind is Jegyupka, the Gipsy, by Andreas Giubronavich, printed at Venice 1559. Dominic Zlatarich (ob. 1608) translated Tasso and the Electra of Sophocles, and was himself a ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... sides of a small fire, with only a table between them, the Abbe keeping his eyes constantly fixed on Monsieur St. Gille all the time. Half an hour had passed, during which that gentleman diverted the Abbe with a relation of many comic scenes which he had given occasion to by this talent of his; when, all on a sudden, the Abbe heard himself called by his name and title, in a voice that seemed to come from the roof of a house at a distance. He ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... and made shapely through contact with Latin drama, passes from the provincial market-place to Bankside, and the rude mechanicals of the trade-guilds yield place to the Lord Chamberlain's players. In the dramas of Shakespeare the popular note is still audible, but only as an undertone, furnishing comic relief to the romantic amours of courtly lovers or the tragic fall of Princes; with Beaumont and Fletcher, and still more with Dryden and the Restoration dramatists, the popular element in the drama passes away, ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... came we went to our seats under the whispering, sighing fir trees. It was a beautiful night—clear, windless, frosty. Some one galloped down the road on horseback, lustily singing a comic song. How dared he? We felt that it was an insult to our wretchedness. If Peter were going to—going to—well, if anything happened to Peter, we felt so miserably sure that the music of life would be stilled for us for ever. How could ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... at woman's use of dress and ornaments as bait for entrapping lovers, and many a squib expressing this theory appeared in the newspapers. These cynical notes no more represented the general opinion of the people than do similar satires in the comic sheets of to-day; but they are interesting at least, as showing a long prevailing weakness among men. The following sarcastic advertisement, for instance, was written by ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... jumped with joy at the phrase. From that moment Cennick was known as "Swaddling John";120 and his name was introduced into comic songs at the music-halls. As he walked through the streets he had now to be guarded by an escort of friendly soldiers; and the mob, ten or fifteen thousand in number, pelted him with dirt, stones and bricks. At one service, says the local diary, "near ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... a subtle seducer of women, who, however, escaped detection by a smooth, conventional bearing. He was interested in such girls as Georgia Timberlake, Irma Ottley, a rosy, aggressive maiden who essayed comic roles, and Stephanie Platow. These, with another girl, Ethel Tuckerman, very emotional and romantic, who could dance charmingly and sing, made up a group of friends which became very close. Presently intimacies sprang up, only in ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... agreed to be the dupes of anything preposterous; and the respect which these mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which details of high life are read, betray the universality of the love of cultivated manners. I know that a comic disparity would be felt, if we should enter the acknowledged 'first circles,' and apply these terrific standards of justice, beauty, and benefit, to the individuals actually found there. Monarchs ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Bishop Clayton and John Mitchell, who stood firmly by the scientific method; but these appear generally to have been overwhelmed by a chorus of churchmen and dissenters, whose mixtures of theology and science, sometimes tragic in their results and sometimes comic, are among the most instructive ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... said Maxwell, "except as it's stupid, and loves anything that makes it laugh. It loves a comic lover, and in the same way it loves a droll ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... face to another along the miserable line of his captives. In a harsh, imperious voice he said something which brought Mansoor, the dragoman, to the front, with bent back and outstretched supplicating palms. To his employers there had always seemed to be something comic in that flapping skirt and short cover-coat above it; but now, under the glare of the mid-day sun, with those faces gathered round them, it appeared rather to add a grotesque horror to the scene. The dragoman salaamed and salaamed like some ungainly automatic doll, and then, as the ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... magnificence of their surroundings. There is a type of butler employed in the comparatively modest homes of small country gentlemen who is practically a man and a brother; who hobnobs with the local tradesmen, sings a good comic song at the village inn, and in times of crisis will even turn to and work the pump when the ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... passed with no other casualty than might seem comic to the inhumane. Yet we looked round on serious faces and—a fact that spoke volumes—Tom was putting up the shutters on the bar. Custom might go elsewhere, Mr. Williams might profit as he pleased, but Tom had had enough ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hilarity when she seemed to carry all before her. Her sisters could not help laughing every time Betty opened her lips, and it was the same during recess. When many girls clustered round her with their gay jokes, they became convulsed with laughter at her comic replies. ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... voice of the lawyer or the orator; but these attractions were occasional and the constant throng that any day might witness was drawn thither by the enticements supplied by the spirit of adventure, the thirst for news and the strain of business life. The comic poet has drawn for us a picture of the shifting crowd and its chief elements, good and bad, honest and dishonest. He has shown us the man who mingles pleasure with his business, lingering under the Basilica in extremely doubtful ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... laughter, and has been rewarded by commendation for his services to morality and condemnation for his buffoonery. The majority of Plautine critics have evinced too serious an attitude of mind in dealing with a comic poet. However portentous and profound his scholarship, no one deficient in a sense of humor should venture to approach a comic poet in a spirit of criticism. For criticism ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... follow—he did up the genteel comedy; he kept on hand a supply of "little jokes" gleaned from Joe Miller, current comic literature, dinner tables, clubs, etc.—"little jokes" of which every point in his discourse continually reminded him, though his hearers could not always perceive the association of ideas. This ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... follows: "I defy you to lay a Hand on me. I am the Stand-By of the Comic Artist and the Star Attraction of the Colored Supplement. When I pull the Step-Ladder from under some Honest Workingman, causing him to break his Leg, or hit a Stout Lady in the Eye with a Brick, please remember that I am bringing Sunshine into thousands of Homes. As ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... the scene—this is the country which the greatest English statesman tells us must be governed as we govern the Antipodes." And he emphasized the last word with a downward sweep of his right hand, which in a commonplace speaker would have been frankly comic, but in this great master of oratory was a ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... council of war. This meant that Scott called Bowers, and perhaps Oates, into our tent after supper was finished in the morning. Somehow these conferences were always rather serio-comic. On this occasion, as was usually the case, the question was ponies. It was decided to wait here one day and rest them, as there was ample food. The main discussion centred round the amount of forage to be taken on from here, ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... about fifteen years of age, with such a development of under-lip and such a want of development elsewhere, that his head looked like a scoop. There was an infinite fund of humor in Billy, an uncontrollable sense of the comic, that would break out in spite of his grave endeavors to put himself under guard. It exhibited itself in his motions and gestures, in the flourish of his hands as he buckled up the pony, in the looseness of his gait, the swing of his head, and the roll of his eyes. His very ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... Marshall, the wife of a Sir Everard Marshall, a comic scientist in perpetual flight from his overwhelming spouse, is one of the sort that finds a new religion every few months and is now in the first fast furious throes of her latest, which is some form of psychomania, whereof the high priest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... nine o'clock. He was pale and dejected, stained with dust, and exhausted with hunger and fatigue. A cold supper was ready upon the table, and when his needs were satisfied and his pipe alight he was ready to take that half comic and wholly philosophic view which was natural to him when his affairs were going awry. The sound of carriage wheels caused him to rise and glance out of the window. A brougham and pair of greys under the glare of a gas-lamp ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... wonder that some, hearing this dread sentence, go half crazy in a frenzied effort to clutch at what remains, run amok, so to say, in their despairing determination to have, if need be, a last "good time" and die. Their efforts are apt to be either distasteful or pathetically comic, and the world is apt to be cynically contemptuous of the "romantic" outbursts of aging people. For myself, I always feel for them a deep and tender sympathy. I know that they have heard that last fearful call to the dining-car of life—and, poor souls, they have ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... expected to crack jokes about the crockery and lighten up the granite ware with persiflage. I was second bookkeeper, and if I failed to show up a balance sheet without something comic about the footings or could find no cause for laughter in an invoice of plows, the other clerks were disappointed. By degrees my fame spread, and I became a local "character." Our town was small enough to ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... the churchyard is crowded, but is by no means distinguished for that artistic character—which it might have received as covering the remains of so great an artist. A small slab, in relief, takes from it, however, the charge of insipidity; it contains a comic mask, an oak branch, pencils and mahl-stick, a book and a scroll, and the palette, marked with the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... with gentlemen. When I was a young fellow I tell you I enjoyed myself. I mixed with fine decent fellows. Everyone of us could do something. One fellow had a good voice, another fellow was a good actor, another could sing a good comic song, another was a good oarsman or a good racket player, another could tell a good story and so on. We kept the ball rolling anyhow and enjoyed ourselves and saw a bit of life and we were none the worse of it either. ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... in the Soudan. A soldier had been nearly hacked in two by a broad-bladed Arab spear. For one instant the man felt no pain. Looking down, he saw that his life-blood was going from him. The stupid bewilderment on his face was so intensely comic that both Dick and Torpenhow, still panting and unstrung from a fight for life, had roared with laughter, in which the man seemed as if he would join, but, as his lips parted in a sheepish grin, the agony of death came upon him, and he pitched grunting at their feet. Dick laughed ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... inexhaustible Paisiello, charmed with her performance of his "Nel cor piu non me sento," and his "Io son Lindoro," will produce some new masterpiece to introduce the debutante. Others insist upon it that her forte is the comic, and that Cimarosa is hard at work at another "Matrimonia Segreto." But in the meanwhile there is a check in the diplomacy somewhere. The Cardinal is observed to be out of humour. He has said publicly,—and the words are portentous,—"The silly girl is as mad as her father; ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... not very explicable on any principles, as a detail not visible without search was sought and verified, and that by a habitual mocker at anything out of the common way. For example, Hone published a comic explanation, correct or not, of the ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... during the process of its withdrawal, and grievously lacerating the bowels. Sometimes an enormous radish was substituted for the mullet. According to an epigram quoted by Vossius from the Anthologia, Alcaeus, the comic writer, died under this ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... of this building, it was by no means destined to revive the earlier prosperity of the tragic and comic drama. Even at the opening of it the signs of degeneracy are apparent. Luckily for us Cicero was in Rome at the time, and in a letter to a friend in the country he congratulates him on being too unwell to come to Rome and see the spoiling of old tragedies by over-display.[511] "The ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... romanticism, all his poetry, all his joy. Its abundance of life bears one along like a fast-flowing river. And it is not without humour, a calm, detached humour, which, as the critic Bolinsky puts it, is not there merely "because Gogol has a tendency to see the comic in everything, but because it ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in the one object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic to those who do not share the philosopher's perception of identity. To him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws. Though ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... closely followed by Henry at the head of his cavalry, and lively skirmishes were of frequent occurrence. In a military point of view none of these affairs were of consequence, but there was one which partook at once of the comic and the pathetic. For it chanced that in a cavalry action of more than common vivacity the Count Chaligny found himself engaged in a hand to hand conflict with a very dashing swordsman, who, after dealing and receiving many severe blows, at last succeeded in disarming the count ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... daytime things there were two very good theatres, at one of which I saw Mr. Barrie's Little Mary given better than in New York (that was easy), and at the other a comic opera, with a bit of comedy or tragedy in a stage-box, not announced in the bills. The audience was otherwise decorous enough to be composed of Welsh Baptist elders and their visiting friends, but in this box there were two young men in evening dress, scuffling ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... of light and amusing incidents; it exhibits the foibles of individuals, the manners of society, and the humorous phases of life. The name tragi-comedy is applied to a drama in which tragic and comic scenes are intermingled. A farce is a short comedy distinguished by its slight thought and ridiculous caricature or extravagance. A melodrama is a drama with a romantic story or plot, and sensational situations and ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... no novelty, and was fortunately regarded by the gallant electors present as a form of comic relief. I adopted my usual plan ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... was a horrid man, and deserved to be done away with," said Daisy. The idea struck them both as so very comic that they began to ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... for Fan's general inquiries produced only provokingly unsatisfactory replies from Tom, who sang the praises of "the beautiful Miss Bailey," and professed to be consumed by a hopeless passion for somebody, in such half-comic, half-tragic terms, that the girls could not decide whether it was "all that boy's mischief," or only a cloak ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... has shewn me one of the most strange, eccentric, and perhaps comic letters, from honest Aby, that I think I ever read. I am glad it is not quite so intelligible to Sir Arthur as it is to me; for I see no good that could result, were he to understand its true sense. The old—! I can find no epithet for him that pleases me—Well then—Honest Aby ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... in virile march, reveals the man himself, his physical glamour, his intoxication that caused him to see in every woman the Venus, and that in the end made him the victim as well as the hero of the sexual life. It is Till Eulenspiegel himself, the scurvy, comic rascal, the eternal dirty little boy with his witty and obscene gestures, who leers out of every measure of the tone-poem named for him, and twirls his fingers at his nose's end at all the decorous and respectable world. Here, for once, orchestral music is really wonderfully rascally ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... evident to the most unpracticed eye; and in no way can one get a better idea of the brute's power than by watching it busily working for its breakfast, shattering big logs and upsetting boulders by sheer strength. There is always a touch of the comic, as well as a touch of the strong and terrible, in a bear's look and actions. It will tug and pull, now with one paw, now with two, now on all fours, now on its hind legs, in the effort to turn over a ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... never been a patient man, and the feelings which that wild girl had awakened in his heart were all too earnest for such trifling. He rose to leave her. Then she gave him a side glance, half comic, half repentant. ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... informed us gravely that "Thunder and Lightning" was just then in such an especially surly state of temper as to render it quite unsafe for me to think of painting him. I looked inquiringly at Mr. Garthwaite, who smiled with an air of comic resignation, and said, "Very well, then, we have nothing for it but to wait till to-morrow. What do you say to a morning's fishing, Mr. Kerby, now that my bull's bad temper has given us ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... sense, with genius fraught, Canst thou to Fashion's tyranny submit, Secure in native, independent wit? Or yield to Sentiment's insipid rule, By Taste, by Fancy, chac'd through Scandal's school? Ah no—be Sheridan's the comic page, Or let me fly with Garrick from the stage. Haste then, my friend, (for let me boast that name,) Haste to the opening path of genuine fame; Or, if thy muse a gentler theme pursue, Ah, 'tis to love and thy Eliza due! For, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... to publish Salmagundi, a magazine containing humorous articles on the social life of New York. This became so popular that twenty numbers were issued. Having found so much of interest in the life of his native city, Irving next wrote a comic History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, dealing with the early period when the city was ruled by the Dutch. The novel way in which this work was announced would do credit to the most clever advertiser. About six weeks before the book ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... much-loved staff, dear to him by many a fond recollection of riot repressed, and evildoer apprehended, and away it went, floating with the tide, far, far astern. His unmitigated horror at this event was comic in the extreme, and the keeper of the king's peace could not have evinced more unsophisticated sorrow than did the late keeper of his conscience at the loss of the Seals, the more especially as the magistrate's clerk refused to permit the boat to go in pursuit of it, not wishing ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... anti-geologist resides,—describes in a recent work, with the enthusiasm of the poet, the noble mountains which rise around it. I know not, however, whether my admiration of the passage was not in some degree dashed by a few comic notions suggestive of an "imaginary conversation," in the style of Landor, between this popular author and his anti-geologic townsman, on the merits of hills in general, and in especial on the claims of those which encircle Comrie ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... plays our hero, and who is the idol of the stalls. Mr. O'Malley, our comic man. Mr. Whistler, who does heavy father parts, wig and all. Mr. Jimmy Rolls, who dances on light toes and who prompts when nothing else is doing. The ladies, honey, take their names on trust, you will find them ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... gazing at one another with a grim, half-angry, half-comic expression, and ere they could speak, three maidens disguised as warriors stood meekly one before each brave, a horse's tail in one hand, and the other trophies in the other. The friends tried their utmost to look angry; but the countenances of the girls were so meek, and yet so malicious, ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... himself, except that little of him which seemed to square with their shallow mechanical taste. The old fairy superstition, the old legends and ballads, the old chronicles of feudal war and chivalry, the earlier moralities and mysteries, and tragi-comic attempts—these were the roots of his poetic tree—they must be the roots of any literary education which can teach us to appreciate him. These fed Shakespeare's youth; why should they not feed our children's? Why indeed? That inborn delight ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... went out to fight,"' hummed the student rather derisively, but he did not proceed further than the first line of the old song. Some of the others laughed, and all smiled at the allusion to the comic battle. ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... presented itself with an aspect which he might have found comic if it had been another's destiny. Mr. Hubbell brought March's removal, softened in the guise of a promotion. The management at New York, it appeared, had acted upon a suggestion of Mr. Hubbell's, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... comic aspect to these strokes of state. The lists of new magistrates being hurriedly furnished by the Prince's adherents to supply the place of those evicted, it often happened that men not quahified by property, residence, or other attributes were appointed to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... degradation, But would oblige the crown and nation Next to your wise negotiation. 70 If you pretend, as well you may, Your high degree, your friends will say, The Duke St Aignon made a play. If Gallic wit convince you scarce, His Grace of Bucks has made a farce, And you, whose comic wit is terse all, Can hardly fall below rehearsal. Then finish what you have began; But scribble faster, if you can: For yet no George, to our discerning, 80 Has writ without a ten ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... go to ruin, they may let it; and if the two little birds—there was a cock and hen—didn't bring up twelve of the rummiest little, tiny young uns I ever did see. There they was, all a-sitting in a row along the gun, and it seemed to me so comic for 'em to be there that I bust ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... assumption of the name of Robinson had been misunderstood and severely commented upon by the judge. A sympathetic jury had awarded thumping damages, and for the next six months the family title would be a peg on which music-hall singers and comic journalists would hang their ribald jokes. Lord C—- read the letter, flushed, and dutifully handed it back to his mother. She made pretence to read it as for the first time, and counselled him to accord ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... human exhibit, stripped of all the chimera of romance with which Little Rivers had clothed his personality. If he had not happened to meet her on the pass, the townspeople would have regarded this stranger as an invasion of real life by a character out of a comic opera. She viewed the specimen under a magnifying glass in all angles, turning it around as if it were a bronze ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... the critic touches but the thing whereby he relates this author to his following and to the world. The young man John, Colonel Sprowle with his 'social entertainment,' the Landlady and her daughter, and the Poor Relation, almost make up the sum of the comic personages, and fifty per cent. of the things they say—no more—are good enough to remain after the bloom of their vulgarity has worn off. But that half is excellent, keen, jolly, temperate; and because of that temperance—the most stimulating and fecundating of qualities—the humour of it has ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... loosens our hold on it, is the only pain that is really tragic. That which attaches to particular objects is a will that is broken, but not resigned; it exhibits the struggle and inner contradiction of the will and of life itself; and it is comic, be it never so violent. It is like the pain of the miser at the loss of his hoard. Even though pain of the tragic kind proceeds from a single definite object, it does not remain there; it takes the separate affliction only as a symbol of life ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... and few thanks. He brought Lancelot his breakfast before hunting, described the run to him when he returned, read him to sleep, told him stories of grizzly bear and buffalo-hunts, made him laugh in spite of himself at extempore comic medleys, kept his tables covered with flowers from the conservatory, warmed his chocolate, and even his bed. Nothing came amiss to him, and he to nothing. Lancelot longed at first every hour to be rid of him, and eyed him about the room as a bulldog ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... Christopher Benson and the school which has acquired celebrity by holding the mirror up to its own nature. The wonder was that Mr. Benson did not, following his precedent, write to the papers to say that Mr. Whitten was no gentleman. In the days before the Academy blended the characteristics of a comic paper with those of a journal of dogmatic theology, before it took to disowning its own reviewers, Mr. Whitten was the solid foundation of that paper's staff. He furnished the substance, which was embroidered by the dark grace of the personality ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... The man gaped in comic dismay as Bud pounced on him and pinned him to the ground. Moments later, the two police officers rushed ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... hour my canoe was full to sinking; and I should certainly have sunk with my cargo, had it not been most opportunely taken out by one of the spare boats. All was high glee on shore and on the lake, and the scene was now and then still diversified by comic accidents, causing the more mirth, as there was no possibility ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... and the sight of him put the American into a friendly humor. He was everywhere, the little pantalon rouge, streaming the walks, dotting the cafes with red, and every wee piou-piou under the great big epaulettes of a great big comic opera generalissimo. His huge military coat fitted him awkwardly, and the crimson pompon cocked on his little fighting kepi was more often awry, and he could not by any effort achieve a strut. He was only bon enfant, this unconquered soldier ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... Schroeder's house threatened to hide him from view, he would stop, drop the sample case, wave his hand just once, pick up the sample case and go on, proceeding backward for a step or two until Schroeder's house made good its threat. It was a comic scene in the eyes of the onlooker, perhaps because a chubby Romeo offends the sense of fitness. The neighbors, lurking behind their parlor curtains, had laughed at first. But after a while they learned to look for that little scene, and to take it ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... for a human dogfish like Bat Reeves," he grunted, his heart full of righteous bitterness against a proclaimed enemy, "but as first selectman of this town I don't stand for makin' a comic joke-book out of this cemetery." He climbed over the fence, secured the offending board and split it across his broad toe. Then with the pieces under his arm he trudged on toward the town office, having it in his mind to use the board for kindling ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... "Exceedingly comic," said the Phoenix severely. "I am quite overcome with mirth and merriment. But perhaps—perhaps—I shall let you off lightly if you tell us ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... approval not later than the 10th December the details of their songs and dances. Comedians will also submit their "gags" and comic scenes for blue-pencilling. This is merely a matter of form and the strictest secrecy as to their real intentions will be preserved in order that the principle of "springing it on one another" ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... Bob; but I think it quite as sensible as many of the criticisms of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,—as that one of his, for instance, upon "Measure for Measure," which I never read without a feeling of personal injury. I should like to know if it is writing criticism to write,—"Of this play, the light or comic part is very natural and pleasing; but the grave scenes, if a few passages be excepted, have more labor than elegance." Now, if old Boltcourt had written instead, as he might have done, if the fit had been on him,—"Of this play, the heavy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Bungay, are chaotic enough, but they are of the chaos that precedes cosmic development. The almost insane bombast that marks the whole school has (as has been noticed) the character of the shrieks and gesticulations of healthy childhood, and the insensibility to the really comic which also marks them is of a similar kind. Every one knows how natural it is to childhood to appreciate bad jokes, how seldom a child sees a good one. Marlowe and his crew, too (the comparison has no doubt often been used before), were of the brood of Otus ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... tame ending which actually came about—namely, the High Commissioner's intervention coupled with President Kruger's moderation and wisdom in allowing England to punish her own irregular soldiers. The more one heard of the whole affair, the more it seemed to resemble a scene out of a comic opera. The only people at Johannesburg who had derived any advantage from the confusion were several hitherto unknown military commanders, who had proudly acquired the title of Colonel, and had promptly named a body ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... of the Meeting over the way for a barrack, Aunt Gainor." Now this was idly rumoured, but how could one resist to feed an occasion so comic? ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... this lady? Had she lived in the days of Juvenal, it might have been supposed that he had her in his eye, when he drew, in his sixth satire, the picture of the "greatest of all plagues"—had her existence been cast in the time of the prince of French comic writers, she would undoubtedly have been presumed to be the prototype of the heroine in one of his most exquisite comedies; we need hardly say, therefore, that she is, in the words of Boileau, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... very prosperous and clean comic opera gypsies, Mrs. Nesbit," said Hippy Wingate, who had come up just in time to ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower |
