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More "Burlesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wall of living faces lit up by thousands of staring eyes. He does not dwell long upon this, however; in his pride and anger he sees a nearer enemy. The horsemen have taken position near the gate, where they sit motionless as burlesque statues, their long ashen spears, iron-tipped, in rest, their wretched nags standing blindfolded, with trembling knees, and necks like dromedaries, not dreaming of their near fate. The bull rushes, with ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... blackest part of the whole gloomy affair,' he answered, with burlesque gravity. 'It's in the depraved nature of men to keep secrets from their wives, especially about money. To tell the truth, I'm hanged if I know why I didn't tell you before our marriage. The infamous step was taken not ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... the Baronet. "I am honoured indeed. But the sketch is most imperfect. I shall now have much to add. I can say that the Prince, whom I had accused of idleness, is zealous in the department of police, taking upon himself those duties that are most distasteful. I shall be able to relate the burlesque incident of my arrest, and the singular interview with which you honour me at present. For the rest, I have already communicated with my Ambassador at Vienna; and unless you propose to murder me, I shall be at liberty, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... every class of society. Eichenstine Bros. sent fifty dollars, and six ragged newsboys came to present thirty cents. A lavender note, with huge monogram and written in white ink, stated that some of the girls of the "Gay Burlesque Troupe" sent a few dimes to the "kid's" mother. The few dimes amounted to fifteen dollars. Mrs. Van Larkin's coachman had to wait with her note while Lucy answered the questions of a lame old negro who had ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... kind of work at twenty-four. What are his matrimonial prospects? His office work occupies his entire attention (the idea that Government clerks don't work is a fiction preserved merely for the writers of burlesque) from the moment he wakes in the morning until dinner. His leisure extends, roughly speaking, from eight-thirty until twelve. The man whom I am discussing, and of whom Malim is a type, is, as I have already proved, intellectual. He has, therefore, ambitions. ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... of two factions, which, for near two centuries, divided and agitated the whole population of Holland and Zealand. One bore the title of Hoeks (fishing-hooks); the other was called Kaabel-jauws (cod-fish). The origin of these burlesque denominations was a dispute between two parties at a feast, as to whether the cod-fish took the hook or the hook the cod-fish? This apparently frivolous dispute was made the pretext for a serious quarrel; and the partisans of the nobles and those of the towns ranged themselves at either side, and ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... poems appear, however, to belong to a later date; and the quaint stanza, afterwards employed in a modified form with such effect by Fergusson and Burns, is that used by Alexander Scot in The Justing at the Drum, and in other burlesque pieces of the early or middle period of ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... as a celebrity. Strangers even went to him, and gravely asked to be permitted to shake hands with him as such. He was pointed out to newcomers, and observed on all hands with a serious respect that had all the comedy of piquant burlesque. ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... Madame Montoni to stop. If any thing could have made Emily smile in these moments, it would have been this speech of her aunt, delivered in a voice very little below a scream, and with a vehemence of gesticulation and of countenance, that turned the whole into burlesque. Emily saw, that her misfortunes did not admit of real consolation, and, contemning the commonplace terms of superficial comfort, she was silent; while Madame Montoni, jealous of her own consequence, mistook this for the silence ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... customs officers. It began with the joking tone of the inspectors, who surmised that we were not trying to smuggle a great value into the country, and with their apologetic regrets for bothering us to open so many trunks. They implied that it was all a piece of burlesque, which we were bound mutually to carry out for the gratification of a Government which enjoyed that kind of thing. They indulged this whim so far as to lift out the trays, to let the Government see that there ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... of the heart. We laugh indeed, but, on reflection's birth, We wonder at ourselves, and curse our mirth. His walk of parts he fatally misplaced, And inclination fondly took for taste; 380 Hence hath the town so often seen display'd Beau in burlesque, high life in masquerade. But when bold wits,—not such as patch up plays, Cold and correct, in these insipid days,— Some comic character, strong featured, urge To probability's extremest verge; Where modest Judgment her decree suspends, And, for a time, nor censures, nor commends; ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... princess' boot, laid it down, and hurried to the king's apartment. But feeling, as he went, that anything sentimental would be disagreeable, he resolved to carry off the whole affair with burlesque. So he knocked at the door of the king's counting-house, where it was all but a capital crime to disturb him. When the king heard the knock, he started up, and opened the door in a rage. Seeing only the shoeblack, ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... W. S. Gilbert (in Patience) or Robert Hichens (in The Green Carnation) to satirize its distorted attitudinizing. It strained itself to death; it became its own burlesque of the bizarre, an extravaganza of extravagance. "The period" (I am again quoting Holbrook Jackson) "was as certainly a period of decadence as it was a period of renaissance. The decadence was to be seen ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... a word used in the theatrical business to distinguish the full-evening drama, its actors, producers, and its mechanical stage from those of burlesque and vaudeville. Originally coined as a word of reproach against vaudeville, it has lost its sting and is used by vaudevillians as well as legitimate ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... in Hades to pass before Rhadamanthus, Minos, or Aacus, three upright judges, to be dealt with, according to their merits, with impartial accuracy. The distribution of poetic justice in Hades at last became, in many authors, so melodramatic as to furnish a fair subject for burlesque. Some ludicrous examples of this may be seen in Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead. A fine instance of it is also furnished in the Emperor Julian's Symposium. The gods prepare for the Roman emperors a banquet, in the air, below the moon. The good emperors are admitted to the table with ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... these now wonderful, now charming improvisations quickened the brains and made supple the legs of our performers. He led them as he pleased and made them pass, according to his fancy, from the droll to the severe, from the burlesque to the solemn, from the graceful to the passionate. We improvised costumes in order to play successively several roles. As soon as the artist saw them appear, he adapted his theme and his accent in a marvellous manner to their respective characters. This went on for three evenings, and then the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... effect of long-pondered vivid colors, and still return to illumine and complete any representation of that indescribable dance. Heaven knows what peril there might have been in the beauty and grace of the pretty muletress but for the spectacle of her fat aunt, who, I must confess, could only burlesque some of her niece's airiest movements, and whose hard-bought buoyancy was at once pathetic and laughable. She earned her share of the spoils certainly, and she seemed glad when the dance was over, and went contentedly back ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... times," Julien remarked quietly, "when I scarcely know whether to take you seriously. There is surely a little of the burlesque about ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... famous for much generous and unobtrusive philanthropy. Also his self-evolved translation of the duties of friendship is the last word on that subject. He was visited unexpectedly at his office one day by a group of friends. With much ceremony, they presented him with a placque—an amusing plaster burlesque of the real article. He had the Californian sense of humor and he thoroughly enjoyed the situation. Admitting that the joke was on him, he celebrated according to time-honored rites. After his friends had left, he found on his desk a small uninscribed package which had apparently been left ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... a voice in the doorway, and Florentine appeared. "I have come to look after 'milord Cardot,'" she added, speaking with a burlesque English accent. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... indignation; but, suddenly recovering his calmness, he turned to me with his grave smile. "I am ashamed, Marston, of thus betraying a temper which time ought to have cooled. But, after all, what is public life but a burlesque; a thing of ludicrous disappointment; a tragedy, with a farce always at hand to relieve the tedium and the tinsel; the fall of kingdoms made laughable by the copper ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... in modern times shows that there is no historical ground for the elaborate mythical genealogy in Men. 409 ff. We contend that "Portus Persicus" is pure fiction, as our novelists refer fondly to "Zenda" or "Graustark," while the Men. passage is a patent burlesque ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... four times, and at last proceeded to lick it with the most delightful tenderness. This spectacle grated against our sensibilities: it seemed to us that he who first invented this parody upon one of the most touching incidents in nature must have been a man without a heart. A somewhat burlesque circumstance occurred one day, to modify the indignation with which this treachery inspired us. By dint of caressing and licking her little calf, the tender parent one fine morning unripped it: the hay issued from within; and the cow, manifesting not the slightest surprise nor agitation, proceeded ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... the personage who had just addressed him with much curiosity. He was dressed in the height or rather the burlesque of fashion, wore an eyeglass, and an enormous locket on his chain. The face which surmounted all this grandeur was almost that of a monkey, and Toto Chupin had not exaggerated its ugliness when he likened it to ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... inaudible to persons between the speakers. Thus the tales of saints with preternaturally loud voices are not quite in point. Colum Cille was heard to read his Psalms a mile and half away (LL, 828); Brenainn also was heard at a long distance (LL, 3419). The burlesque Vision of MacConglinne parodies such voices (ed. Meyer, ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... Paris on the inaugural day of the Constitution for the present year. The foreign ministers were ordered to attend at this investiture of the Directory;—for so they call the managers of their burlesque government. The diplomacy, who were a sort of strangers, were quite awe-struck with the "pride, pomp, and circumstance" of this majestic senate; whilst the sans-culotte gallery instantly recognized their old insurrectionary acquaintance, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... justice (should anything go wrong), would be simply ridiculous—a farce. And if every one of our deeds is fixed, what better are men than mere automata? To try them, to judge them, and to award praise and blame for what was done, would be to burlesque justice. The judgment day, therefore, and foreordination of all things cannot stand in the same category. If we hold by the one we must give up the other. God foreknows all things, but foreordains only what He himself brings to pass. Man will be judged, condemned, or rewarded, according as he ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... the scurry of pattering feet had both ceased. The sounds of the night were now more soothing, more harmoniously blended. The earliest arrivals of the theatre crowd were besieging the sidewalk ticket office of the burlesque house opposite. Simonoff ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... corners coruscating groups of shops. And somewhere I came along a narrow street suddenly upon the distant prospect of a great monstrous absurd place on a steep hill against the last brightness of the evening sky, a burlesque block of building with huge truncated pyramids at either corner, that I have since learnt was the Alexandra Palace. It was so queer and bulky that it arrested and held my attention, struck on my memory with an almost dreamlike quality, so that years afterwards I went to Muswell ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... quality inconsistent with her evident habits, and the lace-edged petticoat that peeped beneath it was draggled with mud and unaccustomed usage. Her glossy black hair, which had been tossed into curls in some foreign fashion, was now wind-blown into a burlesque of it. This incongruity was still further accented by the appearance of the room she had entered. It was coldly and severely furnished, making the chill of the yet damp white plaster unpleasantly obvious. A black harmonium organ stood in one corner, ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... women in general is more daring, more designed for sex allurement than for a century past. Women paint and powder in a way that only the demimonde did a generation ago, reminding one of the ladies of the French Court in the eighteenth century. Further, the plays of the day would be called mere burlesque a generation back; the girl and music show has the center of the stage, and the drama in America has almost disappeared. There is an epidemic of magazines that flirt with the risque; with titles that are sometimes much more ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... such cases were dull. No really dramatic moments. The book-keeping of The Orb and all the rest of them was certainly a burlesque revelation but the public did not care for revelations of that kind. Dull dog that de Barral—he grumbled. He could not or would not take the trouble to characterize for me the appearance of that man now officially a criminal (we had gone across ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... malicious nor ill-informed, who contended that such pageantry was ill-timed. They advanced against it all sorts of objections which would have been quite appropriate if the public had been bidden to witness some colossal farce or burlesque; some raree-show of tasteless oddities, or some untimely pantomime of fairy-lore. What was really intended, and was performed, at a great cost of toil and organizing skill, was the opposite of all this. All the ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... supposed to select the assignees. Thus it happens that the judge almost always appoints as assignees those creditors whom it suits the bankrupt to have,—another abuse which makes the catastrophe of bankruptcy one of the most burlesque dramas to which justice ever lent her name. The honorable bankrupt overtaken by misfortune is then master of the situation, and proceeds to legalize the theft he premeditated. As a rule, the petty trades of Paris are guiltless in this respect. ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... reforming us. You can't make us go by decimals. You can't increase our consumption by lowering our taxation. I wish you had gone back to some Board." This she said looking up into his face with an anxiety which was half real and half burlesque. ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... be new to great numbers of our readers. One of the best evidences of the naturalness and ease of our author's writings, is to be found in the ready appreciation of them by all classes of readers. Whether the vein be a serious one, or the theme turn upon the humorous or the burlesque, it is not too much, we think, to say that the writer takes always with him the heart or the fancy of the reader. Without however pausing to characterize productions which bid fair to become very widely and favorably known, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... on the long way to their new art. Such leadership his record hardly augered. It was in the very lowest forms of vaudeville, in what is the analogue abroad of our negro minstrelsy, that Mr. Fay had his stage experience, a stage experience that had made him well enough known in burlesque roles to make it difficult for him to assume with success serious roles in the early years of the National Dramatic Company. Because of this old association, Dublin audiences insisted in 1902 in seeing humor in his Peter Gillane in "Cathleen ni ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... usual home and occupations, when he had paid his devotions at the particular spot which was the object of his pilgrimage. The Palmers seem to have been the Quaestionarii of the ancient Scottish canons 1242 and 1296. There is in the Bannatyne MS. a burlesque account of two such persons, entitled, "Simmy and his Brother." Their accoutrements are thus ludicrously described (I discard the ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... removing it out of the range of physical combinations and making a distinct destiny fairly predicable of it. When we reflect on the nature of a self contained will, intelligent of immaterial verities and perhaps transcendent of space and time, how burlesque is the terror of the ancient corpuscular theorists lest the feebly cohering soul, on leaving the body, especially if death happened during a storm, would be blown in pieces all abroad! Socrates, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... even to the veriest embryonic reader of Horace, if he will but remember that, while some of these transcriptions are indeed very faithful reproductions or adaptations of the original, others again are to be accepted as the very riot of burlesque verse-making. ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... one another; the mendicants, lying everywhere in wait for charity, murmured a modulated appeal; if you heard shouts or yells afar off they died upon your ear in a strain of melody at the moment when they were lifted highest. I am aware of seeming to burlesque the operatic fact which every one must have noticed in Naples; and I will not say that the neglected or affronted babe, or the trodden dog, is as tuneful as the midnight cat there, but only that they approach it in the prevailing tendency of all the local discords to soften and lose themselves ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... another—sometimes tolerated, sometimes the object of the Church's anathema—the tradition held its own down through the Dark Ages, and we meet with the substance of the Saturnalia, during the centuries immediately preceding the Reformation, in the burlesque festivals with which the rule of the Boy-Bishop has been often identified. We shall see presently how far this judgment is correct. An example will, no doubt, readily recur to the reader from a source to which we owe so ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... competence, many gained only a bare subsistence; thousands lost their health, and not a few their lives. It was a strange play that men enacted there, embracing all the confusion, glitter, rapid change of scene, burlesque, and comedy of a pantomime, with many a dash of darkest tragedy intermingled. Tents were pitched in all directions, houses were hastily run up, restaurants of all kinds were opened, boats were turned keel up and converted ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... navy—the navy that had been despised and spat upon. In those days his uniform alone had barred him from decent theatres, decent halls, decent dances, contact with decent people. They had forced him to a knowledge of the burlesque houses, the cheap theatres, the shooting galleries, the saloons, the dives. And now, bewilderingly, the public had right-about faced. It opened its doors to him. It closed its saloons to him. It sought him out. It offered him amusement. It invited ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... No. 11 will be commenced a new burlesque serial, "The Mystery of Mister E. Drood," written expressly for this paper by the celebrated humorist, ORPHEUS ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... about this, and as Elder Stenhouse read it to me "my feelings may be better imagined than described," to use language I think I have heard before. I pleaded, however, that it was a purely burlesque sketch, and that this strong paragraph should not be interpreted literally at all. The Elder didn't seem to see it in that ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... and the royal flight to Varennes in June 1791, and the loss of the "Royal George" in 1782, all form the subjects of quizzical comments, and there are many other allusions the interest of which is quite as ephemeral as those of a Drury Lane pantomime or a Gaiety Burlesque. ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... eighteenth. 'Insidieux' was invented by Malherbe; 'frivolite' does not appear in the earlier editions of the Dictionary of the Academy; the Abbe de St. Pierre was the first to employ 'bienfaisance', the elder Balzac 'feliciter', Sarrasin 'burlesque'. Mad. de Sevigne exclaims against her daughter for employing 'effervescence' in a letter (comment dites-vous cela, ma fille? Voila un mot dont je n'avais jamais oui parler). 'Demagogue' was first hazarded by Bossuet, and was counted so bold a novelty that ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... resolutions privately, are, no doubt, secret friends, needing a little more courage to face the pro-slavery feeling and sentiment which are all about them. Some one who read these resolutions suggested the idea of their being a burlesque. I repudiated the idea at once. They will commend themselves to you, dear Aunty, I am sure, as ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... exhorting high and low to practical duties, with tender or passionate appeals to religious feeling, his sermons were noble exceptions to the common practice. And the descent from Gerson to even his more eminent successors is swift and steep. The orators of the pulpit varied their discourse from burlesque mirth or bitter invective to gross terrors, in which death and judgment, Satan and hell-fire were largely displayed. The sermons of Michel Menot and Olivier Maillard, sometimes eloquent in their censure ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... throughout The sort of mock-heroic gigantesque, With which we bantered little Lilia first: The women—and perhaps they felt their power, For something in the ballads which they sang, Or in their silent influence as they sat, Had ever seemed to wrestle with burlesque, And drove us, last, to quite a solemn close— They hated banter, wished for something real, A gallant fight, a noble princess—why Not make her true-heroic—true-sublime? Or all, they said, as earnest as the close? Which yet ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Cantapresto for the Philodramatic Academy. It was late when they entered their box, and several masks were already capering before the footlights, exchanging lazzi with the townsfolk in the pit, and addressing burlesque compliments to the quality in the boxes. The theatre seemed small and shabby after those of Turin, and there was little in the old-fashioned fopperies of a provincial audience to interest a young gentleman fresh from ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... his other features were cartooned out of all familiar likeness, effecting an alteration as shocking to behold, in a man of his severe cast of countenance, as was his falsetto mimicry to hear. She rose in a kind of terror, perceiving that this contortion was produced in burlesque of her own expression, and, as he pressed nearer her, stepped back, overturning her chair. She had little recollection of her father during her childhood; and as long as she could remember, no one had spoken to ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... peculiar to the local stage (who is supposed to have originated in Acerra, as Arlequino did in Bergamo), supported by his inseparable companion Pancrazio, poked fun to his heart's content, and in the raciest of burlesque, at all the latest Neapolitan occurrences and fashions, in a piece entitled ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... source in a rather bitter feeling of the futility of life;[129] and this is accompanied by fits of weariness which are not altogether healthy, followed by capricious moods and nervous gaiety, and a freakish liking for burlesque and mimicry. It is his eager, restless spirit that makes him rush about the world writing Breton and Auvergnian rhapsodies, Persian songs, Algerian suites, Portuguese barcarolles, Danish, Russian, or Arabian caprices, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... me think! (Points his finger at his forehead and assumes tragic attitude. Then stalks to the front of stage in manner of burlesque Hamlet.) Come, thought, come. Shed the glory of thy greatness full on me, and thus confound mine enemies. Where ...
— The Bicyclers and Three Other Farces • John Kendrick Bangs
... game popular in the 17th and 18th centuries—the rhymed words at the end of a line being given for others to fill up. Thus Horace Walpole being given, "brook, why, crook, I," returned the burlesque verse— "I sits with my toes in a Brook, And if any one axes me Why? I gies 'em a rap with my Crook, 'Tis constancy ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... behind the face-plate. He clicked his heels and bowed stiffly from the waist, in a fine burlesque of an ancient courtier. He stalked past Hoskins and punched the button ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... that you cannot trust a man who, unless he is intending a burlesque, can bring himself to write like that. Crabbe not only brings himself to it, but rejoices and luxuriates in the style. The tale from which that last luckless distich is taken, "The Elder Brother," is full of pathos and about equally full of false notes. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... of the drama first appeared in the thirteenth century, when rude attempts to imitate the Mystery plays were conducted in churches by the priests. But when the populace tried to introduce the Burlesque, the performances were banished to the open fields. Students in the universities took part in them, and they continued until after the Reformation. Brought into Europe from Constantinople by the Crusaders ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... and other epigrams and Sir James Mackintosh his attacks on Canning his contempt for George IV. his attack on Gifford on the spy system his defence of Caroline of Brunswick epigram on Lord Byron writes for Merchant Taylors' boys burlesque of "Angel Help" his "Satan in Search of a Wife" as a writer of prologues ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... last might be related to the tragedies or be quite independent, as they usually were in Sophocles and Euripides. The satyric play was named from the satyrs or attendants upon Bacchus, and was a farce or burlesque intended to relieve the feelings of the spectators after the tragedies. The 'Alcestis' was entered by Euripides as a satyric play, but it only in parts approaches the characteristics of such a play. In other parts it has the dignity and beauty of a tragedy. In fact it is more nearly like a comedy ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... go to the moving pictures with him?" Grace asked, rather unhappily. She had never been inside a moving picture theater. To her they meant something a step above the corner saloon, and a degree below the burlesque houses. They were constituted of bad air and unchaperoned young women accompanied by youths who dangled cigarettes from a lower lip, all obviously of the lower class, including the cigarette; and of other women, sometimes drab, dragged of breast and carrying children who should have been in bed ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... humor and in skill of literary treatment. The grotesque statement of impossibilities with which it begins is the Caucasian story-teller's conventional method of forewarning his hearers that they are about to listen to a burlesque, a pure extravaganza, lying entirely outside the domain of fact and reality. There is no attempt made to give it the air of truth: on the contrary, the narrator takes especial pains to demolish what little intrinsic probability the story ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... and assist the inspector were both pitiful and burlesque, to those who knew his daily habits. He wedged himself into the cage with Castle, handing him parcels of money to count, and playing the caddy to perfection. He lifted a bag of silver, and as he did so his bulging eyes rested waveringly on the teller, who was ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... fails him, that he is grand and lofty always in the right place, and knows infallibly how to rise and fall with his subject. Big words on small matters may serve as a pretty exact definition of the burlesque; an instance of which they will find in the Battle of the Frogs and Mice, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... Job. Arnold must have read Franklin's piece hastily, since he has mistaken a bit of ironic trifling for a serious attempt to rewrite the Scriptures. The Proposed New Version of the Bible is merely a bit of amusing burlesque in which six verses of the Book of Job are rewritten in the style of modern politics. According to Mr. William Temple Franklin the Bagatelles, of which the Proposed New Version is a part, were "chiefly written by ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... This burlesque note had been maturely studied. The last sentence might be interpreted in favour of all parties. By this expedient, Aristide devised a glorious return for himself on the morrow of battle, in the shape of a laudatory article on the victors. On the following day he showed himself to the whole ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... bewildering succession there are ballets on skates, solo skating numbers, skating carnivals and skating races. Finally scenery is slid in on runners and the whole company, in costumes grotesque and beautiful, go through a burlesque that keeps you laughing when you are not applauding, and admiring when you are doing neither; while alternating lightwaves from overhead electric devices flood the picture with shifting, shimmering tides of color. It is like seeing a Christmas pantomime under ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... Chinese condense brace quite bade oppose deceive force scribe burlesque embrace machine crease measure canine emerge endorse cease absolve caprice ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... you're right. One way or the other. Either go back to the old life or start a new one. What we are living now is a horrible burlesque." ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... example, whose poem was first published in 1656. Chapelain is unconsciously burlesque; he is a Scarron without knowing it. It is none the less interesting to learn from him that he merely treated his subject as an occasion for glorifying the Bastard of Orleans. He expressly says in his preface: "I did not so much regard her (the Maid) as the chief character ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... most successful flights of humor of Mark Twain have been descriptions of the persons who did not appreciate his humor at all. We have become familiar with the Californians who were thrilled with terror by his burlesque of a newspaper reporter's way of telling a story, and we have heard of the Pennsylvania clergyman who sadly returned his INNOCENTS ABROAD to the book-agent with the remark that "the man who could shed tears over the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... exile—le Canadien errant, comme dit la chanson populaire—qui croit toujours entendre resonner a son oreille le vague tintement des cloches de son village; que le recit soit plaisant ou pathetique, jamais la note ne sonne faux, jamais la bizarrerie ne degenere en puerilite burlesque. ...
— The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems • William Henry Drummond
... a thing entirely stately and beautiful as those terms are commonly understood. The whole world of the fantastic, all things top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of man, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns of Robert Browning. But in truth a part, and a very large part, of the sanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes all this instinct of caricature. Nature may present ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... concealed nearly the whole forehead; and, for a last adornment, the collar of his shirt and that of his coat came so high that his head seemed enveloped like a bunch of flowers in a horn of paper. Add to these queer accessories, which were combined in utter want of harmony, the burlesque contradictions in color of yellow trousers, scarlet waistcoat, cinnamon coat, and a correct idea will be gained of the supreme good taste which all dandies blindly obeyed in the first years of the Consulate. This costume, utterly ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... deeply embedded in matter, were also plunged in the grossest superstitions? Materialism in morals always ends by producing a low credulity. Here Augustin triumphs. He sends marching under our eyes, in a burlesque array, the innumerable army of gods whom the Romans believed in. There are so many that he compares them to swarms of gnats. Although he explains that he is not able to mention them all, he amuses himself by stupefying ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... Flower Seekers," superb with grace, warm harmony, and May ecstasies; "Confluentia," whose threads of liquidity are eruditely, yet romantically, intertangled to represent the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle; and "The Headless Horseman," a masterpiece of burlesque weirdness, representing the wild pursuit of Ichabod Crane and the final hurling of the awful head,—a pumpkin, some say. It is relieved by Ichabod's tender reminiscences of Katrina Van Tassel at the spinning-wheel, and is dedicated to Joseffy, the pianist, who lives ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... of rebel paraphernalia. Their only intent 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 a ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... territory, and cannot give foreigners the necessary protection, because Mataafa and his people can at any moment forcibly interrupt me in my jurisdiction." Yet in the eyes of Anglo-Saxons the severity of his code appeared burlesque. I give but three of its provisions. The crime of inciting German troops "by any means, as, for instance, informing them of proclamations by the enemy," was punishable with death; that of "publishing or ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... notable in him is the combination of three things; an immense love of life, a romantic interpretation of material things, and a remarkable talent for parody and burlesque. ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... the "Carpet-Bag," the subject of our sketch closely studied the theatre and courted the society of actors and actresses. It was in this way that he gained that correct and valuable knowledge of the texts and characters of the drama, which enabled him in after years to burlesque them so successfully. The humorous writings of Seba Smith were his models, and the oddities of "John Phoenix" were ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... wife is intrusted commonly to a slender man, beardless and fresh of face, who can give a great appearance of truth to his personification and plays the burlesque despair naturally enough to make people sad and glad at once, as they are in real life. These thin, beardless men are not rare among us, and, strangely enough, they are sometimes most remarkable ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... by storm. A letter of Mrs. Pendarves, dated January 19, but evidently continued later, tells us that she went to a rehearsal of Siroe: "I like it extremely, but the taste of the town is so depraved, that nothing will be approved of but the burlesque. The Beggar's Opera entirely triumphs over the Italian one." Even Mrs. Pendarves could not help enjoying it, once she had ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... subject, I should name the Hippolytus, Ion, Troades, Bacchae, and Iphigenia in Aulis as his best plays, placing the Phoenissae, Alcestis, Medea, Hecuba, and Orestes in a lower rank. The Helena is an amusing heap of absurdities, and reads much better in the burlesque of Aristophanes; the Electra is utterly beneath criticism; the Cyclops a weak, but humorous imitation of Homer. The other plays appear to be ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... art there are permissible certain exaggerations, as upon the stage. There is exaggeration of feature, exaggeration of talk, exaggeration in action. There are degrees of exaggeration, by which one passes through tragedy, comedy, farce, and burlesque; but in all there must be an exaggeration. Dickens was master of exaggeration—if he sometimes carried it too far, he produced farce, but never burlesque. As for selection, which is perhaps the most important point after exaggeration, it came ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Sisters" pursued its spectacular course; Ione Burke, Polly Marshall, and Mrs. Vining were in the cast; tableau succeeded tableau; "I wish I were in Dixie," was sung, and the popular burlesque ended in the celebrated scene, "The Birth of the Butterfly in the Bower of Ferns," with the entire company kissing their finger-tips to a vociferous ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... manner described by Tacitus, Annals, b. xiv. s. 16. And yet it may be a question, whether the satirist would have the hardiness to insert the very words of an imperial poet, armed with despotic power. A burlesque imitation would answer the purpose; and it may be inferred from another passage in the same poem, that Persius was content to ridicule the mode of versification then ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... more frequented than the preaching meeting, whenever that was held, and how, on one occasion, a party of scoffing unbelievers bore in mock triumph an effigy of the Saviour through the streets. A regular meeting of infidels was held, and burlesque celebrations of the Lord's Supper performed. Still later, when the business of slaughtering hogs became an important branch of industry, it was carried on regularly, on Sundays as well as on week-days, and as this was a leading feature in the year's doings the religious observance ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... man at his side felt as if he were witnessing a burlesque of himself as he listened to the pitiless and lurid description of torment which Elder Wheat poured forth,—the same figures and threats he had used a hundred times. He stirred uneasily in his seat, while the audience paid so little attention ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... "Salmagundi," Irving in connection with his brother Peter projected the work that was to make him famous. At first nothing more was intended than a satire upon the "Picture of New York," by Dr. Samuel Mitchell, just then published. It was begun as a mere burlesque upon pedantry and erudition, and was well advanced, when Peter was called by his business to Europe, and its completion was fortunately left to Washington. In his mind the idea expanded into a different conception. He condensed the mass of affected ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... a coloring drop of romance, for, as he himself would have said, he was diablement epris with Lucy. This was regarded as one of the best of Zavier's jokes. He himself laughed at it, and his extravagant compliments and gallantries were well within the pale of the burlesque. Lucy laughed at them, too. The only one that took the matter seriously was Bella. She ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... not already been bereft of his senses by the melodrama preceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty, her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart, but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate who fought a losing fight with broadswords, two up and two down—click-click, click-click—and died all over ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... and my hands trembled. In what burlesque comedy is there a jealous lover so stupid as to inquire what has become of a cup? Why seek to discover whether Smith and Madame Pierson had drunk from the same cup? What ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... poem was intended for perusal only, the author, one would have thought, might have easily avoided. This arises from the stage directions, which supply the place of the terrific and beautiful descriptions of Milton. What idea, except burlesque, can we form of the expulsion of the fallen angels from heaven, literally represented by their tumbling down upon the stage? or what feelings of terror can be excited by the idea of an opera hell, composed of pasteboard and flaming rosin? If these follies were ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... refinement; so unarmed a credulity, noblest of weaknesses, betrayed for the laughter of a chambermaid. By an actual Bottom the Weaver our pity might be reached for the sake of his single self-reliance, his fancy and resource condemned to burlesque and ignominy by the niggard doom of circumstance. But is not life one thing and is not art another? Is it not the privilege of literature to make selection and to treat things singly, without the after-thoughts ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... to be known in the neighbourhood as a maker of rhymes. The first of my poetic offspring that saw the light was a burlesque lamentation on a quarrel between two reverend Calvinists, both of them dramatis personae in my "Holy Fair". I had a notion myself that the piece had some merit; but, to prevent the worst, I gave a copy of it to a friend, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... of moderation. Many were intoxicated; guests and attendants mingled together without distinction, the serious and the ludicrous; drunken fancies and affairs of state were blended one with another in a burlesque medley; and the discussions on the general distress of the country ended in the wild uproar of a bacchanalian revel. But it did not stop here; what they had resolved on in the moment of intoxication, they attempted when sober to carry ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... making it a club of the lowest species. Here, in advance, we contemplate the ways of the future revolutionary inquisition. They welcome burlesque denunciations; enter into petty police investigations; weigh the tittle-tattle of porters and the gossip of servant-girls; devote an all-night session to the secrets of a drunkard.[2218] They enter on their official report and without any disapproval, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... English burlesque of the unprofitable sermons of the preaching friars in the Middle Ages, which is worthy of Rabelais himself, and of which this is ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... Brunswick; and promised protection to the inhabitants, if they behaved themselves accordingly. Two regiments were left at Castine, with transports to remove them in case of attack by superior numbers. This burlesque of occupation, "one foot on shore, and one on sea," was advanced by the British ministry as a reason justifying the demand for cession of the desired territory to the northward. Wellington, when called into counsel concerning American affairs, said derisively that an officer ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... Abolition of the Slave Trade (1781.) Mrs. Hannah More has also written several works of religious fiction, and above all, some charming poems; Florio (1786,) and the Blue Stocking, or Conversation. The Blue Stocking is a burlesque name given to a lady's coterie, in which several females attempted to start a sort of bureau d'esprit under the direction of Mesdames Robinson and Piozzi, a coterie innocent enough, but which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various
... burlesque of the casket scene in which Gratiano played Portia's part, Shylock was Nerissa, Gobbo Bassanio, and Jessica the Prince of Morocco. Next Alice called for the Gobbos and Portia and the Prince of Morocco ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... of Ariosto's continuation called Orlando Furioso ("Orlando mad"). Robert Greene, in 1594, produced a drama which he called The History of Orlando. Rhode's farce of Bombast[^e]s Furioso (1790) is a burlesque of Ariosto's ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... corruptions, or, as they are called, alterations and adaptations of the plays of Shakspeare. As he has not prosecuted the subject, I will, with your permission, say a word or two on that vilest and most infamous of literary treasons, Tate's burlesque of king Lear. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... perched the effigies of the Meistersinger's feathered friends, from whom the canons of the church, as Mrs. March read aloud from her Baedeker, long ago directed his bequest to themselves. In revenge for their lawless greed the defrauded beneficiaries choose to burlesque the affair by looking like the four- and-twenty blackbirds when the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the thundering vaunts of this Scythian Shepherd. He comes in drawn by conquered kings, and reproaches these pampered jades of Asia that they can draw but twenty miles a day. Till I saw this passage with my own eyes, I never believed that it was anything more than a pleasant burlesque of mine Ancient's. But I can assure my readers that it is soberly set down in a play, which their ancestors took to ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... our rooms.... Great was our merriment; for if we did not always sink the shop, we kept it solely for our own amusement. Fitz-James O'Brien was a frequent guest, and an eager partaker of our merriment, which sometimes resolved itself into the writing of burlesque poems. We sat around a table, and whenever the whim seized us, we each wrote down themes on little pieces of paper, and putting them into a hat or box we drew out one at random, and then scribbled away for dear life. We put no restriction upon ourselves: ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... chiefs and principal men of each village grouped themselves together. Some were garbed in beaver skins, others in the shaggy hide of the bear. Still others were guiltless of apparel, and all bore themselves with an excessive dignity bordering on burlesque. Brebeuf, Daniel, and Davost stood by in their sable vestments; and in the midst of all was Champlain surrounded by the soldiers of his garrison. The next two days were given up to trade—a beaver-skin exchanging for a tin kettle, a bright cloth, or a string of ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... my impressions I finally got upstairs again to bed. It was four o'clock in the morning. I laughed all the way up—at the grotesque banisters, the droll physiognomy of the staircase window, the burlesque grouping of the furniture, and the memory of that outrageous footstool in the room below; but nothing more happened to alarm or disturb me, and I woke late in the morning after a dreamless sleep, none the worse for my experiment except ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... in your eternal daubs!" exclaimed M. Leminof, reseating himself. "You know that I dislike to wait. I profess, it is true, a passionate admiration for the burlesque masterpieces with which you are decorating the walls of my chapel; but I cannot suffer them to annoy me, and I beg you not to sacrifice again the respect you owe me to your foolish passion for those coarse paintings; if you do, I shall some fine morning bury your sublime daubings under ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... c. 1790). Dictionnaire comique, satyrique, critique, burlesque, libre & proverbial. AAmsterdam, chez Michel ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... He points out how the poets began to introduce rhyme into alliterative verse, until at length rhyme came to predominate over alliteration, and "thus was this kind of metre at length swallowed up and lost in the common burlesque Alexandrine or anapaestic verse, as "A cobbler there was, and he lived in a stall.'' Percy made a serious mistake when he gave the name of Alexandrine to anapaestic verse; but he is quite right in his general statement that alliterative verse ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... indeed. Maurice, will you come and help us?" says Tita, seeing her husband, and going to him gladly, as a means of getting out of her ridiculous interview with Mrs. Chichester, which has begun to border on burlesque. ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... think you might make a success," he said, "of an entertainment like one I attended up in the mountains last summer. It was called a 'County Fair,' and was a sort of burlesque on the county fairs or state fairs that used to be held annually, and are still, I believe, in some ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... appearance will make a contrast with her office. As to the other, she still has beauty and elegance; but do you imagine, Sire, that the Court of Bavaria and the Court of France have forgotten, in so short a time, the pleasant and burlesque ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... troops, October 20th. He was again arrested next month; but the court did not sit until July of the next year, and their decision is not known. Col. Butler died Sept. 7, 1805. Out of the arrest and persecution of this sturdy veteran, Washington Irving (Knickerbocker) has worked up a fine piece of burlesque, in which Gen. Wilkinson's character is inimitably delineated in that of the vain and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... the sailor and his Portsmouth Poll, it all at once came to my mind that no Portsmouth Poll would ever wait for me. Did you ever hear anything so ridiculously absurd—such a bit of maudlin nonsense. I laughed at myself afterwards. It gave me a good, idea, though. I'll compose a burlesque, and the refrain ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... If 'to bathe in reeking wounds,' and 'spongy officers,' and even 'alarum'd by his sentinel the wolf, Whose howl's his watch,' and other such phrases in Macbeth, had occurred in the speech of Aeneas, we should certainly have been told that they were meant for burlesque. I open Troilus and Cressida (because, like the speech of Aeneas, it has to do with the story of Troy), and I read, in a perfectly serious context (IV. v. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... in front of a neighbour's door, as a nuptial serenade on the occasion of some unsuitable marriage; when the clamour of horns and kettles, marrow-bones and cleavers, saluted the mother's ears, accompanied by thirty burlesque verses, the composition of the father of the child who had ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... in the Epistle of Mrs. Barbauld to Wilberforce, on the subject of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1781.) Mrs. Hannah More has also written several works of religious fiction, and above all, some charming poems; Florio (1786,) and the Blue Stocking, or Conversation. The Blue Stocking is a burlesque name given to a lady's coterie, in which several females attempted to start a sort of bureau d'esprit under the direction of Mesdames Robinson and Piozzi, a coterie innocent enough, but which excited the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various
... taxes, or any thing else when yer honor is near? Will yer enter me tent and partake of me hospitalities?" demanded Pat, with a serious face, and a show of politeness that was refreshing, knowing as I did that it was intended as burlesque. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... in their own smoke. The ghastly desert of Taverna was not forgotten, nor the old Genoese tower that served as an office for the Maritime Agency. But the detail that rejoiced the heart of the Chamber above all else was the description of a burlesque ceremonial organized by the Governor for driving a tunnel through Monte-Rotondo,—a gigantic undertaking still in the air, postponed from year to year, requiring millions of money and thousands of arms, which had been inaugurated ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... intending to lead them to the field. Prevented from carrying out this design, his energies were directed to a more effective service. His famous "Nasby Letters" exposed the absurd and sophistical argumentations of rebels and their sympathisers, in such broad, attractive and admirable burlesque, as to direct against them the "loud, long laughter of a world!" The unique and telling satire of these papers became a power and inspiration to our armies in the field and to their anxious friends at home, more than equal to the might of whole battalions poured in upon the enemy. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... and gallantry, it was hoped I would do my utmost to maintain it; after which I was dismissed. I soon found that my exploit had placed me upon quite a different footing in the ship from that which I had occupied before. The men treated me with real respect, instead of the good-humoured burlesque thereof which they had accorded me hitherto; and my fellow-mids at once received me into the berth upon a footing of perfect equality with themselves, each one striving to do me some little kindness or show me some little attention, in place ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... hath styled Tom Thumb "Heroum omnium tragicorum facile principem:" nay, though it hath, among other languages, been translated into Dutch, and celebrated with great applause at Amsterdam (where burlesque never came) by the title of Mynheer Vander Thumb, the burgomasters receiving it with that reverent and silent attention which becometh an audience at a deep tragedy. Notwithstanding all this, there have not been wanting some who have represented these scenes ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal—a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... passengers concerning Senor Perkins' extravagant adulation of this unknown poetess. As a part of the staple monotonous humor of the voyage, it had only disgusted him. With a feeling that he was unconsciously sharing the burlesque relief of the passengers, he said, with a polite ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... had no sooner recover'd, and had heard of the Menaces of Caesar, but he called his Council, who (not to disgrace them, or burlesque the Government there) consisted of such notorious Villains as Newgate never transported; and, possibly, originally were such who understood neither the Laws of God or Man, and had no sort of Principles to make them worthy the Name of ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... and the Field of Hastings," at the other house, is very pleasant too. The irascible William is acted with great vigour by Snoxall, and the battle of Hastings is a good piece of burlesque. Some trifling liberties are taken with history, but what liberties will not the merry genius of pantomime permit himself? At the battle of Hastings, William is on the point of being defeated by the Sussex volunteers, very elegantly led by ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... near the floor made me bend down hastily with a stern: "Don't laugh," for in his grotesque, almost burlesque discourses there seemed to me to be truth, passion, and horror ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... palpable parody, not only of the general spirit, but of the numerous passages of the Iliad itself; and even, if no such intention to parody were discernible in it, the objection would still remain, that to suppose a work of mere burlesque to be the primary effort of poetry in a simple age, seems to reverse that order in the development of national taste, which the history of every other people in Europe, and of many in Asia, has almost ascertained to be a ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... contemporary historical accounts. A poet or a dramatist is not responsible for the accuracy of chronicles. But what is an attack upon Joan, being briefly the foulest and obscenest attempt ever made to stifle the grandeur of a great human struggle, viz., the French burlesque poem of La Pucelle—what memorable man was it that wrote that? Was he a Frenchman, or was he not? That M. Michelet should pretend to have forgotten this vilest of pasquinades, is more shocking to the general sense of justice than ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... every Frenchman on earth is more or less a persifleur, you must never practise the art upon himself. M. Rossignol Perigord Pantoufle would have been an incomparable subject for the exercise, for he was eccentricity from top to toe. But the state of my spirits prevented my taking any share in the burlesque which too frequently befell this worthy person; and he attached himself to me as a sort of refuge from the sly, but stinging, persecution of his fellow-officers. When the hen-wife plucks the goose's bosom it makes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... of high morality, and so deeply embedded in matter, were also plunged in the grossest superstitions? Materialism in morals always ends by producing a low credulity. Here Augustin triumphs. He sends marching under our eyes, in a burlesque array, the innumerable army of gods whom the Romans believed in. There are so many that he compares them to swarms of gnats. Although he explains that he is not able to mention them all, he amuses himself by stupefying us with the prodigious ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... readily imagined, though it might not be pleasant to describe. Suffice it to say, that she sees no shame in addressing them, or in allowing herself to be addressed by a name which a Court of law has held to be libellous when applied to a burlesque actress. She is always at Hurlingham or the Ranelagh, and has seen pigeons killed without a qualm. She never misses a Sandown or a Kempton meeting; she dazzles the eyes of the throng at Ascot every year, and never ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... up the unsatisfactory reply in an exasperated burlesque of mimicry: "I cannot say, sir—you cannot say? Pooh, pooh, there is no shame in being in love with her. We all are more or less; pass the bottle. As for you, since you clapped eyes on her you have been like a man in the moon, not a word to throw to a dog, no eyes, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... speak of the cubic contents of anything? The inference is easy: reduce all objects to forms which can be bounded by planes and defined by straight lines and angles; make their cubic contents measurable to the eye; transform drawing into a burlesque of solid geometry; and you have, at once, attained to the highest art. The Futurist, on the other hand, maintains that we know nothing but that things are in flux. Form, solidity, weight are illusions. Nothing ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... The book has a few gorgeous passages. Among the documents read at the trial of Innocent Smith, for example, is a statement made by a Trans-Siberian station-master, which is a perfectly exquisite burlesque at the expense of the Russian intelligenzia. The whole series of documents, in fact, are delightful bits of self-expression on the part of a very varied team of selves. While Chesterton is able to turn out such things we must be content to take the page, and not ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... or passionate appeals to religious feeling, his sermons were noble exceptions to the common practice. And the descent from Gerson to even his more eminent successors is swift and steep. The orators of the pulpit varied their discourse from burlesque mirth or bitter invective to gross terrors, in which death and judgment, Satan and hell-fire were largely displayed. The sermons of Michel Menot and Olivier Maillard, sometimes eloquent in their censure of sin, sometimes ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... be no chance for mistake even to the veriest embryonic reader of Horace, if he will but remember that, while some of these transcriptions are indeed very faithful reproductions or adaptations of the original, others again are to be accepted as the very riot of burlesque verse-making. ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... contrast, no impulse given to the mind. It is all on a level and of a piece. In fact, there is so little connection between the subject-matter of Mr. Crabbe's lines and the ornament of rhyme which is tacked to them, that many of his verses read like serious burlesque, and the parodies which have been made upon them are hardly ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... my pet," he said at last. "You've been tiring yourself too much. You must rest. You'd better not go to the Brilliant Theatre to-night—it's only a burlesque, and is sure to be vulgar and noisy. We'll stop at home and spend a quiet evening ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... signs of intellectual barrenness and the vicious pandering to lower appetites, consequent upon the trading spirit of literature, we note with regret the growing tendency to desecrate beautiful subjects by using them as materials for burlesque. We have had a Comic History of England—one of the dreariest and least excusable of jokes, and capable of for ever vulgarizing in the young mind the great deeds and noble life of our forefathers—and we have had burlesques in which the loved fairy tales that have charmed ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... by any chance have dreamed of that stately honor. His ambitions did not lie in the direction of mental achievement. It is true that now and then, on Friday at school, he read a composition, one of which—a personal burlesque on certain older boys—came near resulting in bodily damage. But any literary ambition he may have had in those days was a fleeting thing. His permanent dream was to be a pirate, or a pilot, or a bandit, or a trapper-scout; something gorgeous and active, where ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... this shocking burlesque upon legislative proceedings, we must not forget that there is something very real to this uncouth and untutored multitude. It is not all sham, nor all burlesque. They have a genuine interest and a genuine earnestness in the business of the assembly which we are bound to recognize ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... woman. You couldn't make a prettier present to a person with whom you wished to exchange a harmless joke. It is not classic art, signore, of course; but, between ourselves, isn't classic art sometimes rather a bore? Caricature, burlesque, la charge, as the French say, has hitherto been confined to paper, to the pen and pencil. Now, it has been my inspiration to introduce it into statuary. For this purpose I have invented a peculiar plastic compound which you will permit me ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... feeble in mind and in body, with red, contracted, watering eyes, "Yes, sir, if I had been Sam Tilden, the blood in these streets would have touched your stirrups"—the little man had no stirrups—"This country is trembling over an abyss deeper'n the infernal regions. Ha, ha! What a ghastly burlesque on human freedom! Now, hark you, Pickles"—the small man was not only listening, but, I could imagine, trembling. He would now and then look furtively around, as if fearing that somebody else might hear the doctor, and that war would begin—"listen to me: 'Hell ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... make a success," he said, "of an entertainment like one I attended up in the mountains last summer. It was called a 'County Fair,' and was a sort of burlesque on the county fairs or state fairs that used to be held annually, and are still, I believe, in some sections of ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... epilogue after a serious play, speaking of the fate of those unhappy wretches who are condemned to suffer an ignominious death by the justice of our laws, endeavours to make the reader merry on so improper an occasion by those poor burlesque expressions of tragical dramas and monthly performances.—I am, Sir, with great respect, your most ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... was surprised that Blent did not on the instant punish the blasphemy by a revengeful earthquake or an overwhelming flood. Cecily caught her by the arm, a burlesque apprehension screwing her face up into a ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... Motte, and, perhaps more to avenge him for the "grosses paroles de Mme. Dacier"[33] than to depreciate le divin Homere (whom he made a point of always mentioning in that way), would not let the matter rest, and, in 1717, composed a burlesque poem entitled l'Iliade ravestie. Had he been familiar with the Greek language, he might never have committed this piece of literary impudence, but he knew Homer only through La Motte's reduction of the Iliad, which in turn was based upon Mme. Dacier's translation. If his object was ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... box tickets were 9s., the upper boxes, 8s., the pit, 6s., and the gallery, 2s.; and the proceeds realised no less a sum than 610 pounds! The performances were the "Poor Gentleman," "A Concert," by musical amateurs, and the burlesque of "Bombastes Furioso." The characters were personated for the most part in each of the pieces by amateurs, amongst whom were several of the leading gentlemen of the town, who spared no pains, study, nor cost to ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... as their mother, had an unpleasant lisp, and yet they always took part in every play and were always doing something for charity—acting, reciting, singing. They were very serious and never smiled, and even in burlesque operettas they acted without gaiety and with a businesslike air, as though ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... to the antique hymn a new character and a more scientific music [9],—gradually, in Attica, it gave way before the familiar and fantastic humours of the satyrs, sometimes abridged to afford greater scope to their exhibitions—sometimes contracting the contagion of their burlesque. Still, however, the reader will observe, that the tragedy, or goatsong, consisted of two parts—first, the exhibition of the mummers, and, secondly, the dithyrambic chorus, moving in a circle round the altar of Bacchus. It appears on ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... story!—something rises to my throat when I recollect how I rewarded her sisterly love!—I was elder than Clara—I should have directed her reading, and confirmed her understanding; but my own bent led me to peruse only works, which, though they burlesque nature, are seductive to the imagination. We read these follies together, until we had fashioned out for ourselves a little world of romance, and prepared ourselves for a maze of adventures. Clara's imaginations were as pure as those of angels; mine were—but it is unnecessary to tell ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... Fielding's burlesque tragedy, 'The Tragedy of Tragedies; or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... imperfect. I shall now have much to add. I can say that the Prince, whom I had accused of idleness, is zealous in the department of police, taking upon himself those duties that are most distasteful. I shall be able to relate the burlesque incident of my arrest, and the singular interview with which you honour me at present. For the rest, I have already communicated with my Ambassador at Vienna; and unless you propose to murder me, I shall be at liberty, whether you please or not, within the week. For I hardly fancy the future ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... But 'twas no burlesque that night, as you may know when I tell you that Governor Brigdar's forces played us such a trick they were under shelter of the ship before ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... felt a little embarrassed. But, on the other hand, she had pledged her word, and a silly performance it was! But she would keep it, at least until Lady Hamilton released her from her promise. Patty's ideas of honour were, perhaps, a little strained, but she took the promise of that burlesque document as seriously as if it had been of national importance. And now she was in a dilemma. To refuse to walk with the Earl was so rude, and yet to talk with him was ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... itself whether discipline be not the final cause of the universe, and whether Nature outwardly exists. The frivolous make themselves merry with the ideal theory as if its consequences were burlesque, as if it affected the stability of Nature. It surely does not. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... boast of another good shepherd (Act 3, Sc. 3), but he savors a little of burlesque. "Macbeth" has several humble worthies. There is a good old man in the second act (Sc. 2), and a good messenger in the fourth (Sc. 2). King Duncan praises highly the sergeant who brings the news of Macbeth's victory, and uses language ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... the first part of the work which made Cervantes famous, and which has kept his name before the world ever since. This was the inimitable Don Quixote, which gives the burlesque adventures of the self-styled "Knight of the Rueful Countenance." This book was not intended to satirize knight-errantry itself, for that had long before died out in Spain. What it did aim to do was to make ridiculous the romances of chivalry over which all Spain at the time of Cervantes ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... more than this: he was the ship's wag, and so was greeted with shouts and whistles of approval as he stepped on to the stage attired in the burlesque ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... golden Monday afternoon I should have been slowly coming down the Housatonic Valley, with my dear little wife beside me. Instead, the unfamiliar train, and the fat man at my side reading a campaign newspaper, and shaking his huge sides over some broad burlesque. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... epitaphs are a burlesque upon religion, a caricature of all things holy, divine, and beautiful, and an outrage upon the common sense and culture of the community. A collection of comic churchyard poetry might be made in this place which would eclipse ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... house in the adaptation of attire. Very estimable and we trust very religious young women sometimes enter the house of God in a costume which makes their utterance of the words of the litany and the acts of prostrate devotion in the service seem almost burlesque. When a brisk little creature comes into a pew with hair frizzed till it stands on end in a most startling manner, rattling strings of beads and bits of tinsel, mounting over all some pert little hat with a red or green feather standing saucily upright in front, she may look exceedingly pretty ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... billy-cock hat. Portia was attired as a barrister in wig and gown and Nerissa as a clerk with a green bag and a pen behind his ear. This being much appreciated, Your Humble Servant questions what portion of the Bard of Avon he shall next burlesque. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... and had something of Luis de Leon's fearlessness.[118] Zuniga (alias Rodriguez) was a man of a very different type: pedantically attached to the letter of the law, morbidly scrupulous on points of discipline. There seems to be no touch of burlesque intention in Luis de Leon's presentment of the man. According to Luis de Leon, Zuniga (alias Rodriguez) was half-crazed with vanity, much given to boasting of the esteem in which he was held at the Papal Court. On one occasion, the fatuous Zuniga produced a short treatise ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... public and personal, has long been a stranger to the island. Internal improvements, such as the laying and repairing of roads, the erection of bridges, building wharves, piers, &c., were either wholly neglected, or conducted in such a listless manner as to be a burlesque on the name of business. It was a standing task, requiring the combined energy of the island, to repair the damages of one hurricane before another came. The following circumstance was told us, by one of the shrewdest observers of men ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... mercantile agencies were young, they acquired a consensus of opinion upon a business man by annoying his acquaintances with inquiries. One such house queried of Lincoln about one of his neighbors. His reply was a smart burlesque on the bases on which they ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... ph]. point out in any existing poem of such profession and character, a single heroic line, consisting of ten words, all which ten words shall be "low" in the sense of "vulgar"? Can even the Muses of burlesque and slang ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... the shrewdly practical Pandarus of the former poem—a character almost wholly of Chaucer's creation—is the very embodiment of the anti-romantic attitude, and a remarkable anticipation of Sancho Panza; while the "Rime of Sir Thopas" is a distinct burlesque of the fantastic chivalry romances.[2] Chaucer's pages are picturesque with tournament, hunting parties, baronial feasts, miracles of saints, feats of magic; but they are solid, as well, with the everyday life of fourteenth-century England. They have the naivete and garrulity ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... scenes and danced comic ballets. I leave you to imagine whether these now wonderful, now charming improvisations quickened the brains and made supple the legs of our performers. He led them as he pleased and made them pass, according to his fancy, from the droll to the severe, from the burlesque to the solemn, from the graceful to the passionate. We improvised costumes in order to play successively several roles. As soon as the artist saw them appear, he adapted his theme and his accent in a marvellous ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... would call there on its provincial progress, and it chanced one day, looking into a shop window, that Theophil caught sight of a photograph of a woman that startled him with its remarkable resemblance to Jenny. It was the prima donna of a Gaiety burlesque. Such was the strange shape Jenny had for the ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... family of the Snobs, and in every way did honour to her progenitors. As the reader is aware, there is what is known as a "cultivated voice," the result of education—it is absolutely without affectation: there is also the voice which, in imitation of the well-trained one, is little more than a burlesque, and is affected in the highest degree: this was the only ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... illusion which is the aim of the short story—the introduction, for example, of the author's personality—any comment that seems to admit that, after all, fiction is fiction, a change in manner between part and part, burlesque, parody, invective, all such thing's are not necessarily wrong in the novel. Of course, all these things may fail in their effect; they may jar, hinder, irritate, and all are difficult to do well; but it is no artistic merit to evade a difficulty any more than it is a merit in a hunter ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... use in the service of history that "knack ... for selecting the striking and interesting points out of dull details," which he felt was his endowment.[412] The original introduction to the Tales of the Crusaders has the following burlesque announcement of his intention, in the words of the Eidolon Chairman: "I intend to write the most wonderful book which the world ever read—a book in which every incident shall be incredible, yet strictly true—a ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... in the Institution. Some who send in these resolutions privately, are, no doubt, secret friends, needing a little more courage to face the pro-slavery feeling and sentiment which are all about them. Some one who read these resolutions suggested the idea of their being a burlesque. I repudiated the idea at once. They will commend themselves to you, dear Aunty, I am sure, ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... to indulge in. A very strange note, preserved at Siena, to a "Nina padrona mia dilettissima," shows that the memory of Gori and the friendship of Gori's friends were not the only things which attracted him ever and anon from Florence to Siena. A collection of wretched bouts-rimes and burlesque doggrel, written at Florence in a house which Mme. d'Albany could not enter, and in the company of women whom Mme. d'Albany could not receive, and among which is a sonnet in which Alfieri explains his condescension in joining in these poetical exercises ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... resuscitation of the spectacle play, with its lavish tinsel and calcium glare and its multitudinous nymphs; by the opera bouffe, with its frequent licentious ribaldry; by the music-hall comedian, with his vulgar realism; and by the idiotic burlesque; with its futile babble and its big-limbed, half-naked girls. Nevertheless there are just as good actors now living as have ever lived, and there is just as fine a sense of dramatic art in the community as ever existed in any of "the palmy days"; only, what ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... will be commenced a new burlesque serial, "The Mystery of Mister E. Drood," written expressly for this paper by the celebrated humorist, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... debated. Amidst assassination, massacre, and confiscation, perpetrated or meditated, they are forming plans for the good order of future society. Who is it that admires, and from the heart is attached to, national representative assemblies, but must turn with horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque and abominable perversion of that sacred ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... Balcony. Balustrade. Bandit. Bankrupt. Bravo. Brigade. Brigand. Broccoli. Burlesque. Bust. Cameo. Canteen. Canto. Caprice. Caricature. Carnival. Cartoon. Cascade. Cavalcade. Charlatan. Citadel. Colonnade. Concert. Contralto. Conversazione. Cornice. Corridor. Cupola. Curvet. Dilettante. Ditto. Doge. Domino. Extravaganza. Fiasco. Folio. ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... sculptor sat at the same board as Marsilio Ficino, interpreter of Plato; Pico della Mirandola, the phoenix of Oriental erudition; Angelo Poliziano, the unrivalled humanist and melodious Italian poet; Luigi Pulci, the humorous inventor of burlesque romance—with artists, scholars, students innumerable, all in their own departments capable of satisfying a youth's curiosity, by explaining to him the particular virtues of books discussed, or of antique works of ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... reverence for its sanction, two or three testimonies given in a court of justice usually cured them. The indifferent, business-like manner in which the oaths are put, the sing-song tone of voice, the rapid utterance of the words, give to this solemn act an appearance of excellent burlesque, which ultimately renders the whole proceedings remarkable for the absence of truth and reality; but, at the same time, gives them unquestionable merit as a dramatic representation, abounding with fiction, well related and ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... into a small square, laid it on the wet beaten grass, and sat thereon, arching his knees till only the soles of his boots touched the ground. To Alec's eye his long, thin figure looked so odd, bent into this repeated angle, that he almost suspected burlesque, but none was intended. The youth clasped his hands round his knees, the better to keep himself upright, and seated thus a few yards from the body, he shared the watch for some time as mute as was all else in that ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... recognised on that occasion, between good-natured and ill-natured mimicry. Now nothing can be more harmless fun than my Carrie's imitations. She never has the bad taste to mimic a deformity, or to burlesque a misfortune. She certainly said of Mrs. Blomonge (who is known to be the stoutest person in the parish of St. Bride's) that her head floated on her shoulders like a waterlily on a pond; but then the joke was irresistible, and there was ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... proper, why not do equal honour to a Shakspeare, a Pitt, a Newton, or any of those illustrious men by whose superior intelligence society has so greatly profited?" The obvious truth is, that such "celebrations" are not to our taste, that there is something burlesque, to our ideas, in this useless honour; and that we think a bonfire, a discharge of squibs, or even a discharge of rhetoric, and a display of tinsel banners and buffoonery, does not supply the most natural way of reviving the memory of departed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Fields on January 29, 1728, and at once took London by storm. A letter of Mrs. Pendarves, dated January 19, but evidently continued later, tells us that she went to a rehearsal of Siroe: "I like it extremely, but the taste of the town is so depraved, that nothing will be approved of but the burlesque. The Beggar's Opera entirely triumphs over the Italian one." Even Mrs. Pendarves could not help enjoying it, once ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... celebrity. Strangers even went to him, and gravely asked to be permitted to shake hands with him as such. He was pointed out to newcomers, and observed on all hands with a serious respect that had all the comedy of piquant burlesque. ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... the burlesque, cynic, or vulgar phases of life to secure amusement. He is grotesque and droll in his manner, and above all always restrained. His literary life is full of sprites and gnomes that frolic before young children and once before mature people. The Griffin and the Minor Canon is a beautiful ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... lines entitled "New Style," which are a burlesque on Wordsworth, Landor introduces a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... artists, such as Ostade, Mieris, and Dou. But, even taking into consideration its satirical character, one must say that Steen has often exceeded his purpose if he really had a purpose. The fury with which he pursued the burlesque often got the better of his feeling for reality; his figures, instead of being merely ridiculous, became monstrous and hardly human, often resembling beasts rather than men, and he has exaggerated these figures until ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... (d. c. 1790). Dictionnaire comique, satyrique, critique, burlesque, libre & proverbial. AAmsterdam, chez Michel Charles. ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... sapphics on the spring, which, though they date from the seventh century, have a truly modern sentiment of Nature. Such, too, is the medieval legend of the Snow-Child, treated comically in burlesque Latin verse, and meant to be sung to a ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... You preach to me no more, You, once so glib with holy words! I am Astonished!. . . (With burlesque fury): Stay, I will surprise you too! Hark! I permit you. . . (He pretends to be seeking for something to tease her with, and to have found it): . . .It is something new!— To—pray for me, to-night, ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... Confederation—horror-struck, as may be imagined, at its auxiliary Brother of the Sun and Moon and his performances—is weltering in violently impotent spasms into deeper and ever deeper wretchedness, Friedrich sometimes thinking of a Burlesque Poem on the subject;—though the Russian successes, and the Austrian grudgings and gloomings, are rising on him as a very serious consideration. "Is there no method, then, of allowing Russia to prosecute its Turk War in spite of Austria and its umbrages?" thinks Friedrich ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and arms which no one had yet gazed upon except her husband and maids. Of course Katenka sided with her mother and, in general, there became established between Avdotia and ourselves, from the day of her arrival, the most extraordinary and burlesque order of relations. As soon as she stepped from the carriage, Woloda assumed an air of great seriousness and ceremony, and, advancing towards her with much bowing and scraping, said in the tone of one who is ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... but may it not also occasionally express itself indirectly in these purple towers of painted velvet words, extravagant fables, and unbelievable characters he is so fond of erecting? Some of his work almost approaches the burlesque in form. He carries his manner to a point where he seems to laugh at it himself, and then, with a touch of poignant realism or a poetic phrase, he confounds the reader's judgment. The virtuosity of the ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... mock-heroic gigantesque, With which we bantered little Lilia first: The women—and perhaps they felt their power, For something in the ballads which they sang, Or in their silent influence as they sat, Had ever seemed to wrestle with burlesque, And drove us, last, to quite a solemn close— They hated banter, wished for something real, A gallant fight, a noble princess—why Not make her true-heroic—true-sublime? Or all, they said, as earnest as ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... of the Lord, ogress, every man beholds her according to his own fashion, creates her according to his own image. Pious souls clothe her with an invincible charm and the divine gift of charity; simple souls make her simple too; men gross and violent figure her a giantess, burlesque and terrible. Shall we ever discern the true features of her countenance? Behold her, from the first and perhaps for ever enclosed in a ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... Review (February, 1818, vol. xxix. pp. 302-310), is unconcerned with regard to Whistlecraft, or any earlier model, but observes "that the nearest approach to it [Beppo] is to be found in some of the tales and lighter pieces of Prior—a few stanzas here and there among the trash and burlesque of Peter Pindar, and in several passages of Mr. Moore, and the author of the facetious miscellany entitled ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... these beautiful hills that Bayard Taylor lived and wrote his "Hannah Thurston," a most contemptible burlesque of his own neighbors and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of Portraits, engraved, painted, hewn, and written; of Eulogies, Reminiscences, Biographies, nay Vaudevilles, Dramas and Melodramas, in all Provinces of France, there will, through these coming months, be the due immeasurable crop; thick as the leaves of Spring. Nor, that a tincture of burlesque might be in it, is Gobel's Episcopal Mandement wanting; goose Gobel, who has just been made Constitutional Bishop of Paris. A Mandement wherein ca ira alternates very strangely with Nomine Domini, and you are, with a grave countenance, invited ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... few days, or even hours. While a few gained a competence, many gained only a bare subsistence; thousands lost their health, and not a few their lives. It was a strange play that men enacted there, embracing all the confusion, glitter, rapid change of scene, burlesque, and comedy of a pantomime, with many a dash of darkest tragedy intermingled. Tents were pitched in all directions, houses were hastily run up, restaurants of all kinds were opened, boats were turned keel up and converted into cottages, while ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... falling into disorder, you promptly married a wealthy woman—the poor, rich lady who has for some years honoured you by being your duchess at a distance. This burlesque of a marriage helped to reassure your friends, and actually obtained for you an ornamental appointment for which an over-taxed nation provides a handsome stipend. But, to sum up, you must always remain an irritating source of uneasiness to your own order, ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... He was wont bitterly to complain that the Manuscript in which he had written down an Account of his Life at Juan Fernandez had been cozened out of him by some crafty Booksellers; and that a Paraphrase, or rather Burlesque, of it, in a most garbled and mutilated form, had been printed as a Children's Story-book, under the name of ROBINSON CRUSOE. This was done by one Mr. Daniel Foe, a Newswriter, who, in my Youth, stood in the Pillory by Temple Bar, for a sedition in some plaguey Church-matters. ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... pleasures of the understanding are preferable to those of the imagination, or of sense."—Murray's Key, 8vo, p. 191. "Claudian, in a fragment upon the wars of the giants, has contrived to render this idea of their throwing the mountains, which is in itself so grand, burlesque, and ridiculous."—Blair's Rhet., p. 42. "To which not only no other writings are to be preferred, but even in divers respects not comparable."— Barclay's Works, i, 53. "To distinguish them in the understanding, and treat of their several natures, in the same cool ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... was a strange evolution. He was a man who had spent a lifetime in the show business, running first a concert hall that "broke into the papers" every Sunday morning with an account of from two to seven fights the night before, then an equally disreputable "burlesque" house, the broad attractions of which appealed to men and boys only. To this, as he made money, he added the cheapest and most blood-curdling melodrama theater in town, then a "regular" house of the second grade. In his career he had endured ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... afterwards drew in bolder colours. Thus, Montezuma, who, like the hero of an ancient romance, bears fortune to any side which he pleases to espouse, is justly pointed out by Settle, as the prototype of Almanzor; though we look in vain for the glowing language, which, though sometimes bordering on burlesque, suits so well the extravagant character of the Moorish hero. Zempoalla strongly resembles Nourmuhal in Aureng-Zebe; both shewing that high spirit of pride, with which Dryden has often invested his female characters. The language of the Indian ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... existence of two factions, which, for near two centuries, divided and agitated the whole population of Holland and Zealand. One bore the title of Hoeks (fishing-hooks); the other was called Kaabel-jauws (cod-fish). The origin of these burlesque denominations was a dispute between two parties at a feast, as to whether the cod-fish took the hook or the hook the cod-fish? This apparently frivolous dispute was made the pretext for a serious quarrel; and the partisans of the nobles and those of the towns ranged themselves at either side, and ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... impossible for you to do more than glance) at his illustrations of Balzac's "Contes Drolatiques," you will see further how this "drolatique," or semi-comic mask is, in the truth of it, the mask of a skull, and how the tendency to burlesque jest is both in France and England only an effervescence from the cloaca maxima of the putrid instincts which fasten themselves on national sin, and are in the midst of the luxury of European capitals, what Dante meant when he wrote "quel mi sveglio col puzzo," of the body of the Wealth-Siren; ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... were signs everywhere that the forces of reaction were gaining confidence.(See App. I, Sect. 5) At the Troitsky Farce theatre in Petrograd, for example, a burlesque called Sins of the Tsar was interrupted by a group of Monarchists, who threatened to lynch the actors for "insulting the Emperor." Certain newspapers began to sigh for a "Russian Napoleon." It was the usual thing among bourgeois intelligentzia to refer to the Soviets of Workers' Deputies ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... before the affinity of that clean-limbed, shining figure and his small soul was recognized. But he carried his point at last. The Mercury became his inseparable darling, his symbol, his private god, the one dignified and serious thing in a little life much congested by the quaint, the burlesque, and all the smiling, dull ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... unwilling periwinkle from its shell, once more to play his abased and bashful role of free entertainer to guffawing mixed audiences. For all others in the great city there were havens and homes. But for a poor, lorn, unguided vagrant, enmeshed in the burlesque garnitures of a three-year-old male child, what haven was there? By night the part had been hard enough—as the unresponsive heavens above might have testified. By the stark unmerciful sunlight; by the ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... in what may be termed "Cartes de fantaisie," burlesque and satirical, not always designed, however, with due regard to the refinements of well-behaved communities. They are always spirited, and as specimens of inventive adaptation are worth notice. The example shown (Fig. 24) is from a pack of the year 1818, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... real and personal, and subjectively true at least. Of the great external world, however, their knowledge was exceedingly crude; and the facts in nature had become so strangely distorted, through centuries of ignorance and superstition, that the solemnly pronounced verities of the time were but a burlesque upon the truth. Belief in the existence of the antipodes was considered by ecclesiastical authority as a sure proof of heresy, the philosopher's stone had been found, astrology was an infallible science, and the air was filled with demons ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... opinions was now added one of the greatest misfortunes that have befallen the Negro race in its entire history in America—burlesque on the stage. When in 1696 Thomas Southerne adapted Oroonoko from the novel of Mrs. Aphra Behn and presented in London the story of the African prince who was stolen from his native Angola, no one saw any reason why the Negro should ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... original Bois de Boulogne, hot and dusty, a much-frequented and sadly-abused promenade, one of those spots, avaricious of shade, to which the common people flock to disport themselves at the gates of great capitals—burlesque forests, filled with corks, where you find slices of melon and skeletons ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... went to the chieftains and sold them a bill of goods (with a generous bribe of sugar) to close the borders. The next step was to corrupt the border guards, which was easy with Annie Oakleys to do the burlesque shows. ...
— Mars Confidential • Jack Lait
... things in the volume which I don't like. "The little room with the two little white sofas," I hate, though I can fancy perfectly well both the room and his feeling about it; but that sort of thing does not make good poetry, and lends itself temptingly to the making of good burlesque. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... with her evident habits, and the lace-edged petticoat that peeped beneath it was draggled with mud and unaccustomed usage. Her glossy black hair, which had been tossed into curls in some foreign fashion, was now wind-blown into a burlesque of it. This incongruity was still further accented by the appearance of the room she had entered. It was coldly and severely furnished, making the chill of the yet damp white plaster unpleasantly obvious. A black harmonium organ stood in one corner, set out with black and white hymn-books; a trestle-like ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... concludes it as follows: "Flashy people may burlesque these things, but when hundreds of the most sober people in a country, where they have as much mother-wit certainly as the rest of mankind, know them to be true, nothing but the absurd and froward spirit of Sadduceeism can question them. I have not yet ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... Universal Joint was closed. There was no one inside but Primo Palveri, the manager and majority stockholder of the Great Universal, and the new strip act he was watching. Malone didn't particularly like the idea of sharing his conversation with a burlesque stripper, but there was little he could do about it; he'd waited several ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... again, an individual, suspended by his arms from a cross-bar, had his feet held up and his legs stretched apart by another, while a third pounded vigorously with closed fists upon his seat of honour. Now and then a prolonged yell, accompanied with all sorts of burlesque variations, issued from the throats of the assembly. The object of this was at first not clear to me, but I afterwards discovered that the full use of the lungs was considered by Ling a very important part of the exercises. Altogether, it was a peculiar scene, and ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... Walford told me that it was certainly first spoken of by George Grossmith, senr., of humorous memory. But Hodder and Vizetelly agree in fathering it on Blanchard's son, Sidney, at the time when Gilbert a Beckett's "Comic Blackstone" and comic histories were delighting all true connoisseurs of burlesque. Sidney Blanchard, Hodder reminds us, was possessed of a quaint wit, which was wont to deliver itself in a manner such as that in which he referred to a cashier who was never behind his desk when money was to be paid out: "Compared with him," said he, "the eel ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... scratches on the paper, he handed it to one of his red companions, and, with a smile on his rough countenance, addressed to him some directions in reference to the document. Although the Mexicans were much amused at these burlesque actions of the Indians, yet they did not dare to show their mirth until the latter had departed and left them in possession ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... catches echoes of him, perhaps, in Willa Sibert Cather, in Mary S. Watts, in David Graham Phillips, in Sherwood Anderson and in Joseph Medill Patterson, but, after all, they are no more than echoes. In Robert Herrick the thing descends to a feeble parody; in imitators further removed to sheer burlesque. All the latter-day American novelists of consideration are vastly more facile than Dreiser in their philosophy, as they are in their style. In the fact, perhaps, lies the measure of their difference. What they lack, great and small, is the gesture of ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... now best remembered are the farce, Love-a-la-Mode (1760), and his masterpiece, the farcical comedy, The Man of the World (1764). In Sir Pertinax MacSycophant, Macklin has given us one of the traditional burlesque characters of the ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... in memory. In a way it condemns the poetical theory of the time; when forms are fixed, new writing is less likely to be creative and more likely to exhaust itself in the ingenious but trifling exercises of parody and burlesque. The Rape of the Lock is brilliant ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... initial two hundred a year. Say that a man begins this kind of work at twenty-four. What are his matrimonial prospects? His office work occupies his entire attention (the idea that Government clerks don't work is a fiction preserved merely for the writers of burlesque) from the moment he wakes in the morning until dinner. His leisure extends, roughly speaking, from eight-thirty until twelve. The man whom I am discussing, and of whom Malim is a type, is, as I have already proved, ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... deserving mention is the boastful knight, Basilisco, whose incredible vaunts and invariable preference for the very freest of blank verse, in a play almost entirely exempt from either, read like an intentional burlesque of Tamburlaine. If so, and the suggestion is not ill-founded or improbable, it may be interpreted as an emphatic rejection of the influence of Marlowe and as a claim, on Kyd's part, to sole credit for his own form of tragedy ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... renewed the mirth of the guests, and their festivities soon passed the bounds of moderation. Many were intoxicated; guests and attendants mingled together without distinction, the serious and the ludicrous; drunken fancies and affairs of state were blended one with another in a burlesque medley; and the discussions on the general distress of the country ended in the wild uproar of a bacchanalian revel. But it did not stop here; what they had resolved on in the moment of intoxication, they attempted when sober to carry into execution. It was necessary to manifest to the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... the two unexpectedly together; and an understanding of some kind evidently was come to, for during the season they met secretly at the house of one of Lincoln's friends, Mr. Simeon Francis. It was while these meetings were going on that a burlesque encounter occurred between Lincoln and James Shields, for which Miss Todd was partly responsible, and which no doubt gave just the touch of comedy necessary to relieve their tragedy and restore them to a healthier view of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... portion of this work, I attempted to define the Italian Romantic Epic, and traced the tale of Orlando from Pulci through Boiardo and Ariosto to the burlesque of Folengo. There is an element of humor more or less predominant in the Morgante Maggiore, the Orlando Innamorato, and the Orlando Furioso. This element might almost be regarded as inseparable from the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... another music going on—a music that cannot be written and will be difficult to describe—I mean the song of the "Cicada Stridulantia" in walnut trees above me. This insect—the balm cricket—is in appearance a burlesque, just such a house fly as you might imagine would be introduced in a pantomime; and its cry is as loud and incessant as it is peculiar. To describe it, fancy to begin with a number of strange chirps, and that every few seconds, one of those cogged wheels and spring toys that you buy ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... same reason. The first of these "Tales" is told by the poet himself, after a stop has been unceremoniously put upon his recital of the "Ballad of Sir Thopas" by the Host. The ballad itself is a fragment of straightforward burlesque, which shows that in both the manner and the metre (Dunbar's burlesque ballad of "Sir Thomas Norray" is in the same stanza) of ancient romances, literary criticism could even in Chaucer's days find ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... unheard-of cruelties, and especially of being taken with arms in our hands against the authority of the true and proper chief of the island. It is impossible to describe the absurd language used, and the ceremonies gone through. It would have been a complete burlesque had not the matter been somewhat too serious. As it was, when one of the counsellors kicked another for interrupting him, and the judge threw a calabash at their heads to call them to order, I could not help bursting ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... the crowded house. The ruffling of the face of the sea before a storm. The Sisters Sigsbee, Coon Delineators and Unrivalled Burlesque Artists, have finished their dance, smiled, blown kisses, skipped off, skipped on again, smiled, blown more kisses, and disappeared. A long chord from the orchestra. A chord that is almost a wail. A ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... do not speak that word. It stings me to the quick to think the French To-day have seen the backs of Englishmen. Oh, Orleans! Orleans! Grave of England's glory! Our honor lies upon thy fatal plains Defeat most ignominious and burlesque! Who will in future years believe the tale! The victors of Poictiers and Agincourt, Cressy's bold heroes, routed ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... to work effectively, your son must have money. I brought him no dot, alas! Except"—with a burlesque courtesy—"my beauty and my blood. I must know how much money we shall have before I ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... farcical standard. The good PINERO has nodded over this. The Cabinet Minister is an excellent title thrown away. The Cabinet Minister himself, Mr. ARTHUR CECIL, in his official costume, playing the flute, is as burlesque as the General in full uniform, in Mr. GILBERT'S "Wedding March," sitting with his feet in hot-water. The married boy and girl, with their doll baby and irritatingly unreal quarrels, reminded me of the boy-and-girl lovers in Brantingham Hall. The mother of The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, May 3, 1890. • Various
... success—I could see that it would be at the moment Mr. Bernard Shaw so forgot himself as to be interested in something he had not himself written. The Press was charmed with the play and went so far as to say, with a gross burlesque of Chesterton, that it was 'real phantasy and had soul.' Chesterton by his one produced play had earned the right to call himself a dramatic author, who could make the public shiver and think at the same time, an ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... an initial two hundred a year. Say that a man begins this kind of work at twenty-four. What are his matrimonial prospects? His office work occupies his entire attention (the idea that Government clerks don't work is a fiction preserved merely for the writers of burlesque) from the moment he wakes in the morning until dinner. His leisure extends, roughly speaking, from eight-thirty until twelve. The man whom I am discussing, and of whom Malim is a type, is, as I have already proved, intellectual. He has, therefore, ambitions. The more intellectual ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... to ask odd questions of one of his preceptors, a learned and ceremonious personage who, considering the extent of his certificated wisdom, was yet so singularly servile of habit and disposition that he might have won a success on the stage as Chief Toady in a burlesque of Court life. He was a pale, thin old man, with a wizened face set well back amid wisps of white hair, and a scraggy throat which asserted its working muscles visibly whenever he spoke, laughed or took food. His way of shaking hands ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... only Frenchman to burlesque the religious quarrels of the day. Bonaventure des Periers, [Sidenote: Des Periers, d. 1544] in a work called Cymbalum Mundi, introduced Luther under the anagram of Rethulus, a Catholic as Tryocan ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the famous dance of the devils. The missionary had taken a fancy to have the ceremonies by which the piaches (who are at once priests, physicians, and conjurors) evoke the evil spirit Iolokiamo, represented in a burlesque manner. He thought that the dance of the devils would be an excellent means of proving to the neophytes that Iolokiamo had no longer any power over them. Some young Indians, confiding in the promises of the missionary, consented to act ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... not escaped, but of which he saw the inanity, the petty jealousies of authors which had also come within his personal experience. A mock tragedy on the subject of Esther, which forms part of the burlesque, is a malicious parody of the French models which he had begun by imitating, but which were now the sport of the youths who ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... starts up from its green thickets; not one of the hideous objects which the architects of our district churches perpetrate, to puzzle the passer-by as to the purpose of its being,—whether a brewer's chimney, or a shot-tower,—a perch for city pigeons, or a standing burlesque on the builders of the nineteenth age of the fine arts in England. This steeple is an old grey turret, ivy-mantled, modest, and with that look of venerable age which instinctively makes us feel, that it has witnessed memorable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... down into it, however, I by coach endeavoured to have waited on my Lord Sandwich, but meeting him in Chancery Lane going towards the City I stopped and so fairly walked home again, calling at St. Paul's Churchyarde, and there looked upon a pretty burlesque poem, called "Scarronides, or Virgile Travesty;" extraordinary good. At home to the office till dinner, and after dinner my wife cut my hair short, which is growne pretty long again, and then to the office, and there till 9 at night doing ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... of the squib I wrote and jumped to the conclusion that it was serious, and the rest did not read it at all, but heard of my agricultural venture at second-hand. Those cases I could not guard against, of course. To write a burlesque so wild that its pretended facts will not be accepted in perfect good faith by somebody, is, very nearly an impossible thing to do. It is because, in some instances, the reader is a person who never tries to deceive anybody himself, and therefore is not expecting any ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... voyages. Ridicule convulsed her home of refuge. For the young soldier-hero, to be unhorsed by misfortune, was one thing; but the meanness of the ambition he had taken in exchange for the thirst of glory, accused his nature. He so certainly involved her in the burlesque of the transformation that she had to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... often said, but as we believe without sufficient proof, that the wit combats of the lords and ladies, {146} and the artificial speech of the sonneteering courtiers, were also introduced for burlesque. These elements appear, however, in other plays than this, with no intention of burlesque; and it seems probable that Shakespeare greatly enjoyed this display of his power as a master in the prevailing fashion of courtly repartee. In this ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... was having much fun. But Agoncillo is a lawyer and a diplomat, and I had heard so much, of this horrid society I did not feel positive it was certain that its alleged blood rites were fictitious. Of one thing I am sure—that the dreadful picture is no joke, and was not meant for a burlesque, though it might possibly be expected to perform the office of a scarecrow. It cannot be doubted that there are oath-bound secret societies that are regarded by the Spaniards as fanatical, superstitious, ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... nor the strength of the other artists, such as Ostade, Mieris, and Dou. But, even taking into consideration its satirical character, one must say that Steen has often exceeded his purpose if he really had a purpose. The fury with which he pursued the burlesque often got the better of his feeling for reality; his figures, instead of being merely ridiculous, became monstrous and hardly human, often resembling beasts rather than men, and he has exaggerated these figures until sometimes ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... perplexed him, for he became quite passionate and at the same time had much moral repugnance to illicit relations. His sexual curiosity was intense, and he read all manner of books on the subject, went to the burlesque shows on the sly and almost became obsessed ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... enjoyable performance," said Mr. Charteris, as we came out of the Opera House. "I have always had a sneaking liking for burlesque." ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... boot, laid it down, and hurried to the king's apartment. But feeling, as he went, that anything sentimental would be disagreeable, he resolved to carry off the whole affair with burlesque. So he knocked at the door of the king's counting-house, where it was all but a capital crime to disturb him. When the king heard the knock, he started up, and opened the door in a rage. Seeing only the shoeblack, he drew ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... resources, he came to London and began to write light comedies and farces, of which during the next few years he threw off nearly a score. The drama, however, was not his true vein, and none of his pieces in this kind have survived, unless Tom Thumb, a burlesque upon his contemporary playwrights, be excepted. About 1735 he m. Miss Charlotte Cradock, a beautiful and amiable girl to whom, though he gave her sufficient cause for forbearance, he was devotedly attached. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... there were signs everywhere that the forces of reaction were gaining confidence.(See App. I, Sect. 5) At the Troitsky Farce theatre in Petrograd, for example, a burlesque called Sins of the Tsar was interrupted by a group of Monarchists, who threatened to lynch the actors for "insulting the Emperor." Certain newspapers began to sigh for a "Russian Napoleon." It was the usual thing among bourgeois intelligentzia to refer to the Soviets of ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... the curtain of the box between him and the audience. But he was not so easily to escape. Leaving the orchestra to continue unheeded with the prelude to the next verse, Miss Winter walked slowly and deliberately toward him, smiling mischievously. In burlesque entreaty, she held out her arms. She made a most appealing and charming picture, and of that fact she was well aware. In a voice loud enough to reach every part of the house, ...
— The Man Who Could Not Lose • Richard Harding Davis
... know how you feel with an old cat for a landlady, and living up here on a side street with a lot of cheap burlesque people." Laura snatched her hand away, and going up to the window, turned her back. It was a direct snub, but Elfie did not care. Unabashed, she went on: "Why, the room's cold, and there's no hot water, and you're beginning to look shabby. You haven't got a job—chances ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... this. All such cases were dull. No really dramatic moments. The book-keeping of The Orb and all the rest of them was certainly a burlesque revelation but the public did not care for revelations of that kind. Dull dog that de Barral—he grumbled. He could not or would not take the trouble to characterize for me the appearance of that man now officially a criminal (we had gone across the road for a drink) but told me with a sourly, derisive ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... invented and named by Dion Boucicault; by the resuscitation of the spectacle play, with its lavish tinsel and calcium glare and its multitudinous nymphs; by the opera bouffe, with its frequent licentious ribaldry; by the music-hall comedian, with his vulgar realism; and by the idiotic burlesque; with its futile babble and its big-limbed, half-naked girls. Nevertheless there are just as good actors now living as have ever lived, and there is just as fine a sense of dramatic art in the community as ever existed in any of "the palmy days"; only, what was formerly ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... into subterranean portals, we find ourselves in the abode of wonder and terror; but not till Meredith's Shaving of Shagpal (1856) do we meet again Beckford's kinship with the East, and his gift for fantastic burlesque. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... every way did honour to her progenitors. As the reader is aware, there is what is known as a "cultivated voice," the result of education—it is absolutely without affectation: there is also the voice which, in imitation of the well-trained one, is little more than a burlesque, and is affected in the highest degree: this was the only ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... "I know it is an age of burlesque. But let us spare the sacraments, and the altar, and ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... sorcerers kneeling with their heads and bodies humbly bowed down, and the magicians, who stood highest in importance, only kneeling. After this they all went through the formality of denying God and the Saints. Then they had a diabolical service in burlesque of that of the church, at which the Evil One served as priest in a violet chasuble; the elevation of the demon host was announced by a wooden bell, and the sacrament itself was made of unleavened bread. The scenes which followed resembled those of other witch-meetings. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... accomplish this effect. Literature itself is either bromidic or sulphitic. The dime novel and melodrama, with hackneyed situations, once provocative, are so easily nitro-bromidic that they become sulphitic in burlesque ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... the originality of the converted fisherman, a few young people belonging to the better families in the locality gathered together to witness what they imagined would be mere burlesque. There was only standing room behind the kitchen bed for them, and there was anything but an air of sanctity amongst that portion of his congregation. Jimmy's pulpit style was peculiar. He was flashing out ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... IV.3: The king's a bawcock,] A burlesque term of endearment, supposed to be derived ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... came back and entertained Grim and me with a burlesque account of the interview, after whispering to Narayan Singh to give the alarm in the event of Yussuf Dakmar returning forward to spy on us. Grim put the doped whisky into his valise after a sniff at it, instead of throwing it out of the window at ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... differs from others in its burlesque, quasi-comic character, and it is also the best-known of the Hymns to English readers in consequence ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... mention is the boastful knight, Basilisco, whose incredible vaunts and invariable preference for the very freest of blank verse, in a play almost entirely exempt from either, read like an intentional burlesque of Tamburlaine. If so, and the suggestion is not ill-founded or improbable, it may be interpreted as an emphatic rejection of the influence of Marlowe and as a claim, on Kyd's part, to sole credit for his own form of tragedy ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... impossible," he says, "to depict the confusion of ideas, the license of the imagination, the burlesque of popular notions. One would think that they saw before them the world on the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... It's deadly. A Thackeray miss, all black silk mitts and white cotton stockings. Long ago, in the beginning, I thought of shortening it. But Harriet Fuller sounds like a school-teacher, doesn't it? And Hattie Fuller makes me think, somehow, of a burlesque actress. You know. 'Hattie ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... with what was called a satyric play. This last might be related to the tragedies or be quite independent, as they usually were in Sophocles and Euripides. The satyric play was named from the satyrs or attendants upon Bacchus, and was a farce or burlesque intended to relieve the feelings of the spectators after the tragedies. The 'Alcestis' was entered by Euripides as a satyric play, but it only in parts approaches the characteristics of such a play. In other parts ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... a name, but to make a deep impression. One of his professed admirers made a strange mistake when he called them doggerel rhymes.[320] His Caution to Watch Against Sin is full of solemn and impressive thoughts, the very reverse of doggerel or burlesque. his poem on the house of God is worthy of a most careful perusal; and thousands have been delighted and improved with his emblems. One rhyme in the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... finished, with a grand flourish, the burlesque personage, still standing uncovered in the pouring rain, anticipated the question upon de Sigognac's lips, and began at once the following address, in an emphatic ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... general, do not speak that word. It stings me to the quick to think the French To-day have seen the backs of Englishmen. Oh, Orleans! Orleans! Grave of England's glory! Our honor lies upon thy fatal plains Defeat most ignominious and burlesque! Who will in future years believe the tale! The victors of Poictiers and Agincourt, Cressy's bold ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... An heroic and burlesque design, united in one picture, would be monstrous; though we place two pictures of so opposite a character in the same chamber, and even close by each other, without any scruple ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... by Strauss to provide a comic interlude. Years ago a musical humorist in Vienna caused much amusement by writing the words of a quarrel of Jewish pedlers under the voices of the fugue in Mozart's overture to "The Magic Flute." Three hundred years ago Orazio Vecchi composed a burlesque madrigal in the severe style of that day, in which he tried to depict the babel of sounds in a synagogue. Obviously the musical Jew is supposed to be allied to the stage Jew and to be fit food for the humorist. ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... pretext of killing the tedium of October evenings in a country-house, got up a burlesque wedding, in which Louise de Querouaille was the bride and the King the bridegroom, with all the immodest ceremonies which marked, in the good old times, the retirement of the ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... Sotherton, I should be always planting and improving, for naturally I am excessively fond of it. It would be too ridiculous for me to attempt anything where I am now, with my little half acre. It would be quite a burlesque. But if I had more room, I should take a prodigious delight in improving and planting. We did a vast deal in that way at the Parsonage: we made it quite a different place from what it was when we first had it. You young ones do not remember much about it, perhaps; but if ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... a savage burlesque. "'Lady Mary Carlisle, may I assume the honor of presenting the barber of the Marquis de ...
— Monsieur Beaucaire • Booth Tarkington
... weakminded and narrow-spirited individual, ill-bred, like all his colleagues, given, as it is said, to frequent excesses of drunkenness, and whom the National Assembly raised again imprudently to a throne which was not made for him,—if we show him hereafter some pity, it shall not be the result of the burlesque ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... of fashion; nor do they, in using the pronoun thou, or their improper nominative thee, ordinarily inflect with st or est the preterits or the auxiliaries of the accompanying verbs, as is done in the solemn style. Indeed, to use the solemn style familiarly, would be, to turn it into burlesque; as when Peter Pindar "telleth what he troweth." [213] And let those who think with Murray, that our present version of the Scriptures is the best standard of English grammar,[214] remember that in it they have no warrant for substituting s or es for the old termination ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... France; it belonged to an age far behind the eleventh century, or even the tenth, or indeed any century within the range of French history; and it was as little fitted for Christian's way of treatment as for any avowed burlesque. The original Tristan—critics say—was not French, and neither Tristan nor Isolde had ever a drop of French blood in their veins. In their form as Christian received it, they were Celts or Scots; they came from Brittany, Wales, Ireland, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... so amused that I become exhausted. I am sure that you would be madly amused by it also; for there is a splendid fire and abandon in these improvisations; and the characters done by Maurice have the appearance of living beings, of a burlesque life that is real and impossible at the same time; it seems like a dream. That is how I have been living for the ten days that I have ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... the other with the toe of the carpet slipper touching the walk, in the manner of a burlesque actor, took the cigarette out of his mouth with a little flourish, ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... from no restraint in consequence of his marriage. He is adored by a certain class of burlesque actresses. He flatters them by adoring himself. He owns a small house in Belgravia, but he frequently lives elsewhere. No pigeon-shooting matches, and few poker parties, amongst a certain set, are complete without him. Having benefited only to a limited extent under the will of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... Yes! Let me think! (Points his finger at his forehead and assumes tragic attitude. Then stalks to the front of stage in manner of burlesque Hamlet.) Come, thought, come. Shed the glory of thy greatness full on me, and thus confound mine enemies. Where the deuce is ...
— The Bicyclers and Three Other Farces • John Kendrick Bangs
... not to over-inflect. Too much modulation produces an unpleasant effect of artificiality, like a mature matron trying to be kittenish. It is a short step between true expression and unintentional burlesque. Scrutinize your own tones. Take a single expression like "Oh, no!" or "Oh, I see," or "Indeed," and by patient self-examination see how many shades of meaning may be expressed by inflection. This sort of common-sense practise will do you more good than ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... was a witty burlesque upon the heroic dramas of Davenant, Dryden, and others, written by George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, the Zimri of Dryden's 'Absalom and Achitophel,' 'that life of pleasure and that soul of whim,' who, after running through a fortune of L50,000 a year, died, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... system, in full operation. Men live there, year in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in supplies. The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper they will fall in debt - a burlesque injustice in a new country, where labour should be precious, and one of those typical instances which explains the prevailing discontent and the ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had no money in his purse and but one change to his back? Was not love all in all, and why did Cydaria laugh at a truth so manifest? There she was under the beech tree, with her sweet face screwed up to a burlesque of grief, her little hand lying on her hard heart as though it beat for me, and her eyes the playground of a thousand quick expressions. I strode up to her, and caught her by the hand, saying no more than just her name, "Cydaria." It seemed that there was no more to say; yet she ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... she hung streamers of rosettes, flowers of colors that would have been strident if they had been the eighteenth of a shade stronger. As it was, they were as delicious as cream curdled in a syrup of cherries. The whole effect would have been burlesque if it had not been the whim of a brilliant taste. Men would look it at and say, "Good Lord!" Women would murmur, enviously, "Oh, Lord!" Kedzie's soul expanded to the ultimate ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... should give throughout The sort of mock-heroic gigantesque, With which we bantered little Lilia first: The women—and perhaps they felt their power, For something in the ballads which they sang, Or in their silent influence as they sat, Had ever seemed to wrestle with burlesque, And drove us, last, to quite a solemn close— They hated banter, wished for something real, A gallant fight, a noble princess—why Not make her true-heroic—true-sublime? Or all, they said, as earnest as the close? Which yet with such a framework scarce could be. Then rose a little ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... crowded house. The ruffling of the face of the sea before a storm. The Sisters Sigsbee, Coon Delineators and Unrivalled Burlesque Artists, have finished their dance, smiled, blown kisses, skipped off, skipped on again, smiled, blown more kisses, and disappeared. A long chord from the orchestra. A chord that is almost a wail. A wail ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... of what looks like the chorus of a burlesque show, only the men is wearin' tights instead of the women. I picked him out right away because he was the first guy I had seen in the place in citizen's clothes, outside of the guys with the kodaks. He was little and fat, lookin' more like a human plum ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... and passenger brakeman, fired and ran a locomotive; also a freight train conductor and check clerk in a freight house; worked on the section; have been a shot gun messenger for the Wells, Fargo Company. Have been with a circus, minstrels, farce comedy, burlesque and dramatic productions; have been with good shows, bad shows, medicine shows, and worse, and some shows where we had landlords singing in the chorus. Have played variety houses and vaudeville houses; have ...
— Uncles Josh's Punkin Centre Stories • Cal Stewart
... grace, warm harmony, and May ecstasies; "Confluentia," whose threads of liquidity are eruditely, yet romantically, intertangled to represent the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle; and "The Headless Horseman," a masterpiece of burlesque weirdness, representing the wild pursuit of Ichabod Crane and the final hurling of the awful head,—a pumpkin, some say. It is relieved by Ichabod's tender reminiscences of Katrina Van Tassel at the spinning-wheel, and is dedicated ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... paid his devotions at the particular spot which was the object of his pilgrimage. The Palmers seem to have been the Quaestionarii of the ancient Scottish canons 1242 and 1296. There is in the Bannatyne MS. a burlesque account of two such persons, entitled, "Simmy and his Brother." Their accoutrements are thus ludicrously described (I discard the ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... you say just now? Perhaps I did not hear you aright," inquired Alden, elevating his eyebrows, for there was something that struck him as unreal, ludicrous and bordering upon the burlesque in the whole situation. ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... help exclaiming to myself, What a strange burlesque is all this! instead of two noble youths, rich in all that nature and fortune can endow them with, here I have a pupil, poor little fellow! deaf, dumb, a castaway; the son of a robber, who at most can aspire only to the rank ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... hanging about him that is often mistaken for the scent of evil. It took no psychological examiner to decide that he had drifted into indulgence and laziness as casually as he had drifted into life, and was to drift out. He was pale and his clothes stank of smoke; he enjoyed burlesque shows, billiards, and Robert Service, and was always looking back upon his last intrigue or forward to his next one. In his youth his taste had run to loud ties, but now it seemed to have faded, like his vitality, and was expressed in pale-lilac four-in-hands and indeterminate gray collars. ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... handle of the dining-room door, and realises that his scent is not so good as he had thought it. He bids his hostess and the COMTESSE good-bye in a burlesque whisper and tiptoes off to safer places. JOHN having gone out with him, MAGGIE can no longer avoid the COMTESSE's reproachful eye. That much injured lady advances upon her with ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... accusing the whites of unheard-of cruelties, and especially of being taken with arms in our hands against the authority of the true and proper chief of the island. It is impossible to describe the absurd language used, and the ceremonies gone through. It would have been a complete burlesque had not the matter been somewhat too serious. As it was, when one of the counsellors kicked another for interrupting him, and the judge threw a calabash at their heads to call them to order, I could not help bursting into a fit ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... faculty for characterization. As Flaubert wrote her: "In spite of your great Sphinx eyes you have always seen the world as through a golden mist." She dealt in vague, vast figures, and so her Prince Karol in "Lucrezia Floriana," unquestionably intended for Chopin, is a burlesque— little wonder he was angered when the precious children asked him "Cher M. Chopin, have you read 'Lucrezia'? Mamma has put you in it." Of all persons Sand was pre-elected to give to the world a true, a sympathetic picture of her friend. She understood him, but she had not ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... the Tales—of the Council of Nice, in the fourth century, Mr. Smith indulges his usual felicitous vein of humour, in a burlesque which he puts into the mouth of a slave of the Bishop of Ethiopia,—"a little, corpulent, bald-headed, merry-eyed man of fifty, whose name was Mark; whose duty it was to take charge of the oil, trim the lamps, and perform other ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various
... his lips and knit his brows with a burlesque, melodramatic air, and strode up and down, with his forefinger ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... was a success—I could see that it would be at the moment Mr. Bernard Shaw so forgot himself as to be interested in something he had not himself written. The Press was charmed with the play and went so far as to say, with a gross burlesque of Chesterton, that it was 'real phantasy and had soul.' Chesterton by his one produced play had earned the right to call himself a dramatic author, who could make the public shiver and think at the same time, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... quoted by Grose in his Olio, where it is made the subject of a burlesque commentary, the covert political allusions having evidently escaped the penetration of the antiquary. The reader familiar with the annals of the Commonwealth and the Restoration, will readily detect the leading points of the allegory. ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... not be significant. It is safe to say that if a Sir Launcelot had appeared in fiction one or two generations earlier, had the fact been recognised (which is not indubitable) that he bore the name of the most celebrated knight of later Arthurian romance, he would have been nothing but a burlesque figure. But in 1760, literary taste was changing. Romanticism in literature had begun to come to the front again, as Smollett had already shown by his romantic leanings in Count Fathom. With it there came interest in the Middle Ages and in the ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... stoops to the burlesque, cynic, or vulgar phases of life to secure amusement. He is grotesque and droll in his manner, and above all always restrained. His literary life is full of sprites and gnomes that frolic before young ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... The "burlesque" statue of the famous actor, David Garrick, with "a farrago of false thoughts and nonsense inscribed below," must ever be associated with Charles Lamb, who thus appropriately described it. With Garrick himself is indissolubly connected the memory of his lifelong ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... everywhere in wait for charity, murmured a modulated appeal; if you heard shouts or yells afar off they died upon your ear in a strain of melody at the moment when they were lifted highest. I am aware of seeming to burlesque the operatic fact which every one must have noticed in Naples; and I will not say that the neglected or affronted babe, or the trodden dog, is as tuneful as the midnight cat there, but only that they ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... strange, but quite essential, character in us—ever since the Conquest, if not earlier:—a delight in the forms of burlesque which are connected in some degree with the foulness in evil. I think the most perfect type of a true English mind in its best possible temper, is that of Chaucer; and you will find that, while ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... who were laughing and chattering as they tripped along at his side. And Spargo, glancing at them meditatively, instinctively told himself which of them it was that he and Rathbury had overheard as she made her burlesque speech: it was not the elder one, who walked by Ronald Breton with something of an air of proprietorship, but the younger, the girl with the laughing eyes and the vivacious smile, and it suddenly dawned upon him that somewhere, deep within him, there had been a notion, a hope of seeing ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... hurried on, he removed his hat and bowed with an attempt at stateliness which held a pathos of burlesque. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... a great rushing to and fro in preparation. Men bowed to each other with burlesque dancing school formality, offered arms, or accepted them with bearlike coyness. We stood for a moment rather bewildered, not knowing ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... "massacres of September," when the prisons in Paris, which had been filled with priests and laymen arrested on charges of complicity with the enemies of liberty, were entered by ruffians acting under influence of Marat and the commune's "committee of surveillance," and, after "a burlesque trial" before an armed jury, were murdered. In Versailles, Lyons, Orleans, and other towns, there were like massacres. The victims of these massacres numbered ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... baleful, ballast, banality, baneful, beatitude, bellicose, belligerent, benefaction, beneficent, benison, betide, bibulous, bigotry, bizarre, bombastic, burlesque. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... in abnormal shapes as she struggled to cry out. "Hamoud!" she screamed at last, raising her arms as high as she could, and trying to tear her gaze away from that spectacle. The Arab's pose, as he bent over his enemy, was a frightful burlesque of solicitude. How many times had she not seen him bending thus over David, maybe to smooth his pillow? And now, against the colonnade of gloomy trees, there was something sacrificial in that tableau—the ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... The burlesque was irresistible, and none the less so that the child was so direfully in earnest. To his infant imagination no worse disaster than had befallen Clayton's cat could be devised. This animal, adored by him, had been ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... the ground with indignation; but, suddenly recovering his calmness, he turned to me with his grave smile. "I am ashamed, Marston, of thus betraying a temper which time ought to have cooled. But, after all, what is public life but a burlesque; a thing of ludicrous disappointment; a tragedy, with a farce always at hand to relieve the tedium and the tinsel; the fall of kingdoms made laughable by the copper ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... without soul, heart, or talent, studies in the Julian atelier and goes to Fontainebleau during the summer. No one, naturally, will ever describe Fontainebleau better than Flaubert, in whose L'Education Sentimentale there are marvellous pictures; also a semi-burlesque painter, Pellerin, who reads all the works on aesthetics before he draws a line, and not forgetting that imperishable portrait of Jacques Arnoux, art dealer. Goncourt, too, has excelled in his impression of the forest and its painters, Millet in particular. Nevertheless, let us ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... shocking burlesque upon legislative proceedings, we must not forget that there is something very real to this uncouth and untutored multitude. It is not all sham, nor all burlesque. They have a genuine interest and a genuine earnestness in the business of the assembly which we are bound to recognize ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... upper boxes, 8s., the pit, 6s., and the gallery, 2s.; and the proceeds realised no less a sum than 610 pounds! The performances were the "Poor Gentleman," "A Concert," by musical amateurs, and the burlesque of "Bombastes Furioso." The characters were personated for the most part in each of the pieces by amateurs, amongst whom were several of the leading gentlemen of the town, who spared no pains, study, nor cost to ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... holding a pen in his right hand. The countenance has neither the fire, force, nor truth, which Denon's terra-cotta head of the poet seems to display. The extremities are meagre and offensive. In short, the whole, as it appears to me, has an air approaching the burlesque. Opposite to this statue are the colossal busts of LA-GRANGE and MALESHERBES; while those of PEIRESC and FRANKLIN are nearly of the size of nature. They are all in white marble. That of Peiresc ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... really go to the moving pictures with him?" Grace asked, rather unhappily. She had never been inside a moving picture theater. To her they meant something a step above the corner saloon, and a degree below the burlesque houses. They were constituted of bad air and unchaperoned young women accompanied by youths who dangled cigarettes from a lower lip, all obviously of the lower class, including the cigarette; and of other women, sometimes drab, dragged of breast and carrying ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... were induced by mental agitation. One night he read aloud to Jean and myself the first chapter of an article, "The Turning-Point in My Life," which he was preparing for Harper's Bazar. He had begun it with one of his impossible burlesque fancies, and he felt our attitude of disappointment even before any word had been said. Suddenly he rose, and laying his hand on his breast said, "I must lie down," and started toward the stair. I supported him to his room and hurriedly poured out the hot ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... are commonly understood. The whole world of the fantastic, all things top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of man, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns of Robert Browning. But in truth a part, and a very large part, of the sanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes all ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... like the valiant soldier who expects straight blows and feels only the harassing stings of insects. Seeing her break down, Christian thought her vanquished, and to complete his victory he put the finishing touch to the burlesque picture he had drawn of kings in exile. "What a pitiful figure they cut, all these poor princes in partibus, figurants of royalty, who drape themselves in the frippery of the principal characters, and declaim before the empty benches without a farthing of receipts! Would ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... that whimsical city, the Boeuf a-la-mode, (with his cachemire shawl and his ostrich feathers) and the Mort d'Henri Quartre. The contrasts and varieties of the grave and gay, the affecting and the burlesque, the magnificent and the paltry, which exist and may be sought out in abundance in every great capital, are perhaps more vividly concentrated at Paris than any where else, and brought with less trouble under the eye of those whose ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... Lady is the latest resultant of the two forces of ennui and dissipation acting on a Society that is willing to spend money and desires to kill time. She has played many parts, some (of infinitesimal proportions), on the burlesque stage, others in the semi-private life of her own residence in the South-west district of London. Her versatility has gained for her many admirers and a precarious income, but so long as she possesses the former she scorns to live upon the latter. Being unquestionably ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... ambitious of distinguishing himself as a painter of history. But not only his coloring and drawing rendered him unequal to the task; the genius that had entered so feelingly into the calamities and crimes of familiar life deserted him in a walk that called for dignity and grace. The burlesque turn of his mind mixt itself with the most serious subjects. In his "Danae," the old nurse tries a coin of the golden shower with her teeth to see if it is true gold; in the "Pool of Bethesda," a servant of a rich ulcerated lady beats back a poor man that sought the same ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... and the Abbess are the subjects of the next two cuts. In the former, Death has assumed the mitre and the crosier of his victim, and drags him off with such an expression of fun and burlesque pomp as we sometimes see in the face of a mischievous boy who mocks his betters. In the companion group his look is that of a demon; and with his head fantastically dressed, he drags the Abbess off by the scapulary which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... been slowly coming down the Housatonic Valley, with my dear little wife beside me. Instead, the unfamiliar train, and the fat man at my side reading a campaign newspaper, and shaking his huge sides over some broad burlesque. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... never made his bow To such an audience as salutes us now. He lack'd the balm of labour, female praise. Few Ladies in his time frequented plays, 35 Or came to see a youth with awkward art And shrill sharp pipe burlesque the woman's part. The very use, since so essential grown, Of painted scenes, was to his stage unknown. The air-blest castle, round whose wholesome crest, 40 The martlet, guest of summer, chose her nest— The ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Legends" is neatly turned, and the topical allusions, although out of date now, are not sufficiently frequent to make it unintelligible. The pictures (possibly by Alfred Crowquill) are conceived in a spirit of burlesque, and are full of ingenious conceits and no little grim vigour. The design of Robinson Crusoe ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... wild and abominable, luckily counteract themselves;—they present such a Fee-fa-fum for grown up people, such a burlesque upon tragic horrors, that a sense of the ludicrous irresistibly predominates over the terrific; and, to avoid disgust, our feelings gladly take refuge in contemptuous laughter. Pathos like this may affect women, and people ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... slipped into a corner behind a very broad table and under the shaded lamps examined some engravings. Mrs. Sheldam talked in hesitating French to the Marquis de Potachre, an old fellow of venerable and burlesque appearance. His fierce little white mustaches were curled ceilingward, but his voice was as timid as honey. He flourished his wizened hand toward ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... came to my mind that no Portsmouth Poll would ever wait for me. Did you ever hear anything so ridiculously absurd—such a bit of maudlin nonsense. I laughed at myself afterwards. It gave me a good, idea, though. I'll compose a burlesque, and the refrain ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... "A burlesque polo match: ladies against men: the men to play on side-saddles by way of a mild handicap! Some of the older folk are a bit horrified at the notion. But I believe it'll come off; and they want me to ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... ancient romance, bears fortune to any side which he pleases to espouse, is justly pointed out by Settle, as the prototype of Almanzor; though we look in vain for the glowing language, which, though sometimes bordering on burlesque, suits so well the extravagant character of the Moorish hero. Zempoalla strongly resembles Nourmuhal in Aureng-Zebe; both shewing that high spirit of pride, with which Dryden has often invested his female characters. The language ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... word of unknown origin, probably coined in burlesque imitation of scholastic Latin, as "hocus-pocus" or "panjandrum"), originally a term meaning whim, fancy or ridiculous idea; later applied to a pun or play upon words, and thus, in its usual sense, to a particular form of riddle in which the answer depends on a pun. In a transferred sense the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... up to the Jury in the action taken by Jones (author of burlesques) v. Roberts (player of the same) was excellent common sense, a quality much needed in the case. Mr. JONES,—not our ENERY HAUTHOR, whose contempt for Burlesque generally is as well known as he can make it,—wrote to Mr. ARTHUR ROBERTS, formerly of the Music Halls and now of the legitimate Stage, styling him "Governor," and professed that he would "fit him to a T." Poeta nascitur non "fit."—and the born burlesque-versifier was true to what would ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 18, 1891 • Various
... of Walt Whitman and Artemas Ward. Yet it is not burlesque. It appears to have been written in good faith, and for this reason the incongruity of such a grandiloquent rhapsody on such a prosaic subject is all the more noticeable. As an example of "fine writing" ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... "Y" and their own efforts to battle ennui with minstrel show and burlesque and dances have already been mentioned. The great high Gorka built by the American engineers in the heart of the city afforded a half-verst slide, a rush of clinging men and women as their toboggan coursed laughing and screaming in merriment down to the river where it pitched ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... the thing that pleased me most was a gay little piece of burlesque by Mr. ARTHUR CHESNEY as the red-haired shop assistant who was not a pacifist. Mr. CHARLES GLENNEY so thoroughly enjoyed the robustious sea-captain that we had to enjoy it too—a sound notion of entertainment, that. Mr. SEBASTIAN SMITH played chief rabbit with considerable skill and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... uncounteracted by any preceding description of the boy's beauty, assisted in recalling them. The other is, that the idiocy of the boy is so evenly balanced by the folly of the mother, as to present to the general reader rather a laughable burlesque on the blindness of anile dotage, than an analytic display of maternal affection in ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... in a Bill for reforming us. You can't make us go by decimals. You can't increase our consumption by lowering our taxation. I wish you had gone back to some Board." This she said looking up into his face with an anxiety which was half real and half burlesque. ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... permitted details to be introduced into religious subjects which were far from suitable or devotional; sometimes they were even comic in their effects. For example, such scenes as allowed the representation of evil spirits or devils were made to serve for all sorts of coarse, grotesque, and burlesque side-play, and the little figures which represented these powers were made to do all kinds of ridiculous capers side by side with such serious subjects as the Last Judgment or the death scenes of eminent men. This makes us feel, when we study the ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... whole company had been invited to a dance at the U. C. V. Hall; the two bandsmen were going; the chaperon—lively old lady with experience on the burlesque circuit—was gaily going. Carl and Eve were not. It had taken but one glance between them ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... wish you more amusement than I have generally extracted from these burlesque meetings," replied I. "Adieu, and may you be ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... magnificence. His grade was never lower than that of colonel, and it not unfrequently extended to, or even beyond, the rank of brigadier-general. It was worth "a sabbath-day's journey" on foot, to witness one of these parades; for I believe that all the annals of the burlesque do not furnish a more amusing caricature of the "pomp and circumstance" of war. Compared to one of those militia regiments, Falstaff's famous corps, whose appearance was so unmilitary as to prevent even that liberal-minded gentleman from marching ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... height; the novelty of which caused them to succeed for a few years. One of the earliest productions of this kind, which distinguished him as a painter, is supposed to have been a representation of Wanstead Assembly; the figures in it were drawn from the life, and without burlesque. The faces were said to bear great likenesses to the persons so drawn, and to be rather better coloured than some of his more finished performances. Grace, however, was no attribute of his pencil; and he was more disposed to aggravate, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... Then he acted the rollicking Irishman to perfection; the real live Yankee, with his genuine mannerisms and dialect, with proper spirit and without ridiculous exaggeration, and the Negro, so open to burlesque. The special charm of his acting in those characters was his artistic execution. He never stooped to vulgarities, his humor was quaint and spontaneous, and the entire absence of apparent effort in his performance gave his audience a most favorable impression of power in ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... understand. One was obliged then to cultivate French; but the language was neither noble nor regular. The syntax was left to caprice. The genius for conversation being turned to pleasantries, the language became very fertile in burlesque and naive expressions, and very sterile in noble and harmonious terms: from this it comes that in rhyming dictionaries one finds twenty terms suitable for comic poetry, for one for more exalted use; and it is, further, ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... really hard it is to foist a moral or a truth upon an unsuspecting public through a burlesque without entirely and absurdly missing one's mark, I will here set down two experiences of my own in this thing. In the fall of 1862, in Nevada and California, the people got to running wild about extraordinary ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... difficulties of interpreting aright my clumsy, circumlocutory phrases in attempting to describe shawls, gowns, and bonnets; and taught me the exact millinery language which I ought to have made use of with an arch expression of triumph and a burlesque earnestness of manner, that always enchanted me. At that time, every word she uttered, no matter how frivolous, was the sweetest of all music to my ears. It was only by the stern test of after-events that I learnt to analyse her ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... The testimony taken during the trial of Guiteau shows that he was that night in that square; and, knowing the President had left the White House, was on the look-out, with intent to murder him. The incarnate sneak was lying in wait, a horrible burlesque, to take his revenge because he thought he had been slighted, and was so malignant a fool he believed public opinion might applaud the deed. One of the dusky figures on the benches was ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... and we all had an awful time with ourselves cracking rare quips. Me the center of an admiring throng. They all knew I was an actress and they asked me to act. You know the extent of my acting, a champagne dance and a burlesque on the 'Merry Widow' waltz, and my lines are limited to, 'Oh! girls, here comes the prince, now, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah.' Therefore I ducked the request to exhibit my art. I was going home after the show—I mean entertainment—and Waldo, the fellow I went with before I got sense enough to blow the ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey
... boudoir of a pretty woman. You couldn't make a prettier present to a person with whom you wished to exchange a harmless joke. It is not classic art, signore, of course; but, between ourselves, isn't classic art sometimes rather a bore? Caricature, burlesque, la charge, as the French say, has hitherto been confined to paper, to the pen and pencil. Now, it has been my inspiration to introduce it into statuary. For this purpose I have invented a peculiar ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... found amusement in composing treatises on odd subjects. Seneca wrote a burlesque narrative of Claudian's death. Pierius Valerianus has written an eulogium on beards; and we have had a learned one recently, with due gravity and pleasantry, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... her hand toward his lips, and Kitty had not the power to resist him. She felt strangely theatrical, a character in a play; for American men, except in playful burlesque, never kissed their women's hands. The moment he released the hand the old wave of hysteria rolled over her. She must fly. The desire to weep, little fool that she was! was breaking through her defences. Loneliness. The two of them all alone but for Cutty. She rose, ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... unobtrusive philanthropy. Also his self-evolved translation of the duties of friendship is the last word on that subject. He was visited unexpectedly at his office one day by a group of friends. With much ceremony, they presented him with a placque—an amusing plaster burlesque of the real article. He had the Californian sense of humor and he thoroughly enjoyed the situation. Admitting that the joke was on him, he celebrated according to time-honored rites. After his friends had left, he found on his desk a small ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... try!" Her chassee quickened ever so little, doubled on itself, and became a tortuous thing. Poppy's feet beat out the measure that is danced on East End pavements to the music of the concertina. In the very abandonment of burlesque Poppy remained an artist, and her dance preserved the gravity of the original ballet, designed for performance on a flagstone. Now it unfolded; it burst its bounds; it was a rhythmic stampede. Louder and louder, her clicking heels beat the furious time; higher ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... old Izaak Walton, who is put forward as a substitute for argument on this question, and whose sole merits consisted in his having a taste for nature and his being a respectable citizen, the trumping him up into an authority and a kind of saint is a burlesque. He was a writer of conventionalities; who, having comfortably feathered his nest, as he thought, both in this world and in the world to come, concluded he had nothing more to do than to amuse himself by putting worms on a hook, and fish into his stomach, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... into play to cover the dress of the ballet or burlesque opera and the bathing dress. Conventionalization always includes strict specification and limits of time, place, and occasion, beyond which the same dress would become vicious. Amongst Moslems and Orientals this conventionalization as to dress has never been introduced. We are familiar with the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Arabian Nights. The series of tales about Prince Florizel of Bohemia was a brilliant, original, and altogether delightful departure in light literature. The stories are a frank and wholesome caricature of the French detective story. They are legitimate pieces of literature because they are burlesque, and because the smiling Mephistopheles who lurks everywhere in the pages of Stevenson is for this time the acknowledged ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... void of an abstract and undefinable beauty, like that of the only woman before the fall. If instead of the costume of the epoch, which is a necessary element, you substitute another, you create an anomaly which can have no excuse unless it is a burlesque called for by the vogue of the moment. Thus, the goddesses, the nymphs, the sultans of the eighteenth century are ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... appear, however, to belong to a later date; and the quaint stanza, afterwards employed in a modified form with such effect by Fergusson and Burns, is that used by Alexander Scot in The Justing at the Drum, and in other burlesque pieces of the early or middle period of ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... "The Clouds," to mention no other examples; and in English drama this kind of thing is alluded to again and again. What Jonson really did, was to raise the dramatic lampoon to an art, and make out of a casual burlesque and bit of mimicry a dramatic satire of literary pretensions and permanency. With the arrogant attitude mentioned above and his uncommon eloquence in scorn, vituperation, and invective, it is no wonder that Jonson soon involved himself in literary and even personal quarrels with his fellow-authors. ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... left it. It is entirely without any kind of consciousness or intelligence, and is drifted passively about upon the astral currents just as a cloud might be swept in any direction by a passing breeze; but even yet it may be galvanized for a few moments into a ghastly burlesque of life if it happens to come within reach of a medium's aura. Under such circumstances it will still exactly resemble its departed personality in appearance, and may even reproduce to some extent his familiar expressions or handwriting, but it does so merely by the automatic action of the ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... is the basal element in the laughable? What common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-andrew, a play upon words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque and a scene of high comedy? What method of distillation will yield us invariably the same essence from which so many different products borrow either their obtrusive odour or their delicate perfume? The greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this little problem, which ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... rare, and the men are slow to take them. There is a man towards the end of the evening who wins one unmistakably with an inimitable burlesque of "Alice, where art thou?" The pianist fails to keep in touch with the astonishing vagaries of this performance, and the singer, unabashed, finishes without accompaniment. The audience yells with delight, and continues to yell till the singer comes forward ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... wholesome reverence for its sanction, two or three testimonies given in a court of justice usually cured them. The indifferent, business-like manner in which the oaths are put, the sing-song tone of voice, the rapid utterance of the words, give to this solemn act an appearance of excellent burlesque, which ultimately renders the whole proceedings remarkable for the absence of truth and reality; but, at the same time, gives them unquestionable merit as a dramatic representation, abounding with fiction, well related and ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... ever render impossible the rehearsal of another great poet. But a work of art is valuable, and pleasurable in proportion to its rarity; one beautiful book of verses is better than twenty books of beautiful verses. This is an absolute and incontestable truth; a child can burlesque this truth—one verse is better than the whole poem, a word is better than the line, a letter is better than the word, but the truth is not thereby affected. Hugo never had the good fortune to write a bad book, nor ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... daughter Mary of Troyes; but the subject was one neither of courtesy nor of France; it belonged to an age far behind the eleventh century, or even the tenth, or indeed any century within the range of French history; and it was as little fitted for Christian's way of treatment as for any avowed burlesque. The original Tristan—critics say—was not French, and neither Tristan nor Isolde had ever a drop of French blood in their veins. In their form as Christian received it, they were Celts or Scots; they came from Brittany, Wales, Ireland, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... letters in the style of Junius—generally signing them Decimus or Probus—that kind of vague libellous ranting which will always serve to voice the discontent of the inarticulate. He wrote essays—moral, antiquarian, or burlesque; he furbished up his old satires on the worthies of Bristol; he wrote songs and a comic opera, and was miserably paid when he was paid at all. None of his work written in these veins has any value as literature; but the skill with which this mere lad not eighteen ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... po'traits," suggested Miss Woodburn, "or just paint the ahdeal?" A demure burlesque lurked ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the portal, swaying drunkenly. They shuddered at the sight of its face as it crossed toward the fire. It did not walk; it shuffled, haltingly, with flexed knees and hanging shoulders, the strides measuring inches only—a grisly burlesque upon senility. ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... and a bath tub of lemonade and we all had an awful time with ourselves cracking rare quips. Me the center of an admiring throng. They all knew I was an actress and they asked me to act. You know the extent of my acting, a champagne dance and a burlesque on the 'Merry Widow' waltz, and my lines are limited to, 'Oh! girls, here comes the prince, now, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah.' Therefore I ducked the request to exhibit my art. I was going home after the show—I mean entertainment—and Waldo, ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey
... slowly coming down the Housatonic Valley, with my dear little wife beside me. Instead, the unfamiliar train, and the fat man at my side reading a campaign newspaper, and shaking his huge sides over some broad burlesque. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... quote more examples. They are not unknown to the historian, but because they are in rhyme they have been hastily assumed to be spurious or even burlesque.[142] But the evidence of a rhyming formula is the opposite to this. It is evidence of their genuineness, and if some of the words appear to be nonsensical it is due to the fact that the sense of the old formula has been misunderstood, and has ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... pyramid was erected in the centre of the church, surmounted by a temple, inscribed, 'To Philosophy.' The torch of 'Truth' was on the altar of 'Reason,' spreading light, &c. The National Convention, and all the authorities, attended at this burlesque and insulting ceremony. In February, 1794, a grand fete was ordered by the convention, in which hymns to Liberty were chanted, and a pageant in honor of the abolition of slavery in the colonies, was displayed in the ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... expressed the manhood of England; but many of the Puritan practices were open to ridicule, and the Royalists, in revenge for their defeat, began to use ridicule without mercy. During the early years of the Restoration doggerel verses ridiculing Puritanism, and burlesque,—that is, a ridiculous representation of serious subjects, or a serious representation of ridiculous subjects,—were the most popular form of literature with London society. Of all this burlesque and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... excursion into the theater must later have seemed to him a minor episode in his life, Payne's enemies were aware of the fact that he was a playwright and have written their knowledge into the record of his treasonable activities. For example, the author of a burlesque life of Payne, which contains, so far as I know, the only connected account of his activities, makes this useful remark: "Then [after his return from Ireland in 1672] he composes a Tragedy of a certain Emperour of ...
— The Fatal Jealousie (1673) • Henry Nevil Payne
... could see that it would be at the moment Mr. Bernard Shaw so forgot himself as to be interested in something he had not himself written. The Press was charmed with the play and went so far as to say, with a gross burlesque of Chesterton, that it was 'real phantasy and had soul.' Chesterton by his one produced play had earned the right to call himself a dramatic author, who could make the public shiver and think at the same time, an ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... scoffers were silent. But as the sultry night drew on toward one o'clock, Bill Day and his party felt their spirits revive a little. The calculation had failed in one part, and it might in all. Bill resumed his burlesque exhortations to the rough-looking "brethren" about him. He tried to lead them in singing some ribald parody of Adventist hymns, but his terror and theirs was too genuine, and their voices died down into husky whispers, ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... manner. Contrast it with the simple statement—"His memory is good." Sometimes Simile is prostituted to a low and degrading use; as "His face was like a danger signal in a fog storm." "Her hair was like a furze-bush in bloom." "He was to his lady love as a poodle to its mistress." Such burlesque is never permissible. Mere likeness, it should be remembered, does not constitute a simile. For instance there is no simile when one city is compared to another. In order that there may be a rhetorical simile, the objects compared must be of different classes. ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... indeed. But the sketch is most imperfect. I shall now have much to add. I can say that the Prince, whom I had accused of idleness, is zealous in the department of police, taking upon himself those duties that are most distasteful. I shall be able to relate the burlesque incident of my arrest, and the singular interview with which you honour me at present. For the rest, I have already communicated with my Ambassador at Vienna; and unless you propose to murder me, I shall be at liberty, whether you please or not, within ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... its spectacular course; Ione Burke, Polly Marshall, and Mrs. Vining were in the cast; tableau succeeded tableau; "I wish I were in Dixie," was sung, and the popular burlesque ended in the celebrated scene, "The Birth of the Butterfly in the Bower of Ferns," with the entire company kissing their finger-tips to a vociferous and ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... Burlesque, that is comic imitation, comprises parody and caricature. The latter is a valuable addition to humorous narrative, as we see in the sketches of Gillray, Cruikshank and others. By itself it is not sufficiently suggestive and affords no story or conversation. Hence in the old caricatures ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... of plot and incident are attractively arranged, the expression of life for the most part second-hand and artificial. There are traces of Dickens' burlesque without his sympathy, and the high colouring of Lytton with less than Lytton's wit. Disraeli's satire, too, is echoed in the political scenes. The young Australian squatter, whose experiences in England were to have formed the main purpose ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... and manfully—Get on, man," said the King, who never doubted that this was the introduction to something burlesque or witty, not conceiving that the charge was made ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... and as he kept a good table, gave good wines, and excelled in his cuisine, it was a delight he could command whenever he chose. He had the entre, also, of the green-room at both theatres, and acquired an intimate knowledge of all the feuds, rivalries, managerial oppressions, intrigues, burlesque dignity, and solemn plausibilities, of that mimic world. Living thus in an atmosphere electrical, as it were, with excitement, it is no wonder that, by degrees, he became less and less sensitive with regard to that ambiguous difficulty which had ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... Guildenstern." Stevenson's "Macaire" may have all the literary quality that is claimed for it, although I personally think Stevenson was only making a delightful idiot of himself in it! Anyhow, it is frankly a burlesque, a skit, a satire on the real "Macaire." The Lyceum was not a burlesque house! Why ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... paraphrases. However, there can be no chance for mistake even to the veriest embryonic reader of Horace, if he will but remember that, while some of these transcriptions are indeed very faithful reproductions or adaptations of the original, others again are to be accepted as the very riot of burlesque verse-making. ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... Graces, what relentless fate has conducted thee to the shambles? Butterfly of the summer, why should a nation rise to break thee upon the wheel? A sense of the mockery of such an execution, of the horrible burlesque that would sacrifice to the necessities of a mighty people so slight an offering, made itself felt among the crowd. There was a low murmur of shame and indignation. The dangerous sympathy of the mob was perceived by the officer in attendance. Hastily he made the ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal—a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... by a way of writing very peculiar, procured to himself the name of Namby Pamby. This was first bestowed on him by Harry Cary, who burlesqued some little pieces of his, in so humorous a manner, that for a long while, Harry's burlesque, passed for Swift's with many; and by others were given to Pope: 'Tis certain, each at first, took ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... an opera in an extravagant burlesque style, with characters, music, and other accompaniments to match; is the creation of OFFENBACH (q. v.), his more distinguished successors in the production of which have ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... to ask me how I like him? Do want, and I will tell you.—I like her exceedingly; her behaviour is all sense, and all sweetness too. I don't know how, he does not improve so fast upon me: there is a great deal of parts, and vivacity, and variety, but there is a great deal too of mimicry and burlesque. I am very ungrateful, for he flatters me abundantly; but unluckily I know it. I was accustomed to it enough when my father was first minister: on his fall I lost it all at once: and since that, I have lived with Mr. Chute, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... Owenson) and "Rosa Matilda" even more roughly and asks (as has been asked about a hundred years later and was asked about a hundred years before), "Is it not amazing that the [two] most licentious writers of romance are women?" And it starts with a burlesque account of a certain Margaret Marsham who exclaims, "What then? to add to my earthly miseries am I to be called Peggy? My name is Margaritta!" "I am sure that if I am called Peggy again I shall go into a fit." But this promise of something ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... Noble Kinsmen" there is a "distinct imitation of the circumstances of Ophelia's madness and death in Hamlet." In "The Woman Hater," assigned conjecturally to 1605 or 1606 by Professor Thorndike, there are "several burlesque ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... shapes as she struggled to cry out. "Hamoud!" she screamed at last, raising her arms as high as she could, and trying to tear her gaze away from that spectacle. The Arab's pose, as he bent over his enemy, was a frightful burlesque of solicitude. How many times had she not seen him bending thus over David, maybe to smooth his pillow? And now, against the colonnade of gloomy trees, there was something sacrificial in that tableau—the blue robe, the wet dagger, the plumed head ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... of a carriage, quarrelled rhythmically with one another; the mendicants, lying everywhere in wait for charity, murmured a modulated appeal; if you heard shouts or yells afar off they died upon your ear in a strain of melody at the moment when they were lifted highest. I am aware of seeming to burlesque the operatic fact which every one must have noticed in Naples; and I will not say that the neglected or affronted babe, or the trodden dog, is as tuneful as the midnight cat there, but only that they approach it in the prevailing ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... years beyond the seas" is spoken by the lips of the judge, and the burlesque of justice is at an end. Mr. Martin heard the sentence with perfect composure and self-possession, though the faces of his brothers and friends standing by, showe signs of the deepest emotion. "Remove the prisoner," were the next words uttered, and then John Martin, ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... of the early Romans made little progress beyond personal satire, burlesque extravagance and licentious jesting, but upon this was ingrafted the new Greek comedy, and hence arose that phase of the drama, of which the representatives were Plautus, Statius, and Terence. The Roman comedy was calculated to produce a moral result, although the morality it inculcated was extremely ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... recollecting himself, and thinking, as he owned afterwards, that the dispute grew too serious, with a skill all his own, suddenly and unexpectedly turned it to burlesque; and taking Sir Philip by the hand at the moment we arose after supper, and were ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... for the puff and humbug attracted people. The Montefiores, like fashionable knicknacks, succeeded that whimsical jade, Rose Peche, who had gone off the preceding autumn, between the third and fourth acts of the burlesque, Ousca Iscar, in order to make a study of love in company of a young fellow of seventeen, who had just entered the university. The novelty and difficulty of their performance, revived and agitated ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... all this for Edith Darrell?—Edith Darrell, who such a brief while gone, used to sweep and dust, sew and darn, in dull, unlovely Sandypoint, and get a new merino dress twice a year? No, it could not be—such transformation scenes never look place out of a Christmas pantomime or a burlesque Arabian Night—it was all a dream—a fairy fortune that, like fairy gold, would change to dull slate stones at light of day. She would never be Lady Catheron, never be mistress of this glittering Aladdin's Palace. It grew upon her day after day, this feeling ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... much choked by his tears on his pronouncing these words, that Fleur-de-Marie, very much affected, turned quickly toward him: he had turned away his head. An incident, half burlesque, diverted the attention of La Goualeuse, and prevented her from remarking more closely the emotion of her father: the worthy squire, who still remained behind the curtain, and, apparently was very attentively looking into the garden of the hotel, could not refrain from blowing his nose with ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... from all over the State, and from every class of society. Eichenstine Bros. sent fifty dollars, and six ragged newsboys came to present thirty cents. A lavender note, with huge monogram and written in white ink, stated that some of the girls of the "Gay Burlesque Troupe" sent a few dimes to the "kid's" mother. The few dimes amounted to fifteen dollars. Mrs. Van Larkin's coachman had to wait with her note while Lucy answered the questions of a lame old negro ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... are the subjects of the next two cuts. In the former, Death has assumed the mitre and the crosier of his victim, and drags him off with such an expression of fun and burlesque pomp as we sometimes see in the face of a mischievous boy who mocks his betters. In the companion group his look is that of a demon; and with his head fantastically dressed, he drags the Abbess off by the scapulary which hangs ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... the reader may imagine who has already gathered some idea of the reckless irreverence of Roaring Camp. The master of ceremonies was one "Boston," a noted wag, and the occasion seemed to promise the greatest facetiousness. This ingenious satirist had spent two days in preparing a burlesque of the Church service, with pointed local allusions. The choir was properly trained, and Sandy Tipton was to stand godfather. But after the procession had marched to the grove with music and banners, and the child had been deposited before a mock altar, Stumpy stepped before ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... Juggler is not amiss applicable to those of their craft, considering all their tricks and mummery not a whit superior to those of these poor savages, in the eyes of common-sense. Who does not know, that the low-burlesque word of Hocus-pocus, is an humorous corruption of their Hoc est corpus meum, by virtue of which, they make a God out of a vile wafer, and think it finely solved, by calling it a mystery, which, by the way is but another name for nonsense. Is there any thing amongst the savages ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... it's true! You preach to me no more, You, once so glib with holy words! I am Astonished!. . . (With burlesque fury): Stay, I will surprise you too! Hark! I permit you. . . (He pretends to be seeking for something to tease her with, and to have found it): . . .It is something new!— To—pray for ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... this luxury; then the universe is stupid in company with it; then Paris awakes, rubs its eyes, says: "How stupid I am!" and bursts out laughing in the face of the human race. What a marvel is such a city! it is a strange thing that this grandioseness and this burlesque should be amicable neighbors, that all this majesty should not be thrown into disorder by all this parody, and that the same mouth can to-day blow into the trump of the Judgment Day, and to-morrow into the reed-flute! Paris has a sovereign joviality. Its gayety is of the thunder and ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... character in his gifted daughter's novel of the Heiress [Inheritance]. I wrote a long letter after I came home to my Lord Elgin about Greenshields, the sculptor.[241] I am afraid he is going into the burlesque line, to which sculpture is peculiarly ill adapted. So I have expressed my veto to his patron, valeat quantum. Also a letter to Mrs. Professor Sandford at Glasgow about reprinting Macaulay's History of St. Kilda,[242] advising them ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... know what I am doing. I have a studio here on Broadway, and am painting portraits. The old gift, that you were the first to discover in me, when you said a kind word for my burlesque sketch of you on the board, at Emburg (how often I do get back to that old school-room), at last proved my salvation. Gradually I found that I had talent in this direction, and I am making the most of it. Carefully and honestly I took up the work, and with perseverance I have attained ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... locomotive; also a freight train conductor and check clerk in a freight house; worked on the section; have been a shot gun messenger for the Wells, Fargo Company. Have been with a circus, minstrels, farce comedy, burlesque and dramatic productions; have been with good shows, bad shows, medicine shows, and worse, and some shows where we had landlords singing in the chorus. Have played variety houses and vaudeville houses; have slept in a box car one night, ...
— Uncles Josh's Punkin Centre Stories • Cal Stewart
... twisted and misshapen by storms and floods—or characters gnarled by some interior force working in conjunction with or in opposition to outward circumstances. She draws no monstrosities, or monsters, thus avoiding on the one side romance and on the other burlesque. She keeps to life—the life that fails from "the meanness of opportunity," or is "dispersed among hindrances" or "wrestles" unavailingly "with ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Resident de France, and directed by the attorney-general, made a declaration against my work, by which, in the most severe terms, it was declared to be unworthy of being burned by the hands of the hangman, adding, with an address which bordered upon the burlesque, there was no possibility of speaking of or answering it without dishonor. I would here transcribe the curious. piece of composition, but unfortunately I have it not by me. I ardently wish some of my readers, animated by the zeal of truth and equity, would read over the Letters from the Mountain: ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... on his entry into subterranean portals, we find ourselves in the abode of wonder and terror; but not till Meredith's Shaving of Shagpal (1856) do we meet again Beckford's kinship with the East, and his gift for fantastic burlesque. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the Stage through the distance-entrance [Left Side-door] the colossal figure of Hercules. Here is the turning-point of the play: which has the peculiarity of combining an element of the Satyric Drama (or Burlesque) with Tragedy, the combination anticipating the 'Action-Drama' (or 'Tragi-Comedy') of modern times. Accordingly the costume and mask of Hercules are compounded, of his conventional appearance in Tragedy, in which he is conceived as the perfection of physical strength toiling and suffering ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... a burlesque poem by Samuel Butler (1663). It satirized the leading persons and parties of the Commonwealth, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... His pieces include numerous burlesques and pantomimes, the libretti of Savonarola (Hamburg, 1884) and of The Canterbury Pilgrims (Drury Lane, 1884) for the music of Dr (afterwards Sir) C. V. Stanford. The Happy Land (Court Theatre, 1873), a political burlesque of W. S. Gilbert's Wicked World, was written in collaboration with F. L. Tomline. For the last ten years of his life he was on the regular staff of Punch. His health was seriously affected in 1889 by the death of his only son, and he died on the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... nervous fever or violent convulsions on the part of young women, fond to excess of music, which have no other origin than the prayer of the Hebrews in the third act, with its superb change of key.'" Thus by a stroke of genius, a scene which first impressed the audience as a piece of theatrical burlesque, was raised to sublimity by the solemn music written ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... to have given vent to her real feelings at that time, she would have burst into a fit of laughter; it was too ludicrous. At the same time, the very burlesque reassured her still more. She went into the cabin with a heavy weight ...
— The Three Cutters • Captain Frederick Marryat
... evening I went to the "Frivolity," to see the latest rays of the lamp of burlesque. That scene, at any rate, was familiar. There, in all their spotless panoply of expressionless face, and irreproachable shirt-front, sat the golden lads of the Metropolis in their rows, images of bored stupidity, stiffly cased in black and white. There too, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... say just now? Perhaps I did not hear you aright," inquired Alden, elevating his eyebrows, for there was something that struck him as unreal, ludicrous and bordering upon the burlesque in the whole situation. ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... they may consequently appear ridiculous, as here he does. Again, in his third objection against my third Song, where he says— I, (that is in my own person) make a jest of the Fall, rail at Adam and Eve; and then Oliver's Porter, raving again, says, I burlesque the Conduct of God Almighty; [Footnote: Ibid.] now, pray judge whether it ought to be Constru'd so or no. This Song is suppos'd to be made and sung by Gines de Passamonte, a most notorious Atheistical Villain, who, as he is going Chain'd to the Galleys, is redeem'd from them by ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... of perverted Christian mysticism and idolatry. The Baibailanes of Negros are not entirely pagans; there is just a glimmer of Christian precept mingled in their belief, whilst the scores of religious monomaniacs and saint-hawkers who appear from time to time present only a burlesque imitation of ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... image of himself as a worthy astronomer, received by all the world, and the envied husband of Viviette, the present imputation was humiliating. The glorious light of this tender and refined passion seemed to have become debased to burlesque hues by pure accident, and his aesthetic no less than his ethic taste was offended by such an anti-climax. He who had soared amid the remotest grandeurs of nature had been taken to task on a rudimentary question of morals, which had never been a question with him at all. This was what ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... for its Successor: Royalist Squib predicting Milton's speedy Acquaintance with the Hangman at Tyburn: Another Squib against Milton, called The Censure of the Rota upon Mr. Milton's Book: Specimens of this Burlesque: Republican Appeal to Monk, called Plain English: Reply to the same, with another attack on Milton: Popular Torrent of Royalism during the forty days of Interval between the Parliament of the Secluded Members and ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... sublime, its writer's genius should be so too; otherwise it becomes the meanest thing in writing, viz. an involuntary burlesque. ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... irrepressible and joyous; he is full of comicality and drollery, of fun, jeers, jokes, yah-yas, and merriment; and this element will be needed in our midst to temper our puritan and national seriousness. He loves music whether sad, burlesque, or gay; is devoted to those who treat him worthily, his affections being easily won; and there is something touching, soothing, and delightful in his inherent respect for gentleman and lady. His aptitude ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... disorder; and, in some form or another—sometimes tolerated, sometimes the object of the Church's anathema—the tradition held its own down through the Dark Ages, and we meet with the substance of the Saturnalia, during the centuries immediately preceding the Reformation, in the burlesque festivals with which the rule of the Boy-Bishop has been often identified. We shall see presently how far this judgment is correct. An example will, no doubt, readily recur to the reader from a source to which we owe so many impressions of ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... Duke ends the burlesque by upsetting the chair. The Captain and Patch-Eye, chuckling at their jest, sit to a game of cards. The Duke returns to the chest. Once in a while he lays down the ship and seems to be thinking. The broken crystal of the fortune-teller lies ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... the sect, and not from the sophisticated narratives of a later period, that the real character of the persecuted class is to be gathered. Walker writes with a simplicity which sometimes slides into the burlesque, and sometimes attains a tone of simple pathos, but always expressing the most daring confidence in his own correctness of creed and sentiments, sometimes with narrow-minded and disgusting bigotry. His turn for the marvellous was that of his time and sect; but there is little ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... pure and undisturbed between the contrasts it thus simultaneously calls up; the obvious danger being that, where matters of taste are concerned, the habit of forming such incongruous juxtapositions—as that, for example, between the burlesque and sublime—should at last vitiate the mind's relish for the nobler and higher quality; and that, on the yet more important subject of morals, a facility in finding reasons for every side of a question may end, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Honore the coachman struck his cocked hat against a burlesque effigy of Marat swinging from the cord of a ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... look up and are not fed,'" quoted the rector in a burlesque despair. "Why, what we believe, boy,—what we believe! The rest of my flock know better, Mr. Ward, ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... personal, and subjectively true at least. Of the great external world, however, their knowledge was exceedingly crude; and the facts in nature had become so strangely distorted, through centuries of ignorance and superstition, that the solemnly pronounced verities of the time were but a burlesque upon the truth. Belief in the existence of the antipodes was considered by ecclesiastical authority as a sure proof of heresy, the philosopher's stone had been found, astrology was an infallible science, and the air was filled with demons who were ever waiting for an opportunity to steal away ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... them {11} to his friends. At the College Debate, of which he became secretary and president in his second year, he was a frequent and fluent speaker, with a remarkable command of language, though sometimes his eloquence was more than half burlesque. His powers of thought and real strength in argument were more often displayed in private discussions, where irony and humour hardly veiled ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... side. They are called principal dancers. Then I make a separate group of those who expect to sing, or to do any sort of a musical specialty, or any kind of a "stunt" that might be included in the show. I have had the greatest variety of specialties in a show. I have had them do magic, burlesque magic, play ukuleles, and all sorts of stunts which I have placed effectively in a show. We had a man in the Princeton show who did a little trick with a cigarette that was a scream. I saw him standing around, and I asked him if he could do a specialty. "I don't ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... the most remarkably successful men of his century was Rossini, son of a village inspector of slaughter-houses, and a baker's daughter. Once, while the husband was in jail on account of his political sympathies, the mother became a burlesque singer, and when the father was released, he joined the troupe as a horn-player. Rossini was left in the care of a pork-butcher, on whom he used to play practical jokes. He always took life easily, this Rossini. At the age of sixteen he was already a successful ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... Guiteau shows that he was that night in that square; and, knowing the President had left the White House, was on the look-out, with intent to murder him. The incarnate sneak was lying in wait, a horrible burlesque, to take his revenge because he thought he had been slighted, and was so malignant a fool he believed public opinion might applaud the deed. One of the dusky figures on ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... man impulsively. It was impossible to resist the human quality, the confiding friendliness, of the Governor's manner. The chances were, he said to himself, that the whole thing was mere burlesque, one of the successful sleight-of-hand tricks of the charlatan. In theory he was still sceptical of Gideon Vetch, yet he had already surrendered every faculty except that impish heretical spectator that dwelt ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... gives us on the whole the noblest books, the early part of the fourteenth affords the loveliest. They come from England, France, and the Netherlands. A noticeable element in their art is that of the grotesque and burlesque, never, of course, quite absent even from early books, but now most prominent and most delightful. The defect of the art of this time is lack of strength and austerity; ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... in his Eclogues with boyish inexperience, the praise, which these compositions obtained, tempted him into a belief that Nature was not to be trusted, at least in pastoral Poetry. To prove this by example, he put his friend Gay upon writing those Eclogues which their author intended to be burlesque. The instigator of the work, and his admirers, could perceive in them nothing but what was ridiculous. Nevertheless, though these Poems contain some detestable passages, the effect, as Dr. Johnson well observes, 'of reality ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Story of the Severed Hand"; "The Story of Little Muck"; "Nosey the Dwarf"; "The Young Englishman"; "The Prophecy of the Silver Florin"; "The Cold Heart," etc. What prospects for winter evenings are here! And while we can assure the adult reader that the promise which these titles give of burlesque or humorous description, and bold, romantic narrative, shall be more than kept, it may be well also to say, for the comfort of those whom we hope to see buy the book for their children's sake, that the stories in it are entirely free from certain objections which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... mouldering in an extinct servants' hall. Not a word passed, in the drawing-room, between Lady Lundie and Blanche. Each waited the appearance of the persons concerned in the coming inquiry, absorbed in her own thoughts. Their situation at the moment was a solemn burlesque of the situation of two ladies who are giving an evening party, and who are waiting to receive their guests. Did neither of them see this? Or, seeing it, did they shrink from acknowledging it? In similar positions, who does ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... various words: in those of the agriculturist of the Seine-et-Marne, whom I could name, and who for perhaps the first time in his life takes an interest in the sunset; in those of the young middle-class Parisian who had seemed incapable of speech save in terms of unbelief and burlesque; in those of the artist who utters his emotion in poetry and lifts it up to the heights of stoical philosophy. Through all unlikenesses, in the hearts of all—peasant, citizen, soldier, German schoolmaster—one prevailing thought is revealed; the living man, passing away, feels, at ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... free and easy clubs met on Wednesday evenings at the Globe Tavern in Fleet Street. It was somewhat in the style of the Three Jolly Pigeons; songs, jokes, dramatic imitations, burlesque parodies and broad sallies of humor, formed a contrast to the sententious morality, pedantic casuistry, and polished sarcasm of the learned circle. Here is a huge "tun of man," by the name of Gordon, use to delight Goldsmith by singing the jovial song of Nottingham Ale, and looking like ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... that owing to the indisposition of the young lady, Miss Beatrice Franklin and her father are unable to appear to-night. I have pleasure in announcing an extra turn, namely the Sisters De Vere in their wonderful burlesque act." ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... gifts which serve to arrest and fix the attention are wanting in this style, neither grandeur of imagination nor profound sentiment, vivid characterization, delicate gradations, vigorous precision, a sportive grace, unlooked-for burlesque, nor variety of representation. But, amidst so many ingenious tricks, apologues, tales, portraits and dialogues, in earnest as well as when masquerading, his deportment throughout is irreproachable and his tone is perfect. If; as an author, he develops a paradox ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... either that Marbodius, or even Virgil, could have known the Etruscan tombs of Chiusi and Corneto, where, in fact, there are horrible and burlesque devils closely resembling those of Orcagna. Nevertheless, the authenticity of the "Descent of Marbodius into Hell" is indisputable. M. du Clos des Lunes has firmly established it. To doubt it would be to ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... apprenticeship at it, during which most of my labour was in the field of comedy—"walking gentleman," burlesque, and low comedy parts—the while my soul was yearning for high tragedy. I did my best with all that I was cast for, however, and the unpleasant experience did me a world of good. Had I followed my own bent, I would have been, long ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... sportiveness in parliament, was a humorist at table, and fond of humorous recollections. His story of Dunning on his travels has got into print; but, in the hands of a genuine humorist, it must have been an incomparable ground for burlesque. Dunning, when solicitor-general, had gone to see the Prussian reviews. Some of these were profoundly secret, and were presumed to be experiments in those tactical novelties with which Frederick dazzled Europe. But others were showy displays, to which the king invited ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... called "Zingit." What it is I don't know, and I haven't as yet come across the inevitable big advertisement; but what I have ascertained is, that Mr. EDWARD SOLOMON, who is now wearing the diamond scarf-pin presented to him by the Guards whom he led on to victory in their recent burlesque engagement, has composed a polka or waltz which bears the name of "Zingit," and which might bear on the wrapper, "If you can't play it, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... legs were lost in gum boots, also loose and cavernous, and his entire costume looked relaxed and flapping, so that he gave the impression of being able to shake himself out of his raiment, and to rise like a burlesque Aphrodite. His face was overgrown with a grizzled tangle that looked as though it had been trimmed with button-hole scissors, while above the brush heap grandly soared a ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... pandemonium in Paris, and the royal flight to Varennes in June 1791, and the loss of the "Royal George" in 1782, all form the subjects of quizzical comments, and there are many other allusions the interest of which is quite as ephemeral as those of a Drury Lane pantomime or a Gaiety Burlesque. ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... moment, and then springing upon me with such wild bounds of delight that I had to call hold, lest his great paws play havoc with my fine Paris clothes that I had donned in mademoiselle's honor. And to quiet him I said in a high, small voice, in palpable burlesque of mademoiselle: ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... Hereditary succession is a burlesque upon monarchy. It puts it in the most ridiculous light, by presenting it as an office which any child or idiot may fill. It requires some talents to be a common mechanic; but to be a king requires only the animal ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... that pleased me most was a gay little piece of burlesque by Mr. ARTHUR CHESNEY as the red-haired shop assistant who was not a pacifist. Mr. CHARLES GLENNEY so thoroughly enjoyed the robustious sea-captain that we had to enjoy it too—a sound notion of entertainment, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... without much discretion, and to call him a little too often in requisition for walks or rides, for tapestry drawings, for playing duets with her, sometimes for nothing, simply to disturb him, standing in front of his windows, and asking him, in the midst of his reading, all sorts of burlesque questions. All this was charming; Monsieur de Lucan lent himself to it with the utmost good nature, and did not surely deserve great credit ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... shirt cuff protruded in limp dejection; at the other an ancient collar, with the grotesque attachment known as a "dickey," asserted its presence. No wonder the manager frowned his annoyance. "The Safe" was in low enough repute among its patrons at that moment without any burlesque interlude to its ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... passions of the heart: witness the devoted love of Thekla for Max in Wallenstein; or the furious jealousy of the Queen in Don Carlos. He has not the grotesque of Shakspeare; we do not see in his tragedies that mixture of the burlesque and the sublime which is so common in the Bard of Avon, and is not infrequent with the greatest minds, who play, as it were, with the thunderbolts, and love to show how they can master them. Hence, in reading at least, his dramas produce a more uniform and unbroken impression ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... will be time to note the extent to which he utilized these results of his widely discursive reading, and to examine the legitimacy of the mode in which he used them: here it is enough to say generally that the materials for many a burlesque chapter of Tristram Shandy must have been unconsciously storing themselves in his mind in many an amused hour passed by Sterne in the library of ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... molten matter of the new world.... Let there breathe once more in our heaven that air which flames in the prodigious song of Dante in which he describes the flight of the Roman eagle, of your eagle, citizens!... Italy is arming, not for the burlesque, but for a serious combat.... Viva, viva Roma, without shame, viva the great and ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... S. Gilbert (in Patience) or Robert Hichens (in The Green Carnation) to satirize its distorted attitudinizing. It strained itself to death; it became its own burlesque of the bizarre, an extravaganza of extravagance. "The period" (I am again quoting Holbrook Jackson) "was as certainly a period of decadence as it was a period of renaissance. The decadence was to be seen in a perverse and finicking glorification of the ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... comic interlude. Years ago a musical humorist in Vienna caused much amusement by writing the words of a quarrel of Jewish pedlers under the voices of the fugue in Mozart's overture to "The Magic Flute." Three hundred years ago Orazio Vecchi composed a burlesque madrigal in the severe style of that day, in which he tried to depict the babel of sounds in a synagogue. Obviously the musical Jew is supposed to be allied to the stage Jew and to be fit food for the humorist. Strauss's music gives ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... have made Emily smile in these moments, it would have been this speech of her aunt, delivered in a voice very little below a scream, and with a vehemence of gesticulation and of countenance, that turned the whole into burlesque. Emily saw, that her misfortunes did not admit of real consolation, and, contemning the commonplace terms of superficial comfort, she was silent; while Madame Montoni, jealous of her own consequence, mistook this for the silence of indifference, or of contempt, and reproached ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... at adaptations of popular pictures,—witness the more than happy parodies of Herrman's "A Bout d'Arguments," and "Une Bonne Histoire." His book-illustrations have been comparatively few, those to Burnand's laughable burlesque of "Sandford and Merton" being among the best. Rumour asserts that he is at present engaged upon Kingsley's "Water Babies," a subject which might almost be supposed to have been created for his pencil. There are indications, it may be added, that Mr. Sambourne's talents are by no means ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... in the crowded house. The ruffling of the face of the sea before a storm. The Sisters Sigsbee, Coon Delineators and Unrivalled Burlesque Artists, have finished their dance, smiled, blown kisses, skipped off, skipped on again, smiled, blown more kisses, and disappeared. A long chord from the orchestra. A chord that is almost a wail. A wail of regret for that which is past. Two liveried menials appear. ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... series of skating stunts. In rapid and bewildering succession there are ballets on skates, solo skating numbers, skating carnivals and skating races. Finally scenery is slid in on runners and the whole company, in costumes grotesque and beautiful, go through a burlesque that keeps you laughing when you are not applauding, and admiring when you are doing neither; while alternating lightwaves from overhead electric devices flood the picture with shifting, shimmering tides of color. ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... not look especially promising. It was to develop into a really remarkable work, and to place Irving's name in a secure place among living humorists. The "Knickerbocker History of New York" really laid the foundation of his fame. The first plan was for a mere burlesque of an absurd book just published, a Dr. Samuel Mitchill's "Picture of New York." Mitchill began with the aborigines: the Irvings began with the creation of the world. Fortunately Peter was soon called away to Europe, ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... follows: "Flashy people may burlesque these things, but when hundreds of the most sober people in a country, where they have as much mother-wit certainly as the rest of mankind, know them to be true, nothing but the absurd and froward spirit of Sadduceeism can ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... faces, the sorcerers kneeling with their heads and bodies humbly bowed down, and the magicians, who stood highest in importance, only kneeling. After this they all went through the formality of denying God and the Saints. Then they had a diabolical service in burlesque of that of the church, at which the Evil One served as priest in a violet chasuble; the elevation of the demon host was announced by a wooden bell, and the sacrament itself was made of unleavened bread. The scenes which followed resembled those of other witch-meetings. Gaufridi acknowledged ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... girl offered another bonne bouche to the crowd. She would never again skip airily behind the footlights of the Wellington, or any other important theater in England. So far as she was concerned, the musical comedy candle that succeeded to the sacred lamp of West End burlesque was snuffed out. ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... when not at the wheel," said Bixby, "but the best thing he ever did was the burlesque of old Isaiah Sellers. He didn't write it for print, but only for his own amusement and to show to a few of the boys. Bart Bowen, who was with him on the "Edward J. Gay" at the time, got hold of it, and gave it to one of the ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... and forty-six years ago, produced the Sot-Weed Factor's Voyage to Maryland. He wrote, printed, published, and sold it in London for sixpence sterling, and then disappeared forever. We do not know certainly that Mr. Cook himself was the actual adventurer who suffered the ills described by him "in burlesque verse." Indeed, "Eben: Cook, Gent." may be a myth—a nom de plume. Yet, there is a certain personal poignancy and earnestness about the whole Story that almost forbid the idea of a secondhand narrative. Nay, I think it extremely probable ...
— The Sot-weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland • Ebenezer Cook
... made us ambitious, and we think of getting up another piece—a burlesque, entitled 'Sir Dagobert and the Dragon,' from one of my Beeton's 'Annuals.' There is not much in it; but, faute de mieux, it may do very well. But to revert to less "towny" and much more interesting matters passing ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... Not so the burlesque eight daughters of the plough, the brawny ministers of the princess' executive, and their usage ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... Paris, which had been filled with priests and laymen arrested on charges of complicity with the enemies of liberty, were entered by ruffians acting under influence of Marat and the commune's "committee of surveillance," and, after "a burlesque trial" before an armed jury, were murdered. In Versailles, Lyons, Orleans, and other towns, there were like massacres. The victims of these massacres numbered ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... been thoroughly naturalised among people whose ideas about knight-errantry, if they had any at all, were of the vaguest, who had never seen or heard of a book of chivalry, who could not possibly feel the humour of the burlesque or sympathise with the author's purpose. Another curious fact is that this, the most cosmopolitan book in the world, is one of the most intensely national. "Manon Lescaut" is not more thoroughly French, "Tom Jones" not more English, "Rob Roy" not more Scotch, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... come, and forth he would be drawn like a shy, unwilling periwinkle from its shell, once more to play his abased and bashful role of free entertainer to guffawing mixed audiences. For all others in the great city there were havens and homes. But for a poor, lorn, unguided vagrant, enmeshed in the burlesque garnitures of a three-year-old male child, what haven was there? By night the part had been hard enough—as the unresponsive heavens above might have testified. By the stark unmerciful sunlight; by the rude, revealing ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... Franklin was essentially a journalist. In his swift, terse style, he is most like Defoe, who was the first great English journalist and master of the newspaper narrative. The style of both writers is marked by homely, vigorous expression, satire, burlesque, repartee. Here the comparison must end. Defoe and his contemporaries were authors. Their vocation was writing and their success rests on the imaginative or creative power they displayed. To authorship Franklin laid no claim. He wrote no work of the imagination. He developed only ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... as he himself would have said, he was diablement epris with Lucy. This was regarded as one of the best of Zavier's jokes. He himself laughed at it, and his extravagant compliments and gallantries were well within the pale of the burlesque. Lucy laughed at them, too. The only one that took the matter seriously was Bella. She was ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... this, and as Elder Stenhouse read it to me "my feelings may be better imagined than described," to use language I think I have heard before. I pleaded, however, that it was a purely burlesque sketch, and that this strong paragraph should not be interpreted literally at all. The Elder didn't seem to see it in that light, but we ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... the first time, it turned its livid stare full upon my uncle with a hateful smile of significance, lifting up the little parcel of papers between his slender finger and thumb. Then he made a long, cunning wink at him, and seemed to blow out one of his cheeks in a burlesque grimace, which, but for the horrific circumstances, would have been ludicrous. My uncle could not tell whether this was really an intentional distortion or only one of those horrid ripples and ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... days grew more mellow, And other minds acknowledged my dominion: Now my sere Fancy "falls into the yellow Leaf,"[232] and Imagination droops her pinion, And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk Turns what was once romantic to burlesque. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... issues had made the Republican party, by 1897, the party of organized business. For twelve years the alliance had grown steadily closer. Marcus A. Hanna was its spokesman. The burlesque of his sincere and kindly face, drawn by a caricaturist, Davenport, for Eastern papers, created for the popular eye the type of commercialized magnate, but it did him great injustice. Self-respecting and direct, he believed ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... than overworn, was still of a quality inconsistent with her evident habits, and the lace-edged petticoat that peeped beneath it was draggled with mud and unaccustomed usage. Her glossy black hair, which had been tossed into curls in some foreign fashion, was now wind-blown into a burlesque of it. This incongruity was still further accented by the appearance of the room she had entered. It was coldly and severely furnished, making the chill of the yet damp white plaster unpleasantly obvious. A black harmonium organ stood in one corner, set out with black and white ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... old friend, the truck system, in full operation. Men live there, year in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in supplies. The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper they will fall in debt—a burlesque injustice in a new country, where labour should be precious, and one of those typical instances which explains the prevailing discontent and the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spoiled rather than overworn, was still of a quality inconsistent with her evident habits, and the lace-edged petticoat that peeped beneath it was draggled with mud and unaccustomed usage. Her glossy black hair, which had been tossed into curls in some foreign fashion, was now wind-blown into a burlesque of it. This incongruity was still further accented by the appearance of the room she had entered. It was coldly and severely furnished, making the chill of the yet damp white plaster unpleasantly obvious. A black harmonium organ stood in one corner, set out with ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... carriage, quarrelled rhythmically with one another; the mendicants, lying everywhere in wait for charity, murmured a modulated appeal; if you heard shouts or yells afar off they died upon your ear in a strain of melody at the moment when they were lifted highest. I am aware of seeming to burlesque the operatic fact which every one must have noticed in Naples; and I will not say that the neglected or affronted babe, or the trodden dog, is as tuneful as the midnight cat there, but only that they approach it in the prevailing tendency ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... easy, and pointed in his delivery—was a mighty fine speaker, indeed. Though there was a lurking consciousness in each, which none cared to publish, that there was, at times, an indefinable flavour of burlesque and irony in Mr. Dangerfield's compliments, which excited momentary suspicions and qualms, which the speaker waived off, however, easily with his jewelled fingers, and smiled ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... light, jesting, paragraph-writing man, and that he will remain to his dying day. When he is jocular he is strong, when he is serious he is like Samson in a wig; any ordinary person is a match for him: a song, an ironical letter, a burlesque ode, an attack in the newspaper upon Nicoll's eye, a smart speech of twenty minutes, full of gross misrepresentations and clever turns, excellent language, a spirited manner, lucky quotation, success in provoking dull men, some half information picked up in Pall Mall in the morning; these are ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... they expressed the manhood of England; but many of the Puritan practices were open to ridicule, and the Royalists, in revenge for their defeat, began to use ridicule without mercy. During the early years of the Restoration doggerel verses ridiculing Puritanism, and burlesque,—that is, a ridiculous representation of serious subjects, or a serious representation of ridiculous subjects,—were the most popular form of literature with London society. Of all this burlesque and doggerel the most famous is Butler's ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... talent and fine attainments as would justify him in sketching the troupe. He was not pleased, of course, with that portion of the performance (a part of which he was compelled to witness) devoted to burlesque. Nevertheless, he found in the vocal and instrumental part much that was in the highest degree gratifying; for during the evening he listened to some of the most pleasing music of the time, sung and played in a manner ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... sympathies; so much aspiration, so ill-educated a love of refinement; so unarmed a credulity, noblest of weaknesses, betrayed for the laughter of a chambermaid. By an actual Bottom the weaver our pity might be reached for the sake of his single self-reliance, his fancy and resource condemned to burlesque and ignominy by the niggard doom of circumstance. But is not life one thing and is not art another? Is it not the privilege of literature to treat things singly, without the after-thoughts of life, without the troublous completeness of the many- sided ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... good deal of ingenious and pleasing burlesque poetry extant by Antonio Malatesti. I have before mentioned his Sphinx: of this I have a dateless edition, apparently printed about the middle of the last century at Florence: the title is La Sfinge Enimmi del Signor Antonio Malatesti. Commendatory verses are prefixed by Chimentelli, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... Montezuma, who, like the hero of an ancient romance, bears fortune to any side which he pleases to espouse, is justly pointed out by Settle, as the prototype of Almanzor; though we look in vain for the glowing language, which, though sometimes bordering on burlesque, suits so well the extravagant character of the Moorish hero. Zempoalla strongly resembles Nourmuhal in Aureng-Zebe; both shewing that high spirit of pride, with which Dryden has often invested his female characters. The language of the Indian Queen possesses, in general, greater ease, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... character and life. Each group of persons is made to parody itself into concert with the others; while the frequent intershootings of fairy influence lift the whole into the softest regions of fancy. At last the Interlude comes in as an amusing burlesque on all that has gone before; as in our troubled dreams we sometimes end with a dream that we have been dreaming, and our perturbations sink to rest in the sweet assurance that they were but the phantoms and unrealities of a ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... great professor Burman hath styled Tom Thumb "Heroum omnium tragicorum facile principem:" nay, though it hath, among other languages, been translated into Dutch, and celebrated with great applause at Amsterdam (where burlesque never came) by the title of Mynheer Vander Thumb, the burgomasters receiving it with that reverent and silent attention which becometh an audience at a deep tragedy. Notwithstanding all this, there have not ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... visiting where she would meet the odd medley in the suburbs of Paris. Retired opera-singers, Bohemians who have made a fortune by chance, superseded politicians, officials who have perfected libeling into an art, and reformed female celebrities of the dancing-gardens and burlesque theatres. But, as society is constituted, it would have earned him the reputation of a tyrant if he had refused her receiving and returning the visits of the venerable Marchioness de Latour-Lagneau, to whom the Bishop always accorded an hour ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... possessed the thought which is communicated to those waxen caricatures of the human face divine. He is a militia-officer, and the most amusing person in the House. Can anything be more exquisitely absurd than the burlesque grandeur of his air, as he strides up to the lobby, his eyes rolling like those of a Turk's head in a cheap Dutch clock? He never appears without that bundle of dirty papers which he carries under his left arm, and which are generally supposed to be the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... in particular—should have such second-rate stuff to say and sing. Seldom could one detect any attempt to evade the obvious. Of topical allusions, apart from timeworn themes of coupons and profiteers, there was scarce a sign, and such burlesque as there was had no sort of subtlety in it. Take, for example, the opportunity lost in the imitation of a bedroom scene from modern drama. It announced itself as something "West-Endy," yet it was like nothing (I imagine) even in the remote Orient. And constantly the poor play ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... that the news was too good to be true. That passed nem. con.; and the second resolution was nearly passing, viz. that a judgment would certainly fall upon Mr. Murray, had a second report proved true, viz. that not the Antigone, but a burlesque on the Antigone, was what he meditated to introduce. This turned out false; [l0] the original report was suddenly revived eight or ten months after. Immediately on the heels of the promise the execution followed; and on the last (which I believe was the seventh) representation ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... has contributed so much to the illustration of our theatrical antiquities, has given us a full account of this pageant, and the burlesque ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... excursions, parties of pleasure, and the contingencies that occurred in them, we decked out poetically; and thus, by the description of an event, a new event always arose. But as such social jests commonly degenerate into personal ridicule, and my friend Horn, with his burlesque representations, did not always keep within proper bounds, many a misunderstanding arose, which, however, could soon be ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the apartment into a large hog trough, that lay along the wall and daily received the refuse of the various meals. The bird, furious with pain, was burying its beak into the leg of the soldier, while he, with the butt end of his musket aloft, and the bayonet depressed, offered the most burlesque representation of St. George preparing to give his ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... visitor will not fail to recognize. If, on a first introduction and visit, he is told that the house and all it contains is his own, and that the proprietor is entirely at his service, he will neither take this literally nor as a burlesque, but will receive the assurance for what it really signifies, that is, as conveying a spirit of cordiality. These expressions are as purely conventional as though the host asked simply and pleasantly after his guest's health, and ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... floor made me bend down hastily with a stern: "Don't laugh," for in his grotesque, almost burlesque discourses there seemed to me to be truth, passion, and horror enough ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... for the last thirty years, and is in particular an excellent retailer of the humours and extravagances of his old friend Peter Pindar. He had recounted a series of them, each rising above the other in a sort of magnificent burlesque and want of literal preciseness, to a medley of laughing and sour faces, when on his proceeding to state a joke of a practical nature by the said Peter, a Mr. ——- (I forget the name) objected to the moral of the story, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... detail the first half of the book. How a man of Mr. Warricombe's intelligence could take grave interest in an arid exegesis of the first chapter of Genesis, Godwin strove in vain to comprehend. Often enough the debates were perilously suggestive of burlesque, and, when alone, he relieved himself of the laughter he had scarce restrained. For instance, there was that terrible thohu wabohu of the second verse, a phrase preserved from the original, and tossed into all the corners of controversy. Was thohu wabohu the first condition of ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... or intelligence, and is drifted passively about upon the astral currents just as a cloud might be swept in any direction by a passing breeze; but even yet it may be galvanized for a few moments into a ghastly burlesque of life if it happens to come within reach of a medium's aura. Under such circumstances it will still exactly resemble its departed personality in appearance, and may even reproduce to some extent his familiar expressions or handwriting, but it does so merely by ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... large extent but the crystallization of this persistent interest. Old saws and proverbs of every people transmit from generation to generation shrewd generalizations upon human behavior. In joke and in epigram, in caricature and in burlesque, in farce and in comedy, men of all races and times have enjoyed with keen relish the humor of the contrast between the conventional and the natural motives in behavior. In Greek mythology, individual traits of human nature are abstracted, idealized, and personified into gods. The heroes ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... is a man of humor, and the burlesque has a place in his philosophical writings; but in the words which I have just read to you he seems to have intended seriously to expound the system which replaces God by an idea. Try now to form a definite conception of this universe composed of the undulations of ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... a success—I could see that it would be at the moment Mr. Bernard Shaw so forgot himself as to be interested in something he had not himself written. The Press was charmed with the play and went so far as to say, with a gross burlesque of Chesterton, that it was 'real phantasy and had soul.' Chesterton by his one produced play had earned the right to call himself a dramatic author, who could make the public shiver and think at the same ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... mother for a school-mistress—is not absolutely new or original; but, again, what matters this to anyone, so long as the new shape given to the old material is genuinely amusing? So "farcical" goes with "original." But now, as to its being a "Romance?" Would not the term "burlesque" be a better term than "Farcical Romance?" The characters of the three adventurous lovers are not less burlesque than were those of the three Knights in ALBERT SMITH'S romantic Extravaganza, The Alhambra, played then by ALFRED WIGAN, and Mr. and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... For another early instance of our genre and a very pure one, see an anonymous Cambridge correspondent's critique of the burlesque broadside ballad of "Moor of Moore-Hall and the Dragon of Wantley," in Nathaniel Mist's Weekly Journal (second series), September 2, 1721, reproduced by Roger P. McCutcheon, "Another Burlesque of Addison's ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... which, in all probability, he must himself so soon descend; think how unpleasant a situation! He bore it all with a firm and unaffected countenance. This grave scene was fully contrasted by the burlesque Duke {82} of Newcastle. He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung himself back in a stall, the archbishop hovering over him with a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... as follows: "Flashy people may burlesque these things, but when hundreds of the most sober people in a country, where they have as much mother-wit certainly as the rest of mankind, know them to be true, nothing but the absurd and froward spirit of Sadduceeism can question them. I have not yet mentioned so much as one thing, ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... the room, a man in a broad-skirted green coat, with corduroy knee-smalls and gray cotton stockings, was performing the most popular steps of a hornpipe, with a slang and burlesque caricature of grace and lightness, which, combined with the very appropriate character of his costume, was inexpressibly absurd. Another man, evidently very drunk, who had probably been tumbled into bed by his companions, was sitting up between the sheets, warbling as much as he could ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... the Chicago Tribune, with the comment that it was a ghastly and melancholy burlesque. There is really a train of melancholy in the reflection that it was so little of a burlesque; that they who could endure such a siege, on such fare, should have been compelled to bear their trial in vain. But the quick-satisfying reflection must follow of the truth, the heroism—the ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... me fixedly for some seconds. And then a very odd thing occurred. Suddenly she squinted—squinted horribly; not with the familiar convergent squint which burlesque artists imitate, but with external or divergent squint of extreme near sight or unequal vision. The effect was quite startling. One moment both her eyes were looking straight into mine; the next, one of them rolled round until it ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... upright judges, to be dealt with, according to their merits, with impartial accuracy. The distribution of poetic justice in Hades at last became, in many authors, so melodramatic as to furnish a fair subject for burlesque. Some ludicrous examples of this may be seen in Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead. A fine instance of it is also furnished in the Emperor Julian's Symposium. The gods prepare for the Roman emperors a banquet, in the air, below ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... BURLESQUE BILL. At Princeton College, it is customary for the members of the Sophomore Class to hold annually a Sophomore Commencement, caricaturing that of the Senior Class. The Sophomore Commencement is in turn travestied by the Junior Class, who prepare and publish Burlesque Bills, as they are called, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... only forgot what they had seen, but what they had said; and when to one of them his own testimony to the privy council was read, he mistook it for that of another, whose evidence he declared to be "the merest burlesque in the world." ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... must have read Franklin's piece hastily, since he has mistaken a bit of ironic trifling for a serious attempt to rewrite the Scriptures. The Proposed New Version of the Bible is merely a bit of amusing burlesque in which six verses of the Book of Job are rewritten in the style of modern politics. According to Mr. William Temple Franklin the Bagatelles, of which the Proposed New Version is a part, were "chiefly written by Dr. Franklin for the ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... was dismissed. I soon found that my exploit had placed me upon quite a different footing in the ship from that which I had occupied before. The men treated me with real respect, instead of the good-humoured burlesque thereof which they had accorded me hitherto; and my fellow-mids at once received me into the berth upon a footing of perfect equality with themselves, each one striving to do me some little kindness or show me some little attention, in place of playing off disagreeable practical jokes upon ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... man," said the King, who never doubted that this was the introduction to something burlesque or witty, not conceiving that the charge was ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... certain and beyond all controversy, is that Rabelais owed much to one of his contemporaries, an Italian, to the Histoire Macaronique of Merlin Coccaie. Its author, Theophilus Folengo, who was also a monk, was born in 1491, and died only a short time before Rabelais, in 1544. But his burlesque poem was published in 1517. It was in Latin verse, written in an elaborately fabricated style. It is not dog Latin, but Latin ingeniously italianized, or rather Italian, even Mantuan, latinized. The contrast between the modern form of the word and its Roman garb ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... reflect it, and as a consequence they assume an air of divinity, which if it rightfully belonged to them would be fatal to all argument for a Second Chamber." That would be very important If it were true. But is it true that First Chambers assume an air of divinity? Or is such an expression a "burlesque of the real argument?" A reasonable familiarity with the course of the controversy in France, where the discussion has been abundant, and in England, where it has been comparatively meagre, leaves me, for one, entirely ignorant that this claim for ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... estimates inherited from the Puritans, hell, natural depravity, and the like. The great literatus will be known, among the rest, by his cheerful simplicity, his adherence to natural standards, his limitless faith in God, his reverence, and by the absence in him of doubt, ennui, burlesque, persiflage, or any strain'd ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... place by his text, as if the houses were so many pictures to which he had appended a story, Clive, the wag, who was always indulging his vein for caricature, was proposing that that they should take the same place, names, people, and make a burlesque story: "What would be a better figure," says he, "than Pliny's mother, whom the historian describes as exceedingly corpulent, and walking away from the catastrophe with slaves holding cushions behind her, to shield her plump person from the cinders! Yes, old Mrs Pliny shall be my heroine!" ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... deal scandalised, and put out by the general's reciting with jolly emphasis, and calling thereto his daughter's special attention, his receipt for 'surprising a weaver,' which he embellished with two or three burlesque improvements of his own, which Puddock, amidst his blushes and confusion, allowed to pass without a protest. Aunt Rebecca was the only person present who pointedly refused to laugh; and with a slight shudder and momentary elevation of her eyes, said, 'wicked and unnatural ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... one upon earthquakes, one upon the devil, and one upon the holy fathers of the church!—the first in the form of a pamphlet, addressed to a lady, giving a scientific explanation of the causes of these phenomena, interspersed with compliments to her beaux yeux; the second is a burlesque poem; and the third a ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... Chesterton has a style which could make even a debilitated paradox of great length seem amusing. The book has a few gorgeous passages. Among the documents read at the trial of Innocent Smith, for example, is a statement made by a Trans-Siberian station-master, which is a perfectly exquisite burlesque at the expense of the Russian intelligenzia. The whole series of documents, in fact, are delightful bits of self-expression on the part of a very varied team of selves. While Chesterton is able to turn out such things we must be content to take the page, and not the story, as his unit of ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... Gunner Moran was of the old navy—the navy that had been despised and spat upon. In those days his uniform alone had barred him from decent theatres, decent halls, decent dances, contact with decent people. They had forced him to a knowledge of the burlesque houses, the cheap theatres, the shooting galleries, the saloons, the dives. And now, bewilderingly, the public had right-about faced. It opened its doors to him. It closed its saloons to him. It sought him out. It offered him amusement. ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... close of July, 1597, Pembroke's Men at the Swan acted Nashe's satirical play, The Isle of Dogs, containing, it seems, a burlesque on certain persons high in authority. As a result the Privy Council on July 28 ordered all acting in and about London to cease until November 1, and all public playhouses to ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... I bite. And all sorts of things that inevitably mar the tense illusion which is the aim of the short story—the introduction, for example, of the author's personality—any comment that seems to admit that, after all, fiction is fiction, a change in manner between part and part, burlesque, parody, invective, all such thing's are not necessarily wrong in the novel. Of course, all these things may fail in their effect; they may jar, hinder, irritate, and all are difficult to do well; but it is no artistic merit to evade a difficulty any more than it is a merit in a hunter ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... in England, and found its way to France. The Marquis de Chastellux, an author himself, took an especial interest in American literature. He wrote to congratulate Trumbull upon his excellent poem, and took the opportunity to lay down "the conditions prescribed for burlesque poetry." "These, Sir, you have happily seized and perfectly complied with.... I believe that you have rifled every flower which that kind of poetry could offer.... Nor do I hesitate to assure you that I prefer it to every work of the kind,—even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... Fox. A Burlesque Poem, from the Low-German Original of the Fifteenth Century. Boston: De ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... gaming-tables, in a few days, or even hours. While a few gained a competence, many gained only a bare subsistence; thousands lost their health, and not a few their lives. It was a strange play that men enacted there, embracing all the confusion, glitter, rapid change of scene, burlesque, and comedy of a pantomime, with many a dash of darkest tragedy intermingled. Tents were pitched in all directions, houses were hastily run up, restaurants of all kinds were opened, boats were turned keel ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... Addison himself was master of that grace, even in his pieces of humour, and which do not owe their merit to style; and from that combined secret he excels all men that ever lived; but Shakspeare, in humour,[1] by never dropping into an approach towards burlesque and buffoonery, when even his humour descended to characters that in other hands would have been vulgarly low. Is not it clear that Will Wimble was a gentleman, though he always lived at a distance from good company? Fielding had as much humour, perhaps, as Addison; but, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... inventiveness of malice, with those of Shakespeare's queen Margaret; but they lose their effect by being thrown into the form of monologue and ascribed to a departed spirit, whose agonies of grief and rage in reciting his own death have something in them bordering on the burlesque. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... and induced in me a pleasing melancholy. Thus was I engaged when young Rupert Hentzau, who feared neither man nor devil, and rode through the demesne—where every tree might hide a marksman, for all he knew—as though it had been the park at Strelsau, cantered up to where I lay, bowing with burlesque deference, and craving private speech with me in order to deliver a message from the Duke of Strelsau. I made all withdraw, and then he said, seating himself ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... the face-plate. He clicked his heels and bowed stiffly from the waist, in a fine burlesque of an ancient courtier. He stalked past Hoskins and punched the button ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... and the right touch, in the interpreter. Miriam had gobbled them up, and she gave them forth in the same way as the first, with close, rude, audacious mimicry. There was a moment for Sherringham when it might have been feared their hostess would see in the performance a designed burlesque of her manner, her airs and graces, her celebrated simpers and grimaces, so extravagant did it all cause these refinements to appear. When it was over the old woman said, "Should you like now to hear how you do?" and, without waiting for an answer, phrased and trilled the last ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Comic and Hudibrastic, containing Burlesque Translations, Dramatic Pieces, and Miscellanies. By W. C. Oulton, Esq. With a Portrait of the Author, ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... influence. But Franklin was essentially a journalist. In his swift, terse style, he is most like Defoe, who was the first great English journalist and master of the newspaper narrative. The style of both writers is marked by homely, vigorous expression, satire, burlesque, repartee. Here the comparison must end. Defoe and his contemporaries were authors. Their vocation was writing and their success rests on the imaginative or creative power they displayed. To authorship ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... extemporized, whilst the young people acted scenes in dumb show and danced comic ballets. These charming improvisations turned the children's heads and made their legs nimble. He led them just as he chose, making them pass, according to his fancy, from the amusing to the severe, from burlesque to solemnity—now graceful, now impassioned. We invented all kinds of costumes, so as to play different characters in succession. No sooner did the artist see them appear than he adapted his theme and rhythm to ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Captain Hawley sang Rule Britannia with the entire company in a deafening chorus. After a short pause, cries of "Howe! Howe!" Nothing short of an oration would satisfy. The secretary rose and delivered something which would take some investigation to classify either as an epic, oration, or burlesque. They wanted variety and such it was. A puzzled expression rested on Lieutenant Trevelyan's face as he tried to follow Mr. ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... in the dances here presented should never attempt to imitate what is supposed to be the Indian's manner of singing or his dancing steps and postures; in either case the result would probably be an unmeaning burlesque. Each dancer should have a clear mental picture of the scene to be enacted and then give free play to bodily movements for its expression, always keeping in rhythm with the song, so as to make sound and motion a ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... capitan-general, in order to give a new impulse to the military service, had ordered a grand review; and the battalion of Turmero, in a mock fight, had fired on that of La Victoria. Our host, a lieutenant of the militia, was never weary of describing to us the danger of these manoeuvres, which seemed more burlesque than imposing. With what rapidity do nations, apparently the most pacific, acquire military habits! Twelve years afterwards, those valleys of Aragua, those peaceful plains of La Victoria and Turmero, the defile of Cabrera, and the fertile banks of the lake of Valencia, became the scenes ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... plays, and wrote at college a farce, never acted, a comedy, written at the age of sixteen, The East Indian, afterwards played for Mrs. Jordan's benefit and repeated with great success, and also a novel, never published, called The Effusions of Sensibility, which was a burlesque upon the sentimental school. He wrote also what he called "a romance in the style of The Castle of Otranto," which appeared afterwards as the play of ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... consultations, tried medicines on him, and laughed at his simplicity. Under his impassive manner, that would have well become a Castilian hidalgo, there was a perpetual love of teasing. He was highly delighted with the adventure of the duel, which struck him as sheer burlesque: and he was amusing himself with fancying the mess that Christophe would make of it. He thought it a great joke to be driving through the woods at the expense of good old Krafft.—That, clearly, was what ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... Institution. Some who send in these resolutions privately, are, no doubt, secret friends, needing a little more courage to face the pro-slavery feeling and sentiment which are all about them. Some one who read these resolutions suggested the idea of their being a burlesque. I repudiated the idea at once. They will commend themselves to you, dear Aunty, I am sure, as honest ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... it with the most delightful tenderness. This spectacle grated against our sensibilities: it seemed to us that he who first invented this parody upon one of the most touching incidents in nature must have been a man without a heart. A somewhat burlesque circumstance occurred one day, to modify the indignation with which this treachery inspired us. By dint of caressing and licking her little calf, the tender parent one fine morning unripped it: the hay issued from within; and the cow, ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... rehearsal of another great poet. But a work of art is valuable, and pleasurable in proportion to its rarity; one beautiful book of verses is better than twenty books of beautiful verses. This is an absolute and incontestable truth; a child can burlesque this truth—one verse is better than the whole poem, a word is better than the line, a letter is better than the word, but the truth is not thereby affected. Hugo never had the good fortune to write a bad book, nor even a single ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... of the other theatres. "St. James' Theatre," in King Street, St. James', was built for Braham, the celebrated singer. "The Olympic" was a small house in Wych Street, Drury Lane, now destroyed. "The Strand Theatre" was famous for its burlesque extravaganzas, a form of theatrical amusement which of late has become exceedingly popular. The "New Globe Theatre" (destroyed so late as 1902) and "The Gaiety" (at the stage entrance of which are the old offices of ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... in progress in my Tokio hotel one afternoon, and through the open door I had glimpses of Japanese gentlemen in frock coats bowing to Japanese ladies and making perfect right angles as they did so. So elaborate indeed were the courtesies that to Western eyes they bordered dangerously on burlesque. ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... done several times. What wicked people dyers are. They begin with dipping their own souls in scarlet sin. It is evening. We have drank tea, and I have torn through the third vol. of the "Heroine." I do not think it falls off. It is a delightful burlesque, particularly on the Radcliffe style. Henry is going on with "Mansfield Park." He admires H. Crawford: I mean properly, as a clever, pleasant man. I tell you all the good I can, as I know how much you will enjoy it. We hear that Mr. Kean ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... said, surpassed the moderns in poetry, painting, oratory, history, architecture, and, in fact, all arts and sciences which depend more on genius than on experience. It was no lightening of the judgment when he added that the moderns surpass the ancients in doggerel, humour burlesque, and all the trivial arts of ridicule, the arts of the "unlucky little wits." So degraded had wit become! In the Adventurer, nos. 127 and 133, Joseph Warton showed himself to be essentially in agreement with Addison's verdict, differing ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... play. This last might be related to the tragedies or be quite independent, as they usually were in Sophocles and Euripides. The satyric play was named from the satyrs or attendants upon Bacchus, and was a farce or burlesque intended to relieve the feelings of the spectators after the tragedies. The 'Alcestis' was entered by Euripides as a satyric play, but it only in parts approaches the characteristics of such a play. In other parts ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... yet caught; and secondly, that in the meditated massacre, not one Frenchman was to be touched. It is moreover believed, though not positively known, that a great many of our profligate and abandoned whites (who are distinguished by the burlesque appellation of democrats) are implicated with the blacks, and would have joined them if they had commenced their operations. The particulars of this horrid affair you will probably see detailed in Davis' paper from Richmond, but certainly in Stewart's ...
— An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, • Joshua Coffin
... already been bereft of his senses by the melodrama preceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty, her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart, but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate who fought a losing fight with broadswords, two up and two down—click-click, click-click—and ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... been living upon the profits of their previous travels. They were not allowed to leave Vienna, however, without a ray of sunshine to cheer them on their homeward journey. Wolfgang had written an operetta, 'Bastien und Bastienne,' founded upon a burlesque of one of Rousseau's operas, and he had the pleasure of hearing his little work performed before a select company of connoisseurs, and of receiving their praises. Nor would the Emperor let him depart without a further sign of royal favour, for he was commanded to write a Mass, an ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... and was considering of his reply to this remarkable speech, when Pete, gravely saluting, passed on, rather congratulating himself on having staged a very good burlesque of the dignified manners of those ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... 11 will be commenced a new burlesque serial, "The Mystery of Mister E. Drood," written expressly for this paper by the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... illustrating it, and bringing in the artist's pencil to aid the writer's pen. I soon resolved to do this, and the third and fourth numbers contained a woodcut on the front page. In the fifth number there appeared an exquisite little burlesque sketch of the Calling of Samuel, by a skilful artist whose name I cannot disclose. Although not ostensibly, it was actually, the first of those Comic Bible Sketches for which the Freethinker afterwards became famous; and from that date, with the exception ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... Meanwhile another burlesque of justice dragged wearily on in the dim courtroom. The judge was sentencing thirty-nine women to prison. When the twenty-sixth had been reached, he said wearily, "How ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... order to harmonize the conflicting interests of the various productive associations, there is nothing, it appears, that the syndicalist so much abhors. He is never quite done with picturing the burlesque of parliamentarism. While, no doubt, this is a necessary corollary to his antagonism to the State, it is aggravated by the fact that one of the chief ends of a political party is to put its representatives into Parliament. The ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... expenses of the wars created great discontent, which during the struggle with Spain led to a series of conspiracies or revolts against the government, known as the Wars of the Fronde (1648-1652). "Notwithstanding its peculiar character of levity and burlesque, the Fronde must be regarded as a memorable struggle of the aristocracy, supported by the judicial and municipal bodies, to control the despotism of the crown.... It failed;... nor was any farther effort made to resuscitate the dormant liberties of the ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... projected the work that was to make him famous. At first nothing more was intended than a satire upon the "Picture of New York," by Dr. Samuel Mitchell, just then published. It was begun as a mere burlesque upon pedantry and erudition, and was well advanced, when Peter was called by his business to Europe, and its completion was fortunately left to Washington. In his mind the idea expanded into a different conception. He condensed the mass of affected learning, which was their ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... Solitude); The History of three late famous Imposters (Padre Ottomano, Mahomed Bei, and Sabatei Sevi: 1669); Mundus Muliebris: or the Ladies Dressing-room Unlock'd and her Toilette spread (1690: a burlesque poem, 'A voyage to Marryland,' cataloguing female follies of the time, by his daughter Mary, who died in 1685); Numismata: a Discourse of Medals, Antient and Modern: &c. (1697); and Acetaria: a Discourse of Sallets (1699), which was merely a chapter, written many ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... furrow beside the terrified horses and belabors them, thus serving the old husbandman as ploughboy. This spectre, which Holbein has introduced allegorically in the succession of philosophical and religious subjects, at once lugubrious and burlesque, entitled the Dance ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... Babette in the burlesque as Phryne at the Varietes—une merveille, mon cher!" he exclaimed, addressing the sous-lieutenant on his right, and he blew a kiss to the ceiling. "The complexion of a rosebud and amusing! ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... the contagion of Roman society. It was fashionable for men like Bembo and La Casa to form connections with women of the demi-monde and to recognize their children, whose legitimation they frequently procured. The Capitoli of the burlesque poets show that this laxity of conduct was pardonable, when compared with other laughingly avowed and all but universal indulgences. Once more, compare Guidiccioni's letter to M. Giamb. Bernardi ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... to go to at that time, so he went and read the papers, and drank coffee at a cigar divan until it was late enough to dine, and after dinner tried to drown his care by going to see one of those anomalous productions—a 'three-act burlesque'—at a neighbouring theatre, which he sat through with a growing gloom, in spite of the pretty faces and graceful dances which have now, with some rare exceptions, made plot and humour so unnecessary. Each leading member of the clever company danced his or her special pas seul as if for ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... thousand miles from salt water, the oysters that are served on his dining cars do not seem to be suffering from car-sickness. And you can get a beefsteak measuring eighteen inches from tip to tip. There are spring chickens with the most magnificent bust development I ever saw outside of a burlesque show; and the eggs taste as though they might have originated with a hen instead of a cold-storage vault. If there was only a cabaret show going up and down the middle of the car during meals, even the New York passengers would be satisfied with ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... uncouth figures you ever saw in old pictures, from childhood up to the present day; select from every theatrical representation within the range of your experience the most monstrous and absurd caricatures upon humanity; bring to your aid all the masquerades and burlesque fancy-balls you ever visited, tumble them together in the great bag of your imagination, and pour them out over a vague wilderness of open spaces, dirty streets, high walls, and rickety little booths, and you have no idea at all of the queer old markets of the ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... this little burlesque in this collection simply in memory of the Boston Miscellany, the magazine in which it was published, which won for itself a brilliant reputation in its short career. There was not a large staff of writers for the Miscellany, ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... diction. How unusual it was can be judged by comparing with the then-current practices and theories of poetic diction his recommendation of monosyllables, expletives, the archaic language of Chaucer and Spenser, and current provincialisms—devices that Gay had used for burlesque—as means of producing the soft and ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... "Nothing more utterly derogatory," he writes, "both to the dignity of art and to the nature of the subject can be imagined. S. John is seen with folded arms, fast asleep, while others of the Apostles with the most burlesque gestures are asking, 'Lord, is it I?' Another Apostle is uncovering a dish which stands on the floor without remarking that a cat has stolen in and is eating from it. A second is reaching towards a flask; ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... midnight. They had broken up into little knots round the table and before the fire, and gave themselves up to the burlesque fun which is only possible or comprehensible in Paris and in that particular region which is bounded by the Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Chaussee d'Antin, the upper end of the Rue de Navarin and the line of ...
— A Man of Business • Honore de Balzac
... Thomas L. James in postal reforms. The testimony taken during the trial of Guiteau shows that he was that night in that square; and, knowing the President had left the White House, was on the look-out, with intent to murder him. The incarnate sneak was lying in wait, a horrible burlesque, to take his revenge because he thought he had been slighted, and was so malignant a fool he believed public opinion might applaud the deed. One of the dusky figures on the benches was ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... incorporated some of them; and although the rest were no longer regarded as sacred, the feeling of obligation remained attached to them for centuries. They were secularized, and ultimately degraded for the most part into burlesque. Such as were connected with municipal life, or, as we shall see in a future chapter, with family life, retained a measure of solemnity long after it had passed away from rites which had been abandoned to an unorganized mob. This is well illustrated by the contrast between ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... Entwistle, the butt of not a little mirth from a half-dozen sceptics who had gathered round him. They addressed him as 'Owd Brimstone,' and made a burlesque of his Calvinistic faith, one going so far as to call him 'a glory bird,' while another declared he was 'booked for heaven fust-class baat ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... their portraits; venerable bachelors, who have striven to earn some little local notoriety by the diligent use of an odd phrase, a quaint garment, or an eccentric fling in the peripatetic, dread a satirist's powers of retributive burlesque; table orators suddenly grow dumb, for they suspect such a caitiff intends cold-blooded plagiarisms from their eloquence; the twinkling stars of humble village spheres shun him for an ominous comet, whose ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... was a burlesque outcry and a good-humored protest from the gentlemen around her against this manifestly leading question. "It's no fair! Ye'll not answer her—for the dignity of our sex." Yet in the midst of it, it suddenly occurred to the consul ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... triumph and all the comfort. If that is his idea of a woman's place, all right, but he must get some other girl to marry him. "Some girls will,"' Helena went on, breaking irreverently into a line of a song from a burlesque, '"but this ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... 1743).—Dramatist and song-writer, was believed to be an illegitimate s. of George Savile, Marquis of Halifax. He wrote innumerable burlesques, farces, songs, etc., often with his own music, including Chrononhotonthologos (1734), a burlesque on the mouthing plays of the day, and The Dragon of Wantley (1744?). His poem, Namby Pamby, in ridicule of Ambrose Phillips (q.v.), added a word to the language, and his Sally in our Alley is one of our best-known songs. God Save the King was ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... revolutionary pandemonium in Paris, and the royal flight to Varennes in June 1791, and the loss of the "Royal George" in 1782, all form the subjects of quizzical comments, and there are many other allusions the interest of which is quite as ephemeral as those of a Drury Lane pantomime or a Gaiety Burlesque. ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... maiden, Brunette, statuesque, The reverse of grotesque, Her pa was a bagman from Aden, Her mother she played in burlesque. ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... the same style as their mother, had an unpleasant lisp, and yet they always took part in every play and were always doing something for charity—acting, reciting, singing. They were very serious and never smiled, and even in burlesque operettas they acted without gaiety and with a businesslike air, as though ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... willingly in the laugh, as it is aimed at general folly and not at individual weakness. The wit is not condensed and sparkling as in the Dunciad; the writer's chief resource consisting in an adaptation of passages from writers, ancient and modern, to the purposes of a grave burlesque; and for the application of these, by a contrivance not very artificial, it is sometimes necessary to recur to the notes. The style, if it be not distinguished by any remarkable strength or elegance, is at least free ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... pieces include numerous burlesques and pantomimes, the libretti of Savonarola (Hamburg, 1884) and of The Canterbury Pilgrims (Drury Lane, 1884) for the music of Dr (afterwards Sir) C. V. Stanford. The Happy Land (Court Theatre, 1873), a political burlesque of W. S. Gilbert's Wicked World, was written in collaboration with F. L. Tomline. For the last ten years of his life he was on the regular staff of Punch. His health was seriously affected ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... object of the Church's anathema—the tradition held its own down through the Dark Ages, and we meet with the substance of the Saturnalia, during the centuries immediately preceding the Reformation, in the burlesque festivals with which the rule of the Boy-Bishop has been often identified. We shall see presently how far this judgment is correct. An example will, no doubt, readily recur to the reader from a source to which we owe so many impressions of the Middle Ages, some true, others false or at least ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... ballet, Jean!" he said, and capering madly sent Jean into deep grumbles of laughter by his burlesque. ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... our sensibilities; it seemed to us that he who first invented this parody [Footnote: Parody: a burlesque or mimicking of something, usually written.] upon one of the most touching incidents in nature must have been a man without a heart. A somewhat burlesque circumstance occurred one day to modify the indignation with which this treachery inspired us. By dint of caressing ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... ——- "at Foote's Alone". 'Foote's' was the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, where, in February, 1773, he brought out what he described as a 'Primitive Puppet Show,' based upon the Italian Fantoccini, and presenting a burlesque sentimental Comedy called 'The Handsome Housemaid; or, Piety in Pattens', which did as much as 'She Stoops' to laugh false sentiment away. Foote warned his audience that they would not discover 'much wit or humour' in the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... exasperate him. He was full of contradictions; and, intolerant and implacable, as he often was, there were intervals, even in his bitterest quarrels, in which he displayed a surprising moderation and patience. By fits he could be magnanimous. A woman once brought him a petition in burlesque verse. Frontenac wrote a jocose answer. The woman, to ridicule him, contrived to have both petition and answer slipped among the papers of a suit pending before the council. Frontenac had her fined a few francs, and then ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... mantel-shelf of a gay young bachelor, for the boudoir of a pretty woman. You couldn't make a prettier present to a person with whom you wished to exchange a harmless joke. It is not classic art, signore, of course; but, between ourselves, isn't classic art sometimes rather a bore? Caricature, burlesque, la charge, as the French say, has hitherto been confined to paper, to the pen and pencil. Now, it has been my inspiration to introduce it into statuary. For this purpose I have invented a peculiar plastic compound which you will permit me not to divulge. That's my secret, signore! It's as ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... Very estimable, and, we trust, very religious young women sometimes enter the house of God in a costume which makes their utterance of the words of the litany and the acts of prostrate devotion in the service seem almost burlesque. When a brisk little creature comes into a pew with hair frizzed till it stands on end in a most startling manner, rattling strings of beads and bits of tinsel, mounting over all some pert little hat with a red or green feather standing saucily upright in front, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... represented as taking place in the spirit land, are most grotesque and silly and would be taken as a burlesque upon Spiritualism, were they not put forth in all gravity by the friends and advocates of that so-called new revelation. Thus Judge Edmunds, giving an account of what he had seen in the spirit world, ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... back at his "Jennie"; that was always her name on such occasions. "It isn't about Oolong?" she asked, in burlesque anxiety. ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... and thinking, as he owned afterwards, that the dispute grew too serious, with a skill all his own, suddenly and unexpectedly turned it to burlesque; and taking Sir Philip by the hand at the moment we arose after supper, and were separating for ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... pass as poetry of the best kind. Will [Greek: ph]. point out in any existing poem of such profession and character, a single heroic line, consisting of ten words, all which ten words shall be "low" in the sense of "vulgar"? Can even the Muses of burlesque and slang ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... early escapade is perhaps to be connected what seems to have been one of Fielding's earliest literary efforts. This is a modernisation in burlesque octosyllabic verse of part of Juvenal's sixth satire. In the "Preface" to the later published Miscellanies, it is said to have been "originally sketched out before he was Twenty," and to have constituted "all the Revenge taken ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... is rather to develop a metaphor only by way of burlesque. All that need be asked of those who tend to this form of satire is to remember that, while some metaphors do seem to deserve such treatment, the number of times that the same joke can safely be made, even with variations, is limited; the limit has surely ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... A parody is a burlesque imitation and degradation of something serious. In his song, "Those Evening Bells," Moore ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... contrary describes it as his aim to please the good and, like Menander, to offend nobody. Plautus is fond of vigorous, often noisy dialogue, and his pieces require a lively play of gesture in the actors; Terence confines himself to "quiet conversation." The language of Plautus abounds in burlesque turns and verbal witticisms, in alliterations, in comic coinages of new terms, Aristophanic combinations of words, pithy expressions of the day jestingly borrowed from the Greek. Terence knows nothing of such caprices; his ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... ingenious theorists themselves, believed their story, and that no one took the slightest pains to verify or disprove it. Happily, Uncle Billy never knew it, and moved all unconsciously in this atmosphere of burlesque suspicion. And then a singular change took place in the attitude of the camp towards him and the disrupted partnership. Hitherto, for no reason whatever, all had agreed to put the blame upon Billy—possibly because ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... man, and that he will remain to his dying day. When he is jocular he is strong, when he is serious he is like Samson in a wig; any ordinary person is a match for him: a song, an ironical letter, a burlesque ode, an attack in the newspaper upon Nicoll's eye, a smart speech of twenty minutes, full of gross misrepresentations and clever turns, excellent language, a spirited manner, lucky quotation, success in provoking ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... thundering vaunts of this Scythian Shepherd. He comes in drawn by conquered kings, and reproaches these pampered jades of Asia that they can draw but twenty miles a day. Till I saw this passage with my own eyes, I never believed that it was anything more than a pleasant burlesque of mine Ancient's. But I can assure my readers that it is soberly set down in a play, which their ancestors ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... name has ever before been associated with charity; I mean the charity that has no relation to advertisement! You are silent! You say"—glancing over the unfinished article—"that 'this was a capricious burlesque of true philanthropy.' I reply that it served its purpose—of proclaiming my arrival in London and of clearly demonstrating the purpose of my coming! You ask who are my accomplices! I answer—they are as the sands of the desert! You seek to learn who ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... pieces of news, none of them true. On the sixth appeared a long narrow box containing a fountain pen. Then came Mr. Howells's "A Foregone Conclusion," which Katy had never seen; then a box of quinine pills; then a sachet for her trunk; then another burlesque poem; last of all, a cake of delicious violet soap, "to wash the sea-smell from her hands," the label said. It grew to be one of the little excitements of ship life to watch for the arrival of these daily gifts; and "What did the mail bring for you this time, Miss Carr?" was a question ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... I may acquaint you with my first exploits without offending my modesty; besides, my squire's style borders too much upon the burlesque ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... and subtle are the toils of this hunter, that on the very next night after that, I was again entrapped, where no vestige of a spring could have been apprehended by the timidest. It was a burlesque that I saw performed; an uncompromising burlesque, where everybody concerned, but especially the ladies, carried on at a very considerable rate indeed. Most prominent and active among the corps of performers was what I took to be (and she really gave me very fair opportunities of coming to a right ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... to obtain some information as to the observance of the nuptial tie amongst slaves, I touched upon that subject, when he told me the ceremony was mostly a burlesque, and that unions were in general but temporary, although he had known some very devoted couples. But he proceeded to state that there was much room for reform in this respect. "I will relate to ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... snowy, well shaped breast and arms which no one had yet gazed upon except her husband and maids. Of course Katenka sided with her mother and, in general, there became established between Avdotia and ourselves, from the day of her arrival, the most extraordinary and burlesque order of relations. As soon as she stepped from the carriage, Woloda assumed an air of great seriousness and ceremony, and, advancing towards her with much bowing and scraping, said in the tone of one who is presenting something ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... impatient," said Miss Howe. "It is waiting with yawns and much whisky and soda." She gave him a stately inclination with her hand, and he overcame the temptation to lay his own on his heart in a burlesque of it. At the door he remembered something, and turned. He stood looking back precisely where Laura Filbert had stood, but the sun was gone. "You might tell me more about your friend of the altruistic ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... just quoted did not, it seems, possess a sufficient sense of humour to enable him to see that this chapter of "Pickwick" was intended for broad fun amounting to burlesque, and nothing more; and to examine Mr. Buzfuz' proceedings by the light of the law is to strip them ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... not seem to be suffering from car-sickness. And you can get a beefsteak measuring eighteen inches from tip to tip. There are spring chickens with the most magnificent bust development I ever saw outside of a burlesque show; and the eggs taste as though they might have originated with a hen instead of a cold-storage vault. If there was only a cabaret show going up and down the middle of the car during meals, even ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... The new academician was recompensed for the public indifference by the cordial appreciation which connoisseurs gave this tasteful and scientific production. Another comic opera, "Psyche," which soon appeared, though full of witty burlesque and humor in the libretto, and marked by delicious melody in every part, failed to please, perhaps on account of the predominance of feminine roles, and the absence of a good tenor part. Still a third comic opera, the "Carnaval de Venise" saw the light the same season, which was written in large ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... was "The Critic," the scene a burlesque rehearsal of an old-time melodrama. Our opportunities were great, and Heaven knows we missed none of them. New York audiences are quick, and in less than three minutes they knew the actors had taken ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... critique or report of Artemus Ward's favourite lecture entitled "The Babes in the wood" was written the day after its first delivery in San Francisco, California, by one of the contributors to the Golden Era. As an imitation of A. Ward's burlesque orthography it is somewhat overdone; but it has, nevertheless, certain touches of humour which will amuse the English reader. Why the lecture is called "The Babes in the Wood" is not known, unless it is because they are ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... hymn a new character and a more scientific music [9],—gradually, in Attica, it gave way before the familiar and fantastic humours of the satyrs, sometimes abridged to afford greater scope to their exhibitions—sometimes contracting the contagion of their burlesque. Still, however, the reader will observe, that the tragedy, or goatsong, consisted of two parts—first, the exhibition of the mummers, and, secondly, the dithyrambic chorus, moving in a circle round the altar of Bacchus. It appears on the whole most ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... him the appearance of a figure in a hairdresser's window, if his countenance possessed the thought which is communicated to those waxen caricatures of the human face divine. He is a militia-officer, and the most amusing person in the House. Can anything be more exquisitely absurd than the burlesque grandeur of his air, as he strides up to the lobby, his eyes rolling like those of a Turk's head in a cheap Dutch clock? He never appears without that bundle of dirty papers which he carries under his left arm, and which are generally supposed to be the miscellaneous estimates ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... pursued its spectacular course; Ione Burke, Polly Marshall, and Mrs. Vining were in the cast; tableau succeeded tableau; "I wish I were in Dixie," was sung, and the popular burlesque ended in the celebrated scene, "The Birth of the Butterfly in the Bower of Ferns," with the entire company kissing their finger-tips to a vociferous and ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... risen from the contents of small tubes smeared over a bit of canvas! My funny little dear delight! Will you always amuse me, I wonder? I hope you will. Nobody else can. Why, the gorse there will grumble next and think I love my poor, daubed burlesque of its gold better than the thing itself. If I find pleasure in the picture, how much the more must I love the soul of it? You see, I'm ambitious. You are quite the hardest thing I ever found to paint, ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... and hers. By 1100 her services became quite unintelligible. Of the mysteries played at the church-doors, he has retained chiefly the comic side, the ox and the ass, &c. On these he makes Christmas carols, which grow ever more and more burlesque, ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... Mr. Locke's account of wit, with this short explanation, comprehends most of the species of wit, as metaphors, similitudes, allegories, enigmas, mottoes, parables, fables, dreams, visions, dramatic writings, burlesque, and all the methods of allusion: as there are many other pieces of wit, how remote soever they may appear at first sight from the foregoing description, which upon examination will be found to ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... it that admires, and from the heart is attached to national representative assemblies, but must turn with horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque and abominable perversion of that sacred institute? Lovers of monarchy, lovers of republics, must alike abhor it. The members of your Assembly must themselves groan under the tyranny of which they have all the shame, none of the direction, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Arlington, under the pretext of killing the tedium of October evenings in a country-house, got up a burlesque wedding, in which Louise de Querouaille was the bride and the King the bridegroom, with all the immodest ceremonies which marked, in the good old times, the retirement of the former into the ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... find our old friend, the truck system, in full operation. Men live there, year in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in supplies. The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper they will fall in debt—a burlesque injustice in a new country, where labour should be precious, and one of those typical instances which explains the prevailing discontent and the success of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of his saddle girth, and paused to gaze at the closed front door of the house. Aside from his saddle and burlesque sombrero, he looked every inch a puncher, both in dress and in bearing. But Miss Isobel missed the effect of his new ensemble. She missed also the ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... poor simple knight (in his dream), and offered his services to polish the corslet up a bit against that great occasion. He pointed toward his forge, and the knight marched to it, in three wide steps that savored strongly of theatrical burlesque. But the moment he saw the specimens of Henry's work lying about, he drew back, and wheeled upon the man of the day with huge disdain. "What," said he, "do you forge toys! Learn that a gentleman can only forge those weapons of war that gentlemen do use. And I took you for ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... and Eve. This represents the serpent in the act of commending to our first parents the knowl- 92:15 edge of good and evil, a knowledge gained from matter, or evil, instead of from Spirit. The portrayal is still graphically accurate, for the common conception of mor- 92:18 tal man - a burlesque of God's man - is an outgrowth of human knowledge or sensuality, a mere offshoot ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... words throughout the land. To the Stockholm born they speak of their daily life and surroundings, of the green isles and shady banks of the Malar, the flowery woods of Haga, the smiling park of Dijurgarden. Burlesque scenes of the life of the people, street tragedies, drinking bouts, and country junketings; broad humor and Nature's philosophy; lively fancies and exquisite landscape painting—such are the themes ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... screws an imaginary eyeglass into his eye, which he contrives to keep contorted, and assuming a supercilious expression and a languid manner, struts leisurely towards us, with his hands in his pockets, thereby giving what I am forced to admit is an imitation of myself perfect in its burlesque. Ben Flint roars with laughter. I clutch the imp and throw him across knee and pretend to spank him. We struggle ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... much, of this horrid society I did not feel positive it was certain that its alleged blood rites were fictitious. Of one thing I am sure—that the dreadful picture is no joke, and was not meant for a burlesque, though it might possibly be expected to perform the office of a scarecrow. It cannot be doubted that there are oath-bound secret societies that are regarded by the Spaniards as fanatical, ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... his entry into subterranean portals, we find ourselves in the abode of wonder and terror; but not till Meredith's Shaving of Shagpal (1856) do we meet again Beckford's kinship with the East, and his gift for fantastic burlesque. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... go in. This vault of heaven with its spotless blue, this wide land that laughs in festive summer, these winds that lift my hair and come heavy with odors,—these do not fit with me, I burlesque the fair face of creation. O invisible airs, that softly sport round the castle-towers, why do you not woo my soul forth and bear it and lose it in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... afternoon, the Universal Joint was closed. There was no one inside but Primo Palveri, the manager and majority stockholder of the Great Universal, and the new strip act he was watching. Malone didn't particularly like the idea of sharing his conversation with a burlesque stripper, but there was little he could do about it; he'd waited several days for ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... front of a neighbour's door, as a nuptial serenade on the occasion of some unsuitable marriage; when the clamour of horns and kettles, marrow-bones and cleavers, saluted the mother's ears, accompanied by thirty burlesque verses, the composition of the father of the child who had ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... of Hastings," at the other house, is very pleasant too. The irascible William is acted with great vigour by Snoxall, and the battle of Hastings is a good piece of burlesque. Some trifling liberties are taken with history, but what liberties will not the merry genius of pantomime permit himself? At the battle of Hastings, William is on the point of being defeated by the Sussex volunteers, very elegantly led by the always pretty Miss Waddy (as ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... polite literature of the pre-Renascence ages—but not both for the same reason. The first of these "Tales" is told by the poet himself, after a stop has been unceremoniously put upon his recital of the "Ballad of Sir Thopas" by the Host. The ballad itself is a fragment of straightforward burlesque, which shows that in both the manner and the metre (Dunbar's burlesque ballad of "Sir Thomas Norray" is in the same stanza) of ancient romances, literary criticism could even in Chaucer's days find its opportunities for satire, though it is going rather far to see in "Sir ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... continent, and in particular to visit Italy without any restraint: but his reasons for it appeared childish; it was not to cultivate his taste, or tread on classic ground, where poets and philosophers caught their lore; but to join in the masquerades, and such burlesque amusements. ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... struck me as so extraordinarily droll. I couldn't get over it at all. After the piece we went round, by Wigan's invitation, to drink with him. It being positively impossible to get Stanny off the stage, we stood in the wings during the burlesque. Mrs. Wigan seemed really glad to see her old manager, and the company overwhelmed him with embraces. They had nearly all been at the ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... laughing and chattering as they tripped along at his side. And Spargo, glancing at them meditatively, instinctively told himself which of them it was that he and Rathbury had overheard as she made her burlesque speech: it was not the elder one, who walked by Ronald Breton with something of an air of proprietorship, but the younger, the girl with the laughing eyes and the vivacious smile, and it suddenly dawned upon him that somewhere, ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... period is intended to be half burlesque, and, therefore, is composed a coda, as the Italians describe the lengthened form of the conclusion. It was written while Michael Angelo was painting the roof of the Sistine, and was sent to his friend Giovanni da Pistoja. The effect of this work, as Vasari ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... 'the Temple of Reason;' a pyramid was erected in the centre of the church, surmounted by a temple, inscribed, 'To Philosophy.' The torch of 'Truth' was on the altar of 'Reason,' spreading light, &c. The National Convention, and all the authorities, attended at this burlesque and insulting ceremony. In February, 1794, a grand fete was ordered by the convention, in which hymns to Liberty were chanted, and a pageant in honor of the abolition of slavery in the colonies, was displayed in the 'Temple of Reason.' In June another festival was ordered—to the Supreme Being: the ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... doubt, but few books seem dull to me now, I can tell you, and I was much delighted with such a piece de resistance. Miss Eden I don't wish for—that sort of theatre burlesque view of the customs of a strange country is inexpressibly tedious to one who is familiar with one akin to it. There is plenty of real fun to be had here, but that sort is only funny to cockneys. I want to read Baker's book very much. I am much pleased ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... disreputable "pal" with large checks and a billy-cock hat. Portia was attired as a barrister in wig and gown and Nerissa as a clerk with a green bag and a pen behind his ear. This being much appreciated, Your Humble Servant questions what portion of the Bard of Avon he shall next burlesque. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... to be known in the neighbourhood as a maker of rhymes. The first of my poetic offspring that saw the light, was a burlesque lamentation on a quarrel between two reverend Calvinists, both of them dramatis personae in "Holy Fair." I had a notion myself that the piece had some merit; but, to prevent the worst, I gave a copy of it to a friend, who was very fond of such things, and told him that ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... an Italian poet, born in Tuscany, who excelled in the burlesque, to whom the Italian as a literary language owes much; remodelled Boiardo's "Orlando Innamorato" in a style surpassing that ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... usual, no expense had been spared in the mounting, and Adrien's money had been poured out like water on extraordinary costumes, gorgeous, highly-coloured scenery, and a hundred embellishments for this new piece of elaborate and senseless burlesque, Prince Bon-Bon. But with all its deficiencies as regarded culture, the piece appeared ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... Stendhal's De l'Amour, but unconsciously they put it in practice. They have by heart their chapters—Love-Taste, Love-Passion, Love-Caprice, Love-Crystalized, and more than all, Love-Transient. All is good in their eyes. They invented the burlesque axiom, 'In the sight of man, all women are equal.' The actual text is more vigorously worded, but as in my opinion the spirit is false, I do not ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... serve to arrest and fix the attention are wanting in this style, neither grandeur of imagination nor profound sentiment, vivid characterization, delicate gradations, vigorous precision, a sportive grace, unlooked-for burlesque, nor variety of representation. But, amidst so many ingenious tricks, apologues, tales, portraits and dialogues, in earnest as well as when masquerading, his deportment throughout is irreproachable and his tone is perfect. If; as an author, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... "Carpet-Bag," the subject of our sketch closely studied the theatre and courted the society of actors and actresses. It was in this way that he gained that correct and valuable knowledge of the texts and characters of the drama, which enabled him in after years to burlesque them so successfully. The humorous writings of Seba Smith were his models, and the oddities of "John Phoenix" were ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... begun to understand poetry many years before he went to Charterhouse; and, while he was there, the reading which he chiefly delighted in was the Elizabethan drama. 'He liked acting,' says Mr. Bevan, 'and was a good judge of it, and used to give apt though burlesque imitations of the popular actors, particularly Kean and Macready. Though his voice was harsh and his enunciation offensively conceited, he read with so much propriety of expression and manner, that I was always glad to listen: even when I was pressed into the service as his ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... most extraordinary, the most highly colored figure in the dull New England church-life was the tithingman. This fairly burlesque creature impresses me always with a sense of unreality, of incongruity, of strange happening, like a jesting clown in a procession of monks, like a strain of low comedy in the sober religious drama of early New England Puritan ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... modern, and ever the champion of his friend La Motte, and, perhaps more to avenge him for the "grosses paroles de Mme. Dacier"[33] than to depreciate le divin Homere (whom he made a point of always mentioning in that way), would not let the matter rest, and, in 1717, composed a burlesque poem entitled l'Iliade ravestie. Had he been familiar with the Greek language, he might never have committed this piece of literary impudence, but he knew Homer only through La Motte's reduction of the Iliad, which in turn was based upon ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... a literary game popular in the 17th and 18th centuries—the rhymed words at the end of a line being given for others to fill up. Thus Horace Walpole being given, "brook, why, crook, I," returned the burlesque verse— "I sits with my toes in a Brook, And if any one axes me Why? I gies 'em a rap with my Crook, 'Tis constancy ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... daily received the refuse of the various meals. The bird, furious with pain, was burying its beak into the leg of the soldier, while he, with the butt end of his musket aloft, and the bayonet depressed, offered the most burlesque representation of St. George preparing to give his ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... life I did my best to improve the style of official writing. I have written, I should think, some thousands of reports,—many of them necessarily very long; some of them dealing with subjects so absurd as to allow a touch of burlesque; some few in which a spark of indignation or a slight glow of pathos might find an entrance. I have taken infinite pains with these reports, habituating myself always to write them in the form in which they should be sent,—without a copy. It is by writing ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... the room, and she pursued me at arm's length, her long graceful legs dramatically striding, making of her pursuit a humorous burlesque, yet I knew she was quite serious about it. If little Nokomee had not warned me against her, I might have succumbed then and there, for, as she said—"What good is a tomorrow that ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... mere opinions of the writer can be of no consequence to me—and I should imagine of very little to himself—that is to say if he knows himself, personally, as well as I have the honor of knowing him. The first misrepresentation is contained in this sentence:—'This letter is a keen burlesque on the Aristotelian or Baconian methods of ascertaining Truth, both of which the writer ridicules and despises, and pours forth his rhapsodical ecstasies in a glorification of the third mode—the noble art of guessing.' What I really say is this:—That ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... silly performance it was! But she would keep it, at least until Lady Hamilton released her from her promise. Patty's ideas of honour were, perhaps, a little strained, but she took the promise of that burlesque document as seriously as if it had been of national importance. And now she was in a dilemma. To refuse to walk with the Earl was so rude, and yet to talk with him was to break ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... English and more money. Will So-and-so win the Derby? What a splendid run we had with the West Somerset on Wednesday! Were you in at the death of that big fox at Coulson's Corner? Ought the new vintages of Madeira to be bottled direct or sent round the Cape like the old ones? Capital burlesque at the Gaiety, but very slow at the Lyceum. Who will go to the Duchess of Dorsetshire's dance on the twentieth:—and so forth for ever. Their own petty round of selfish pleasures from week's end to week's end—no thought of anybody else, no thought of the ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... to be tragic, and become burlesque,—I mean phrases like "curling torrent flames" and "vomiting to heaven," and representing Boreas as a piper, and so on. Such expressions, and such images, produce an effect of confusion and obscurity, not of energy; and if each separately be examined under the light of criticism, what seemed terrible ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... was a daring innovation in point of class. The eighteenth century had, even under its own laws and conditions, distinctly eschewed long narrative poems, the unreadable epics of Glover, for instance, belonging to that class of exception which really does prove the rule. Pope's Rape had been burlesque, and his Dunciad, satire; hardly the ghost of a narrative had appeared in Thomson and Young; Shenstone, Collins, Gray, had nothing de longue haleine; the entire poetical works of Goldsmith probably do not exceed in length ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... the rickety bed, while Mike took up a crutch that was standing idly in a corner. She coughed resignedly and he limped about, forlorn. They had assumed their parts which were almost to the burlesque of poverty, when the door was pushed open and Billy burst in followed ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... efforts to please and assist the inspector were both pitiful and burlesque, to those who knew his daily habits. He wedged himself into the cage with Castle, handing him parcels of money to count, and playing the caddy to perfection. He lifted a bag of silver, and as he did so his bulging eyes rested waveringly on the teller, who was watching. ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... recognition until constitutional amendments were ratified. Their assertion of the conclusiveness of false and fraudulent canvassers' certificates, on the pretense of upholding State rights, should seem to be thrown in our faces by way of bravado, unless it be meant, indeed, for burlesque masking hypocrisy. But if the sight were not strange, and those gentlemen had been all along as careful of the rights of the States as they are of their own places, there is nothing in the claim for the ...
— The Vote That Made the President • David Dudley Field
... been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal—a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... farcical sort of burlesque fight neither ever scored a hit on the other, in all the years throughout which their combats finished each day of every gladiatorial exhibition. Yet the audience never tired of their bloodless bouts and, while the nobility and gentry never joined in, the populace invariably roared a protest ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... entitled "De Ludicra Dictione" was written A.D. 1658, at the request of the celebrated M. Balzac (though published after his death), for the purpose of showing that the burlesque style of writing adopted by Scarron and D'Assouci, and at that time so popular in France, had no sanction from the ancient classic writers. Francisci ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... new type of culture far and wide over the globe. The young sculptor sat at the same board as Marsilio Ficino, interpreter of Plato; Pico della Mirandola, the phoenix of Oriental erudition; Angelo Poliziano, the unrivalled humanist and melodious Italian poet; Luigi Pulci, the humorous inventor of burlesque romance—with artists, scholars, students innumerable, all in their own departments capable of satisfying a youth's curiosity, by explaining to him the particular virtues of books discussed, or of antique ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... audience and his actors. The Prince of Wales's Theatre was directed by a burlesque actress, and devoted to light comedy and extravaganza: after that it gave up burlesque, merely heightening the effect of the comedy and prolonging the programme by a quiet farce. The company was small and strong, the theatre was well managed, and plays were handsomely mounted. After the success ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... agreed the owner must be masculine, as no woman would drop a wedding-ring), and follow him whither he listed all the world over. Amiable giggling Forey girls called Clare, The Betrothed. Dark man, or fair? was mooted. Adrian threw off the first strophe of Clare's fortune in burlesque rhymes, with an insinuating gipsy twang. Her aunt Forey warned her to have her dresses in readiness. Her grandpapa Forey pretended to grumble at bridal presents being ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... contend with, which arose from the form of the building or the shape of the wall on which he had to place his frescoes. Painting on the ceiling was no easy task, and Michelangelo, in a humorous sonnet addressed to Giovanni da Pistoya, gives a burlesque portrait of himself while he was painting ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... had San Carlino or Pulcinella. This character, peculiar to the local stage (who is supposed to have originated in Acerra, as Arlequino did in Bergamo), supported by his inseparable companion Pancrazio, poked fun to his heart's content, and in the raciest of burlesque, at all the latest Neapolitan occurrences and fashions, in a piece entitled ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... such a word as fortitude that Mrs. Eddy's book takes on its most discouraging aspect. Her foolish logic, her ignorance of the human body, the liberties which she takes with the Bible, and her burlesque exegesis, could easily be overlooked if there were any nobility of feeling to be found in "Science and Health"; any great-hearted pity for suffering, any humility or self-forgetfulness before the mysteries of life. Mrs. Eddy professes to believe that ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... country, was as unprovoked as it was brutal; that the Governor and Prosecuting Attorney of the Territory openly declared that no man could be punished for the crime, though the murderers attempted no concealment; and that all the pretended judicial proceedings were a burlesque.'' All this Mr. Bayard was forced to admit. Indeed he did not hesitate to characterize the proceedings as "the wretched travesty of the forms of justice,'' nor did he conceal his "indignation at the bloody outrages and shocking wrongs inflicted upon a body of your countrymen,'' ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... the hill town. In Walpole, she met delightful people, who were all attracted to the versatile, amusing young woman, and she was in great demand when there was any entertainment on foot. One evening she gave a burlesque lecture on "Woman, and Her Position, by Oronthy Bluggage," which created such a gale of merriment that she was asked to repeat it for money, which she did; and so there was added to her store of accomplishments another, from which she was to reap ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... They can be immediately picked out by the peculiar wisps of hair worn on each side of the face, like something between curls and whiskers. Sometimes they look strangely effeminate, like some rococo burlesque of the ringlets of an Early Victorian woman. Sometimes they look considerably more like the horns of a devil; and one need not be an Anti-Semite to say that the face is often made to match. But though they may be ugly, or even horrible, they are not ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... among these beautiful hills that Bayard Taylor lived and wrote his "Hannah Thurston," a most contemptible burlesque of his own neighbors and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of justice usually cured them. The indifferent, business-like manner in which the oaths are put, the sing-song tone of voice, the rapid utterance of the words, give to this solemn act an appearance of excellent burlesque, which ultimately renders the whole proceedings remarkable for the absence of truth and reality; but, at the same time, gives them unquestionable merit as a dramatic representation, abounding with fiction, well related and ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... in "The Clouds," to mention no other examples; and in English drama this kind of thing is alluded to again and again. What Jonson really did, was to raise the dramatic lampoon to an art, and make out of a casual burlesque and bit of mimicry a dramatic satire of literary pretensions and permanency. With the arrogant attitude mentioned above and his uncommon eloquence in scorn, vituperation, and invective, it is no wonder that ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... followed by other light comedies. His pieces include numerous burlesques and pantomimes, the libretti of Savonarola (Hamburg, 1884) and of The Canterbury Pilgrims (Drury Lane, 1884) for the music of Dr (afterwards Sir) C. V. Stanford. The Happy Land (Court Theatre, 1873), a political burlesque of W. S. Gilbert's Wicked World, was written in collaboration with F. L. Tomline. For the last ten years of his life he was on the regular staff of Punch. His health was seriously affected in 1889 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Then I make a separate group of those who expect to sing, or to do any sort of a musical specialty, or any kind of a "stunt" that might be included in the show. I have had the greatest variety of specialties in a show. I have had them do magic, burlesque magic, play ukuleles, and all sorts of stunts which I have placed effectively in a show. We had a man in the Princeton show who did a little trick with a cigarette that was a scream. I saw him standing around, and I ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... or the quinquennial assessment exactly as if Gilbert and Sullivan had never been born. It appeared that Milly had a future, that she was the best Patience yet seen in the district amateur or professional, that any burlesque manager would jump at her, that in five years, if she liked, she might be getting a hundred a week, and that Dolly Chose, the idol of the Tivoli and the Pavilion, had not half her style. It also appeared that Milly had no brains of ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... courtesy nor of France; it belonged to an age far behind the eleventh century, or even the tenth, or indeed any century within the range of French history; and it was as little fitted for Christian's way of treatment as for any avowed burlesque. The original Tristan—critics say—was not French, and neither Tristan nor Isolde had ever a drop of French blood in their veins. In their form as Christian received it, they were Celts or Scots; they came from Brittany, Wales, Ireland, the ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... which have no other origin than the prayer of the Hebrews in the third act, with its superb change of key.'" Thus by a stroke of genius, a scene which first impressed the audience as a piece of theatrical burlesque, was raised to sublimity by the solemn ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... The former, that of earnest and submissive contemplation, declares itself in prayers, hymns, and "the dim religious light" of cathedrals. The second mood, that of playful and erratic fancy, is conspicuous in the buffoonery of Miracle Plays, in Marchen, these burlesque popular tales about our Lord and the Apostles, and in the hideous and grotesque sculptures on sacred edifices. The two moods are present, and in conflict, through the whole religious history of the human race. They stand as near each other, and ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... anathematizing the lights, lungs, liver, and all odd joints, without excepting even the great toe of his victim.—To proceed in our review; the dying expostulations of poor Beatrice, are beautiful and affecting, though occasionally tinged with the Cockney style of burlesque; for instance, Bernado asks, when they tear him from ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... a prolonged and elaborate and audacious burlesque of the early annals of New Amsterdam. The undaunted Goth of the legend who plucked the Roman senator by the beard was not a more ruthless iconoclast than this son of New Amsterdam, who drew its grave ancestors from venerable obscurity by flooding them with the cheerful light ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... about, for the puff and humbug attracted people. The Montefiores, like fashionable knicknacks, succeeded that whimsical jade, Rose Peche, who had gone off the preceding autumn, between the third and fourth acts of the burlesque, Ousca Iscar, in order to make a study of love in company of a young fellow of seventeen, who had just entered the university. The novelty and difficulty of their performance, revived and agitated the curiosity of the public, for there ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... ceremony the reader may imagine who has already gathered some idea of the reckless irreverence of Roaring Camp. The master of ceremonies was one "Boston," a noted wag, and the occasion seemed to promise the greatest facetiousness. This ingenious satirist had spent two days in preparing a burlesque of the Church service, with pointed local allusions. The choir was properly trained, and Sandy Tipton was to stand godfather. But after the procession had marched to the grove with music and banners, and the child had been deposited before a mock altar, Stumpy stepped before the ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... knowledge was exceedingly crude; and the facts in nature had become so strangely distorted, through centuries of ignorance and superstition, that the solemnly pronounced verities of the time were but a burlesque upon the truth. Belief in the existence of the antipodes was considered by ecclesiastical authority as a sure proof of heresy, the philosopher's stone had been found, astrology was an infallible science, and the air was filled ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... not absolutely new or original; but, again, what matters this to anyone, so long as the new shape given to the old material is genuinely amusing? So "farcical" goes with "original." But now, as to its being a "Romance?" Would not the term "burlesque" be a better term than "Farcical Romance?" The characters of the three adventurous lovers are not less burlesque than were those of the three Knights in ALBERT SMITH'S romantic Extravaganza, The Alhambra, played then by ALFRED WIGAN, and Mr. and Mrs. KEELEY. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... attributed this advice to jealousy. In 1714 the delightful poem appeared in its present form with the machinery of sylphs and gnomes adopted from the mysteries of the Rosicrucians. Pope styles it an heroi-comical poem, and judged in the light of a burlesque it is conceived and executed with an art that is beyond praise. Lord Petre, a Roman Catholic peer, had cut off a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor's hair, much to the indignation of her family and possibly of the young lady also. Pope wrote the poem to remove ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... Barbee together dragged Royce away, letting Blenham lie there. Both men were naked to their waists, their shirts and undershirts in rags and strips hanging grotesquely about their hips; Royce looked like some hideously painted burlesque of a ballet-dancer in a comic skirt. Only there was nothing of burlesque or ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... I. Fellow Travellers with a Bird, II. Children in Midwinter That Pretty Person Out of Town Expression Under the Early Stars The Man with Two Heads Children in Burlesque Authorship Letters The Fields The Barren Shore The Boy Illness The Young Children Fair and Brown ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... trampling of the horses and the measured tread of the marching multitude rose the voices of the priests chanting the requiem, while the military bands struck in with the solemn roll of the muffled drums. On reaching the principal square the procession halted, a burlesque funeral oration was pronounced over the defunct Pau Pi, and the lights were extinguished. Immediately the devil and his angels darted from the crowd, seized the body and fled away with it, hotly pursued by the whole multitude, yelling, screaming, and cheering. Naturally the fiends were overtaken ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... but as we believe without sufficient proof, that the wit combats of the lords and ladies, {146} and the artificial speech of the sonneteering courtiers, were also introduced for burlesque. These elements appear, however, in other plays than this, with no intention of burlesque; and it seems probable that Shakespeare greatly enjoyed this display of his power as a master in the prevailing fashion of courtly repartee. ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... the intervals of business I had written a good deal, but my works had been almost exclusively for the stage, and for those theatres that devoted themselves to extravaganza and burlesque. I had written many pieces of this description, full of puns and comic songs, and they had had a fair success, but my best piece had been a treatment of English history during the Reformation period, in the course of which I had introduced Cranmer, Sir Thomas More, Henry the Eighth, Catherine ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... the act of composition has been called the keenest of intellectual pleasures; and this was the poet's almost sole reward in Canada a generation ago, when nothing seemed to catch the popular ear but burlesque, or trivial verse. In strange contrast this with a remoter age! In old Upper Canada, in its primitive days, there was no lack of educated men and women, of cultivated pioneers who appreciated art and good literature in all its forms. Even the average immigrant brought his favourite books ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... af det Kyhlamske vech C. Bredahl: Kiobenhavn, 1834. It is a mixture of tragedy and farce: the former occasionally good, the latter poor buffoonery. In the notes, readings of the old MS. are referred to with apparent seriousness; but Gammel Gumba's Saga is quoted in a manner that seems burlesque. I cannot find the word "Kyhlam" in any dictionary. Can any of your readers tell me whether it signifies a real country, or is a mere fiction? The work does not read like a translation; and, if one, the number of modern allusions show that it is not, as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... place in the spirit land, are most grotesque and silly and would be taken as a burlesque upon Spiritualism, were they not put forth in all gravity by the friends and advocates of that so-called new revelation. Thus Judge Edmunds, giving an account of what he had seen in the spirit world, mentions ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... to a "Nina padrona mia dilettissima," shows that the memory of Gori and the friendship of Gori's friends were not the only things which attracted him ever and anon from Florence to Siena. A collection of wretched bouts-rimes and burlesque doggrel, written at Florence in a house which Mme. d'Albany could not enter, and in the company of women whom Mme. d'Albany could not receive, and among which is a sonnet in which Alfieri explains his condescension in joining ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... "If he were here, I would make him a prince." To Goethe he now said that in art, as in politics, there should be rule and ordered beauty; apropos of the drama imitated from Shakspere, which mingles tragedy and comedy, the terrible with the burlesque, he expressed surprise that a great mind like Goethe's did not like clean-cut models—"N'aime pas les genres tranches." These two judgments, taken together, give a valuable picture of ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... The Californian's Tale A Helpless Situation A Telephonic Conversation Edward Mills and George Benton: A Tale The Five Boons of Life The First Writing-machines Italian without a Master Italian with Grammar A Burlesque Biography How to Tell a Story General Washington's Negro Body-servant Wit Inspirations of the "Two-year-olds" An Entertaining Article A Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Amended Obituaries A Monument to Adam A Humane Word from Satan Introduction to "The ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... matter which will be new to great numbers of our readers. One of the best evidences of the naturalness and ease of our author's writings, is to be found in the ready appreciation of them by all classes of readers. Whether the vein be a serious one, or the theme turn upon the humorous or the burlesque, it is not too much, we think, to say that the writer takes always with him the heart or the fancy of the reader. Without however pausing to characterize productions which bid fair to become very ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... poem was first published in 1656. Chapelain is unconsciously burlesque; he is a Scarron without knowing it. It is none the less interesting to learn from him that he merely treated his subject as an occasion for glorifying the Bastard of Orleans. He expressly says in his preface: "I did not so much regard her (the Maid) as the ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... oysters that are served on his dining cars do not seem to be suffering from car-sickness. And you can get a beefsteak measuring eighteen inches from tip to tip. There are spring chickens with the most magnificent bust development I ever saw outside of a burlesque show; and the eggs taste as though they might have originated with a hen instead of a cold-storage vault. If there was only a cabaret show going up and down the middle of the car during meals, even the New York passengers would be satisfied with the service, ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... Smithson arrived with a small army of men, who dumped paint-pots on the boards, threw hammers down, and rushed across the stage with flats and fly-cloths. Yet, in spite of all these accidents introducing the spirit of burlesque, the play survived. Sir Henry would tolerate interruptions up to a point, but, when a charwoman in the auditorium started brushing or turned on a sudden light, he would turn and roar ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... 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 author ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... history, architecture, and, in fact, all arts and sciences which depend more on genius than on experience. It was no lightening of the judgment when he added that the moderns surpass the ancients in doggerel, humour burlesque, and all the trivial arts of ridicule, the arts of the "unlucky little wits." So degraded had wit become! In the Adventurer, nos. 127 and 133, Joseph Warton showed himself to be essentially in agreement with Addison's verdict, differing only in thinking ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... good farcical standard. The good PINERO has nodded over this. The Cabinet Minister is an excellent title thrown away. The Cabinet Minister himself, Mr. ARTHUR CECIL, in his official costume, playing the flute, is as burlesque as the General in full uniform, in Mr. GILBERT'S "Wedding March," sitting with his feet in hot-water. The married boy and girl, with their doll baby and irritatingly unreal quarrels, reminded me of the boy-and-girl lovers in Brantingham Hall. The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, May 3, 1890. • Various
... improper nominative thee, ordinarily inflect with st or est the preterits or the auxiliaries of the accompanying verbs, as is done in the solemn style. Indeed, to use the solemn style familiarly, would be, to turn it into burlesque; as when Peter Pindar "telleth what he troweth." [213] And let those who think with Murray, that our present version of the Scriptures is the best standard of English grammar,[214] remember that in it they have no warrant for substituting s or es for the old termination eth, any more ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... these terrible fatigues, dancers often run serious personal risks. So, at least, says the author of the "Petits Mysteres" who, as a journalist and frequenter of the coulisses, is excellent authority. He cannot resist a joke, but it is easy to sift the facts from their admixture of burlesque exaggerations. "By dint of incurring simulated dangers, the dancer accustoms herself to real peril, as a soldier in war time becomes habituated to murder and pillage. She suspends herself from wires, sits ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... a quality inconsistent with her evident habits, and the lace-edged petticoat that peeped beneath it was draggled with mud and unaccustomed usage. Her glossy black hair, which had been tossed into curls in some foreign fashion, was now wind-blown into a burlesque of it. This incongruity was still further accented by the appearance of the room she had entered. It was coldly and severely furnished, making the chill of the yet damp white plaster unpleasantly obvious. A black harmonium ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... former self—were laughing in satire. There was a devilish, mischievous joy in battling to outwit Bouchard more than in her deceit of Westerling. Satire, yes—needle-pointed, acid-tipped! Melodrama done in burlesque, too. In the name of the noble art of war, a bit of fooling about ghosts in a tunnel might influence the fate of armies that were the last word in modern equipment. And men played at killing with a grand front of martial dignity, when such a little thing could ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... to portray the motley characters which move before the observer in a large city; but he has not enough of the vision and the faculty divine, to make them more than melancholy ghosts of what they profess to be. The attempts at humor are inexpressibly dismal; the burlesque overpowers the most determined reader, by its leaden dulness. The style is ingeniously tasteless and feeble. He who has read it through can do or dare any thing. Mr. MATHEWS suffers from several erroneous opinions. He seems to think that literary elegance consists ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... noble family of the Snobs, and in every way did honour to her progenitors. As the reader is aware, there is what is known as a "cultivated voice," the result of education—it is absolutely without affectation: there is also the voice which, in imitation of the well-trained one, is little more than a burlesque, and is affected in the highest degree: this was the only fault in ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... of Natural Society," with intent to produce a burlesque, he missed his aim, and came very near convincing himself of the truth of his proposition. And in fact, the book was hailed by the rationalists as a vindication ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... adaptation of attire. Very estimable, and, we trust, very religious young women sometimes enter the house of God in a costume which makes their utterance of the words of the litany and the acts of prostrate devotion in the service seem almost burlesque. When a brisk little creature comes into a pew with hair frizzed till it stands on end in a most startling manner, rattling strings of beads and bits of tinsel, mounting over all some pert little hat with a red ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... gestures. His race has a very keen sense of humor. They see a thousand funny things about them, and laugh inwardly; but they never see anything amusing in themselves. The individual man conceives himself a dignified figure in a world of burlesque. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... barbarously murdered in the tragedy. This was, indeed, novelty to me. It was a peep into another planet. I gazed and listened with intense curiosity and enjoyment. They had a thousand odd stories and jokes about the events of the day, and burlesque descriptions and mimickings of the spectators who had been admiring them. Their conversation was full of allusions to their adventures at different places, where they had exhibited; the characters they had met with in ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... surely should never be applied in a serious composition, but where some reference may be made to a higher being, or where some duty is exacted, or implied. A man may keep his friendship sacred, because promises of friendship are very awful ties; but, methinks, he cannot, but in a burlesque sense, be said to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Honey in a tone of burlesque warning. "There must be five mirrors. He knows nothing of women who thinks that one mirror may be divided among five girls. I hope Lulu ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal—a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... far and wide over the globe. The young sculptor sat at the same board as Marsilio Ficino, interpreter of Plato; Pico della Mirandola, the phoenix of Oriental erudition; Angelo Poliziano, the unrivalled humanist and melodious Italian poet; Luigi Pulci, the humorous inventor of burlesque romance—with artists, scholars, students innumerable, all in their own departments capable of satisfying a youth's curiosity, by explaining to him the particular virtues of books discussed, or of antique works of art inspected. During those halcyon years, before the invasion of Charles VIII., ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... appropriate their portraits; venerable bachelors, who have striven to earn some little local notoriety by the diligent use of an odd phrase, a quaint garment, or an eccentric fling in the peripatetic, dread a satirist's powers of retributive burlesque; table orators suddenly grow dumb, for they suspect such a caitiff intends cold-blooded plagiarisms from their eloquence; the twinkling stars of humble village spheres shun him for an ominous comet, whose very trail robs them of light, or as paling ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... been filled with priests and laymen arrested on charges of complicity with the enemies of liberty, were entered by ruffians acting under influence of Marat and the commune's "committee of surveillance," and, after "a burlesque trial" before an armed jury, were murdered. In Versailles, Lyons, Orleans, and other towns, there were like massacres. The victims of these massacres ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of Altisidora. (This immediately follows the article on Periodical Criticism, and is a burlesque sketch on the same subject. It serves to introduce the following imitations, respectively, of Crabbe, Moore, and ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... other diversion. The cast and language of the poems appear, however, to belong to a later date; and the quaint stanza, afterwards employed in a modified form with such effect by Fergusson and Burns, is that used by Alexander Scot in The Justing at the Drum, and in other burlesque pieces of the early or middle period of the ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... at me fixedly for some seconds. And then a very odd thing occurred. Suddenly she squinted—squinted horribly; not with the familiar convergent squint which burlesque artists imitate, but with external or divergent squint of extreme near sight or unequal vision. The effect was quite startling. One moment both her eyes were looking straight into mine; the next, one of them rolled round until it looked out of the uttermost ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... support his play—Lewis—more worthy to be thus considered than almost any other performer: but here his very skill gives the alarm—for Lewis possesses such unaffected spirit on the stage, a kind of vivid fire, which tempers burlesque with nature, or nature with burlesque, so happily, that it cannot be hoped any other man will easily support those characters written purposely ...
— The Dramatist; or Stop Him Who Can! - A Comedy, in Five Acts • Frederick Reynolds
... from every class of society. Eichenstine Bros. sent fifty dollars, and six ragged newsboys came to present thirty cents. A lavender note, with huge monogram and written in white ink, stated that some of the girls of the "Gay Burlesque Troupe" sent a few dimes to the "kid's" mother. The few dimes amounted to fifteen dollars. Mrs. Van Larkin's coachman had to wait with her note while Lucy answered the questions of a lame old negro who had ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... raise the siege of Orleans, and actually succeeded in so doing. Schiller has a tragedy on the subject, Casimir Delavigne an elegy on her, Southey an epic poem on her life and death, and Voltaire a burlesque. ...
— 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.
... of the book. How a man of Mr. Warricombe's intelligence could take grave interest in an arid exegesis of the first chapter of Genesis, Godwin strove in vain to comprehend. Often enough the debates were perilously suggestive of burlesque, and, when alone, he relieved himself of the laughter he had scarce restrained. For instance, there was that terrible thohu wabohu of the second verse, a phrase preserved from the original, and ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... recover'd, and had heard of the Menaces of Caesar, but he called his Council, who (not to disgrace them, or burlesque the Government there) consisted of such notorious Villains as Newgate never transported; and, possibly, originally were such who understood neither the Laws of God or Man, and had no sort of Principles to make them worthy the Name of Men; but at the very Council-Table ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... of the house at the end of the second act of La Zolfara. And Pietro was not really touched, he had acted in many unwritten dramas, understood in a moment, played up with the correct stage exit and we all laughed at the impromptu burlesque—or modificazione, as one ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... Raffaelle, Parmegiano, Poussin, are all indebted to the cartoon of Pisa. The lecture concludes with some just remarks upon the "Transfiguration," and a censure upon the coldness of Richardson, and the burlesque of the French critic Falconet, who could not discover the point of contact which united the two parts of this celebrated picture. "Raphael's design was to represent Jesus as the Son of God, and, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... inability to penetrate to its true profundities. They will probably say that his theory can tolerate no partial statement, and that the attempts of the uninitiated can compass nothing but caricature and burlesque. We cordially give them the advantage of this supposed stricture, and as cordially refer all earnest inquirers to this first instalment of the heroic work. We say heroic, and would abate the adjective of no jot of meaning. It requires the stuff of which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... and a fitting burlesque to tragic scenes, or, rather, to the thing called "glorious war," old Joe Brown, then Governor of Georgia, sent in his militia. It was the richest picture of an army I ever saw. It beat Forepaugh's double-ringed circus. ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... it a club of the lowest species. Here, in advance, we contemplate the ways of the future revolutionary inquisition. They welcome burlesque denunciations; enter into petty police investigations; weigh the tittle-tattle of porters and the gossip of servant-girls; devote an all-night session to the secrets of a drunkard.[2218] They enter on their official report and without ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... with the joking tone of the inspectors, who surmised that we were not trying to smuggle a great value into the country, and with their apologetic regrets for bothering us to open so many trunks. They implied that it was all a piece of burlesque, which we were bound mutually to carry out for the gratification of a Government which enjoyed that kind of thing. They indulged this whim so far as to lift out the trays, to let the Government see that there was nothing dutiable ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... was occupied with the performance of the curious burlesque which James had invented. The day after George Brooke was beheaded, the King drew up a warrant to the Sheriff of Hampshire for stay of all the other executions. With this document in his bosom, he signed death-warrants ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... called "teaching the young idea how to shoot," since the corps only bore l'arme blanche; but it was highly creditable to the waggery of the citizens of Taunton, and the most efficient burlesque upon the volunteer system I had yet seen, although I have encountered many more elaborately ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... di Cristofano, known as Buffalmacco, a Florentine painter, the same that was pupil of Andrea Tafi, and celebrated as a burlesque character by Messer Giovanni Boccaccio in his Decameron was as we know bosom friend of Bruno and Calendrino, also painters and of an even more witty and merry humour than himself, and as may be seen in his works scattered throughout Tuscany, ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... corner sat Amos Entwistle, the butt of not a little mirth from a half-dozen sceptics who had gathered round him. They addressed him as 'Owd Brimstone,' and made a burlesque of his Calvinistic faith, one going so far as to call him 'a glory bird,' while another declared he was 'booked for heaven fust-class ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... had found his audience and his actors. The Prince of Wales's Theatre was directed by a burlesque actress, and devoted to light comedy and extravaganza: after that it gave up burlesque, merely heightening the effect of the comedy and prolonging the programme by a quiet farce. The company was small and strong, the theatre was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... fanciful to-day, my pet," he said at last. "You've been tiring yourself too much. You must rest. You'd better not go to the Brilliant Theatre to-night—it's only a burlesque, and is sure to be vulgar and noisy. We'll stop at home and spend a quiet evening ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... of the poor, Olive saw the frightful profanities of that cant knowledge which young or ignorant minds acquire, and by which the greatest mysteries of Christianity are lowered to a burlesque. Then she inclined to think that Harold Gwynne was right, and that in this temporary prohibition he acted as became a wise father and "a discreet and learned minister of God's Word." As such she ever considered him; though she sometimes thought ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... one of the hardest problems of a woman's life is to realise just when she must acknowlege that her youthful prime is past. Some women never seem able to solve it. They either hang on to the burlesque semblance of twenty-five, or else go all to pieces, and take unto themselves "views" as violent as they are sour. When they cannot command the uncritical admiration of the gaping crowd, they descend from their ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... seen done at a military post. After making a few scratches on the paper, he handed it to one of his red companions, and, with a smile on his rough countenance, addressed to him some directions in reference to the document. Although the Mexicans were much amused at these burlesque actions of the Indians, yet they did not dare to show their mirth until the latter had departed and left them ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... the Third". I have mentioned the circumstances under which they were written in the notes; and need only add that they are conceived in a very different spirit from Shelley's usual compositions. They are specimens of the burlesque and fanciful; but, although they adopt a familiar style and homely imagery, there shine through the radiance of the poet's imagination the earnest views and opinions of the politician and ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... "Nosey the Dwarf"; "The Young Englishman"; "The Prophecy of the Silver Florin"; "The Cold Heart," etc. What prospects for winter evenings are here! And while we can assure the adult reader that the promise which these titles give of burlesque or humorous description, and bold, romantic narrative, shall be more than kept, it may be well also to say, for the comfort of those whom we hope to see buy the book for their children's sake, that the stories in it are entirely free from certain objections which may ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... lips and knit his brows with a burlesque, melodramatic air, and strode up and down, with his forefinger to ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... of unknown origin, probably coined in burlesque imitation of scholastic Latin, as "hocus-pocus" or "panjandrum"), originally a term meaning whim, fancy or ridiculous idea; later applied to a pun or play upon words, and thus, in its usual sense, to a particular form ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... escapade is perhaps to be connected what seems to have been one of Fielding's earliest literary efforts. This is a modernisation in burlesque octosyllabic verse of part of Juvenal's sixth satire. In the "Preface" to the later published Miscellanies, it is said to have been "originally sketched out before he was Twenty," and to have constituted "all the Revenge taken by an injured Lover." But ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... her innocent ignorance especially, is not very readily intelligible, not quite persuasive, and there is almost a touch of the burlesque in her unexpected appearance as a monk. To weave that old and famous story of love into the terribly complex political intrigue was a task almost too great. The character of Eleanor is perhaps more successfully ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... even hours. While a few gained a competence, many gained only a bare subsistence; thousands lost their health, and not a few their lives. It was a strange play that men enacted there, embracing all the confusion, glitter, rapid change of scene, burlesque, and comedy of a pantomime, with many a dash of darkest tragedy intermingled. Tents were pitched in all directions, houses were hastily run up, restaurants of all kinds were opened, boats were turned keel up and converted into ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... 'Rehearsal' was a witty burlesque upon the heroic dramas of Davenant, Dryden, and others, written by George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, the Zimri of Dryden's 'Absalom and Achitophel,' 'that life of pleasure and that soul of whim,' who, after running through a fortune ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... then, in a sort of burlesque "fashionable" lounge suit and wore a straw hat set rakishly backward on his well-oiled dark hair. He carried gloves and a malacca cane, and his gait was one of assured superiority. He was a stoutly-built, muscular young fellow and might ordinarily have been ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... 9s., the upper boxes, 8s., the pit, 6s., and the gallery, 2s.; and the proceeds realised no less a sum than 610 pounds! The performances were the "Poor Gentleman," "A Concert," by musical amateurs, and the burlesque of "Bombastes Furioso." The characters were personated for the most part in each of the pieces by amateurs, amongst whom were several of the leading gentlemen of the town, who spared no pains, study, nor cost ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... Biographies, nay Vaudevilles, Dramas and Melodramas, in all Provinces of France, there will, through these coming months, be the due immeasurable crop; thick as the leaves of Spring. Nor, that a tincture of burlesque might be in it, is Gobel's Episcopal Mandement wanting; goose Gobel, who has just been made Constitutional Bishop of Paris. A Mandement wherein ca ira alternates very strangely with Nomine Domini, and you are, with a grave countenance, invited to 'rejoice at possessing in ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... them; and although the rest were no longer regarded as sacred, the feeling of obligation remained attached to them for centuries. They were secularized, and ultimately degraded for the most part into burlesque. Such as were connected with municipal life, or, as we shall see in a future chapter, with family life, retained a measure of solemnity long after it had passed away from rites which had been abandoned to an unorganized ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... cube; do we not measure by it and speak of the cubic contents of anything? The inference is easy: reduce all objects to forms which can be bounded by planes and defined by straight lines and angles; make their cubic contents measurable to the eye; transform drawing into a burlesque of solid geometry; and you have, at once, attained to the highest art. The Futurist, on the other hand, maintains that we know nothing but that things are in flux. Form, solidity, weight are illusions. Nothing exists but motion. Everything is changing every moment, ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... in a simple prayer, in an artless letter[4120]. None of the gifts which serve to arrest and fix the attention are wanting in this style, neither grandeur of imagination nor profound sentiment, vivid characterization, delicate gradations, vigorous precision, a sportive grace, unlooked-for burlesque, nor variety of representation. But, amidst so many ingenious tricks, apologues, tales, portraits and dialogues, in earnest as well as when masquerading, his deportment throughout is irreproachable and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... its stead. As usual, no expense had been spared in the mounting, and Adrien's money had been poured out like water on extraordinary costumes, gorgeous, highly-coloured scenery, and a hundred embellishments for this new piece of elaborate and senseless burlesque, Prince Bon-Bon. But with all its deficiencies as regarded culture, the piece ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... most obvious proofs that we can select for proving the existence of a state of unbelief(302) are, the ridicule of religion expressed in the burlesque poetry of the time, and the antichristian sympathies of ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... and daily received the refuse of the various meals. The bird, furious with pain, was burying its beak into the leg of the soldier, while he, with the butt end of his musket aloft, and the bayonet depressed, offered the most burlesque representation of St. George preparing to give his mortal thrust ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... has my pupil of his own abilities, that he has for some time professed himself a wit, and tortures his imagination on all occasions for burlesque and jocularity. How he supports a character which, perhaps, no man ever assumed without repentance, may be easily conjectured. Wit, you know, is the unexpected copulation of ideas, the discovery of some occult relation between images in appearance remote from ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... acquaintance with the little Tessa. He came upon her in the thronged streets during carnival time, and seeing her, a timorous, tearful little contadin, terrified by the burlesque threats of a boisterous conjurer, took her under ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... an article in the Nuevo Mundo, in which I considered Vazquez Mella and his refutation of the Kantian philosophy, dwelling especially upon his seventeenth mathematical proof of the existence of God. The thing was a burlesque, but a conservative paper took issue with me, called me an atheist, a plagiarist, a drunkard and an ass. As for being an atheist, I did not take that as an insult, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... abode of drunkenness and grossness; they defaced the sacred trees and the grey walls with inscriptions which the indignation of a purer age has caused to be removed; they carried on nightly revels which no historian could describe, and in their wicked buffoonery mocked the Creator with burlesque religious rites. Such an unholy place would be pulled down by the mob nowadays, and the gang of debauchees would figure in the police-court; but in those "good old times" the Prime Minister and the Secretary to the Admiralty were merry members of a crew that disgraced humanity. ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... he got, and mimicked the dances of the boy and girl in burlesque fashion, and inasmuch as the spectators had been pleased to think the natural beauty of the boy enhanced by every gesture of his body in the dance, so the jester must give a counter-representation, (44) in which each twist and movement of his ...
— The Symposium • Xenophon
... best kind. Will [Greek: ph]. point out in any existing poem of such profession and character, a single heroic line, consisting of ten words, all which ten words shall be "low" in the sense of "vulgar"? Can even the Muses of burlesque and slang furnish such ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... club to go to at that time, so he went and read the papers, and drank coffee at a cigar divan until it was late enough to dine, and after dinner tried to drown his care by going to see one of those anomalous productions—a 'three-act burlesque'—at a neighbouring theatre, which he sat through with a growing gloom, in spite of the pretty faces and graceful dances which have now, with some rare exceptions, made plot and humour so unnecessary. Each leading member of the clever company danced his or her ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... applying them to another sense they are made a relation of a wedding-night, and the act of consummation fulsomely described in the very words of the most modest amongst all poets. Of the same manner are our songs which are turned into burlesque, and the serious words of the author perverted into a ridiculous meaning. Thus in Timon's "silli" the words are generally those of Homer and the tragic poets, but he applies them satirically to some customs and kinds of philosophy which he arraigns. But the Romans not using any ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... little relation to life as the philosophy that is enunciated in a monkey-house. Opera-bouffe performed upon Helvellyn would be a sorry spectacle; what was all this bedizened rout of people playing before the footlights of cities, but a vain burlesque at which Nature laughed? And as my sense of the importance of this kind of spectacle gradually sank, my appreciation of the serious drama conducted by Nature, upon a stage as old as time, whose footlights are the changeless planets, gradually rose. I had become the neighbour ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... institution it was so trite that once we made of it a fraternity play. I faintly remember a pledge to secrecy—sworn by the moon and the seven wandering stars—but nevertheless I shall divulge the plot. It was a burlesque tragedy in rhyme. Some eighteen years ago, it seems, Brabantio, the noble Venetian Senator, kept this same dog-wagon—he and his beautiful daughter Desdemona. Here came Othello, Iago and Cassio of the famous ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... consequently, of inferior manners, whereas the grave romance sets the highest before us: lastly, in its sentiments and diction; by preserving the ludicrous instead of the sublime. In the diction, I think, burlesque itself may be sometimes admitted; of which many instances will occur in this work, as in the description of the battles, and some other places, not necessary to be pointed out to the classical reader, for whose entertainment those parodies or burlesque ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... now became acquainted with all the audacious and burlesque inventions, all the serio-comic combinations of that mendicancy of great cities, organized like a department of state, innumerable as an army, which subscribes to the newspapers and knows its Bottin ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... according to his own fashion, creates her according to his own image. Pious souls clothe her with an invincible charm and the divine gift of charity; simple souls make her simple too; men gross and violent figure her a giantess, burlesque and terrible. Shall we ever discern the true features of her countenance? Behold her, from the first and perhaps for ever enclosed in a flowering thicket ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... bordering on farce—are classed as "dramatic" subjects, and this, apparently, because they are strongly dramatic in certain scenes. Thus, again, genuine farce (as distinguished from "slap-stick" comedy), social comedy, burlesque and extravaganza are all classed under the head of "comedy," just as comedy-drama, tragedy, melodrama, and historical plays are classed as "dramatic." These two broad classifications will be used ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... puerile street fights with slings, of the printers' devils and schoolboys of Paris. The incidents of the war read like scenes in a comic opera. A hundred thousand armed citizens were besieged by eight thousand soldiers. The evolution of a burlesque form of cavalry, called the corps of the Portes Cocheres, formed by a conscription of one horseman for every house with a carriage gate, became the derision of the royal army. They issued forth, beplumed and beribboned, ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... overcoming the difficulties of interpreting aright my clumsy, circumlocutory phrases in attempting to describe shawls, gowns, and bonnets; and taught me the exact millinery language which I ought to have made use of with an arch expression of triumph and a burlesque earnestness of manner, that always enchanted me. At that time, every word she uttered, no matter how frivolous, was the sweetest of all music to my ears. It was only by the stern test of after-events that I learnt to analyse her conversation. Sometimes, when I was away ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... its subjects are sublime, its writer's genius should be so too; otherwise it becomes the meanest thing in writing, viz. an involuntary burlesque. ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... over, for ever render impossible the rehearsal of another great poet. But a work of art is valuable, and pleasurable in proportion to its rarity; one beautiful book of verses is better than twenty books of beautiful verses. This is an absolute and incontestable truth; a child can burlesque this truth—one verse is better than the whole poem, a word is better than the line, a letter is better than the word, but the truth is not thereby affected. Hugo never had the good fortune to write a bad book, nor even ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
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