"Travesty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 of the natural situation was in itself full of laughable possibilities, had the book gone ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... to me: "In Russia now there is no God, no Czar, no law, no property, no money, no food—only freedom." And in that travesty of liberty, which the whole civilized world may well shudder at, all mercy, pity and toleration are alike scorned. And it is this new and wonderful equality of man which by means of torture, outrage and assassinations ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... give?" but "How much can I gain?" and so it has expressed itself in these re-entering curves. It has not even ventured to throw itself boldly outward, as do other thoughts, but projects half-heartedly from the astral body, which must be supposed to be on the left of the picture. A sad travesty of the divine quality love; yet even this is a stage in evolution, and distinctly an improvement upon earlier stages, ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... royal prerogative in the system of government which was introduced by the adoption of the Constitution. It is clear enough now that the implication was mere calumny; the notion that Washington was either aiming at monarchy or was conniving at it through ignorance was a grotesque travesty of the shameful situation that actually existed; but fictions, pretenses, slanders, and calumnies that would never have been allowed utterance if the Administration and Congress had stood face to face now had opportunity to spread and infect ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... Subsequently a story grew up that his soul had visited hell during a prolonged fainting fit after which he recovered and became a devout Buddhist. See chap. XI of the Romance called Hsi-yu-chi, a fantastic travesty of Hsuan Chuang's travels, and Wieger, Textes Historiques, ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... the "stunts" for which the various members of the little circle were famous and which were always performed for Mrs. Gray's pleasure. "Oakdale's Great Mystery," of which Hippy calmly admitted the authorship, proved to be a ridiculous travesty on a melodrama which the boys had seen the previous winter. Hippy as the much-vaunted Mystery, with a handkerchief mask, a sweeping red portiere cloak, and an ultra-mysterious shuffle was received with shrieks of ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... pitiful little efforts to imitate her, to copy, distantly and humbly indeed, the fashion of her clothes, to learn the trick of her voice, of her slow, soft gait, of her little, surprised laugh. But I soon give it up. If I tried till my death-day, I should never arrive at any thing but a miserable travesty. Before—ere Roger's return—I used complacently to treasure up any little civil speeches, any small compliments that people paid me, thinking, "If such and such a one think me pleasing, why may not Roger?" But now I have given ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... earnest in their distractions," observed Deppingham, with a glance at his wife's eager face. "This could be nothing more than a travesty, a jest." ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... repeated. "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. I belong to two buried worlds. But ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... country are finding out the same thing. I never gave the matter any thought until the Werner episode. Then I began to examine this thing called patriotism and I found that it was the very wellspring of a man's usefulness as a citizen. Without it family pride is a travesty. Without it, the impulse to build up sane and humane and lasting governments is lacking. Without it, a man may be ever so learned, ever so rich, yet he lacks any real place in community life. Patriotism is to a man's community life what religion ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... follow the poor worn body to its grave rather with thanksgiving than with grief. And realizing so well that this was his inevitable feeling, even as in a smaller degree it had become her own, Dinah agreed without demur to his wish to spare her all the jarring details, the travesty of mourning, that could not fail to strike a ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... law, it is the antithesis of Mr. Carpenter's proposal that they should disappear, because they are the travesty of inward government and order. On the contrary, I hope that external government, animated by the general will of a social democratic commonwealth and vested in representatives sensitively accountable to an alert ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... picking up lumps of gold from the surface, or digging them out of the earth, or collecting the glittering dust by sifting and washing; and then we hear of vast torrents of the precious metal finding their way into Europe, threatening to swamp us all with absolute wealth, and confound and travesty the whole monetary transactions of the world. What we don't see, is the gold itself. We should like, if it were only out of curiosity, to feel a handful of it in our pocket: but we grope in vain. A sovereign costs twenty shillings, as before; and twenty shillings are ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... advertisement—of Victor Hugo's Les Chatiments. It is as sinister, as malign as a Rops. The big book, title displayed, crushes to earth a vulture which is a travesty of the Napoleonic beak. Daumier was a power in Paris. Albert Wolff, the critic of Figaro, tells how he earned five francs each time he provided a text for a caricature by Daumier, and Philipon, who founded several journals, actually claimed a share in Daumier's ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the subterranean gold whose stream was concealed from their eyes. While their lips were being moistened by the stream of gold, they were, as a matter of fact, drinking the transformed flesh and blood of the heroes who had sacrificed themselves on the French battlefields, and in this infamous travesty of the Christian mystery of the Lord's Supper the devil himself took part and possession of them. They followed new customs, new views of life, other ideals. The motto of their noisy and obtrusive life seemed to be, "Get rich as quickly and with as little trouble as possible, and make ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... be, I neither know nor care,' Said Baba; 'but pray do as I desire: I have no more time nor many words to spare.' 'At least,' said Juan, 'sure I may enquire The cause of this odd travesty?'—'Forbear,' Said Baba, 'to be curious; 't will transpire, No doubt, in proper place, and time, and season: I have no authority ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... 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 ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of novelists' which appeared in the 'Edinburgh Review' for July 1857. He fell foul of 'Little Dorrit'; but the chief part of the article referred to Charles Reade's 'Never Too Late to Mend.' That novel was briefly a travesty of a recent case in which a prisoner had committed suicide in consequence, as was suggested, of ill-treatment by the authorities of the gaol. The governor had been tried and punished in consequence. Fitzjames gives the actual facts to show how Reade had allowed ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... ethical, were the only permanent testament that her father had given to the world; and dealing, as in the main they did, with ultimate problems, their keynote an illumined democracy that saw in most of the results as yet achieved by his country a base travesty of the doctrine, the largeness of their grasp was perhaps a trifle loose. Imogen did not see it. Her appreciation was more of aims than of achievements; but she felt that her father's writings were the body, only, of his message; its spirit lived—lived in herself and in ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... unpunished by the law. No one could tell the hour of his fate. The people lived from day to day and left their homes not knowing whether they should return to them or whether they should be dragged from the streets and thrown into the dungeons of that travesty of courts, the Revolutionary Committee, more terrible and more bloody than those of the Mediaeval Inquisition. We who were strangers in this distraught land were not saved from its persecutions and I personally ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... are the springs of Georg and Kasimir, at which stand two charming maidens ready to fill your glasses. No conventional and hideous hat or bonnet disfigures the neat outline of their heads. No travesty of Berlin or Paris fashion burlesques their sturdy figures. Theirs the traditional costume of the Thuringian female peasant—a dark skirt, and white, short-sleeved chemisette, a blue apron and the daintiest of white silk kerchiefs, fringed ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... he said to himself, "that the fine woman I married—for she was a fine woman, a deuced fine woman!—should have died to present the world with such a travesty! It's like nothing human! It's an affront to the family! Ah! the strain will show! They say your sins will find you out! It was a sin to marry the woman! Damned fool I was! But she bewitched me! I was bewitched!—Curse ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... Borovitch of 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
... referred to 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 most ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... a Virginian Loyalist, and a Tory of extreme views, calm, polished, and judicial in his demeanour. But whatever his opinions on the questions of the day he was too discreet a politician and too honest a judge ever to have descended to such a travesty of justice as had been shown by his predecessor in the case of Gourlay. His influence, however was never in the direction of liberal measures. He opposed responsible government and the union of the two provinces, both when proposed unsuccessfully in 1822, ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... said, pointing away in the distance. "Did you ever see such a ghastly travesty of nature, the whole country-side swept clean of every green and living thing, beautiful woods and charming villages blown to the four winds of heaven, and this might have been our own beautiful sunny downs, our own charming villages. The ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... even in mythological fable, Trove has scarcely ever reduced demi-god or hero to more fantastic plight than was this travesty of the great Henry. After dinner Madame de Traigny led her fair guest about the castle to show her the various points of view. At one window she paused, saying that it ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... encomiums on Mrs. Behn prefixed to her lover's watch; among the rest, Mr. Charles Cotton, author of Virgil Travesty, throws in his mite in her praise; though the lines are but poorly writ. But of all her admirers, Mr. Charles Gildon, who was intimately acquainted with our poetess, speaks of her with the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... 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 impression; truth in spirit, not truth to letter, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Markheim. "Who can do so? My life is but a travesty and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them. You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and muffled ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... longer contain an acute transcript of life as only a sensitive feminine mind would have the cunning to observe it, and of a form of human life in itself highly feminine in its character, but they now present a singularly insular travesty of man, an unconscious caricature of man as he could only appear to a feminine mind bound by the romantic limitations of sex, a mind, that is, devoid of masculine understanding, unable to recognise by virtue of affiliation of instinct ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... that buffoon that travesties the travesty? Who is that old cripple alighted from his donkey-cart, who dispenses doggrel and grimaces in all the glory of plush ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... 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 or ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... domestic life; out of the stuff of which they made their emperors, their heroes, and their princesses, they cut out a pompous country justice, a hectoring tailor, or an impudent mantua-maker; but it was not merely this travesty of great personages, nor the lofty effusions of one in a lowly station, which terminated the object of parody. It was designed for a higher object, that of more obviously exposing the original for any absurdity in its scenes, or in its catastrophe, and dissecting its ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... grief. The comedy is in a lighter and happier vein; its situations may be trying but they end happily; the sun shines and the air is clear; if storms appear they are the showers of a summer day, not awful tempests. The comedy descends through various forms to the travesty and farce whose purpose is solely to excite laughter by ludicrous scenes and absurd incidents. The melodrama abounds in thrilling situations and extravagant efforts to excite emotions, but its final outcome is a happy one, and the villain is punished ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... 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 Hannah's ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 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 ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... chapters of the Epistle. But he must emphasize it again, for it is the inmost purport of his whole discourse. And he must do it now with the urgency of one who has in view a real peril of apostasy. His readers are hard pressed, by persuasions and by terrors, to turn back from Christ to the Judaistic travesty of the message of the Law. He must tell them not only of the splendour of Messiah's work but of the absolute finality of it for man's salvation. To forsake it is to "forsake their own mercy," to ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... subtle and original variations that we faintly recognise the broad simple theme of Italy's struggle for deliverance. The Patriot and Instans Tyrannus both have a kind of nexus with the place and time; but the one is a caustic satire on popular fickleness and the other a sardonically humorous travesty of persecution. Italy is mentioned in neither. Both are far removed from the vivid and sympathetic reflection of the national struggle which thrills us in The Italian in England and the third scene of Pippa Passes. This "tyrant" has nothing to do with the Austrian whom Luigi was so eager ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... correspond to or contrast with the colour of her chintz dress, thus producing what the French term "une gamme de couleur," most pleasing to the eye, and with never a false note in it. Beside these comely, amply breasted bronze statues, the British West Indian negress, with her absurd travesty of European fashions, and her grotesque hats, cuts, I am bound to say, ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... Tim 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 ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... 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 music-hall ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... Nagaya's charge that he had compassed the death of the infant prince by charms and 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 ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... and sadness to say that things are going badly with them in the outer world, and who act as if they supposed that no joy can be too exuberant and no elation too lofty if, on the other hand, things are going rightly. It is a miserable travesty of the Christian faith to suppose that its prime purpose is anything else than to put into our hands the power of ruling ourselves because ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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
... be almost a travesty to call a trial the proceedings which began early in December and dragged along until the twenty-sixth. Rizal was defended by a young Spanish officer selected by him from among a number designated by the tribunal, who ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... invalid chair. There, propped up in cushions, lay a fat travesty of the old Saradokis. This was a Sara whose tawny hair was turning gray with suffering; whose mouth, once so full and boyish, was now heavy and sinister, whose buoyancy had changed to the bitter irritability of the ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... 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 has scouted ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... believe that I have not been giving you a bona fide account of conditions in my country before the Evolution, when we first took the name of Altruria in our great, peaceful campaign against the Accumulation. As for offering you any allegory or travesty of your own conditions, I will simply say that I do not know them well enough to do so intelligently. But, whatever they are, God forbid that the likeness which you seem to recognize should ever go so far as the desperate state of things which we finally reached. I will not trouble you with ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... suffered through all the nights of all these years stretching behind him in so terribly long a perspective. No one else knew how he had craved for the darkness which all the time he had both feared and shunned. No one else knew how miserable a travesty on sleep his sleep had been, he reading until a heavy physical weariness came, then lying in his bed through the latter hours of the night, fitfully dozing, often rousing, while from either side of his bed, from the ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... bobbed in one girl's head, and on 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 ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... secrets, stop to set their words to music, and roar and howl in each other's ears, the world will be mad, and the opera natural," he said. "I will not lend my countenance before them to such a villainous travesty." ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... must ever fear from one who is no true Muslim, from one who makes a mock and travesty of the True Faith that he ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... history good service, albeit a true sample of the small hedge-school pedant. The old pioneer's own language would have been far better than that which Filson used; for the latter's composition is a travesty of Johnsonese in its most aggravated form. For Filson see Durrett's admirable "Life" ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Faure, the original of Ambroise Thomas's Hamlet, had been succeeded in the 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. In considerable distress he went to Faure, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... long, till finally its monotony wearied him. It was doing admirable work, but it never swerved from its course at the call of sentiment or emotion. Its travesty of life was repulsive. Machinery is the most admirable invention of man, but is modelled after no heavenly prototype, and will have no part in the millennium. It seems to annul space and time, yet gives us no taste of eternity. Man lives quicker by it, but not more. With another ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... what they would do, nor it might be said, such is the insanity of the atmosphere, not even what they intend to do. The conduct of Rochester is so primevally and superhumanly caddish that Bret Harte in his admirable travesty scarcely exaggerated it. "Then, resuming his usual manner, he threw his boots at my head and withdrew," does perhaps reach to something resembling caricature. The scene in which Rochester dresses up as an old gipsy has something ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... importance of the rising of the men of Kent under Jack Cade in 1450, the first thing to be done is to clear the mind of Shakespeare's travesty in King Henry VI., Part 2. In the play the name of Cade has been handed down in obloquy, and all that he and his followers aimed at caricatured out of recognition. The part that Jack Cade really played in national affairs has ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... his lantern on me, or the draggled, drunken old woman that was my travesty. 'Now then, mum,' ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... solemn sneer"; and Hume, with his thorough-going philosophic skepticism, his dry Toryism, and cool contempt for "zeal" of any kind. The characteristic products of the era were satire, burlesque, and travesty: "Hudibras," "Absalom and Achitophel," "The Way of the World," "Gulliver's Travels" and "The Rape of the Lock." There is a whole literature of mockery: parodies like Prior's "Ballad on the Taking of Namur" ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... is 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
... conveying in a strain of fatiguing drollery the history of the relations between Great Britain and the United States previous to the war of 1812, and reflecting the popular feeling with regard to some of the English tourists who overran us after the conclusion of peace. In this ponderous travesty John Bull of Bullock is England, and Brother Jonathan the United States; Napoleon figures as Beau Napperty, Louis XVI. as Louis Baboon, and France as Frogmore. It could not have been a hard thing to write in its day, and we suppose that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... parody is not travesty, for a writing may be parodied without being ridiculed. This was notably the case in the Centones,[1] Scripture histories in the phraseology of Homer and Virgil, which were written by the Christians in the ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... 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 higher ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... announced. A majority, consisting of Lord Alverstone and the three American members, had decided substantially in favour of the United States. Sir Louis Jette and Mr Aylesworth declined to sign the award, and declared it in part a 'grotesque travesty of justice.' ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... urge him on, not in any failure by others or by the State to do justice to him or his. He is a malefactor and nothing else. He is in no sense, in no shape or way, a "product of social conditions," save as a highwayman is "produced" by the fact than an unarmed man happens to have a purse. It is a travesty upon the great and holy names of liberty and freedom to permit them to be invoked in such a cause. No man or body of men preaching anarchistic doctrines should be allowed at large any more than if ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... 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
... 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
... all sorts of calamities," Brantome returned, with a loud, artificial laugh, and a look of anxiety in the depths of his old eyes. As for the invalid, silent in his wheel chair before the Flemish tapestry, he showed her a frozen smile, a travesty of approval. ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... and how many allegories, 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 of Fame,"—A ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... to the terrible travesty of justice which was going on. Magistrates were seen to have overlooked the most flagrant instances of falsehood and contradiction on the part of both accusers and accused, using the baseless hypothesis that the devil ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... grey wig and stuffgown, speaking with a voice of pained protest) This is no place for indecent levity at the expense of an erring mortal disguised in liquor. We are not in a beargarden nor at an Oxford rag nor is this a travesty of justice. My client is an infant, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as a stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny. The trumped up misdemeanour was due to a momentary aberration of heredity, brought on by hallucination, such familiarities as the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... who had received, through a long line of apostolical succession, some mystic power for administering rites and conferring absolution, together with those who came beneath the touch of their priestly hands. That theory has notoriously broken down. But the truth of which it is a grotesque travesty is presented in our Lord's conception of the vine, deeply planted in the dark grave of Joseph's garden, which had reached down its branches through the ages, and in which every believing soul has a part. Touch Christ, become one with Him in living union, abide ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... "nervous diseases"—it can be readily seen in what a brainless way some "nerve specialists" classify patients of this kind. Not knowing the constituents of the nerve-cells, they still attempt to prescribe for neurasthenic patients. The results are in accordance with such travesty of treatment. The increase in the number of Insane Asylums gives, or should give, a true picture of existing conditions. What is needed is a little more knowledge of physiological chemistry, but as it is too much to expect of the ordinary so-called "nerve specialist" ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... it needs constant emphasis or it is forgotten under the propaganda. Besides, I don't believe in mating people like cattle or slaves. That's why this whole thing is a travesty of love and marriage. I hate being used to give it a semblance of scientific authenticity. I'm going to declare the top four contestants equal. They are, as far as I am concerned, genetically speaking. The audience will decide the winner. They'll love it and so will the sponsor. The ...
— Mother America • Sam McClatchie
... had felt both extremes of fortune to the full. During the travesty of justice at his trial the attorney-general, having no sound argument, covered him with slanderous abuse. These are three of the false accusations on which he was condemned to death: 'Viperous traitor,' 'damnable atheist,' and 'spider ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... through his boots. He gave one the impression of having followed cleanliness of thought and person all his life. I began to have a sneaking admiration for the man. I beheld in its openness that which I had often seen pierce through Paragot's travesty of mountebankery or rags, but which singularly enough seemed hidden beneath his conventional garb—the inborn and incommunicable quality of the high-bred gentleman. I set to dreaming of it and scheming out a portrait in which that essential quality could be expressed; whereby I played the fool ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... black bottles from under tattered shawls, and said nothing, but put down a 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 in that ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... many complexities she had come up against in his character. The two women who should mean most in a man's life had both failed him. He bore on his body a scar which surely he must never see reflected in the mirror without recalling the travesty of motherhood that was all he had ever known. And scored into his soul, hidden beneath a bitter reticence and unforgiving cynicism, lay the still deeper scar of that hurt which the woman who was to have been his ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... influence upon their movement, far beyond the reach of any legislation short of prohibition. The market for breadstuffs in the world is as the number of consumers; that is, of population. It is sometimes said in the way of reproach, (and it is a curious travesty of Mr. Carey's manure argument,) that foreign nations will not take our breadstuffs. It is not true; but if it were, that would not be a good reason for our passing laws to prevent them from doing so; that is, to deprive them of the means to pay for them. Every country must ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... with 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
... This spirited travesty of logic has enough historical truth in it to show that dialectic must always stand, so to speak, on its apex; for life is changeful, and the vision and interest of one moment are not understood in the next. Theological dialectic ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... king of the Belgians protested that it was a travesty of the intentions of the French Government to interpret them in that sense, and to let oneself be misled as to the sentiments of the French nation by the ebullitions of a few irresponsible spirits or ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... 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
... lacking the end is not far off. England is given up to idleness, pomp, dissolute practices, and pleasure—pleasure, always pleasure. The vice of intemperance, the mania for gambling, these are the vultures that are consuming the vitals of our people. Look at the luxury of the country—a ludicrous travesty of national greatness! Look at the tastes and habits of our age—the deadliest enemies of true religion! And then look at the price we are paying in what the devil calls 'the priestesses of society' for the tranquillity of the ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... not tell that he was making observations for himself and that she was often in his mind. She supposed that he, like all others, laughed at her pretensions to gravity, swept her exhibition of real and honest emotion away from his memory with a sneer, considered her despair over another's ruin a vile travesty, a grinning absurdity and trick. Never had Cuckoo felt more lonely than in these days, though a vast loneliness is the constant companion of her large sisterhood. Even Jessie failed to comfort her, and she could find little courage within herself. ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... was against the treasonable liquor traffic. Had there been no liquor dispensing there had been no smashing. This the liquorized courts would not admit for a moment. Every ruling was a burlesque on civil law, a travesty on justice and a contemptible farce. The whole proceedings from beginning to end were ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... wailings of Petrarch's sonnets and others of the same kind were taken off by caricaturists; and the solemn air of this form of verse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle. A constant invitation to parody was offered by the 'Divine Comedy,' and Lorenzo il Magnifico wrote the most admirable travesty in the style of the 'Inferno' (Simposio or I Beoni). Luigi Pulci obviously imitates the Improvisatori in his 'Morgante,' and both his poetry and Boiardo's are in part, at least, a half-conscious parody of the chivalrous poetry of the ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... truth is concerned. The German poet wishes, it seems, to remove the bad impression made by Voltaire's poem. The play was first performed on the stage at Weimar in 1801; and the Jungfrau von Orleans met with considerable success. It contains noble lines, but is historically a mere travesty of the life and death ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... might be done without special hardship. Then suddenly the rusted name-plate on Hannibal's old rifle danced again before his burning eyes, and a bitter sense of hurt and loss struck through him. He saw himself as he was, a shabby outcast, a tavern hanger-on, the utter travesty of all he should have been; he dropped ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... Sam's pocket with one hand and with the other clutches the bread-money out of the tremblin' weak fingers of the poor. Is our law," sez I, "a travesty, a vain sham, that a man that steals millions for greed goes unpunished, while a man who steals a loaf to keep his children from starvin' is punished by our laws and scorfed at? Monopoly makes the poor pay tribute on every loaf of bread and bucket of coal, and the govermunt looks on and helps ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... this twaddle, farce, 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 convulsions ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... 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 suggested ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... diagonala. Trap (snare) kaptilo, enfalujo. Trap kapti. Trapdoor plankpordo. Trapezium trapezo. Trash (rubbish) forjxetajxo. Travail nasklaboro, naskdoloro. Travel (by car) veturi. Travel vojiri, vojagxi. Traveller vojagxanto. Traverse trapasi, trairi. Travesty maskajxo. Tray pleto. Treacherous perfida—ema. Treachery perfideco. Treacle mielsiropo. Tread premi, subpremi, marsxi, pasxi. Treadle pedalo. Treason perfido. Treasure trezoro. Treasurer kasisto. Treat (to feast) regali. Treat (medicinally) kuraci. Treat (to discuss) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... And he continued 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 in ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... 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 the heads ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... transpositions or parodies of Christian hymns, and one in particular was his favorite. Apparently he had made it very popular with the natives of the band, for it vied with the "Himene Tatou Arearea" in repetition. It was a crude travesty of a hymn much sung in religious camp-meetings and revivals, of which the proper chorus as often heard by me in Harry Monroe's mission in ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... 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 through ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... this hot August day, one of the last of glorious Fructidor, had begun to wane, and the shades of evening to slowly creep into the long, bare room where this travesty ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... it is not surprising that mere ethical systems should prove unavailing. Nicolai shows us what a travesty Kant's disciples have made of their master's teaching. Willy-nilly, the author of the Critique of Pure Reason has been compelled to put on the field-grey uniform. Have not his German commentators insisted that the Prussian army is the most perfect realisation of Kant's thought? For, ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... his literature, he must express himself and his own views and preferences; for to do anything else is to do a far more perilous thing than to risk being immoral: it is to be sure of being untrue. To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty a sentiment; that will not be helpful. To conceal a sentiment, if you are sure you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth. There is probably no point of view possible to a sane man but contains some truth and, in the true connection, might be profitable to the race. I am not afraid of the ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "kills him." Fusbos, seeing the king fallen, "kills" the general; but at the close of the farce the dead men rise one by one, and join the dance, promising, if the audience likes, "to die again to-morrow."—W. B. Rhodes, Bombastes Furioso. This farce is a travesty of Orlando Furioso, and "Distaffina" is Angelica, beloved by Orlando, whom she flouted for Medoro, a young Moor. On this Orlando went mad, and hung up his armor on a tree, with this ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... earth, acting independently, in ten years' time. The Republican senatorial cabal insists that the treaty be Americanized. Suppose that Italy asked that it be Italianized— France that it be Frenchized—Britain that it be Britainized, and so on down the line. The whole thing would result in a perfect travesty. ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... influence in the air and come. In the foreground, where a solitary Indian stood motionless, waiting, there was being repeated the same puerile pantomime and horse-play of a former occasion. At intervals, from the rear, sounded the war whoop travesty. It was all the same as that afternoon eighteen days before, when the girl had left, similar even to the cloud of black smoke in the distance lifting lazily into the sky; only now the trail, instead of growing thinner and lighter, became denser and blacker minute ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... brother, they will turn that fact into an advertisement—a thing of value to them, but not to you and me. This must be prevented. I will write them a note to say you have a friend near Keokuk, Charles S. Miller, who has a MS for sale which you think is a pretty clever travesty on Verne; and if they want it they might write to him in your care. Then if any correspondence ensues between you and them, let Mollie write for you and sign your name—your own hand writing representing Miller's. Keep yourself ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to see him back; so, apparently, was the chaffinch. He started, craned his neck, and regarded his adversary first with one eye then with the other. "What, rags and tatters, back again so soon!" I seem to hear him say. "You miserable travesty of a bird, scarcely fit for a weasel to dine on! Your presence is an insult to us, but I'll soon settle you. You'll feel the cold on the other, side of the wall when I've knocked off a few more of ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... deny that he killed Richardson, yet he was acquitted on the plea of insanity, and was, at the same time, made the legal guardian of his child, a boy, then, twelve years of age, and walked out of the court with him, hand in hand. What a travesty on justice and common sense that, while a man is declared too insane to be held responsible for taking the life of another, he might still be capable of directing the life and education of a child! And what an insult to ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... a modern and English treatment of its topics. Caesar, upon this system, becomes George the Second—a very strange sort of Caesar; and Pope is supposed to have been laughing at him, which may be the color that Pope gave to the travesty amongst his private circle; otherwise there is nothing in the expressions to sustain such a construction. Rome, with a little more propriety, masquerades as England, and France as Greece, or, more strictly, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 not so in the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... like him.' In 1673, in a Dedication of the third edition of Reliquiae Wottonianae, Walton alludes to his friendship with a much younger and gayer man than himself, Charles Cotton (born 1630), the friend of Colonel Richard Lovelace, and of Sir John Suckling: the translator of Scarron's travesty of Virgil, and of Montaigne's Essays. Cotton was a roisterer, a man at one time deep in debt, but he was a Royalist, a scholar, and an angler. The friendship between him and Walton is creditable to the freshness of the old man and ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... the room told him that his brothers were awake and watching him, though the monk still snored on in his stertorous fashion. One after the other the pair stole from their beds and looked for a moment at this skilful travesty of nature's handiwork, and both nodded in token of ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... 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 the politic ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... and order and civilization have gained at best but a precarious foothold, the most characteristic feature of the people being the gambler's instinct. But I remember that I am coming into Burma, into the real East, where the tangle and the topsy-turvydom, the crooked vision and the distorted travesty of the truth, which result from judging the Oriental from the standpoint of the Europeans and looking at the East through the eyes of the West, impress themselves upon one's mind in bewildering fashion as a hopeless problem. Everything is all ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... original," suggested the host. "Now, Sullivan, you should write us something." "All right," said Sullivan, "but how about the words? Where's the libretto?" "Oh, I'll write that," said Burnand. And thus those two were started. "Cox and Box," a travesty of "Box and Cox," was read and rehearsed a fortnight afterwards at Burnand's house, and the following Saturday it was performed at Moray Lodge. Du Maurier was "Box," Harold Power "Cox," and John Foster "Sergeant Bouncer." Du Maurier's rendering ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... hotly, wheeling on his enemy, with blazing eyes and with hands that shook in the stress of passion. "A while ago you called me a brave man and a good scout; and, because I'm both, your people have set a price on me. Five hundred dollars—alive or dead!" He laughed; a hoarse, harsh travesty of mirth, and added, with a lip that curled in withering contempt: "Alive or dead! A gentleman and a scout!—for just half the price of one good, sound nigger! By Heaven, it makes ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... adhesion to any Church, established or disestablished?" If Mr. Darwin heard these questions he might answer with a good humored smile, "My dear sir, you quite mistake my theories, and your questions travesty them. I would further observe that while the composition of poems would unquestionably be creditable to monkeys, I, who have some regard for them as relatives, however distant, am heartily glad they have never done any of the other things ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... world. Lord Shalem was one of the few Peers who kissed the hand of the new Sovereign, his wife was one of the few hostesses who attempted to throw a semblance of gaiety and lavish elegance over the travesty of a London season following the year of disaster. The world of tradesmen and purveyors and caterers, and the thousands who were dependent on them for employment, privately blessed the example set by Shalem House, whatever their feelings might be towards the fait accompli, and the ...
— When William Came • Saki
... Cal Maggard he had fled from Virginia, where, with the juries packed against him, justice would have been a travesty. In self-defense his sister had killed her husband, and he had taken ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... soubrette; of the heaven-defying AEschylean Prometheus hiding under an umbrella from the thunderbolts of Zeus. And they must have felt instinctively what only a laborious erudition reveals to us, the sudden subtle modulations of the colloquial comic verse into mock-heroic travesty of high tragedy ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... delivered in a sententious tone, and with a strong German accent, seemed to Odo no more than a learned travesty of the familiar and pathetic expedient of distracting a sick child by the pretence of manly diversions. He was struck, however, by the physician's aspect, and would have engaged him in talk had not one of the Duke's gentlemen appeared with ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... peculiar,—almost as unlike that of his Essays as that of 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in a patisserie in the Rue de la Paroisse that we noticed an uninviting compound labelled "Pudding Anglais, 2 fr. 1/2 kilo." A little thought led us to recognise in this amalgamation a travesty of our old friend plum-pudding; but so revolting was its dark, bilious-looking exterior that we felt its claim to be accounted a compatriot almost insulting. And it was with secret gratification that towards ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... Hart, bitterly, as he realized the travesty. "You cannot act and never could. I was ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... write, not at all for the sake of disputing with those who love the lie they may not be to blame for holding; who, like the Jews of old, would cast out of their synagogue the man who doubts the genuineness of their moral caricature of God, who doubts their travesty of the grandest truth in the universe, the atonement of Jesus Christ. Of such a man they will unhesitatingly report that he does not believe in the atonement. But a lie for God is against God, and carries the sentence of death ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... wore the scarab as a charm or amulet, to increase bravery;[8] the women, to increase fertility. The Greeks called it, Helio-cantharus, and, not understanding its significance, were disposed to ridicule it, as is apparent from the travesty upon it by Aristophanes in his comedy of Peace. Pliny also again speaks of it ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... to angelic eyes, So, through the scenes of life below, In life's ironical disguise, A travesty of ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... or probably with what was more in keeping with his character—a coarse jest. And he watched the spectacle attentively from end to end. Firstly the play in verse on the subject of the judgment of Paris, a perversion of the legend favoured by the Greeks—a travesty wherein Paris—renamed Parisia—was a woman, and three gods were in rivalry for the golden apple, the emblem of her favours. Then the naval spectacle over the flooded arena, with ships and galleys executing complex manoeuvres on waters rendered turbulent by cleverly ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... 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
... I was a child I was so bored with 'Telemachus' that, in order to endure it, I turned it into travesty." ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... infinitely young could have held firm in face of such dejection, only eyes as alert and wakeful as those of this wayfaring boy could possibly have looked undaunted at the shabby streets with their flaunting travesty of joy exhibited in the dripping awnings of the deserted cafes, that offered Biere, Billard, and yet again ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... clean with bran, and after the initiation was supposed to enter upon a new and higher life. It is possible that the veiling and disguising with clay originally signified a death to the old life, such as is the ruling idea in many initiations of a primitive type. (Cf. Aristophanes, travesty of an initiation-ceremony in the ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... equally audacious is a more recent travesty of the well-known scene in Dante's Inferno where Bertrand de Born, a noted sower of sedition, comes forth with his severed head in his hands. In the Russian version the renowned editor of the Moscow Gazette is seen hobbling along with a cannon-ball labelled "Police Surveillance" at his ankle, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... apparel, on or off the stage, and never so self-conscious. Shall we have, then, no refined characters on the stage? Yes; but let them be taken by men and women of taste and refinement and let us have done with this masquerading in false raiment, ancient and modern, which makes nearly every stage a travesty of nature and the whole theatre a painful pretension. We do not expect the modern theatre to be a place of instruction (that business is now turned over to the telegraphic operator, who is making a new language), but it may give amusement instead of torture, and do a little in satirizing folly ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... therein consisted his history. The ordinary idea of Newman (leaving the past tense for the moment) seems to be that he sacrificed his intellect, that out of weariness he threw himself into the Catholic fold. Such may be a true account of some conversions, but it is a pitiable travesty of the facts in the case of Newman. Newman went into the Church because it seemed rational to him to do so; and it is still the great question, whether once assuming certain fundamental ideas held by Protestant and Catholic alike, any other course is rational. The "trouble" ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various |
