"Ribald" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the children violently struggled, and that the round hard head of one of them butted him in the stomach. He divined that sounds of ribald laughter, in the distance, proceeded from the driver of the Marychurch station fly. He knew two small figures raced whooping down the lane attended by squelchings of mud and ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... place where he was unable to endure certain tests (or he thought so) which were about to be made with a view to retiring certain officers grown fat in the service. As he explained to Culhane, and the latter was always open and ribald afterward in his comments on those who offered explanations of any kind, his plan was to take the course here in order to be able to make the ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... and leant far out into the darkness as though sucking in the air when the sash was raised and the thing which had been only a dim babel of wordless sounds a moment before became now the riotous laughter and the ribald comments of men upon the verses of a comic song which one of ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... silence by the weight of his presence. Clodius rose when Pompey had done, and rival yells went up from the Milonians. Yells were not enough; filthy verses were sung in chorus about Clodius and Clodia, ribald bestiality, delightful to the ears of "Tully." Clodius, pale with anger, called out, "Who is murdering the people with famine?" A thousand throats answered, "Pompey!" "Who wants to go to Alexandria?" "Pompey!" they shouted again. "And whom do you want to go?" "Crassus!" they cried. Passion ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... merry-making. In Devonshire, when a farmer's wheat was ripe he sent round notice to the neighbourhood, and men and women from all sides came to reap the crop. As early as eleven or twelve, so much ale and cider had been drunk that the shouts and ribald jokes of the company were heard to a considerable distance, attracting more helpers, who came from far and near, but none were allowed to come after 12 o'clock. Between 12 and 1 came dinner, with copious libations of ale and cider, which lasted till 2, when reaping was resumed and went on without ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... he spoke. Now and then the priests with the other prisoners cast suspicious glances towards him; but he continued to walk on, speaking so low that no one else but the unhappy lady could hear him; and thus the band of prisoners arrived at Smithfield. Here they were saluted by the ribald shouts of the populace, who seemed to delight in hurling all sorts of abusive epithets on their heads. A'Dale wanted to remain, but I kept to my purpose. My chief interest was with the unhappy lady. I rejoiced, however, to see that her countenance was calm ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... can be learned, it appears that women were not treated with any special respect; men were free to indulge in the most ribald conversation in their presence, and it has yet to be proved that they took offence at this unbecoming liberty. The songs which were composed at Carnival time were dedicated to the ladies especially, and yet in all literature it would be difficult to find anything more indecent. Society was simply ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... A ribald cuckoo clamoured, And out of the copse the stroke Of the iron axe that hammered The ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... but it was not the soft music such as a lover demands if he is to give of his best. It was a brassy, clashy rendering of a ribald one-step, enough to choke the eloquence of the most ardent. Couples were dipping and swaying and bumping into one another as far as the eye could reach; while just behind him two waiters had halted in order to thrash out one of those voluble arguments in which waiters love to ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... passing butcher's boy, awed by its important sound, to inquire, with the cynical empressement of his race, whether I thought myself the "Emperoar of Rooshia." I turned my back on him with contempt; but, his ribald remark made me feel ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... heed of her letter, she finally mounted the walls of the town, and in a loud voice warned the English to depart before overtaken with the shame and disaster in store for them. To this the English responded with insults and ribald words, and told her to "Go home and keep her cows." Joan wept at their insults to her modesty, and would have at once opened an attack, had she not been dissuaded by her generals, who begged her to await the arrival of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... more private than military, the only obligation on the ordinary householder being the furnishing of billets. Occasionally the cobbled streets became the scene of an unwonted animation when young French recruits celebrated their call to the colours by marching down the streets arm-in-arm singing ribald songs, or a squad of sullen German prisoners were marched up them on their way to the prison, within which they vanished amid the imprecations of the crowd. One such squad I saw arriving in a motor lorry, from the tailboard of which they jumped down to enter the gates, and one of them, a ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... disposed to deny to Garrick the merit of being an admirer of Shakespeare. A true lover of his excellences he certainly was not; for would any true lover of them have admitted into his matchless scenes such ribald trash as Tate and Cibber, and the ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... that he finds nothing amiss in him; but the rabble cry out, all the more, "crucify him." While ardently loved by a devoted few in that tumultuous crowd, he is, to all the rest, an object of severest scorn, the butt of ribald jest. Wearing his crown of thorns, he is made to bear, till he faints under his burden, the very instrument of his torture. His Roman executioners, giving to him the punishment accorded to thieves ...
— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe
... conscience and a revolt of the heart. As the deer recoils by instinct from the tiger, as the very look of the scorpion deters you from handling it, though you never saw a scorpion before, so the very first line in some ribald profanity on which the Tinker put his black finger, made Lenny's blood run cold. Safe, too, was the peasant boy from any temptation in works of a gross and licentious nature, not only because of the happy ignorance of his rural life, but because of a more enduring safeguard—genius! Genius, that, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... bullet wounds a comrade so that he grimaces with pain—it is true; I saw it." It was true, and had reference to a sight scrape of a bullet across the tip of the nose of a Towers private, and the ribald jests and laughter thereat. "They make jokes, and say a man 'stopped one,' meaning a shell had been stopped in its flight by exploding on him—this the interpreter has explained to me. But cold—no, no, no! If you had seen this man—ah, ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... into a ribbon behind, removed the traces of tears from her wild and terror-stricken eyes, and not stopping even for her hat, in her fear that she might be too late, left the house and made her way through the throng before the Fennell house. At sight of her pallid cheeks and set lips, the ribald jeer died on the lips even of the drunken, and the people made way for her in silence. It was not that they had ever liked her, or now sympathized with her. She had always held herself too daintily aloof from speech or ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... independent enough to denounce the fanaticism of secession. A more amusing scene than that presented by the attitudes-the questions in regard to South Carolina licking the Federal Government-the strange pomp-ribald gasconade, and high-sounding chivalry of the worthies, cannot be imagined. They were in a perfect ecstasy with themselves and South Carolina, and swore, let whatever come, they were ready ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... eye of the woodsman. And so we knew. This old soldier had come in from the Long Trail to bear again the flag of his country. If his clothes were old and ill-fitting, at least they were his best, and the largeness of the empty sleeve belittled the too-largeness of the other. In all this ribald, laughing, irreverent, commonplace, semi-vicious crowd he was the one note of sincerity. To him this was a real occasion, and the exalted reverence in his eye for the task he was so simply performing was Smith's real triumph—if he could have known it. ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... the abbey are foregone. The reverend stillness of the cloisters, scarce broken by the quiet tread of the monks, is now disturbed by armed heel and clank of sword; while in its saintly courts are heard the ribald song, the profane jest, and the angry brawl. Of the brethren, only those tenanting the cemetery are left. All else are gone, driven forth, as vagabonds, with stripes and curses, to seek refuge where ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Virgin modesty, that thou shalt wish The earth might cover thee! in that last hour, When thy bruis'd breast shall heave beneath the chains That link thee to the stake; when o'er thy form, Exposed unmantled, the brute multitude Shall gaze, and thou shalt hear the ribald taunt, More painful than the circling flames that scorch Each quivering member; wilt thou not in vain Then wish my friendly aid? then wish thine ear Had drank my words of comfort? that thy hand Had grasp'd the dagger, and in death preserved ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... found a seat in Misery's brake, squatting on the floor with his back to the horses, thankful enough to be out of reach of the drunken savages, who were now roaring out ribald songs and startling the countryside, as they drove along, with unearthly ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... answered, "but think you that the ribald jests of mortal men can touch one of the angels of God? She stood for a moment framed in the doorway, and I tell you I lie not when I declare that it seemed to all present as though a halo of pure white ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... fine record our comrades, the engineers, made in the expedition. As the ribald old marching ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... bend, and green trees send A chuckle round the earth, And the soft winds croon a jeering tune, And the harsh winds shriek with mirth, And the wee small birds chirp ribald words When the Swank walks down the street; But every Glug takes off his hat, And whispers humbly, "Look at that! Hats off! Hats off to the Glug of rank! Sir Stodge, the Swank, the Lord High Swank!" Then the East wind roars a loud guffaw, And the ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... The blasphemies and ribald jokes with which this good-for-nothing young man adorned his speech made it sound tenfold more hideous than I can do. Even his mother shrank away from him, in terror and amaze at his levity, and cried aloud in her fear so that instantly the door ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... from roaring, raging fire, and from the agony of monstrous earth-tremors, man had been born, and that by these same agencies he would eventually be swallowed up—he and the sins within his breast. And here the Empress was prostituting its solemnities into a mere call to gluttony, and sign for ribald laughter ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... the surviving Union and Confederate officers to give an account of the bravest act observed by each during the Civil War. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson said that at a dinner at Beaufort, S. C., where wine flowed freely and ribald jests were bandied, Dr. Miner, a slight, boyish fellow who did not drink, was told that he could not go until he had drunk a toast, told a story, or sung a song. He replied: "I cannot sing, but I will give a toast, although I must drink it in water. It is ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... magnificently attired in all the meagre finery he could call into service. What he lacked in attire he made up in the grooming. Billy shone. Billy was plastered. Billy smelled to high heaven of soap and kerosene. But there was that about Billy which checked Maggie's ribald jeers, and the mother's question as to where ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... or her own has kept her from aspiring to academic honours. The beautiful Fulvia is a good daughter, and devotes herself, I'm told, to helping Vivaldi in his work; a far more becoming employment for one of her age and sex than defending Latin theses before a crew of ribald students." ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... and incidents of it. In spite of misconceptions, and such mistaken estimates as those of Mirabeau and Bonaparte, such insolent mockery of good and able men, such ridiculous caricatures as that of the "Feast of Pikes" and the trial of the King, such ribald horse-play as "Grilled Herrings" and "Lion Sprawling," in spite of blots and blunders in every chapter—the French Revolution is destined to live long and to stand forth to posterity as the typical work of the master. It cannot be said to have done such work as the Cromwell; for ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... heard words more mild and peaceful." Selden is again referred to and complimented: "one of your own now sitting in Parliament, the chief of learned men reputed in this land." Acquaintance, on the other hand, is implied or avowed, on Milton's part, with some of the most notoriously ribald writers that the world had produced: with Petronius Arbiter, and him of Arozzo "dreaded and yet dear to the Italian Courtiers," and an Englishman whom he will not name, "for posterity's sake," but "whom Harry the Eighth named in merriment his Vicar of Hell." We may add, that Wycliffe ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... window, glanced round. Her first impulse was to speak; her second to remain silent. For the Arkansan was not looking at her. His mocking ribald gaze ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... strolled too near the warlike ranks; for had not all the sturdy citizens of New York come down to see the hated British evacuate the city, forced out by the troops of Gen. Washington (plain Mr. Washington, the British liked to call him)? The ragged gamins scurried here and there, yelling ribald jests at the departing soldiers; and the scarlet-coated troopers had hard work keeping down their rising anger, as suggestive cries of "boiled lobsters" rose on every side. Even the staid citizens could hardly conceal their exultation, ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... an oath we heard, and foul words, as is customary in a camp. Verily I saw well that this was not the army of men clean confessed and of holy life who had followed the Maid from Blois to Orleans. In place of priests, here were harlots, and, for hymns, ribald songs, for men had flocked in from every quarter; soldiers of the robber companies, Bretons, Germans, Italians, Spaniards, all talking in their own speech, rude, foul, and disorderly. So we took our way, as best we knight, through the press, hearing oaths enough if our horses trod over ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... and turned victory into defeat. We were beaten. I shall never forget that election night. I walked home through the Bowery in the midnight hour, and saw it gorging itself, like a starved wolf, upon the promise of the morrow. Drunken men and women sat in every doorway, howling ribald songs and curses. Hard faces I had not seen for years showed themselves about the dives. The mob made merry after its fashion. The old days were coming back. Reform was ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... their own families—for they have none, nor among their neighbours, who may esteem and respect, but will scarce unbend before men who are become masters of their most secret thoughts. They therefore betake themselves to the pot-house, and in drinking and ribald conversation, look for that amusement which, under a better state of things, the Reformed pastor is sure to find in the bosom of his own family, and among his friends. I do not mean to justify the individuals, ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... parting lips uttered a line she had thoroughly mastered them, the innate purity of her perfected womanhood, the evident innocence of her purpose, shielding her against all indecency and insult. The ribald scoffing, the insolent shuffling of feet, the half-drunken uneasiness, ceased as if by magic; and as her simple act proceeded, the stillness out in front became positively solemn, the startled faces picturing an awakening to higher things. It was ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... away to untie the black velvet ribbon on his leg, and go home! He looked very cheated! He scorned my Father with ribald glances! "Work?" he gloated. "Of course it won't work! I knew all the time it wouldn't work!—Two hundred dollars! And forty-three cents?" he ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... certain parties that the prisoner's conviction would be the signal for the outbreak of a series of massacres of the Jews, and because a case which had taken nearly three years to prepare was obviously a very thin case. Chesterton wrote a ribald article in The Daily Herald on Mr. Henderson's attempt at intervention, saying in effect, How do you know that Beilis isn't guilty? Now it is impossible to hold the belief that Beilis might be guilty ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... himself, he was unbreakable. They thanked him kindly for his efforts in their behalf, those fat, fresh men,—thanked him kindly, with broad grins and ribald laughter; and now, when he understood, he made no answer. Nor did he cherish silent bitterness. It was immaterial. The idea—the fact behind the idea—was not changed. Here he was and his thousand dozen; there was Dawson; the problem ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... the mob had not been gratified with a spectacle of this nature. In the ribald language of the day, the "holy guillotine had grown thirsty from long drought;" and they read the announcement with greedy eyes, commenting as they went upon those whose names were familiar to them. There were many of noble birth among the proscribed, but by far the greater number were priests, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... the War a changed nation. The people who in 1870 made ribald verses and sang cynical songs over the plight of their country are now no more, and France emerges serious, resolute, to the great work which she has before her — of building the great first Democratic State ...
— NEVER AGAIN • Edward Carpenter
... pay the pedagogue.—Add what thou wilt Of injury. Say that, grown into man, I've known the pittance of the hospital, And, more degrading still, the patronage Of the Colonna. Of the tallest trees The roots delve deepest. Yes, I've trod thy halls, Scorned and derided midst their ribald crew, A licensed jester, save the cap and bells, I have borne this—and I have borne the death, The unavenged death, of a dear brother. I seemed, I was, a base, ignoble slave. What am I?—Peace, I say!—What am I now? Head of this great republic, chief of Rome— In all ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... we find, in the half-random and wholly scurrile slander of womankind, a touch of real humour, of the humour that has feeling behind it, as here, where a sufficiently ribald variation on the theme of the "Ephesian ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... real! God knew the abysmal depths of its reality. Months piled on months there had been of it! Those voices out there that rose in a jangle of ribald mirth were the same voices that, hushed in deadlier menace, had whispered that grim slogan, "Death to the Gray Seal!" through every hidden cranny in the underworld; these men and women here around him were of the same breed as those ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... where the morning sun, searching and fervid, did not reach, and threw themselves to the ground, resting their backs against the foot wall, and trying patiently to await the appearance of their guides. The steady, hurried clink of glass and bottle on bar, the ribald shouts and threats of the crowd that filled the road house, the occasional burst of a maudlin song, all told the condition of the ejected placer men who had ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... with the most accomplished tutors in the persons of the traders and trappers by whom he is surrounded; but he can not comprehend either the temporal or eternal happiness offered through the medium of Christianity. Ribald as the statement may appear, I have heard an Osage declare, with much seriousness, that "nothing could seem to him less inviting than what the pale face called heaven, and if he was to go there he should not know how to pass his time." With these unsophisticated ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... frequented the great shop doors, thronged with brilliantly-dressed ladies, and watched to see if his little sister might not dash up in one of those satin-lined coaches and take him where he would be warm and safe and would sleep undisturbed by drunken, ribald songs and loathsome surroundings. There were days when he almost forgot his name, and, striving to remember, would lose his senses for a moment and drift back to the harmonious solitudes of the North and breathe the resin-scented frosty atmosphere. ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... is that he does not exaggerate; his fools are never overwitty, his buffoons too grotesque, his men of wit too anxious to display their smartness, nor his fine gentlemen too fond of immodest and ribald talk. His satire is always kept within bounds, his repartees are never out of place, his plots are but seldom intricate, and the moral of his plays is not obtruded, but follows as a natural consequence of the whole. He rarely rises to those lofty realms of poetry ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... terms of badinage, approached other men, inquiring how they bore themselves in the matrimonial dispute, and what were the subjects usually spoken of in the intimacies of family life. But from these people he received the smallest assistance.—Some were ribald, some jocose, some so darkly explanatory that intelligence could not peer through the mist or could only divine that these hated their wives. One man held that all domestic matters should be left entirely to the wife ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... "boss" assents, Johnny proceeds to shut and lock the tavern door. Soon after the windows of the Choctaw Chief show lightless, its interior silent, the moonbeams shining upon its shingled roof peacefully and innocently, as though it had never sheltered robber, and drunken talk or ribald blasphemy ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... Whilst a hack author, does he pawn the books entrusted to him to review? Does he break his word to his publisher? Does he write begging letters? Does he get clothes or lodgings without paying for them? Again, whilst a wanderer, does he insult helpless women on the road with loose proposals or ribald discourse? Does he take what is not his own from the hedges? Does he play on the fiddle, or make faces in public-houses, in order to obtain pence or beer? or does he call for liquor, swallow it, and then say to a widowed landlady, "Mistress, I have no brass?" In a ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... comfortless arms, uttering these cries. The grave was a year old at least, but the grief seemed of yesterday or of that morning. At times the friend that stood beside the prostrate woman stooped and spoke a soothing word to her, while she wailed out her woe; and in the midst some little ribald Irish boys came scuffling and quarreling up the pathway, singing snatches of an obscene song; and when both the wailing and the singing had died away, an old woman, decently clad, and with her many-wrinkled face softened by the old-fashioned frill ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... for by those words, wittingly or unwittingly, their general had confessed his faith, and that day they made ribald songs about him in the camp. But on the morrow when they learned how that the man whom the prince spared had been seized by a lion and taken away as he sat at night with his companions in the bivouac, his mouth full of boasting of ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... Massachusetts Bay, then called Wessagusset, now the town of Weymouth, which they had selected for their residence. They left their sick behind them, to be nursed by those Christian Pilgrims whose piety had excited their ribald abuse. ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... when its inhabitants, instead of crowding reverently to the kirk, swooped profanely down in their scores and tens of scores on our God-fearing town, intent on making a day of it. Then did the weavers rise as one man, and go forth to show the ribald crew the errors of their way. All denominations were represented, but Auld Lichts led. An Auld Licht would have taken no man's blood without the conviction that he would be the better morally for the bleeding; and if Tammas Lunan's case gave an impetus to the blows, it can only have been ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... bedeck a British chamber of horrors. Nor would death itself have shielded their reputations from hatchments of dishonour. For the greatest of Englishmen reviled even the sacred name of Joan of Arc, the stainless Maid of France, to belittle a fallen foe and spice a ribald stage-play. ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... assumed the centre of the ring. The sanctified were without sense of humor, but the unregenerate onlookers were not proof against the comic aspects of emotional religion, and from the dark outskirts rang a ribald laugh. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... the Mayor, "d'ye think I'll brook Being worse treated than a Cook? Insulted by a lazy ribald With idle pipe and vesture piebald? You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst, Blow your ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... than the fact that it seemed to them all the most fitting and natural thing that she and Father Antoine should stand side by side speaking to the people, should walk away side by side in earnest conversation with each other. If any man had ventured upon a jest or a ribald word concerning them, a dozen quick hands would have given him a plunge head-foremost into the great stone basin, which was the commonest expression of popular indignation in St. Mary's; a practice which, strangely enough, did not appear to interfere with anybody's ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... in the closets of palaces. She is the product of an Alchemy of such virtue that he who is able to practise it, will turn her into pure gold of inestimable worth. He that possesses her must keep her within bounds, not permitting her to break out in ribald satires or soulless sonnets. She must on no account be offered for sale, unless, indeed, it be in heroic poems, moving tragedies, or sprightly and ingenious comedies. She must not be touched by the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... and the stores. As Hollis walked down to his office after leaving the court house, he was kept busy nodding to friends—many of whom had become such during the later days of the drought. Merchants grinned at him from their doorways; Dunlavey's friends sneered as he passed or sent ribald jokes after him. ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... sitting-room. The view from the windows, of the formal garden outside, with its rows of white statues, leading to a winding lake, and parklike slopes beyond it, was certainly cheerful. Coryston particularly disliked it, and had many ribald things to say about the statues, which in his mad undergraduate days he had more than once adorned with caps of liberty, pipes, mustaches, and similar impertinences. But most people were attracted by the hard brightness of the outlook; and of light and sunshine—on ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fame Lives in the mouth of men, and distant climes Re-echo his wide glory; where the brave Are honoured, where 'tis noble deemed to save A prostrate nation, and for future times Work with a high devotion, that no taunt, Or ribald lie, or zealot's eager curse, Or the short-sighted world's neglect can daunt, That name is worshipped! His immortal verse Blends with his god-like deeds, a double spell To bind the coming age he loved ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... man-fiend, that vampire-ghoul who drank Hot blood of headless victims, and compelled Mothers to view the murder of their babes; At whose red guillotine, in Arras raised, The pipe and fiddle played at every fall Of ghastly head the ribald "Ca Ira;" And fiends unnamed and nameless ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... ten said that he was teaching letters to his employer's children or lecturing to the students of the Latin Quarter. At last he decides to return to his father,—possibly the Archbishop of Paris or the Abbot of Saint-Denis,—who receives him with open arms, and gives him a new robe, which to the ribald student would mean a church living—an abbey, perhaps Saint Gildas-de-Rhuys in Brittany, or elsewhere. The fatted calf is killed, the feast is begun, and the elder son, whom the malicious student would name Bernard, appears in order to make protest. ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... mildly: 'So romantic—a young girl giving up all for God;' and Caroline gave the ribald laugh on which she prided herself— a shocking sound. 'Rose Mallett,' Sophia went on, so lost in her vision that the jarring laughter was not heard, 'such a pretty name—a nun! She would never be forgotten: people would tell their children. Sister Rose!' She ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... to-morrow," Hamilton went on, "and I suppose I am one of the officers commanding troops who must school my ribald soldiery in the art of protecting the Rt. ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... greatest outrages were inflicted. It was a pastime of the castle retainers to fall upon peaceful villages to the consternation of its women, who were struck, tortured, were great, while their sense of security was slight, it was upon and made the sport of the ribald soldiery, "Serfs of the Body," they had no protection. The vilest outrages were perpetrated by the Feudal Lords under the name of Rights. Women were taught by Church and State alike, that the Feudal Lord or Seigneur had a right to them, not only as against ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... probably—I may say certainly—more meritorious countrymen. I do not indeed go so far as to say that this woman is in collusion with those ferocious ruffians who have made these sacred precincts of justice ring with their ribald and threatening scoff's. But the persistence of these riotous interruptions, and the ease with which their perpetrators have evaded arrest, have produced a strange impression in my mind. (Very impressively.) However, gentlemen, ...
— The Tables Turned - or, Nupkins Awakened. A Socialist Interlude • William Morris
... rose-red city looked like nothing on earth but a fearful and wonderful collection of pink and white birthday cakes, set out for a giants' tea-party! It seemed almost a pity the giants had never come and eaten them up. Vinx said I was ribald. As a matter of fact, he was simply jealous of my brilliant metaphor! Look at him now—bored to death with me, because I'm telling ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... whispers from them that have reached us, while furtive perhaps, are clear. They furnished the poets with notes that are resonant still. They lifted the drama to heights that astound. Even in the fancy balls of Aristophanes, where men were ribald and the gods were mocked, suddenly, in the midst of the orgy, laughter ceased, obscenities were hushed. Afar a hymn resounded. It was the chorus of the Initiate going ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... much coming and going between the world outside and the adjoining cell, and late at night there were heavy and shambling footsteps, and even some coarse and ribald talk. ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... thraldom. If the song had been without words the result would have been the same, almost, for it was the voice which reached through liquor befuddled brains to find and stir remote and hidden recesses in natures long since hardened to sentiment. Rough speeches, ribald words and oaths died on the lips of those who crowded the doorway of saloons, and they stood spell-bound by the song which was sung as they felt dimly the angels must sing up there in that shadowy land back of the stars in which ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... again fall into their clutches, there would be but slight chance of a second escape. His protector knew that. Ben knew, moreover, that his own life would be equally sure of being sacrificed to the resentment of the ribald crew, with whom he ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... that a Puritan tinker should moulder for a dozen years in a damp jail could count for little against the blessed fact of the Maypole reinstated in the Strand, and five play-houses in London performing ribald comedies, till but recently, when the plague ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... parsonage presented little attraction in its external aspect to men whose object was plunder, and they turned first to larger and more showy buildings. These were soon rifled; the noise of their ribald songs, their blasphemous oaths and drunken revelry penetrating often the chamber of death, yet scarcely awakening an emotion in the presence of the great Destroyer. At length the little gate is flung rudely ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... ye have—Barabbas or this Jew?" Pilate made answer to the mob, "The choice Is yours; I wash my hands of this, and you, Do as you will." With one vast ribald voice The populace arose and, shrieking, cried, "Give us Barabbas, we condone his deeds!" And He of Nazareth was crucified— Misjudged, condemned, ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... the table now was flushed and moist; every forehead streaming with perspiration. Escanes, goblet in hand, was singing a ribald song, the chorus of which was taken up by the group of young men nearest to him. The older ones were making insane bets and driving preposterous bargains over horses ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... have caught a note of ribald scorn in Mr. Doolittle's drawl, as he quoted from his candidate's statement, via the ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... began, there was a strange commotion in GORTON's College. GORTON, who was supposed to have been reading hard, was found at about twelve o'clock in the quad in his nightgown. He was on all fours, and was engaged in eating grass and roaring out ribald snatches of Latin songs in a shrill voice. When the porter approached him he said he was a hippogriff, and that in another ten minutes he intended to fly to Iffley and back in half a second. He was carried up to bed raving horribly. On the following ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... women could stand that test? How many could bear the ribald distortions of that lens-like seidel bottom and yet keep their charm? How many thus caricatured and vivisected, could command this free reading notice from a casual American, dictating against time and space to a red-haired stenographer, ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... earth, and heaven, and nature, hung from it. Beatrice explained many mysteries to him connected with that sight; and then vehemently denounced the false and foolish teachers that quit the authority of the Bible for speculations of their own, and degrade the preaching of the gospel with ribald jests, and legends of Saint ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... mighty consoling. The fact is, the poets are the only people who score by the present arrangement; which it is therefore their interest to maintain. While we are doing all the work, these incorrigible skulkers lounge about and make ribald remarks; they write Greek tragedies on Fate, on the sublimity of Suffering, on the Petty Span, and so on; and act in a generally offensive way. And we are even weak enough to buy their books; offer them drinks, peerages, and things; and say ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... lived in an attic of the same tenement-house as the Coupeaus and the Lorilleux. He was generally drunk and made ribald jests about his dismal calling. It was he who buried Gervaise Coupeau after she was found dead in an ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... them were many of his own men. From the door-way of one of the bunk houses came the strains of a violin, while in another, a concertina shrieked and groaned, and from all directions came the sound of ribald songs, coarse jests and boisterous laughter. Here and there were groups of men engaged in playing poker or seven-up, where little piles of silver and gold were rapidly changing hands, to the accompaniment of muttered oaths. At one ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... sheriff stood again to set his censorious eye upon someone responsible, the last ripple was on the farther rows. Nobody can catch a laugh in a crowd; it is as evasive as a pickpocket. Nobody can turn with watchful eye upon it and tell in what face the ribald gleam first breaks. It is as impossible as the identification of the first stalk shaken when a breeze assails a field ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... said Gilbert Galbraith in Honesty; adding: "for all she wants of Irishmen is their lives that she might live," and he warned Irishmen that "she (England) who took everything they had and stripped them naked and left them like Christ to the ribald jest and sneer of the rabble in the world's back-streets, would, like every bully, try to have revenge when she ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... shocked Foundations flew Before his ribald questionings. He broke the Oracles in two, And bared the paltry wires and strings. He headed desert wanderings, He led his soul, his cause, his clan A little from the ruck of Things. 'Once on a time ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling
... befell. But the widowed mother had to bear the burden, and to receive in her home and bring up the child that should not have been born. When silence and shame would have most become him, Burns poured forth his feelings in ribald verses, and bitterly satirized the parish minister, who required him to undergo that public penance which the discipline of the Church at that time exacted. Whether this was a wise discipline or not, no blame attached to the minister, who merely carried out the rules ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... of these young beggars had much effect upon him: the cabmen and watermen at the cabstand knew him and passed their comments upon him: the policemen gazed after him and warned the boys off him, with looks of scorn and pity; what did the scorn and pity of men, the jokes of ribald children, matter to the General? He reeled along the street with glazed eyes, having just sense enough to know whither he was bound, and to pursue his accustomed beat homewards. He went to bed not knowing how he had reached it, as often as any man in London. He woke and found himself there, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... withhold ye the countryman's Ribald raillery Fescenine. (120) Nor if happily boys declare Thy dominion attaint, refuse, Youth, the nuts ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... 1604. They might have claimed a longer period of existence, as their first charter was granted by Edward IV. Their bye-laws are particularly interesting, and give minute directions with regard to their profession. They tested the skill of music and dancing masters, forbade the singing of ribald, wanton, or lascivious songs, or the playing of any instrument under any knight or gentleman's window without the company's licence. The Needlemakers existed in the time of Henry VIII., but have little history. The Painters' or Painter-stainers' Company suggests many reflections ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... ribald questions were best unanswered. Yet thus much thou shalt know.—All that was Amphitryon in Heracles, is dead; I am that mortal part. The Zeus in him lives, and is with ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... lit his pipe and pulled out the previous day's Coast newspaper. He was tired from his all day's running around after Jim. It was a raw evening out-of-doors, but it was cosy in there. The popping of corks, the clinking of glasses, the hum of voices and the occasional burst of ribald laughter, even the quarrelsome argument; all had more or less a soothing effect, which began to make Phil feel at harmony with the world at large. He looked at his watch. It was eight o'clock. He stretched his legs, unfolded the large sheet and ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... of the head here. Business! Standing in a buggy at street-corners, jauntily urging a crowd to buy the magic grease-eradicator, toothache remedy, meretricious jewelry, what not! first playing a fiddle and rollicking out some ribald song to fetch them. Business indeed! ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... water and wrapping it about a tomato-can with a rosebush planted in it. Another, very much intoxicated, leaned from her window, and, regarding the whole matter as an agreeable entertainment, called down humorous remarks and ribald jokes to the oblivious audience. There was an improvised hook-and-ladder company pouring water where it was least needed, and a zealous self-appointed commanding officer who did nothing but shout contradictory orders; but as nobody obeyed them, and every man did just as he was inclined, ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... cymbals clanged, drums rattled and droned, without either time or tune. Drunken pastophori had flung open the rooms where the vestments and sacred vessels were kept, and from these treasuries the ribald mob had dragged forth panther-skins such as the priests wore when performing the sacred functions, brass cars for carrying sacrifices, wooden biers on which the images of the gods were borne in solemn processions, and other precious objects. In a large room adjoining, a party of students ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "you forget that it is not becoming in men of breeding to make ribald jests about the name of a lady whom nobody in the world has any cause or any ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... be committing a sin in sending a ribald on the church's affairs," he replied, fervently. "However, we must use the instruments put into our hands. Is it agreed that ...
— The Miraculous Revenge - Little Blue Book #215 • Bernard Shaw
... were marching up the hill from the main road. They sang a song with a ribald chorus, such as men sing in a tavern when they have drunk deep. Lord Dunseveric and Maurice had already reached the door of the meeting-house, and sat silent on ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... gleeman, tumbled, sang, and balanced knives in the hall; or, out in the bailey of an afternoon, displayed the acquirements of his trained monkey or bear. The fool, too, clad in coloured patchwork, cracked his ribald jests and shook his cap and bells at the elbow of roaring barons, when the board was spread and the circling of ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... a little bow. "You have insulted both womanhood and the Established Church by the spitting out of that ribald oath; and me you have with equal levity wronged by the theft of my affianced bride. I am only a play-actor, but in inflicting an insult a gentleman must either lift his inferior to his own station or else forfeit his gentility. I wear ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... fiercely, flinging out an arm to drag forward her son. "Is he to waste his youth here in softness and idleness? But yesternight that ribald mocked him with his lack of scars. Shall he take scars in the orchard of the Kasbah here? Is he to be content with those that come from the scratch of a bramble, or is he to learn to be a fighter and leader of the ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... but sneers at and ribald jokes about the American Navy. They laughed in derision at our declaration of war. They spoke of the Constitution frigate, which had performed such gallant deeds in the Mediterranean, as "a bundle of pine boards sailing under a bit of striped bunting," and they declared that "a few broadsides ...
— Harper's Young People, August 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... he is after, Makes the woods ring with ribald laughter; "Hee, hee, ha, ha," he says, and then "Ha, ha, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... lesson hours, falsely so called. After that he was allowed to go where he liked, and even his mother sometimes felt relieved by his absence; so that he was continually in the men's huts, listening to their yarns—sometimes harmless bush adventures, sometimes, perhaps, ribald stories which he could not understand; but one day Tom Troubridge coming by the hut looked in quietly, and saw master Charles smoking a black pipe, (he was not more than fourteen,) and heard such a conversation going ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... an abiding loyalty. God grant that it may fill us with some of that charity which bears all things, hopes all things, believes all things, which rejoices not in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; and make us thrust aside henceforth, in dignified disgust, the cynic and the slanderer, the ribald and the rebel. ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... each the conviction that, in the long run, civilization must triumph, and that, in order to win success, Nature must be conquered and subdued. In such an environment, with its spirit of primitive democracy, its atmosphere of wild and ribald jest, its contempt for the impostor, its perpetually recurring incongruities, and behind all the solemn, perhaps tragic, presence of inexorable Nature—in such an environment were sharpened and whetted in Mark Twain the sense of humour, the spirit of real ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... of national and individual obligations, communists or anarchists bearing the torch and axe. This specialty is Mr. Cleveland's long suit. Little wonder that his school should place him at its head. His preeminence in the field where self-admiration is a supreme virtue and ribald abuse passes for irrefutable argument will scarcely be denied by anybody who shall have read the following characteristic specimens from this Waldorf essay, carefully written down and calmly delivered: "We are gathered here to-night as patriotic citizens anxious to do something toward ... ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... soberer ones, shamed by her tone, led the rest back into the dining-room, where, seating themselves, they began to pound the table and swing the chairs, swearing, and singing ribald songs. ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... in the very midst of the big table and drank her health, standing, bursting into a jovial, ribald song; and the child, excited by the noise and laughter, actually broke forth and joined them in a high, strong treble, the song being one she was quite familiar with, having heard it often enough in the stable to ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... province. The burgomaster smoked his pipe in peace; the substantial solace of his domestic cares, after her daily toils were done, sat soberly at the door, with her arms crossed over her apron of snowy white without being insulted by ribald street walkers or vagabond boys—those unlucky urchins who do so infest our streets, displaying under the roses of youth the thorns and briars of iniquity. Then it was that the lover with ten breeches, and the damsel with petticoats of ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... and mouldered jaws command you to be a man. I ask you, in the name of God and of your country, will you draw your sword and go with me to Carlisle, were it but to lay your father's head, now the perch of the obscene owl and carrion crow and the scoff of every ribald clown, in consecrated earth ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... Dreadful, "the Court, having with shame listened to your ribald effusion, I will ask you what you had to drink upon the night you and the Lord Mayor were found wandering under extraordinary circumstances in ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... "Thou slanderous ribald!" quoth the Miller, "hast? A traitor false, false lying clerk!" quoth he, "Thou shalt be slain by heaven's dignity, Who rudely dar'st disparage with foul lie My daughter that is come of lineage high!" And by the ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... king coming to restore them once more to freedom, they saw the implacable czar enter in triumph, followed by those heroes, the least of whom had lately made him tremble, now in chains, and exposed to the ribald mirth and derision of the gaping crowd, they lost at once their fortitude, and even all sense of expressing their grief at this misfortune:—the shock of it was so violent, it even took away the power of feeling it, and they remained for some moments rather like statues carv'd out by mortal art, ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... set the immediate crowd in a roar. I became an object for ribald laughter and cheers; I was pushed and hustled, albeit good-naturedly enough, but none the less to my great annoyance, so that I made all haste to wriggle away and, espying a narrow lane between these canvas booths and tents, I slipped into it, took to my heels and turning ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... pulled clean out of his nether garments, cursing bitterly as the wind caught his bare legs, and hung suspended between earth and water, amid ribald comments ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... in the sun. The only drawback was my shame of a sentimental situation, but once or twice I longed to turn the whole equipage into the woods—or the ditch. As, for instance, when three pine-woods cavalrymen had no sooner got by us than they set up that ribald old camp-song, ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... party, but offered no comment other than some sneering laughter and ribald whispering. Yet Beaudry breathed freer when he was out in the open again lengthening the distance between him and them ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... letter lying on the ground—a letter that had dropped out of M. de Poissy's pocket—a letter from his wife, full of tender words of endearment and pretty babblings of love. This was read aloud, with coarse ribald comments on every sentence, each trying to outdo the previous speaker. When they came to some pretty words about a sweet Maurice, their little child away with its mother on some visit, they laughed at M. de la Tourelle, ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... for the villain Franz, with his abysmal depravity, and Amalia, with her witless sentimentalism, we find it hard to take them seriously; they do not produce a good illusion. And then the whole style of the piece, the violent and ribald language, the savage action, the rant and swagger, the shooting and stabbing,—all this seems at first calculated for the entertainment of young savages, and moves one to approve the oft-quoted mot of the German prince who said to Goethe: ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... and crush it openly, in the sight of all men: then, I will believe that its influence is lessening, and men are returning to their manly senses. But while that Press has its evil eye in every house, and its black hand in every appointment in the state, from a president to a postman; while, with ribald slander for its only stock in trade, it is the standard literature of an enormous class, who must find their reading in a newspaper, or they will not read at all; so long must its odium be upon the country's head, and so long must ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... extorts blackmail from monarchs, makes princes tremble, and receives smooth answers to his insults from Buonarroti. These three men, Machiavelli, Cellini, and Aretino, each in his own line, and with the proper differences that pertain to philosophic genius, artistic skill, and ribald ruffianism, sufficiently indicate the dissolution of the social bond in Italy. They mark their age as the age of adventurers, bandits, bullies, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... knows all about dogs; we don't differentiate in the case of males and females; the latter hunt with the pack. If women are similarly to have the same employments as men, they must have the same education in music and gymnastic. We must not mind ribald comments. But should they share masculine employments? Do they differ from men in such a way that they should not? Women bear children, and men beget them; but apart from that the differences are really only in degrees of capacity, not essential distinctions ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... they are not all of the low, ignorant class I have described. Professors, teachers, musicians, all drift at times down the river; and one is often startled at finding in the apparently rough crew men who seem worthy of a better fate. To these the river experiences are generally new, and the ribald jokes and low river slang, with the ever-accompanying cheap corn-whiskey and the nightly riots over cutthroat euchre, must be at first a revelation. Hundreds of these low fellows will swear to you that the world owes them a living, and that they mean to have ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... gangway, when it became apparent that those in charge of her were so helplessly drunk that they could hardly stand. Yet, somehow, they managed, with assistance, to clamber up our low side and reach the deck; when, as well as their drunken state would allow, they forthwith proceeded, in ribald language, to entertain their more sober shipmates with a tale of gross, wanton, cruel outrage, perpetrated on board the Spaniard, that made my blood boil with indignation, and caused me, thick-skinned sailor as I was, to blush at the thought that the ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... and the fourth and all the rest of them. The station became a sty where before it had been a kennel; the flies multiplied; the stenches increased in volume and strength, if such were possible; the windows of the littered waiting room, with their cracked half panes, were like ribald eyes winking at the living afflictions which continually trailed past them; the floors looked as though there had been ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb |
