"Humorist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his chums differ as widely in character as in personal appearance. We have Patrick O'Fflahertie, the good-natured Irish boy; Jack Brookes, the irrepressible humorist; Davie Jackson, the true-hearted little lad, on whose haps and mishaps the plot to a great extent turns; and the hero himself, who finds in his experiences at Wynport College a wholesome corrective of a ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... genial humorist came near the serious reality of a duel he was the party challenged. The cause of the misunderstanding that promised to result so tragically was a magazine article in which the doctor caricatured a peculiar ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... except perhaps a butcher or an undertaker? Yet I can only keep myself alive with music. That's the jest of the Arch Humorist. My father was a clergyman. He droned out services for fifty years in a hamlet, with a little square church like a wooden money-box. I was taught music so that I could - well - make the tin-pot organ groan, ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... poet of religious England: born 1731; died 1800. Cowper was an elegant humorist, despite the gloominess of his religious belief. It is said, however, that his most comic effusions were written during periods ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... as a humorist or song-writer or publisher that I wish to portray him, but as an odd, lovable personality, possessed of so many interesting and peculiar and almost indescribable traits. Of all characters in fiction he perhaps most suggests Jack Falstaff, with his love of women, his bravado and ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... President Lincoln referred to Mississippi gunboats with draught so light that they would float wherever the ground was a little damp. Typically American in its grotesquerie was the assertion of a rural humorist who asserted that the hogs thereabout were so thin they had to have a knot tied in their tails to prevent them from crawling through ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... Among them were the local celebrities in other things than war, Daniel, Bagby, Pegram, Randolph, and a half-dozen more, musicians, artists, poets, orators and wits. People were quite democratic, and Harry and Dalton were free to draw their chairs near the edge of the group and listen. Pegram, the humorist, gave them a glance of approval, when he noticed their uniforms, the deep tan of their faces, their honest eyes and their ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... humorist, who died In the bright Indian Summer of his fame! A simple stone, with but a date and name, Marks his secluded resting-place beside The river that he loved and glorified. Here in the autumn of his days he came, But the dry leaves of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... reasons why Dr. Franklin, who was universally confessed to be the ablest pen in America, was not always asked to write the great documents of the Revolution. He would have put a joke into the Declaration of Independence, if it had fallen to him to write it. At this time he was a humorist of fifty years standing, and had become fixed in the habit of illustrating great truths by grotesque and familiar similes. His jokes, the circulating medium of Congress, were as helpful to the cause, as Jay's ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... humorist, who, in times of peace, was the owner of a fried fish and chip barrow in that home of low comedians—the East End. After him appeared Sergeant Andrews, disguised in one of Eliza's discarded skirts, with a wisp of straw ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... and Christian principles are theoretically, if not practically, taken for granted, a new range of qualities comes in sight. By humour I do not mean a taste for irresponsible merriment; for though humour is not a necessarily melancholy thing, in this imperfect world the humorist sighs as often as he smiles. What I mean by it is a keen perception of the rich incongruities and absurdities of life, its undue solemnity, its guileless pretentiousness. To be true humour, it must not be at all a cynical thing—as soon as it becomes cynical, it loses all ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ambrosial, if not of Ambrose's, which dashed the somber picture of war round Richmond, with high-lights boldly put in by master-hands! Of them were quaint George Bagby, Virginia's pet humorist; gallant, cultured Willie Meyers; original Trav Daniel; Washington, artist, poet and musician; Page McCarty, recklessly brilliant in field and frolic alike; Ham Chamberlayne, quaint, cultivated and colossal in originality; Key, Elder and other artists; genial, jovial Jim Pegram; Harry Stanton, ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... being left on one side of the main currents of commercial activity, and gradually assuming a character of repose and leisure, in many regards more attractive than the life and bustle of earlier days. Many persons are still living there who remember the humorist as a quaint and tricksy boy, alternating between laughter and preternatural gravity, and of a surprising ingenuity in devising odd practical jokes in which good nature so far prevailed that even the victims were too much amused to be ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... beaming broadly upon the minister, as if the mere mention of the fact promoted jollity. "That's it, Brother Gorringe,—take your seat at Brother Ware's desk. Mind the Dominie's pen don't play tricks on you, an' start off writin' out sermons instid of figgers." The humorist turned to Theron as the lawyer walked over to the desk at the window. "I allus have to caution him about that," he remarked with great joviality. "An' do YOU look out afterwards, Brother Ware, or else you'll catch that pen o' yours scribblin' ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... coming guild—that ancient local festival, which is so clear to the people of Preston, that they are not likely to allow it to go by wholly unhonoured, however severe the times may be. Amongst them was a gray-haired friend of mine, who is a genuine humorist. He told us many quaint anecdotes. One of them was of a man who went to inquire the price of graves in a certain cemetery. The sexton told him that they were 1 pound on this side, and 2 pounds on the other side of the knoll. "How is it that they are 2 pounds on the other side?" inquired ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... was rudely cut short by the loss of his fortune and he was forced to earn his living by literature and journalism. Under various pseudonyms he soon gained a reputation as a satirist and humorist, his first success being The Great Hoggarty Diamond. Then years of work for PUNCH and other papers followed before he won enduring fame by Vanity Fair, which he styled "a novel ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... conundrum "As the natives of Mulinuu appear to be under the protection of the Imperial German naval guard belonging to the vessel under your command, I have the honour to request you to inform me whether or not they are under such protection? Amicable relations," pursued the humorist, "amicable relations exist between the government of the United States and His Imperial German Majesty's government, but we do not recognise Tamasese's government, and I am desirous of locating the responsibility for violations of American ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sucked up juices from all the land, whose liberal fruits were showered all around; having a key to unlock all hearts, and a treasure for each; hospitable friend, husband-lover, doting father; a boisterous wit, fantastic humorist, master of pathos, practical joker, sincere mourner; always an extremist, yielding to various excess; an April day, all smiles and tears; January and May met together; a many-sided fanatic; a universal enthusiast; a large-hearted sectarian; a hot-headed judge; a strong sketch ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... Charles B. Loomis, the widely known humorist, is an extremely original and clever juvenile, Mr. Loomis's first piece of long fiction. It has a fairy-tale motive in an entirely realistic setting. A country boy, who has a marvellous power of plucking fruit from the bare branches of any ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... splendid humorist, Mr. Crewe. Five dollars wouldn't pay for the plate and the paper. A gentleman like you could give us twenty-five, and never know it was gone. You won't be wanting to stop in the Legislature, Mr. Crewe, and we remember ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of comedy that goes with spirit and sparkle, Mrs. Fedden's little story shows her to be a genuine humorist.... She deserves to be welcomed cordially to the ranks of those who can make us ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... how can we best characterize briefly this fascinating, versatile genius, the most delightful humorist of his time, one of the most artistic story-tellers, one of the greatest novelists? It is impossible to classify him, for he was more than a humorist, he nearly outgrew romance, he never accepted unreservedly ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... superb teeth; the cheeks were glowing, as were the eyes, the crimson below them deepening to splendor the velvet in the iris. The one severe line in the face, the thin, straight nose, ended in wide nostrils in the quivering, mobile nostrils of the humorist. The swell of the gourmand's paunch beneath the soutane was proof that the cure was a true Norman he had not passed a lifetime in these fertile gardens forgetful of the fact that the fine art of good living is the one indulgence the Church has left ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... plowed and planted and prayed for rain, was incidentally demonstrating the exact length of time that a human being could live on jack-rabbit and navy beans, were the only other users of the mountain range. Was it the hoax of some local humorist? Or an attempt to intimidate and worry her by someone whose enmity ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... keeps a little house down at Wimbledon, these things have a way of dropping out as time goes on.' 'Just like the teeth,' said I. He thought over this for a while, and then laughed—oh, he laughed quite a lot—and declared I was a humorist. He hadn't heard anything so quick, not for a long while. 'Mr. Collingwood,' he said, 'I'm a lonely man with it all. I don't mind owning to you that I've taken up these here politics partly for distraction. It used to be different when me and Maria could stick it out over a game of bezique. ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... be a great journalist, and spelled hard words with great fluency. He never tried to be a humorist in any of his newspaper work, and everybody ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... attempt to classify, must be almost as numerous as the representatives themselves. In Hoelderlin we have the ardent Hellenic idealist; Lenau gives expression to all the pathos of Weltschmerz, Heine is its satirist, the misanthrope, while in Raabe we even have a pessimistic humorist. ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... some little reputation as a humorist, but as is so often the case with those who make us laugh, his very success will prove ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... for a writer to be known as a humorist; nobody will take him seriously ever afterward. Even a book suffers from such a reputation, the famous Don Quixote for example, which we read as a type of extravagant humor but which is in reality a tragedy, since it portrays the disillusionment of a man who believed the world ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Lord Brampton, better known as Sir Henry Hawkins, tells many good stories of himself in his Reminiscences, but it is the unconscious humorist of Marylebone Police Court who records this ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... the neighboring streets were lively with bargains of prickly pears spread open on the ground by old women who did not care whether any one bought or not. There were also bargains in palmistry; and at one place a delightful humorist was selling clothing at auction. He allured the bidders by having his left hand dressed as a puppet and holding a sparkling dialogue with it; when it did not respond to his liking he beat it with his right hand, ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... stated hours. Obviously a widow, she had a poor, loose-hung, trailing little body, which no nourishment could plump or fortify. Her visage was habitually doleful, but contracted itself at moments into a grin of quaint drollery, which betrayed her for something of a humorist. ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... everything that was coming to us. His tent was right at the head of the street; he wanted us to come to him at any time for any question; it was his business (and again no twinkle) to make our minds as well as our bodies comfortable. Thus I get the impression that he is something of a humorist, yet also that his chief trait is aggressiveness. I cannot tell you why, for all was spoken with a quiet voice, even with a certain gentleness that disguises what I am sure is the basic character of the man. Knudsen felt it too, for as we walked away from the ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... Trapper evidently relished the mirthfulness of his companion, for his face was lighted with the amused expression of the humorist when he has told to an appreciative comrade an experience against himself. But in an instant his countenance dropped, and, looking at the huge kettle that stood half buried in the coals and warm ashes in front of the glowing logs and ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray
... hah!" he let out at the top of his voice. "Good! you're a born humorist, friend Middlebrook!" He pushed the claret nearer. "Fill your glass again! Hand it over to the authorities? Why, that would merit a full-page cartoon in the next number of Punch. Good, good! but," he went on, ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... vastly stimulating and entertaining place if you take it aright—namely, if you recognise that it is the creation of a profound humorist, is designed for wholly practical and personal uses, and proceed to adapt your conduct to that knowledge in all light-heartedness and good faith. Thus, though in less trenchant phrase since she was still happily very young, meditated Madame de Vallorbes, while standing ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... was really any better than St. John's coffee there before them, and another professed to be in a secret more recondite than had yet been divined: it was that long grim girl, who served it; she had lured Hewson from his rest at five o'clock in the morning; and this humorist proposed a Welsh rarebit some night at the inn, where they could all see for themselves why Hewson broke out of the house and smashed a ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... complete and impartial, of the age to which he belongs, of the men, their manners, fashions, tastes, and prevalent opinions. Thus they have a historical as well as a literary and an ethical value. And Thackeray, in speaking of the office of the humorist or satirist, for to him they were one, says, "He professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness, your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture, your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of ...
— English Satires • Various
... therefore, there is no dramatic progression. The same remark applies to Dinah Morris. It is not in her conceptions nor her composition that George Eliot is strongest: it is in her touches. In these she is quite original. She is a good deal of a humorist, and something of a satirist; but she is neither Dickens nor Thackeray. She has over them the great advantage that she is also a good deal of a philosopher; and it is to this union of the keenest observation with the ripest reflection, that her style ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... neurasthenic voluptuary. A group of Jews who are shown disputing in the manner of Baxter Street, though conveyed by Wilde from Flaubert's pages, are used by Strauss to provide a comic interlude. Years ago a musical humorist in Vienna caused much amusement by writing the words of a quarrel of Jewish pedlers under the voices of the fugue in Mozart's overture to "The Magic Flute." Three hundred years ago Orazio Vecchi composed a burlesque madrigal in the severe style of that day, in which he tried to depict the babel ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... him. Again, it may be advanced, in Hook's behalf, that political animosity—a less despicable, though not less hurtful passion than love of gentility—contributed to Hook's dislike of the quarter on the north side of Holborn. As a humorist he ridiculed, as a panderer to fashionable prejudices he sneered at, Bloomsbury; but as a tory he cherished a genuine antagonism to the district of town that was associated in the public mind with the wealth and ascendency of the house of Bedford. Anyhow, the Russell ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... peripatetic showman with his company of white rats establishes himself on the pavement opposite, till admonished to move on by the sergent de ville. What an ever-shifting panorama! What a kaleidoscope of color and character! What a study for the humorist, ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... as a "philosopher, psychologist, and humorist." It was partly because Patrick delighted in long words, and partly to excuse himself for being full of the sour cream of an inhuman curiosity. His curiosity, however, did not extend itself to science and belles lettres; it concerned ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... was one Behrisch, now residing in Leipzig in the capacity of tutor to a young German count. In his Autobiography Goethe has given a large place to Behrisch, who, as there depicted, comes before us as an accomplished man of the world, something of a roue, and a humorist in the old English sense of the word. He never appeared without his periwig, invariably wore a suit of grey, and was never seen in public without his sword, hat under arm. Of a caustic wit, of considerable literary ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... connected with it. It was a rather tedious explanation, but it filled in the time till tea arrived, when Betty busied herself among the tea-cups; her brother drew his chair close to their guest, and sat regarding him with breathless expectancy. Was this the side-splitting humorist Betty had talked so much about for months after the wedding—and then abruptly ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... nothing so disappointing to a humorist as to lead up to an interruption, and then find he is not interrupted. Mr. Chamberlain seldom fails to bring off his little unsuspected repartee, and it is his mastery of this art that make his speeches sparkle with diamond brilliancy, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... same happy, imperturbable expression. He had quite as much reason as I, if not more, for joining our gloom-party. He, too, was waiting sentence. For six days his wild, untamed spirit had been cabined in these walls; but he had been born a humorist, and even in bonds he sought to play the clown. He went through contortions, pitched coins against himself, and staggered around the room with a soda-water bottle at his lips, imitating a drunkard. But ours was a tough house even for his irrepressible spirit to play to. Despite all his efforts, ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... moral nature must be debilitated. The mosses and fungi gather on sickly trees, not thriving ones; and the odious parasites which fasten on the human frame choose that which is already enfeebled. Mr. Walker, the hygeian humorist, declared that he had such a healthy skin it was impossible for any impurity to stick to it, and maintained that it was an absurdity to wash a face which was of necessity always clean. I don't know how much fancy there ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... younger school of "Punch" artists, of whom Mr. George du Maurier, Mr. Linley Sambourne, and Mr. Charles Keene are the most illustrious. The first is nearly as popular as Leech, and is certainly a greater favourite with cultivated audiences. He is not so much a humorist as a satirist of the Thackeray type,—unsparing in his denunciation of shams, affectations, and flimsy pretences of all kinds. A master of composition and accomplished draughtsman, he excels in the delineation of "society"—its bishops, its "professional beauties" and "aesthetes," its nouveaux ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... in one of the most accredited journals of England the other day that Ireland had never produced a poet, could not even show a second-rate humorist,' ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... genius, he had not reached the perennial springs of cheerfulness in the depths of the human soul. In his gayest arabesques, we trace the eternal line of life, but the deep, monotonous echo of death is always nigh. He still had the sorrows which grieve the strong humorist of every age. He could not escape the deep woe of seeing social right and human happiness trodden under foot by tyranny; and folly and ignorance, pain and sorrow were the great foundation stones on which the gay temple of Grecian beauty was built. For every free citizen ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... education. The very name "interest" suggests to many that this must be some plan for sugar-coating education, or perhaps for giving children only what they like. And this is quite the opposite of the traditional view which is expressed by the humorist who said, "It does not matter much what you teach a boy, so long as he doesn't like it." But the idea of interest in modern psychology does not mean letting the child have his own way, any more than discipline means doing only what is ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... to laugh at this strangely frank, yet, I fully believe, strangely sincere communication; for Bulstrode was a humorist, with all his conventionalism and London notions, and was more addicted to saying precisely what he thought, than is common with men of his class. After sitting and chatting with him half an hour longer, on the subject of the late military operations, ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... many kinds of cakes and pastries by a row of cooks of various nations. A bakery in connection with this mill turns out 400 loaves at a baking. As in every exposition, visitors crowd the booths where edible samples are distributed. After viewing many such scenes, a local humorist dubbed this building "the ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... deny, I went and stood nearer to them. Nearly all their clothes had fallen away, hanging but in shreds here and there. That the hat had so jauntily kept its place was one of those grim touches Death, that terrible humorist, loves to add to his jests. The cards, which had apparently just been dealt, had suffered scarcely from decay—only a little dirt had sifted down upon them, as it had into the rum glasses that stood too at each man's side. And, as I looked at the skeleton ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... sensibility, trying to play upon you as upon an instrument; more concerned that you should acknowledge his power than have any depth of feeling." Thackeray, whose opinion is just quoted, calls him "a great jester, not a great humorist." He had lived a careless, self-indulgent life, and was no honor to his profession. His death was like a retribution. In a mean lodging, with no friends but his bookseller, he died suddenly from hemorrhage. His funeral was hasty, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... best known as a humorist and a charming storyteller, but he has also written serious and tender works. His life of Washington is a tribute of loving reverence to the great American for whom he was named. As a boy, Irving was of a rather mischievous turn, a trait ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... They give such an inside picture of savage life, with its nastiness, its alternate gluttony and starving, and its ferocity, as it would be hard to find elsewhere, drawn in such English as the wildest humorist ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... is terrible!" exclaimed the cadaverous humorist. "Ever this indigenous Pius IX—fulminating, fulminating, fulminating!—Too much inferno. The cure does half his burning for Beelzebub! We are ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... climbed into the little make-believe train, and smiled as he settled back in a seat. There was not another soul going to Quincy that morning, save the conductor and engineer. The conductor looked at his passenger as boredly as the wife of a professional humorist looks at her husband, took his ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... suitable reply. At last, in furtherance of his facetious design, it became necessary for "Boston" to call upon the young actress herself and secure her personal participation. To her he unfolded a plan, the successful carrying out of which he felt would secure his fame to posterity as a practical humorist. The "California Pet's" black eyes sparkled approvingly and mischievously. She only stipulated that she should see the man first,—a concession to her feminine weakness which years of dancing Juba and wearing trousers ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... flowers of rhetoric, no eloquent passages; he is not a wit, a humorist or a clown; yet, so great a vein of pleasantry and good nature pervades what he says, gliding over a deep current of practical argument, he keeps his hearers in a smiling good mood with their mouths open ready to swallow ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... of the kind we have supposed sure to be elevated to the highest sphere of character and of feeling. So long as Lucian merely furnishes absurdity, as in his "Wishes," in the "Lapithae," in "Jupiter Tragoedus," etc., he is only a humorist, and gratifies us by his sportive humor; but he changes character in many passages in his "Nigrinus," his "Timon," and his "Alexander," when his satire directs its shafts against moral depravity. Thus he begins in his "Nigrinus" his ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... "You are a humorist. And a clever young fellow, Georg Brende. You—as Elza's brother—and as your father's son with your medical knowledge—you can be of great use to me. Suppose I offer you a place by my side always? ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... only possible phrases for the case, that I mean the Victorian Englishman to appear as a blockhead, which means an unconscious buffoon. To all this there is a final answer: that he was also a conscious buffoon—and a successful one. He was a humorist; and one of the best humorists in Europe. That which Goethe had never taught the Germans, Byron did manage to teach the English—the duty of not taking him seriously. The strong and shrewd Victorian humour appears ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... that be understood; and thereby they are sufficiently punished. The notion that a knave cares a pin what is thought of his ways by one who is civil and friendly to himself appears to have been invented by a humorist. On the vaudeville stage of Mars it would probably have made his fortune. If warrants of arrest were out for every man in this country who is conscious of having repeatedly shaken hands with persons ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... thoroughly good-natured, cultivated, and well-bred man of no particular force or character or strength of emotion. He has not the least intention of taking Sensibility seriously, but it is the proper thing to take it somehow or other. So he sets himself to work to be a man of feeling and a humorist at the same time. His encounter with the leper is so freshly and simply told, there is such an air of genuineness about it, that it seems at first sight not merely harsh, but unappreciative, to compare ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... suppose any one man was a greater disappointment to prophets than Brand Whitlock. When he came up from a freshwater college in Ohio and quietly attached himself to the Herald staff he attracted attention almost immediately as a humorist. He specialized on "Josh stuff." He wrote bantering, fantastic, mock-serious stories of the kind that were standardized by Mr. Dana's young men. He was a star reporter, pulling down his thirty-five per; but any first-class horoscoper would have allowed that Whitlock ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... school of professional men, whose tongue, save in telling a story, knew not the vernacular, and yet in its pitch and accent inevitably betrayed their birthplace. Precise in speech and dress, uncommonly skilful, a mild humorist, and old in the world's wisdom, he had gone down the evening way of life with ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... the Philadelphia "Press," writing of one of Schuyler Colfax's receptions, says of our Washington correspondent: "Mark Twain, the delicate humorist, was present: quite a lion, as he deserves to be. Mark is a bachelor, faultless in taste, whose snowy vest is suggestive of endless quarrels with Washington washerwomen; but the heroism of Mark is settled for all ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... Indeed, it is only by quoting Dickens's description of the latter personage that we have anything which fairly matches the traits suggested by some statements in the President's speeches. "A big, loud man," says the humorist, "with a stare and a metallic laugh. A man made out of coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him. A man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... with us. That handsome bird, the blue jay, so wild at the East, is as tame and domestic as the robin in many parts of the West, because treated well. He is also a winter resident, and one of the most intelligent birds in existence. Indeed, he is a genuine humorist, and many amusing stories are told of his pranks. His powers of mimicry are but slightly surpassed by those of the mocking-bird, and it is his delight to send the smaller feathered tribes to covert ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... intangible quirk. No type has the sensitiveness essential to this in any such degree as the Thoracic. Individuals of other types sometimes possess a keen sense of humor. This trait is not confined to the Thoracic. But it is a significant fact that almost every humorist of note has had this type as the first or second element in ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... Alsatian humorist of satiric bent, great learning, and little originality. His prose—especially in Gargantua, his most important work, which is an amplified and Germanized version of the first book of Rabelais—is hard to read on account of its recondite allusions, far-fetched ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... from his pages. Many of Cowper's strictures were amply justified by the condition of the English Church. But Cowper's method is not Crabbe's. The note of the satirist is seldom absent, blended at times with just a suspicion of that of the Pharisee. The humorist and the Puritan contend for predominance in the breast of this polished gentleman and scholar. Cowper's friend, Newton, in the Preface he wrote for his first volume, claimed for the poet that his satire was "benevolent." But ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... Breughel, a humorist, who so designs his pictures that they seem painted only by way of jest. He is, however, in good repute as an artist. I saw recently one of his pictures in which he represents the Saviour carrying his cross to Calvary. In this he represents pilgrims with their staves, Spanish ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... on, we returned across the water and made fast to the dock in the lower end of Juneau. This settlement has seen a good deal of experience for a young one. It was first known as Pilsbury; then some humorist dubbed it Fliptown. Later it was called Rockwell and Harrisburg; and finally Juneau, the name it still bears with more or less dignity. The customary Indian village hangs upon the borders of the town; in fact, the two wings ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... third time our note-book and pencil have been busily employed in this very pleasant corner of Kensington. At No. 16, Madame Albani has chatted over five o'clock tea and deliciously thin bread and butter; at No. 27, Mr. F. C. Burnand once frankly declared that to become a successful humorist one must needs possess a serious turn of mind, and ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... burlesque operas, "The Maid of Athens" and "The Burglar's Bride," the libretto of the latter by his brother, Charles Battell Loomis, the well-known humorist. This latter contains some skilful ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... 1160. He was as full of fun as he could be, and used to take his old sabre and sharpen it up, and get in a convenient place on a dark night, and stick it through people as they went by, to see them jump. He was a born humorist. But he got to going too far with it; and the first time he was found stripping one of these parties, the authorities removed one end of him, and put it up on a nice high place on Temple Bar, where it could contemplate the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... it.' So they parted, and laughing, over the years, at the incident, Sir George said: 'You know Mundella was a capital fellow, of sterling ability and many qualities, but I'm afraid he was never a humorist.' ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... well known to the public to require a formal introduction at my hands. By his story of the Frog he scaled the heights of popularity at a single jump and won for himself the 'sobriquet' of The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope. He is also known to fame as The Moralist of the Main; and it is not unlikely that as such he will go down to posterity. It is in his secondary character, as humorist, however, rather than in the primal one of moralist, that I aim to ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... with himself. Then he thought that he too must have become tainted with the corruption of Paris for the Bible to have become a humorous work to him. But he did not stop saying over and over again the judgment of the great judiciary humorist: and he tried to imagine its effect on the head of his young friend. He went to sleep laughing like a child. He had lost all thought of his new sorrow. One more or less.... He ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... youthful humorist. "They don't let Clarence out without the dawg. That's to keep Clarence from gettin' kidnapped. Nobody would wanter kidnap him if they had ter take ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... so much pleasure that I was vexed with the indifference with which some of my friends laid the works of the great humorist aside. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... bright, and his education has been good. He has traveled in post chaises miles without number. He is fond of seeing much of the world. He eats of every good dish, especially apple pie. He drinks Old Hock. He has a very fine temper. He is somewhat of a humorist and a little tinctured with pride. He has a good manly countenance, and he owns himself to be amorous. He has infinite vivacity, yet is observed at times to have a melancholy cast. He is rather fat than lean, rather short than tall, rather young than old. His ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... at the University of Edinburgh, and afterwards appointed parish minister of Fodderty and Chaplain to the 71st Highlanders, his father having resigned both offices in his favour. He was a noted humorist and said by those who knew him best to be much more at heart a soldier than a minister. He married first, his cousin, Mary, daughter of John Mackenzie of Brea, "the Laird," and sister of Alexander, XI. of Hilton, with issue - (1) Colin, a Colonel of Royal Engineers, who, born in 1793, married ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... meanings, this oscillation between the ironical and the serious, is always amusing, and sometimes delightful. Some simple-minded people are revolted, even in literature, by the ironical method; and tell the humorist, with an air of moral disapproval, that they never know whether he is in jest or in earnest. To such matter-of-fact persons Disraeli's novels must be a standing offence; for it is his most characteristic peculiarity that the passage from one phase to ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... genuine humorist the faculty of observation is the first necessity. Consider the great pictorial humorists, whether dead or living, whose names are familiar in the mouth as household words. That they gained acknowledgment by masterly handling of the medium in which they chose ...
— Frank Reynolds, R.I. • A.E. Johnson
... Italian masks has always found a more unfavourable reception in England than in France. The fool or clown in Shakspeare's comedies is far more of an ironical humorist than a mimical buffoon. Intrigue in real life is foreign to the Northern nations, both from the virtues and the defects of their character; they have too much openness of disposition, and too little acuteness and nicety of understanding. It is remarkable that, with greater ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... was a bit of a humorist, answered that we would give him as many cartridges as he wanted, if he gave us all the rifles he had in ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... I have said, I feel no grudge, though a certain regret that his sympathy with that deep vein of poetical imagination which underlies all our 'steaks and sirloins' should have been intercepted by this detestable lay-figure. The poetical humorist must be allowed a certain license in dealing with facts; and poor Hawthorne, in the uncongenial atmosphere of the Liverpool Custom-house, had doubtless much to suffer from a thick-skinned generation. His characteristic shyness made it a hard task for him to penetrate ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... was delighted when he discovered a native by the name of Satan among the numerous applicants. He engaged him instantly on his name; no other recommendation was necessary. To have a servant by the name of Satan was a privilege no humorist had ever before enjoyed, and the possibilities to his imagination were without limit. And it so happened that on the very day Satan was employed, Prince Aga Khan, the head of a Persian sect of Mohammedans, who is supposed to have a divine origin and will be worshiped as a god when he dies, ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... slackening for a moment, and then shooting ahead, as if the propelling power were the subject of strange perturbation. The roguish boys, and the men too, and, chief of them, that practical humorist of a conductor, observing this, screamed, "Boo! boo! boo I boo!" all the louder. Tiffles knew that the critical time had come, and philosophically laughed at the ruin of his last grand project, as he had laughed at the ruin of forty other grand ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... an ancient stronghold, which one must speak of in earnest as that unconscious humorist the classic American traveller is supposed invariably to speak of the Colosseum: it will be a very handsome building when it's finished. Even Perugia is going the way of all Italy—straightening out her streets, preparing her ruins, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the author, did not know that he lived within a drive of my own home. When next I heard of him, it was in his biography. As a 'Probationer,' or unplaced minister, he, somehow, was not successful. A humorist, a poet, a delightful companion, he never became 'a placed minister.' It was the old story of an imprudence, a journey made in damp clothes, of consumption, of the end of his earthly life and love. His letters to his betrothed, his poems, his career, constantly remind one of Murray's, ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... well as a tender humorist Mark Twain loomed larger in my horizon after that night. The warmly human side of him was revealed to me as never before, and thereafter I knew him and I felt that he knew me. That remote glance from beneath those shaggy eyebrows no longer deceived me. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... have been difficult for a joke to fall more flat. Nobody laughed, though why Mr. Augustus Longcord could not understand, and maybe none of his audience could have told him, for at Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square Mr. Augustus Longcord passed as a humorist. The stranger himself appeared unaware that he ...
— Passing of the Third Floor Back • Jerome K. Jerome
... think that humorist should be prohibited from givin' his lecture in the opera house tomorrow ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... horribly. Long ago it inspired a wit to madness and he made a joke; the same old joke has been made by those who followed after him. It will continue to be made with impertinent impunity until the sea gives up its seals; for the temptation is there daily and hourly, and the humorist is but human—he can not long resist it; so he will buttonhole you on the veranda of the Cliff House and whisper in your astonished ear as if he were imparting a state secret: "Their bark is ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... There was no humorist Hugo Mallin in this group; no nimble fancy to send heresy skating over thin ice; but there was Herbert Stransky, with deep-set eyes, slightly squinting inward, and a heavy jaw, an enormous man who was the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... of humor might have avoided some of those pitfalls. I am seriously of the opinion that a professional humorist ought to be attached to every reform movement, to keep it from making itself ridiculous by either too great solemnity or too much conceit. As it is, the enemy sometimes employs him with effect. Failing the adoption of that plan, I would recommend ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... and his old craving for power and mental domination over others revives. At last Michael tries to raise the Devil, and the Devil comes at his call. My Devil was to be, like Goethe's, the universal humorist, who should make all things vain and nothing worth, by a perpetual collation of the great with the little in the presence of the infinite. I had many a trick for him to play, some better, I think, than any in the Faust. In the mean ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... other day of our most earnest and genial humorist, who is just now proving himself also our most earnest and genial novelist. 'I like your novel exceedingly,' said a lady; 'the characters are so natural—all but the baronet, and he surely is ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... humorist revived. Susie's jeers had the effect of a bucket of ice-water, for he had not been aware that this blot upon his escutcheon—the disgraceful epoch in his life when he had earned ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... gave it a chance, and I didn't see why it shouldn't happen right away. I hoped the monk would turn up again; had a notion that my head would feel better if I could once get my hands on that wire-stretching humorist. ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... disposition would defeat the very earnestness from which it sprang. So, one morning, the landscape-maker went to the telephone, and called for the number of a friend whom he rightly believed to be the wisest man, and the greatest humorist, in New York. The call brought no response, and the painter dried his brushes, and turned up Fifth Avenue to an apartment hotel in a cross street, where on a certain door he rapped with all the elaborate formula of a secret code. Very cautiously, the door opened, and revealed a stout man with a ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... enjoys the whimsical and mischievous consequence, while it condemns the folly and puerility of the Blood who occasioned it. It is this peculiar faculty of choice of subjects, situation, and assemblage, which constitutes the excellence of a humorist, which Stevens possessed in a most eminent degree; for he displays it in almost every line of his Lecture. Indeed, in this art we know of none superior to him, except it be Shakespeare in some of his comedies, which are inimitable in every thing which relates to the vis comica. With respect to ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... straight-from-the-shoulder American takes time to finish his thought, to mold his sentences, to brain his reader with a perfect expression of his tense emotion, then he makes literature. And when the easy-going humorist, often nowadays a column conductor, or a contributor to The Saturday Evening Post, takes time to deepen his observation and to say it with real words instead of worn symbols, he makes, and does make, literature. More are doing it than ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... bounteous ears? But stay, I lose myself, and wrong their patience: If I dwell here, they'll not begin, I see. Friends, sit you still, and entertain this troop With some familiar and by-conference, I'll hast them sound. Now, gentlemen, I go To turn an actor, and a humorist, Where, ere I do resume my present person, We hope to make the circles of your eyes Flow with distilled laughter: if we fail, We must impute it to this only chance, Art hath an enemy call'd ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... at all, you know." The absurdity of the objection must have struck the humorist comically; but as he wanted the volume republished, he good-naturedly saved the proverbial valor of the British soldier by changing ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... in common with other people, that they experienced the greater part of their destinies and satisfactions, their joys and sorrows, more in imagination than in tangible reality. A humorist might indeed have considered the difference between the life of these wrecks of humanity and that of busy citizens as consisting only in imagination, since both alike carried on their large and small affairs with the same busy gravity, and in the last resort an unfortunate inmate ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... is a humorist," replied Fountain, good-humoredly, "and dearly loves a paradox"; and they pooh-poohed him without a particle ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... has continued to be himself, who has not fallen into a trick of aping his master's mannerisms. His mixture of the serious, the earnest, the pathetic, makes his humour not unlike the melancholy mirth of Thackeray and Sterne. He is almost the only American humorist with sentiment. It is only the air, not the spirit, that is changed—coelum ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... lay in the street, and we were in fear of being discovered, while therefore we were pensively considering which way to avoid the impending storm, a servant of Agamemnon's interrupted our fears: "And do not ye know," said he, "with whom we eat to-day? Trimalchio, a trim finical humorist has a clock in his dining-room, and one on purpose to let him know how many minutes of his life he had lost." We therefore drest our selves carefully, and Gito willingly taking upon him the part of a servant, as he had ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... one by one, a sect of about a dozen persons, who called themselves "God's Remnant of the True Faithful," or, for short, "God's Remnant." To the profane, they were known as "Gib's Deils." Bailie Sweedie, a noted humorist in the town, vowed that the proceedings always opened to the tune of "The Deil Fly Away with the Exciseman," and that the sacrament was dispensed in the form of hot whisky-toddy; both wicked hits at the ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the rock which formed the floor of the dungeon a pathlet [vionnet], or little path, as if one had beaten it out with a hammer." He was fastened by a chain four feet in length to one of the beautiful Gothic pillars of the vault, and you still see where this gentle scholar, this sweet humorist, this wise and lenient philosopher, paced to and fro those weary years like a restless beast—a captive wolf, or a bear in his pit. But his soul was never in prison. As he trod that vionnet out of the stone he meditated upon his reading, his travels, ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells
... of the mighty school of Russian Realism was Gogol. Filled with enthusiasm for Pushkin, he nevertheless took a different course, and became Russia's first great novelist. Furthermore, although a melancholy man, he is the only Russian humorist who has made the world laugh out loud. Humour is not a salient quality in Russian fiction. Then came the brilliant follower of Gogol, Ivan Turgenev. In him Russian literary art reached its climax, and the art of the modern novel as well. He is not only the greatest master ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... the next morning Mercutio was roused from his slumbers by Hamlet, who counted every minute a hundred years until he saw Juliet. Mercutio did not take this interruption too patiently, for the honest humorist was very serious as a sleeper; but his equilibrium was quickly restored by ...
— A Midnight Fantasy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... in anger than in sadness. He was no cynic, no Heraclitus; he deemed it wisest to laugh at the follies of mankind. Through all his experience he lost none of his natural urbanity, his freshness of feeling, his earnestness and sincerity. The late THEODORE HOOK, the first humorist and most celebrated bon-vivant of our day, was employed by his publisher to edit Mr. SANDERSON'S 'American in Paris.' He read it, adapted it as well as he could to the English market, and returned it with the observation that 'there was never a book ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... with a past of charm and beauty. His patriotic verse has both strength and loveliness and reflects a depth of feeling that his lighter work does not lead us to expect. In his dialect verse he revels in fun and shows himself a genuine and cleanly humorist. ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... of Tonia Round The Circle The Rubber Plant's Story Out of Nazareth Confessions of a Humorist The Sparrows in Madison Square Hearts and Hands The Cactus The Detective Detector The Dog and the Playlet A Little Talk ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... income. The State, as we have seen, almost takes his children off his hands from the time they are six years old. It brings them up for nothing, or next to nothing; in cases of need it partially feeds and clothes them, it even washes them. Some English humorist has said that a German need only give himself the trouble to be born; his government does the rest. But first his mother and then his wife do a good deal. They are like the woman in Proverbs who worked willingly with her hands, rose while it was night, saw well to the ways of her household, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... a French humorist and satirist, who wrote novels, plays, and short stories. He was born in Provence in southeast France, a district of which he is typical in the warmth of his imagination. He lived for a time at Lyons but later went to Paris, where he came in contact with ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... of the Negro has found its echo in the white race of the South and we find the dignified L. Q. C. Lamar, of Mississippi, succeeded in his grasp upon public attention by the witty, fun-loving John Sharp Williams, while the great American humorist, Mark Twain is likewise a product ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... so jolly, nothing seems so funny, now, as when Leech was drawing for Punch. The gaiety of one nation at least has been eclipsed by his death. Is it merely that there is no such light humorist to see and draw for us in a frolicsome spirit all the fun and the jollity? Is it because some of us have grown old? Or is it that the British people themselves have changed and gone back to their old way of taking ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... ministry, in that marvellous picture of a parson's life given in The Deserted Village he has revealed a living and an enlightening ideal. Here the hearts of priest and poet beat as one. There is a universal ministry, higher than divided priesthoods. Oliver Goldsmith, poet, playwright, and humorist, was a veritable minister of God. Poetry has one eternal test. The poem must ever be a very part of the very life of the poet, his very soul, the breathing hope and the vital blood of his whole being. This is true of Goldsmith's two great poems. They are in themselves a sufficing and beautiful ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... "a mathematician, a chemist, a physicist, a mechanician, an inventor, a musician and a composer of music, a man of literary knowledge and practice, a writer of airy and dainty songs, a clever artist with pencil and brush, and a humorist ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... and, leading the way in, ordered refreshment for two, exchanging a pleasant wink with the proprietor as that humorist drew the lad's half-pint ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... uncongenial, for then there is no motive (so it is supposed) except the acknowledgment of duty or the value of discipline. The logical result is expressed with literal truth in the words of an American humorist: "It makes no difference what you teach a boy so long as he ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... different as they are. There is the same geniality, the same tender pathos, the same lambent humor, the same delicate observation of details, the same overpowering instinct of literary art. But Geoffrey Crayon is a humorist, while the Pilgrim beyond the Sea is a poet. The one looks at the broad aspects of English life with the shrewd, twinkling eye of a man of the world; the other haunts the valley of the Loire, the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... their consolations, and even Dona Ignacia Arguello was less gastronomic than Father Landaeta. Rezanov, whose epicurianism had survived a year of dried fish and the coarse luxuries of his managers, suddenly saw all life in the light of the humorist, and told so many amusing versions of his adventures in the wilderness, and even of his misadventure with Japan, that the priests choked over their wine, and Langsdorff, who had not a grain of humor, swelled with pride in his chance relationship to a man ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... innumerable; England had yielded Shakspeare and a host of humorists. But Germany had borne no great comic dramatist, no great satirist, and she has not yet repaired the omission; she had not even produced any humorist of a high order. Among her great writers, Lessing is the one who is the most specifically witty. We feel the implicit influence of wit—the "flavor of mind"—throughout his writings; and it is often concentrated ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... rhymed loose version of a passage in the Vera Historia of Lucian. The humorist was unable to resist the temptation to introduce passages of mockery, which are here omitted. Part of his description of the Isles of the Blest has a close and singular resemblance to the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse. The clear ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... of my papers, that my friend Sir ROGER, amidst all his good qualities, is something of an humorist; and that his virtues, as well as imperfections, are, as it were, tinged by a certain extravagance, which makes them particularly his, and distinguishes them from those of other men. This cast of mind, as it is generally ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... of his vagaries here; says the most offensive things, but in such a high-bred, supercilious, if not gentlemanly way, that people cannot make up their minds about him, nor whether to cut him dead or acknowledge him for a genius and a humorist. Sir Robert Inglis says, publicly, that Mr. Randolph "on these boards" claimed for Virginia the first attempt at abolition. "And I am disposed to believe the gentleman correct," adds Sir Robert, "because of his opportunities for knowledge." Whatever related to the United States was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... or six years we have a new humorist—at one time a Jack Downing, then a Doesticks, then again a Phoenix-Derby. Last on the list we have 'Artemus Ward,' as set forth in letters to the Cleveland Plaindealer and Vanity Fair, purporting to come from the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... I.' There was nothing particularly wise or witty in the words; but their truth was so evident, and the manner in which they were spoken so clear and calm, that they were followed by a roar of laughter that for a little time upset the mighty humorist, though, in the extempore song in which he rallied, he did ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... suspected sense of humor, and no little judgment in estimating motive and character. He actually enjoyed the first call made by Miss Perkins, suggested her coming again on the morrow, and summoned his chief surgeon and his provost marshal, another keen humorist, to be present at the interview. It has been asserted that this triumvirate went so far as to encourage the lady to even wilder flights of assertion. We have her own word for it that then and there she was promised as offices three big rooms in the Palace,—the ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... The humorist, thank heaven, we have always with us. Spectres cannot afright him, nor mundane terrors deflect him from his path. He takes nothing either in earth or heaven seriously, as is his God-given right. Some of the best examples of what he has done in the general field of mystery are ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... fool. For he knew his ignorance; but the rest were ignorant without knowing it. This was his own way of telling the story; and you can never be sure how much camouflage was in it;—and yet, too, he was a giant humorist. Anyhow, he did show men their ignorance; and you all know his solemn way of doing it. He drew them on with sly questionings to see what idiots they were; and then drew them on with more sly questionings to perceive at least a few sound ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the Saturday Evening Post). It is seven years since Irvin Cobb published his first short story, "The Escape of Mr. Trimm," in the Saturday Evening Post. During that short period he has passed from the position of an excellent journalist to that of America's most representative humorist, in the truer meaning of that word. Upon him the mantle of Mark Twain has descended, and with that mantle he has inherited the artistic virtues and the utter inability to criticize his own work that was so characteristic of Mr. Clemens. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Mark Twain, the celebrated humorist, was so taken with the quaint charm of L.M. Montgomery's tremendously popular novel that upon reading it for the first time he said: "In 'Anne of Green Gables' you will find the dearest and most moving and delightful girl since the immortal Alice." [Anne is played ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... takes notes, and against the battery of whose quick wits even the costly raiment of Poole is no protection. We are forced as we read to exclaim with Petruchio: 'Thou hast hit it; come sit on me.' No doubt the task of the modern humorist is not so easy as it was. The surface ore has been mostly picked up. In order to win the precious metal you must now work with in-stroke and out- stroke after the most approved methods. Sometimes one would enjoy ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... shdeak-meat!'" Wonder whether this is a typical sample of BOSCH's badinage. "What did he say to that, BOSCH?" "Oh, he vas vair moch loff, a-course!" says BOSCH, with the natural complacency of a successful humorist. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 18, 1892 • Various
... been classed as a humorist. This he was, and of a type peculiar to himself, but he was not content with merely having amused or entertained the people, he aspired to arouse public sentiment in the interest of certain reforms. He was a hater of shams and defied every form ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... name was Jumpoff. The train's conductor, who had the misfortune to be considered a humorist, liked to say that Jumpoff was a knot at the end of the road to keep the track from unraveling. He had told the girl that, on the long, jolty ride from the junction. The girl replied that at any rate she liked ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... "scherzo" is his own invention. In music, as in literature, much hinges upon the definition of humor, and there is the same distinction in each art between wit—light and playful, and humor—broad, serious, and, at times, even grim. A genuine humorist is always a deep thinker, one who sees all sides of human nature—the great traits and the petty ones. The poet Lowell has defined humor as consisting in the contrast of two ideas, and in a Beethoven scherzo the gay and the pathetic are ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... French-Spanish-African—Creole patois, a language which is becoming fixed, with its own grammar and declensions, etc. A curious book on it has lately been published in Trinidad by Mr. Thomas, a coloured gentleman, who seems to be at once no mean philologer and no mean humorist. The substance of the Negro's answer was, 'Why, sir, you sent me to the town to buy a packet of sugar and a packet of salt; and coming back it rained so hard, the packets burst, and the salt was all washed into the sugar. And so—I am washing it out ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... if, forsaking the gold-mines of finance and that political slaughter of fat oxen whereby a man himself grows fat, they were apt to run goose-hunting into regions of bilberries and crowberries, and be swallowed up at last in remote peat-bogs. Of that unwise science, which, as our Humorist expresses it,— ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... to treat the occupant of Suite A as a humorist or a lunatic, but finally he observed, ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach |
