"Travesty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this well-sounding term was a certain bundle of ideas—some of them very illiterate, some very delicate hair-splitting, some curious even to comicality,—gathered out of the writings of a certain number of men, who assuredly were not inspired, since they often travesty Scripture, and at times diametrically contradict it. Having lived in the darkest times of the Church, they were extremely ignorant and superstitious, even the best of them being enslaved by fancies as untrue in fact as they ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... a travesty. 'Mrs. Borrow was devoted to her husband, and looked after business matters; and he always treated her with exceeding kindness,' is the verdict of Miss Elizabeth Jay, who was frequently privileged to visit the ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... it open to the vessels of all nations on equal terms. We had assumed the position of guarantor of the canal, including, of course, the building of the canal, and of its peaceful use by all the world. The enterprise was recognized everywhere as responding to an international need. It was a mere travesty on justice to treat the government in possession of the Isthmus as having the right—which Secretary Cass forty-five years before had so emphatically repudiated—to close the gates of intercourse on one of the great highways of the world. When we submitted to Colombia the Hay-Herran ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... array compose a pleasing picture which imagination would fail to evolve from the burlesque ugliness of the slovenly deshabille wherewith the Dutch colonist disguises every claim to beauty or grace. On alluding to the shock experienced by this grotesque travesty of native garb, a Dutch officer asserts that there are in reality but few Dutch ladies in Java of pure racial stock, for one unhappy result of remoteness from European influence is shown by the gradual merging of the Dutch colonists into the Malay race by intermarriage. Exile to Java was ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... assent from this bill because, if the facts before me, derived from the army records and the statements of the claimant are true, the allowance of this claim would, in my opinion, be a travesty upon our whole scheme of pensions and an insult ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... another's locks was arranged a gorgeous fillet of pale-blue ribbon of the style advertised at the time in every shop-window in New York as the "Du Barry." The scene was a sorry burlesque on the boudoir and the ball-room, a grim travesty on the sordid realities of ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life's struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character. ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... bare floor, Ambrose would drink the bat's blood he had collected, sniff the wolfbane he had ground to ash, and pronounce the obscure Celtic words that would alter the very atoms of his flesh, transforming them into an obscene travesty of life. Brother Lorenzo, when he opened the door, would be met not by a fellow human being, but by a snarling fanged wolf that would hurl its hairy bulk at ...
— G-r-r-r...! • Roger Arcot
... whom he had loved long ago and who had died. Since her death he had put aside love as a passion. Now and then—not often—a sort of travesty of love had come to him, the spectre of the real. It is difficult for a young, strong man in the pride of his life never to have any dealing either with love or with its spectre. But Isaacson was right. Nigel's life had been much purer than are most men's lives. Often he had fought against himself, ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... difference in character between the child and the cretin. The latter has none of the curiosity, the seeking for experience, the active interest, the pliant expanding will, the sweet capacity for affection, friendship and love present in the average child. The cretin is a travesty on the human being ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... her of love and charity rushed into sudden blossoming,—she found that her inexperienced hands must deal. She, whose wifehood was all joy and sanity, all sweet and mysterious deepening of the color of life, encountered now the hideous travesty of wifehood and motherhood, met by immature, ill- nourished bodies, ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... What a travesty on common sense and justice is such legislation! I know there are men in this Convention shaking in their boots for fear their mothers, wives, and daughters shall have equal power with themselves; cowardly men without gallantry, who fear ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the overthrow of that gorgeous pile. The Bible, as to its important verities and solemn doctrine, is transparent to the imagination and affections, and does not require the mediation of dumb show or scenic travesty. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... intolerable if his career were not effectively checked. He was accordingly tried before the Assembly on a frivolous charge of having, in a private conversation held at the house of a Mr. Glennan, in York, spoken disrespectfully of some of the members. The proceedings were the veriest travesty of the forms of justice. The accused was found guilty, and committed to the common jail of the Home District, there to remain during the sitting of Parliament.[53] This indignity he was compelled to suffer, being confined for many weeks in a small close cell, which he was not permitted ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... little travesty reminds me of a quaint story. It was in 1746, when I was completing my noviciate under the care of the Pere Magitot, a man well on in years, of deep learning and austere morals. At that period, you perhaps remember, dancing figures, intended in the first instance to amuse children, exercised ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... use of plain English, "naked wordes in English"; he will employ the national language, the king's English—"the king that is lord of this langage."[549] And he will use it, as in truth he did, to express exactly his thoughts and not to embellish them; he hates travesty, he worships truth; he wants words and things to be in the closest ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... Prophet have described an inward and purely spiritual process? To say as Duhm does that the phrases only mean that common men would learn the Law of God "by heart" (auswendig), is, whoever their author may have been, to travesty his meaning. Finally, all the phrasing of the New Covenant is in harmony with the rest of the Prophet's teaching. He had spoken of God's will to give His people a new heart to know Him;(818) he had taught ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... travesties the travesty? Who is that old cripple alighted from his donkey-cart, who dispenses doggrel and grimaces in all the glory ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... parodied this march of Jews. The fishmongers, who, from their proximity to the Ghetto, were aware of its customs, enriched the Carnival with divers other parodies; now it was a travesty of a rabbi's funeral, now a long cavalcade of Jews galloping upon asses, preceded by a mock rabbi on horseback, with his head to the steed's tail, which he grasped with one hand, while with the other he offered an imitation Scroll of the Law to the derision of the mob. Truly, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... incantations. Two of the Fujiwara nobles were appointed to investigate the accusation, and they condemned the prince to die by his own hand. He committed suicide, and his wife and children died with him. The travesty of justice was carefully acted throughout. A proclamation was issued promising capital punishment to any one, of whatever rank or position, who compassed the death or injury of another by spells or incantations, and, six months later, the lady Asuka ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... heart? It will never come! No, the marriage was a travesty from the beginning, and I ought to have pulled her out of it. I did suggest it to her, but she said she was going to stick ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... one may take leave to ask, in our own allegory-loving literature or in any other, merit the same commendation? For the rest, Pope's own immortal "Dunciad," though doubtless more immediately suggested by a personal satire of Dryden's, is in one sense a kind of travesty of the "House ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... 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 drew all Paris in crowds; and certainly any thing more ludicrous than Poitier, as the wicked old King Danaus, with his fifty daughters, it is impossible ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... they were half-way to the bateau did Carrigan dare to glance back over his shoulder at the man who was paddling, to see what effect the fistic travesty had left on him. He was a big-mouthed, clear-eyed, powerfully-muscled fellow, and he was grinning ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... Henry Fielding was like going into the fresh air from a close room heated by stoves. Richardson, it has been affirmed, knew man, but Fielding knew men. The latter's first novel, Joseph Andrews, 1742, was begun as a travesty of Pamela. The hero, a brother of Pamela, was a young footman in the employ of Lady Booby, from whom his virtue suffered a like assault to that made upon Pamela's by her master. This reversal ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... sacred opera, as Rubinstein entitles it, was written in 1870, the text, which is somewhat of a travesty on sacred history, by Julius Rodenberg. An English critic very pertinently says: "One item alone in all the multitude of details crowded by Herr Rodenberg into his canvas has any foundation in fact. He adopts the theory ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... by egotism, that sad travesty of personal interest, appears under a form quite as formidable when the general interest takes the form of communism. The cooeperation of personal interest and of the general interest is always necessary, both for individual ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... blue ribbons, but she had not had strength to paint her lips and cheeks again, and the old woman's efforts had ended pitifully. She had grown very small in the last few hours, and with her thin, daubed face and blood-stained lips, she looked like a sorrowful travesty of the little circus clown who had ridden the fat pony and shouted "Oh la—la!" and blown kisses to ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... white, who applauded loudly when the Pahi Minstrels emerged from a little boarded room in one corner, and took up their positions on the platform at the end of the hall. Then, for two mortal hours, there was a dismal and lugubrious travesty of the performances of that world-famous troupe which never performs ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... struck by editorials, many of them couched in language even stronger and more suited to fan the public rage. The recent trial was called an outrageous travesty on justice; attention was directed to the damnable vagaries of recent juries which had been impaneled ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... seated man, which had evidently at some remote period, been sculptured out of a solid block of black marble seemingly springing vertically out of the ground. There was nothing artistic in the conception or execution of the image, which was a mere travesty of the human figure, every member being absurdly out of proportion, while the only features upon the modelling of which any pains had been taken were those of the face, the expression of which hideously ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... right by raising supplies in the manner they judge best." Chatham, in short, applied precisely the same argument to Ireland as, in his memorable speeches of the next year (1774), he applied to America, and in both cases he was right. The only mistake he made was in his estimate of that travesty of a representative assembly, the Irish House of Commons, which, at the secret instigation of the Viceroy, though without actual coercion, eventually threw out a tax so distasteful to its English patrons. But the argument for financial independence remained unassailable, and eventually the Irish ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... North are not mirrored with any exactitude in the Elder Edda. Indeed only a travesty of the faith of our ancestors has been preserved in Norse literature. The early poet loved allegory, and his imagination rioted among the conceptions of his fertile muse. "His eye was fixed on the mountains till the snowy peaks assumed human features and the giant of the ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... were traced magic symbols in clustered rubies, clad in the barbaric splendour of an Eastern queen; presently she would be wearing the black hood, pointed above the brow, and the dusky velvet robe of a Royal widow, like the portraits to be seen guarded as holy relics in a chamber of the Louvre; last travesty of all (and it was in this guise he found her most adorable), as a modern horsewoman, clothed from neck to heel in a close-fitting habit, a man's hat set rakishly on her dainty head. He would fain spend his life in these romantic dreams, ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... disguises he went from place to place, and did not fear to return to Rome in the travesty of a pilgrim. The story of his adventures would fill many pages, but Rome is not concerned with them. In vain he appealed to adventurers, to enthusiasts, and to fanatics to help in regaining what he ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... that burnt, but rage for a blunder which he had so incredibly committed. That to have conceived of those men, the most dignified in our literature, our civilization, as impersonable by three hoboes, and then to have imagined that he could ask them personally to enjoy the monstrous travesty, was a break, he saw too late, for which there was no repair. Yet the time came, and not so very long afterward, when some mention was made of the incident as a mistake, and he said, with all his fierceness, "But I don't admit that it was a mistake," and it was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... with an eye to the bizarre, to whom Dennis had presented some of his characteristic enterprises, had put the young Irishman in the way of securing a biography of the Hebrew premier, whom he provided with such an absurd travesty of likeness, and the "ole clo' merchant" was so impressed by the resolution and dexterity of the celebrated statesman, that he became, from that moment, the prey of a consuming ambition whose ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... who voted for him to have no other connection with reconstruction than what a casting vote in the Senate might possibly give him, has taken the whole vast subject into his exclusive control. Was there ever acted on the stage of history such a travesty of constitutional government? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" was unlike the style of his "Life of Schiller." It was vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to travesty and ridicule. But the laugh could not be very loud or very long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson tells us, to sell five hundred copies. It was a good ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... could be found of the curious mixture of French and English in Hamilton. Hardly any Frenchman could have borne to put even a fictitious eidolon of himself in such a contemptible light; very few Englishmen, though they might easily have done this, would have done it so neatly, and with so quaint a travesty of romantic situation. But the main story, as admitted above, is assommant, though, just before the breach, a substitution of three agreeable damsels for the nymph herself promises ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... word, so plausible a cloak did it become for much that is mean and degrading. For example, when I was riding from Bloemfontein to Kimberley I and my companion descried a farmhouse two miles in front of us near Koodoesrand Drift; when we had come within about a mile of it a little travesty of a Union Jack was run up on a stick, and when we rode up to the door a farmer came out, smiling, rubbing his hands, sniggering—in a word, truckling. His talk was like the political swagger of the ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... indeed—we are sorry to say it, and trust our readers will sympathize with the interest we take in the matter—it was indeed honest Jin Vin, who had been so far left to his own devices, and abandoned by his better angel, as occasionally to travesty himself in this fashion, and to visit, in the dress of a gallant of the day, those places of pleasure and dissipation, in which it would have been everlasting discredit to him to have been seen in his real character and condition; that is, had it ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... the God of repressions and denials, and now must speak a little more freely of this travesty on "the Father," as expressed to us in Jesus Christ. Of all the obstacles to the rooting out of fear the lingering belief in such a distortion of Divine Love is to my mind the ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... often hiding them in strange places while waiting for an opportunity of heating the furnace. And some have been found, here and there, piled up in little vaults, most generally near the Tiber, by which it was always easy to ship the metal away. Already temples had been turned into churches, in a travesty only saved from the ridiculous by the high solemnity of the Christian faith. Other temples and buildings, here and there, had been partly stripped of columns and marble facings to make other churches even more nondescript than the ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... a propos of the prevailing epidemic, writes,—"Sir, there must have been an epidemic of influenza at Cambridge about thirty-three years ago, as in a travesty of Faust, produced at the A. D. C. about that time, occurs a parody of the song 'Di Frienza' from La Traviata, commencing 'Influenza is about, So I'll stay no longer out.' History ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... I turn them out when I begin to feel the beast in them, and presently they wander there. They all dread this house and me. There is a kind of travesty of humanity over there. Montgomery knows about it, for he interferes in their affairs. He has trained one or two of them to our service. He's ashamed of it, but I believe he half likes some of those beasts. It's his business, ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... pronounce an opinion upon them. He said that I wrote many things which I did not believe, and then stood aside, and was amused in a humorous mood to see that other people believed them. It would be absurd to be, or even to feel, indignant at such a travesty of my purpose as this, and indeed I think that one is never very indignant at misrepresentation unless one's mind accuses itself of its ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... could have given no more conclusive proof of his courage and his earnestness of purpose than in selecting as the motif of this book that outrage upon justice, that travesty on morality; the condemnation of woman for a crime that is readily ignored or as readily forgiven in man. It is really such an outworn theme that the very mention of it is greeted with smiles or supercilious shrugs, and even lovers of their kind have grown ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... mission of Christ teaches us about the love of God is that it is a love which takes note of and overcomes man's sin. I have said, as plainly as I can, that I reject the travesty of Christianity which implies that it was Christ's mission which originated God's love to men. But a love that does not in the slightest degree care whether its object is good or bad—what sort of a love do you call that? What do you name it when a father shows it to his ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the time it reaches Grand Street the $400 gown in brocaded velvet from the best looms in Europe has become a cotton velvet from Lawrence or Fall River, decorated with mercerized lace and glass ornaments from Rhode Island! A travesty—and yet a recognizable travesty. The East Side hovers over it as Fifth Avenue has done over the original. The very shop window, where it is displayed, is dressed and painted and lighted in imitation of the uptown shop. The same process goes on inland. This same gown will ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... governors-general and the governors—the power of issuing special enactments and thereby setting aside the normal laws as well as of placing under arrest and deporting to Siberia, without the due process of law, all citizens suspected of "political unsafety." This travesty of a habeas corpus Act, insuring the inviolability of police and gendarmerie, and practically involving the suspension of the current legislation in a large part of the monarchy, has ever since been annually renewed by special imperial enactments, and has remained in force until ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... work, by the way, but ultimately came into his own over his own bridge of kisses, built under a heavy barrage of needless misunderstandings. But Joey's pipsqueak shirker fiance, Hilary, was altogether too foolish a travesty of a man ever to have gained her hand or, having gained it, to have held it against any real male in or out of khaki. The fact is that "BERTHA RUCK" can achieve something better than these meandering methods and this spinelessness of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 8, 1917 • Various
... to imagine us in a change of role," she cried. "I should play the poorest travesty of Mentor to your Telemachus. ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... travesty and by- play regarding Tommy! You know I warned you, over and over, and you mustn't blame me for the deception. I never thought you'd take it so in earnest!" and here the jovial Major again went into ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... a leading Sunday newspaper in the spring of 1919, signalized by this amazing travesty of the actual facts. In a reference to our land forces of the early days of the struggle, the writer spoke of "armies sent to war lacking almost every modern requisite." Now, the Press generally manages to avoid grossly ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... that with Ale or viler Liquors, Didst inspire WITHERS, PRYN, and VICARS. This Vicars was a man of as great interest and authority in the late Reformation as Pryn or Withers, and as able a poet. He translated Virgil's AEneids into as horrible Travesty, in earnest, as the French Scaroon did in burlesque, and was only outdone in his way by ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... Gershom himself, and secondly on his residence. These names were obtained from the intensity of their respective characters, in favor of the beverage named. L'eau de mort was the place termed by the voyagers, in a sort of pleasant travesty on the eau de vie of their distant, but still well-remembered manufactures on the banks of the Garonne. Ben Boden, however, paid but little attention to the drawling remarks of Gershom Waring. This was not the first time he had heard of "Whiskey Centre," though the first ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... travesty on human progress, a social paradox, that war and science go hand in hand. On one side are all of the machines of destruction, the battleships, bombing-planes, huge guns, high explosives, and poisonous gases, products of scientific experiment ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... rarely hanged for infanticide, and it is a mere travesty of justice to pass on her the death sentence, well knowing that ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... witnesses whose twisted version of the word about 'destroying the Temple and rebuilding it in three days' seemed to Caiaphas serious enough to require an answer. Their mistake was one which might have been made in good faith, but none the less was their travesty 'false witness.' Their version of His great word shows how easily the teaching of a lofty soul, passed through the popular brain, is degraded, and made to mean the opposite of what he had meant by it. For the destruction of the Temple had appeared ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... knight; and that the contrast of what was real, as we say, under the fiction appears to me less ironical in the former than in the latter. We have to allow, you will admit, at least as much to the beneficent heightening of travesty, if we have ever seen the living actor in the morning, not yet shaved, standing at the bar, his hat on one side, his mouth spreading in that abandonment to laughter which has become from the necessity of his profession, a ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... could not be mistaken that here a voice was singing as if out of the black water-deeps, so clear and hollow were the notes. I burst through the knotted stalks of the ivy, and stooping like some poor travesty of Narcissus, with shaded face pierced down deep—deep into eyes not my own, but violet and unendurable and strange—eyes of the living water-sprite drawing my wits from me, stilling my heart, till I was very near plunging into that crystal ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... him for different reasons. In her soul she had always regarded him as "real cunning," and had even, when she passed to bring up the dish of apples from the cellar, or a mug of cider, longed to touch the queer lock that would straggle down from his sparsely covered poll in absurd travesty ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... It was a travesty on running, to be sure, but it was the best he could do. He staggered and stumbled; he lurched rapidly ahead for a little space and then moved with halting steps. His limbs grew weak, his breath came in gasps, and the pain in his side was ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... would have required a full college of languages to translate them. But the speech was along a line perfectly familiar to every woman since Eve. And Dorcas understood. She would have understood had Link voiced his proposal in the Choctaw dialect instead of a slurringly mumbled travesty on English. ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... fortune. He is, as you say, a senile old man in his dotage. As you say again, such a marriage is a travesty. But Elise is incapable of feeling the love which alone renders marriage a holy institution. She has undesirable qualities which ought not to be transmitted to children, and she is absolutely devoid ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... been laudable in the extreme and trade would have suffered little inconvenience from the depredations of the gangs; but there was in the system a flaw that generally reduced the aid lent to ships to something little better than a mere travesty of assistance. That flaw lay in the fact that Admiralty never gave as good as it took. Clearly, it could not. True, it supplied substitutes to go in "pressed men's rooms," but to call them "men in lieu" was a gross abuse of language. In reality the substitutes supplied were in the great ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... nautical in sentiment. The chorus contained some observations like "Hilley-hiley-Hilley-ho," and it also gave us the information that gentleman named Jack would shortly come home from the sea. The thing was a silly Cockney travesty of a sailor's song, but we were all pleased with it, and it led the way nicely to the girl's ditty, which stated that somebody was going sailing, sailing, over the bounding main (sailors always mention ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... not have known my departed relation did not prevent two of my cousins, elderly maiden ladies who had had that privilege, from writing to me in great indignation at my having ventured to travesty my old aunt. They had found me out (I am always being found out), and the vials of their wrath were poured out ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... works, the aim of all being to infuse into the masses a contempt of the received Scriptures. He issued a travesty of the New Testament under the title of The New Testament, or The Newest Instructions from God through Jesus and his Apostles. He did just what he pleased with the miracles and words of Christ. He would convert dialogue ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... way recently, the representative of one of our philanthropic societies had arrested an agent who had committed a crime. It was so clear a case that he was found guilty at once. Let us hear this travesty of justice. The law required a fine and imprisonment both. The fine was placed by the Judge at twenty-five cents, which the Judge paid himself. The term of the imprisonment he made one day, and told the Sheriff to allow the jail, in this case, to be the ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... Philosophy of the Fine Arts," and aims at carrying a love of the beautiful into all the relations of life. The fantastical developments which accompanied the movement brought its devotees into much ridicule about ten years ago, and the pages of Punch of that time will be found to happily travesty its more amusing and extravagant aspects. The great success of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, "Patience," produced in 1881, was also to some extent due to the humorous allusions to the extravagances of the "Aesthetetes." In support of what may be termed a ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... afraid of tragedy, you ought never to have joined me in starting upon such a story. Even what has never happened must be made to seem actual to be successful. The art of fiction is to imitate truth with absolute fidelity, not to travesty it. In such circumstances the man's love would be changed ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... "When the name was a travesty, an ignominy, a reproach! When Barbarians thronged the Forum, and the representative of Galilee fishermen claimed power in the Capitol? Yes; I descend, they say, from the Commneni; but I am far prouder that, on the other hand, I come from pure Athenians. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... was another travesty, of about the same literary merit, or rather demerit, as "The Bonnie Blue Flag." Its air was that of the well-known and popular negro minstrel song, "Billy Patterson." For all that, it sounded very martial and stirring when played by ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... there was no town in England, or country in Europe, of which he could not give a very particular account. He had some letters, and was ingenious, but much of an unbeliever, and wickedly undertook, some years after, to travesty the Bible in doggerel verse, as Cotton had done Virgil. By this means he set many of the facts in a very ridiculous light, and might have hurt weak minds if his work had been ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... towns, with the Pope's Bull borne before him on a cushion, and brandishing indulgences for the living and the dead, when the coins were tinkling in the box, and the souls, released by contract, were flying off out of purgatory, the religious sense of thinking men was outraged by this travesty of the Day of Judgement; but scarcely less were they angered to see the tinkling coins, honest German money, flying off as rapidly as the souls, to build palaces for the supercilious Italians. In the great struggle of the Reformation the main issue was of course religious; ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... English Fun and Frolic,' placarded in vermilion letters on the gate. He went into the pit, and saw the lovely Mrs. Leary, as usual, in a man's attire; and that eminent buffo actor, Tom Horseman, dressed as a woman. Horseman's travesty seemed to him a horrid and hideous degradation; Mrs. Leary's glances and ankles had not the least effect. He laughed again, and bitterly, to himself, as he thought of the effect which she had produced upon him, on the first night of his arrival in London, a short time—what ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... her, and a man stooped over Dylks and voided a mouthful of tobacco juice in his face; another lashed him on the head with a switch of leatherwood: all in a squalid travesty of the supreme tragedy of the race. As if a consciousness of the semblance touched the gospel-read actors in the drama, they shrank in turn from what they had done, and lost themselves in ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... our most productive farming and grazing lands. In that event Graustark will be no larger than one of the good-sized farms in your western country. There will be nothing left for Her Royal Highness to rule save a tract so small that the word principality will be a travesty and a jest. This city and twenty-five miles to the south, a strip about one hundred fifty miles long. Think of it! Twenty-five by one hundred fifty miles, and yet called a principality! Once the proudest and most prosperous state in the east, ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... simplest human wants may have been responsible for an impression which I carried about with me almost constantly for a period of two years and which culminated finally in a visit to Tolstoy—that the Settlement, or Hull-House at least, was a mere pretense and travesty of the simple impulse "to live with the poor," so long as the residents did not share the common lot of hard ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... back and surveyed the two heaps with tired eyes, a curious, almost scornful smile on her lips. "There!" she said with a sigh. "The black pile is mine, the gay pile is yours," she went on, turning toward the sleeping girl. "What a travesty!" ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... multiplication of androgyne lodges for this purpose; the dual nature of the Divine Principle; and the cultus of Lucifer as the good God. The most curious feature of the performance is that here again it is from end to end a travesty of Eliphas Levi, slice after slice from his chief writings, combined with interlineal additions, which give them a sense diametrically opposed to that of the great magus. Now, it is impossible that two persons, working independently ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... calumny. A fact may be an exception; but the feeling is the law, and it is that which you must neither garble nor belie. The whole tenor of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate statement; the beginning and the end define and travesty the intermediate conversation. You never speak to God; you address a fellow-man, full of his own tempers; and to tell truth, rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, but to convey a true ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said briefly, as he turned into a travesty of a front yard and halted beside a small cabin, built of logs and containing not more than three ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... zoological garden which, although inferior to ours, is far better than that at Amsterdam, while it converts The Hague's Zoo into a travesty. Last spring the lions were in splendid condition. They are well housed, but fewer distractions are provided for them than in Regent's Park. I found myself fascinated by the herons, who were continually ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... white things," as being "ever an after-thought—the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselves but half-real, half-material—the white queen, the white witch, the white mass, which, as the black mass is a travesty of the true mass turned to evil by horrible old witches, is celebrated by young candidates for the priesthood with an unconsecrated host, by way of rehearsal." So, white-nights, I suppose, after something like the same analogy, should be [14] nights not of ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... the date of the travesty known to us, and most popular amongst our mediaeval ancestors, it might be shown that some rude notion of Homer's fable and personages had ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the ludicrous that these industrials now do their little drama of the war-dance and the oration and the council-smoke. That drama has degenerated into a very feeble farce now, and the actors in it would be quite outdone in their travesty by any average corps of "supes" at one of our theatres. By-and-by all this will have died out, and the "Indian side" of the stream at Lorette will be assimilated in all its features to the other. The moccason ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... an immersionist cannot be a consistent evolutionist. For when an evolutionist is immersed, he is either perpetrating a meaningless travesty on immersion, or else he is denying the whole doctrine of evolution. For immersion certainly does not picture a step in the progress of the living, but rather the burial of the totally dead. Immersing churches that have gone over to the evolutionary position ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... us at this, and we all trooped into the house again. The little girl had crowed and clapped her hands during our struggle, all unconscious of the dreadful event of which it was a juvenile travesty. We two boys admired her as she was borne in on the negro's ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... and more fully worked out. In spite of incongruous masque or rather pantomime scenes the pervading atmosphere is sustained. One would say that Purcell got his inspiration by reading of Prospero's magic island, and never thought of Shadwell's stupid and boorish travesty. ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... close the colloquy; an older peasant, tranquilly kneeling to the Madonna of the traghetto, amid the clatter, while steaming greasy odors from her housewifely basket of Venetian dainties mount slowly, like some travesty of incense, and cloud the humble shrine. Two or three comers swell the group from the recesses of the dark little shop behind, for no other reason than that life is pleasant where so much is going on; and some maiden, into whose life a dawning romance ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... 'For this travesty,' he answered; and coolly, as he stood before her, he twitched the sleeve of her shapeless gown, looking masterfully down at her the while, so that her eyes fell before his. 'Did you think it kind to me or fair to me,' he continued, ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... forget The gravity of life to the extent, At times, of kindling much astonishment About him: With a quick, observant eye, And mind and memory, he could supply The tamest incident with liveliest mirth; And at the most unlooked-for times on earth Was wont to break into some travesty On those around him—feats of mimicry Of this one's trick of gesture—that one's walk— Or this one's laugh—or that one's funny talk,— The way "the watermelon-man" would try His humor on town-folks that wouldn't buy;— How ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... the king, had resolutely held himself aloof from the proceedings which, beginning on Saturday the 20th of January 1649, terminated so dismally on Tuesday the 30th. The strange part played by Lady Fairfax on the first day of the so-called trial (though it was no greater a travesty of justice than many a real trial both before and after) is one of the best-known stories in English history. There are several versions of it. Having provided herself with a seat in a small gallery in Westminster Hall, just above ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... of flowers" should, to be complete, give a chapter on their political significance. England had her War of the Roses; and of this contest a mild travesty may possibly be furnished in a French "Strife of the Flowers". The violet is the Bonapartist badge, and when, last spring, the emperor died in exile, and his partisans sought to show some outward token of their fidelity to his memory and his cause, violets began to bloom profusely in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... been preserved, was translated into Latin by Julius Valerius about the end of the 3rd century, and an epitome of this translation, also in Latin, was made some time before the 9th century, and is introduced by Vincent de Beauvais into his Speculum historiale. Much of the legend is a running travesty of the true history of the conqueror. The first book deals with his birth and early exploits. The trace of Alexandrian influence is to be found in the pretence that his actual father was Nectanebus, a fugitive king of Egypt. The latter ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... rle by Lassalle, whose fine art in newer works had met with full recognition from press and public. To Lassalle's great surprise, his Hamlet, a remarkably fine performance within the limit set by the pitiable operatic travesty of Shakespeare's play, was received coldly, and there was wide comment on the circumstance that he had ignored traditions of performance, especially in the scene between the Prince and his mother. ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... And he wondered if Natalie felt at all as he did, the vast room and the two men serving, with Graham no one knew where, and that travesty of Christmas joy between them. His mind wandered to long ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... my good friend Dr. Duchat. If that excellent man had not long since died he should have shared in my triumph. I took Stepan to my home and plied the saw and the knife. could operate on that poor, worthless, useless, hopeless travesty of humanity as fearlessly and as recklessly as upon a dog bought or caught for vivisection. That was a little more than twenty years ago. To-day Stepan Borovitch wields more power than any other man on the face of the earth. In ten years he will be the autocrat of Europe, the master ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... accompanied them without delay to Alexandrovsk. There they were put into prison for a month, until it pleased the Governor to take notice of them. Then followed the mere mockery of a trial, during which the prisoners were not permitted to utter a word in self-defence, and as a fitting end to this travesty of justice, the ten unfortunates were launched upon their weary foot-journey to the frozen North, destined to live and die beyond the reach, ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... to travesty the truth, and I was impotent—the truth, that profound thing whose voice was in my ears, whose shadow was in my eyes, and whose taste was ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... is really all that M. Flourens can make of Natural Selection. We have given the original, in fear lest a translation should be regarded as a travesty; but with the original before the reader, we may try to analyse the passage. "For an organized being, Nature is only organization, neither more ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... Radbourn, pitilessly, "that the wives of the American farmers fill our insane asylums. See what a life they lead, most of them; no music, no books. Seventeen hours a day in a couple of small rooms—dens. Now there's Sim Burns! what a travesty of a home! Yet there are a dozen just as bad in sight. He works like a fiend,—so does his wife,—and what is their reward? Simply a hole to hibernate in and to sleep and eat in in summer. A dreary present and a well-nigh hopeless ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... overlooked by some of the critics who want to make graphic history out of his novels. Fielding's mind had gathered coarseness, but it had not been poisoned. He sees how many ugly things are covered by the superficial gloss of fashion, but he does not condescend to travesty the facts in order to gratify a morbid taste for the horrible. When he wants a good man or woman he knows where to find them, and paints from Allen or his own wife with obvious sincerity and hearty sympathy. He is less anxious to exhibit ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... is part of him, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, for she eats what comes from his table and, being fed of one flesh, are they not brother and sister to one another in virtue of community of nutriment which is but a thinly veiled travesty of descent? When she eats peas with her knife, he does so too; there is not a bit of bread and butter she puts into her mouth, nor a lump of sugar she drops into her tea, but he knoweth it altogether, though he knows nothing whatever about it. She is en-Croesused and he enscullery-maided ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... cases a reverse is possible, is the appropriate business of burlesque and travesty, a predominant taste for which has been always deemed a mark of a low and degraded mind. When I was at Rome, among many other visits to the tomb of Julius II. I went thither once with a Prussian artist, a man of genius and great vivacity of feeling. As we were gazing on Michael Angelo's ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... quite close to me I obtained an excellent view of him, and though I was later to become better acquainted with his kind, I may say that that single cursory examination of this awful travesty on Nature would have proved quite sufficient to my desires had I been a free agent. The fastest flier of the Heliumetic Navy could not quickly enough have carried me far from this ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... travesty of merriment. They voiced the gossip of a vanished society; the politics, fashions, and scandals of old Florence. One heard the names of noble families long since extinct, accounts of historic escapades related as if they had happened yesterday. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... world, anything resembling the injustice of a civilisation which, of set purpose, excludes from the only redemption flesh and blood can inherit, that sad rear-guard whose besetting sin is poverty. Yet John Knox's wildest travesty of eternal justice never rivalled in flagrancy the moving principle of a civilisation which exists merely to build on extrinsic bases an impracticable barrier between class and class: on one side, the redemption of life, education, refinement, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... of business on reassembling; Truculent TIM, coming to the front at least urgent opportunity, demanded that Irish business should not be taken as first Order. OLD MORALITY promptly gave desired pledge. Then MARJORIBANKS, who, to travesty TREVELYAN's famous saying, Though a Whip, is a Scottish gentleman, broke the long pause of eloquent silence cultivated in the Lobby; protested against Scotch Members being placed in inconvenient position, by being obliged to put in appearance on first day after holidays. Welsh Members echoed plaint ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Dec. 20, 1890 • Various
... piece of money; and the man behind the counter said nothing, but took the money and filled the bottles, which were hidden under the tattered shawl again, and the speechless phantoms glided out, guarding that little travesty of modesty even ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... need be wasted on President Kruger or the Transvaal Republic. The latter (Republic) is a shadow of a name, and as great a travesty and burlesque on the word as ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... This is no travesty. It is a hasty, but I believe a pretty exact application of Jefferies' method. And I ask how it would look in a book. If the critics really enjoy, as they profess to, all this trivial country lore, why on earth don't they come into the fresh ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the existing mass of our crude and unassimilated colored population holds its present place in the body politic, we must expect that civilization and political rights will oscillate between alternate perils—the peril that comes from the white man when he places civilization, or sometimes his travesty of it, higher than the Negro's political rights, and the peril that comes from the black man when his political rights are placed by himself or others higher than civilization—President James C. Willing, on "Race Education" in The ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... see the real author of the "Maximes," when, at the age of forty, he begins to peep forth from the travesty of his aristocratic violence and idleness. Whether the transformation would have been gradual instead of sudden is what can never be decided, but we date it from July 2, 1652, when he was dangerously ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... almost total lack of resentment amongst the victims consigned here by an infamous travesty of justice. Madame Akimova, for instance, a plain but homely-looking person, seemed devoted to the care of her miserable little household to the exclusion of all mundane matters. I sometimes wondered, as I sat in her hut, and watched the pale, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... up the poor travesty upon life that we should have seen behind the footlights for a glimpse into one of ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... to bring wood for a fire that he might feast us. The wife of this chief was one of the finest looking Indian women I have ever met,—tall, straight, lithe and dignified. But, crawling about on the floor on all fours, was the most piteous travesty of the human form I have ever seen. It was an idiot boy, sixteen years of age. He had neither the comeliness of a beast nor the intellect of a man. His name was Hootz-too (Bear Heart), and indeed all his motions were those of a bear rather than of a human being. Crossing ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... Irish Unionists, whose organ the Times has constituted itself. Let us clear our minds of cant on the matter, and ask in view of this open disclaimer of the democratic principles which are so much vaunted in England, for what reason is maintained the travesty of representative government, the decrees of which it is frankly avowed are to be ignored? Every English Liberal must be impressed by the fact that the party which has tried to arrogate to itself the sole claim to be thought Imperialist ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... the will of the baggage herself!" declared Monsieur Brisson with bitterness. "Hardly had she put on her travesty of a mourning than she began her oglings of ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... out of the inconveniences and reasonable fears caused by such an inept phase. I am a persistent advocate for the restoration of Poland, but at the same time it is very plain to me that it is a mere travesty of the facts to say that Poland, was a white lamb of a country torn to pieces by three wicked neighbours, Poland in the eighteenth century was a dangerous political muddle, uncertain of her monarchy, her policy, her affinities. She endangered ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... was joking. This was some odd prank. He had borrowed the tin trunk and was giving me a travesty on Tip Pulsifer fleeing over the mountain from his petulant spouse: for last night Tim and I had had a little tiff. For the first time I had forgotten the post-prandial pipe, and undismayed by the horrors of the famine in India or the tribulations of Sister Flora Martin, journeyed up the ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... bulged in the cheeks and the stomach, was highly coloured with purple veins down the sides of his nose and his rather podgy hands trembled. Nevertheless, it was his father. When the red dressing-gown spoke it was in a kind of travesty of that old sharp voice, those cutting icy words—a ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... suddenly larger, swung there with a hiss. Falling from above came a pink body. A bloated body, square, with squat, twisted legs; a thing larger than a man. A grotesque naked monstrosity almost in human form. A travesty—gruesome mockery ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... body was driven on without conscious volition, actuated by some dreadful, unclean force. Breed knew it for some sort of poisoning, and his muscles bunched for flight. Shady barked angrily as if to drive the thing away. Then Breed saw a hairless travesty of a coyote move out of a draw and halt directly in the path of the mad coyote. Cripp stood there grinning till he felt the other's teeth score his unprotected hide; then he whirled and snapped back at him. The ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... Sellingworth. To be with him was like being with eternal youth, and made her long for her own lost youth with an ache of desperation. But to act being young is hideously different from being actually young. She acted astonishingly well, but she paid for every moment of the travesty, and Rupert never noticed, never had the least suspicion of all she was going ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... John Fitz Victor. The name of the supposititious nephew reminds us of "Original Poems" by Victor and Cazire, and raises the question whether the poems in that lost volume may not have partly furnished forth this Oxford travesty. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... The whole spectacular travesty came back to me with a rush, as I sat there in the presence of the only man who had ever been known to get the better of Jasper Titus in a trade. I remembered with some vividness my scornful attitude toward the newspapers ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... drawing-room of one of her father's friends at Market Dalling. It was called "The Gambler's Wife." She had always thought it a very pretty and pathetic picture; but she no longer thought it so; in fact, it now appeared to her to be a ridiculous travesty of life. Gamblers were just like other people, neither better nor worse—and often infinitely more lovable than were ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... rein and sat on his horse in the road. He was trying to picture Hannah standing in the door waiting for him, to hear her calling him from work; but always Phebe intervened with her travesty of ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... succeed. The poverty of his wit is thus enriched by his complacency in dealing it out. His part indeed amply pays its way, in showing how much of mirth may be caused by feebleness in a great attempt at a small matter. Besides, in him the mother element of the whole piece runs out into broad humour and travesty; his reasons for breaking with his master the Jew being, as it were, a variation in drollery upon the fundamental air of the play. Thus he exhibits under a comic form the general aspect of surrounding humanity; while at the same time his character is an integral ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson |
