"Comic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vexed. The words uttered were words of rebuke, but the odd manner in which they were said and the humorous twinkle in the minister's eyes did not well agree. He waited a moment for her answer, still holding her hand and looking down into her face with a serio-comic expression quite unlike a clergyman, until Dexie ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... scene, character succeeded character, comic and ridiculous like the bailiff and Grenicheux, imposing and winsome like the marquis and Germaine. The audience laughed heartily at the slap delivered by Gaspard and intended for the coward Grenicheux, which was received by the grave bailiff, ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... to know how "Jack and the Beanstalk" goes. I have a notion from a notice—a favourable notice, however—which I saw in Galignani, that Webster has let down the comic business. ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... harness. She was the first hog that father bought to stock the farm, and we boys regarded her as a very wonderful beast. In a few weeks she had a lot of pigs, and of all the queer, funny, animal children we had yet seen, none amused us more. They were so comic in size and shape, in their gait and gestures, their merry sham fights, and the false alarms they got up for the fun of scampering back to their mother and begging her in most persuasive little squeals to lie down and ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... Paris most addicted to private theatricals. This reproduction of a forgotten play, with its characters attired in the costume of the period in which the play was placed, had had great success, a success due largely to the excellence of the costumes. In the comic parts the dressing had been purposely exaggerated, but Madame de Nailles, who played the part of a great coquette, would not have been dressed in character had she not tried to make herself ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... a year or so ago to Annette Oakleigh, a Broadway comic opera singer, who was his second wife. By his first marriage he had had two children, a son, Warner, and ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... forgive Thee, Milton, those thy comic-dreadful wars Where, armed with gross and inconclusive steel, Immortals smite immortals mortalwise And fill ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... [Footnote 67: The famous comic poet and dramatist, author of the "Frogs," "Clouds," "Birds," and many other works, of which only eleven are now extant; born about 451 B.C., ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... comic songs to cheer us up during that night of dolor, filling the intervals between the ditties with anathemas against his South African luck and realistic stories of his Australian experiences. He had lived, he told us, for several years by earning pennies in ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... Casaubon,[2] theorizes that the character evolved out of Greek Old Comedy. The Augustans saw a close connection between drama and character-writing. Congreve (Dedication to The Way of the World, 1700) thought that the comic dramatist Menander formed his characters on "the observations of Theophrastus, of whom he was a disciple," and Budgell, who termed Theophrastus the father of modern comedy, believed that if some of Theophrastus's characters "were well worked up, and brought upon the British theatre, they could ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... to wait longer than she anticipated, for she found that "El Diablo Cojuelo" had left his stronghold. Failing to make herself understood, Dolores fetched an old man who looked like a comic opera pirate and who could speak a ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... "Theer's sothin' comic about them theer goanners," said the old man at last. "I've seed swarms of grasshoppers an' big mobs of kangaroos, but dang me if ever I seed a ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... lower type, not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the Ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... attune myself to him I know not. If I wear a grim face, I am a sour fellow, scarcely to be endured. If I assume my most cheerful expression, my smiles arouse his contempt and disgust. As well attempt to act a comic part in the mask of tragedy! And what is the end of it all? My present life has been another's: do I look to have a new life ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... shots and the possibility of retrieving lost balls had raised a tremor of excitement as well as our hasty descent into the realms of Bacchus, in common words—the wine cellar. By the thin rays of a candle the scene was comic; there we were, fourteen of us huddled together in a twelve by twenty foot vault, earthen floor and stone walls. Expecting at any moment an onslaught of we did not know what, each one was bracing himself for the blow, in different attitudes of mind and body. Madame X. was pale, her daughter ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... lovers go in fours, Master and mistress, man and maid; Where people listen at the doors Or 'neath a table's friendly shade, And comic Irishmen in scores Roam o'er the ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... 13 vols. Green's History fo the English People. Stanhope's History of England. Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century. Macaulay's Essays (Milton, Mackintosh's History, War of the Spanish Succession, and The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration). Creighton's Life of Marlborough. Guizot's History of Civilization (Chapter XIII). Morris's Age of Anne.[1] Hale's Fall of the Stuarts.[1] Cordery's Struggle against Absolute Monarchy.[1] Scott's Peveril of the Peak ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... of circles, sittings, and "seances"—good Lord, how he hated that word!—were almost comic, and yet to think of Viola and her gracious mother concerned with these meetings, even as spectators, filled him with ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... its peculiar and diversified circumstances. Taking a particular view of things in general, we may say of life that it is composed of diverse and miscellaneous materials—the grave and the gay; the sad and the comic; the extraordinary and the commonplace; the flat and the piquant; the heavy and the light; the religious and the profane; the bright and the dark; the shadow and the sunshine. All these, and a great deal more, similar ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... innocent rate-payers are fleeced by barefaced robbers, but the catalogue would be only wearisome. Let any man of probity venture to force his way into one of these dens of thieves and see how he will fare! It is a comic thing that the gangs of jobbers consider that they have a prescriptive right to plunder at large, and their air of aggrieved virtue when they are challenged by a person whom they call an "interloper" is among the most droll and humiliating farces that may be seen ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... to realize that in very truth History has been one vast stupendous drama, world-embracing in its splendor, majestic, awful, irresistible in the insistence of its pointing finger of fate. It has indeed its comic interludes, a Prussian king befuddling ambassadors in his "Tobacco Parliament"; its pauses of intense and cumulative suspense, Queen Louise pleading to Napoleon for her country's life; but it has also its magnificent pageants, its gorgeous ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... outcast. Nor have we here the infernal courtliness of the scene as represented at Chartres, the doubtful consideration of an evil spirit gently driving in a nun; it is brutality in all its horror, the lowest violence; the sometimes comic side of these struggles is not to be seen here. At Bourges the myrmidons of the deep work and hit with a will. A devil with a wild beast's muzzle and a drunkard's face in the middle of his fat stomach, is hammering the skull of a wretch ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... known about the life of Aristophanes. He was born about 444 B.C., and devoted himself to comic poetry. He wrote fifty-four plays, of which eleven ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Life is either comic or tragic, according to the point of view from which we regard it. The observer will be impelled to laugh or to weep over it, as he shall fix his attention on men's follies or their sufferings. So of the Great Exhibition, and more especially its Royal Inauguration, which I have just ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... better class attended; nine-tenths of the people resort to these crude, wayside performances. They look on with seeming indifference; there is never a sign of approval, much less an outburst of applause. They seem to have no place in their souls for the ludicrous, the comic, or the joyous. They were shocked by my smiles and peals of laughter. They have a strange preference for the minor key in music, for the dirge. No wonder when our bands would play lively music that they were quite ready to take up the catchy airs, ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... you'd like me to fill the role of comic relief," she said sweetly. "Thanks a thousand times for ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... revelry should run high and the fun grow fast and furious, while the fire blazed and crackled on the hearth, while the streets swarmed with festive crowds, and through the clear frosty air, far away to the north, Soracte showed his coronal of snow. When we compare this comic monarch of the gay, the civilised metropolis with his grim counterpart of the rude camp on the Danube, and when we remember the long array of similar figures, ludicrous yet tragic, who in other ages and in other lands, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the photograph of an honest fellow deceased, whom she had never seen. The family was indignant because she had not given him the exact colors of his eyes and hair. It was necessary to do it all over again. Since she was disposed rather to look at the comic side of her misadventures, she laughed courageously about it. But Pierre did ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... four hours' rowing, and with a large leather bag well filled at starting but empty on its return; and instead of its contents we bring back in our memory a whole series of tales, characters, and incidents of water-craft life, some tragic, others comic, many 'hum-drum' enough, but still instructive, suggestive, branching out into hidden lives one would like to draw forth, and telling sorrows that are softened by being told. Of the French crews I began with here, not one of the first ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... the sun enters the four cardinal points of the heavens, that is, when he enters Cancer, Libra, Capricorn, and Aries. On these occasions they have very learned, splendid, and as it were comic performances. They celebrate also every full and every new moon with a festival, as also they do the anniversaries of the founding of the city, and of the days when they have won victories or done any other great achievement. The celebrations take place with the music of female voices, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... Puss, with a comic grin; "The words of truth you have spoken; A name for ourselves we must strive to win At once, now the ice is broken; For one or two doses of catnip tea Have had ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... wrote miserable comedies: Let it be no disgrace to Murphy that he has written an indifferent tragedy. By the merit of his comic scenes, his tragic ones are perhaps judged, and in the ...
— The Grecian Daughter • Arthur Murphy
... with a curt announcement that he would have to think the matter over. If I had not known the essential justice and common sense under his dry and irascible exterior, I might have been alarmed. The lobbyist's concern was almost comic. As soon as we were out of hearing of the Senator's apartment, shaking both fists frantically at me, he cried: "You've ruined everything! We had him. We had him—all right—until you came down here and let the cat out of the bag! You knew what we'd been telling him. Why ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... great festivities when the sun enters the four cardinal points of the heavens, that is, when he enters Cancer, Libra, Capricorn, and Aries. On these occasions they have very learned, splendid, and, as it were, comic performances. They celebrate also every full and every new moon with a festival, as also they do the anniversaries of the founding of the city, and of the days when they have won victories or done any other great achievement. ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... bandages, and had something the appearance of a relic of the Fourth of July, as our comic weeklies depict Young America the day after that glorious occasion. But, except for one thing which he had on his mind, the Coloradoan was as ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... said that no proposition ever had so many adherents; there was no question of hesitations, doubts, or anxieties. As to the jokes, caricatures, and comic songs that would have welcomed in Europe, and, above all, in France, the idea of sending a projectile to the moon, they would have been turned against their author; all the "life-preservers" in the ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... comic, Griggs," said the inventor, bruskly. "I'm going down to see who's fooling with that motor. It should not have been touched, although I must say it's a satisfaction to sit in a first-class place like this and hear my own machinery running. Are ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... without tools,' he says. 'And what's more,' he says, 'the worthy delicatessener is engaged at this present moment in locking up and going away from here. In about a half an hour,' he says, 'he'll be setting in his happy German-American home picking his teeth after supper, and reading comic jokes to his little son August out of the Fleagetty Bladder. And shortly thereafter,' he says, 'what'll you and me be doing? We'll be there, in that vittles emporium, in the midst of plenty,' he says, 'filling ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... Of course not! I am only forced by circumstance—and an oblique sense of the comic—to make a convenience of him. And by the Lord Harry, it's up to ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... laugh at his way of putting it; impossible, too, not to feel that behind his strange manner, his brutal speeches and his serio-comic rage there was the character of a man who would keep his word and who expected others to do the same. There might even be lurking somewhere in ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... the most crafty sovereign of his time, he was fond of low life, and, being himself a man of wit, enjoyed the jests and repartees of social conversation more than could have been expected from other points of his character. He even mingled in the comic adventures of obscure intrigue, with a freedom little consistent with the habitual and guarded jealousy of his character, and he was so fond of this species of humble gallantry, that he caused a number of its gay and licentious anecdotes to be enrolled in a ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... horse to keep up with. The first bullock-cart was driven by Hans, who sat upon the top of a heap of baggage, his head covered with a very old and battered Panama hat, through several broad holes in which his red hair bristled out in a most comic fashion, and over his blue flannel shirt a large red beard flowed almost to his waist. Terence was walking by the side of the second cart in corduroy breeches and gaiters and blue coat, with a high black ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... invent after dinner, invent on Sundays. See with what ardour they rush home of a night! See how they seize a half-holiday, like hungry dogs a bone! They don't want golf, bridge, limericks, novels, illustrated magazines, clubs, whisky, starting-prices, hints about neckties, political meetings, yarns, comic songs, anturic salts, nor the smiles that are situate between a gay corsage and a picture hat. They never wonder, at a loss, what they will do next. Their evenings never drag—are always too short. You may, indeed, catch them at twelve o'clock at night ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... approaching it, and after a strain which it had endured for no less than ten days; but the capture of Reading was not effected entirely without bloodshed; certainly fifty men were killed (counting both sides), possibly a few more; and the whole episode is a grotesque little foot-note to the comic opera upon which rose the curtain of the Civil Wars. It was not till the appearance of Cromwell, with his highly paid and disciplined force, that the ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... a prolonged council of war. This meant that Scott called Bowers, and perhaps Oates, into our tent after supper was finished in the morning. Somehow these conferences were always rather serio-comic. On this occasion, as was usually the case, the question was ponies. It was decided to wait here one day and rest them, as there was ample food. The main discussion centred round the amount of forage to be taken on from here, while the state ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... frantically serious efforts of the hermit to coax his flabby rear into a shell obviously a flattering misfit. But it is not a smiling matter to him. Not until he has exhausted a programme of ingenious attitudes and comic contortions is the attempt to stow away a No. 8 tail into a No. 5 shell abandoned. When a shell of respectable dimensions is presented, and the grateful hermit backs in, settles comfortably, arrays all his ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... Paris. They flatter themselves that somebody will say, in M. de Choiseul's drawing-room, "How passionately M. de —— loves his sister; he would certainly die if he had the misfortune to lose her." Madame related this to her brother, in my presence, adding, that she could not give it in the Duke's comic manner. M. de Marigny said, "I have had the start of them all, without making so much noise; and my dear little sister knows that I loved her tenderly before Madame de Grammont left her convent. The Duc d'Ayen, however, is not very wrong; he has made the most of it in his lively ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... I think it amused them to see Wilfred sitting underneath. They simply roared every time he pushed up the keys. It was as good as a comic song. It really is tiresome, though, to have a piano like that at the school. John Crosby, the stonemason's little boy, sings very nicely, and I went so wrong in playing his accompaniment, through losing so many ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... here from day to day in a businesslike and orderly fashion, the comic relief being supplied by a temporary, very temporary, man from overseas, who has operated for a while at our telephone exchange. Most people, myself included, are overawed by the dignity and significance of our environment ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... his sons whom I have to mention, Don Giovanni, married a dissolute woman of low birth called Livia, and disgraced the name of Medici by the unprincely follies of his life. Eleonora de'Medici, third of his daughters, introduces a comic element into these funereal records. She was affianced to Vincenzo Gonzaga, heir of the Duchy of Mantua. But suspicions, arising out of the circumstances of his divorce from a former wife, obliged him to prove his marital capacity before the completion ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... white posters which seemed to me robust and considerably lively. At any rate, Mr. Holliday exhibited drawings on Fifth avenue and had illustrative work published by Scribner's Magazine. He did commercial designs and comic pictures for juvenile readers. At this time he lived in a rural community of artists in Connecticut, and did his own cooking. Also, he is proud of having lived in a garret on Broome street. This phase of his ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... Duke is equally merciless in the description of George II.'s funeral in the Abbey, in which the "burlesque Duke" is introduced as comic relief into the ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Comic poets reproach Socrates with teaching how to make a bad cause good, and Plato represents Lysias and Gorgias boasting the same thing. To these may be added several examples of Greeks and Romans, and a long list of orators whose eloquence was not only ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... the hill, and I saw the river in the distance once more. How different all this was from my girlhood visions of romance. That has been characteristic of my life all along—it has been full of homely, workaday happenings, and often rather comic in spite of my best resolves to be highbrow and serious. All the same I was something near to tears as I thought of the tragic wreck at Willdon and the grief-laden hearts that must be mourning. I wondered whether the Governor was now returning from ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... philosophic ken, there is no such thing as a trifle; the ridiculous is but skin-deep, papillae on the surface of society; cut a little deeper, you will find the veins and arteries of wisdom. Therefore will a sober man not deride the notion that comic almanacs, comic Latin grammars, comic hand-books of sciences and arts, and the great prevalence of comicality in popular views taken of life and of death, of incident and of character, of evil and of good, are, in reality, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... left, moreover, there was a pitiable ashen portrait of a general; on the right a colossal nymph in a moonlit landscape, the bloodless corpse of a murdered woman rotting away on some grass; and everywhere around there were mournful violet-shaded things, mixed up with a comic scene of some bibulous monks, and an 'Opening of the Chamber of Deputies,' with a whole page of writing on a gilded cartouch, bearing the heads of the better-known deputies, drawn in outline, together with their names. And high ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... Man's Destiny Love's Incongruities Retribution Love's Mutability A Mother's Advice Sunrise in the Country Faith in Love Unrequited Affection The Poet's Troubles Echoes from the City Love's Wiles Hazard in Love A Mother's Love "The Shadow of the Cross" Curates and Colliers: on reading in a Comic Paper absurd comparisons between the wages of Curates and Colliers Wanted—a Wife: a Voice from the Ladies Sympathy A Fragment Law versus Theology: on an Eminent County Court Judge The Broken Model Impromptu: on an Inveterate ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... generous to the philosopher in the gifts of soul, was unkind to him in the matter of his person. His face was ugly as a satyr's, and he had an awkward, shambling walk, so that he invited the shafts of the comic poets of his time. He loved to gather a little circle about him in the Agora or in the streets, and then to draw out his listeners by a series of ingenious questions. His method was so peculiar to himself that it has received the designation of the "Socratic dialogue." He ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... grotesque to me, and I could not forget that dozen of soldiers playing piquet round the stove, and that row of doors on which I had read "Public Health," "Burials," "Deaths," "Expropriations," etc. I should have been aggrieved at this dealer in iron bedsteads touching on my cherished dreams if the comic side of the situation had not absorbed my whole attention, and if a mad wish to laugh outright had not ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... burning of the Theatre Royal in Sydney, we were favoured with the presence in our midst of artists who rarely, if ever before, had quitted the metropolitan stage. But our "jeune premier" in one sense has eclipsed every darling of the tragic or the comic muse. ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... already told you," replied the fat man. "I am a clown—a musical clown.... I interpret comic romances.... I dress up as a negro, I play the banjo!" This jovial individual began humming an air which was the rage of ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... he saw some boys looking at him, they thinking that his despair heightened his comic appearance, he began ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... To hear comic songs in dreams, foretells you will disregard opportunity to advance your affairs and enjoy the companionship of the pleasure loving. To sing one, proves you will enjoy much pleasure for a time, but difficulties will ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... skirt. "There's God, ain't there?" she said, inquiringly, and getting no answer she flopped upon her knees, to say a babyish prayer that would sound comic to anybody except to Him to ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... expression fear no colours was "probably at first a military expression, to fear no enemy. So Shakespeare derives it [Twelfth Night, i. 5], and, though the passage is comic, it is likely ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... specimens recently discovered in his country-walks between Broadstairs and Ramsgate, he thoroughly explored the ballad literature of Seven-Dials, and took to singing himself, with an effect that justified his reputation for comic singing in his childhood, not a few of these wonderful productions. His last successful labor of the year was the reconciliation of two friends; and his motive, as well as the principle that guided him, as they are described by himself, I think worth preserving. For the first: "In the midst ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... in the matter of the Middle Ages that the popular histories trample upon the popular traditions. In this respect there is an almost comic contrast between the general information provided about England in the last two or three centuries, in which its present industrial system was being built up, and the general information given about ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... to Mrs Ffolliot, asking that it might be put with Mary's other presents on her plate that morning. And she had written to thank him for it, but he did not answer the letter. He had always been by way of writing to her from time to time; letters, generally embellished with comic sketches and full of chaff and nonsense, which were shared by the family. Lately he had not felt in the mood to write such letters. He wanted to see her with an unceasing ache of longing intense and persistent; ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... note. This letter was written in reply to a long one from W.H. Harvey, dated August 24th, 1860. Harvey had already published a serio-comic squib and a review, to which references are given in the "Life and Letters," II., pages 314 and 375; but apparently he had not before this time completed ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... shore, the men jumped out to haul the alligator up on the dry land, and began to pull away vigorously. It was a comic scene to witness. They expected to have some difficulty in performing their task; but suddenly they found the rope slacken, and looking round beheld the alligator walking up after them of his own accord, faster than was pleasant. In their haste, endeavouring to keep ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... characterized the picture, he still retained the same elevated beauty—the same deep, quiet expression of intellectual power. At a short distance, with his arm resting on the couch, stood his nephew Alcibiades, deservedly called the handsomest man in Athens. He was laughing with Hermippus, the comic writer, whose shrewd, sarcastic and mischievous face was expressive of his calling. Phidias slowly paced the room, talking of the current news with the Persian Artaphernes. Anaxagoras reclined near the statue of Aphrodite, listening and occasionally speaking ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... gave Nick such a beautiful trouncing the other night, so I was told. It was hard luck that I could only catch a word now and then, for some of the boys were calling out to each other; and that silly clown, Claude Hastings, had begun to sing one of his comic songs, while he capered around like a baboon. But I did hear Nick say the words: 'Get even,' 'show him who's who in this burgh,' and 'Belgian hares.' Do they put you ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... in fine order, and was painted like all the king's miniature fleet—white outside, and bright salmon inside. One glance at his boat's crew showed me that they were all armed—in a flashy melodramatic style, like the Red Indians of a comic opera, each naked native having a brace of revolvers buckled to a broad leather belt around his waist, from which also hung a French navy cutlass in a leather sheath. They were all big, stalwart fellows, though no one of ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke
... from seventy to one hundred and fifty years old, gray, knock-kneed, bent in the back, and goes to sleep standing up—and stays asleep. He is the exact duplicate of the tramp in the comic opera of "Miss Hook of Holland"—except that the actor-sleeper occasionally topples over and has to be braced up. Bob is past-master of the art and goes it alone, without propping of any kind. He is the only man in Dordrecht, or Papendrecht, or the country round about, who ...
— The Parthenon By Way Of Papendrecht - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... comic songs, and variety items, blared out with ceaseless reiteration; and as the men-folk smoked and talked cattle, and the wee baby—a bonnie fair child—toddled about, smiling and contented, the women-folk spoke of ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... his capers and noise; and woe to the gray squirrel or chipmunk that ventures to set foot on his favorite tree! No matter how slyly they trace the furrows of the bark, they are speedily discovered, and kicked down-stairs with comic vehemence, while a torrent of angry notes comes rushing from his whiskered lips that sounds remarkably like swearing. He will even attempt at times to drive away dogs and men, especially if he has had no previous knowledge of them. Seeing a man for the first time, he approaches ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... heroine of Offenbach's comic opera (opera bouffe) of that name. She was originally a street-singer of Lima, the capital of Peru, but became the mistress of the viceroy. She was not a native of Lima and offended the Creole ladies by calling them, in her bad Spanish, pericholas, "flaunting, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... and passes through many phases when it bears an old figure to the grave. The last phase of a world historical figure is its comedy. The gods of Greece, once tragically wounded to death in the chained Prometheus of AEschylus, were fated to die a comic death in Lucian's dialogues. Why does history take this course? In order that mankind may break away in a jolly ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... interviews, that they have been very few, and far between, indeed. Today, there has been a fracas of some kind. I have no doubt that Marston, poor devil, is jealous. His situation is really pitiably comic—with an intriguing mistress, a saintly wife, and a devil of a jealous temper of his own. I shall meet Mary on reaching town. Has Clavering (shabby dog!) paid his I.O.U. yet? Tell the little opera woman she had better ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... pointed out, "that every comic opera had one act on a tropical island. Then some fellow discovered Holland, and now all comic operas run to blonde girls in patched breeches and wooden shoes, and the back drops are 'Rotterdam, Amsterdam, any damn place at all.' But this town combines both the ancient and modern schools. Its ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... of Aheer. The Aheer comedian then caricatured all the Touaricks together, by shaking his hands and body as if a tremor was passing through his limbs; he then fell at full length on the floor, as if dead. In this way the comic camel-driver ridiculed the poverty and pusillanimity of Ghat Touaricks. He convulsed all the Moors and Arabs with laughter. In fact, he hit off the objects of his satire as well as some of our best comedians. And from what I can learn in town, it would ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... in over the feet to add to the illusion. There used to be a saying that cross-eyed people could not be honest. Similarly, perhaps, Newman thought the appearance of bow-legs would increase the villainy of his pirate. Certainly, no such blood-curdling ruffian has been seen out of comic opera. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... nibble at experience, old Time's fruit, hateful to the palate of youth! for which season only hath it any nourishment! Experience! You know Coleridge's capital simile?—Mournful you call it? Well! all wisdom is mournful. 'Tis therefore, coz, that the wise do love the Comic Muse. Their own high food would kill them. You shall find great poets, rare philosophers, night after night on the broad grin before a row of yellow lights and mouthing masks. Why? Because all's dark at home. The stage is the pastime of great minds. That's how it comes that the stage is ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... work is, of course, evident to the most unpracticed eye; and in no way can one get a better idea of the brute's power than by watching it busily working for its breakfast, shattering big logs and upsetting boulders by sheer strength. There is always a touch of the comic, as well as a touch of the strong and terrible, in a bear's look and actions. It will tug and pull, now with one paw, now with two, now on all fours, now on its hind legs, in the effort to turn over a large log or stone; and when it succeeds it jumps round to thrust ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... I have a great esteem for Plautus; And think your boys may gather there-hence More wit and humour than from Terence; But as to comic Aristophanes, The rogue too vicious and too profane is. I went in vain to look for Eupolis Down in the Strand,[1] just where the New Pole[2] is; For I can tell you one thing, that I can, You will not find it in the Vatican. He and Cratinus used, as Horace says, To take his greatest grandees for ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... to his advantage to compete with the actors in a fashion of his own. He was the inventor of the modern English form of pantomime, with a serious part that he took from Ovid's Metamorphosis or any fabulous history, and a comic addition of the courtship of harlequin and columbine, with surprising tricks and transformations. He introduced the old Italian characters of pantomime under changed conditions, and beginning with 'Harlequin Sorcerer' in 1717, continued to produce these entertainments ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... be hard pushed afore I shot that feller," he said. "Ain't the black bear a comic chap when he tries to be. I declare I hev a real feller feelin' fur him. I couldn't ever feel that way toward a panther. They always look mean an' they always are mean, but I could hobnob right along with a ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... years of pruning. Under the lens his strange personality becomes manifest, and we wonder whether the old Danish zoologist had in mind the slender toe-tips which support him, or in a chuckling mood made him a namesake of C. Quintius Atta. A close-up shows a very comic little being, encased in a prickly, chestnut-colored armor, which should make him fearless in a den of a hundred anteaters. The front view of his head is a bit mephistophelian, for it is drawn upward into two horny spines; ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... disquieting; there is that embarrassing atmosphere about them which suggests nobility in durance vile. As for me, I prefer Kentucky, where every man is a colonel, and you never make a mistake. And these kingdoms!" He indulged in subdued laughter. "They are always like comic operas. I find myself looking around every moment for the merry villagers so happy and so gay (at fifteen dollars the week), the eternal innkeeper and the perennial soubrette his daughter, the low comedian and the self-conscious ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... football with all the desired bullishness. He had hammered ragtime on the piano like the best ordinary man in the University. With his father he rode to hounds hell for leather, and he wrote comic stuff in a Yale magazine which made him admiringly regarded as a sort of junior George Ade. It was only in secret, and then with a sneaking sense of shame, that he allowed his idealistic side to feed on Browning and Ruskin, Maeterlinck ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... him. A door led from the granary into the miller's house, and the miller's daughter happened, of course entirely by chance, to be coming through that way. A very pretty girl she was too, and I never in my life saw anything more intensely comic than the looks of intelligence that passed between her and the young friar when he presented us. It was decidedly contrary to good monastic discipline it is true, and we ought to have been shocked, but it was so intolerably laughable ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... converted into something Christian by an infusion of the tenderest loving-kindness and humanity, remaining still recognizable notwithstanding that all its bitterness was gone, such was the expression of Miss Letty's mouth, It was always half puckered as if in resistance to a comic smile, which showed itself at the windows of the keen gray eyes, however the mouth might be able to keep it within doors. She was neatly dressed in black silk, with a lace collar. Her hands were small ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... demanded of us when we find the simplicity and moral dignity of the Vicar meeting and beating the jeers and taunts of the abandoned wretches in the prison. This is really a remarkable episode. The author was under the obvious temptation to make much comic material out of the situation; while another temptation, towards the goody-goody side, was not far off. But the Vicar undertakes the duty of reclaiming these castaways with a modest patience and earnestness in every way in keeping with ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... never tried it, had forgotten it. Then, turning with an air half comic, but with something of earnestness, he said, naming me by way of start: "You have been holding a sort of autopsy over me ever since I tumbled over at Atlantic City. I exposed myself there too long both in the water and in the sun, but it was ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... husbands, paste diamonds, and figures no better than your own (madam) if they weren't padded. Chorus girls are inseparable from peroxide, Panhards and Pittsburg. All shows walk back to New York on tan oxford and railroad ties. Irreproachable actresses reserve the comic-landlady part for their mothers on Broadway and their step-aunts on the road. Kyrle Bellew's real name is Boyle O'Kelley. The ravings of John McCullough in the phonograph were stolen from the first sale of the Ellen Terry memoirs. Joe ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... I have designedly omitted all special treatment of the lyric metres of Horace and Catullus, as well as of the measures of the comic poets. Our standard editions of these authors all give such thorough consideration to versification that repetition in a ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... it would be baseness in a voluntary soldier; in the Germans it means only that the war is not their own war; that they are fighting as slaves, not as free men. The idea that we could ever live under the rule of these people is merely comic. To do them justice, they do not now entertain the idea, though they have dallied with it in ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... speaking to his secretary, who, if the fact deserve to be recorded, was an abbe named Fleuriel. This personage, who was an extraordinary specimen of impertinence and self-conceit, would have been an admirable study for a comic poet. He had all the dignity belonging to the great secretary of a great Minister, and, with an air of indifference, he told me that the Count was not there; but M. de Blacas was there, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Comic and tragic were so jumbled up in this startling series of adventures, that Jack scarce knew whether ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... to withdraw in silence, casting a half sorrowful half comic glance at Roland Graeme, which seemed to say—"You see to what your untimely visit has exposed me," when, suddenly changing her mind, she came forward to the page, and extended her hand as she bid him good evening. ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... story of a planet that could have been another proud and majestic sun with a solar system of its own; it ended up, instead, in the comic ...
— Mars Confidential • Jack Lait
... a few days later up the Putney Hill to have his first interview with Felix Pender, the humorous writer who was the victim of some mysterious malady in his "psychical region" that had obliterated his sense of the comic and threatened to wreck his life and destroy his talent. And his desire to help was probably of equal strength with his desire to know ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... moment Dick Stone had lighted his pipe, and as he gave two or three tremendous puffs he screwed his face into a profoundly serio- comic expression and winked his right ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... executed a picturesque Indian dance, the manager would strongly recommend the people to "Come forward, ladies and gentlemen, the show's just a-going to begin." The performance consisted of a short play, a comic song by "Billy," and a portion of the pantomime, "Jack and the Beanstalk," the whole lasting under half-an-hour. We gave about a score performances a day: it was very hard work, and, what was more, hot weather. I don't want to figure in these pages as a champion ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... acted with a Stage Curate, rather weak and a little comic; obviously such a man could be no match for Sladder. Hippanthigh should be of stronger stuff than that: he is defeated because that particular evil is, as I have said, defeating its enemies at present. Nor could there be any ...
— Plays of Near & Far • Lord Dunsany
... young people roamed the hills together, or took their share in the household duties, and the whole picture seems to breathe forth an air of reality and truth which far removes it from that atmosphere of comic-opera love and passion which seemed to fill the Midi. When the winter came, the hardship of this mountain life commenced; the winds grew too keen, and the young girl soon began to show the effects of the want and misery to which she was exposed. ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... error that it is, it leaped forth, after a long period of travail, full-fledged and panoplied, and on its lips were these words: "What fools these mortals be!" Dame Eddy gets good returns from the sacrilegio-comic tour of her progeny around the country. Intellectual Boston is at her feet, and Boston pays well for ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... rich grain, and gave a very amusing study of the hero's old nurse. Miss JEAN GADELL, that clever specialist in dour unpleasant stage women, made a properly repulsive thing out of the matron of the orphanage. Mr. HYLTON ALLEN scored his points as a comic lover with droll effect. If the distinctly clever children of the home (Judy excepted) had been effectively put on the contraband list I should not have worried. They were unduly noisy (for art, not for life perhaps), and they overdid their parts, being not only rowdy in the absence, and abject ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... exaggerated Roosevelt's traits, and created a false idea about him. This is true. But it is also true that there was a great deal of real and honest fun poked at him throughout his life, and that it added to the public enjoyment of his career. The writers of comic rhymes, the cartoonists, and the writers of political satire had a chance which no other President has ever given them. Many of our Presidents—wise and good men—and many Senators, Governors, Cabinet officers and others, have gone about ...
— Theodore Roosevelt • Edmund Lester Pearson
... about to defend himself it suddenly rushed over him what a comic figure he would make, accusing a girl of abducting him. He closed his mouth and blushed crimson. Big Jack and his pals smiled ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... at this period of his celebrity, the inimitable comic actor, Poitier, in a farce called "Les Danaides" that was making a furor—a burlesque upon a magnificent mythological ballet, produced with extraordinary splendor of decoration, at the Academie Royale de Musique, and of which this travesty ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... was a comic actor of high reputation. Like Tarlton, whom he succeeded "as wel in the fauour of her Maiesty as in the opinion and good thoughts of the generall audience,"[v:1] he usually played the Clown, and was ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... mother died, he never failed in his kindness towards her, and the old dame was wont to express a kind of comic surprise at the womanish demeanour of her son. He caught fish for his living, but a cramped piece of reasoning forced him to the conclusion that it would be wrong for him to shoot any more birds. He said, "The birds was made by God, and God's been ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... red-brick villas which have been termed an Englishman's castle and his home. After all, every new system has its ridiculous side, and strangely enough, it is this ridiculous side which is most apparent at the outset. Only after you have delved below the "comic froth" do you begin to realise that there is a very vital truth hidden beneath. Well, a sense of humour blows away that froth in time, and then—as for example after the Suffragette antics—the real argument behind the capers and the words becomes known. Thus in England all revolutions ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... the solo sung, by way of novelty, behind the Curtain, by TURIDDU,—(what a name! like the commencement of a comic nonsensical chorus! TURIDDU ought to have been in love with Tulla Lieti and have behaved badly to Tralala. "But this is another story.")—the choruses, and most of the concerted pieces are charming; and, above all, the intermezzo, which, were the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... composure increased the old woman's fury, and her lips were just parting to utter a torrent of angry words, when Jason stepped as lightly as a boy between her and the betrothed lovers, cast a delighted glance at his favorites, and bowing with comic dignity to Semestre ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... as good a pattern for orders as I can think on. A little thin flowery border, round, neat, not gaudy, and the Drury Lane Apollo, with the harp at the top. Or shall I have no Apollo,—simply nothing? Or perhaps the Comic Muse? ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... was made for him—by Clara. It had become one of his chief pleasures to give her lunch in the Aquarium, as she called it, and to laugh with her over her vivid and comic impressions of London, and insensibly he had fallen in love with her, not as was his habit theatrically and superficially, but with an old man's passion for youth. It hurt him, plagued him, tortured him, because she never gave him an opening ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... containing humorous articles on the social life of New York. This became so popular that twenty numbers were issued. Having found so much of interest in the life of his native city, Irving next wrote a comic History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, dealing with the early period when the city was ruled by the Dutch. The novel way in which this work was announced would do credit to the most clever advertiser. About six weeks before the book was ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... intelligence to business, they sought no intellectual pleasures. The theatre, which had formerly been very flourishing among them, was now reduced to pantomimes and comic dances. Even the pieces in which women acted were given up; the taste for pretty forms and brilliant toilettes had been lost; the somersaults of clowns and the music of negroes were preferred above them, and what roused enthusiasm was the sight of women upon the stage whose necks were bedizened ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... hem-stitched bands, poured in upon him. He burned with angry blushes when his mother, smiling meaningly, passed them over to him. "Put them away, mother; I don't want them," he would growl out, in a distress that was half comic and half pathetic. He would never taste of the tempting viands which were brought to him. "How you act, Thomas!" his mother would say. She was secretly elated by these feminine libations upon the altar of her son. They did not grate upon her sensibilities, which were not delicate. ...
— Evelina's Garden • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... a colossal threat, a threat which warrants Pope's numerous echoes of Paradise Lost. Harte's Essay, in fact, contains several echoes of the same poem. Though, like most of Pope's, these Miltonic echoes are given a comic turn which indicates a wide gap between the real satanic host and its London auxiliary, there is little doubt that Harte grasped the underlying seriousness of his mentor's ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... amusement to me, because every one knew that under his veil of imperturbability was hidden, not very successfully, a flourishing crop of failings. Whenever his chief failing overpowered him his gravity increased, until he became one of the most indescribably comic people ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... saw Betty. She was standing in front of a booth talking to a group of clowns, comic policemen and ringmasters. She was dressed in the costume of an Egyptian snake charmer, a costume carried out to the smallest detail. Her tawny hair was braided and drawn through brass rings, the effect crowned with a glittering Oriental tiara. Her fair face was stained to a warm olive glow ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... He would take no chances. The party carried along a small cannon. Lieutenant Mayne could not take his cruiser the Plumper higher than Langley; and there the forces were transferred to Tom Wright's stern-wheeler, the Enterprise. But, when they arrived at Hope, the whole affair looked like semi-comic vaudeville. Yale, too, was as quiet as a church prayer-meeting; and Colonel Moody preached a sermon on Sunday to a congregation of forty in the court-house—the first church service ever held on the mainland of ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... who discovered that there were faults in Mozart's operas, Haydn, when appealed to, replied—"All I know is, that Mozart is the greatest composer now existing." When applied to in 1787, to write a comic opera, Haydn thought a new subject, or libretto, would ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... have things cheerful here," Al'mah said almost gaily. "Sometimes I have four or five convalescents in here, and they like a little gaiety. I sing them things from comic operas—Offenbach, Sullivan, and the rest; and if they are very sentimentally inclined I sing them good old-fashioned love-songs full of the musician's tricks. How people adore illusions! I've had here ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... common ancestors of the various dramatic tribes, source and origin of many sorts of plays, the Mysteries, which had contributed to the formation of the tragical, romantic, allegorical, pastoral, and comic drama, were still in existence. Reformation had come, the people had adopted the new belief, but they could not give up the Mysteries. They continued to like Herod, Noah and his wife, and the tumultuous troup of ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... resorted to music to celebrate coffee. Brittany has its own songs in praise of coffee, as have other French provinces. There are many epics, rhapsodies, and cantatas—and even a comic opera by Meilhat, music by Deffes, bearing the title, Le Cafe du Roi, produced at the Theatre Lyrique, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... frequent in the next century—in the unlikely Mrs. Davys (preface, Works, 1725); in Joseph Andrews of course, where the rules of the serious epic and of the heroic romance are to aid the author in copying the ancient but, as it happens, nonexistent comic epic; and in Fielding's preface to his sister's David Simple (1744). Both Richardson and Fielding were attacked on epic grounds.[4] Dr. Johnson's interesting and unfriendly essay on recent prose fiction (Rambler No. 4) adopted ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various |
