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More "Buffoonery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mess, and when he did found some things of which he did not approve. Barristers, it appears, are still capable of indulging in such tastes as were once gratified by the game of 'High Jinks,' celebrated in 'Guy Mannering.' The Circuit Court was the scene of a good deal of buffoonery. It was customary to appoint a 'crier'; and Fitzjames, 'to his infinite disgust, was elected on account of his powerful voice. He stood it once or twice, but at last broke out in a real fury, and declared he would never come to the Circuit Court again, calling it by very strong names. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... would have languished often but for the social buffoonery of the clever Larry Beers, who devised new diversions and stimulating mental condiments for the jaded brains of that gilded cult. His table ballets, his bizarre parlor circuses, his cunningly devised fads in which he set forth his own inimitable antics, won him the motley and the cap ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... make the religious festivals of the Greeks appear as amusements and diversions, was that ridiculous buffoonery that constituted so great a part of them: it would be tedious to enumerate one half of these buffooneries; but let a few serve as a specimen. At a festival held in honor of Bacchus, the women ran about for a long time seeking the god, who, they pretended, had run away from them: this done, ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... out of a brief and solemn church function, which followed a Latin ritual. In time German superseded the Latin, but without replacing it entirely; the performances increased greatly in scope, took in elements of fun, buffoonery and diablerie, outgrew the churches and became great popular festivals, which were usually held in the market-place. The performance of an Easter play together with a preceding passion play might occupy several hundred ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... scramble down the length of the room, Miss Cobb with her thin, bare little arms flung up over her head, Miss Kinealy tugging and then riding in high buffoonery over the bare floor, firmly secured to ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... nature. Thus prepared, they could take in everything, sanguinary ferocity and refined generosity, the brutality of shameless debauchery, and the most divine innocence of love, accept all the characters, wantons and virgins, princes and mountebanks, pass quickly from trivial buffoonery to lyrical sublimities, listen alternately to the quibbles of clowns and the songs of lovers. The drama even, in order to satisfy the prolixity of their nature, must take all tongues, pompous, inflated ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the church itself did little to remove the barbarism prevailing among the common people, for, in point of fact, buffoonery, immodesty, and cruelty had intruded into the very ceremonial of religion. Never were there more disgusting exhibitions of the low state of the public morals than when the occurrence of pestilence, drought, or some other signal visitation of the displeasure of ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... he at one moment talks of his desolation, and says that, "leaving England without regret," he has thought of entering the Turkish service; in the next, especially in the stanzas to Hodgson, he runs off into a strain of boisterous buffoonery. On the 2nd of July, the packet, by which he was bound, sailed for Lisbon and arrived there about the middle of the month, when the English fleet was anchored in the Tagus. The poet in some of his stanzas has described the fine view of the port and the disconsolate dirtiness of the city itself, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... This buffoonery, joined to the strange figure of the poor lady, had almost thrown Miss Stewart into hysterics; for the princess of Babylon, after this accident, was quite flat on one side, and immoderately protuberant ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... with a very different purpose, has left an elegy, in which he darkly hints at and bemoans the fate of the ill-starred young person, whose very uncommon calamity Whitelaw, Dunlop, and Milne thought a fitting subject for buffoonery and ribaldry. This bard of milder mood was Andrew Symson, before the Revolution minister of Kirkinner, in Galloway, and after his expulsion as an Episcopalian following the humble occupation of a printer in Edinburgh. He furnished ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... of the Imperial family, as we have already said, everything has been done for the Russian stage that could possibly be done, and is done no where else. The extremest liberality favors the artists, schools are provided in order to raise them from the domain of gross buffoonery to that of true art, the most magnificent premiums are given to the best, actors are made equal in rank to officers of state, they are held only to twenty-five years' service, reckoning from their debut,—and ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... be found among the supporters of the movement, the monastic orders as a whole repelled it with unswerving obstinacy. The quarrel only became more bitter as years went on. The keen sarcasms of Erasmus, the insolent buffoonery of Hutten, were lavished on the "lovers of darkness" and of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... additions, for which the distinguished coadjutors are responsible, reek with mawkish sentimentality, inane vapidity, or vulgar buffoonery. Most of the leading characters are duplicated or triplicated. Miranda has a sister, Dorinda, who is repellently coquettish. This new creation finds a lover in another new character, a brainless youth, Hippolito, who has never before seen a woman. Caliban becomes ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... of his lecture at Sepulchre's caused it to be asserted by his enemies, that his enthusiastic style of preaching was but stage buffoonery. (See p. 100.) ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851 • Various
... A.D. 1314, of Jacques du Bourg-Molay, Grand Master of the Templars; and purports to be a sort of canticle, with solo and chorus, composed two centuries after the event by a Flemish canon of Ypres, to be sung at hocktide and festivals. The childishness and devout buffoonery of an old miracle play are imitated here, as in Swinburne's "Masque of Queen Bersabe." This piece and "Holy Cross Day" are dramatic, or monodramatic, grotesques; and in their apprehension of this trait of the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... from London—the Aberdeen doctors and professors might have rushed to hear his address; or if he had been a famous music-hall singer or an imitation negro minstrel, the public at large might have flocked to be amused and degraded by his parrot-like buffoonery; but as he was only a working shoemaker from Banff, with a heaven-born instinct for watching and discovering all the strange beasts and birds of Scotland, and the ways and thoughts of them, why, of course, respectable Aberdeen, high or low, would have nothing in particular to ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... so that I did not for one moment suppose that it was really George Eliot, or that she would countenance that particular sort of buffoonery, and the incident made no impression upon me at all. I had already taken my hands off the table, when someone—Mr Kitchener, I think—banged it down four times, and then triumphantly observed: "Yes, of course, you will see somebody during the night, or rather ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... Rochester I expect nothing but pot-house buffoonery; but I take it vastly ill on your part, George, to join in making me ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... auditory; whereas, Mr. Home, the modern author, knew how to be refined in the very midst of grief and passion; to represent death, not merely as awful, but graceful and pathetic; and never condescended to degrade the majesty of the Tragic Muse by the ludicrous apposition of buffoonery and familiar punning, such as the elder playwright certainly had resort to. Besides, Mr. Home's performance had been admired in quarters so high, and by personages whose taste was known to be as elevated ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was passionate and irregular. He had no humor, and the comic portions of Faustus are scenes of low buffoonery. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... talent for impromptu buffoonery might perhaps have in time created a genuine native comedy, so the powerful and earnest rhetoric in which the deeper feelings of the Roman always found expression, might have assumed the tragic garb and woven ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... so closely,—as every reader can see for himself, by reading the play in Dyce's edition, and comparing it with the notes under the text,—that sometimes whole scenes are copied, and even whole speeches, as, for instance, that of the Emperor Charles V. The coarse buffoonery, in particular, of which the work is full, is retained word for word. Of the countless absurdities and prolixities of the Volksbuch, Marlowe has, of course, omitted a great deal, and condensed the story to the tenth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... youth, as he often confessed and lamented, he was gay, giddy and profligate; so fondly attached to the stage, that he joined a company of strolling actors and vagabonds, and spent a part of his life in that capacity. At this period it is probable he learned that grimace, buffoonery and gesticulation which he afterwards displayed from the pulpit. From an abandoned and licentious course of life he was converted; and, what is no uncommon thing, from one extreme he run into the other, and became a most zealous and indefatigable teacher of religion. Having studied some time at Oxford, ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... Montague, of modern times, are generally received as some of the best specimens extant of epistolary composition. The letters of Charles Lamb are a series of brilliances, though of kaleidoscope variety; they have wit without buffoonery, and seriousness without melancholy. He closes one of them by subscribing himself his friend's "afflicted, headachey, sorethroaty, humble ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... organisation or stage management could influence, impressed the English journalists and Members of Parliament even more than the gigantic scale of the demonstration. There was not a trace of the picnic spirit. There was no drunkenness, no noisy buffoonery, no unseemly behaviour. The Ulster habit of combining politics and prayer—which was not departed from at Balmoral, where the proceedings were opened by the Primate of All Ireland and the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church—was jeered at by people who ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... feelings without disgrace, and will be the gainer by the pleasure. But the inevitable consequence is that he who begins by weeping at the sorrows of others, will end by weeping at his own. The same is true of comedy,—you may often laugh at buffoonery which you would be ashamed to utter, and the love of coarse merriment on the stage will at last turn you into a buffoon at home. Poetry feeds and waters the passions and desires; she lets them rule instead of ruling them. And therefore, when we hear the encomiasts of Homer ...
— The Republic • Plato
... to the Bible will be admitted at once. But there is great credit due to the writer (or writers) who could keep so true a sense of proportion that in scenes even of coarse derision, almost bordering on buffoonery, the central figure remained unsoiled and unaffected by his surroundings. A writer less filled with the religious sense must have been strongly tempted to descend to biting dialogue, in which his ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... the existence of the moon. . . . Christianity is itself so jolly a thing that it fills the possessor of it with a certain silly exuberance, which sad and high-minded Rationalists might reasonably mistake for mere buffoonery." But if this is his own psychology he faces too the special difficulty of theirs—the main and towering barrier that he wished but hardly hoped to surmount. He was the first person, I think, to see that Free Thought was no longer a young movement, but old ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... harlequin, stuck in his hat, instead of the rabbit's tail, its prescribed ornament, a peacock's feather of excessive length. This new appendage, which repeatedly got entangled among the scenery, gave him an opportunity for a great deal of buffoonery. There was some inclination to punish him; but it was presumed that he had not assumed the feather without authority.-NOTE BY ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... to tire of this deliberate imprisonment, and to reduce buffoonery to a modern science. His father was a rich man, and he was an only child. Therefore he was able to gratify the supposed whims, which were no whims at all. He could get up surprise parties, which really bored him, carry out elaborate practical jokes, give ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... taken hold of Rose Pompon with his right hand, and of the Queen with his left, in order to advance between the two, in which figure he showed off his buffoonery to the utmost extent, when the door again opened, and the same waiter, who had called out Jacques, approached Cephyse with an air of consternation, and whispered in her ear, as he had ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... happily I am not. What has this to do with your defence of buffoonery, and apotheosis of ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... day at noon. Most of the shops, especially those that dealt in provisions, were open and full of vociferous customers, while every alehouse was a pandemonium. The street was choked with townspeople and soldiery; lanterns flickered and torches flamed; oath and jest, bravado and buffoonery, filled the air. ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter. True wit, or sense, never yet made anybody laugh; they are above it: They please the mind, and give a cheerfulness to the countenance. But it is low buffoonery, or silly accidents, that always excite laughter; and that is what people of sense and breeding should show themselves above. A man's going to sit down, in the supposition that he has a chair behind him, and falling down upon his breech for want of one, sets a whole company ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... is Elijah. I am the Wandering Jew," said Klesmer, flashing a smile at Miss Arrowpoint, and suddenly making a mysterious, wind-like rush backward and forward on the piano. Mr. Bult felt this buffoonery rather offensive and Polish, but—Miss Arrowpoint being there—did not like ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... must pardon me, I can't help laughing), that an absolute lover would have concluded the poor creature to have had darts, and flames, and altars, and all that in his breast. Araminta, come, I'll talk seriously to you now; could you but see with my eyes the buffoonery of one scene of address, a lover, set out with all his equipage and appurtenances; O Gad I sure you would—But you play the game, and consequently can't see the miscarriages obvious ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... very popular at Rome, certainly never so much as the sports of the circus. Besides comedies and tragedies, the Romans had a species of drama peculiar to their country, called the Atellane farces, which were, in general, low pieces of gross indecency and vulgar buffoonery, but sometimes contained spirited satires on the character and conduct of ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... Repeal to a question of national welfare, a man is pledged to sincerity. Had he seven devils of mockery and banter within him, for that hour he must silence them all. The foul fiend must be rebuked, though it were Mahu and Bohu who should prompt him to buffoonery, when standing ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... by this kind of buffoonery. He issued comic proclamations and almanacs, and even produced short farces in which his wife performed with him. From one of these farces Moliere is supposed to have borrowed the ideas for his sack-scene ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... the most mischievous creatures that can enter into a civil society. His satire will then chiefly fall upon those who ought to be the most exempt from it. Virtue, merit, and everything that is praiseworthy, will be made the subject of ridicule and buffoonery. It is impossible to enumerate the evils which arise from these arrows that fly in the dark; and I know no other excuse that is or can be made for them, than that the wounds they give are only imaginary, and produce nothing more than a secret shame or sorrow in the ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... qualifications of a fine orator, a good voice, graceful gesture, and forcible elocution. Warburton justly remarked, "Sometimes he broke jests, and sometimes that bread which he called the Primitive Eucharist." He would degenerate into buffoonery on solemn occasions. His address to the Deity was at first awful, and seemingly devout; but, once expatiating on the several sects who would certainly be damned, he prayed that the Dutch might be undamm'd! He undertook to show the ancient use of the petticoat, by quoting the ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... immediate. A cloud had hung over the assembly. It might have broken into terror; it broke into delight. Mad merriment seized the whole House. Nothing pleases the great chambers of sovereign man so much as buffoonery. It is their ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Great Man's Masterpieces, and utterly fail: especially when two much better men have been before one. One excuse is, that Shelley and Dr. Trench only took parts of these plays, not caring surely—who can?—for the underplot and buffoonery which stands most in the way of the tragic Dramas. Yet I think it is as a whole, that is, the whole main Story, that these Plays are capital; and therefore I have tried to present that whole, leaving out the rest, or nearly so; and altogether the Thing has become so altered ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... misery when the excitement was over. Tragedies deep and dire were the chief favourites. Comedy brought with it too great a contrast to the inner despair: when such were attempted, it was not unfrequent for a comedian, in the midst of the laughter occasioned by his disporportioned buffoonery, to find a word or thought in his part that jarred with his own sense of wretchedness, and burst from mimic merriment into sobs and tears, while the spectators, seized with irresistible sympathy, wept, and the pantomimic revelry was changed to a real exhibition ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... contrived by fortune. Among those pursuing with John it happened that there was Uliaris, the aide of Belisarius. Now this man was a passionate fellow and well favoured in strength of heart and body, but not a very serious man, but one who generally took delight in wine and buffoonery. This Uliaris on the sixth day of the pursuit, being drunk, saw a bird sitting in a tree at about sunrise, and he quickly stretched his bow and despatched a missile at the bird. And he missed the bird, but John, who was behind it, he hit in the neck by no will of his own. And since the wound was ...
— History of the Wars, Books III and IV (of 8) - The Vandalic War • Procopius
... the man's dead wife. The short story, in which the author deliberately shakes our nerves and then soothes away our fears by accounting naturally for startling phenomena, is an amazingly popular type. It reappears continually in different guises. Occasionally it merges into pleasant buffoonery. Die Geistertodtenglocke, for instance, a story in the Dublin University Magazine (1862), is a burlesque, in which the mysterious tolling of a bell is explained by the discovery that a cow strolled into the ruin to ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... his own discernment hindered him from suspecting any weakness or mistake. He wondered that his wit was so little understood, but expected that his audience would comprehend it by degrees, and persisted all his life to shew by gross buffoonery, how little the strongest faculties can perform beyond the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... finds that she is rather depressing—that his vanity is almost as painfully damaged by her emotional inertness as it would have been by a too provocative and hedonistic spirit. For the thing that chiefly delights a man, when some, woman has gone through the solemn buffoonery of yielding to his great love, is the sharp and flattering contrast between her reserve in the presence of other men and her enchanting complaisance in the presence of himself. Here his vanity is enormously tickled. To the world in general ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... store of talk. His words gushed forth abundantly in original remarks, laughable images, the metaphors that flow from the comic genius of crowds. He had the natural picturesqueness of the unadulterated farce. He was brimming over with amusing stories and buffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all repertories of house-painter's nonsense. Being a member of divers of the low haunts called lists, he knew all the new tunes and ballads, and he was never tired of singing. He was amusing, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... bargain, he is one of the most mischievous creatures that can enter into a civil society. His satire will then chiefly fall upon those who ought to be the most exempt from it. Virtue, merit, and everything that is praiseworthy, will be made the subject of ridicule and buffoonery. It is impossible to enumerate the evils which arise from these arrows that fly in the dark; and I know no other excuse that is or can be made for them, than that the wounds they give are only imaginary, ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... have rushed to hear his address; or if he had been a famous music-hall singer or an imitation negro minstrel, the public at large might have flocked to be amused and degraded by his parrot-like buffoonery; but as he was only a working shoemaker from Banff, with a heaven-born instinct for watching and discovering all the strange beasts and birds of Scotland, and the ways and thoughts of them, why, of course, respectable Aberdeen, high or low, would have nothing ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... lurid play, 'The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus' follows very closely most of the details given in the German Faust-books. Its poetical beauties (and they are many) are unfortunately, as Hallam rightly remarks, intermingled with a great deal of coarse buffoonery. Possibly he had to consult the taste of his public in introducing such a large ingredient of this buffoon element—taken from what I called the Muenchhausen portion of the old legend. Patriotic German commentators sometimes deny that Goethe knew Marlowe's play (though he knew Shakespeare ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... Miss GLADYS COOPER, over her petit dejeuner, preserves a natural demeanour, even to the point of talking with her mouth full; the light humour of the First Act declines to the verge of buffoonery. The devastating confusions which ensue in the matter of identity and relationship (in our author's Ostend you assume, till corrected, that all couples are married); the intervention of the local gendarmerie, headed by a British detective; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... present year marks an advance in one respect at least—that the grotesque and the beautiful are kept reasonably apart; the lovely colour-scheme, for instance, of the garden in Fairyland is undisturbed by any element of buffoonery. There was a revival too of topical allusiveness after the reticence proper to war-time; and the GEDDES family must be justifiably flattered by their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... without my knowledge, a piece of buffoonery, or play acting gone through with, which I did not see, when my own name, called by Madame, brought me to ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... before him, still left the Grecian stage in a state of great rudeness and imperfection, and, what was worse, in a condition of low buffoonery. Before Thespis tragedy consisted of no more than one person, who sung songs in honour of Bacchus. Thespis introduced a second performer; such was the state of the Grecian stage when AEschylus arose, and made an illustrious epoch in the history of the drama. Before him the chorus was the principal ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... and undertook the quest. They parted at the great west door of the Abbey, where, by way of vindicating his own character for buffoonery, Randall exclaimed, "Where be mine ass?" and not seeing the animal, immediately declared, "There he is!" and at the same time sprang upon the back and shoulders of a gaping and astonished clown who was gazing at ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... known that this procession in honour of the Being of beings, represented under the sacramental forms, is followed by all the religious confraternities, and this is duly done at Aix; but the scandalous part of the ceremony is the folly and the buffoonery which is allowed in a rite which should be designed to stir up the hearts of men to awe and reverence ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... were not exhausted by this kind of buffoonery. He issued comic proclamations and almanacs, and even produced short farces in which his wife performed with him. From one of these farces Moliere is supposed to have borrowed the ideas for his sack-scene ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Lord Arlington, "were there some reality at the bottom of this buffoonery; for we know these wild men have been consulting together to-day, and five conventicles have held ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... wretched buffoonery that refined people were expected to sit through! Yet worse followed, for at their climax, the mimic Oswald having gone quite off his head, the Hobbs person, still with the preposterous affectation of taking me off in speech and manner, was persuaded by the stricken ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... to do with a master-spirit. The King of France had lately sent the Duke of Vendome to command in Spain. This man was distinguished by the filthiness of his person, by the brutality of his demeanour, by the gross buffoonery of his conversation, and by the impudence with which he abandoned himself to the most nauseous of all vices. His sluggishness was almost incredible. Even when engaged in a campaign, he often passed whole days in his ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Moliere gains. Of all the great French classics, he is the least classical. His fluid mind overflowed the mould he worked in. His art, sweeping over the whole range of comic emotions, from the wildest buffoonery to the grimmest satire and the subtlest wit, touched life too closely and too often to attain to that flawless beauty to which it seems to aspire. He lacked the precision of form which is the mark of the consummate artist; he was sometimes tentative and ambiguous, often careless; the ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... and their friends were not content to go quietly to church on saints' days and quietly home again. They used to spend their holidays in dancing and singing and buffoonery, as country folk have always done until our own gloomier, more self-conscious age. They were very merry and not at all refined, and the place they always chose for their dances was the churchyard; and unluckily the songs they sang as they danced in a ring were old pagan ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... yesterday," writes a journalist; and he adds, "They say he received the cure of St. Roche very badly." What an admirable piece of buffoonery! these cures going in turn to shrive the writers of the eighteenth century, and having flung at their heads epigrams composed for the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... himself, by reading the play in Dyce's edition, and comparing it with the notes under the text,—that sometimes whole scenes are copied, and even whole speeches, as, for instance, that of the Emperor Charles V. The coarse buffoonery, in particular, of which the work is full, is retained word for word. Of the countless absurdities and prolixities of the Volksbuch, Marlowe has, of course, omitted a great deal, and condensed the story to the tenth part of its original length; but the fundamental ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... remarked, have employed such humor as I can command "in favor of establishment." What it is worth I am not to judge; as usual in such cases, those who are of my cabal pronounce it good, but cyclometers and other paradoxers either call it very poor, or commend it as sheer buffoonery. Be it one or the other, I observe that all the effective ridicule is, in this subject, on the side of establishment. This is partly due to the difficulty of quizzing plain and sober demonstration; but so much, if not more, to the ignorance of the paradoxers. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... said Wrinstone, cap in hand, addressing the minister scornfully, and thrusting his tongue into his cheek, to the great diversion of his companions, who, with shouts of laughter, began to ape the buffoonery of their leader. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... wore? And suddenly the true answer came to him in the form of another question: What if it should prove to be no mask at all, but just the man's own face? So there are an increasingly large number of readers who are discerning in the dauntless gambols of Vachel Lindsay, not the mask of buffoonery, worn to attract attention, but a real poet, dancing gaily with bronchos, children, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... deliberately set himself to raise the people to open resistance against their oppressors, while he disarmed the suspicions of the nobles by intentional buffoonery and extravagance of conduct. On May 20, 1347, the first blow was struck. Rienzi, with a chosen band of conspirators, and accompanied by the papal vicar, who had every interest in weakening the baronage, proceeded to the Capitol, and, amid the applause of the mob, promulgated ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... stage management could influence, impressed the English journalists and Members of Parliament even more than the gigantic scale of the demonstration. There was not a trace of the picnic spirit. There was no drunkenness, no noisy buffoonery, no unseemly behaviour. The Ulster habit of combining politics and prayer—which was not departed from at Balmoral, where the proceedings were opened by the Primate of All Ireland and the Moderator of the ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... which he did not approve. Barristers, it appears, are still capable of indulging in such tastes as were once gratified by the game of 'High Jinks,' celebrated in 'Guy Mannering.' The Circuit Court was the scene of a good deal of buffoonery. It was customary to appoint a 'crier'; and Fitzjames, 'to his infinite disgust, was elected on account of his powerful voice. He stood it once or twice, but at last broke out in a real fury, and declared he would never come to the Circuit Court again, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... cause of the great neglect and scorn of preaching ariseth from the practice of men who set up to decry and disparage religion; these, being zealous to promote infidelity and vice, learn a rote of buffoonery that serveth all occasions, and refutes the strongest arguments for piety and good manners. These have a set of ridicule calculated for all sermons and all preachers, and can be extremely witty as often as they please upon the ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... also is a kind of merriment,—not true cheerfulness, neither careless nor idle jesting, but a determined effort at gaiety, a resolute laughter, mixed with much satire, grossness, and practical buffoonery, and, it always seemed to me, void of all comfort or hope,—with this eminent character in it also, that it is capable of touching with its bitterness even the most fearful subjects, so that as the love of beauty retains its tenderness in the presence ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... which would be little relished in England. The tragedies acted at the Theatre Francais are generally modelled on the Greek; those of Racine and Voltaire are common. The comedies have seldom any low life or buffoonery, or vulgar ribaldry in them; The after pieces, and the ballets at the Academie de Musique, and at the Opera Comique, are often beautiful representations of ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... talk. His words gushed forth abundantly in original remarks, laughable images, the metaphors that flow from the comic genius of crowds. He had the natural picturesqueness of the unadulterated farce. He was brimming over with amusing stories and buffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all repertories of house-painter's nonsense. Being a member of divers of the low haunts called lists, he knew all the new tunes and ballads, and he was never tired of singing. He was amusing, in short, from head to foot. ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... Ginger Hose, and Jack Allspice. The humour of this piece, though not particularly refined, seemed to be appreciated by the audience generally, as well as by the monarch, who laughed heartily at its coarse buffoonery. ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... it signifies very little whether there be any sense in it or no. Now, your reading play is of a different stamp, and must have wit and meaning in it. These latter I call your substantive, as being able to support themselves. The former are your adjective, as what require the buffoonery and gestures of an actor to be joined with them to shew ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... humorous book is 'That Fascinating Widow,' by Mr S. J. Adair Fitz-Gerald, who can be very funny when he tries. The story which gives the title to the book would make a capital farce. 'The Blue-blooded Coster' is an amusing piece of buffoonery." ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... salutation, and at another make an honorary dress the return for an act of rudeness; and they have said, That to be over much facetious is the accomplishment of courtiers and blemish of the wise.—Be wary, and preserve the state of thine own character, and leave sport and buffoonery ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... embellished within and without and all over, should ever live to that unhappy dotage as at last to dishonour his grey hairs and his venerable age with such childish and impotent endeavours at wit and buffoonery."—(Reproof, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... diseased expectation. Napoleon's protruding leg, extended wing and twisted neck, his busy and unconscious devotion to the arrangement of his person, his evident sensation of complete loneliness, most comfortable solitude, brought home with vehemence to the Father the undignified buffoonery of his conduct; the more piteous buffoonery of his friend. He seized the curtains with his hands and was about to thrust them aside and issue forth when an abrupt movement of the parrot stopped him. The bird, as if sharply attracted by something, ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... and stand in the way of progress," Saton declared, fiercely. "They have not the faintest glimmering of the truth, and they turn what should be the greatest of the sciences into buffoonery. To the real student it is never possible to answer questions to foretell specific things. On the other hand, it is as sure as the coming of night itself that there are times when a person who has studied these matters even so slightly as I myself, can ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lines. This was all trifling, the reader will say. No doubt. Thackeray was always trifling, and yet always serious. In attempting to understand his character it is necessary for you to bear within your own mind the idea that he was always, within his own bosom, encountering melancholy with buffoonery, and meanness with satire. The very spirit of burlesque dwelt within him,—a spirit which does not see the grand the less because of the travesties which it is ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... the requirements for a western lawyer," said Mr. Stanton acidly, "are a gift of buffoonery and a reputation for gallantry." He was intensely bored, and had small desire to make the acquaintance of ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... new 'boy' (all coloured servants are 'boys,'—a remnant of slavery), and he is the type of the nigger slave. A thief, a liar, a glutton, a drunkard—but you can't resent it; he has a naif, half-foolish, half-knavish buffoonery, a total want of self-respect, which disarms you. I sent him to the post to inquire for letters, and the postmaster had been tipsy over-night and was not awake. Jack came back spluttering threats against 'dat domned Dutchman. Me no WANT (like) him; ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... about the middle of the fifteenth century were a priest near Florence, Arlotto (1483), for more refined wit ('facezie'), and the court-fool of Ferrara, Gonnella, for buffoonery. We can hardly compare their stories with those of the Parson of Kalenberg and Till Eulenspiegel, since the latter arose in a different and half-mythical manner, as fruits of the imagination of a whole ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... thus encouraged to continue on his road to buffoonery, and when the summer term came, he found no reason to pursue any other course. On the cricket field he could not get a run; first he hit wildly, then he began to poke; but all without the least success. After a few weeks he almost ceased ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... this insolent buffoonery was a person supposed to represent the King of Prussia. To this worthy representative they did not so much as condescend to mention his master; they did not seem to know that he had one; they addressed themselves solely ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... an usurer, and the pedant Athenaeus as illiterate; the latter points out as a Socratic folly our philosopher disserting on the nature of justice before his judges, who were so many thieves. The malignant buffoonery of Aristophanes treats him much worse; but he, as Jortin says, was a great wit, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... then to my relief the horse bolted. Swaying like a ship in a gale, the whole outfit lurched out of sight round the corner of hill where lay my cache. If Amos could stop the beast and deliver the goods there, he had put up a masterly bit of buffoonery. ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... what he had let himself in for. Not for worlds would he have subjected himself to such buffoonery had he known. It was not the sport of a gentleman; it was the play of a circus clown! He watched with horrified disgust as the Scot's grimy face and tousled head emerged ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... built up around the house of McGuire, the mystery surrounding the awe-inspiring prowler, the night vigils, the secrecy—all seemed to fade into a piece of hobbledehoy buffoonery at Beth's contemptuous description of her recreant relative. And he smiled at ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... seeing the travestie of ancient academies and groves where the schools used to congregate, the dialogues consisting of bald atheism under sheep's clothing to trap the unwary, and termed "The Religion of Humanity," of abuse and personality in lieu of argument, of buffoonery called wit, of airing pet hobbies alien to the subject instead of disputating, of shouting vulgar claptrap instead of rhetoric, etc.—I sadly fear these stout old Greeks, having power for the nonce, would, throwing philosophy to the dogs in a moment of paroxysmal indignation, despite ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... resolute virtue expiated his crimes and brought about the happy catastrophe of the piece, is left to sneak off unrewarded. As to Florian, though obviously intended for the hero of the tale, he is a strange nondescript, in whose language the author has given buffoonery by way of wit, and bombast by way of dignity. The Count De Valmont is a most interesting personage, and so ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... make his attendants play all sorts of tricks with the Dervish to draw him out; who seemed to be a perfect prince in the art of buffoonery. We were amazingly amused. He now told me he had a grand chasse in twenty-five days' time, and desired that I would come to him on that day, bring my gun, and stay with him a week; nothing could have pleased me more than this offer. And as I lay Gardo in Smyrna, twenty-five days afterwards ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... the truth"? If any thing besides fondness for paradox inspired Coleridge in saying this, it must, one would guess, have been belief on his part in the allegorical sense hidden deep underneath the monstrous mass of the Rabelaisian buffoonery. A more judicial sentence is that of Hallam, the historian of the literature of Europe: "He [Rabelais] is never serious in a single page, and seems to have had little other aim, in his first two volumes, than to pour out the exuberance of his ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... say to these representations, they seemed plausible; and though at first I had suspected that the man had only resorted to the buffoonery of his quotations in order to gain time for invention or to divert my notice from any flaw in his narrative, yet at the close, as the narrative seemed probable, so I was willing to believe the buffoonery was merely characteristic. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... patrons during the siege, finding himself abandoned to starvation on all sides, he had now, as a last resource, obtained permission to participate in the Banquet of Famine, to enliven it by a final exhibition of his buffoonery, and to die with his masters, as he had lived with them—the slave, the parasite, and the imitator of the lowest of their vices and the worst ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... down the length of the room, Miss Cobb with her thin, bare little arms flung up over her head, Miss Kinealy tugging and then riding in high buffoonery over the bare floor, firmly secured to Mr. ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... opened; new and original forms have sprung to life of poetical grandeur, seriousness, and magnificence. From the poor and rude play-houses, with their troops of actors most of them profligate and disreputable, their coarse excitements, their buffoonery, license, and taste for the monstrous and horrible,—denounced not without reason as corruptors of public morals, preached against at Paul's Cross, expelled the city by the Corporation, classed by the law with rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars, and patronized by the great ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... it is true, as yet, but sure of recognition one day, and when that day comes, of great distinction. They are distinguished as it is at carnival time, when their exuberant wit, repressed for the rest of the year, finds a vent in more or less ingenious buffoonery. ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... of Devonshire, and two or three staunch critics, made me feel unpleasantly: for I opened the piece. However, this soon wore off; our set played extremely well—like persons of good sense without extravagance or buffoonery, and yet with sufficient spirit. Lady Caher, Mr. J. Madox, and G. Lamb were the most conspicuous—the first so beautiful that I felt love-making very easy. A splendid supper closed the business.' Lawrence seems to have fancied that the propriety of his joining in the theatricals ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... film. act, scene, tableau; induction, introduction; prologue, epilogue; libretto. performance, representation, mise en scene[French], stagery[obs3], jeu de theatre[French]; acting; gesture &c. 550; impersonation &c. 554; stage business, gag, buffoonery. light comedy, genteel comedy, low comedy. theater; playhouse, opera house; house; music hall; amphitheater, circus, hippodrome, theater in the round; puppet show, fantoccini[obs3]; marionettes, Punch and Judy. auditory, auditorium, front ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and laughing wildly, singing at times themselves as the myrtle branch and the lute went round, at times listening to the licentious chaunts of the unveiled and almost unrobed dancing girls, or the obscene and scurrilous buffoonery of the mimes and clowns, who played so conspicuous a part in the Roman entertainments of ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... representations do not appear to have been very popular at Rome, certainly never so much as the sports of the circus. Besides comedies and tragedies, the Romans had a species of drama peculiar to their country, called the Atellane farces, which were, in general, low pieces of gross indecency and vulgar buffoonery, but sometimes contained spirited satires on the character ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... discernment hindered him from suspecting any weakness or mistake. He wondered that his wit was so little understood, but expected that his audience would comprehend it by degrees, and persisted all his life to shew by gross buffoonery, how little the strongest faculties can perform beyond the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... patiently, to give him no handle for accusing me of bigotry or intolerance, and in the hope that after the fever of erotic buffoonery and folly had subsided, he might have some lucid intervals, and listen to common sense. Meantime I gave him expressly to understand that I disapproved of his want of respect towards women, his free and profane expressions, and pitied those unhappy ones, who, he informed ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... pleasing to the occupants of the reserved seats, had now been changed to loud, uproarious buffoonery as he bowed before the blue, fifty cent seats where his auditors were massed on boards reaching from the top of the side wall clear down to the edge ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... to chat with the justice of the peace and his clerk, assisting with professional coolness to affix the seals—a ceremony which always involves some buffoonery and plentiful comments on the objects thus secured, unless, indeed, one of the family happens to be present. At length the party sealed up the chamber and returned to the dining-room, whither the clerk betook himself. Schmucke watched the mechanical operation which consists in setting ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... cursed act,' said the merchant Neupeter, 'such a price of buffoonery enjoined by any man of sense and discretion? For my part, I can't understand what the d——l it means.' However, he understood this much, that a house was by possibility floating in his purse upon a tear: and that was enough to cause a violent irritation in ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... October, The Taylor. The natives camped last night at their former place; they seem to have given up all their buffoonery. I suppose they see it has no effect upon us. Shortly after sunrise despatched Thring and King. The day again oppressively hot, with a few light clouds from the ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... light, when we recur to the fact of his astonishment at a religious princess refusing to confer a bishoprick upon one that had treated the Trinity, and all the profoundest mysteries of Christianity, not with mere scepticism, or casual sneer, but with set pompous merriment and farcical buffoonery. This dignitary of the church, Dean of the most conspicuous cathedral in Ireland, had, in full canonicals, made himself into a regular mountebank, for the sake of giving fuller effect, by the force of contrast, to the silliest of jests directed against all that was most inalienable from Christianity. ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... more and more into the hands of the laity, who employed jongleurs, histrions, and strolling vagabonds, whose acting included gross buffoonery, and whose profanity completely choked the religious growth first implanted by these miracle plays. The stages, it should be explained, were of curious construction, being divided into three stories, the upper one containing the heavenly characters, the middle one being ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... following year (1709), found it of advantage to assume the name of Bickerstaff, which these squibs had made so popular. Swift loved practical jokes, and sometimes yielded to a license that bordered on buffoonery. He was now in London, charged with a mission from the Irish Church, and hoping for Church preferment himself. With the latter object in view he published the Sentiments of a Church of England Man (1708). Two years later, vexed at heart at being unable to gain for the Irish clergy ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... at this sally was lost on Madame le Claire. She was looking down on the unconscious Amidon, and wondering how any one could think of making him the instrument of buffoonery. ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... hall, some of which was presented to him by the female attendants. During the repast, various Indians were introduced at intervals for his amusement: Some of these were hump-backed, ugly, and deformed, who played various tricks of buffoonery, and we were told that others were jesters, besides which there were companies of singers and dancers in which he was said to take great delight; and to all these he ordered vases of chocolate to be distributed. When the repast was ended, the four female attendants already ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... gentlemen, who wanted one another to know that they knew what he meant], he made me the loan of the song I'm a-going to sing. He made up the words and the tune of this song hisself, and he's right here in this audience." This gave an opportunity for some buffoonery among the young gentlemen. Mr. Blythoe looked for one instant straight at Aladdin, and Aladdin went into a cold sweat, for he began to recollect that somewhere on a certain awful night he had taken drinks with Mr. Blythoe and had sung him ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... or there might be found among the supporters of the movement, the monastic orders as a whole repelled it with unswerving obstinacy. The quarrel only became more bitter as years went on. The keen sarcasms of Erasmus, the insolent buffoonery of Hutten, were lavished on the "lovers of darkness" ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... now only to say, that from the parodies of the ancient writers, begun by Aristophanes, and awkwardly imitated by his contemporaries and successors, sprung mimes, farces, and the grossest buffoonery; and though the Grecian theatre still kept up an appearance of greatness, and there was often some brilliancy beamed across the heterogeneous mass which obscured truth and nature, to which the people were no longer sensible; yet the grandeur and magnificence of public exhibitions decreased; ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... sober and regulated minds, that are "the commoners of life:" And the theatrical grandeur of Napoleon, the severe dignity of Cromwell, are strangely contrasted by a frequent, nor always seasonable buffoonery, which it is hard to reconcile with the ideal of their characters, or the gloomy and portentous interest of their careers. And this, equally a trait in the temperament of Rienzi, distinguished his hours of relaxation, and contributed to that marvellous versatility with which his ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... culture of Massinger, would suffice to keep the name of Dekker sweet and safe forever among the most memorable if not among the most pre-eminent of his kindred and his age. The four scenes of rough and rank buffoonery which deface this act and the two following have given very reasonable offence to critics from whom they have provoked very unreasonable reflections. That they represent the coarser side of the ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... before he begins. There is also something like an attempt to stimulate the superficial dulness of his hearers by exciting their surprise, by running into extravagance: and he sometimes demeans himself by condescending to what may be considered as bordering too much upon buffoonery, for the amusement of the company. Those lines of Milton were admirably applied to him by some one—"The elephant to make them sport wreathed his proboscis lithe." The truth is, that he was out of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... s. of a gardener, was ed. at Westminster School and Oxf., and entered the Church, in which he obtained many preferments, and rose to be Bishop successively of Oxf. and Norwich. He was celebrated for his wit, which not seldom passed into buffoonery. His poems, which are often mere doggerel, were not pub. until after his death. They include Journey to France, Iter Boreale, the account of a tour from Oxf. to Newark, and the Farewell ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... am both surprised and delighted. He and I have read the same books, and discuss Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Fletcher, Webster, and all the old authors. He can quote verses by the page, and has really a very pretty literary taste. Altogether, with all his roughness and buffoonery, a more pleasant, clever fellow you may seldom see. I was very much surprised with him; and he with me. "Where the devil did you read all these books?" says he; and in my heart, I echo the question. One amusing thing I must say. We were both talking about travelling; and I said I was so fond of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his vanity is almost as painfully damaged by her emotional inertness as it would have been by a too provocative and hedonistic spirit. For the thing that chiefly delights a man, when some, woman has gone through the solemn buffoonery of yielding to his great love, is the sharp and flattering contrast between her reserve in the presence of other men and her enchanting complaisance in the presence of himself. Here his vanity is enormously tickled. To the world in general she seems remote and unapproachable; to him she is ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... should always be employed as means by which information is communicated. Between lecturers equal in other respects, one with the salt of humor, native to the soil, should be preferred; but it is a sad reflection upon public taste, when a person whose entire intellectual capital is wit, humor, or buffoonery, is preferred to men of solid learning. But it is a worse view of human nature, when men of real merit and worth depreciate themselves and lower the public taste, by attempting to do what, at best, they can have but ill success in, and what they would despise ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... related each of his robberies in the most ludicrous manner, and endeavoured to set off every circumstance of his flagitious life as well as his capacity would give him leave, which, to say truth, was excellent at cunning, and buffoonery, and nothing else. ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... requiring obedience to it. The disobedient were flayed alive or roasted over a slow fire. She and all her followers took particular pleasure in manifesting their hatred and contempt for the religion of their oppressors. They defiled the sacred vessels of the churches, imitated with buffoonery the ceremonies of the mass, which she herself performed, and stoned to death the ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... Procter (Barry Cornwall), 1787-1874 (Edinburgh Review, January, 1820, vol. 33, pp. 144-155), compares Diego de Montilla, a poem in ottava rima, with Don Juan, favourably and unfavourably: "There is no profligacy and no horror ... no mocking of virtue and honour, and no strong mixtures of buffoonery and grandeur." But it may fairly match with Byron and his Italian models "as to the better qualities of elegance, delicacy, and tenderness." See, too, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, March, 1820, vol. vi. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... characteristic of their author. It seems impossible for him to be dull; he never nods; his bow, such as it is, is always strung. It is remarkable that his comic scenes, although crammed with fun, never run down into farce; nor does he find it necessary to eke out his wit with buffoonery. He had an instinctive taste which preserved him from coarseness; although he wrote a century and a half ago, there is less of the low and indelicate than in the plays we see posted at the doors of our theatres. The French of the time of Louis XIV. must have been a much more refined people ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... again, upon D'Aubigne, and upon Bouchet he has made no direct and verbatim depredations. From Bruscambille he seems to have taken little or nothing but the not very valuable idea of the tedious buffoonery of vol. iii. c. 30, et sqq.; and to Scarron he, perhaps, owed the incident of the dwarf at the theatre in the Sentimental Journey, an incident which, it must be owned, he vastly improved in the ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... clappers, but being close together they make a great jingling noise by dashing one against another. Suppers were brought this evening, but the singing and dancing were not continued. We had, however, at sunset, a visit from a Hazna dancer,—a perfect specimen of African buffoonery and jingling. He danced and sung with the wildest barbarity. He had two followers, to pick up the offerings of the people. They beat two pieces of stick together to the motion of his legs, hung with ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... thinking in his mind that he ought to be made an Ambassador, like Prior, or a Secretary of State, like Addison? his pretence of equality falls to the ground at once: he is scheming for a patron, not shaking the hand of a friend, when he meets the world. Treat such a man as he deserves; laugh at his buffoonery, and give him a dinner and a bon jour; laugh at his self-sufficiency and absurd assumptions of superiority, and his equally ludicrous airs of martyrdom: laugh at his flattery and his scheming, and buy it, if it's worth the having. Let the wag have his dinner and the hireling his pay, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... then," she said, "that this buffoonery is too amusing to be foregone? I am afraid I do not agree ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... duke's fool suddenly appeared in the crowded apartment, the hubbub abruptly ceased; the minstrels and mountebanks gazed in surprise at the slender figure of the alien jester whose rich garments proclaimed him a personage of importance, one who had reached that pinnacle in buffoonery, the high office of court plaisant. The morio crouched against the wall, his fear of the new-comer as great as his body was large; the garret minstrels stopped strumming their instruments, while ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... travelling merchant, turned of threescore, a hale, tall, strong man, and full of stories, gesticulations, and buffoonery, with the soul as well as the look of a mountebank, who, while he is making you laugh, picks your pocket. Amid all his droll looks and droll gestures, there remained one look untouched by laughter; and that one look ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... not astonishing that the church itself did little to remove the barbarism prevailing among the common people, for, in point of fact, buffoonery, immodesty, and cruelty had intruded into the very ceremonial of religion. Never were there more disgusting exhibitions of the low state of the public morals than when the occurrence of pestilence, drought, or some other signal ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... Shakespeare's plays were produced at Court. But very early in this reign plays gave place to the more costly and elaborate entertainments called masques, but which were very different from the dumb-show masques of Elizabeth's reign, the masquerades of Henry the Eighth, and the low-buffoonery masques of earlier times. At the Court of James thousands of pounds were sometimes expended on the production of a single masque. To the aid of poetry, composed by poets of the first rank, came the most skilful musicians and the most ingenious machinists. Inigo Jones, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... looked long and earnestly into that endless procession of faces. In not one of them did I see any sign of sorrow or repentance. They marched in defiantly, almost proudly. Ever and anon I heard a snicker, sometimes a downright laugh: there was a coarse buffoonery in the ranks. I turned aside at last, unable to bear it longer. Here they will learn what their laughter is ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... Adair said, conscious that he was expressing the feelings of the entire company: 'What do you mean, sir? Have you gone mad? Do you not know that this is no fitting time for buffoonery?' ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... life, Monsieur, for at my age assuredly I shall not expose myself to the buffoonery of your ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... bread-winner of the family may demand more and more coppery shillings, or assignats, or greenbacks for his day's work, and so get the needful quantum of food; but let that moral currency be emptied of its value—let a greedy buffoonery debase all historic beauty, majesty, and pathos, and the more you heap up the desecrated symbols the greater will be the lack of the ennobling emotions which subdue the tyranny of suffering, and make ambition one ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... are better supported in Dryden than in Shakespeare. We have no low buffoonery in the former, such as disgraces Enobarbus, and is hardly redeemed by his affecting catastrophe. Even the Egyptian Alexas acquires some respectability, from his patriotic attachment to the interests of his country, and from his skill as a wily courtier. He expresses, by ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... are very often laid among tradesmen and mechanics, and though it may be contrary to all good taste, the author is compelled to indulge in bombast expressions, pompous and thundering rhymes, and sometimes even ribaldry and mean, unmannerly buffoonery. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... sir," said the Doctor, now effectually roused, "that this was ill-timed buffoonery, and not an intentional insult, I should be seriously angry. As it is, I can overlook any exuberance of mirth which is, perhaps, pardonable when the mind is elated by the return to the cheerful bustle and activity of school-life. But ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
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