"Satire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Wharton. But, though there was a certain amount of satire in the exclamation, it had been ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... slowly in reply—an involuntary exclamation of helplessness, an automatic phrase deflected from its first significance to meet a casual need of the mind. Yet it seemed like satire, like a sardonic, even vulgar, humour. So it struck Louis Trudel, who snatched up a hot iron from the fire and rushed forward with a snarl. So astounded was Charley that he did not stir. He was not prepared for the sudden onslaught. He did not put up his hand even, but stared at the tailor, who, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... had made of Oriental poetry.[103] For the heroic there was no material, nor were some of the other divisions suitable for Goethe's purpose. So only the Buch der Liebe and the Buch des Unmuts (to correspond to satire) could be formed. Other books were formed in an analogous manner until they were twelve in number. The poet originally intended to make them of equal length, but this intention he never carried out, and so they ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... intellectual refinement, in which alone a relish exists for delicate and half latent irony. The plain and literal citizens of an earlier period, who conned over what was "so nominated in the bend," would have misapprehended that graceful playfulness of satire, elegant and fanciful as ever charmed the leisure of the literary loungers of Athens. For, in the writings of Bonnel Thornton and Colman, the philosophy of Aristippus may indeed be said to be revived[8]. We would not, however, be supposed, by these allusions, to imply that all the papers ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... castigation. Having found out that the friars were not to be touched with impunity, he wrote, he says, a short and ambiguous poem. But the king, who loved a joke, demanded something sharp and stinging, and Buchanan obeyed by writing, but not publishing, the 'Franciscans,' a long satire, compared to which the 'Somnium' was bland and merciful. The storm rose. Cardinal Beaton, Buchanan says, wanted to buy him of the king, and then, of course, burn him, as he had just burnt five poor souls: so, knowing James's avarice, he fled to ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... Bernard Shaw of Germany. He is considered the leading German editor and an expert in Germany on foreign politics. As editor and proprietor of Die Zukunft, his fiery, brooding spirit and keen insight and wit, coupled with powers of satire and caricature, made him a solitary and striking independent figure in the German press years before the other newspapers of Germany dared to criticise or attack the Government or the persons at ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... plaintive satire. "What affairs is it of mine? That's just the trouble! It's got to be my affairs because you're my first-cousin. My goodness I didn't have anything to do with you being ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... right," resumed Porphyrius cheerily, whilst looking at the young man with a kindliness which immediately awoke the latter's distrust. "Our judicial customs deserve your satire. Our proceedings, which are supposed to be inspired by a profound knowledge of psychology, are very ridiculous ones, and very often useless. Now, to return to our method or form: Suppose for a moment that I ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... and a heart—but 'tis over now. That name he is content to bear alone—to go where the persecuted syllables shall be no more heard, or excite no meaning —some spot where his native tongue has never penetrated, nor any of his countrymen have landed, to plant their unfeeling satire, their brutal wit, and national ill manners—where no Englishman—(Here Melesinda, who has been pouting during this speech, fetches a deep sigh.) Some yet undiscovered Otaheite, where witless, unapprehensive savages shall innocently pronounce ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... published at the age of seventeen. It attracted little or no attention, and has long been out of print. A trip to Egypt in 1893 resulted in a burning desire to become a novelist, and his brilliant satire, "The Green Carnation," followed. The book was written in a month, and at once established its author's name and fame. "The Garden of Allah," of all Mr. Hichens' works the most typical of his genius, appeared in 1905. "The intellectual grip of the story," says one critic, "cannot be denied, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... of politics according to his own rules, the underlying principle of which is audacity. He knows very well that the weak spot in the armor of nearly all politicians of the old school is their assumption of superiority, a sort of mask of benignant political venerability. They dread satire. They shrink from ridicule. A well-directed critical outburst freezes them. Such has been the Harvey method of approach. Having reduced his subjects to a state of terror, he flatters them, cajoles them, and finally makes terms with them; but he always remains a more or ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... but stupid; his droll is not jocose, but ridiculous; and his lover is not gay, but lewd. So that to me the man seems not to have written his poesy for any temperate person, but to have intended his smut and obscenity for the debauched and lewd, his invective and satire for the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... fist. The queen was a frivolous woman; she had that worst of failings—a taste for satire. She despised all conventionalities, and trampled all ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... "Journey on Foot," and in most of my writings, satire had been the prevailing characteristic. This displeased many people, who thought that this bent of mind could lead to no good purpose. The critics now blamed me precisely for that which a far deeper feeling had ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... all, wasn't there some truth in "Martin Chuzzlewit?" Mr. Dickens might have been far from a clear understanding of our people; but didn't it argue a pretty ticklish vanity in ourselves that we were so fiercely resentful of satire; and was not this very heat over "Martin Chuzzlewit" a confirmation of one of the points the book had presented against us? General Trumble replied to this suggestion with a personal one to the effect that a man capable of saying ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... Klimii iter subterraneum novam telluris theoriam ac historiam quintae monarchi ad huc nobis incognitae exhibens e bibliotheca b. Abelini. Hafniae et Lipsiae sunt. Jac. Preuss', 1741. An admirable Danish translation of this learned but severe satire on the institutions, morals, and manners of the inhabitants of the upper Earth, appeared at Copenhagen in 1789, and was entitled 'Niels Klim's underjordiske reise ocd Ludwig Holberg, oversal after den Latinske original of Jens Baggesen'. Holberg, who studied for a time at ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... to them and to time. As early as the year 1869, the Comedie Francaise—the standard French stage—added Mercadet to its repertory; and more than one company in other theatres have scored success in its representation. The play contains situations full of bubbling humor and biting satire. Its motif is not sentiment. Instead, it inveighs against that spirit of greed and lust for gain which places a money value even upon affection. But during all the arraignment, Balzac, the born speculator, cannot conceal a sympathy for the wily ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... of all this I have not hesitated to reprint even certain 'epitaphs' which, once of the living, are now of the dead, as all the others must eventually be. The objection inheres in all forms of applied satire—my understanding of whose laws and liberties is at least derived from reverent study of the masters. That in respect of matters herein mentioned I have but followed their practice can be shown by ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... relation to another life were held as strict verity? What portions were regarded as fable or symbolism? It is obvious enough that among the civilized nations of antiquity the distinctions of literal statement, allegory, historic report, embellished legend, satire, poetic creation, philosophical hypothesis, religious myth, were more or less generally known. For example, when Aschylus makes one of his characters say, "Yonder comes a herald: so Dust, Clay's thirsty sister, tells me," the personification, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... subject, this is a perfectly fair, nay, moral one; despite some silly opinions that have stated to the contrary. Satire, when based upon truth, is the highest province of the stage, which enables us to laugh away folly and wickedness, when they cannot be banished by direct exposure. Ladies' boarding-schools form, in the mass, a gross and fearful evil, to which the Haymarket author has ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... Bertha Schimpfelheim—some call her Big Bertha—slipped and fell in a waltz, injuring the knee of her companion. To my surprise the brainiest of these working-folk saw the satire in which they were taking part, and entered into it with all the more ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... cold. We solaced ourselves, at first, by reading the Secular Review, Mr. Bradlaugh tearing it into pages, and passing them one by one through the grating. By pushing on his side and pulling on mine, we managed to get them through the narrow holes. Our position when we read them was a strange satire on one article (which I read with great pain), which expressed the writer's opinion that the book was so altered as not to be worth prosecuting. Neither the police nor the magistrate recognised any difference ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... to hope that you will grant permission, now that they have come!" said the widow with an attempt at biting satire, which Salina received in solemn ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... like that of satire, is to correct the disorders of mankind by exhibiting their faults and follies in ridiculous and contemptible attitudes. The tendency we feel to laugh at each other's foibles, or at those misadventures which denote weakness in us, being implanted by the hands of Providence, was no doubt given ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... first of these fables the child learns the basest flattery; from the second, cruelty; from the third, injustice; from the fourth, satire; from the fifth, insubordination. The last of these lessons is no more suitable for your pupils than for mine, though he has no use for it. What results do you expect to get from your teaching when it contradicts itself! But perhaps the same system of morals which furnishes ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... MARABOUT the Mugwump sniffs and sneers; Gregarious 'votes of thanks' and sheepish 'cheers' Stir him to satire scornful. But when sleek Culture apes, irate and loud, The follies of the Caucus and the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... at “The Pines” was not always of the serious things of life. It very frequently partook of the playful, when the hearers would be kept amused with a humour and whimsicality, cauterized now and then with some biting touch of satire which showed that neither Swinburne nor Watts-Dunton had entirely ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... enjoyment of everyone. To obey it, the duty only of princes. No wonder that, on the other hand, this "Vengeance de peuples, lecon des rois," as M. de Lamartine calls it, was taken for the bitterest satire by Louis XIV., and completed the disgrace of one who had dared to teach the future king of France that he must show himself, in all things, the opposite of his grandfather. No wonder if Madame de Maintenon and the court looked on its portraits of wicked ministers and courtiers as caricatures ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... course, money doesn't matter," he said with fine satire. "Not at all! But because we haven't got it, those fellows, on thirty per, can throw the hooks into us at every turn. And, if we threw enough money around, we could be the rottenest man and woman on the face of the globe, we could be murderers and thieves, ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... the weight of his own flesh. Hamlin County knew him as "Big Tom D'Willerby," and, indeed, rather prided itself upon him as a creditable possession. It noted any increase in his weight, repeated his jokes, and bore itself patiently under his satire. His indolence it regarded with leniency not ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... possibly be based upon some current tradition of Latona having been subjected to such cruel treatment from some country clowns; or, which is more probable, it may have been originally invented as a satire on the rude manners and uncouth conduct of the peasantry of ancient times. The story may also have been framed, to account, in a poetical manner, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... he does not care for, the Thoracic is inclined to betray his aversions. He occasionally delights to put people he dislikes at a disadvantage by his wit or satire. The stony individual who walks through life like an Ionian pillar is a complete mystery to the Thoracic; and the pillar returns the compliment. We do not like anything we do not understand and we seldom understand anything that ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... Eaton Stannard Barrett was a man of considerable ability. He published several works anonymously, all of which acquired celebrity; but I believe the poem of "Woman," published by Mr. Colburn, was the only work to which he attached his name. He was the author of the well-known political satire called All the Talents; of the mock romance of The Heroine, in which the absurdities of a school of fiction, at that time in high favour, are happily ridiculed; and of a novel which had great success in its day, and is still to be found in some of the circulating ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... cunning slave[141]. The parasite is "featured" too, when Ergasilus bewails the decline of his profession[142], or Peniculus and Gelasimus indulge in haunting threnody on their perpetual lack of food[143]. Bankers, lawyers and panders come in for their share of satire[144]. Our favorite topic today, the frills and furbelows of woman's dress and its reform, held the boards of ancient Athens and Rome[145]. In Mil. 637 ff, Periplecomenus descants on the joys of the old bon vivant and the expense of a wife. The delights or pains of love[146], ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... Terence is said to have translated from Menander, there now remain only six. Excepting a few inconsiderable fragments, the writings of all the other authors have perished. The early period of Roman literature was distinguished for the introduction of satire by Lucilius, an author celebrated for writing with remarkable ease, but whose compositions, in the opinion of Horace, though Quintilian thinks otherwise, were debased with a mixture of feculency. Whatever may have been their merit, they also have perished, with the works ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... its completed form is a history of the three Dutch governors of New York, whom Irving uses as a stalking-horse for purposes of satire. Everybody laughed at it except a few descendants of the old Dutch worthies with whose names and characters he had made free. As late as the year 1818, G. C. Verplanck, a personal friend of Irving's, called him to account in an address before the New ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... intrepidity. [22] This romantic spirit lingered in Castile, long after the age of chivalry had become extinct in other parts of Europe, continuing to nourish itself on those illusions of fancy, which were at length dispelled by the caustic satire ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... on everything is a satire on nothing; it is mere absurdity. All contempt, all disrespect, implies something respected, as a standard to which it is referred; just as every valley implies a hill. The persiflage of the French and of fashionable worldlings, which turns ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... attention. It sprang manifestly from some imaginary suspicion of a sensitive minor poet, but Mickle used to denounce Smith without stint, and, thinking he had an opportunity for retaliation when the letter to Strahan appeared, he wrote a satire entitled, "An Heroic Epistle from Hume in the Shades to Dr. Adam Smith," which he never published indeed, though he showed it about among his friends, but in which, says Sim, who had seen it, Smith and his noble pupil were rather roughly handled.[278] Mickle afterwards burnt this jeu ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... book, a piece of work which, though inordinately versed, contained, he thought, some rather excellent political satire. "The Faerie Queene" by Edmund Spenser lay before him under the tremulous candle-light. He had ploughed through a canto; he was ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... London celebrities of our day. I remember the delight with which he came to my hotel and said: "You must dine with me to-day; I want to introduce you to a person you will much like. His greatest fault is one you possess yourself, a turn for satire, which sometimes makes him enemies." On the same morning he had announced to his friend with beaming eyes, "My father is here;" and when the next day that same friend wished to engage him to an evening party, he replied: "You forget that I have a wild young father ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... Charles Sprague, of Massachusetts, no language can be spoken but that of unqualified praise. Forsaking the modern school of writing, he is contented with being simple and natural. Sublimity, tenderness, wit, elegance, and beneficial satire characterise his muse.—The only complaint I have ever heard made of him is that he does not ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... is to blame? Surely, neither Roman Catholics, nor Protestants, nor those who managed "thumbscrews" and "hot irons," and other condemned instruments of the dark ages, nor yet those who now live to be the "butt" of Colonel Ingersoll's satire and ridicule. A kind feeling for all, and unfaithfulness ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880
... and yet of a generous disposition. As to her internal accomplishments, I have reason to speak still more highly of them: good sense without vanity, a penetrating judgment without a disposition to satire, with about as much religion as my William likes, struck me with a wish that she was my William's wife." That is about the tune: pleasing voice, moderate good looks, unimpeachable internal accomplishments after the style ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Infinity. Would you quarrel with Science because it is not yet made perfect? Would you condemn music because of an occasional discord? Would you reject history altogether because amid a world of truth there are preserved some fables such as tempted the satire of Cervantes? Would you banish the sun from Heaven because of its spots or declare Love a ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of four satires written in 1766 and 1767,[1] all of which are now little-known. What little notice he receives today results from his friendship with John Wilkes and David Garrick and from one satire, The Methodist, which is usually included in surveys of anti-Methodist literature.[2] For the most part, his obscurity is deserved. In The Methodist, however, he participates in a short-lived revolt against the tyranny of Augustan satire and shows considerable ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... which that last luckless distich is taken, "The Elder Brother," is full of pathos and about equally full of false notes. If we turn to a far different subject, the very vigorously conceived "Natural Death of Love," we find a piece of strong and true satire, the best thing of its kind in the author, which is kept up throughout. Although, like all satire, it belongs at best but to the outer courts of poetry, it is so good that none can complain. Then the page is turned ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... twenty or thirty thousand serfs. On the death of Lanskoi, it is recorded of her that "she gave herself up to the most poignant grief, and remained three months without going out of her palace of Czarsko Selo," thus perpetrating a very curious practical satire upon the holiest of human affections. Her grenadier lover Potemkin, according to the character given of him by the Count Segur, was little better than a gigantic and savage buffoon—licentious and superstitious, bold and timid by turns—sometimes desiring ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... of what the queen really did that day, instead of writing these lines against her, and consequently against me, you would have written an ode in her favor. Perhaps the subject does not inspire you; but I should have liked a bad ode better than a good satire." ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... reward offered to hale him forth and force him to enjoy that privilege—five hundred dollars?" asked Bygrave, who was a newspaper man and had a habit of easy satire. ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... vagrant humanity (sometimes scalawags and sometimes angels), born in basements and bred on curbstones, then believe me, my countrymen, there is a sight worth seeing, a scene fit for a painter. It might be a pleasant satire upon our national hospitality if the artist were to call such a picture "Young America," for comparatively few distinctively American faces would be found in his ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin
... sealed orders were opened, and the first name found in them was that of Francisco Barreto, a most experienced officer. This governor is chiefly known from his persecution of the poet Camoens, whom he sent to the little island of Macao as a punishment for a satire he had written on the pride and immorality of the officials at Goa. But Barreto was a very vigorous governor. He did much to strengthen the various Portuguese fortresses throughout Asia, and showed himself a ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... opinion that a man's character and fate are determined by the stars under which he is born. And the nature of these stars is deduced from their names, so that the bear should have been found in the horoscope of Dr. Johnson. When Giordano Bruno wrote his satire against religion, the famous 'Spaccio della bestia trionfante,' he proposed to banish not only the gods but the beasts from heaven. He would call the stars, not the Bear, or the Swan, or the Pleiads, but Truth, Mercy, Justice, and so forth, that men might be born, not under bestial, ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... instincts of defence. The General did not mean to give himself away; he intended, indeed, precisely the contrary; but, after every round of conversation Miss Boyson felt herself more and more richly provided with materials for satire at the expense of England and the English tourist, his invincible conceit, insularity, and condescension. She was a clever though tiresome woman; and expressed herself best in letters. She promised herself to write a "character" of General Hobson in her next letter to an intimate friend, ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her effort might have resulted cruelly. And now that she had done so much for Con Hite, it was her pleasure to take it out on him, as the phrase goes. All unaware of this curious mental attitude, he winced under her satire. ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... said by a great moral philosopher that fashion supplies the place of reason. On superficial consideration the assertion will appear paradoxical; but there is much truth in it, and much biting satire too, upon the absurdities of the world. Fashion could not supply the place of reason, if reason were not absent; and most irrational and unaccountable indeed are all her ladyship's ways. Her capriciousness is proverbial, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... Ross, interrupting the stream of eloquence; and Mr. Harcourt, without finishing his sentence, went at once in search of his wife. Women might be illogical, but they were to be considered, for all that. With all his satire and love of argument, Mr. Harcourt valued his wife's comfort before his own. 'I am quite ready, dear,' he said, as she looked up at him with a deprecating smile; 'and I know your mother ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... you sometimes see on sultry summer days, moving sluggishly across the purely azure sky; so this remark of P—— overshadowed my mind with a misgiving feeling; and Horace's Ninth Satire, seizing my memory with prophetic tenacity, made ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... his own country, he returned. He could not, however, conscientiously take the oaths to Government, and therefore never had any other military employment. "With much truth, honour, and humanity," relates Mrs. Grant, "he inherited his father's wit and self-possession, with a vein of keen satire which he indulged in bitter expressions against the enemies of his family. Some of these I have seen, and heard many songs of his composing, which showed no contemptible power of poetic genius, although rude and careless of polish." ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... whom no slight can chill nor, even insult, cause to abate the least of his intrusive familiarity—a familiarity which he covets, too, only for the sake of disputation and satire. To me, however, he is never other than a source of amusement. He is a variety of the species I ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... course that he should engage me in conversation. He was as lonesome for a chance to bark as a country dog. Presently when I dissented from some point in his creed, he called me a heretic, and I with gentlest satire asked him if the word yet lived. But he was not angry, and he told me of his brotherhood. It had a branch in America, and he bade me, if ever I met any of its priests, to convey to them his warm regards. As for America, it was, he said, too coldly ethical, and needed ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... moment imagined you could. In fact, you told me so, and therefore I have never troubled you with them, my dear," was the reply, with just the slightest shade of satire. But its bitterness passed away the moment Sybilla jumped up and came to sit down on the hearth at his feet, in an attitude of comical attention. Thereupon he patted her on the head, gently and smilingly, ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... now a very famous poet, but still essentially the same as he had been when a student in Athens. Destiny or the gods had played with him, but the poet had taken it as a good joke on the part of the Higher Powers, and answered it with a satire. After the murder of Caesar, Brutus had fled to Greece, and been so well received there, that the Athenians had erected a statue to him, and raised troops for him against Antonius and the other generals, among whom was the invalid ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... of forfeiture of all ecclesiastical promotion." Parker regarded it as his duty to remonstrate with her in person against so popish a prohibition; on which, after declaring to him that she repented of having made any married bishops, she went on to treat the institution of matrimony itself with a satire and contempt which ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... perfect," she said, in her rather deep voice, gazing at the young composer with eyes in which a light satire twinkled. "Don't think I'm criticizing it. Only I'm so dreadfully un-English, and I think English musicians get rather into a groove. The Hallelujah bow-wow, ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... of the Shakspere piece, which was rewritten from an Academic original after Raleigh's consignment to the Tower,—in that fierce satire into which so much Elizabethan bitterness is condensed, under the difference of the reckless prodigality which is stereotyped in the fable, we get, in the earlier scenes, some glimpses of this 'Athenian' also, in ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... cheery than usual; he talked about the wonderful idea of personal immortality, and he said if it be a dream of the imagination let us worship the imagination. He spoke of Mrs. Child's book on 'Aspirations,' and I shall order it at once. The only satire was such a sentence as this: on speaking of a piece of Egyptian sculpture he said, 'The gates of heaven opened to the good, not ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... print. Dostoevsky is beginning to be recognized as one of the ablest and profoundest among Russian writers. His characters are invariably typical portraits drawn from various classes of Russian society, strikingly life-like and realistic to the highest degree. The following extract is a cutting satire on modern theology generally and the Roman Catholic religion in particular. The idea is that Christ revisits earth, coming to Spain at the period of the Inquisition, and is at once arrested as a heretic by the Grand Inquisitor. One of the three brothers ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... Steve's incautious satire suddenly precipitated the crisis he feared. The girl's eyes flashed a hot look of resentment. He was laughing at her. She was in no mood to be made sport of, or to have her words made sport of. She sat up with a start and ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... thus complimented, appeared to enjoy the satire of Johnny Darbyshire; and still more was it relished in the ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... cause. Look on this form—where humour, quaint and sly, Dimples the cheek, and points the beaming eye; Where gay invention seems to boast its wiles In amorous hint, and half-triumphant smiles; While her light mask or covers satire's strokes, Or hides the conscious blush her wit provokes. Look on her well—does she seem form'd to teach? Should you expect to hear this lady preach? Is grey experience suited to her youth? Do solemn sentiments become ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... well known as the original of Drawcansir, in "The Rehearsal," into whose mouth parodies of some of Dryden's most extravagant flights have been put by the duke of Buckingham. Shaftesbury also, whose family had smarted under Dryden's satire, attempts to trace the applause bestowed on the "Conquest of Granada" to what he calls "the correspondence and relation between our Royal Theatre and popular Circus, or Bear-Garden. For, in the ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... Man," and his "Common Sense," excellent books, once praised by bishops and since sedulously lied about. Gulliver was there unexpurgated, strong meat for a boy perhaps but not too strong I hold—I have never regretted that I escaped niceness in these affairs. The satire of Traldragdubh made my blood boil as it was meant to do, but I hated Swift for the Houyhnhnms and never quite liked a horse afterwards. Then I remember also a translation of Voltaire's "Candide," and "Rasselas;" and, vast book though it was, I really ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... great success. It is certainly a brisk and lively piece, and coming at the juncture it did must have been extraordinarily effective. As a topical key-play reflecting the moment it is indeed admirable, and the crescendo of overwhelming satire, all the keener for the poet's deep earnestness, culminating in the living actors, yesterday's lords and law-givers, running to and fro the London streets, one bawling 'Ink or pens, ink or pens!', another 'Boots or shoes, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... brandished its control of the courts in the face of every one who strove to temper war with hopes of peace, that tolerated Metellus until he proved too dilatory, and sent out Marius in the vain hope that he might show greater expedition. The close of the war was a singular satire on their policy, a remarkable proof of the justice of the official view. The end came through diplomacy, not through battle, through an unknown quaestor who belonged to the old nobility and possessed its best gifts of facile speech and suppleness in intrigue, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... sharper rate; nay, and he did not sometimes refrain from naming the persons: whereas I have not only stifled the mentioning any one person, but have so tempered my style, as the ingenious reader will easily perceive I aimed at diversion rather than satire. Neither did I so far imitate Juvenal, as to rake into the sink of vices to procure a laughter, rather than create a hearty abhorrence. If there be any one that after all remains yet unsatisfied, let him at least ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... this was unsuccessful. His first distinction was won as a writer in Fraser's Magazine, Punch, and other periodicals of character. In the latter amusing periodical appeared his Jeames's Diary, a clever satire on the follies of the railway mania, exposing the hollow foundation upon which railway fortunes and reputations were made. His Snob Papers, published in the same manner, have since been collected and reprinted ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... d'Argens's Letter 35. The work referred to in the third footnote on page 258 is Le Chevalier des Essars et la Comtesse de Berci (1735) by Ignace-Vincent Guillot de La Chassagne. The last footnote on that page refers to G.H. Bougeant's satire, Voyage Merveilleux du Prince Fan-Feredin dans la ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... satire on the critics. When anything strikes them as good—by a new man, that is—they're ashamed to say so, just because they never dare trust their own judgment.—But it is good, Warburton; uncommonly good. If there's a weak point, it's doggy; I can't come the Landseer. ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... facts. If their panegyric had been answered with an invective, (bating the difference in point of eloquence,) the one would have been as good as the other: that is, they would both of them have been good for nothing. The panegyric and the satire ought to be suffered to go to trial; and that which shrinks from if must be contented to stand, at ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... his eminence as a popular orator. His speech against the Mexican War, though unfortunate as a political event, has always been regarded as one of the most eloquent ever made in either House of Congress. His speech in reply to Crary, of Michigan, is still remembered as the best specimen of humorous satire in our language. He had served in the legislature of Ohio, as a Member of Congress for ten years, as Governor of Ohio, as a Member of the Senate, and as Secretary of the Treasury. After an absence from public life for six years, he was elected ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... the drama, and it was not until after 1870 that he became fully conscious of his vocation as a novelist, perhaps through the trials of the siege of Paris and the humiliation of his country, which deepened his nature without souring it. Daudet's genial satire, 'Tartarin de Tarascon', appeared in 1872; but with the Parisian romance 'Fromont jeune et Risler aine', crowned by the Academy (1874), he suddenly advanced into the foremost rank of French novelists; it ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... before me the realization of a character which in the abstract so much absorbed my regards, gave me a degree of satisfaction which it would be difficult to express." Eighteen years later Lord Byron calls him a prepossessing looking person, and, with his usual admixture of satire, says, "To have his head and shoulders I would almost have written his Sapphics;" and elsewhere he speaks of his appearance as "Epic," an expression which may be either a sneer ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... published in Pearch's collection. After moving, for a long time, as one of the most brilliant orbs in the sphere of fashion, she suddenly retired, and like her morose brother, shut herself up from the world. While she lived in this seclusion, she became an object of the sportive satire of the late Mr Fox, who characterized ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... burning desire to find a shop where he can buy animal-crackers. Finding such a place,—and usually it is not difficult,—he will lay in a supply of lions and tigers, and then go marching about with great delight, with mockery in his eyes, keenly appreciating the satire involved in eating the head off a cooky lion, incapable ...
— By The Sea - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... Boccace, and Chaucer. Instances of that public abuse are triumphantly inserted by Warburton in his Edition of Pope's works. See Appendix to the Dunciad. It is re-published there, to justify some of the personal severities of Pope's celebrated Satire. ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... liberalism, Bettina's pretensions, Young Germany's reaction, even the Indian studies of the Schlegels and Alexander von Humboldt's substantial scholarship, so that, for the general reader, the larger part of the work is a sealed book. Its references are obscure, its satire abstruse, its humor vague. Even Ferdinand Freiligrath, Immermann's contemporary and friend, declined, on the ground of lack of familiarity with the allusions, to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... latest political questions of the day—religion and the haut monde—come in for a large share of good-natured satire. To be cleverly caricatured is an honor, and should evince no ill-feeling, especially from these clever singing comedians, who are the best of fellows at heart; whose songs are clever but never vulgar; who sing because they love to sing; and whose versatility ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... sufficient reason, and be justified by something more than mere obstinate prejudice. Men like Pitt and Sir Robert Peel, if they accepted Coleridge's support, would have to alter their whole position. Coleridge's defence of his ideal church was at once the severest satire upon the existing body and a proof, as against Bentham and Adam Smith, of the advantages of an endowed class for the cultivation and diffusion of learning. Coleridge, moreover, though he objected to the Reform Bill, showed himself a better ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... "Mulier est erratum naturae, et mas occasionatus, et per accidens generatur; atque ideo est monstrum." For other instances see Bayle s. v. Gediacus (Revd. Simon of Brandebourg) who in 1695 published a "Defensio Sexus muliebris," a refutation of an anti-Socinian satire or squib, "Disputatio perjucunda, Mulieres homines non esse," Parisiis, 1693. But when Islam arose in the seventh century, the Christian learned cleverly affixed the stigma of their own misogyny upon the Moslems ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... stand out in this powerful book. La Espuma was a cry from the desert to those who wear soft raiment in king's palaces. It was the ruthless tearing aside of the conventions by a Knox or a Savonarola. It was stringent satire, yet tempered with an artist's ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... sentiment and scoff at thy style (which Heaven forfend!), console thyself that thou livest in peaceable and enlightened times, and needest fear that no greater evil can befall thee on account of thy folly in writing than the lash of his satire and the bitterness of his caustic pen. After the manner of thy race thou wilt tempt Fortune again. May'st thou ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... effective service. His famous "Nasby Letters" exposed the absurd and sophistical argumentations of rebels and their sympathisers, in such broad, attractive and admirable burlesque, as to direct against them the "loud, long laughter of a world!" The unique and telling satire of these papers became a power and inspiration to our armies in the field and to their anxious friends at home, more than equal to the might of whole battalions poured in upon the enemy. An athlete in logic ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... up a volume that lay on one of the tables. It was easy to see that his hands shook, and that there was perspiration on his forehead. With pleasant tact, Moxey struck into a new subject, and for the next quarter of an hour Peak sat apart in the same attitude as before his outburst of satire and invective. Then he advanced to Miss Moxey again, for the purpose of taking leave. This was the signal for Earwaker's rising, and in a few minutes both ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... time, a sense of the harsh treatment of the lord of Charlecot, and revenged himself in his writings, but in the sportive way of a good-natured mind. Sir Thomas is said to be the original of Justice Shallow, and the satire is slyly fixed upon him by the justice's armorial bearings, which, like those of the knight, had ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... asked them what some carriages were still waiting for at the door of the station, and one of them answered with a lightness you do not expect in England, "Oh, Lord This, and Lady That, and the Hon. Mr. I-don't- know-what's-his-name." The others laughed at this ribald satire of the upper classes, and I thought it safer to follow the King to the races lest I should ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... amazing art. But one can hardly pass without tribute such things as the head of the Japanese poet on page 1 ("Seer of Visions"), a really wonderful example of much meaning in few lines, or the WYNDHAM LEWIS, the only drawing in the book in which a suggestion of cruelty tinges the satire. Perhaps the most directly laughter-moving pages are those devoted to the brilliant series of musical conductors; is this because we have all stared our two hours into expert familiarity with these variously-tailored ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various
... important causes both for the prosecution and for the defence, "et faisait rage d'alleguer loix, chapitres, et decisions, et luy croissoit le latin en la bouche comme le cresson a la guelle d'un four," the whole being a satire on the well-known Norman passion for a lawsuit, which was appreciated as much by the good people of Rouen as by their ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... explain by rising to the heights of natural philosophy, and Maturin did not explain at all, but let his extravagant genius roam between heaven and earth—Thackeray's keen wit saw mainly one chance for exquisite literary satire and parody. At one point or another in this skit, the style of each principal sensational novelist of the day is ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Mr. Williams, who would sometimes be jocose, and had the Art of making even Satire agreeable; that if ever Jane deserved the Character of a Witch, it was after this Money was left her; for that with her five thousand Pounds, she did more Acts of Charity and friendly Offices, than all the People of Fortune within fifty ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • Anonymous
... has become to me an abstraction rather than a human being—an embodiment of all the vicious routine, the foul obscurantism, the stupid prejudice, which an enlightened Liberalism has to struggle against. There he sits, a satire on our parliamentary system. He can't put together three sentences; he never in his life had an idea. The man is a mere money-sack, propped up by toadies and imbeciles. Has any other borough such a contemptible representative? I perspire ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... mind, evidenced in his works and proved by his biography, is so perfectly honest, open, home-bred English, that we claim him with pride—as belonging exclusively to England. His originality is of English growth; his satire broad, bold, fair-play English. He was no screened assassin of character, either with pen or pencil; no journalist's hack to stab in secret—concealing his name, or assuming a forged one; no masked caricaturist, responsible to none. His philosophy was of the straightforward, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... Constantine to the most abhorred of those tyrants, who, by their vice and weakness, dishonored the Imperial purple. The same passions have in some degree been perpetuated to succeeding generations, and the character of Constantine is considered, even in the present age, as an object either of satire or of panegyric. By the impartial union of those defects which are confessed by his warmest admirers, and of those virtues which are acknowledged by his most-implacable enemies, we might hope to delineate a just portrait of that extraordinary ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Kirk brings to my mind the notorious John Williams, better known as Anthony Pasquin, under which name he was doomed to everlasting infamy by Gifford, in his satire of the Baviad and Maeviad, in judgments afterwards confirmed in a celebrated trial for libel in which the famous Erskine delivered one of his best forensic speeches. Williams was the associate in London of a small but ambitious set of mutual admirers in literature, of whom ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... conjured up in our mind of Mrs. Warren is farthest away from satire. To judge by the costume she wore when she sat to Copley for her portrait, she must have been graced with all the feminine wiles of the period. Behold Mrs. Mercy Warren, satirist, as the records ...
— The Group - A Farce • Mercy Warren
... the greatest satire upon human nature which the world has ever produced, that acts perfectly innocent, high, and pure as God's holy light, cannot be permitted to persons even of tried virtue, simply because they would afford the opportunity of doing ill. It is, in fact, to say, ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... he ever read attentively the poem of Dante, perhaps never ran through it from the first verse to the last."[69] Accordingly we have heard that the Commedia was a sermon, a political pamphlet, the revengeful satire of a disappointed Ghibelline, nay, worse, of a turncoat Guelph. It is narrow, it is bigoted, it is savage, it is theological, it is mediaeval, it is heretical, it is scholastic, it is obscure, it is pedantic, its Italian is not that of la Crusca, its ideas are not those ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... he took a French book. It was one of the works of Blaise Pascal, his "Lettres Provinciales." He admired their originality, the trenchant satire, and the galling blows of this man whom Chateaubriand called a ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... 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 ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... Madam, with what a surprising grace Miss Horton reads!—she enters into the very spirit of her subject —this she could have from nobody but you! An intended praise; but, as the subjects were, would have been a severe satire in the mouth of an enemy!—While the fond, the inconsiderate mother, with a delighted air, would cry, Why, I cannot but say, Miss Horton does credit to her tutoress! And then a Come hither, my best Love! and, with a kiss of approbation, ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... following lines six years ago from a review in a Munich newspaper of Batornicki's Ungoettliche Comoedie. They were cited as from Tieck's suppressed (zurueckgezogen) satire, La Comoedie Divina, from which Batornicki was accused of plundering freely, thinking that, from its variety, he would ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... remark, not without distinct satire in its tone, took her so greatly by surprise that she was confounded. Nicholas was by this time nearer, though coming against the sun he had not yet perceived her. Influenced by her father's lecture, she felt ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... writer, save Shakespeare, has drawn so many and so varied characters. It would be as absurd to interpret all of these as caricatures as to deny Dickens his great and varied powers of creation. Dickens exaggerated many of his comic and satirical characters, as was his right, for caricature and satire are very closely related, while exaggeration is the very essence of comedy. But there remains a host of characters marked by humour and pathos. Yet the pictorial presentation of Dickens's characters has ever tended toward the grotesque. The interpretations in this volume aim ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... prayer meeting will be held in the basement of the church on Wednesday evening." Then almost in a tone of colloquy, and with just a hint of satire about his long ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Christianity and was too long retained by the Christian world. There is even danger of excess in the liberality now extended to her. The toast, "Woman, Once Our Superior and Now Our Equal," is not without satire as well as significance. There must be a measurable reaction against the ultra tendency in progress which has evolved the New Woman, as the phrase is. I never met one and I hope I never shall. The women of the present, the girls of the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... house was built by Inigo Jones, most of which has disappeared in subsequent additions and alterations. While the Queensberry family were in possession the poet Gay was a guest here and wrote, in a sham cave or grotto still existing on the river bank, the Beggar's Opera, that satire on certain aspects of eighteenth-century life which, strangely enough, became lately popular after a ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... introduced were supposed to be typical of personages who had attained some notoriety in the throng of speculation. Any such resemblances must be considered as fortuitous; for the writer cannot charge himself with the discourtesy of individual satire or allusion.] ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... suppositions, the pretended good nature of an inquiry, all these arts are employed against you. A man who undertakes to subjugate his wife is an example too dangerous to escape destruction from them, for will not his conduct call up against them the satire of every husband? Moreover, all of them will attack you, either by bitter witticisms, or by serious arguments, or by the hackneyed maxims of gallantry. A swarm of celibates will support all their sallies and you will be assailed and persecuted as an original, a tyrant, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... one remedy only, and that remedy was the cultivation of the simple and beautiful religion of the Brethren. The last part of his book, "The Paradise of the Heart," is delightful. Comenius was a marvellous writer. He combined the biting satire of Swift with the devotional tenderness of Thomas Kempis. As we linger over the closing sections of his book, we can see that he then regarded the Brethren as almost ideal Christians. Among them he found no priests in gaudy attire, no flaunting wealth, no ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... say Mass, the fellows were turned out, the undergraduates were whipped—boyish martyrs—and crossed at the buttery. What most pleases, in this tragic reign, is the anecdote of Edward Anne of Corpus. Anne, with the conceit of youth, had written a Latin satire on the Mass. He was therefore sentenced to be publicly flogged in the hall of his college, and to receive one lash for each line in his satire. Never, surely, was a poet so sharply taught the merit of brevity. ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... of any satire, answered promptly: "If you mean the Pike County Billingses who live on the turnpike road as much as they do off it, or the six daughters of that Georgia Cracker who wear men's boots and hats, ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... on more than one occasion, while acting under him, was to remember that "abuse" seldom effectually answered a purpose, and that it was wiser as well as safer to act on the principle that "praise undeserved is satire in disguise." All that was evil in the "John Bull" had been absorbed by two infamous weekly newspapers, "The Age" and "The Satirist." They were prosperous and profitable. Happily, no such newspapers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... all nations since the expedition of Napoleon. That animal-worship, which had remained unchanged for centuries, a riddle of human religion, was bound to excite the curiosity of strangers. In this divinisation of animals lay the greatest contempt for human understanding, and it was a bitter satire on the apotheosis of kings and emperors. For what was the divinity of Sesostris, of Alexander, of Augustus, or Hadrian compared with the heavenly majesty of the ox Apis, or the holy cats, dogs, kites, crocodiles, ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... very ignorant. All these simple things, so well known and customary, astonished him at first, and once—in a brief moment of forgetting that he was done with writing—he thought that if he had known them and written of them, how like a satire the plainest relation of them must have seemed! Strangest of all to him was the vehement and sincere patriotism. On every side he heard it—it was a permeation; the newest school-child caught it, though just from Hungary and learning to stammer a few words ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... rather dropped with me; and complimented us all round, beginning with my father and Madame Rupprecht, and ending with little Alwina. But he a little scoffed at the old-fashioned church ceremonies which my father insisted on; and I fancy Fritz must have taken some of his compliments as satire, for I saw certain signs of manner by which I knew that my future husband, for all his civil words, had irritated and annoyed my brother. But all the money arrangements were liberal in the extreme, and more than satisfied, almost surprised, my father. Even Fritz lifted up his eyebrows and ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Thus Washington Irving is said to belong to the Democrats; but it would be hard to find in his writings anything countenancing their claim upon him. His sketches of English society are a panegyric of old institutions; and the fourth book of his Knickerbocker is throughout a palpable satire on the administration of Thomas Jefferson, the great apostle of Democracy. Perhaps, however, he may since have changed his views. Willis, too, the 'Free Penciler,' who has been half his life prating about lords and ladies, and great people, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... his bourgeois, envelops him softly in satire as in cotton-wool, dandles him like a great baby; and Coquelin is without bitterness, stoops to make stupidity heroic, a distinguished stupidity. A study in comedy so profound, so convincing, so full of human nature and of the art-concealing ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... Inventory of the wealth, furniture, or means of man according to his present estate, as far as it is known; which I do not to shew any universality of sense or knowledge, and much less to make a satire of reprehension in respect of wants and errors, but partly because cogitations new had need of some grossness and inculcation to make them perceived; and chiefly to the end that for the time to come (upon the account ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... symbolised by the "strait house" and the "poor prospect" I should have grown angry, had not a certain sense of humour come to my rescue, who remembered that after all Ayesha's satire was profoundly true. Why, beyond the earth, should anyone desire to remain unalterably tied to and inextricably wrapped up in such a personality as my own, especially if others of superior texture abounded about them? Now that I came to think of it, the thing ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... ball far back in 1667 had given grievous offence to the Jesuits, and the unholy acting of plays was now declared an open profanity. Nicomede and Mithridate were condemned as immoral; but when Tartuffe, Moliere's mordant satire upon religious hypocrisy, was put upon the boards, the limits of endurance were reached ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... any part of my writing a satire upon the women; nor, indeed, does the extravagance either of dress or house-keeping, lie all, or always, at the door of the tradesmen's wives—the husband is often the prompter of it; at least he does not let his wife into the detail of his ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... dissipation in London and at Brighton, Byron threw himself, at Newstead, into the preparation of a satirical revenge, training himself for it by a deep study of the writings of Pope. After his coming of age, in 1809, he went up to London with his satire, and on March 13 took his seat in the House of Lords. A few days later "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" was the talk of the town. Wild festivities at Newstead followed its publication, and on July 2 Byron sailed from Falmouth in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... remains to us out of this life of many purposes, which had found an end satisfying to itself in the Deanery of St. Paul's, is simply a bundle of manuscript verses, which the writer could bring himself neither to print nor to destroy. His first satire speaks contemptuously of 'giddy fantastic poets,' and, when he allowed himself to write poetry, he was resolved to do something different from what anybody had ever done before, not so much from the artist's instinctive desire of originality, as from a kind ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... one was so rash as to allude to this, his foulest crime. This reference to his brother's death had as usual stirred his wrath, but he controlled it; for as a torrent of rain extinguishes the fire which a lightning-flash has kindled, the homage to his strength, in Alexander's satire, had modified his indignation. The irony which made the artist's contemptuous words truly witty, would not have escaped Caracalla's notice if they had applied to any one else; but he either did not feel it, or would not remark it, for the sake of leaving Melissa in the belief that his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... amusingly illustrated, M.E., p. 390. A translation into Japanese of Goethe's Reynard the Fox is among the popular works of the day. "Strange to say, however, the Japanese lose much of the exquisite humor of this satire in their sympathy with the woes of the maltreated wolf."—The Japan Mail. This sympathy with animals grows directly out of the doctrine of metempsychosis. The relationship between man and ape is founded upon the pantheistic identity ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... Hogarth was not often of a personal nature; but he knew his own power, and he sometimes exercised it. Two of his prints, "The Times," produced a memorable quarrel between himself, on one side, and Wilkes and Churchhill, on the other. The satire of the prints of "The Times," which were published in 1762, was directed, not against Wilkes himself, but his political friends, Pitt and Temple; nor is it so biting as to have required Wilkes, in defence of his party, to retaliate upon one with whom he had lived in familiar ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... the boys' sport was quite sufficiently punished by being made into earnest. Master Sniggius was far from merciful as to length, and his satire was so extremely remote that Queen Elizabeth herself could hardly have found out that Zenobia's fine moral lecture on the vanities of too aspiring ruffs was founded on the box on the ear which rewarded poor Lady Mary Howard's display of her rich petticoat, nor would ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... quarter. When I consider the exceeding Candour and Good-nature of our Author, (which inclin'd all the gentler Part of the World to love him; as the Power of his Wit obliged the Men of the most delicate Knowledge and polite Learning to admire him;) and that he should throw this humorous Piece of Satire at his Prosecutor, at least twenty Years after the Provocation given; I am confidently persuaded it must be owing to an unforgiving Rancour on the Prosecutor's Side: and if This was the Case, it were Pity ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... hand, bright, without wounding, Purity of mouth, without poisonous satire, Purity of learning, without reproach, Purity, as ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... of a future peer of England, knows very well the delicate work she has in hand, and takes pains accordingly. It is different when she manufactures a mob of skulls which, by a jumble of worldly accidents, or by the satire of Fortune in her bitterest mood, may ultimately belong to Members of the House of Commons. These she makes, as they make blocks in Portsmouth-yard, a hundred a minute. All she has to do is to fulfil her contract with the world, taking care that there ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... pass the test of ringing true. Look, for example, at the work of those two whom we could so ill spare—Synge and St. John Hankin. They were as far apart as dramatists well could be, except that each had found a special medium—the one a kind of lyric satire, the other a neat, individual sort of comedy—which seemed exactly to express his spirit. Both forms were in a sense artificial, but both were quite sincere; for through them each of these two dramatists, so utterly ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... sometimes that of the polecat. In his Malcontent he probably drew a nattering likeness of his inner self: yet the most compassionate reader of the play would experience little pity in seeing the Malcontent hanged. So much, indeed, of Marston's satire is directed at depravity, that Ben Jonson used to say that "Marston wrote his father-in-law's preachings, and his father-in-law his comedies." It is to be hoped, however, that the spirit of the chaplain's tirades against sins was not, like his son-in-law's, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... flesh. Bumble is a magnificent figure of the follies and cruelties of ignorance in office—I would have every candidate for the post of workhouse master pass a severe examination upon "Oliver Twist"—but it is not only caricature and satire I demand. We must have not only the fullest treatment of the temptations, vanities, abuses, and absurdities of office, but all its dreams, its sense of constructive order, its consolations, its sense of service, and its nobler satisfactions. You may say that is ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... been placed in charge of the liquids. What a satire there is in circumstances, and how those of to-day laugh at those of yesterday! Yes, Wild Bill had charge of the liquids,—no mean charge, when the occasion is considered. Nor was the position without its embarrassments, as few honorable positions are, for it brought him ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray
... He was tall, fair, and handsome, the features clean cut and the eyes grey. His manners were polished, and he was always well dressed. He was full of high spirits and good temper, and was a most agreeable companion to all to whom his satire did not render him uncomfortable. Strange to say, he stood very high in the favour of Mrs. Porkington, who, had she known what fun he made of her behind her back, would, I think, have sometimes forgotten that he was the nephew of a peer. He studied logic, classics, mathematics, ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... bitter satire, O'Connell introduced into his speech,' said Sir George, 'the story of the siege of Limerick. He eloquently told how the women of Limerick beat back the soldiers of William III. This was his shrewd method of getting at us soldiers, and he implied ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... dormant project was revived, after Pope had finished his Homer, on occasion of the last two visits of Swift to England. He passed six months in England from March to August, 1726, and had brought with him the MS. of Gulliver's Travels, the greatest satire produced by the Scriblerians. He passed a great part of his time at Twickenham, and in rambling with Pope or Gay about the country. Those who do not know how often the encounter of brilliant wits tends to neutralize rather than ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... distress, came to talk to me in my room: they compared the conduct of M. de Machault with that of M. de Richelieu, at Metz. Madame had related to them the circumstances extremely to the honour of the Duke, and, by contrast, the severest satire on the Keeper of the Seals. "He thinks, or pretends to think," said she, "that the priests will be clamorous for my dismissal; but Quesnay and all the physicians declare that there is not the slightest danger." Madame having sent for me, I saw the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... a common soldier, fought Miguel de Cervantes, a Spaniard, who, toward the close of a roving life, settled down to literature in his native land, and after Philip's death wrote what was in many ways a satire upon that monarch's rule in Spain. Cervantes' Don Quixote altered the taste of the whole literary world. Its influence spread from Spain to France and over all Europe. It was the death-song of ancient chivalry, the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... most eligible methods of preparing the same for the table, was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster; and to hear these literary gourmands talk with such gusto of this writer's delightful style, or of that one's delicious humor, or t' other's brilliant wit and merciless satire, gave one a taste and a relish for the authors so lovingly and heartily commended. Certainly, after hearing the genial, scholarly, gentlemanly lawyer S—— sweetly discourse on the old English divines,—or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various |
