|
|
|
More "Clown" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... two others endeavour to gain a subsistence by successively appearing as physicians, actors, and musicians: but the Man of Genius is disregarded, and at last prosecuted for his productions; the benefice is sold to an illiterate clown; and in the end three of the scholars are compelled to submit to a voluntary exile; another returns to Cambridge as poor as when he left it; and the other two, finding that neither their medicines nor their music would support them, resolve ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... hand against the wall. He seemed to have a fair appreciation of the character of his associates for the evening; and though himself perfectly competent to behave well in the best society, chose to act the clown in this. ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... Zelda persisted, she would have to go West earlier than she had planned. She could not regard Ann's sister-in-law as suitable person for attendant at Major Darrett's wedding. That would be a little too much like playing the clown at a masked ball. ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... for its corrections and remodellings, reducing the grandeur of the originals to the levels of the critics. Lord Lansdowne degraded Shylock into the clown of the play; it was "furnished with music and other ornamentation, enriched with a musical masque, 'Peleus and Thetis,' and with a banqueting scene in which the Jew," dining apart from the rest, drinks to his God, Money. Gildon mangled "Measure for Measure" ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... it is left rude, and fine only as it is wrought finely. Educate a boy to tumbled hair and grimy hands, and he will go tumbled and grimy to his grave. Put a hundred boys together where they will have the appurtenances of a clown, and I do not believe there will be ten out of the hundred who will not become precisely to that degree clownish. I am not battling for the luxuries of life, but I am for its decencies. I would not turn boys into Sybarites, but neither would I let them riot into Satyrs. The effeminacy of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... would like to revisit, Galilee, for instance, a country that St. Paul never seemed to have visited, which, to say the least, was strange. Whereupon a long talk began about Paul and Jesus, Mr. Walter Poole maintaining that Paul's teaching was identical with that of Jesus, and that Peter was a clown despised by ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... In other pictures, a clown or jester appears, introducing a witty joking element into the scene and thus presenting Krishna's attitude to love ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... with which his colleagues were certain to signalize the debacle. When the two appeared, he started involuntarily. He had been prepared for violence, he had expected tears.... The vision of a blubbering idiot, that mowed and mumbled, its wig awry, its dreadful face blotched, like a clown's, with paint, swaddled from head to toe in gorgeous furs, leaning desperately upon the very reed it had broken—this was unearthly, hellish. He found himself praying that it might not visit ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... dark room in the courtyard. There it was that I saw him for the first time, surrounded by a great wilderness of books, and attired in an unpretentious indoor costume, the most striking feature of which was a tall, pointed felt cap, such as I had seen worn by the clown who belonged to the troupe of rope-dancers at Eisleben. A great love of independence had driven him to this strange retreat. He had been originally destined for the Church, but he soon gave that up, in order ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... a tragedy in which clown is wholly absent? As he steps over the graves, up comes a man as drunk as a goat, and cries out, "Ah! Mr. Gladstone will you take the duty off the whiskey?" Upon which he of Hawarden Castle turns him round and says slowly—"My friend, the duty does not seem ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... very thing!" shouted the clown, jumping up and embracing him; and with this crash and a run of semitones to the centre of the piano this troublesome tempest was ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... that she did not mind at all the fact that she had once been a circus-clown. Rather he had tossed her a memory on which she feasted joyfully, almost greedily. She pushed her plate and glass away from her, and sat with her face ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... I guess we'll be in a circus anyhow. That'll be more fun. You can ride a horse in the ring, and sometimes I can ride with you and sometimes I can be a clown. When I'm a clown I can squirt water from my fire engine over the other clowns. That'll make the ...
— The Bobbsey Twins on Blueberry Island • Laura Lee Hope
... misery commenced for him. A dependent on a sister of his, everybody in the farmhouse treated him as a beggar who is eating the bread of others. At every meal the very food he swallowed was made a subject of reproach against him; he was called a drone, a clown; and although his brother-in-law had taken possession of his portion of the inheritance, the soup was given to him grudgingly—just enough to ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... passed, Jasmin, being a spirited fellow, was allowed to accompany his father at night in the concerts of rough music. He placed a long paper cap on his head, like a French clown, and with a horn in his hand he made as much noise, and played as many antics, as any fool in the crowd. Though the tailor could not read, he usually composed the verses for the Charivari; and the doggerel of the father, mysteriously fructified, ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... turns on a tragical ending to a comedy which is incorporated in the play. The comedy is a familiar one among the strolling players who perform at village fairs in Italy, in which Columbina, Pagliaccio, and Arlecchino (respectively the Columbine, Clown, and Harlequin of our pantomime) take part. Pagliaccio is husband to Colombina and Arlecchino is her lover, who hoodwinks Pagliaccio. There is a fourth character, Taddeo, a servant, who makes foolish love to Columbina and, mingling imbecile stupidity with maliciousness, delights ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... thrown aside these senseless trappings—if he were an under-keeper now, or a water-bailiff, or even a gillie looking after the dogs and the ponies, he could have met the gaze of those clear hazel eyes without shame. But here he was the coadjutor of this grimacing clown; and she was sitting in her box ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... dastard kestrel kite Aye hugs the earth in his stealthy flight. Hope gone! the pool at the otter's cave Will prove the Ladye Tomasine's grave. Ho! ho! see yonder comes rushing down A lithe young hind, though a simple clown— Off bonnet and shoes, and coat and vest, A plunge! and he holds her round the waist! Three strokes of his arm, with his beautiful prize All safe, although faint, on the bank she lies! A cottager's ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... animals form their burrows, their cells, or their nests, with no other tools than those with which nature has provided them. In cultivating the ground, also, man can do nothing without a spade or a plow; nor can he reap what he has sown till he has shaped an implement with which to cut clown his harvest. But the inferior animals provide for themselves and their young ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... small Renown, But noted for a Man of Mettle; Thro' all the Parts of London Town, No Gentleman, nor yet a Clown, No grave wise man, ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... than a man. But if he is gnawed with anxiety lest he may not be a gentleman, he is only pitiable. There is a third case, however. If a man must loftily, by his manner, assert that he is now a gentleman, he shows himself a clown. For Alvina, poor Dr. Mitchell fell into this third category, of clowns. She tolerated him good-humouredly, as women so often tolerate ninnies and poseurs. She smiled to herself when she saw his large and important presence on the board. She smiled when ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... bell tinkled, and the great doors slowly swung open. Gerty saw beautiful ladies, all bright and glittering with spangles, and handsome horses in gorgeous trappings, and great strong men in tights, all the wonders and sights of the circus, and the funny jokes and antics of the clown and pantaloon. And Gerty had never known anything half so fine; and there was riding and jumping and tumbling, and all manner of fun, until the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... small boy back before the war, a circus came to town. I remember the clown, whose name was Gullins. My father, John Mappin, was so much like the clown in his ways and sayings, that afterwards everyone started calling him Gullins. This soon became a sort of nickname. Some years after when slaves ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... that you know he has such a liking for you that he is becoming a clown in the hope that ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... she. "Where be these ghostly [fabulous, figurative] Scots? I will go bail they be wrapped of their foldings [plaids] fast asleep on some moor an hundred miles hence. 'Tis but Robin, the clown! that is so clumst [stupid] with his rashness, that he seeth a Scot full armed under every bush, and heareth a trumpeter in every corncrake: and as if that were not enough, he has a sister as ill as himself, that must take all for gospel as if Friar Robert preached it. Mary love us! but ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... talk to me of your art! What do I care for your art. I've clung to your art merely to attract your attention. Did Heaven create a man like you to let you make a clown of yourself night after night? Are you not ashamed of boasting of it? You see that I am willing to overlook your being an artist. What wouldn't one overlook in a demigod like you? And if you were a convict, Oscar, I could not ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... wretch!" replied Anastasia, showing her teeth. "You are a low-bred fellow. Alfred, your boot-tree, till I take the length of his muzzle, to teach him to come and play the Joe Miller at his age, old clown!" ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... a wonderful exploit?" asked one of the young maidens, with a smile. "Any clown in the country ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... you ... oh, Mac!" The commanding voice trailed off in a chuckle. Better to clown his way through the inspection, MacNamara thought, than to let Ruiz notice his nervousness. The co-pilot, Ruiz, walked toward him, still smiling. "One of these days, boy, you gonna go too far. Thought ...
— Tight Squeeze • Dean Charles Ing
... hours ago I beheld their heads tossed like footballs by the foot of the common executioner, and afterwards fixed over the porch of the Nether Bow, for the execration and indignities of the slaves of Albany. All day the blood of the Homes has dropped upon the pavement, where the mechanic and the clown pass ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... clash of elemental forces, we see a dark mass, that glows dully. We can hardly believe that here is the origin of the explosions that shake the island, and are inclined to consider the demon of the volcano rather as a mischievous clown than ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... the mischief is your little game? Monkeyish tricks help neither power nor dignity. A little country heir of much fair fame, I'd like to treat with patience and benignity; But memories of CAMOENS and DE GAMA Should save you from the clown's part ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... soldiers who should quit the service of the usurper and enlist under his banners, might depend upon receiving their pardon and arrears; and that the foreign troops, upon laying clown their arms, should be paid and transported to their respective countries. He solemnly protested that he would protect and maintain the church of England, as by law established, in all her rights, privileges, and possessions: he signified his resolution to use his influence ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... production, smiled somewhat as he regarded it, and Donato seeing this, entreated him by the friendship existing between them, to say what he thought of it. Whereupon Filippo, who was exceedingly frank, replied that Donatello appeared to him to have placed a clown on the cross, and not a figure resembling that of Jesus Christ, whose person was delicately beautiful, and in all parts the most perfect form of man that had ever been born. Donato hearing himself censured where he had expected praise, and more hurt than he was perhaps ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... day of mea culpas! and she, a quarter of an hour before the time for his reappearance, had powdered her nose—which, she knew, gave her an expression half amusing, half piteous, just like that of the clown who is playing his tricks at the circus while his little daughter is dying at home. "Hello, Goosie," she said breathlessly (also she had rubbed a trace of rouge under her eyes); "hello, just in time for dinner! Made a ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... only stunned." It was Fletcher's voice above her. "Leave him alone. He will soon come to his senses. Serves him right for acting the clown ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... deep-cut lines a licentious life, whose misdeeds were still further evidenced by the badness of the man's teeth, and the black speckles which appeared here and there on his corrugated skin. Claparon had the air of a provincial comedian who knows all the roles, and plays the clown with a wink; his cheeks, where the rouge never stuck, were jaded by excesses, his lips clammy, though his tongue was forever wagging, especially when he was drunk; his glances were immodest, and his gestures compromising. Such a face, flushed with the jovial features of punch, was enough ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... duty to the President and to the country," he wrote, "and I shall go on with right good heart."[1072] In the East the party got on very well, but at Cleveland and other Western cities the President acted like a man both mad and drunk, while people railed at him as if he were the clown of a circus. "He sunk the Presidential office to the level of a ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... went away again to their own home. (11)And Mary was standing by the sepulchre without, weeping. So, as she wept, she stooped clown into the sepulchre, (12)and beholds two angels in white, sitting the one at the head and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus lay. (13)And they say to her: Woman, why weepest thou? She says to them: ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... clown or a hacrobat, or somethink of that sort, in one of the theatres or music-'alls. He's bin burnt out o' his 'ome last night, an's a-sellin' off all he's been able to save, ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... of God with wholesale massacre? What altar and what hearthstone had they not profaned? What fatigue, what danger, what crime, had ever checked them for a moment? And for all this obedience, labor, and bloodshed, were they not even to be paid such wages as the commonest clown, who only tore the earth at home, received? Did Philip believe that a few thousand Spaniards were to execute his sentence of death against three millions of Netherlanders, and be cheated of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... limp a little. So Bruce was commanded by no less person than Kathlyn to be her father's guest till they departed for America. Daily Winnie rode Rajah. He was such a funny old pachyderm, a kind of clown among his brethren, but as gentle as a kitten. Running away had not paid. He was like the country boy who had gone to the big city; he never more could be satisfied with ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... the child; for, of course, in poor Mary's state the least shock might prove fatal. I found Marshall stooping over the bed and supporting his wife with clumsy fondness, with the tears rolling clown his ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... our clown when my father-my dear father-was alive. He was a coarse horrid man, as cruel to the poor dear horses as he dared. And now he has set up for himself, and has been going about all over the county. Mother has been quite ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... At first I didn't see how I was going to do so. That was during camp, and Hans Dunnerwust tented with him then. I cultivated the thick-headed Dutchman, and succeeded in getting into his good graces. So I often visited Hans in the tent when Merriwell and Mulloy, that Irish clown, who thinks Merriwell the finest fellow in the world, were away. I kept my eyes open, and one day I spotted a letter to Merriwell. I swiped it instanter, and it helped me out, for it ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... in. His usual walk is by pauses, as if (from the same vacuity of thought which made Dryden's clown whistle) he was telling his steps: and first paid his clumsy respects to my mother; then to my sister; next to me, as if I was already his wife, and therefore to be last in his notice; and sitting down by me, told us in general what weather it was. Very cold he made it; but I was warm ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... hand and kissed it tenderly. He was very fond of his mother. At this moment Pax took a little run, and jumped on to Mamma's lap, where, sitting facing the company, he opened his black mouth and yawned, with a ludicrous inappropriateness worthy of any clown. It made ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... J. started in to tell me what a delightful time she had had at the New Rochelle theatre, and how clever the magician was, and what a funny clown came out first and smashed a real egg on the stage, but I begged off ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... of the house," he echoed bitterly. "We might put some flaming hoops out in the street, so that the clown can turn a somersault through ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... substantial excellence is lost by this suppling of the intellectual faculties, and bringing the nervous system nearer the surface by the absorption of superfluous fat. What is lost in bulk may be gained in spring. It is true that the clown, with his parochial horizon, his diet inconveniently thin, and his head conveniently thick, whose notion of greatness is a prize pig, and whose patriotism rises or falls with the strength of his beer, is a creature as little likely to be met with here as the dodo, his only rival in the qualities ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... riding this way; We soon shall know what he has to say. Courier! what are the tidings to-day? "Christ is arisen!" Whence come you? "From town." Then I do not believe it; away with you, clown. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... laborer, and a good honest fellow, if we may call a poor man honest, for he was poor indeed, poor in purse and poor in brains; and, in short, the knight talked so long to him, plied him with so many arguments, and made him so many fair promises, that at last the poor clown consented to go along with him and become his squire. Among other inducements to entice him to do it willingly, Don Quixote forgot not to tell him that it was likely such an adventure would present itself as might ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... minds is his making a clown of himself in her front yard! It made her think he didn't care much about her. She's probably mistaken, but that's what she thinks, and it's too late for her to think anything else now, because she's going to be married right away—the invitations will be out next week. It'll be a big ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... not aware of the sorry tragedy in his voice that contrasted so sharply with the banality of his words. He felt that he was but a pitiful jester who was like a clown, compelled to play a merry part when there was anguish in ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... instruction of common people. Even amid the pathos of divine suffering the peasants must be amused. Care was taken that the character of Judas should meet this demand. So Judas was made at once a traitor and a clown. His pathway was beset by devils of the most ridiculous sort. And when at last he hung himself on the stage, his body burst open, and the long links of sausages which represented intestines were devoured by the imps amid the laughter and delight ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... Italian origin and contained four stock characters, Pappus the old man or pantaloon, Dossennus the wise man, corresponding to the dottore of modern Italian popular comedy, Bucco the clown, and Maccus the fool. It dealt with every kind of theme, parodied the legends of the gods, laughed at the provincial's manners or at the inhabitants of Italian country towns, or depicted in broad comic style incidents in the life of farmer and artisan. Maccus appeared as a young girl, as a soldier, ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... decays the wise{,} doth eve{r} make the better fool. Clown. God send you, sir, a speedy infirmity{,} for the better increasing of your folly."—Shakespeare. Twelfth ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... days a Clown in the East, on a visit to a city kinsman, while at dinner, pointed to a burning candle and asked what it was. The City Man said, in jest, it was a sunling, or one of the children of ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... newspaper opinions of him-self and his writings. It is as if Dickens, when the whole English-reading world—judges on the bench and bishops in their studies, cobblers in their stalls and grooms in the stables—were all laughing over Pickwick, should have sued the Eatanswill Gazette for calling him a clown. Thackeray pronounces Cooper's Long Tom Coffin one of the prizemen of fiction. That is a final judgment by the chief-justice. But who knows what was the verdict in Cooper's lawsuits to vindicate himself, and who cares? ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... deserted street; they beheld a being more agile than a clown climb over the omnibus, and Gavroche bounded into the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... with which the author so often honeys her drugs; but the novel-part of it is largely composed of the same sort of violent bosh which almost monopolises Indiana. In fact, the peasant-bourgeois hero Benedict, whom every woman loves; who is a conceited and ill-mannered mixture of clown and prig; who is angry with his mistress Valentine (Madame de Lansac) for "not knowing how to prefer him to her honour," though one would have said she had given ample proofs of this preference; and who finally appeases the reader by ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... would teach men to aspire he writes "Excelsior" and so causes them to know that only he who aspires really lives. They see the groundling, the boor, the drudge, and the clown content to dwell in the valley amid the loaves and fishes of animal desires, while the man who aspires is struggling toward the heights whence he may gain an outlook upon the glories that are, know the throb ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... to Lockwood, and smiled. "The face of a malignant Pierrette. A diabolic clown. Look at it. I saw it in the lightning outside. She wears a mask. Do you get her?" He paused mockingly. Lockwood shifted away from the woman. Erik was drunk. Or crazy. But the woman, thank God, had eyes only for him. She remained, ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... inherited. Melted rubies it was indeed, of the sort which had quickened the blood of many a royal gathering at Blois and Amboise and Chenonceaux,—the distilled peasant song of the Loire valley. In it many a careworn clown had tasted the purer happiness of the lowly. Our restraint gave way under its influence. His Grace lost for the moment his deformities, and Mr. Fox made us laugh until our sides ached again. His Lordship told many a capital yarn, and my own wit was afterwards ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was indeed small, but at the same time it was thin, light, delicately articulated, and, if I may say so, highly expressive. Chopin's whole body was extraordinarily flexible. According to Gutmann, he could, like a clown, throw his legs over his shoulders. After this we may easily imagine how great must have been the flexibility of his hands, those members of his body which he had specially trained all his life. Indeed, the startlingly wide-spread chords, arpeggios, &c., which ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... makes me feel as happy as a clown in a circus," declared Andy, and, in high spirits, he began a jig and ended by turning a flip-flap over one of the beds. Then he and his twin indulged in a pillow fight, in which ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)
... does not fulfil what its form requires. Nor does any mind ever think or form conceptions in accordance with this law, nor does any existence conform to it.' Wisdom of this sort is well parodied in Shakespeare (Twelfth Night, 'Clown: For as the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc, "That that is is"...for what is "that" but "that," and "is" but "is"?'). Unless we are willing to admit that two contradictories may be true, many questions which lie ...
— Sophist • Plato
... tell you clearly, instantly, and emphatically, in what temper you must set about it. Here are you, a Christian, a gentleman, and a trained scholar; there is your subject of education—a Godless clown, in helpless ignorance. You can present no more blessed offering to God than that human creature, raised into faith, gentleness, and the knowledge of the works of his Lord. But observe this—you must not hope to make so noble an offering ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... petty finance, some quite mites, to make up the accounts for Tripoli. Whilst seated near his Excellency, a big lout of a fellow was brought up, charged with beating a little urchin, who was present to substantiate the charge. The Rais, after gravely hearing the case, had the big clown turned round with his hands tied behind him, and then told the little rogue aggrieved to lay it into him as hard as he could with his fists clenched. The little imp, who looked as wicked as imp could be, instantly gave the broad back of the great fellow half a dozen ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... being to die so soon, And passing proud a little color makes thee. If thee thy brittle beauty so deceives, Know then the thing that swells thee is thy bane; For the same beauty cloth, in bloody leaves, The sentence of thy early death contain. Some clown's coarse lungs will poison thy sweet flower, If by the careless plough thou shalt be torn; And many Herods lie in wait each hour To murder thee as soon as thou art born— Nay, force thy bud to blow—their tyrant breath Anticipating life, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... go on, So hark 'ye friend; his grandfather I say,"— "Poh, poh,"—cried Gilbert, as he turn'd away. Her eyes were fix'd, her story at a stand, The snuff-box lay half open'd in her hand; "You great ill-manner'd clown! but I must bear it; You oaf; to ask the news, and then won't hear it!" But Gilbert had gain'd forty paces clear, When the reproof ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... English Fairy court was the celebrated Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, who to the elves acted in some measure as the jester or clown of the company—(a character then to be found in the establishment of every person of quality)—or to use a more modern comparison, resembled the Pierrot of the pantomime. His jests were of the most simple and at the ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... CONQUEST: persons dressed as cavalrymen in steel armor of 1066, when William the Conqueror became King of England. PARTY-COLORED MERRY ANDREW: an old term for a clown dressed in garments having several colors. FALSTAFF: an important character in several of Shakespeare's plays. He is always represented as fat and ridiculous. DON QUIXOTE: the chief character of the celebrated Spanish satire "Don Quixote" (1605) by Cervantes. ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... dangerous, his visit to Rome, and his conversion to Romanism; and, in short, disgusted the cautious Mr. Walpole. There is something delightfully impudent about all these acts of Wharton's; and had he only been a clown at Drury Lane instead of an English nobleman, he must have been successful. As it is, when one reads of the petty hatred and humbug of those days, when liberty of speech was as unknown as any other liberty, one cannot but admire the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... "Actually, that country clown is trying on, right here in New York, the same primitive methods that real estate boomers use in the soggy South and the woolly West. Would you believe it? Come ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... Wind he took to his revels once more; On down, In town, Like a merry-mad clown, He leaped and hallooed with whistle and roar— "What's that?" The glimmering thread ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... two other bits of amusement we had while at Florence. One of these was in hearing the colored soldiers sing patriotic songs, which they did with great gusto when the weather became mild. The other was the antics of a circus clown—a member, I believe, of a Connecticut or a New York regiment, who, on the rare occasions when we were feeling not exactly well so much as simply better than we had been, would give us an hour or two of recitations of the drolleries with which he was wont to set the crowded canvas in a roar. One ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... entanglements for me. Has it not been said that to a writer all women are "copy"? Even when he falls in love, your author is so busy studying the symptoms that he usually fails to inform the lady until she has eloped with some other clown. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... a procession. The boys tried to make them out by the pictures and names on the bills: which was Rivers, the bare-back rider, and which was O'Dale, the champion tumbler; which was the India-rubber man, which the ring-master, which the clown. Covered with dust, gasping with the fatigue of a three hours' run beside the procession, but fresh at heart as in the beginning, they arrived with it on the Commons, where the tent-wagons were already drawn up, and the ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... peaceful camp of the Third Alabama, in that state, the scenes were similar. There was always "a steady hum of laughter and talk, dance, song, shout, and the twang of musical instruments." It was "a scene full of life and fun, of jostling, scuffling, and racing, of clown performances and cake-walks, of impromptu minstrelsy, speech-making, and preaching, of deviling, guying, and fighting, both real and mimic." The colonel found great difficulty in getting men to work alone. Two would volunteer for any ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... may not be highly developed, but it is easily aroused. The friends of the outraged brave stamped up and down the dirt floor in spasms of mirth. They clapped him on the back and jabbered ironic inquiries as to his well-being. For the moment, at least, Dud was as popular as a funny clown in a ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... a large picture, and Jimmy stared at it with a great deal of interest. The picture represented a lion and a clown, and the clown's head was inside the lion's mouth; whilst a little way off a very small clown, of about Jimmy's ...
— The Little Clown • Thomas Cobb
... the clown's absurd story, with the still more ridiculous application, made me sick at heart a second time. It was not because I thought my illustrious friend was the Devil, or that I took a fool's idle tale as a counterbalance to ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... on anybody but his author. In my opinion, an actor who scorns to be a mannerist will take it to signify his leg, which is quite as good a piece of him, as his hand, and, if he be a dancer, a much better. My interpretation of this passage is strengthened by the usage of the clown in the dramatic entertainment entitled Mother Goose. When the late Mr. Lewis Bologna, as Pantaloon, proffered his hand in token of amity and forgiveness, Mr. Joseph Grimaldi protruded his foot into his master's palm. His reading was certainly ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... right when I was a reveryin'—right there, when we wuz a floatin' clown the still waters, their voices riz up in one of their inspired songs. They sung about their "Hard Trials," and how the "Sweet Chariot swung low," and how ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... at him, pray, dearest Darsie, let not thy ardour for adventure carry thee into more such scrapes as that of the Solway Sands. The rest of the story is a mere imagination; but that stormy evening might have proved, as the clown says to Lear, 'a naughty night ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... so easy! Elly Precious from his lofty shoulder-post clapped small, joyous hands and crowed. In the ring a clown threw them kisses. A fairy in short, silvery skirts rode by on two horses. "Wait! Watch her—watch her!" Evangeline whispered hissingly. "She's goin' to jump through a hoop o' ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... does she know she wrecked us," suggested the other. He was a stunted, wiry little man of thirty-five. His head seemed slightly too large; he had a pasty face with the sloe-black eyes, button nose, and the widely chiselled mouth of a circus clown. ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... Farmer: "Doan't thou marry for money, but go where money is." An admirable piece of advice. Well, Maud made a mistake, let us say. Dolomore is a clown, and now she knows it. Why, if she had waited, she might have married one of the leading men of the day. She is fit to be a duchess, as far as appearance goes; but I was never snobbish. I care very little about titles; what I look to ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... water-flowers, Bits of broken reeds and rushes, Deep-sea shells and colored pebbles, Did not find his harp of fish-bone, Lost forever to Wainola! Thereupon the ancient minstrel Left the waters, homeward hastened, Cap pulled clown upon his forehead, Sang this song with sorrow laden: "Nevermore shall I awaken With my harp-strings, joy and gladness! Nevermore will Wainamoinen Charm the people of the Northland With the harp of his ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... not let it come so far," answered the Prior; "but here is the clown's sunken cross, and the night is so dark that we can hardly see which of the roads we are to follow. He bid us turn, ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... way, a necessary proceeding in view of the fact that Selifan could hardly maintain his seat on the box. Twice Petrushka, too, had fallen headlong, and this necessitated being tied to his perch with a piece of rope. "What a clown!" had been Chichikov's ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... galloping rhyme—'How we beat the Favourite'—with a ring and a rush, a spirit and swiftness of colour, not approached by the best verse of Egerton Warburton or Whyte-Melville. Especially vivid and terse is the description of the latter part of the race, where the favourite (The Clown) overtakes Iseult, the mare leading in the ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... shed tears. Madame..." He looked straight at Mabel. "Major..." He met Grim's eyes and smiled. "Messieurs ..." It was my turn, and Narayan Singh's; his steady stare was good and made you feel like shaking hands with him. "Monsieur Scapin (Clown)..." That was meant for Jeremy, and they both laughed. "You have been adroit, but do you think I could depend on ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... of a common man differs from that of an educated Moslem as much as the eating of a clown and a gentleman. Moreover there are important technical differences between the Wuzu of the Sunni and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... extremities are all dingy and dusty. Yet but a few days, Bob, and flakes of paint will have cracked off the fairy flower-bowers, and the revolving temples of adamantine lustre will be as shabby as the city of Pekin. When you read this, will Clown still be going on lolling his tongue out of his month, and saying, "How are you to-morrow?" Tomorrow, indeed! He must be almost ashamed of himself (if that cheek is still capable of the blush of shame) for asking the absurd question. To-morrow, indeed! To-morrow the diffugient snows will give place ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hour later there appeared among the other mummers in the ballroom an old lady in a hooped skirt—this was Nicholas. A Turkish girl was Petya. A clown was Dimmler. An hussar was Natasha, and a Circassian was Sonya with burnt-cork mustache ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... where the immediate effect, whether directly or indirectly, is such as has been described. But, to reduce this to a common-sense view, it is only saying,—what no one will deny,—that a man of education and refinement has not only more, but higher, pleasures of the mind than a mere clown. ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... she could not recognise any one as she looked round upon Turks, clowns, Indians, the tinselled, sequined, beaded, ragged flutter of the room, then from the coloured and composite clothing of a footballer, clown or jockey grinned the round face and owlish eyes of little Duval, who flew to her at once to whisper compliments and stumble on the swelling fortress of her white skirt. She realised dimly from ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... of the maskers, who is dressed as a clown, raises his hands, ineffectually trying ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... all reaping their harvests. Even the fat man was entertaining large audiences. The fellows had a thoroughly good time and took in almost every sight on the grounds. Judd had been kidded and made fun of until he was followed about by a troop of youngsters who thought he was a clown employed by the fair people. Judd was really embarrassed ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... account. They were often abused and beaten by others, and sometimes put in danger of their lives. It was a common question put to a Quaker in those days, who addressed a great man in this new and simple manner, "why you ill bred clown do you thou me?" The rich and mighty of those times thought themselves degraded by this mode of address, as reducing them from a plural magnitude to a singular, or individual, or simple station in life. "The use of thou, says George Fox, was a sore cut to proud ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... novelettes, in the police reports, in the Sunday papers; he had heard a street preacher declaim against it, and warn young women of the serpent-like wiles of tempters of the Stratton variety. But even now Jack failed to recognize Stratton as a serpent, or indeed anything but a blundering cheat and clown, who had left his dirty 'prentice work on his (Jack's) hands. But the girl was helpless and, it seemed, homeless, all through a certain desperation of feeling which, in spite of her tears, he could not but respect. That momentary shadow of death had exalted her. He stroked his ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... save when he was being taken out or brought back, but he could smell them and hear them, and, in his loneliness, he even started a feud of snarling bickeringness with Pedro, the biggest of them who acted as clown in their turn. They were aristocrats among performing animals, and Michael's feud with Pedro was not so much real as play-acted. Had he and Pedro been brought together they would have made friends in no time. But through the slow monotonous drag of the hours they developed a fictitious ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... his ways, though they were far from suspecting what had really happened. But Mrs. Grivois, rather surprised than uneasy at her pug-log's insensibility to her affectionate appeals, and believing him to be sullenly crouching beneath the seat, stooped clown to take him up, and feeling one of his paws, drew it impatiently towards her whilst she said to him in a half-jesting, half angry tone: "Come, naughty fellow! you will give a pretty notion of your ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... jester at the carnival. Because my Lord Christ and His holy Word, even He who gave His own blood as the purchase-price, is held to be but mockery and fools' wit, I must likewise drop all seriousness, and see whether I, too, have learned how to play the fool and clown. Thou knowest, my Lord Jesus Christ, how my heart stands toward these arch-blasphemers. That is my reliance, and I will let matters take their course in Thy name. Amen. They must ever abide Thee as the ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... love below stairs, the principal characters being chosen from the class who appear as supers in Pan; subjects or retainers of the all-powerful Trader Mack. It is as if the sub-plots in one of Shakespeare's plays had been taken out for separate presentment, and the clown promoted to be hero in a play of his own. The cast is increased, the milieu lightly drawn in Pan is now shown more comprehensively and in detail, making us gradually acquainted with a whole little community, a village world, knowing little of any ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... headed for more trouble," nodded a clown. "Watch him if you want to see some fun. Fat Marie is in trouble already, and she's going to get into ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... will give great disgust to the people, I doubt. Thence with Creed to Hercules Pillars by the Temple again, and there dined he and I all alone, and thence to the King's house, and there did see "Love in a Maze," wherein very good mirth of Lacy, the clown, and Wintersell, the country-knight, his master. Thence to the New Exchange to pay a debt of my wife's there, and so home, and there to the office and walk in the garden in the dark to ease my eyes, and so home to ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... under side which is pure white. They are gregarious and very sociable in their habits. Porpoises race and play with each other and dart out of the sea, performing almost as many antics as the circus clown. They feed on mackerel and herring, devouring large quantities. Years ago the porpoise was a common and esteemed article of food in Great Britain and France, but now the skin and blubber only have a commercial ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... like BEFORE WITNESSES—sometimes they wallow, even in books, as on their own dung-hill. Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach what is called honesty; and the higher man must open his ears to all the coarser or finer cynicism, and congratulate himself when the clown becomes shameless right before him, or the scientific satyr speaks out. There are even cases where enchantment mixes with the disgust—namely, where by a freak of nature, genius is bound to some such indiscreet billy-goat and ape, as in the case of the Abbe Galiani, the profoundest, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... different pursuits before they come into the world; from one shell comes forth a warrior, from another a philosopher, from a third a divine, from a fourth a lawyer, from a fifth a farmer, from a sixth a clown, &c. &c., and each of them immediately begins to perfect themselves, by practising what they before knew ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... reputation for mirth and riddles suggested this new cruelty. Surely there is no more pathetic picture than that of the blind hero, with such thoughts as we know were seething in him, dragged out to make a Philistine holiday, and set to play the clown, while the bitterness of death was in his soul. And this is what God's soldiers come down to, when they forget Him: 'they that wasted ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... have been in civilisation, humorous as a clown in a circus; but seeing it here, solitary, exotic, no observer would have laughed. Fear, mortal dogging fear, impersonate, supreme, was in every look, every action. Somewhere back of that curved line where met the earth ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... some one called out to ask what was the matter with the circus, and whether the clown were lost, while others demanded "The lady!" Johnston turned to Miss Marvin, and there was a hush as the slight girlish figure—and she seemed very young—stood upright before us. She thrust back the unlovely ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... but ne'er was blundering clown Upon the boards more promptly hooted down; The sister flowers began to ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... member of the family old enough to govern except Tiberius Claudius Nero, the brother of Germanicus and the only surviving son of Drusus and Antonia. He was generally considered a fool, was the laughing-stock of freedmen and women, and such a gawk and clown that it had been impossible to put him into the magistracy. Indeed, he was not even ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... I should not have missed one." And so it was that the youngest member of the ballet corps came to be looked on as a general-utility person, who could be called on at a moment's notice to play the part of queen or clown, boy or elderly woman, as ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Says the Clown, when I tell him to do what he ought, "Sir, whatever your character be, To obey you in this I will never be brought, And it 's wrong to be meddling with me." Says my Wife, when she wants this or that for the house, "Our matters to ruin must go: Your reading ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... brute! I to be reconciled to that clown! Never! It shall not be, it shall not be!" Ivan Ivanovitch was in a remarkably ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... wealth and power with unremitting ardour, O, The more in this you look for bliss, you leave your view the farther, O: Had you the wealth Potosi boasts, or nations to adore you, O, A cheerful honest-hearted clown I will ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... public-house keepers); or else—and more strictly I believe in etymology—a form of the German 'leute,' 'common people.' In either case, its proper classical English sense is given by Johnson as "a mean, awkward fellow; a bumpkin, a clown." ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... have an example in "Le Gendre," in some respects one of the most objectionable of De Bernard's novels, certainly not well suited for a birth-day present to misses in their teens. A seemingly tame, insipid clown of a husband counteracts the base manoeuvres of a dashing Paris roue; and finally, after refusing to fight the would-be seducer, whom he has ascertained to be an arrant swindler, takes truncheon in hand, and belabours him in presence of his intended victim and of a roomful ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Hot Cockles once I laid me down, And felt the weighty hand of many a clown, Buxoma gave a gentle tap, and I Quick rose, and read ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... reader, to Bartlemy fair? If you have, you may have seen—nay, you must have seen—Richardson's immortal show. You must have seen a tall platform in front of the migratory edifice, and on that platform you must have delighted your visual orb with the clown, the pantaloon, the harlequin, the dancing ladies, the walking dandy, the king with his crown, the queen in her rabbit-skin robes, the smock-frocked countryman, the top-booted jockey, and all the dramatis person of the performance that every moment of every day, during ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... that isn't beastly!" cried Franell, in apparent surprise. "I knocked him over! Why the little clown ...
— The Rover Boys in Camp - or, The Rivals of Pine Island • Edward Stratemeyer
... word," said Colonel Laporte, "although I am old and gouty, my legs as stiff as two pieces of wood, yet if a pretty woman were to tell me to go through the eye of a needle, I believe I should take a jump at it, like a clown through a hoop. I shall die like that; it is in the blood. I am an old beau, one of the old school, and the sight of a woman, a pretty woman, stirs me to the tips of my ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... up a bit last week because the village clown was on his home leave. He is a lad of twenty-three with a young wife and a little three-year-old girl, who has learned to talk since "dada" saw her, and is her father right over—full ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... possible change was worked in Ellis. He no longer looked like the same boy. The alteration in his appearance was almost as striking as that which takes place in a country clown caught by a recruiting sergeant, half drunk at a fair, as he rolls on, looking every moment as if he was going to topple over, from public-house to public-house, and when he has been under the drill-sergeant's hands for a couple of years, and is turned into the trim, active, intelligent ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... for these tidings. Now have I put on a fool's cap that these Genoese may have wherewith to rack their wits. Next I will shave my head, that they may play Merry Andrew to my Clown. How did the manufacturers ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... see about that," said Mr. Bobbsey slowly. "I suppose the circus people will want him back, for he must be valuable. Perhaps some clown trained him." ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at School • Laura Lee Hope
... green-baize hung with the inscription she had already seen (Mr Slum's productions), and a highly ornamented table placed at the upper end for Mrs Jarley herself, at which she was to preside and take the money, in company with his Majesty King George the Third, Mr Grimaldi as clown, Mary Queen of Scots, an anonymous gentleman of the Quaker persuasion, and Mr Pitt holding in his hand a correct model of the bill for the imposition of the window duty. The preparations without doors had not been neglected either; a nun of great ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... dame, Who will know all, if I to her arrive. This only would I have thee clearly note: That so my conscience have no plea against me; Do fortune as she list, I stand prepar'd. Not new or strange such earnest to mine ear. Speed fortune then her wheel, as likes her best, The clown his mattock; all things have ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... their sweethearts bid against each other recklessly. Marie wanted it, too, and she kept making signals to Frank, which he took a sour pleasure in disregarding. He didn't see the use of making a fuss over a fellow just because he was dressed like a clown. When the turquoise went to Malvina Sauvage, the French banker's daughter, Marie shrugged her shoulders and betook herself to her little tent of shawls, where she began to shuffle her cards by the light of a tallow candle, ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... aunt were walking home that night Aunt Kate said: "I like them people better one at a time. I never did like a two-ring circus. I never could watch the monkey trundlin' a barrel up a gangway when the clown was jumpin' through rings; it always annoyed me to be losin' either one or the other. Did you get any sense ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... his revels once more; On down And in town, A merry-mad clown, He leaped and holloed with whistle and roar— When there was that glimmering thread ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... of Hands-worth. My hero was there in glory, followed about by an innumerable tag-rag and bobtail, and I am afraid that on two occasions at least he was tempted to swagger and 'show off,' as children say. He shambled up to one of the 'try your strength' machines: the figure of a circus clown, with a buffer to punch at in the neighbourhood of his midriff, and a dial on his chest to indicate the weight of the blow administered. The Slasher tossed a penny to the proprietor of the machine and waved him on one side; ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... of fury rising above his fear. This lacklander clown actually dared to try to establish domination over a member of the ruling class? ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... he persisted. 'Will ye risk your crowns in defence of King James's one, or will ye strike in, hit or miss, with these rogues of Devon and Somerset? Stop my vital breath, if I would not as soon side with the clown as with the crown, with all due respect to ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... is all so easy; it is within every man's reach. No education is necessary, no nonsensical argumentation. I offer you a short cut to Glory. You may be the merest clown—cobbler, fishmonger, carpenter, money-changer; yet there is nothing to prevent your becoming famous. Given brass and boldness, you have only to learn to wag your tongue ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... such music only as would deafen common ears by its crash of sounds, in which they perceive no connection or harmony; while the simple rustic listens to the rude notes of a flageolet in the hands of a clown with feelings of ineffable delight. Nature, if the seekers after luxurious and exciting pleasures could but understand her language, would say to them, "Except ye become as this simple rustic, ye ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... They meet in dumb salutes, as one great star. The room, methinks, grows darker; and the air Contracts a sadder colour, and less fair. Or is't the drawer's skill? hath he no arts To blind us so we can't know pints from quarts? No, no, 'tis night: look where the jolly clown Musters his bleating herd and quits the down. Hark! how his rude pipe frets the quiet air, Whilst ev'ry hill proclaims Lycoris fair. Rich, happy man! that canst thus watch and sleep, Free from all cares, but thy wench, pipe and sheep! ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... is much too cold for me." The mamma bear was dressed in a poke bonnet and white apron, and resembled the wolf who frightened Little Red Riding-Hood, and Ikey, the baby bear, wore rakishly over one eye the pointed cap of a clown. To those who knew their vaudeville, this was indisputable evidence that Ikey would furnish the comic relief. Nor did Ikey disappoint them. He was a wayward son. When his parents were laboriously engaged in a boxing-match, or dancing to the "Merry Widow Waltz," or balancing ...
— The Nature Faker • Richard Harding Davis
... two baskets hitherto borne by the couple, giving himself time, however, every now and then to look out of his little black eyes at the rightful owners, with rather a spiteful expression, but protruding at the same time his red tongue, like a clown at the circus, as if enjoying the joke of their picking and he eating. Afterward I learned that they had deposited their baskets on the ground under a loaded bush, for greater facility in securing the fruit, when suddenly they heard a blow and a snort, and looking where the queer sounds ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... sought to beguile themselves—each for the sake of the other—with all the tricks and chimeras of optimism, but that was only the masquerade of the clown who laughs while his heart is sick and under whose toy-bright paint is the gray pallor ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... day and every hour, a new ninny is born who fancies he's cleverer than all his predecessors put together. Talk about suckers! Why, they're giants of intellect compared to the mentally lop-sided that five thousand years of experience can't teach. When the criminal-clown's turn comes, he hops, skips and jumps into the ring with the old, old gag. He thinks it's new, because he himself is so fresh and green. 'Here I am again,' he yells, 'the fellow that'll do you up. Others have tried it. They're dead in jail or under jail-yards. But me—just ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... me to know my father's wrongs are righted and I am still his own, and only his. The clown, from whose polluting arms kind Providence rescued me, has never shown his hateful form among us since the day that witnessed the disclosure of his father's baseness. His vile mother has also disappeared, in search of her ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... prince may sit with clown or churl Nor feel himself disgraced thereby; But he who has but small esteem Husbands ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... remember names!... who had gone on writing steadily, though there was battle all about him.... He settled himself to write, though he had no plan in his mind, and as he wrote, he felt that the story, whatever it might grow to be, must be comic. "I feel like a clown making jokes in the circus while his wife is dying," he ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... trying to hide beneath a wave. He had sailed every sea, with no other flag above him than the Union Jack, and felt maybe that even his misdeeds deserved not the covering of less bright colors. It was like a ringmaster fallen on hard times having to act the part of "clown." But needs must where necessity drives, and as his own country would have none of him, he was tolerant of the flag that hid him from ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... coming from so white a priestess, and in words that lent so musical and sweet a sanction, removed the last mote of conjecture from the air. Mrs. Wright, as usual, was the first to take action. Every set of women, probably, has its recognized clown, she who is just too cute and killing. And those who do not like her say she is tiresome and "silly." Mrs. Wright, in keeping with the character, went through the gate with exaggerated ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... "I am only a clown giant in a circus, but I ran away to-day so I could see the flowers in the woods. I was tired of being in the circus so ...
— Bully and Bawly No-Tail • Howard R. Garis
... life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death. Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him. Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid clown his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him; how dwelleth the love of God in him? My little ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... peacemaker, Mohammedan and Christian—always a comedian, yet always in earnest. And we all know how the heir to the throne is the reverse of the Kaiser, and how this Crown Prince, with the fancies of a degenerate, has deserved to be called the "Clown Prince." ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... appears on the stage with head shaved close. "Why is the clown mourning?" "Because oil is so dear." "Why is oil dear?" "On account of the Jews. On the Sabbath day they consume everything they earn during the week. Not a stick of wood is left to make fire whereby to cook ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... of delight when the funny old clown, who had been forcibly deprived of three tin flutes in rapid succession, now produced yet a fourth from the seemingly inexhaustible depths of his baggy white pants—a flute with a string and a bent ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... Marcadee. Blondel had grown from a minstrel-boy To a very romantic troubadour Whose soul was music, whose song was joy, Whose only motto was Vive l'amour! In lady's bower, in lordly hall, From the king himself to the poorest clown, A joyous welcome he had from all, And Care in his presence forgot to frown. Sadly romantic, fantastic and vain, His heart for his head still made amends; For he never sang a malicious strain. And never was known to fail his friends. Who but he, when the captive king, By a ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... a poor fat squinny rogue, a low-born fellow even as I am, whom you had baffled and made a laughing-stock, had come to me in my loneliness and sworn before God that if you honorable gentlemen would not keep your words, he the clown would?" ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... this man compelled me to withdraw from Europe. I returned to my native country, uncertain whether silence and obscurity would save me from his malice. I resided in the purlieus of the city. I put on the garb and assumed the manners of a clown. ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... Constable of France. An English nobleman, according to the Lady of Belmont, can speak no language but his own. An English tailor, according to the porter of Macbeth's castle, will steal cloth where there is hardly any cloth to be stolen, out of a French hose. The devil, says the clown in All's Well, has an English name; he is called the ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... for me." The mamma bear was dressed in a poke bonnet and white apron, and resembled the wolf who frightened Little Red Riding-Hood, and Ikey, the baby bear, wore rakishly over one eye the pointed cap of a clown. To those who knew their vaudeville, this was indisputable evidence that Ikey would furnish the comic relief. Nor did Ikey disappoint them. He was a wayward son. When his parents were laboriously engaged in a boxing-match, ...
— The Nature Faker • Richard Harding Davis
... narrative the partners made out that while Licorice Stick was on his way to embellish the wayside in strict accordance with instructions, he had encountered a spirit from the other world in the form of the carnival clown whom we have seen pass our ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... wretch ordain'd by fate, Neal Gahagan, Hibernian clown, With hatchet blunter than thy pate, To hack my hallow'd ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... a noble pile, Wrought with pilaster, bay, and balustrade In tactful times when shrewd Eliza swayed. - On burgher, squire, and clown It smiled the long street down for near ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... I was a reveryin'—right there, when we wuz a floatin' clown the still waters, their voices riz up in one of their inspired songs. They sung about their "Hard Trials," and how the "Sweet Chariot swung low," and how ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... vows, are rare, The Sabine country and the Sabine air. Philip looks on and chuckles, his one aim To get a laugh by keeping up the game, Lends him seven hundred, gives him out of hand Seven more, and leads him on to buy some land. 'Tis bought: to make a lengthy tale concise, The man becomes a clown who once was nice, Talks all of elms and vineyards, ploughs and soil, And ages fast with struggling and sheer toil; Till, when his sheep are stolen, his bullock drops, His goats die off, a blight destroys his crops, One night he takes a waggon-horse, and sore With ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... false, According to the strictest Rules of Honour, Beauty should still be the Reward of Love, Not the vile Merchandize of Fortune, Or the cheap Drug of a Church-Ceremony. She's only infamous, who to her Bed For Interest takes some nauseous Clown she hates: And though a Jointure or a Vow in publick Be her Price, that makes her but ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... the world, as in the school, I'd say, how fate may change and shift; The prize be sometimes with the fool, The race not always to the swift. The strong may yield, the good may fall, The great man be a vulgar clown, The knave be lifted over all, The kind ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was a cant word, used for a clown; Galba being jeered for his rusticity, in consequence of his long retirement. See c. viii. Indeed, they ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... shouted Tom, waving his hand at the man. "How are we to-morrow, as the clown in the circus ...
— The Rover Boys in Camp - or, The Rivals of Pine Island • Edward Stratemeyer
... still disputed whether the fullest head of which we have record were cultivated beyond the range of grammar-school precedent!) but he used it with a poetic instinct which we cannot parallel, identified himself with it, yet remained always its born and questionless master. He finds the Clown and Fool upon the stage,—he makes them the tools of his pleasantry, his satire, and even his pathos; he finds a fading rustic superstition, and shapes out of it ideal Pucks, Titanias, and Ariels, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... pale accusing clay In some undreamed-of sepulchre bestow, But where? Hold back thy fleet-wing'd coursers, Time, Whilst we bethink us! Ah—such place there is! Close, too, at hand—a place wherein a man Might lie till doomsday safer from the touch Of prying clown than is the spiced dust Of an Egyptian ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... variance with Mr Farmer's ideas; so, in order to overcome it by the gentlest means in the world, Reuben had the option given him of being flogged, or of laying out on the smoke-sail yard, just to begin with, and to get into the way of it. It was a laughable thing to see this huge clown hanging with us boys on the thin yard, and hugging it as closely as if he loved it. He had a perfect horror of getting to the end of it. At a distance, when our smoke-sail yard was manned; we looked like a parcel of larks spitted, with one great goose in the midst of us. "Doey, get beyond ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Abel, with what would be called in animals an ugly expression—"Belch is the clown, and they left him off easy. The Party is like the old kings, it keeps a good many fools ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... tim'rous goddess! quits her old domain, In sentiment and song content to reign. Nor are the nymphs that breathe the rural air So fair as Cynthia's, nor so chaste as fair: These to the town afford each fresher face, And the clown's trull receives the peer's embrace; From whom, should chance again convey her down, The peer's disease in turn attacks the clown. Here too the 'squire, or 'squire-like farmer, talk, How round their regions nightly pilferers walk; How from their ponds the fish are borne, and all The rip'ning ...
— The Village and The Newspaper • George Crabbe
... ambition as he walked gloomily through life, with the stamp of failure on his brow. The picture was a pathetic one, you must admit, worthy to take its place on the line with the well-known fancy sketch of the Clown who, after making the masses split their sides, goes home to a private life of penury ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... she said; "you can't go that way. It would be all right to go with Ferdinand, of course, but what could you do when you, reached Newark? Race about on foot, following up this clown, or whoever ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... bruised and beaten, on the deck. Neither the sailors nor the Captain knew what to do with him. Presently up came the Commander's jester or clown, a man whose business it was to make the officers laugh. 'What,' said he, 'can't you make that Quaker work? Do you want him to draw ropes for you and he won't? Why you are going the wrong ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... of one of those "gorgeous processions" in Eastern "spectacles" at home, that we wonder for a moment whether it be "part of the play," or tangible, sober reality. Yes! placed upon a scarlet cushion lies an enormous gilt key (such a one as clown in the pantomime might open his writing-desk with, or such as hangs over a locksmith's door), and above it glistens a golden legend to the effect that the treasure beneath was presented to "William of Prussia by his ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... faith in the child, who had seen the image of Pegasus in the water, and in the maiden, who had heard him neigh so melodiously, rather than in the middle-aged clown, who believed only in cart-horses, or in the old man, who had forgotten the beautiful things of ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... is trained. It will be rude, if it is left rude, and fine only as it is wrought finely. Educate a boy to tumbled hair and grimy hands, and he will go tumbled and grimy to his grave. Put a hundred boys together where they will have the appurtenances of a clown, and I do not believe there will be ten out of the hundred who will not become precisely to that degree clownish. I am not battling for the luxuries of life, but I am for its decencies. I would not turn boys into Sybarites, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Russia, with whom I desire to live in friendly relations, has sent to me a clown. I can not consequently allow any of my people to accompany him back to Russia, lest they should find him offensive. Respected as I am from the east to the west, I blush in being exposed to such an affront. It is in consequence my wish that my son, the sultan of Caffa, ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... of woman are a theme on which men, from the sage to the clown, have at all times been eloquent. Her natural coquetry in dress, her maternal vanity, her devotion to the little elegancies of the home, to clean windows and fresh curtains, are inexhaustible sources of masculine merriment or abuse. What housekeeper ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... singing, and gaming. In the peaceful camp of the Third Alabama, in that state, the scenes were similar. There was always "a steady hum of laughter and talk, dance, song, shout, and the twang of musical instruments." It was "a scene full of life and fun, of jostling, scuffling, and racing, of clown performances and cake-walks, of impromptu minstrelsy, speech-making, and preaching, of deviling, guying, and fighting, both real and mimic." The colonel found great difficulty in getting men to work alone. Two would volunteer for any service. "Colonel," said a visitor ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... ever see a chicken escape from clown in a pantomime, and hop over into the pit, or amongst the fiddlers? and have you not seen the shrieks of enthusiastic laughter that the wondrous incident occasions? We had our chicken, of course: there never was a public ...
— The Second Funeral of Napoleon • William Makepeace Thackeray (AKA "Michael Angelo Titmarch")
... ladder 'gainst the tree, And clambered up and down; They played a thousand pranks as wild As any gipsey clown. ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... remember, the law of wager by battle was unrepealed, and the rascally murderous, and worse than murderous, clown, Abraham Thornton, put on his gauntlet in open court and defied the appellant to lift the other which he threw down. It was not until the reign of George II. that the statutes against witchcraft were repealed. As for the English Court of Chancery, we know ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... ways of God are thus rich, and so far above the gold and rubies of the world, so also is that sanctified and gracious heart, without which no man can walk in this golden street. It is not every clown with his clumping dirty shoes that is admitted into kings' privy-chambers and private palaces; neither doth, or will God, at the day of New Jerusalem, suffer any to trace about this golden street, but such as have golden feet, and that beautified with goodly shoes. For as for this street, all ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Brace," cried Lynton, laughing. "It's as the circus clown said, too dangerous to ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... enough of the naval hero's harangue, to acquaint them with the new danger with which they might be assailed by the possible misdirection of the weapons, and, rushing clown towards the lists at the head of a crowd half-desperate with fear, they hastily propagated the appalling news, that the Latins were coming back from Asia with the purpose of landing in arms, pillaging, and burning the city. The uproar, in the meantime, of this unexpected occurrence, was ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Commanding, 'Put the evil thing away!' Since then the woman's to the monarch's hate Had added strength—the serpent's poison-bag Venoming the serpent's fang. 'Depart the realm!' With voice scarce human thus the tyrant cried, 'Depart or die;' and gave the Church's goods To clown and boor. Upon the bank of Thames Settled like ruin. Holy Sebert dead, In that East Saxon kingdom monarch long, Three sons unrighteous now their riot held. Frowning into the Christian Church they strode, Full-armed, and each, with far-stretched ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... stage—to make a quick change, you know. I came back—in tights, playing a big trombone, prancing round and making an awful noise. Lady Webling gave a little scream; nobody heard her because I made a loud blat on the trombone in the ear of the black-face clown, and he gave a shriek and ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... right; most natural mistake in the world. I've got a clown rig and I'm going down there myself after a while." He turned to Butterfield. "Better change your mind ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Burbage and Kemp, the noted morrice dancer and clown of Shakespeare's company, are introduced. 'Few of the University men pen plays well,' says Kemp; 'they smack too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... King, all she could: however, that is over now. As to Sophie [young Sister just betrothed to the eldest Margraf whom you know], she also is no longer the same; for she approves all that the Queen says or does; and she is charmed with her big clown (GROS NIGAUD) of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... intuitions—in a word, consistent with that central thing which I have called the kernel of his personality. An artist is in this sense insincere whenever, for example, he inserts anything in his work which exists solely for the sake of convention—some of Shakespeare's clown scenes were often put in solely because an Elizabethan audience demanded them, and they were to that extent a truckling to convention, an insincerity. They do not express the real Shakespeare. Any artist not capable of entirely direct and spontaneous ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... cover channel. Now turn right side up and insert in the jar, taking care that the jar walls enter the cover channels at all points. Apply heat carefully to the edges of the cover and gently force cover clown. If too much compound has been used, so that it squeezes out around the cover, scrape off the excess with a hot knife while forcing ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... Mercutio fell upon the English stage, there fell with him a gay and hardly human figure; it fell, perhaps finally, for English drama. That manner of man—Arlecchino, or Harlequin—had outlived his playmates, Pantaleone, Brighella, Colombina, and the Clown. A little of Pantaleone survives in old Capulet, a little in the father of the Shrew, but the life of Mercutio in the one play, and of the subordinate Tranio in the other, is less quickly spent, less easily put out, than the smouldering of the old man. Arlecchino frolics in and out ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... in the Street The City That Will Not Repent The Trap Where is David, the Next King of Israel? On Reading Omar Khayyam The Beggar's Valentine Honor Among Scamps The Gamblers On the Road to Nowhere Upon Returning to the Country Road The Angel and the Clown Springfield Magical Incense The Wedding of the Rose and the Lotos King Arthur's Men Have Come Again Foreign Missions in Battle Array Star of My Heart Look You, I'll Go Pray At Mass Heart of God The Empty Boats With ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... 'No, you purblind clown,' said Major de Blacquaire, rising, and fitting his crutches to his armpits. 'I am not. You have about as much notion of what a man is bound to do under these conditions as an ox would have. Please do as I have asked you, and leave me, and send the boy along. I don't think that he will leave the ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... Bodo sang lustily to cheer himself and Wido; for is it not related that once, when a clerk was singing the 'Allelulia' in the emperor's presence, Charles turned to one of the bishops, saying, 'My clerk is singing very well,' whereat the rude bishop replied, 'Any clown in our countryside drones as well as that to his oxen at their ploughing'?[6] It is certain too that Bodo agreed with the names which the great Charles gave to the months of the year in his own Frankish tongue; ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... necessary deeds were drawn in accordance with them. When the day for signing arrived, the bridegroom-elect demurred at first to the stringency of the provisions of the marriage-contract; but as upon this point Mr Dutton was found to be inflexible, the handsome, illiterate clown—he was little better—gave up his scruples, the more readily as a life of assured idleness lay before him, from the virtual control he was sure to have over his wife's income. These were the thoughts which passed across his mind, I was quite sure, as taking the pen awkwardly in his hand, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... dependent on a sister of his, everybody in the farmhouse treated him as a beggar who is eating the bread of others. At every meal the very food he swallowed was made a subject of reproach against him; he was called a drone, a clown; and although his brother-in-law had taken possession of his portion of the inheritance, the soup was given to him grudgingly—just enough to ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... bizarre. For this reason it has come to pass that you can hardly mention the name of Jonah to a modern audience without provoking a smile. Thus Jonah, coming to us as an evangelist, is mistaken by many for a clown. ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... Nature for the part he plays. This nimble, freckled jackanapes is Harlequin; not your spangled Harlequin into which modern degeneracy has debased that first-born of Momus, but the genuine original zany of the Commedia, ragged and patched, an impudent, cowardly, blackguardly clown." ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... with Shakespearean clowns?—Still, at least, they give us acrobats, and the acrobat is an artist. The mere fact that he never speaks to the audience shows how well he appreciates the great truth that the aim of art is not to reveal personality but to please. The clown may be blatant, but the acrobat is always beautiful. He is an interesting combination of the spirit of Greek sculpture with the spangles of the modern costumier. He has even had his niche in the novels of our age, and if Manette ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... shall have ready our swords and our strong arms. Thousands of noble and faithful Hessians belong to this league. The honest minds of the people cannot see what right the Corsican emperor had to expel their legitimate ruler, and to place an Italian clown on his throne. Intense indignation at the foreign yoke is prevailing throughout Hessia and Westphalia, and every patriot rallies around Doernberg waiting for the signal to expel the oppressor. United with us, Doernberg sends his messengers and ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... said the beaming Danny to the captain, for the recollection of that victory made all else seem trivial. "Say! he doubled up like a clown droppin' into a barrel." ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... who follow wealth and power with unremitting ardour, O, The more in this you look for bliss, you leave your view the farther, O: Had you the wealth Potosi boasts, or nations to adore you, O, A cheerful honest-hearted clown I ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... a clown. He had no fancy dress except flour and two Turkish towels pinned on to look like trousers, but he put the flour all over himself, and it took the rest of the ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... obedient servant before them, and if you produce something be sure that it does not run against the grain of your "superiors," or say adieu to success, reputation and recompense. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, prejudices which they hold as righteousness and falsehoods which they hold as truths. Paint the whole, crown it with regard for good manners, for society does not like to hear the truth ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... stoups, their occasional altars of stone, still remaining, their Lady chapels, and their niches for the images of the saints, as ill befit the present occupiers, and their modern English services, as a Court dress befits a clown. ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... and out from a side place, back of a big screen, came Jack Hopkins dressed like a real clown, leading our old ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Country • Laura Lee Hope
... you, of all men, I've been going round and round ever since,' said Jack. 'A clown or pantaloon would have given me balance. Say no more. You couldn't help it. We met because we ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of more importance than the letters themselves. Indeed, all the inferior classes possess an innate self-respect, and a natural gravity of deportment, which differs as far from the suppleness of a Hindustani as from the awkward rusticity of an English clown." ... "Even children," he continues, "in Mahomedan countries have an unusual degree of gravity in their deportment. The boy, who can but lisp his 'Peace be with you,' has imbibed this portion of the national character. In passing through a village, these ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... thoroughly hates and dreads him as our parish schoolmaster, a most worthy King Log, whom Ben dumbfounds twenty times a day. He is a great ornament of the cricket-ground, has a real genius for the game, and displays it after a very original manner, under the disguise of awkwardness—as the clown shows off his agility in a pantomime. Nothing comes amiss to him. By the bye, he would have been the very lad for us in our present dilemma; not a horse in England could master Ben Kirby. But we are too far from him now—and perhaps it is as well that we are so. I believe the rogue has a kindness ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... having painted Fanny Kemble's face like a clown's, posted her at one of the stage side doors to confront her mother, poor Mrs. Stephen Kemble, entering at the opposite one to perform some dismally serious scene of dramatic pathos, who, on suddenly beholding this grotesque apparition of her daughter, fell into convulsions ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... on the stage of consciousness. She a dupe! she helpless! she to have betrayed herself in seeking to betray her husband! she to have lived these years upon flattery, grossly swallowing the bolus, like a clown with sharpers! she—Seraphina! Her swift mind drank the consequences; she foresaw the coming fall, her public shame; she saw the odium, disgrace, and folly of her story flaunt through Europe. She recalled the scandal she had ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lyceum-audience to suppose that it can have a strong and permanent interest in a trifler; and it is a gross injustice to every respectable lecturer in the field to introduce into his guild men who have no better motive and no higher mission than the stage-clown ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... most natural mistake in the world. I've got a clown costume and I'm going down there myself after a while. Silly idea for a man of my age." He turned to Butterfield. "Better change your mind and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... dressed in a suit of mediaeval court clothes, black from head to foot, and fashioned according to the period of the play in which he was acting. But if he had worn the garments of a pierrot or a clown, one would never have noticed it. The man's individuality, magnetic and irresistible, triumphed easily. Mr. Grooten had passed away. It was the great Feurgeres, whose sad shining eyes lingered so wistfully upon ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to make a simultaneous advance, we and the French on our right," he wrote in one place. "Our sector will bear the brunt of it. The thing has been kept wonderfully quiet, and so far the enemy knows nothing. All their attention is turned on the 'Clown' Prince's insane operations against Verdun, and the German General Staff seem to have forgotten the Somme region altogether, and to underrate the British as usual. But there will be a big ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... with excitement, returned a timid salute, while Juanito bowed profoundly, took off his hat, and made the same gesture as the celebrated clown and caricaturist Panza ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... was, that there was laughter enough to have frightened Cassius out of his thin carcass, could the lean old homicide have been present, otherwise than as a fleshless ghost;—in which capacity I thought I had a glimpse of him looking over the shoulder of a particolored clown, in a carriage full of London Cockneys driving towards the Capitol. This good-humored foolery will go on for several days to come, ending always with the celebrated Horse-race, of horses without riders. The long street is cleared in the centre by troops, and half a dozen ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... those with which nature has provided them. In cultivating the ground, also, man can do nothing without a spade or a plow; nor can he reap what he has sown till he has shaped an implement with which to cut clown his harvest. But the inferior animals provide for themselves and their young without any ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... failed in his suit to her? And has she ever so much as vouchsafed to look at Henry Howard, who is upon the point of being the first duke in England, and who is already in actual possession of all the estates of the house of Norfolk? I confess that he is a clown, but what other lady in all England would not have dispensed with his stupidity and his disagreeable person, to be the first duchess in the kingdom, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... her is a hunchback, who is present as a familiar clown or merrymaker, and dances and laughs to please the company, at the same time snapping his fingers. Two other illustrations of this action, the middle finger in one leaving and in the other having left the thumb and passed to its base, are seen in Figs. 86, 87. This gesture by itself ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... a thing of the past. A German painter, seeing Doctor Splendiano walking across the Spanish Square, said—and he was perhaps not far wrong—that it looked as if some strapping fellow of six feet or so had walked away from his own head, which had fallen on the shoulders of a little marionette clown, who now had to carry it about as his own. This curious little figure walked about in patchwork—an immense quantity of pieces of Venetian damask of a large flower pattern that had been cut up in making a dressing-gown; high up round his waist he had buckled a broad leather belt, from which an ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... stage player, strolling player; stager, performer; mime, mimer^; artists; comedian, tragedian; tragedienne, Roscius; star, movie star, star of stage and screen, superstar, idol, sex symbol; supporting actor, supporting cast; ham, hamfatter [Slang]; masker^. pantomimist, clown harlequin, buffo^, buffoon, farceur, grimacer, pantaloon, columbine; punchinello^; pulcinello^, pulcinella^; extra, bit- player, walk-on role, cameo appearance; mute, figurante^, general utility; super, supernumerary. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... a passion for performing in these extemporal comedies. Salvator Rosa was famous for his character of a Calabrian clown; whose original he had probably often studied amidst that mountainous scenery in which his pencil delighted. Of their manner of acting I find an interesting anecdote in Passeri's life of this great painter; he ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... those were the only things that didn't make us yearn; so much we felt we were masters of the type, and so almost sufficiently was that a stop-gap for London constantly deferred. We hadn't the transformation-scene, it was true, though what this really seemed to come to was clown and harlequin taking liberties with policemen—these last evidently a sharp note in a picturesqueness that we lacked, our own slouchy "officers" saying nothing to us of that sort; but we had at Niblo's harlequin and columbine, albeit of less pure a tradition, and we knew moreover all ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... girls and forgetting that he was an old fellow, and now his family rather surprised him; he seemed to think it a joke that all these children should belong to him. As the younger ones slipped up to him in his retreat, he kept taking things out of his pockets; penny dolls, a wooden clown, a balloon pig that was inflated by a whistle. He beckoned to the little boy they called Jan, whispered to him, and presented him with a paper snake, gently, so as not to startle him. Looking over the boy's head he said to me, "This ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... generations to make a gentleman one will not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity for instruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trained intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer and a soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of race and pedigree in a race horse and a bird dog how dare you deny it in ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... "The clown costumes on all you men," I told him, for now I'd noticed that the others were in rainbow hues, Bruce a real eye-buster in yellow tights and violet doublet as he furiously bushed out and clipped crosswise sections of beard and slapped them on his chin gleaming brown with spirit gum. "I haven't ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... catastrophe, is a main cause of the painful tension just described. To this may be added that, after the conflict has begun, there is very little relief by way of the ridiculous. Henceforward at any rate Iago's humour never raises a smile. The clown is a poor one; we hardly attend to him and quickly forget him; I believe most readers of Shakespeare, if asked whether there is a clown ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... appear that he had thought deeply on the people's cause and was prepared to handle it strongly. His eyes began to flash, his voice to grow resonant and fill the room; in the words of William Wirt, his biographer, "As his mind rolled along and began to glow from its own action, all the exuviae of the clown seemed to shed ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... his ear the muffled sound of a cheer raised by countless voices. The smile upon his lips grew scornful: "The King!" he muttered, "greeting his good Parliament. 'Tis said he loves a well-timed jest; pity to rob England of such a famous clown; perchance in hell the devil may use his wit to ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... and turned on the left hand (towards their own table) out of the way, but the King's footmen most insolently and violently seized upon the canopy, which the Barons endeavouring to keep and defend, were by their number and strength dragged clown to the lower end of the Hall, nevertheless still keeping their hold; and had not Mr. Owen York Herald, being accidentally near the Hall door, and seeing the contest, caused the same to be shut, the footmen had certainly carried it away by force. But in the interim also (speedy notice hereof ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... cutting a wide swath of misery wherever they go, have suddenly stopped in a book—have purged away jealousy and despair and passion and nervous prostration in it. A paper-person with melancholia is a better cure for gloom than a live clown can be—who merely goes about reminding people how ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the chief rebel was not far off. The pursuers redoubled their vigilance and activity. The cottages scattered over the healthy country on the boundaries of Dorsetshire and Hampshire were strictly examined by Lumley; and the clown with whom Monmouth had changed clothes was discovered. Portman came with a strong body of horse and foot to assist in the search. Attention was soon drawn to a place well suited to shelter fugitives. It was an extensive tract of land separated by an inclosure from the open country, ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... compromise and surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation.... But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the barber-surgeons laughed at Harvey—and how vainly! What clown ever brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Jenner? Or Lincoln? Or Darwin?... They are ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... actor; stage player, strolling player; stager, performer; mime, mimer[obs3]; artists; comedian, tragedian; tragedienne, Roscius; star, movie star, star of stage and screen, superstar, idol, sex symbol; supporting actor, supporting cast; ham, hamfatter *[obs3]; masker[obs3]. pantomimist, clown harlequin, buffo[obs3], buffoon, farceur, grimacer, pantaloon, columbine; punchinello[obs3]; pulcinello[obs3], pulcinella[obs3]; extra, bit-player, walk-on role, cameo appearance; mute, figurante[obs3], general utility; super, supernumerary. company; first ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... during the 17th, repeatedly visited the continent, bringing with them the repertory of the Elizabethan theatre. From those actors Ayrer learned how to enliven his dramas with sensational incidents and spectacular effects, and from them he borrowed the character of the clown. His plays, however, are in spite of his foreign models, hardly more dramatic, in the true sense of the word, than those of Hans Sachs, and they are inferior to the latter in poetic qualities. The plots ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... loud war-whoop yell would create; and though I foresee an ignominious expulsion, perhaps broken limbs and disgraceful exposure in the public prints, I can not resist the strange impulse; and throwing myself back in my stall, I raise a wild cry, such as a circus clown gives when he vaults into the arena, and ties himself up into a knot by way of introduction. I had not under-calculated the confusion, but I had under-calculated the indignation. In an instant all eyes are upon me—from the little piccolo-player in the corner of the orchestra, to the diamonded ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... with his art contemptible, and the physician with all his slip-slops go a-begging. Lastly, you will be taken for an ugly fellow instead of youthful, and a beast instead of a wise man, a child instead of eloquent, and instead of a well-bred man, a clown. So necessary a thing it is that everyone flatter himself and commend himself to himself before he can be ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... from magical processes in that they are assemblies of the people, religious because there is communication with spirits. In the Californian tribes and others they become occasions of merrymaking; a peculiar feature of these gatherings among the Maidu and other tribes is the presence of a clown who mimics the acts and words of the dancers and performs knavish tricks; the origin of this feature of the dances is not clear. In all such ceremonies the tendency to regulate the details of religious performances is apparent, and such regulation is ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... They can't help themselves. We courtiers really ought to be very careful not to abuse our power. It is positive cruelty. The contest is too unequal. It makes one inclined sometimes to put on the manners of a clown, so as to give them a chance. Nay, nay, you might as well ask the Ethiopian to change his skin as a courtier his fine manners. By all the saints! here she comes ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... silly clown, They'd drum him out of London town. Professor Flunkey, the historian, Would say he was a dull Victorian. Matthew, Mark, and Luke and John, Bless the bed I rest upon. Children, let a wandering fool Stuff your ears ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... so that it took a painful grip upon my inflamed imagination, I dreamt of my uncle's face, only that it was ghastly white like a clown's, and the throat was cut from ear to ear—a long ochreous cut. "Too late," ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... recognise any one as she looked round upon Turks, clowns, Indians, the tinselled, sequined, beaded, ragged flutter of the room, then from the coloured and composite clothing of a footballer, clown or jockey grinned the round face and owlish eyes of little Duval, who flew to her at once to whisper compliments and stumble on the swelling fortress of her white skirt. She realised dimly from him that her dress was as beautiful as she had hoped it might be, but what was the use of its ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... tenderly. He was very fond of his mother. At this moment Pax took a little run, and jumped on to Mamma's lap, where, sitting facing the company, he opened his black mouth and yawned, with a ludicrous inappropriateness worthy of any clown. It ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the little boy was standing suddenly broke, and down he fell. He turned over, almost like a clown doing a somersault in the circus, and the next moment Bunny's two feet caught between two other branches, and there he hung, upside down, his head ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue Playing Circus • Laura Lee Hope
... comic boys of Dickens may be remembered one who, instead of being introduced in any of the Novelist's larger works, from the Pickwick Papers clown to Edwin Drood, interpolates himself, as may be said, among one of the groups of Christmas stories, through the medium of a shrill monologue. "The Boy at Mugby," to wit, the one exhilarated and exhilarating appreciate of the whole elaborate system of Refreshmenting ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... all Marcolf (or whatever other name he bears) is a keen contester with the king in a battle of wits. No doubt, at first Marcolf filled a serious, respectable role; in course of time, his character degenerated into that of a clown or buffoon. It is difficult to summarize the legend, it varies so considerably in the versions. Marcolf in the best-known forms, which are certainly older than Zabara, is "right rude and great of body, of visage greatly ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... wallow, even in books, as on their own dung-hill. Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach what is called honesty; and the higher man must open his ears to all the coarser or finer cynicism, and congratulate himself when the clown becomes shameless right before him, or the scientific satyr speaks out. There are even cases where enchantment mixes with the disgust—namely, where by a freak of nature, genius is bound to some such indiscreet billy-goat and ape, as in the case of the Abbe Galiani, the profoundest, acutest, and ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... by a clown in blue, Walks like a two-legged bush of may, With the little wee lads that wriggled up the flue Ere Cheltenham town ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... puppy that soon there would be no bearing him. But the truth is, the young man's success and dashing manners pleased his elder companion. He liked to see Pen gay and spirited, and brimful of health, and life, and hope; as a man who has long since left off being amused with clown and harlequin, still gets a pleasure in watching a child at a pantomime. Mr. Pen's former sulkiness disappeared with his better fortune: and he bloomed as the sun began to ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... moves me to tears," said Mr. Amarinth musingly. "There is nothing so absolutely pathetic as a really fine paradox. The pun is the clown among jokes, the well turned paradox is the polished comedian, and the highest comedy verges upon tragedy, just as the keenest edge of tragedy is often tempered by a subtle humour. Our minds are shot with moods as a fabric is shot with colours, and our moods often seem inappropriate. ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Clown Toby and the big "boss canvas-man" Jim had always taken turns amusing and guarding little Polly, while her mother rode in the ring. So Toby now carried the babe to another side of the lot, and Jim bore the lifeless body of the mother to the distant ticket-wagon, now closed ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo
... "Tempest." We can not blame Shakespeare for making use of cutthroats and villains in developing his plots, but we might have been spared the jokes which the jailors of Posthumus perpetrate when they come to lead him to the scaffold, and the ludicrous English of the clown who supplies Cleopatra with an asp. The apothecary who is in such wretched plight that he sells poison to Romeo in spite of a Draconian law, gives us another unflattering picture of a tradesman; and when Falstaff declares, "I would I were a weaver; I could sing psalms or ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... breath and in my breast! And cursed be this sin to which he led me! Spurn me, Rei; strike me on the cheek, spit upon me, on Meriamun, the Royal harlot who sells herself to win a crown. Oh, I hate him, hate him, and I will pay him in shame for shame—him, the clown in king's attire. See here,'—and from her robe she drew a white flower that was known to her and me—'twice to-day have I been minded with this deadly blossom to make an end of me, and of all my shame, and all my empty greed of glory. But this thought has ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... exception of a few hits at 'Douglas's notions.' He is far from prepossessing in personal appearance, and his voice is disagreeable; and yet he wins attention and good-will from the start. He indulges in no flowers of rhetoric, no eloquent passages. He is not a wit, a humorist, or a clown; yet so fine a vein of pleasantry and good-nature pervades what he says, gliding over a deep current of poetical arguments, that he keeps his hearers in a smiling mood, ready to swallow all he says. His sense of the ludicrous is very keen; and an exhibition ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... that decays the wise{,} doth eve{r} make the better fool. Clown. God send you, sir, a speedy infirmity{,} for the better increasing of your folly."—Shakespeare. Twelfth ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... ladies in wonderful blue and silver and pink and gold habits, and by knights in armor, all of whom carried umbrellas also. Pages walked beside the horses, waving banners and shields with "Visit Currie's World-Renowned Circus" painted on them. A droll little clown, mounted on an enormous bay horse, made fun of the pages, imitated their gestures, and rapped them on the back with his riding-stick in a droll way. A long line of blue and red wagons closed ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... monsters, any one of which would make a man a fortune to-day, if it could be kept on ice and exhibited for one season only. You could take a full grown mastodon to-day, and with no calliope, no lithographs, no bearded lady, no clown with four pillows in his pantaloons and no iron-jawed woman, you could go across this continent and successfully ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... actors are ashamed of being funny?—Why, there are obvious reasons, and deep philosophical ones. The clown knows very well that the women are not in love with him, but with Hamlet, the fellow in the black cloak and plumed hat. Passion never laughs. The wit knows that his place is at the tail ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... old fellow, and now his family rather surprised him; he seemed to think it a joke that all these children should belong to him. As the younger ones slipped up to him in his retreat, he kept taking things out of his pockets; penny dolls, a wooden clown, a balloon pig that was inflated by a whistle. He beckoned to the little boy they called Jan, whispered to him, and presented him with a paper snake, gently, so as not to startle him. Looking over the boy's head he said to me, "This one is ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... though I was a clown in a circus!" she exclaimed. "Laughing when, as you say yourself, the man that she—the cat—wrote that fiendish letter ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the Euryalus brought up above the Third Cataract, don't you? and eighty-one-ton guns at Jakdul? Now, I'm quite satisfied with my breeches.' He turned round gravely to exhibit himself, after the manner of a clown. ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... evening of the very day of the upheaval, we made a pitch on the greensward opposite to the theatre we had seceded from. Spencer, I ought to mention here, was "the great man of strength;" Buckley, the "marvellous jumper;" while I myself filled a double role—being both the "clown" and "cashier" of the establishment. The latter is generally a safe post to hold. Spencer would willingly allow a stone to be broken on his chest with a sledge hammer, bend bars of iron across his ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... variety of noise, the quantity of people and the quantity of sweetmeats; little boys so happy, and shop people so polite, the music at the booths, and the bustle and eagerness of the people outside, made my heart quite jump. There was Richardson, with a clown and harlequin, and such beautiful women, dressed in clothes all over gold spangles, dancing reels and waltzes, and looking so happy! There was Flint and Gyngell, with fellows tumbling over head and heels, playing such tricks—eating fire, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... considered a clown, or, at least, not well bred, who, without tapping at the door, or making a bow, or saying "By your leave," or some other token of respect, should burst in upon a company of persons unknown to him, and instead of a welcome ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... Freme Skinner, was a young lumberman of thirty, with red hair and blue eyes; a giant in build; clad in a heavy woollen lumber-man's jacket of variegated colours. One of his distinguishing features—one which gained for him the soubriquet of the "Clown" the country about, was the wearing of a girl's ring in his ear, the slit having been made with his pocket knife in a moment of gallantry. At the heels of the two men trotted silently a ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... sudden reaction of mad delight, he began to dance a wild jig in the middle of the room, a jig mingled with bits of can-can and the contortions of the cakewalk and the whirls of a dancing dervish and the acrobatic movements of a clown and the lurching steps of a drunken man. And he announced, as though they were the numbers in ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... or clown, in monstrous garb With crooked arrows starred, Silently we went round and round The slippery asphalte yard; Silently we went round and round, And ...
— The Ballad of Reading Gaol • Oscar Wilde
... was troubled with asthma, and whose breath came far too thick and heavy for the letter s, 'Your thervant! Thith ith a bad piethe of bithnith, thith ith. You've heard of my Clown and hith dog being thuppothed ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... exhaling the smoke in little globes, rings and so forth. The invaluable Ben Jonson, in the preliminary account of the characters in his "Every Man out of his Humour," 1600, describes one Sogliardo as "an essential clown ... yet so enamoured of the name of a gentleman that he will have it though he buys it. He comes up every term to learn to take tobacco and see new motions." Sogliardo was accustomed to hire a private room ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... Doctor Gall [Franz Joseph Gall, founder of the system of phrenology. Born in Baden, 1758; died in Paris, 1825] was illustrated. I saw a troop passing the Place du Carrousel, composed of clowns, harlequins, fishwives, etc., all rubbing their skulls, and making expressive grimaces; while a clown bore several skulls of different sizes, painted red, blue, or green, with these inscriptions: Skull of a robber, skull of an assassin, skull of a bankrupt, etc.; and a masked figure, representing Doctor Gall, was seated on an ass, his head turned to the ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... the world, marries, makes children men, men to conquer kingdoms, murder monsters, and bringeth gods from Heaven, and fetcheth devils from Hell. And, that which is worst, many times, to make mirth, they make a clown companion with a king; in their grave counsels they allow the advice of Fools; yea, they use one order of speech for all persons,—a gross indecorum."—In 1581, Stephen Gosson published a tract in which he says: "Sometimes you shall see nothing but the adventures of an amorous knight, passing ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... business instead of his own. As the wife was senior and business boss, the Bard endured these curtain lectures with meekness and surface sorrow and promises of reformation, but, when out of her sight continued in the same old rut of playing the clown and philosopher for the ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... Mishongnovi the dance was going on and everybody laughing and having a good time, for the clown kachinas were going round pestering the dancing kachinas. These rough clown kachinas took turns appearing and disappearing, and some coming, others ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... undreamed-of sepulchre bestow, But where? Hold back thy fleet-wing'd coursers, Time, Whilst we bethink us! Ah—such place there is! Close, too, at hand—a place wherein a man Might lie till doomsday safer from the touch Of prying clown than is the spiced dust Of ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... conception of idyllic merriment. That delicious effervescence of the mind which we call fun has no equivalent for the northern peasant, except tipsy revelry; the only realm of fancy and imagination for the English clown exists at the bottom of the ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... in a suit of mediaeval court clothes, black from head to foot, and fashioned according to the period of the play in which he was acting. But if he had worn the garments of a pierrot or a clown, one would never have noticed it. The man's individuality, magnetic and irresistible, triumphed easily. Mr. Grooten had passed away. It was the great Feurgeres, whose sad shining eyes lingered so wistfully ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... room for mirth;" Much less for sigh and frown. "A vale of tears" may be this earth— 'Tis so to every clown. The desert blossoms as the rose, And joy flows everywhere; The star of hope in brightness glows, No room ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... a puppy that soon there would be no bearing him. But the truth is, the young man's success and dashing manners pleased his elder companion. He liked to see Pen gay and spirited, and brimful of health, and life, and hope; as a man who has long since left off being amused with clown and harlequin, still gets a pleasure in watching a child at a pantomime. Mr. Pen's former sulkiness disappeared with his better fortune: and he bloomed as the sun began ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... deformed in figure—a caricature of a man, His Grace of Richmond was the last degenerate scion of the Stuarts of Richmond-d'Aubigny, a man of depraved tastes and besotted brain, the butt and the clown of Charles's Court. That this middle-aged buffoon should aspire to the hand of the loveliest and most elusive woman in England was only less amazing than that she should smile on his suit. The Court was struck with consternation—and convulsed ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... the novel-part of it is largely composed of the same sort of violent bosh which almost monopolises Indiana. In fact, the peasant-bourgeois hero Benedict, whom every woman loves; who is a conceited and ill-mannered mixture of clown and prig; who is angry with his mistress Valentine (Madame de Lansac) for "not knowing how to prefer him to her honour," though one would have said she had given ample proofs of this preference; and who finally appeases the reader by ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... some cedar-trees at the back of the house there were always some of them on fine days. But perhaps they sought to increase their apparent number, and ran from one place to another to be ready to meet observation, like the famous clown Grimaldi, who used to go through his performances at one London theatre, and then dash off in his paint and motley to another, so that perambulating theatre-going men might imagine that there were two greatest ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... genius of Elia. Jaques, it will be remembered, after hearing the "motley fool" moral on the time, declared that "motley's the only wear"; and I opine that Lamb would consider it no small praise to be likened, in wit, wisdom, and eloquence, to Touchstone, or to the Clown in "Twelfth Night." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... loud," said the impersonator, who was dressed in a funny clown suit. "Sing your best, so all the people will like the show that Bunny ...
— Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue Giving a Show • Laura Lee Hope
... tentacles and all, inwards, and so down into his stomach, just as if you were to turn the finger of a glove inward from the tip till it passed into the hand; and so performs, every time he eats, the clown's as yet ideal feat, of jumping ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... of evil in any particular play, sometimes Fraud, Covetousness, Pride, Iniquity, or Hypocrisy. It was the business of the Vice to annoy the Virtues and to be constantly playing pranks. The Vice was the predecessor of the clown and the fool upon the stage. The Vice also amused the audience by tormenting the Devil, belaboring him with a sword of lath, sticking thorns into him, and making him roar with pain. Sometimes the Devil would be kicked down Hell Mouth by the offended Virtues; but he would soon reappear with ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... a mole Than 'tis for you; Oh! could you see My residence, how charm'd you'd be. Instead of bringing up your brood In wind, and wet, and solitude, Come bring them all at once to town, We'll make a courtier of a clown. I think that, for your children's sake, 'Tis proper my advice to take." "Well," said his host, "I can but try, And so poor ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... as bright as a silver dollar. In the book we can smell the sawdust, hear the flapping of the big white canvas and the roaring of the lions, and listen to the merry "hoop la!" of the clown. ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... he stumble across no stolid peasant at a corner; for on such an occasion, I scarcely know which is the more troubled, or whether it is worse to suffer the confusion of your troubadour, or the unfeigned alarm of your clown. A sedentary population, accustomed, besides, to the strange mechanical bearing of the common tramp, can in no wise explain to itself the gaiety of these passers-by. I knew one man who was arrested as a runaway lunatic, because, ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... old totemic tattooing. The Arab woman still tattoos her face, arms, and ankles. The war-paint of the American savage reappeared in the woad with which the ancient Briton stained his body; and Tylor suggests that the painted stripes on the circus clown are a survival of a custom once ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... and bells: The conventional dress of the court fool, or jester, of the Middle Ages, and, after him, of the stage clown, consisted of the "fool's cap" and suit of motley, ornamented with ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... himself to the contents of the two baskets hitherto borne by the couple, giving himself time, however, every now and then to look out of his little black eyes at the rightful owners, with rather a spiteful expression, but protruding at the same time his red tongue, like a clown at the circus, as if enjoying the joke of their picking and he eating. Afterward I learned that they had deposited their baskets on the ground under a loaded bush, for greater facility in securing the fruit, when suddenly they heard a blow and a snort, and looking where the queer sounds came ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... came to an understanding. The poor devil did not come like a conqueror, for he was a wretched clown who had just been released from prison, where he had undergone three years' hard labor for an attempted outrage on a girl, but, with one exception, the best fellow in the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... the trunk of a tree, standing on his head, with his legs in the air, l'Encuerado kicked about with all the frenzy of one possessed. He fell sometimes to the right, and sometimes to the left, but raised himself after every fall, and resumed his clown-like attitude. Not one of us could keep a serious countenance while looking at his contortions. Lucien laughed till he cried, especially because the Indian, as if on purpose to render the scene more comical, accompanied his gestures with invectives ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... laugh if you do not want to," said Cutter. "I am used to being thought dull. Your gravity would not wound me though I were chief clown to the whole universe, and yours were the only grave face in the world. By the by, you are laughing, I see. I am much obliged for the appreciation. Shall I go on ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... [Pantaloon, Clown, Harlequin, and Columbine are the characters of an old sixteenth-century drama, acted in dumb-show. "Pantaleone" is a Venetian type; Columbine means ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... are dispersed in the next. If it takes three generations to make a gentleman one will not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity for instruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trained intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer and a soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of race and pedigree in a race horse and a bird dog how dare you deny ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... deserve. This man has some cause to mislike me, since to be frank, when I was younger than I am to-day and given to the follies of youth, it chanced that in England I met his mother, a beautiful Spanish lady who by ill fortune was wedded to an Englishman, this man's father and a clown of clowns, who maltreated her. I will be short; the lady learned to love me and I worsted her husband in a duel. Hence this traitor's hate ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... Colonel Meadows, his eyes sparkling with the humor of the situation. "Never misses a chance to clown." ...
— The Second Voice • Mann Rubin
... made up of jurists, psychologists, and physicians, all, therefore, men trained in careful observation. Somewhere in the same street there was that evening a public festivity of the carnival. Suddenly, in the midst of the scholarly meeting, the doors open, a clown in highly colored costume rushes in in mad excitement, and a negro with a revolver in hand follows him. In the middle of the hall first the one, then the other, shouts wild phrases; then the one falls to the ground, the other jumps on him; then a shot, and suddenly both are ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... poem of Marathon, the story of the nameless clown, the mysterious holder of the ploughshare, is not less inspiring. The unknown champion, so plain in his heroic magnitude of mind, so brilliant as he flashes in the van, in the rear, is like the incarnated genius of the soil, which hides itself in the furrow and flashes into ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... in it. Only at times the commoner sort will howl when the actors embrace or kiss the actresses, but they never go beyond that. Formerly, dramas only were played; the local poet composed a piece in which there must necessarily be a fight every second minute, a clown, and terrifying transformations. But since the Tondo artist have begun to fight every fifteen seconds, with two clowns, and even greater marvels than before, they have put to rout their provincial compeers. ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Social Democrats Internationalists Kramarov, long, stoop-shouldered and near-sighted-destined to achieve some notoriety as the Clown of the Opposition. Only a Government composed of all the Socialist parties, he said, could possess the authority to take such important action. If a Socialist coalition were formed, his faction would support the entire programme; if not, only part of it. As for the ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... just as good a slave without it. You can earn your board and lodging without the formality of culture. The training of the college will make your power for action greater, no doubt; but it will also magnify your needs. The debt of life a scholar has to pay is greater than that paid by the clown. And the higher sacrifice the scholar may be called upon to make grows with the increased fullness of his life. Greater needs go with greater power, and both mean ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... suspecting what had really happened. But Mrs. Grivois, rather surprised than uneasy at her pug-log's insensibility to her affectionate appeals, and believing him to be sullenly crouching beneath the seat, stooped clown to take him up, and feeling one of his paws, drew it impatiently towards her whilst she said to him in a half-jesting, half angry tone: "Come, naughty fellow! you will give a pretty notion of your temper ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... whatever other name he bears) is a keen contester with the king in a battle of wits. No doubt, at first Marcolf filled a serious, respectable role; in course of time, his character degenerated into that of a clown or buffoon. It is difficult to summarize the legend, it varies so considerably in the versions. Marcolf in the best-known forms, which are certainly older than Zabara, is "right rude and great of body, of visage greatly misshapen and foul." Sometimes he is ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... beneath a wave. He had sailed every sea, with no other flag above him than the Union Jack, and felt maybe that even his misdeeds deserved not the covering of less bright colors. It was like a ringmaster fallen on hard times having to act the part of "clown." But needs must where necessity drives, and as his own country would have none of him, he was tolerant of the flag that hid him from the ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... on your rhinoceriouses," answered Ben, who couldn't help imitating his old friend the clown when he ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... (the miller's second son) is really an exquisite droll, and I don't remember to have seen him in better form. He has some of the authentic ingredients of the old circus clown—a very ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... ablution of a common man differs from that of an educated Moslem as much as the eating of a clown and a gentleman. Moreover there are important technical differences between the Wuzu of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... in which clown is wholly absent? As he steps over the graves, up comes a man as drunk as a goat, and cries out, "Ah! Mr. Gladstone will you take the duty off the whiskey?" Upon which he of Hawarden Castle turns him round and says slowly—"My ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... shouldn't like to be a shoal of little fish," cried Dick. "Why, as the clown said in the pantomime, 'it would be dangerous to be safe.' I wonder there ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... bed—the boisterous wind rattled clown the chimney and shook the ill-fitting casement in its rotting frame. The clothes he had last worn were thrown carelessly about, unsmoothed, unbrushed; the scanty articles of furniture were out of their proper ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... honest fellow, if we may call a poor man honest, for he was poor indeed, poor in purse and poor in brains; and, in short, the knight talked so long to him, plied him with so many arguments, and made him so many fair promises, that at last the poor clown consented to go along with him and become his squire. Among other inducements to entice him to do it willingly, Don Quixote forgot not to tell him that it was likely such an adventure would present itself as might secure him the ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... laugh and wonder; but there is also that ever in his pranks which causes us to think, and even sometimes to weep. In much of his that seems burlesque, the most audacious, there are hidden springs of thought and tears. Often, when most he seems as the grimed and grinning clown in a circus girded by gaping spectators, he stops to pour out satire as passionate as that of Juvenal, or morality as eloquent and as pure as that of Pascal. And this he does without lengthening his face or taking off his paint. Sometimes, when he most absurdly scampers in his ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... Here you will see the performing seal, the Circassian beauty, the Chinese giant, and the smallest dwarf in the world." Next to those attractions came the circus, outside of which, on a raised platform, stood harlequin, clown, and columbine, all in a row, ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... Muses' sons are only heir; And fruitful wits, that inaspiring[25] are, Shall, discontent, run into regions far; And few great lords in virtuous deeds shall joy But be surpris'd with every garish toy, 480 And still enrich the lofty servile clown, Who with encroaching guile keeps learning down. Then muse not Cupid's suit no better sped, Seeing in their loves the Fates ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... short time he and his brother had fastened the barrel staves to their shoes, winding and tying the cords and ropes, and even some old straps around and around. Their feet looked very queer—almost like those of some clown in the circus. But Laddie and Russ did not mind that. They wanted to walk on the ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Grandpa Ford's • Laura Lee Hope
... would have taken up arms; buckwheat cakes, in cream, flavored with aniseed, and a cheese, which is a rare thing and hardly ever to be found in Brittany, a cheese to make any one eat a four pound loaf if he only smelt the rind! The whole washed clown by Chambertin, and then brandy distilled by cider, which was so good that it made a man fancy that he had swallowed a deity in velvet breeches; not to mention the cigars, pure, smuggled havannahs; ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... woman's to the monarch's hate Had added strength—the serpent's poison-bag Venoming the serpent's fang. 'Depart the realm!' With voice scarce human thus the tyrant cried, 'Depart or die;' and gave the Church's goods To clown and boor. Upon the bank of Thames Settled like ruin. Holy Sebert dead, In that East Saxon kingdom monarch long, Three sons unrighteous now their riot held. Frowning into the Christian Church they strode, Full-armed, and each, with far-stretched ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... seen—nay, you must have seen—Richardson's immortal show. You must have seen a tall platform in front of the migratory edifice, and on that platform you must have delighted your visual orb with the clown, the pantaloon, the harlequin, the dancing ladies, the walking dandy, the king with his crown, the queen in her rabbit-skin robes, the smock-frocked countryman, the top-booted jockey, and all the dramatis personae of the performance that every moment of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... and it remained silent, so that it did not seem that the clown's scream when he went over had been heard ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... Maria Colville found masks and dominoes filling the shop windows and dangling from the doors. A devil in red and a clown in white crossed the way in front of him from an intersecting street; several children in pretty masquerading dresses flashed in and out among the crowd. He hurried to the Lung' Arno, and reached the palace where Mrs. Bowen lived, with these holiday sights ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... of work to throw upon any two words in any possible language. Even Shakspere's clown,[9] when challenged to furnish a catholic answer applicable to all conceivable occasions, cannot do it in less than nine letters—namely, Oh lord, sir. I, for my part, satisfied that the existing form ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... lower table were noisy and rude enough, and Ranulph suspected that his entertainment had been ordered partly to keep them from getting out of hand with drinking and rioting. He had contrived a clown's costume from some of his belongings, aided by a little flour and paint, and a bauble made of a toasting fork stuck through an apple. When he pranced into the hall the soldiers yelled with surprise and delight. Behind him at a discreet distance came a small boy, also attired ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... curiosity was full of kindness; their hearts were a little touched by the ploughman, by his glowing eyes, and by the strange sight of him there among them in the midst of their high civilisation, a rustic clown who knew nothing better than a thatched cottage and a clay floor. No doubt they had the sincerest desire that he should be made to understand how much he was deficient, what a great deal he had to learn, and be taught ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... or seest. But to the place Where? It standeth North North-east and by East from the West corner of thy curious knotted garden; There did I see that low spirited Swaine, that base Minow of thy myrth, Clown. Mee? Ferd. that vnletered small knowing soule, Clow Me? Ferd. that shallow vassall Clow. Still mee?) Ferd. which as I remember, hight Costard, Clow. O me) Ferd. sorted and consorted contrary to thy established proclaymed Edict and Continent, Cannon: Which ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... books would mean anything, he thought. They would just take their places at the end of the long row of meaningless, disturbing, vicious facts that cluttered up his mind. He wasn't an FBI agent any more; he was a clown and a failure, and he was through. He was going to resign and go to South Dakota and live the life of a hermit. He would drink goat's milk and eat old shoes or something, and whenever another human being came ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... staff twitched convulsively and her terrible eyes were like the vent-holes of internal fires; but she managed her rage with a skill that was high tribute to her will-power. "You are right in selecting this clown—this tag-rag," said she. "You and he, I see, are peculiarly suited to each other....My only regret is that in my blind affection I have wasted all these years and all those thousands of dollars on ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... King Log, whom Ben dumbfounds twenty times a day. He is a great ornament of the cricket-ground, has a real genius for the game, and displays it after a very original manner, under the disguise of awkwardness—as the clown shows off his agility in a pantomime. Nothing comes amiss to him. By the bye, he would have been the very lad for us in our present dilemma; not a horse in England could master Ben Kirby. But we are too far from him now—and perhaps it is as well that ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... this sculpture, you are to learn what a "Master" is. Here was one man at least, who knew his business, once upon a time! Unaccusably;—none of your fool's heads or clown's hearts can find a fault here! "Dog-fancier,[49] cobbler, tailor, or churl, look here"—says Master Jacopo—"look! I know what a brute is, better than you, I know what a silken tassel is—what a leathern belt is—Also, what a woman ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... justice strict attention draws, Acts truly from himself, and gains applause. But when, to please himself or charm his wife, He aims at something in politer life, 360 When, blindly thwarting Nature's stubborn plan, He treads the stage by way of gentleman, The clown, who no one touch of breeding knows, Looks like Tom Errand[28] dress'd in Clincher's clothes. Fond of his dress, fond of his person grown, Laugh'd at by all, and to himself unknown, Prom side to side he struts, he smiles, he prates, And ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... returned the head menial of the castle, "the royal shoemaker, villain, is no clumsy clown from these parts; but he and his wares come from abroad, from Paris. He is, moreover, with the king at present, receiving his reward for the beautiful new pair of shoes in softly-tanned leather, which arrived last night at dusk. He is an elegant gentleman, this Parisian, and knows fine manners ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... had marked him from head to foot with big, bright, red spots, he was as gaudy as a circus clown, and as nimble and merry ...
— Denslow's Humpty Dumpty • William Wallace Denslow
... though I foresee an ignominious expulsion, perhaps broken limbs and disgraceful exposure in the public prints, I can not resist the strange impulse; and throwing myself back in my stall, I raise a wild cry, such as a circus clown gives when he vaults into the arena, and ties himself up into a knot by way of introduction. I had not under-calculated the confusion, but I had under-calculated the indignation. In an instant all eyes are upon me—from the little piccolo-player in the corner ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... effect, the cynical contempt for the original noble spirituality, is the result of an accident? What tricks circumstances play on us! A slight irregularity in drying and a hero becomes a clown. The case of 'Imperial Caesar dead and turned to clay' is not so bad as that of an idealist whose ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... Clara J. started in to tell me what a delightful time she had had at the New Rochelle theatre, and how clever the magician was, and what a funny clown came out first and smashed a real egg on the stage, but I begged off ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... my acquaintance leading a female strangely muffled up, and casting her eyes on the ground. My heart misgave me. I thought this was the very maid who had been the cause of such unheard-of wickedness. Nor were my conjectures ill-founded. Regardless of the clown who stood by in stupid astonishment, she fell to the earth and bathed my hand with tears. Her trembling lips with difficulty inquired after the youth; and, as she spoke, a glow of conscious guilt lightened ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... the painful tension just described. To this may be added that, after the conflict has begun, there is very little relief by way of the ridiculous. Henceforward at any rate Iago's humour never raises a smile. The clown is a poor one; we hardly attend to him and quickly forget him; I believe most readers of Shakespeare, if asked whether there is a clown in Othello, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... any other way, we and the Spirit of Liberty got into a kingdom of Needles and Pins, and found them at war with a potentate who called in to his aid their old arch enemy Rust, and who would have got the better of them if the Spirit of Liberty had not in the nick of time transformed the leaders into Clown, Pantaloon, Harlequin, Columbine, Harlequina, and a whole family of Sprites, consisting of a remarkably stout father and three spineless sons. We all knew what was coming when the Spirit of Liberty addressed the king with a big face, and His Majesty backed ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... in the general tender-heartedness of pretty women. But I confess I was alarmed. Yet, with a feeble smile, I tried to introduce the subject with classical ease and lightness. I even said, "If Shakspeare's Athenian clown, Mrs. Brown, believed that a lion among ladies was a dreadful thing, what must"—But here I broke down; for Mrs. Brown, with the awful intuition of her sex, I saw at once was more occupied with my manner than my speech. So I tried a business brusquerie, and, placing ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... butt! Can't you ... oh, Mac!" The commanding voice trailed off in a chuckle. Better to clown his way through the inspection, MacNamara thought, than to let Ruiz notice his nervousness. The co-pilot, Ruiz, walked toward him, still smiling. "One of these days, boy, you gonna go too far. Thought you were a real, eighteen carat saboteur." ...
— Tight Squeeze • Dean Charles Ing
... snorting of horses in the dressing-tent died away as if by magic; the subdued voices of the men and women who waited their turn to bound into the merry ring faded into indistinguishable whispers; the crack of the ring master's whip and the responsive yelp of the clown trailed off into silence. His head fell back, his body relaxed, and he ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... place, full of many a lovely brood, Tall trees, green arbours, and ground flowers in flocks; And Wild rose tip-toe upon hawthorn stocks, Like to a bonny Lass, who plays her pranks At Wakes and Fairs with wandering Mountebanks, When she stands cresting the Clown's head, and mocks The crowd beneath her. Verily I think, Such place to me is sometimes like a dream Or map of the whole world: thoughts, link by link Enter through ears and eyesight, with such gleam Of all things, that at last in fear I shrink, And leap ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... railing," he repeated, with glistening eyes, "you have forgotten the iron railing. Without his protection the poor Goose Man is to be sure your buffoon, your zany, your clown." ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... berries. Mrs. Budge, forgetting, when Robin held a sprig of mistletoe over her head and daringly kissed her wrinkled cheek, that "things was going to sixes and sevens," laughed until her sides ached at Harkness in his silly clown's cap. Robin and Beryl, with much solemnity, exchanged purchases each had secretly made at the village store and Robin could not resist adding: "Dare you to send it to me ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... fishwives, and what not which is vulgar and commonplace? Or did I, in my clumsy attempt to imitate him, make use of a single argument which does not lie, developed or undeveloped, in the Common Sense of every clown; in that human Reason of his, which is part of God's image in him, and in every man? And has not my complaint against Mr. Windrush's school been, that they will not do this; that they will not accept ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... he was born to belong. When she heard Don Quixote talk in this manner, Altisidora grew very angry with him, and exclaimed: "God's life! Don Stockfish, soul of a mortar, stone of a date, more obstinate and obdurate than a clown asked a favor when he has his mind made up! If I fall upon you I shall tear your eyes out! Do you fancy, then, Don Vanquished, Don Cudgeled, that I died for your sake? All that you have seen to-night has been make believe; I am not the woman to let the black of my nail suffer ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... The old clown was his especial delight. He fairly shouted at his quips and antics. When the mules were brought in and $5 offered to the boy or man who could ride one of them, Alfred was tempted to make the trial. He felt certain he could do better than those ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... the other Kentons made it a cause of coldness which was quite as effective. In Lottie this took the form of something so active, so positive, that it was something more than a mere absence of warmth. Before she came clown to breakfast the next morning she studied a stare in her mirror, and practised it upon Trannel so successfully when he came up to speak to her that it must have made him doubt whether he had ever had her acquaintance. In his doubt he ventured to address her, and then Lottie turned her ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... susceptible material. It grows as it is trained. It will be rude, if it is left rude, and fine only as it is wrought finely. Educate a boy to tumbled hair and grimy hands, and he will go tumbled and grimy to his grave. Put a hundred boys together where they will have the appurtenances of a clown, and I do not believe there will be ten out of the hundred who will not become precisely to that degree clownish. I am not battling for the luxuries of life, but I am for its decencies. I would not turn boys into Sybarites, but neither would I let them riot into Satyrs. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... pre-eminence;—you who prate of God and know nothing whatsoever about Him! The horse, dog, cat,—even the wild animals, whose vices, perchance, pale beside your own, may go to Heaven before you. The Supreme Architect is neither a Nero, nor a Stuart, nor a clown. He will recompense all who deserve recompense, be they great or small—biped ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... the perjured varlet Stands on strongly-planted heel, In his left a strip of scarlet, In his right a streak of steel; Ah! the monster topples over, Till his haunches strike the plain!— Low-born clown and lying lover, Thou hast ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... for read, after muttering the first words of the rubric. A little carven image of an acolyte—a weird boy who seemed to move by springs, whose hair had all the semblance of painted wood, and whose complexion was white and red like a clown's—did not make matters more ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... chastisement to England. A retired officer of cavalry, said to be disgruntled through failure of promotion, a tall, spare, serious, prosy figure, a writer without inspiration, a speaker without force. Germany has never taken him seriously; for he lacks even the clown-charm of his rival Keim, but the mediaeval absurdities and serious extravagances in his defense of war are well tempered to stir the eager watchdogs in the rival lands. In spite of his pleas, "historical, biological and philosophical," for war, he is a man of peace, for which, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... the flowers, she went further and further from the fort, up one sand slope and clown another, almost forgetting her search for Estralla, and finally deciding that it was time to go back ...
— Yankee Girl at Fort Sumter • Alice Turner Curtis
... smile, like his mother's, came suddenly and was very lovable; and then, when there was any clog in his soul's quick running, his face went stupid and ugly. He was the sort of boy that becomes a clown and a lout as soon as he is not understood, or feels himself held cheap; and, again, is adorable at ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... word. Next the farmer met a Jogi or devotee, and to him he gave a cake, without receiving any help in return. At last, he came upon a poor man sitting under a tree, and finding out he was hungry, the kindly farmer gave him his last cake, and sitting clown to rest beside him, ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... of the forecastle with a leap and a gurgle of laughter. But there was something wrong with him, too. He was a dwarf, and, as I was to come to know, his high spirits and low mentality united to make him a clown. ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... instances of persons who had not allowed the greatest griefs to keep them from the exercise of their calling. He knew of a scholar, he said, who delivered his lecture while his wife was dying, of a clown who cracked his jokes on the stage, though his wife had eloped with another man ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... said Lady Mary, speaking still with resentment in her voice, "that the papers you held are the key to the situation. Have you no more sense than to trust them to the care of a red-headed clown from whom they can be taken as easy as if they were picked ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... excellent story, played the trombone, triangle, and bass viol, spoke Spanish well, drove one of the circus wagons, translated the bills, turned an occasional somerset in the ring, cracked jokes in Spanish with the Mexican clown, took the tickets at the entrance with one hand, while with the other he beat an accompaniment to the orchestra inside on the bass-drum, and, in short, made himself 'generally useful.' After partaking of an excellent supper, we spent an ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... fury rising above his fear. This lacklander clown actually dared to try to establish domination over a member of the ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... of horses and feats of horsemanship are always well worth seeing, but the rest grows very tiresome on frequent repetition. Persons must be very fond of this sort of thing who can twice visit the circus, as year after year the clown repeats the same stale jests, and shows up ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... sat beside his friend behind the laboring blacks, "this is a man's life. This is doin' somethin'! This is gettin' somewhere! This is livin'! I envy you, Hiram. I envy you that big body of yours and the way you can handle ten big horses as if you were drivin' a trick donkey hitched to a clown's cart. Wild Cat, you're a lucky man. And what a glorious woman, Hooker, to throw the magic over it all! You're the man for her, my boy—the only man I ever met that oughta have the nerve to try to win her. ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... verging on the improper, a concession to the company, for his stories were not used to verging. He proposed Irene's health in a mock speech. Nobody drank it, and Winifred said: "Don't be such a clown, Monty!" ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... contains a large quantity of the history of songs in the 16th century, and is one of the most important to be found in Shakespeare. Autolycus sells ballads 'of all sizes' among his wares; the country folk, Mopsa, Dorcas, and the Clown, buy them, and afterwards sing them; and the rustic servant distinctly prefers the pedlar's vocalisation to their accustomed 'tabor and pipe,' or ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... was the theatrical man's answer. "This is a circus company returning from abroad that is wrecked, and you are the clown. Be as funny ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast • Victor Appleton
... however, Oxford and Cambridge made common cause with London and Bristol. It was hard, said the Academics, that a grave and learned man, sent by a large body of grave and learned men to the Great Council of the nation, should be thought less fit to sit in that Council than a boozing clown who had scarcely literature enough to entitle him to the benefit of clergy. It was hard, said the traders, that a merchant prince, who had been the first magistrate of the first city in the world, whose name on the back of a bill commanded ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the Pope; a pretended patriot, he impoverished the country; and, in the name of Brutus, he grasped—without remorse and wore without shame the diadem of the Caesars. Through this pantomime of policy, fortune played the clown to his caprices. At his touch, crowns crumbled, beggars reigned, systems vanished, the wildest theories took the color of his whim, and all that was venerable, and all that was novel, changed places with the rapidity of ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... curious custom of the day, which shows Folly and Wisdom side by side, just as we find them in Calderon's and Shakespeare's dramas, Lucretia presented the costly robe which she wore when she offered up her prayer, to one of her court fools, and the clown ran merrily through the streets of Rome, bawling out, "Long live the illustrious Duchess of Ferrara! Long live Pope Alexander!" With noisy demonstrations the Borgias and their ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... that this young clown, without in the least intending to be offensive, was listening to me with a ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... bitterness of deferred ambition as he walked gloomily through life, with the stamp of failure on his brow. The picture was a pathetic one, you must admit, worthy to take its place on the line with the well-known fancy sketch of the Clown who, after making the masses split their sides, goes home to a private ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... considerate enough, God knows, of those dirty brats and ignorant louts—coddling that girl, Rebecca, who is a good-hearted creature enough, but not fit for respectable people to touch their hands to; and associating with such conceited boors as that George Olver, and that grinning clown, Harvey, and that poor fool, Lovell Barlow, and that what-d'ye-call him—that fiddling young devil with ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... the weak and coward with the strong," he cried, "when there's any pleasant charge, you send the other servants, but when it's a question of seeing any one home in the dark, then you ask me, you disorderly clown! a nice way you act the steward, indeed! Do you forget that if Mr. Chiao Ta chose to raise one leg, it would be a good deal higher than your head! Remember please, that twenty years ago, Mr. Chiao Ta wouldn't even so much as look at any ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... taking of that step that was to make or mar her life? The Woman is awakened, and, starting from her sleep, catches blindly at what first her newly opened eyes light upon. It is a spell, a witchery, ruled by chance alone, inexplicable—a fairy queen enamored of a clown with ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... the passion. For Agatha, prompt to ridicule sentimentality in her companions, and gifted with an infectious spirit of farce, secretly turned for imaginative luxury to visions of despair and death; and often endured the mortification of the successful clown who believes, whilst the public roar with laughter at him, that he was born a tragedian. There was much in her nature, she felt, that did not find expression in her popular representation of ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... turgid and unnatural. Nature is never more truly herself than in her grandest form. The Apollo of Belvedere (if the universal robber has yet left him at Belvedere) is as much in nature as any figure from the pencil of Rembrandt, or any clown in the rustic revels of Teniers. Indeed, it is when a great nation is in great difficulties that minds must exalt themselves to the occasion, or all is lost. Strong passion, under the direction of a feeble reason, feeds a low fever, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... took to his revels once more; On down, In town, Like a merry-mad clown, He leaped and hallooed with whistle and roar— "What's that?" The glimmering ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... to each either profit or amusement; the peasants find in them a refreshing and salutary rest from toil, the tradesman fails not to fill his pockets with their hard earnings, the clown shows off his summersets, the young men are touched with the tender passion, and the young girls, with their white teeth and sparkling eyes, await with feigned indifference the proposals of their admirers. The village ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... of women's rights confined themselves to the exhibition of short petticoats and long-legged boots, and to the holding of conventions and speech-making in concert rooms, the people were disposed to be amused by them, as they are by the wit of the clown in the circus, or the performances of Punch and Judy on fair days, or the minstrelsy of gentlemen with blackened faces, on banjos, the tambourine, and bones. But the joke is becoming stale. People are getting cloyed with these performances, and are ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... a hunchback, who is present as a familiar clown or merrymaker, and dances and laughs to please the company, at the same time snapping his fingers. Two other illustrations of this action, the middle finger in one leaving and in the other having left the thumb and passed to its base, are seen ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... words may seem cold; but there, before the whole Chamber, that man's defence seemed to be instinct with an eloquent and imposing serenity, which aroused astonishment at first, coming from that clown, that upstart, unread, uneducated, with his Rhone boatman's voice and his street porter's bearing, and afterward moved his auditors strangely by its unrefined, uncivilized character, utterly at variance with all parliamentary traditions. Already tokens ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... own apartment, I had been arraying myself as Boum-Boum and modestly admiring the imitation I made of a circus clown as I did a couple of comedy steps ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... many accounts of the flying clown, in books, nearly all of which refer to him as bull-bat or nighthawk, and a member of the Goatsucker or Nightjar family. But he wasn't a bull and he wasn't a bat and he wasn't a hawk and he wasn't a jar; and he flew more by day than by night, and he never, never milked a goat in all his life. ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... took her to her first theater—it was Sanger's Circus—and the clown pretended to fall from the tightrope, and the drum went bang! she said: "Take me away! take me away! you ought never to have brought me here!" No wonder she was considered a dour child! ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... when I was a reveryin'—right there, when we wuz a floatin' clown the still waters, their voices riz up in one of their inspired songs. They sung about their "Hard Trials," and how the "Sweet Chariot swung low," and ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... yourself, you beggarly wretch!" replied Anastasia, showing her teeth. "You are a low-bred fellow. Alfred, your boot-tree, till I take the length of his muzzle, to teach him to come and play the Joe Miller at his age, old clown!" ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... my Lord Darnley's life lay in the fact that he was a man born out of his proper station—a clown destined to kingship by the accident of birth and fortune. By the blood royal flowing in his veins, he could, failing others, have claimed succession to both the English and the Scottish thrones, whilst by his marriage with Mary Stuart he made a definite ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... foreground. The band rode in it, far more fortunate than our local band whose best was, Charley Wells's depot 'bus. And nobler than all his fellows was the bass-drummer. He had a canopy over him, a carved and golden canopy, on whose top revolved a clown's head with its tongue stuck out. On each quarter of this rococo shallop a golden circus-girl in short skirts gaily skipped rope with a nubia or fascinator, or whatever it is the women call the thing they ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... feet to about 1200 feet in four gigantic loops, and, as one writer said: "He was doing exactly what the clown in the pantomime does when he climbs to the top of a staircase and rolls deliberately over and over until he reaches the ground. But this funny man stopped before he reached the ground, and took his last flight as gracefully as a Columbine ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... and gave the necessary orders. He lost no time about it, but returned panting, and lay down in a hollow behind us with cartridges in either fist and a grin on his face that would have done credit to a circus clown. I never, anywhere, saw any one more pleased than Kazimoto at the ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... men, and the Bounding Brothers of Borneo, and a clown and monkeys, and a little mite of a pony with blue eyes. Was he any of them?" answered ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... one thing more extraordinary than all, that is that Shakespeare is a genius. The Italians, the French, the men of letters of all other countries, who have not spent some time in England, take him only for a clown, for a joker far inferior to Harlequin, for the most contemptible buffoon who has ever amused the populace. Nevertheless, it is in this same man that one finds pieces which exalt the imagination and which stir the heart to its depths. It is Truth, it ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... accident," went on the former army man. "We were making a landing, but we did not intend to come clown just in that spot. We are sorry the tree is broken, but accidents will ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... 'Clown! loafer! puff-ball! Leave my house instantly, and never enter it again until you have apologized to Mrs. Crawford and her grandson for the insult offered them by your vile accusations. If it were not for soiling my hands, I would throw you down the steps,' he continued, as he stood holding ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... their nests, with no other tools than those with which nature has provided them. In cultivating the ground, also, man can do nothing without a spade or a plow; nor can he reap what he has sown till he has shaped an implement with which to cut clown his harvest. But the inferior animals provide for themselves and their young ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... make a simultaneous advance, we and the French on our right," he wrote in one place. "Our sector will bear the brunt of it. The thing has been kept wonderfully quiet, and so far the enemy knows nothing. All their attention is turned on the 'Clown' Prince's insane operations against Verdun, and the German General Staff seem to have forgotten the Somme region altogether, and to underrate the British as usual. But there will be ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... they were pale and woe- begone. The troopers at the lower table were noisy and rude enough, and Ranulph suspected that his entertainment had been ordered partly to keep them from getting out of hand with drinking and rioting. He had contrived a clown's costume from some of his belongings, aided by a little flour and paint, and a bauble made of a toasting fork stuck through an apple. When he pranced into the hall the soldiers yelled with surprise and delight. Behind him at a discreet ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... fellow-feeling to me, both as a brother and a medicus, that made him declare me on the point of death when I was still as lusty as a false credo. For the rest, I had sufficient science to hold in my breath while the clown tied me with cords, else had I been too straitened to breathe. But thou needest a biscuit ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... their sufferings to be greater merely on this account. They were often abused and beaten by others, and sometimes put in danger of their lives. It was a common question put to a Quaker in those days, who addressed a great man in this new and simple manner, "why you ill bred clown do you thou me?" The rich and mighty of those times thought themselves degraded by this mode of address, as reducing them from a plural magnitude to a singular, or individual, or simple station in life. "The use ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... powers of life, cannot be denied. Fear produces debility, which has a tendency to death. Sound obviates this debility, and restores to the system its natural degree of excitement. The schoolboy and the clown invigorate their trembling limbs, by whistling, or singing, as they pass by a country churchyard, and the soldier feels his departing courage recalled in the onset of a battle, by ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... He asked to be allowed to see the patient, but Merril wouldn't let him go into the room. I thought he behaved to the captain like a clown.' ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... made a pitch on the greensward opposite to the theatre we had seceded from. Spencer, I ought to mention here, was "the great man of strength;" Buckley, the "marvellous jumper;" while I myself filled a double role—being both the "clown" and "cashier" of the establishment. The latter is generally a safe post to hold. Spencer would willingly allow a stone to be broken on his chest with a sledge hammer, bend bars of iron across his arm, and the like; and ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... and chuckles, his one aim To get a laugh by keeping up the game, Lends him seven hundred, gives him out of hand Seven more, and leads him on to buy some land. 'Tis bought: to make a lengthy tale concise, The man becomes a clown who once was nice, Talks all of elms and vineyards, ploughs and soil, And ages fast with struggling and sheer toil; Till, when his sheep are stolen, his bullock drops, His goats die off, a blight destroys ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... fiat-nosed, was a cant word, used for a clown; Galba being jeered for his rusticity, in consequence of his long retirement. See c. viii. Indeed, they ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... suspicion, and debate; Peace, tim'rous goddess! quits her old domain, In sentiment and song content to reign. Nor are the nymphs that breathe the rural air So fair as Cynthia's, nor so chaste as fair: These to the town afford each fresher face, And the clown's trull receives the peer's embrace; From whom, should chance again convey her down, The peer's disease in turn attacks the clown. Here too the 'squire, or 'squire-like farmer, talk, How round their regions ...
— The Village and The Newspaper • George Crabbe
... not stained the house of God with wholesale massacre? What altar and what hearthstone had they not profaned? What fatigue, what danger, what crime, had ever checked them for a moment? And for all this obedience, labor, and bloodshed, were they not even to be paid such wages as the commonest clown, who only tore the earth at home, received? Did Philip believe that a few thousand Spaniards were to execute his sentence of death against three millions of Netherlanders, and be cheated of their ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... parenthesis. Brown was the man Preferred of all others to carry her fan, Hook her glove, drape her shawl, and do all that a belle May demand of the lover she wants to treat well. Folks wondered and stared that a fellow called Brown— Abstracted and solemn, in manner a clown, Ill dressed, with a lingering smell of the shop— Should appear as her escort at party or hop. Some swore he had cooked up some villanous charm, Or love philter, not in the regular Pharm— Acopea, and thus, from pure malis prepense, Had bewitched and bamboozled the young ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... concealed. The ass and the devil were favorite characters. The former sometimes appeared in monkish garb and brayed responses to the intonations of the priests, while the latter, arrayed in fantastic costumes, seems to have been the prototype of clown in the pantomime. As late as 1783 the buffoonery of this kind of exhibition continued. An English traveller, describing a mystery called the "Creation" which he saw at Bamberg ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... from shining or change its colour and its radiance than Joshua could stop the sun and moon. [Laughs savagely.] Why, a real fairy in an elfin cloak strayed too near the lamp an hour or two ago; and it turned him into a common society clown ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton
... of Shakespeare's time, a fellow of brilliant parts, but eccentric, and, we must suppose, lacking in balance and common sense. We are told that one winter Lord Chandos's players visited Evesham, and Jack Miller, our Fool, became greatly attached to the company and in particular to Grumball the clown; indeed, so greatly was he enamoured that he "swore he would goe all the world over with Grumball." The townspeople being loth to lose so popular a character, Jack was locked in a room at the back of the White Hart Inn from which he could ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... Which flowed in such true salt, that we did doubt In which Scene we laught most two shillings out. Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lyes I'th Ladies questions, and the Fooles replyes; Old fashioned wit, which walkt from town to town In turn'd Hose, which our fathers call'd the Clown; Whose wit our nice times would obsceannesse call, And which made Bawdry passe for Comicall: Nature was all his Art, thy veine was free As his, but without his scurility; From whom mirth came unforced, no jest perplext, But without labour cleane, chast, and unvext. ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher
... that's what makes him funny, I suppose—his curious infatuation. I set him off—what do you call it?—show him off: by his going round and round me as the acrobat on the horse in the circus goes round the clown. He has said a great deal to me of your ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... terrible; he would not allow himself to think of it. He turned away, went back up the chamber, and crossed over again to the air-way. Moving back a little to search for foot-prints, he came to an old door-way and sat clown by it to rest—yes, and to weep. He could no longer think of the torture the child must have endured in his wanderings through the old mine and keep the tears from his eyes. He almost hoped that death had long ago come ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... was of Italian origin and contained four stock characters, Pappus the old man or pantaloon, Dossennus the wise man, corresponding to the dottore of modern Italian popular comedy, Bucco the clown, and Maccus the fool. It dealt with every kind of theme, parodied the legends of the gods, laughed at the provincial's manners or at the inhabitants of Italian country towns, or depicted in broad comic style ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... which we relegate sometimes to an inferior place in our estimates. These things make but a poor show by the side of some of the tawdry splendours of what the vulgar world calls virtues. It requires an educated eye to see the harmony of the sober colouring of some great painter. A child, a clown, a vulgar person—and there are such in all ranks—will prefer flaring reds and blues and yellows heaped together in staring contrast. A thrush or a blackbird is but a soberly clad creature by the side of macaws and paroquets; but the one ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... earn some money?" So Mitch's pa made up a lot of pop-corn balls and we sold 'em on the street and got money that way to see the show. It was the most beautiful circus in the world—such lovely ladies, and a clown who sang "Never Take ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... who lived in the Forest, like Robin Hood, you know, with a lot of people who were fond of him. He had a daughter, named Rosalind, and after a while she was banished too and went to look for her father in the Forest. Her cousin Celia and a funny clown, Touchstone, went with her, and they were all disguised. And—well, there is a great deal more to it—but they were all cheerful and brave—everybody is in the Forest of Arden, because they are sure there is good in everything if you only try ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... Samson symbolical! Come and see Slivers, Clown really comical! Come and see Zip, the foremost of freaks! Come and see Palestine's Sinister Sheiks! Eager Equestriennes, each unexcelled, Most mammoth menagerie ever beheld, The Giant, the Fat Girl, the Lion-faced Man, Aerial Artists ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... for a country that has had thirty-eight years of compulsory education. If our War Office wishes to rouse patriotic feeling, it should cease to contrast "the dull labour of the fields" with "the soft calm of Malta": the veriest clown would not be caught by such chaff. It would be more to the point to send gratuitous copies of The Barrack Room Ballads ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... behind the screen when their dance was finished. Thus one pair would follow another till the play was over. Besides the actors who played the serious and solemn part of the dead, there was usually a clown who skipped about and cut capers, tumbling down and getting up again, to make the spectators laugh and so to relieve the strain on their emotions, which were deeply stirred by this dance of death. The beat of the drums proclaimed that the sacred drama was at an ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... darkies, I remember but two other bits of amusement we had while at Florence. One of these was in hearing the colored soldiers sing patriotic songs, which they did with great gusto when the weather became mild. The other was the antics of a circus clown—a member, I believe, of a Connecticut or a New York regiment, who, on the rare occasions when we were feeling not exactly well so much as simply better than we had been, would give us an hour or two of recitations of the drolleries with which ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... companies and public-house keepers); or else—and more strictly I believe in etymology—a form of the German 'leute,' 'common people.' In either case, its proper classical English sense is given by Johnson as "a mean, awkward fellow; a bumpkin, a clown." ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... I was well again, and began to play the clown, imitating my own behavior in order to deceive the people ashore. And I assured Eilert, too, that this was the first time I had ever been seasick, so that he should understand it was nothing to gossip about. After all, he had not heard about the great seas I had sailed without the slightest ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... he proved to be a clown belonging to Bisset's habitation. His panic and surprise on seeing me made him aghast. In my present garb I should not have easily been recognised by my nearest kinsman, and much less easily by one who had ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... as he pointed, both forward and down, And he saw that Right Royal was smeared like a clown, Smeared red and bespattered with flecks of bright blood, From a blood-vessel burst, as ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... is one," continued Miss Petrie, "which has been common on the face of the earth since the clown first trod upon the courtier's heels. It is the instinct of fallen man to hate equality, to desire ascendancy, to crush, to oppress, to tyrannise, to enslave. Then, when the slave is at last free, and in his freedom demands—equality, man is not great enough to take ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... sad-looking little girl, painted by WILLIAM CARTER. She has an unsettled expression. Is she suffering from what the Clown calls "teezy-weezies-in-the-pandenoodles," and, as Sir JOHN MILLAIS'S "Bubbles" served P**RS for an advertisement, is it beyond the range of probability that this, being associated with the name of "CARTER," should be intended as a pictorial advertisement for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various
... refer the unlife-like appearances to inability—for all the rest of Maelzel's automata are evidence of his full ability to copy the motions and peculiarities of life with the most wonderful exactitude. The rope-dancers, for example, are inimitable. When the clown laughs, his lips, his eyes, his eye-brows, and eyelids—indeed, all the features of his countenance—are imbued with their appropriate expressions. In both him and his companion, every gesture is so entirely easy, and free from the semblance ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... here; and we are surprised to find many writers looking upon this "Cogito, ergo sum" as constituting the great idea in his system. Surely it is only a statement of universal experience—an epigrammatic form given to the common-sense view of the matter. Any clown would have told him that the assurance of his existence was his consciousness of it; but the clown would not have stated it so well. He would have said, "I know I exist, because I feel ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... a very small boy back before the war, a circus came to town. I remember the clown, whose name was Gullins. My father, John Mappin, was so much like the clown in his ways and sayings, that afterwards everyone started calling him Gullins. This soon became a sort of nickname. Some years after when slaves were freed, ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... brought up above the Third Cataract, don't you? and eighty-one-ton guns at Jakdul? Now, I'm quite satisfied with my breeches.' He turned round gravely to exhibit himself, after the manner of a clown. ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... happy ... but how does one know one is happy? I suspect my happiness. It is a clown's suit in which my mourning disguises itself. Mallare has fallen out of his black heaven. And he picks himself up like a good burgher. He grunts and chuckles and looks at the skies, alas, without curiosity. Lucifer, fallen, finds diversion as a janitor in red tights. Ergo, I have ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... night upon heads which they were never coined for," his domestics reaping the benefit of that hoard of injurious language which he could not in decency bestow on his royal guest, even in his absence, and which was yet become too great to be altogether suppressed. The jests of the clown had some effect in tranquillizing the Duke's angry mood—he laughed loudly, threw the jester a piece of gold, caused himself to be disrobed in tranquillity, swallowed a deep cup of wine and spices, went to bed, and ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... to be reconciled to that clown! Never! It shall not be, it shall not be!" Ivan Ivanovitch was in a remarkably determined ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... jump and turned half around, sitting in the same place but with the other side of its body facing them. Instead of being black, it was now pure white, with a face like that of a clown in a circus and hair of a brilliant purple. The creature could bend either way, and its white toes now curled the same way the black ones on ...
— The Road to Oz • L. Frank Baum
... childish curiosity. All their faces were singularly white and many were streaked and gouted with red. Something in this— something too, perhaps, in their grotesque attitudes and movements— reminded him of the painted clown whom he had seen last summer in the circus, and he laughed as he watched them. But on and ever on they crept, these maimed and bleeding men, as heedless as he of the dramatic contrast between his laughter and their ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... place: at the second, the card-players left off their games: at the third, those who bawled apples and ale and shouted the name of the new book became silent: the audience settled down: the Play began. Not much costume was wanted: that of the Elizabethan—noble—courtier—young knight—clown—fitted any and every age. There was little scenery required: blue hangings above meant day: black hangings night: the actors came out upon the advanced stage and played their parts. No doubt the illusion was as complete as ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... see how he can," said Alexia, drawing a long breath. "Dear me, it would just tire me to death. Why, Polly Pepper!" Alexia threw clown her pen and stared at her. "When is the first ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney
... curtsy instead of crying, and while Dandie, in his rough way, was encouraging them both, old Pleydell had recourse to his snuff-box. 'It's meat and drink to me now, Colonel,' he said, as he recovered himself, 'to see a clown like this. I must gratify him in his own way, must assist him to ruin himself; there's no help for it. Here, you Liddesdale—Dandie—Charlie's Hope—what do ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... you I am called Lord Fermain Clancharlie, but my real name is one of poverty—Gwynplaine. I have grown up in poverty; frozen by winter, and made wretched by hunger. Yesterday I was in the rags of a clown. Can you realise what misery means? Before it is too late try and understand that our system of society is ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Harlequin, in the Italian comedy, appears to have originated in the role of the zanni, or clown, which comprised several varieties, such as Scapino, Coviello, etc. The costume of the part, whether the zanni represented a stupid lout or a bright and resourceful valet, consisted of a loose jacket, very full trousers, a small cape, a broad-brimmed ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... "no room for mirth;" Much less for sigh and frown. "A vale of tears" may be this earth— 'Tis so to every clown. The desert blossoms as the rose, And joy flows everywhere; The star of hope in brightness glows, No room ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... no one in the department but us toys," said a Calico Clown, and he banged together some shiny cymbals on the ends of his arms. "The Jack is right—we are all ...
— The Story of a Lamb on Wheels • Laura Lee Hope
... lubricity, are so many harmless satires on the weak sides of our nature. The pen of the satirist is as effective as the pencil of the artist; and provided it draw well, cannot fail to prove as attractive. Indeed, the characters of pantomime, harlequin, columbine, clown, and pantaloon, make up the best quarto that has ever appeared on the manners and follies of the times; and they may be turned to as grave an account as any page of Seneca's Morals, or Cicero's Disputations; however various the means, the end, or object, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 358 - Vol. XIII, No. 358., Saturday, February 28, 1829 • Various
... This commonplace sequence and flowing on of life is immeasurably affecting. That winter morning when Charles lost his head in front of the banqueting-hall of his own palace, the icicles hung from the eaves of the houses here, and the clown kicked the snowballs from his clouted shoon, and thought but of his supper when, at three o'clock, the red sun set in the purple mist. On that Sunday in June while Waterloo was going on, the gossips, after morning service, stood on the country roads discussing ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... are often guilty of the same," said William, "forgetting how many angels they entertain unawares. Did ever a mortal man look more of the rustic clown than the country boy, Sam Johnson, when he first went to London? And could he not ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... in some instances wants the graver;—but it is the diamond. Nature seems now and then to have taken a princess's child and dropped it in some odd corner of the kingdom, while she has left the clown in the palace." ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... discussed you at full length—that day last week. We chronicled your vices, your weaknesses, your meannesses in detail. One thing I might have told him, which I left out—the fact that you are no gentleman, not even bourgeois—a mere peasant clown. He would not have let you measure swords with him if he had known the baseness ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... good and loud," said the impersonator, who was dressed in a funny clown suit. "Sing your best, so all the people will like the show that Bunny and ...
— Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue Giving a Show • Laura Lee Hope
... perhaps hundreds of years ago. It was sheer essential elemental horse-play straight from Bartholomew Fair, and the audience received it with rapture that was vouchsafed to nothing else. The story would be too long to tell; but briefly, it was a dumb show representation of the visit of a guest (the clown) to a wife, unknown to her husband. The scenery consisted of a table, a large chest, a heap of straw and a huge barrel. The fun consisted in the clown, armed with a bladder on a string, hiding in the barrel, from ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... amazing. To hear him tell a ghost story with a very florid imitation of a very pallid ghost, or hear him sing an old-time stage song, such as he used to enjoy in his youth at a cheap London theatre, to see him imitate a lion in a menagerie-cage, or the clown in a pantomime when he flops and folds himself up like a jack-knife, or to join with him in some mirthful game of his own composing, was to become acquainted with one of the most delightful and original companions ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... Mas' Don! This here's what I once heard a clown say, 'It's dangerous to be safe.' I say, figgerhead, arn't ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... perpetually tempting me to laugh at him, pray, dearest Darsie, let not thy ardour for adventure carry thee into more such scrapes as that of the Solway Sands. The rest of the story is a mere imagination; but that stormy evening might have proved, as the clown says to Lear, 'a naughty night to ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... and looked upon the woman to me as if I could help him in the difficulty; but I must have seemed a clown in the very abjection of my ignorance of what all this mystery was about He searched my face and I searched my memory, and then I recollected that he had told me before of Mistress Brown's suspicions of ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... had heard a street preacher declaim against it, and warn young women of the serpent-like wiles of tempters of the Stratton variety. But even now Jack failed to recognize Stratton as a serpent, or indeed anything but a blundering cheat and clown, who had left his dirty 'prentice work on his (Jack's) hands. But the girl was helpless and, it seemed, homeless, all through a certain desperation of feeling which, in spite of her tears, he could not but respect. That momentary ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... such strange and attractive shapes as to puzzle and bewilder even those who were familiar with the queer manifestations. Every settlement had its peculiarities, and every neighborhood boasted of its humorist,—its clown, whose pranks and jests were limited by no license. Out of this has grown a literature which, in some of its characteristics, is not matched elsewhere on the globe; but that which has been preserved by printing is not comparable, either in volume or merit, with the great body ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... as well say that your last bill is at the Banker's, and will be honored on the instant receipt of the third Piece, which you have stipulated for. If you have any such in readiness, strike while the iron is hot, before the Clown cools. Tell Mrs. Kenney, that the Miss F.H. (or H.F.) Kelly, who has begun so splendidly in Juliet, is the identical little Fanny Kelly who used to play on their green before their great Lying-Inn Lodgings at Bayswater. Her career has stopt short by the injudicious bringing ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... frock coat that showed a faint green where the light fell on the shoulders, and a tall silk hat that had grown old with the wearer. But for his nose he might have been an undertaker. It was an impossible nose, the shape and size of a potato, and the colour of pickled cabbage—the nose for a clown in the Carnival of Venice. Its marvellous shape was none of Dad's choosing, but the colour was his own, laid on by years of patient drinking as a man colours a favourite pipe. Years ago, when he was a bank manager, his heart had ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... were he a woman of pleasure, he would as soon grant favours to a Westphalian hog, as to the person of his antagonist. The German, enraged at this comparison, was quite abandoned by his patience and discretion. He called the knight an English clown, and, swearing he was the most untoward beast of a whole nation of mules, snatched up one of the candlesticks, which he launched at him with such force and violence, that it sung through the air, and, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... the females who could not go. They all reached the meadow-grass; and the monkeys climbed up the tual-tree that stood in the centre of the field, until all the branches were full of monkeys. The birds and the jungle-fowl flew up in the tree; but the deer and the other animals waited clown on the ground. ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... dim and dreamlike bewilderment, Victor de Mauleon found himself without the walls of the convent. Mechanically, as a man does when the routine of his life is presented to him, from the first Minister of State to the poor clown at a suburban theatre, doomed to appear at their posts, to prose on a Beer Bill, or grin through a horse-collar, though their hearts are bleeding at every pore with some household or secret affliction,—mechanically De Mauldon went his way towards the ramparts, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Jaques, it will be remembered, after hearing the "motley fool" moral on the time, declared that "motley's the only wear"; and I opine that Lamb would consider it no small praise to be likened, in wit, wisdom, and eloquence, to Touchstone, or to the Clown in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... gilded, rubb'd and polish'd: But read 'em, and you wish abolish'd The privilege to make or sell 'em. You read them, and the man is quite Another man: no more polite— No more "the man about the town," But metamorphosed to a clown— Milker of goats, a hedger, digger, So thoroughly is changed his figure, So quite unlike himself. 'Tis odd, Most strange, the man for wit so noted, Whose repartees so much were quoted, Is changed into a very clod! And stranger still—he never seems Quite to himself ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... consequence of the difficulties Cuthbert Burbage was having with Gyles Alleyn over the Theatre property. During the stay of the Chamberlain's Company, which numbered among its members William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, William Kempe (who had succeeded Tarleton in popular favor as a clown), John Heminges, Thomas Pope, and Augustine Phillips, the playhouse probably attained its greatest distinction. Both Shakespeare and Jonson wrote plays for the troupe; Romeo and Juliet, we are told, "won Curtain plaudities," as no doubt did many other of Shakespeare's ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... partnerships." He added that in his opinion earned income above a certain figure might reasonably be added to this category on the ground that it has, in some instances, very much the same characteristics as unearned; the income of a "successful professional man or clown or jockey or opera star" being due to peculiar qualities; "and it would be no great hardship if earned income above, say, a thousand a year for a married couple, with an additional three hundred for every child under twenty-five years of age were regarded as unearned, and taxed accordingly." Income ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... flies through the panel of a door, inscribed "cutting-out room," into the next house, a florist's, there to obtain his favourite flower, the Columbine, with whom he has a long dance in the centre of a very solitary street; whilst Clown and Pantaloon arrange a partnership concern, which they carry on in the middle of the road, in front of the shop, until Clown renders himself more plague than profit, by warming his partner's lumbar region with a very red-hot ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... me!" cried the monkey. Then he gave a great big, long, strong and double-jointed jump, like a circus clown going over the backs of fourteen elephants, and part of another one, and the monkey grabbed Uncle Wiggily by ...
— Uncle Wiggily in the Woods • Howard R. Garis
... Rousseau, naturalist as he was, could hardly tell one berry from another, and three of our greatest wits disputing in the field whether the crop growing there was rye, barley, or oats, were set right by a clown, who truly pronounced ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... upon it, but the position is superb. The castle windows look clown upon the Nore, spanned by a narrow ancient bridge, and command, not only all that is worth seeing in the town, but a wide and glorious prospect over a region which is even now beautiful, and in summer ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... the immediate effect, whether directly or indirectly, is such as has been described. But, to reduce this to a common-sense view, it is only saying,—what no one will deny,—that a man of education and refinement has not only more, but higher, pleasures of the mind than a mere clown. ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... fancied, that the others had missed. It occurred one night after he had told a story and was waiting for the laugh to subside. Soon a strange, weary expression crept over his face—the same look that comes into the face of a clown who has been hurt in a tumble and who, while wrestling with the pain, still keeps his face a-grin. Suddenly, from out of his merry, smooth-shaven face, there came a flash from his eyes so searching, so keen, so suspicious, so entirely unlike the man we knew, so foreign to ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... in the door of my house, when I marked a person passing close to the edge of the bank that was in front. His pace was a careless and lingering one, and had none of that gracefulness and ease which distinguish a person with certain advantages of education from a clown. His gait was rustic and awkward. His form was ungainly and disproportioned. Shoulders broad and square, breast sunken, his head drooping, his body of uniform breadth, supported by long and lank ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... and dusty. Yet but a few days, Bob, and flakes of paint will have cracked off the fairy flower-bowers, and the revolving temples of adamantine lustre will be as shabby as the city of Pekin. When you read this, will Clown still be going on lolling his tongue out of his month, and saying, "How are you to-morrow?" Tomorrow, indeed! He must be almost ashamed of himself (if that cheek is still capable of the blush of shame) for asking ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and pantaloons. The law-breaking of my companion seemed not only seriously excusable, but even comically excusable. Who were all these pompous preposterous people with their footmen and their foot-scrapers, their chimney-pots and their chimney-pot hats, that they should prevent a poor clown from getting sausages if he wanted them? One would suppose that property was a serious thing. I had reached, as it were, a higher level of that mountainous and vapourous visions, the ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... good darling! Do tell! Pity we didn't marry you to some circus clown. Shame on you; there's some kind of folly in you; you whisper right under your mother's ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... said, "He goes a-tumbling through the hollow And trackless empyrean like a clown, Head pointed to the earth where weaklings wallow, Feet up toward the stars; not such renown Even our lord himself, the bright Apollo, Gets in his gilded car. For one bob down You shall behold the thing." "Right-o," ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various
... debacle. When the two appeared, he started involuntarily. He had been prepared for violence, he had expected tears.... The vision of a blubbering idiot, that mowed and mumbled, its wig awry, its dreadful face blotched, like a clown's, with paint, swaddled from head to toe in gorgeous furs, leaning desperately upon the very reed it had broken—this was unearthly, hellish. He found himself praying that it might not visit him ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... plundered and damaged, but not demolished. The following clay was Sunday, but it was no day of rest for the rioters, except those who were too drunk to move; they went into the country, it is true, but it was only to destroy chapels, and to plunder, and burn clown houses. On this day, however, their work of destruction was stopped. By the evening of the day, probably not finding sufficient drink in the cellars of the Dissenters, they had begun to break open ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... leave of the young lady, who made him rich presents. Margutte, seeing this, and being always drunk and impudent, daubed his face like a Christmas clown, and making up to her with a frying-pan in his hand, demanded "something for the cook." The fair hostess gave him a jewel; and the vagabond skewed such a brutal eagerness in seizing it with his filthy hands, and making not the least acknowledgment, that when they got out ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... o' yon' crag, I view yon' smooky town, Where forten she has deigned to smile On monny a simple clown: Though free fra want, they're free fra brains; An' yet no happier I ween, Than this old farmer's wife an' hens, ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... performances of circuses and menageries. Between acts the extravaganzaist in cork and wool would appear, and to the song of "Coal-Black Rose," or "Jim along Joe," or "Sittin' on a Rail," command, with the clown and monkey, full share of admiration in the arena. At first he performed solus, and to the accompaniment of the "show" band; but the school was progressive; couples presently appeared, and, dispensing with the aid of foreign instruments, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... Sleary, who was troubled with asthma, and whose breath came far too thick and heavy for the letter s, 'Your thervant! Thith ith a bad piethe of bithnith, thith ith. You've heard of my Clown and hith dog being thuppothed ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... entered into the services as seriously as the strange gymnastic performances of the preacher would allow of my doing; for he was quite as amusing as a circus clown. ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... votaries have had the hypocritical effrontery to cloak their conduct under the plea of religious zeal. The movement has at bottom everywhere been a hunt after Jewish treasure, embittered by the hatred of the clown for the successful trader, of the individualist native for an alien, clannish, and successful community. In Russia religious motives may possibly have weighed with the Czar and the more ignorant and bigoted of the peasantry; but ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... printed it as a sort of motto to his beautiful poetic play (1902), Such Is Life. However, the truth is that our poet is often disconcerting. His swift transition from mood to mood disturbs the spectator, especially when one mood is lofty, the next shocking. He has also been called "the clown of the German stage," and not without reason, for his mental acrobatics, his grand and lofty tumblings from sheer transcendentalism to the raw realism, his elliptical style, are incomprehensible ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... pictured him gradually losing hope, and wearing his heart out in the bitterness of deferred ambition as he walked gloomily through life, with the stamp of failure on his brow. The picture was a pathetic one, you must admit, worthy to take its place on the line with the well-known fancy sketch of the Clown who, after making the masses split their sides, goes home to a private life of penury ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... repeatedly visited the continent, bringing with them the repertory of the Elizabethan theatre. From those actors Ayrer learned how to enliven his dramas with sensational incidents and spectacular effects, and from them he borrowed the character of the clown. His plays, however, are in spite of his foreign models, hardly more dramatic, in the true sense of the word, than those of Hans Sachs, and they are inferior to the latter in poetic qualities. The plots of two of his comedies, Von der schoenen Phoenicia and Von der schoenen Sidea, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... the next moment, revealing the spectacle on stage and floor in all its tinsel magnificence—snow-nymphs, polar-bears, all capering madly until an unearthly shriek heralded the coming of a favorite clown, who tumbled all the way down the stage steps and continued hysterically turning flip-flaps, cart-wheels, and somersaults until he landed with a crash at the ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... spirit consists in sneering and looking down with contempt at the mother and nurse; that is, at the purely republican, purely democratic political institutions, at the broad political and intellectual freedom to which those clown-aristocrats owe their rearing, their little bit of information, and those shoulder-stripes by which ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... one generation, are dispersed in the next. If it takes three generations to make a gentleman one will not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity for instruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trained intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer and a soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of race and pedigree in a race horse and a bird dog how dare you deny it in ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... processions were started, separating at the bottom of the Cattle Market. The head of the Hanbridge part of the procession consisted of an enormous car of Jupiter, with six wheels and thirty-six paregorical figures (as the clown used to say), and drawn by six piebald steeds guided by white reins. This coach had a windowed interior (at the greater fairs it sometimes served as a box-office) and in the interior one of the delegates of the Signal had fixed himself; from it he directed the paths ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... inhabited the earth. Such an aggregation of actual, living Silurian monsters, any one of which would make a man a fortune to-day, if it could be kept on ice and exhibited for one season only. You could take a full grown mastodon to-day, and with no calliope, no lithographs, no bearded lady, no clown with four pillows in his pantaloons and no iron-jawed woman, you could go across this continent and successfully compete with the ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... A Clown, who had lost his Mare, To his Neighbour, a Wit, did repair, And begg'd him with him to go To the famous Doctor Foreknow, A Conjurer powerful and strong, Who would tell who had done the Wrong. So when ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... pitching headlong to their final catastrophe; others, raising their youthful forms to begin the drama of existence. The world of society is as full of exciting interest, as nature is full of beauty. The great dramatic throng of life is bustling along—the wise, the fool, the clown, the miser, the bereaved, the broken-hearted. Life mingles before us smiles and tears, sighs and laughter, joy and gloom, as the spring mingles the winter-storm and summer-sunshine. To this vast Theatre which ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
