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More "Farcical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... what one of our travel-writers emphatically terms his flag of abomination behind the chair of a woman of quality, without the slightest sensation of its impropriety. There is, however, a sort of odd farcical drollery mingled with this grossness, which tends greatly to disarm one's wrath; and I felt more inclined to laugh than be angry one day, when, from the head of my own table, I saw the servant of a nobleman who dined with us cramming some chicken pattes down his throat behind the door; our own ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... grotesque quiz of the "grand genre classique et heroique," and was almost the first of an order of entertainments which have gone on increasing in favor up to the present day of universally triumphant parody and burlesque, by no means as laughable and by no means as unobjectionable. Indeed, farcical to the broadest point as was that mythological travesty of "The Danaides," it was the essence of decency and propriety compared with "La grande Duchesse," "La belle Helene," "Orphee aux Enfers," "La Biche au Bois," "Le petit Faust," and all ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... improbably farcical, would please children here, as children are entertained with stories full of prodigies; their experience not being sufficient to cause them to be so readily startled at deviations from the natural course of life[58]. The machinery of the Pagans is uninteresting to us[59]: when ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... noted as a droll. A grin was as much a part of his stock apparel as tow breeches or a palm-leaf hat. The negro, too, had from time immemorial been portrayed upon the stage and in fiction as an irrepressible and inimitably farcical fellow. But the "Southern gentleman" was a man of different kidney from either of these. A sardonic dignity hedged him about with peculiar sacredness. He was chivalrous and baronial in his instincts, surroundings, and characteristics. He was nervous, excitable, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... novel Henry of Ofterdingen reaches a depth of obscurity which is saved from absurdity only by the genuinely fervent glow of a soul on the quest for its mystic ideals: "The blue flower it is that I yearn to look upon!" No farcical romance of the nursery shows more truly the mingled stuff that dreams are made on, yet the intimation that the dream is not all a dream, that the spirit of an older day is symbolically struggling for some expression in words, gave it in its day a serious ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... his hand with an impetuous gesture—"that considering all the abominable, farcical tricks women play nowadays, it is simply amazing to find one who is contented with a simple life like this, and who manages to make that simple ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... art, declaring no play should contain an effect, a line, a scene or an act which does not bear on the end in view by developing either the characters or the action. The entire second act, containing the farcical examination-scene, is useless. Robertson again sinned in this way in the Nightingale: although it had no effect on the plot, although it was entirely unnecessary, he introduced a pretty tableau representing the heroine, a lovely prima-donna, singing under the silver moonbeams ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... that she may end his career. Once started on the wrong tack, he works out his evidence with convincing logic, and ties up the whole neighbourhood in the toils of his misconception. The book is full of the wittiest dialogue and the most farcical situations. It will be as certain to please all lovers of Irish humour as the immortal "Experiences of an Irish ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... I have only taken some soup, and a couple of eggs, and drank nothing but water; my tongue is discolored; and without medicine and tonics, whatever my farcical doctor may say, my digestion will ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... "illustrations") of the poems which stirred their own tenderness or filial piety, and carry them to make their first acquaintance with great men, great works, or solemn crises through the medium of some miscellaneous burlesque which, with its idiotic puns and farcical attitudes, will remain among their primary associations, and reduce them throughout their time of studious preparation for life to the moral imbecility of an inward giggle at what might have stimulated their high emulation or fed the fountains ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... summer resident of Leith, who is said to be a millionaire many times over, and who had a somewhat farcical career as a legislator last winter, has announced himself as a candidate for the Republican nomination on a platform attacking the Northeastern Railroads. Mr. Humphrey Crewe declares that the Northeastern Railroads govern us. What if they do? Every ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... studies of boy life (especially Penrod), and of adolescence (especially Seventeen and Clarence). Judged by your own experience and observation, are they presented with true knowledge and humor, or are they a farcical skimming of surface eccentricities? Compare them with Mark Twain's books about boys ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... acquainted with the manners, tastes, sentiments, and general life of the nobility. Through him the poem was brought outwardly more into line with the literary ideals of the court circles. This shows itself chiefly in a negative way, namely, in the almost complete avoidance of the coarse language and farcical situations so common with the popular poet, the spielmann. Beyond this no violence is done to the simple form of the original. The style is still inornate and direct, facts still speak rather than words, and there is nothing approaching ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... A farcical comedy in 3 acts. By Ian Hay and Stephen King-Hall. Produced originally at the Times Square Theatre, New York. 9 males, 6 females. Modern costumes and naval ...
— The Ghost of Jerry Bundler • W. W. Jacobs and Charles Rock
... slightly farcical. Every tack you make lands you in a different port—with a woman waiting in every one of them." The first notes of the ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... sale things went for less than half their value. Pictures by Lawrence and Landseer, a library consisting of thousands of volumes, vases of exquisite workmanship, chandeliers of ormolu, and precious porcelains—all were knocked down relentlessly at farcical prices. Lady Blessington reserved nothing for herself. She knew that the hour had struck, and very soon she was on her way to Paris, whither Count d'Orsay had already gone, having been threatened with arrest by a boot-maker to whom he ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... coats who went in front of the trumpeters, prepared to clear the way if necessary (though a gust of shrewd wind would have blown them off their feet), by means of the long-poled halberts they carried; but this impression of the farcical was modified by the nature of the body whereof they were the pioneers or advance guard. Sleek magistrates and councillors in unaccustomed black suits and silver-buckled shoes, the provost ermined at their head, showed the way to the more actual, the ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... passion in Hamlet when there has been no love. And he had always held his uncle in slight esteem—foreboded something from his smiling insincerity. He never mentions him without an expression of contempt, hardly acknowledges him as king; he is a thing—of nothing—a farcical monarch—"a peacock"—and, in this particular act, no dread usurper, but a "cut-purse of the realm." Whether he designed to wait or was prepared to strike, his future was still intact, his energy unimpaired. His mother remained to him, now ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... public would find something humorous and attractive in the spectacle of a popular actress's leg swathed in several layers of stocking. So he made a show of Blanche Bates. The public refused to be amused at the farcical study in comparative anatomy, and when Mr. Belasco's friends began to fault him for having pandered to a low taste, and he felt the smart of failure in addition, he grew heartily ashamed of himself. His affairs, moreover, began to take on a desperate aspect; ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... that during Xavier's sojourn in Bungo he had numerous public debates—one continuing for five days—with Buddhist priests, but even Fernandez not being available as an interpreter, these debates must have been either farcical or imaginary, though brilliant results are claimed for them by the Church historians. That Xavier himself was not satisfied is proved by his determination to transfer his ministrations to China, for he said, "if the Chinese adopt ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... board. To-morrow they would descend upon her with their fussy attentions, their medical solemnities, their farcical search for something—for anything except the truth they wouldn't let her tell—to account for her nervous breakdown. But for a dozen hours she was, miraculously, to be let alone, with blessed open spaces round ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... to-day even as these who had won such clear title to his contempt, who stultified themselves with vain imaginings and the everlasting concoction of schemes whose sheer intrinsic puerility foredoomed them to farcical failure. ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... say, that Granaglia smiled: to him it was ludicrous. I laughed: to me it was farcical—the chatter of a bavard. The Pope become the patron of a secret society! The priests become our friends and allies! Very well, my friend; but listen. The little minds see what is absurd; the great minds are serious. Granaglia is a little ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... still in his hand, advanced to the bridge table. Strolling from player to player he made mental photographs of each hand, then took his stand behind Penny's chair to observe the horribly farcical playing of it. Poor little Penny! he reflected. She hadn't had a chance against that dumb-bell across the table from her. Fancy anyone's doubling a little slam bid on a hand like Carolyn Drake's—or even calling an informatory double in the first place! Why hadn't she bid four Clubs after Karen's ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... known as "the Murchison letter," did a great deal to impress thoughtless voters that Mr. Cleveland was "un-American." The incident was dramatic and farcical to a degree. The Murchison letter, which interested the entire country for two or three weeks, purported to come from a perplexed Englishman, addressing the British Minister at Washington, Lord Sackville-West. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... knew, meantime, that the spirit of good-will, the grace of universal sympathy, was really growing in the world, and that it was only our awkwardness that, by striving to cram it all for a year into twenty-four hours, made it seem a little farcical. And everybody knows that when goodness becomes fashionable, goodness is likely to suffer a little. A virtue overdone falls on t'other side. And a holiday that takes on such proportions that the Express companies and the Post-office cannot handle it is in danger of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to the fire, and with farcical reverence requested her to be seated on her throne—an empty color cask, for she suffered under the strange permanent delusion that she was the wife of the Mukaukas George. They laughingly did her homage, craved some favor or made enquiries as to her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... general company and addressed himself to the only person of ultimate importance—namely, Mrs. Cole. He lay down on all fours, looked up directly into her face, bared his teeth this time in a smile and not in a growl, and wagged his farcical tail. ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... Spalding responded for the American ball players in happy fashion, his remarks being greeted with generous applause on the part of the audience, after which we returned to our seats to witness an after-piece illustrating in farcical style the evils of Chinese immigration, and then, returning to the hotel, we were introduced to many of the leading business men of the city, remaining up until a ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... Tom's feats of marksmanship, though performed with what white men would despise as arms of precision, end seriously. Yet on one occasion the result was broadly farcical. He has a son, known to our little world as Jimmy, who, like his father, is given to occasional sulks, a luxury that even a black boy may become bloated on. Tom does not tolerate that frame of mind in others. The attentions ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... "The farcical comedy is over, Blanquette," said he gently, "I'm a Monsieur no longer, do you see? We are going to live just as we did before you went away in the summer, and I am not going to be married. I am ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... Christ, the divine tragedy, is the tragedy of the Cross. Pilate, the sceptic, the man of culture, by making a mockery of it, sought to convert it into a comedy; he conceived the farcical idea of the king with the reed sceptre and crown of thorns, and cried "Behold the man!" But the people, more human than he, the people that thirsts for tragedy, shouted, "Crucify him! crucify him!" ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... that it demands of all, of the officer certainly more than of the soldier, is impracticable before the enemy except under exceptional circumstances of picked officers, picked men, ground, distance, safety, etc. Even in maneuvers its execution is farcical. There is not an organization in which the soldiers do not hurry the command to fire in that the officers are so afraid that their men will anticipate the command that they give it as rapidly as possible, while the pieces are hardly ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... scene was that I witnessed to-night! how truly French! Spite of myself and all my melancholy musings, and all my philosophic allowances for the difference of national character, I was irresistibly compelled to smile at some of the farcical groups we encountered. In the most crowded parts of the Champs Elysees this evening (Sunday), there sat an old lady with a wrinkled yellow face and sharp features, dressed in flounced gown of dirty white ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... sang; and the English people principally appear in contemporary impressions as the singing people. They were evidently not only expansive but exaggerative; and perhaps it was not only in battle that they drew the long bow. That fine farcical imagery, which has descended to the comic songs and common speech of the English poor even to-day, had its happy infancy when England thus became a nation; though the modern poor, under the pressure of economic progress, ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... screech-owl. As for the railroads, I noticed that all the excellent Corsicans to whom I mentioned them, replied with cunning smiles, disconnected phrases, full of mystery; and not until this morning did I obtain the exceedingly farcical ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the "Taming of the Shrew." In the hands of a lesser author it would have lost its comedy and degenerated purely into farce, restricting itself to more ignoble aims and to a more indulgent public. For farce, after all, is farcical, and the mood for its appreciation is not one which is sympathetic to any great or moving thing. And in the hands of interpreters less than intelligently fine, the play may still descend into the lower class; but this cannot be done without degrading it beyond ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... exhibits not only a faithful copy of the spirited, loose, and flowing versification of that singular author, but a very just representation of that mixture of extravagance and jocularity which has impressed most of his writings with the character of a sort of farcical horror."—JEFFREY, Edinburgh Review. ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... discussions before the public are fatigued; and, the music sounding, the performers of the national dance appear, and take the place of the two advocates for a time. These combatants soon re-commence their struggle; and, at length, the judge is called upon to pronounce between them. A farcical kind of consultation ensues between the judge and the ministers around, who are supposed to send messengers even to the king himself by their ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... that they must take such pleasures as they may, in their waning years, he returns to the shades. The play ends with the undignified reappearance of Xerxes, and a melancholy procession into the palace of Susa. It was, perhaps, inevitable that this close of the great drama should verge on the farcical, and that the poltroonery of Xerxes should, in a measure, obscure Aeschylus' generous portraiture of Atossa and Darius. But his magnificent picture of the battle of Salamis is unequalled in the poetic annals of naval war. No account of the flight of the Armada, no record of Lepanto ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... sense; and she refused to be bandied from one to another. Both got upon their knees to her; and the upshot of the matter for that while was that she showed both of them the door. That was in August; dear me! the same year I came from college. The scene must have been highly farcical." ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which has been spent upon it, one-half of the wit of Aristophanes is altogether lost to the moderns. Nothing but the incredible acuteness and vivacity of the Athenian intellect could make it conceivable that these comedies which, with all their farcical drolleries, do, nevertheless, all the while bear upon the most grave interests of human life, could ever have formed a source of popular amusement. We may envy the poet who could reckon on so clever and accomplished a public; but this ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Europe burst into tears at a sarcastic remark of Beau Brummell's on the cut of his coat. Humour, Satire, Irony, pounce on it altogether as their common prey. The Comic spirit eyes but does not touch it. Put into action, it would be farcical. It is too ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... because the term had been popular ever since the struggle with Spain. As a designation for movements aimed at securing rotation in office, and hence control of the treasury, it was appropriate enough! At all events, whether serious or farcical, the commotions often involved an expenditure in life and money far beyond the value of the interests affected. Further, both the prevalent disorder and the centralization of authority impelled the educated and ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... period of my stay in England I was mixed up in a farcical comedy which I had to play out from start to finish. I happened to get acquainted with the widow of some departed high Anglo-Indian official. She was good enough to call me by the pet-name Ruby. Some ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... inasmuch as they held command over the lake for more than four months, during which time they could cooeperate with their army; while the Americans held it for barely two months and a half. In fact the conduct of the two fleets on Lake Ontario during the latter part of the war was almost farcical. As soon as one, by building, acquired the superiority, the foe at once retired to port, where he waited until he had built another vessel or two, when he came out, and the other went into port in turn. Under such circumstances it was hopeless ever to finish the contest ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... lies the horror of it all—that, how trepidation, playing ever mean and farcical my accusations may be, they are none the less TRUE. But I am ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... greater measure of success. Her former opponents had withdrawn their opposition and undertaken to lend her positive assistance to attain ends which were directed against themselves. This chapter of Entente diplomacy is marked by broad streaks of farcical comedy calculated to bewilder the serious student. France was converted to political orthodoxy on the subject of the Baghdad Railway and its cultural significance. Some of her publicists frankly repented that she had ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... pleasantly-amused interest in their fate. There is, of course, plenty of distinction in the writing. But I could have wished more or earlier movement. Even the motor-car, whose appearance promised a hint, the merest far-off possibility, of farcical developments, shared in the general lethargy and refused to move from its ditch. In spite, however, of this procrastination I wish it to be understood that the story is in some ways one of unusual charm; it has style, atmosphere and a very sensible ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... Rapidly planning farcical scenes for the syllables she carried her tired troupe to a vague appreciation of the final tableau for Ulrica. Shrouding the last syllable beyond recognition, she sent a messenger to the audience through the hall door of the saal to ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... taste, ever rare at Paris, was the happy portion of the genius of this Frenchman. Hence he delighted to try his farcical pieces, for we cannot imagine that they were his more elevated comedies, on his old maid-servant. This maid, probably, had a keen relish for comic humour, for once when Moliere read to her the comedy of another writer as his own, she soon detected the trick, declaring that ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... word and a malignant word, which I should abhor to use unless where, as in this case, I seek to rouse the vigilance of the inattentive by the apparent intemperance of the language. Pope, in too many instances, for the sake of some momentary and farcical effect, deliberately assumes the license of a liar. Not only he adopts the language of moral indignation where we know that it could not possibly have existed, seeing that the story to which this pretended indignation is attached was to Pope's knowledge a pure ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... persuade everybody that the invasion of Pennsylvania is nothing, a mere tempest in a tea-pot. Whom do they hope to humbug in this way? The disgrace is nameless, only they are callous enough not to feel it. Their cheeks can no more redden.... However, Stanton is not so optimist. It would look so farcical if it were not so deadly to witness. Hooker groping his way after Lee; Lincoln and the all-knowing head-quarters in the utmost darkness about Lee, his army, his movements, and his plans. And all this while the country, the people, ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... the farcical nature of public meetings, and the hollowness, worthlessness, and accidental character of popularity, than the circumstances of Durham's arrival here. He has done nothing in Canada, he took himself off just as the fighting was going to begin, his whole ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him. In the case of the drama, things are a little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true, but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical comedy, the two most popular forms, are distinct forms of art. Delightful work may be produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of this kind the artist in England is allowed very great freedom. It is when one comes to ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... other diversions and amusements which increase upon us, the town," says the Gentleman's Magazine for January 1752, "has been lately entertained with a kind of farcical performance, called 'The Old Woman's Oratory,' conducted by Mrs. Mary Midnight and her family, intended as a banter on Henley's Oratory, and a puff ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... Hamlet, but not so grim. I have heard a country undertaker describe the details of the least attractive branch of his uncomfortable business with a pride and self-satisfaction that would have been farcical had not the subject been so depressing. This would have been matter for Hardy's pen. There are few scenes in his books more telling than that which shows the operations in the family vault of the Luxellians, when John Smith, Martin Cannister, and ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... seemed from the brazen declamation, the monotonous reiterations of the reading-clerk, and from the sharp clank of the speaker's gavel! His ear wearied, his heart sick of the whole life of the farcical legislature, with its flood of corrupt bills, got back serenity and youth and repose in the presence of the snows, the silences, and ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... "we will say request. As I tell you, your presence in this community is distasteful to me, and your farcical marriage stands directly opposed to my plans. But I would not violate the law and commit a misdemeanor to drive you off. You have reasons for believing that ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... ones, at least, we still find a tendency to introduce extraneous elements. Thus Gl' Intricati, printed in 1581, and acted a few years before at Zara, the work of Count Alvise, or, it would appear, more correctly Luigi, Pasqualigo, contains a farcical and magical part combined with some rather coarse jesting between two rogues, one Spanish and one Bolognese, who speak in their respective dialects. Another play in which a comic element appears is Bartolommeo Rossi's Fiammella ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... give bond of $400 to appear in court the next day. At the same time seventeen college boys who were waiting at a New York steamer dock were also apprehended. The trial of the men before the recorder proved farcical, not a single one of the hundred or more prisoners being required to testify. After the chief of the detective force and several police lieutenants had testified, Recorder Schwartz ordered the men all released, but not before he had taken ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... RANSOM: "Don't be farcical, Grinnidge. That sort of thing will do with some victim on the witness-stand who can't help himself. Of course I said I would, and we were off half the time together, painting the loveliest and loneliest bits around Ponkwasset. It ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... not, Mrs. Fyne," I said. "I didn't know I was expected to be serious as well as sagacious. No. That science is farcical and therefore I am not serious. It's true that most sciences are farcical except those which teach us how to ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... along a railroad, you don't know how; beard disappears like grass before the sickle, or a regiment of Britishers before Yankee rifles. Great vartue in the sarve—uncommon vartue! Ma'am!" cried he to a lady who, like ourselves, was looking on from a short distance at this farcical scene, "Ma'am!" ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... and Radisson took one of the Hudson Bay captives as a witness. The thing was done as easily as a piece of farcical comedy. French hostages had been left among the New Englanders as guarantee of Gillam's safety in Radisson's fort. These hostages had been instructed to drop, as if by chance, blocks of wood across the doors of the guard-room and powder house and barracks. Even these precautions proved unnecessary. ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... but the simplest and most innocent of objects. The actual impossibility of the Prince of Wales escaping from his entourage, his identity, and his surroundings, were sufficient to make Continental fictions and foreign fancies about him absolutely farcical to those who knew something of his daily life—aside altogether from those who knew and ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... like Kelly, with old jeu-d'esprits, Like Dibdin, may tell of each farcical frolic; Or kindly inform us, like Madame Genlis,[1] That gingerbread-cakes always give ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... never still. It was like the St. Vitus disease. Tommies and Jocks saluted every subaltern with an automatic gesture of convulsive energy. Every subaltern acknowledged these movements and in turn saluted a multitude of majors, colonels, and generals. The thing became farcical, a monstrous absurdity of human relationship, yet pleasing to the vanity of men lifted up above the lowest caste. It seemed to me an intensification of the snob instinct in the soul of man. Only the Australians stood out against it, and ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... moved forward, passed Major Overstone at the head of the gully, and spread out on the hillside. The assembled camp, still armed, lounging out of ambush here and there, ironically made way for them to pass. A few moments of this farcical quest, and a glance at the impenetrably wooded heights around, apparently satisfied the young officer, and he turned his files again into the gully. Major Overstone ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... up of his oration made him reach out another clutching hand to the vanished reporter. "But it's farcical, father, to be always interviewed by a paper ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... inaccurate to call the French Marlowe, and who had (what Marlowe had not) the gift of comic as well as of tragic excellence, found nothing of this kind and little of any kind to add to the old poet's admirable but arid sketch of farcical incident or accident. But in this light and lovely work of the youth of Shakespeare we find for the first time that strange and sweet admixture of farce with fancy, of lyric charm with comic effect, which recurs so often in his later work, from the ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... with just severity upon the strange way in which the divinity is addressed in this piece, says, "This blot defaces almost all the modern things called dramas or plays. In the farcical comedies we have low vulgar swearing unworthy even the refuse of society; while in the comedies larmoyantes (weeping comedies) and tragedies, we have eternal imprecations of the deity, indicative only of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... arrived. He made a sort of entry which seemed to me farcical. I only noticed that he was very old, and that the hats that have been served out to the special German expeditionary corps are absurd. They are made of straw and are shaped after the manner of the Colonial hats used in South Africa. They have also a cockade of the German colours ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... became exasperated, and struck the table, swallowing up Paris with each draught of beer. Fagerolles, very calm, retained his usual smile. He had accompanied them for the sake of amusement, for the singular pleasure which he found in urging his comrades into farcical affairs that were bound to turn out badly. At the very moment when he was lashing their spirit of revolt, he himself formed the firm resolution to work in future for the Prix de Rome. That day had decided him; he thought it idiotic to compromise his ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... and frame, so to speak, a court ball had been known and practised in varying degrees of elaboration long before his time. But Jonson gave dramatic value to the masque, especially in his invention of the antimasque, a comedy or farcical element of relief, entrusted to professional players or dancers. He enhanced, as well, the beauty and dignity of those portions of the masque in which noble lords and ladies took their parts to create, by their gorgeous costumes and artistic grouping and evolutions, a sumptuous show. ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... should be thorough in order to be effective. We have had of late years in Germany very good evidence of the excellent results flowing from thorough methods, and the recent legislation in Massachusetts against the gypsy moth (Ocneria dispar), which at one time threatened to become farcical, has, fortunately, proved more than usually successful; the commission appointed to deal with the subject having worked with energy and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... volunteers who were at that time in Montenegro will quite believe that they applauded the result, but to pretend that they drove the Skup[vs]tina with bayonets to do what every reasoning creature would have done is so farcical that one might have thought it would not even form (as it did form) the subject for questions in the British House of Commons.... The only part played by bayonets was when on November 7 (one day previous ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... Featherstone," said Borthrop Trumbull, "but I call this will eccentric. I was always willingly of service to the old soul; and he intimated pretty plainly a sense of obligation which would show itself in his will. The gold-headed cane is farcical considered as an acknowledgment to me; but happily ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... it has moved," said he. "Am I such a farcical bungler, Watson, that I should erect an obvious dummy and expect that some of the sharpest men in Europe would be deceived by it? We have been in this room two hours, and Mrs. Hudson has made some change in ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... into me—and does me any damage—I shall sue him and you too!" declared Mr. Bunn. "This is a farcical idea, anyhow. You said I might get a chance to do some Shakespearean work up here; but so far ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Snowbound - Or, The Proof on the Film • Laura Lee Hope
... Miss Morrison got hold of a humorous book called 'The Brass Bottle,' a fantastic, farcical thing, about a genie who had been sealed up in a bottle for a thousand years getting out and causing the poor devil of a hero no end of worry by heaping riches and honours upon him in the most embarrassing manner. It happened that ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... himself. Yet by some extraordinary prescience, some inexplicable presentiment, the approaching catastrophe cast its shadow over his mind and he felt vaguely that the life-journey of genius would be incomplete and farcical without the final tragedy: whoever lives for the highest ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... them at the proper pitch. Was there ever seen such radiancy of valor? Very radiant indeed;—yet, it seems to me, gone somewhat into the phosphorescent kind; shining in the dark, as fish will do when rotten! War has actually its serious character; nor is Death a farcical transaction, however high your genius may go. But what then? it is the Marechal's trade to keep these poor people at the cutting pitch, on any terms that will hold for ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... Stafforth was saying vehemently. 'Illegal and impossible, it will spell disgrace and misfortune to us all. The Emperor will interfere, for this is going too far. We must hinder this farcical ceremony; his Highness cannot marry two wives! It will be Moempelgard over again! Think how absurd, Graevenitz! Cannot you see that ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... Saturday afternoon, two days since the funeral and two days since Mike Prim bent listening with such furious excitement at the keyhole of Judge Regis's office. Jordantown had become the stage upon which a mystery play was being enacted with all the farcical features of a comedy. Every man, especially, was doing exactly what he would have done and said if there had been footlights and an audience in front, only not one of them knew that this was so. Providence is the Great Dramatist, and secures perfectly natural effects by providing ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... think that pause can transmute commonplace thoughts into great and dignified utterance. A grand manner combined with insignificant ideas is like harnessing a Hambletonian with an ass. You remember the farcical old school declamation, "A Midnight Murder," that proceeded in grandiose manner to a thrilling climax, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... agency, juvenile court, settlement, or playground. But beginning students are usually more of a liability than an asset to such agencies; they lack the time to supervise students' work, and field work without strict supervision is a farcical waste of time. If such agencies will accept a few students who have the learner's attitude rather than an inflated persuasion of their social Messiahship, field work can become a very valuable adjunct to class work. In default of such opportunities the very best field work is an open-eyed ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... a steel trust? Would the paper have been so precious and costly? Would the illustrations have so enriched photographers? And would the amanuensis have made L350 more out of the thing then Mr. Murray himself? The price was not extortionate. But it was farcical. The entire rigmarole combines to throw into dazzling prominence the fact that modern literature in this country is still absolutely undemocratic. The time will come, and much sooner than many august mandarins anticipate, when such a book as the "Letters of Queen Victoria" ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... words were drowned by the outburst of one of the younger members of the staff, who had either to laugh or choke at the picture of this deep-eyed, spectral sort of man, known as a woman-hater, in his revelation of the farcical source ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... to consider the working and progress of events, know well enough that this glorious Creation around us is not a caprice or a farce. It is designed for a Cause and moves steadily towards that Cause. There may be—no doubt there are—many men who elect to view life from a low, material, or even farcical standpoint—nevertheless, life in itself is serious ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... in 'Twelfth Night,' also gave him some hints. Trifling and irritating conceits abound in the 'Two Gentlemen,' but passages of high poetic spirit are not wanting, and the speeches of the clowns, Launce and Speed—the precursors of a long line of whimsical serving-men—overflow with farcical drollery. The 'Two Gentlemen' was not published in Shakespeare's lifetime; it first appeared in the folio of 1623, after having, in all ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... some halfpence given him in all good faith; Stephane, whom I think you know, as a spruce peasant, made believe to have been drinking, stumbled against our sous-prefet and accosted him—he is a nice fellow, and was just going to depart when all of a sudden he recognized us. Well, it was a most farcical evening, and would have amused you I will engage. Perhaps you, too, would have been tempted to put on the country-cap, and I will answer for it that there would not have been a pair of black eyes to compete ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... following chapter, dear reader, you will see the end of this farcical adventure. In the mean time, let us take ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... The arrest of ORRIN and Durfee as the murderers by a Mormon officer; a farcical hearing by a coroner's jury, with a verdict of assassins unknown; distrusted participants in the crime themselves the object of the Mormon spies and would-be assassins; the robbery of a neighbor who dared to condemn the crime; a vain appeal ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... a farcical ending to a very arduous thirty-six-hour campaign, and Ross, feeling like a man who, having rolled a huge stone to the top of a hill, has been ordered to drop it, said, "I insist on the maximum penalty of the law, Justice Higley, especially for ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... the first heat of my anger was over, I saw the whole thing in its proper bearings. Those laws about priests were only intended for the days when we had a Temple, and in any case they cannot apply to a merely farcical divorce like yours. It is these old fools,—I beg your pardon,—it is these fanatical Rabbis who insist on giving them a rigidity God never meant them to have, just as they still make a fuss about kosher meat. In America they are less strict; besides, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... up. He saw the parlour, the ground glass of the door, the tumblers and bottles on the table, the sharp features and strained, farcical eyes of Malkiel framed in the matted, curling hair. Then all was not over yet. There was something still in store for him. He sat up, pushed the creaming four-shilling foam out of his sight, turned to his interlocutor, and with a great effort ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... the running away of some British soldiers, "we laugh at his idea of chasing the Royal Fusileers with the stores. Does he consider them as inanimate, or as treasure?" When the British in Boston sent out a bundle of the king's speech, "farcical enough, we gave great joy to them, (the red coats I mean), without knowing or intending it; for on that day, the day which gave being to the new army, (but before the proclamation came to hand,) we had hoisted the union flag in compliment to the United Colonies. ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... had free play to produce the Pickwick Papers, by Boz, which were illustrated, as he proceeded, by H. K. Browne (Phiz). The work met and has retained an unprecedented popularity. Caricature as it was, it caricatured real, existent oddities; everything was probable; the humor was sympathetic if farcical, the assertion of humanity bold, and the philosophy of universal application. He had touched our common nature in all ranks and conditions; he had exhibited men and women of all types; he had exposed the tricks of politics ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... of the plot several persons "of known credit, fortune and reputations, and of religious principles superior to a suspicion of being concerned in such detestable practices; at which the judges were very much astonished."[50] This farcical extreme at length persuaded even the obsessed magistrates to stop ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... discerning in them all the powers which afterwards produced "Evelina" and "Cecilia"; the quickness in catching every odd peculiarity of character and manner; the skill in grouping; the humour, often richly comic, sometimes even farcical. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... despised the wicked fribble who wore the crown of England. Faithless to women, faithless to men, a coward, a liar, a mean and grovelling cheat, George IV. nevertheless clung to a belief in his own virtues; and, if we study the account of his farcical progress through Scotland, we find that he imagined himself to be a useful and genuinely kingly personage. No man, except, perhaps, Philippe Egalite, was ever so contemned and hated; and until ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... Albany, seeking to divide the fund among various sects and localities, used arguments often plausible and sometimes forcible. These I dealt with on various occasions, but especially in a speech before the State Senate in 1865, in which was shown the character of the interested opposition, the farcical equipment of the People's College, the failure of the State Agricultural College, the inadequacy of the sectarian colleges, even though they called themselves universities; and I did all in my power to communicate to my colleagues something of my own enthusiasm for a university suitably endowed, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Louis also by force of arms compelled his nobles to desist from robbing the merchants, dealers, and the poor of their property. At this period the Fete des Fous, or feast of madmen was celebrated to its full extent, and anything more absurd, more farcical, or more irreverential cannot well be imagined. Dulaure, in his voluminous History of Paris, gives a most detailed account of this extraordinary mockery, of which I will give my readers ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... the public mind of their section for more than thirty years, and until at length they have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the Government the day after some assemblage of men have enacted the farcical pretense of taking their State out of the Union who could have been brought to no such thing ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... to attend to-night. Should he attend it or not? His situation had become farcical. Was it not his plain duty to withdraw at once from the political contest, that a serious candidate might as soon as possible take his place? Where could he discern even the glimmer of a hope in this sudden darkness? His heart was heavy ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... stolidly callous. Sally shuddered to the core of her being and had to hold more tightly to the rope to support herself. The two wise guys mocked openly. To the wise guys, expert connoisseurs of swat, the thing had appeared richly farcical. They seemed to consider the blow, administered to a third party and not to themselves, hardly worth calling a blow at all. Two more, landing as quickly and neatly as the first, left ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... to go away just to save his infernal biography from being wasted? You simply can't have a convincing colloquy on these lines between the tragic figure of the disillusioned and embittered hero and this farcical jackanapes. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various
... was, but at the moment she could think of nothing but the farcical complications arising from the idea of Mrs. Maper's providing Mr. Maper with a male companion secretly to improve his manners. Of course the two companions would fall in love ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... Are the farcical interest and the character interest carried on too far not to be seen to be inconsistent interests? Or is the secret of the Art of the Play the reconciliation and harmony of ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... stage and criticism of the drama had frequently been given place in the Port Folio, and Brown's Literary Magazine had published a farcical account of a "Theatrical Campaign" by Dick Buckram (Vol. I, p. 222), but the first magazine in America that attempted to take the theatre for its province was the Theatrical Censor, By a Citizen, first ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... versions, one by the author's son, Charles "the Younger," one by Mr. Hollingshead, and so on. It is a favorite piece for charitable benefits, and a number of well-known performers often volunteer to figure as "Gentlemen of the Jury." Buzfuz has been often played by Mr. Toole, but his too farcical methods scarcely enhanced the part. The easiness of comedy is essential. That sound player Mr. James Fernander is the best ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... Club was Bligh, a notorious madman, of whom Mr Raikes relates:—'One evening at the Macao table, when the play was very deep, Brummell, having lost a considerable stake, affected, in his farcical way, a very tragic air, and cried out—"Waiter, bring me a flat candlestick and a pistol." Upon which Bligh, who was sitting opposite to him, calmly produced two loaded pistols from his coat pocket, which he placed on ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... that the Irish captain recites to Pump, the innkeeper, the gallant innkeeper who, against all opposition, keeps the flag flying and the flagon full. If the book is a little overdrawn it is, no doubt, because the subject is slightly farcical; the arguments of the Oriental are well put, and, if the discussion of the merits of vegetarianism are a little wearisome, the poetry of a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... for six months. If you try to be nice, try to placate them, you'll simply get into hotter water. They don't understand such things. They think they are uncovering a vast conspiracy. Cinderella Cotillion Coterie! Gad, of all the farcical happenings I have come across even ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... indirectly, looking out for the welfare of the people. But we mustn't delude ourselves into thinking that that is their prime objective. These Belt Companies are no better than the so-called 'industrial giants' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The government here is farcical. The sole job is to prevent crime and to adjudicate small civil cases. Every other function of proper government—the organization of industry, the regulation of standards the subsidizing of research, the control of prices, and so on—are left to the Belt Companies or to the people. ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... Comedy, entitled the Inconstant, or the Way to Win Him, which had sufficient merit to have procured equal success to the rest; but for the inundation of Italian, French, and other farcical interruptions, which, through the interest of some, and the depraved taste of others, broke in upon the stage like a torrent, and swept down before thorn all taste for competitions of a more intrinsic excellence. These foreign monsters ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... Rathbawne's library. He met the representatives of the press, conducted the correspondence with mill-owners and other negatively interested parties, and at the Governor's request made what was palpably a farcical inspection of the entire state militia—to judge of their readiness for strike service!—a task which consumed a fortnight in constant travel, and visits to armories all alike in insufficient equipment and utter slovenliness. ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... 1518. I think he has more wit than Maillard, and occasionally displays a brilliant imagination; with the same singular mixture of grave declamation and farcical absurdities. He is called in the title-page the golden-tongued. It runs thus, Predicatoris qui lingua aurea, sua tempestate nuncupatus est, Sermones quadragesimales, ab ipso olim Turonis declamati. Paris, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... from the opening scene, that Shakespeare, even in dealing with classical subjects, laughed at the classic fear of putting the ludicrous and sublime into juxtaposition. After the low and farcical jests of the saucy cobbler, the eloquence of Marullus 'springs upwards ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... that made them all sense a thing beyond the ken of most of their elders. Perhaps this was because the elders, being blind in their superior wisdom, saw neither this thing nor the communion that flourished. They saw only the farcical joke. But His Honor, Judge Priest, to cite a conspicuous exception, seemed not to see the lamentable comedy ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... realized that he took me for an emissary of the great Blenheim. Exasperation overwhelmed me; would these farcical ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... presumed to call into question the validity of the charter of the city of London, and declared it to be forfeited; and not only that, but also the charters of all the corporations in England, including those of the City Companies. The whole business, when regarded in the light of history, appears farcical and absurd, but the danger to the life of the corporations appeared very real and tremendous to the good citizens of London in the year 1684. They behaved in a most loyal and submissive manner, surrendered their charters, expressed their fear that they had offended their sovereign, who, ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... presides at the shrine of rouge et noir. The blood-stains are effaced from the floor. A fresh red mound in the city cemetery is the only relic of French Charlie. Philip Hardin, released upon heavy bail, awaits a farcical investigation. After a few days he bears no legal burden of this crime. Only the easy load upon his conscience. Although the mark of Cain sets up a barrier between him and his fellows, and the murder calls for the vengeance of God, Philip ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... the deck closely, and pretty soon I saw Cockney go forward. So I knew that the farcical examination of Newman was ended, and that he was probably locked up with the rats in the lazaret. I promised myself I would have a heart-to-heart talk with Cockney just as soon as eight bells released me ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... law unto himself. Yet by some extraordinary prescience, some inexplicable presentiment, the approaching catastrophe cast its shadow over his mind and he felt vaguely that the life-journey of genius would be incomplete and farcical without the final tragedy: whoever lives for the highest must ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Thomas or Beroul—but it also includes the mordant satire of the Renard poetry and of Jean de Meun, and the gross realistic humour of the Fabliaux. The mediaeval drama, in whose complex development we have to trace many strands, probably represents in its oldest forms the coarse farcical buffoonery which may be related to the last fashions of the ancient world; it received a new impulse from the dramatization of scripture history in the twelfth century; but in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, at least in France, it had ...
— Progress and History • Various
... wind was light, we generally anchored about two gun-shots from the shore, and in the evening the crew danced or got up a kind of farce, which was farcical enough. After seven long, lazy, tedious weeks, we were ordered to Plymouth to refit. We flew like a shovel-nosed barge against tide, and reached Hamoaze on the evening of the third day. Reader, I do not know whether you were ever at Plymouth. If you have not, go there. ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... stilted. And do not think that pause can transmute commonplace thoughts into great and dignified utterance. A grand manner combined with insignificant ideas is like harnessing a Hambletonian with an ass. You remember the farcical old school declamation, "A Midnight Murder," that proceeded in grandiose manner to a thrilling climax, and ended—"and ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... corruption of this command led to his being "invalided out"; after which he wanders round seeking civilian war-work (and marking only dishonesty everywhere), and ends up with a post in the huge, newly-formed and almost entirely farcical Ministry of Business. This final epithet puts in one word my criticism of Mr. O'DONOVAN'S method. Everyone admits the large grain of truth in his charges; the trouble is that he has too often allowed an honest indignation to carry him past ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 14, 1920 • Various
... leapt out of my mouth as it seemed of their own volition. I was tired of this farcical bargaining, and determined to put an end to it, once for all. I stood up and faced his blank stare of amazement, without ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... transfer instantly his interest to the study of a thing new to him. It was like him, too, to have conceived and risked all upon this last desperate and madcap scheme—this message to a poor, crazed fanatico cruising about with his grotesque uniform and his farcical title. But his companions had been at their wits' end; escape had seemed incredible; and now he was pleased with the success of the plan they had called crack-brained ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... intention of bringing Dulcinea, or Aldonza Lorenzo, on the scene in person. It was probably the ransacking of the Don's library and the discussion on the books of chivalry that first suggested it to him that his idea was capable of development. What, if instead of a mere string of farcical misadventures, he were to make his tale a burlesque of one of these books, caricaturing their ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... coldest feelings into madness; and need one marvel then at your talking of having encountered another impossibility, at your story about finding the dead Pietro come to life among the mountains, and not knowing him again, and about those almost farcical tricks of jugglery that were played you, all which you have related to us with the very same assurance? No, my good Antonio, pain and grief have distracted your sounder senses, so that you see and believe in things which have ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... is used for digging up the bed of the river, but if it could be insinuated out of the water into a drowsy angler's leg it would probably make him sit up. As the paddle is as long as the fish the creature presents a really farcical appearance. The species runs to a hundredweight, ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... thorough appreciation and elaborate knowledge of those characteristics, which must be understood ere one can delineate and portray the subtleties of Camille as they should be given. Those who anticipate a farcical treatment of Dumas's creation at Mr. Robson's hands will be most wofully surprised when they come to witness and hear his artistic presentation of the most remarkable of ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... the character interest carried on too far not to be seen to be inconsistent interests? Or is the secret of the Art of the Play the reconciliation and harmony of the farcical and ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... majority of the Greek people. We Liberals, in the course of a year received the vote of the majority. At the last election, which was nothing more than a burlesque on the free exercise of the right of suffrage, we were not willing to participate in a farcical formality.... Now it is even sought to deny us the right of free speech. Our meetings were held within inclosed buildings. Those who came to them were invited, but the police threw out our doorkeepers, put in their own and let enter whomsoever they, the police, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... monstrous that the modern man, who was pre-eminently capable of realising the strangest and most contradictory beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic, and the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcical bathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat. He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist in raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist. It is indeed difficult to account for the clinging curse of ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... high resolve he might be to-day even as these who had won such clear title to his contempt, who stultified themselves with vain imaginings and the everlasting concoction of schemes whose sheer intrinsic puerility foredoomed them to farcical failure. ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... he thrusts out his tongue at ghosts, he takes the poetry out of stilted things, he introduces caricature into epic extravaganzas. It is not that he is prosaic; far from that; but he replaces the solemn vision by the farcical phantasmagoria. If Adamastor were to appear to him, the street Arab would ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... offers the poet, he severely condemns[35], the scene in which Periplecomenus shouts out to Philocomasium so loudly that the soldier's household could not conceivably help hearing, whereas he is supposed to be conveying secret information.[36] If carried out in a broadly farcical spirit, the ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... speak, a court ball had been known and practised in varying degrees of elaboration long before his time. But Jonson gave dramatic value to the masque, especially in his invention of the antimasque, a comedy or farcical element of relief, entrusted to professional players or dancers. He enhanced, as well, the beauty and dignity of those portions of the masque in which noble lords and ladies took their parts to create, by their gorgeous costumes ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... saw the parlour, the ground glass of the door, the tumblers and bottles on the table, the sharp features and strained, farcical eyes of Malkiel framed in the matted, curling hair. Then all was not over yet. There was something still in store for him. He sat up, pushed the creaming four-shilling foam out of his sight, turned to his interlocutor, and with ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... the youth under educational influences until they are equipped to be masters of their own economic and social careers. The ideal may seem remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of education is a farcical yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and more dominates our public system of education. The same principle has application on the side of the considerations which concern the relations of one nation to another. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... foreign matter, and although it violates that most necessary rule of dramatic art, declaring no play should contain an effect, a line, a scene or an act which does not bear on the end in view by developing either the characters or the action. The entire second act, containing the farcical examination-scene, is useless. Robertson again sinned in this way in the Nightingale: although it had no effect on the plot, although it was entirely unnecessary, he introduced a pretty tableau representing the heroine, a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... patriotism,—he owed nothing but suggestion. The duel at the Diamond in the Desert is admittedly one of the happiest things of the kind by a master in that kind, and if the adventures in the chapel of Engedi are both a little farcical and a little 'apropos of nothing in particular,' the story nowhere else halts or fails till it reaches its real 'curtain' with the second Accipe hoc! If it had been longer, it might not have been so strong, but as it is, it is ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... to laugh. The very thought of it was farcical in its very odiousness. Merri, who had embarked on his proposal with grandiloquent phraseology, suddenly paused, almost awed ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... most exalted virtues, and heroism and magnanimity strained almost beyond the limits of probability, are checkered by uncouth pleasantries, and the most pathetic incidents intruded upon and interrupted by the farcical conundrums of MUG, a low cockney, who has become secretary of state to the king of the Mandingoes. Thus, oscillating between Kotesbue and O'Keefe, giving now a layer of exalted sentiment, and then a layer of mere farce, has Mr. C. raised a ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... world at this time of day. Mr. Horne has much hurt this publication by not abstaining from the Reve's Tale. This, after making all allowance for the rude manners of Chaucer's age, is intolerable; and by indispensably softening down the incidents, he has killed the spirit of that humour, gross and farcical, that pervades the original. When the work was first mentioned to me, I protested as strongly as possible against admitting any coarseness and indelicacy, so that my conscience is clear of countenancing aught of that kind. So great is my admiration of Chaucer's genius, and so profound ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... outrageously violated, and the hero, in once scene a child, in the next is an old man, and so forth. These plays are of very ancient composition, and their stories cast in remote times. They appeared to me very dull, on the whole, but were relieved by startling mechanical contrivances, and a kind of farcical broad humour, and detached passages of great vigour and power expressed in language highly poetical, but somewhat overcharged with metaphor and trope. In fine, they seemed to me very much what the plays of Shakespeare seemed to a Parisian in the time of Louis XV., or ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... their section for more than thirty years, and until at length they have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the Government the day after some assemblage of men have enacted the farcical pretense of taking their State out of the Union who could have been brought to no ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... the attention of an unprejudiced audience from beginning to end, whether it amuses or merely interests them. It does not follow that because it may shock, or even bore, some worthy people it is a bad play. Even farcical comedy bores some people, with ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... the hands of Dr. Stuebel. The Germans may have been wrong before; they were now in the right to be angry. They had been publicly, solemnly, and elaborately fooled; the treaty and the reconciliation were both fraudulent, with the broad, farcical fraudulency of children and barbarians. This history is much from the outside; it is the digested report of eye-witnesses; it can be rarely corrected from state papers; and as to what consuls felt and thought, or what instructions they acted under, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... returned Mr. Calverley. "You informed me—which was your duty as a friend—of this curmudgeon's boast that he would have me horsewhipped if I dared venture into England. You will readily conceive that any gentleman of self-respect cannot permit such farcical utterances to be delivered without appending a gladiatorial epilogue. Well! what are the ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... which Ronder would never forgive Brandon. The man with his childish temper and monstrous conceit had made him into a ludicrous figure. It was true that they were laughing, it seemed, more at Brandon than at himself, but the whole scene was farcical. But beyond this, that incident, trivial though it might be in itself, had thrown the relationship of the two men into dazzling prominence. It was as though they had been publicly announced as antagonists, and now, stripped and prepared, ringed in by the breathless ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... fall on her and the rocks cover her from the gaze of men. She upbraided herself for her blindness to the most obviously important aspect of the situation. Now that she saw it, her zeal to "pay," by doing penance in public, became tragic and farcical at once. The absurdity of making satisfaction to Mrs. Rodman and Mrs. Clay, to Fanny Burnaby and the Brown girls, by calling in the law, when less suffering—to her father at least—would give them actual cash, was not the least element in ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... because its source Is common life, must be a thing of course, Whereas there's nought so difficult, because There's nowhere less allowance made for flaws. See Plautus now: what ill-sustained affairs Are his close fathers and his love-sick heirs! How farcical his parasites! how loose And down at heel he wears his comic shoes! For, so he fills his pockets, nought he heeds Whether the play's a ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... watch still in his hand, advanced to the bridge table. Strolling from player to player he made mental photographs of each hand, then took his stand behind Penny's chair to observe the horribly farcical playing of it. Poor little Penny! he reflected. She hadn't had a chance against that dumb-bell across the table from her. Fancy anyone's doubling a little slam bid on a hand like Carolyn Drake's—or even calling an informatory double in the first place! Why hadn't she bid ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... are lovers of ludicrous actions, and hence all their ceremonies seem farcical. The greater part pull the fingers till they crack. Snelgrave gives an odd representation of the embassy which the king of Dahomy sent to him. The ceremonies of salutation consisted in the most ridiculous contortions. When two negro monarchs visit, they ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... running away of some British soldiers, "we laugh at his idea of chasing the Royal Fusileers with the stores. Does he consider them as inanimate, or as treasure?" When the British in Boston sent out a bundle of the king's speech, "farcical enough, we gave great joy to them, (the red coats I mean), without knowing or intending it; for on that day, the day which gave being to the new army, (but before the proclamation came to hand,) we had hoisted the union flag in compliment to the United Colonies. But, behold, ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... those other plays, his was the feminine part. The working up of the dramatic conception, the contrast of political and social antagonisms, the "characters," if we may call them so, of Henri and Montrichard, the farcical caricature of De Grignon, these are all Scribe's, and they make up the skeleton, perhaps even the flesh and blood, of the comedy: but its spirit, its soul, lies in the delicate touches that give a sympathetic charm to the conquest of De Grignon's ...
— Bataille De Dames • Eugene Scribe and Ernest Legouve
... to him have been published; and it is impossible to read them without discerning in them all the powers which afterwards produced "Evelina" and "Cecilia"; the quickness in catching every odd peculiarity of character and manner; the skill in grouping; the humour, often richly comic, sometimes even farcical. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... long been noted as a droll. A grin was as much a part of his stock apparel as tow breeches or a palm-leaf hat. The negro, too, had from time immemorial been portrayed upon the stage and in fiction as an irrepressible and inimitably farcical fellow. But the "Southern gentleman" was a man of different kidney from either of these. A sardonic dignity hedged him about with peculiar sacredness. He was chivalrous and baronial in his instincts, surroundings, and characteristics. He was nervous, excitable, and bloodthirsty. ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... school, and a mother for a school-mistress—is not absolutely new or original; but, again, what matters this to anyone, so long as the new shape given to the old material is genuinely amusing? So "farcical" goes with "original." But now, as to its being a "Romance?" Would not the term "burlesque" be a better term than "Farcical Romance?" The characters of the three adventurous lovers are not less burlesque ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... without leaving the faintest trace of the manner of his presumed death, while in German East there were unscrupulous despots—the disciples of atrocious kultur—only too ready to condemn an Englishman without even the farcical formality ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... died in 1518. I think he has more wit than Maillard, and occasionally displays a brilliant imagination; with the same singular mixture of grave declamation and farcical absurdities. He is called in the title-page the golden-tongued. It runs thus, Predicatoris qui lingua aurea, sua tempestate nuncupatus est, Sermones quadragesimales, ab ipso olim Turonis ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... them, laden like beasts of burden, up once more to that hell of blood and mud, of nerve-shattering shell, of blinding glare and ear-bursting roar of gun fire, and, worse than all, to the place where, crouching in the farcical deceptive shelter of the sandbagged trench, their fingers gripping into the steel of their rifle hands, they would wait for the zero hour. But as the weeks passed and the orders failed to come they passed from that bewildering and subconscious anxious waiting, to an experience ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... this glorious Creation around us is not a caprice or a farce. It is designed for a Cause and moves steadily towards that Cause. There may be—no doubt there are—many men who elect to view life from a low, material, or even farcical standpoint—nevertheless, life in itself is ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... of the People, President of the German Republic,—there's the only true sovereignty. That was what kings were once—giants of brain and brawn. King—one who knows, one who can! Headship is for the head. What is this mock dignity that stands on the lying breaths of winking courtiers? What is this farcical, factitious glamour that will not bear the light of day? The Grace of God? Ay, give me god-like manhood, and I will bend the knee. But to ask me to worship a stuffed purple robe on a worm-eaten throne! 'Tis an insult ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Gosse, Omphalos, London, 1857, p. 5, and passim; and for a passage giving the keynote of the whole, with a most farcical note on coprolites, see ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... horse, and made a dash for liberty on foot, but he would have failed in his effort had not Lieutenant Darling, a West Australian boy, ridden to his aid, and together the two officers on the one horse got back to the shelter of the guns. The enemy still blazed away in the wildest and most farcical fashion. Had they been Boer hunters or marksmen very few of the West Australians would ever have got across that strip of veldt alive. As it was, only two of them got wounded, none were killed, one or two horses were shot ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... Thus ended this farcical demonstration on the part of the government —a war without a battle! There was, perhaps, no genuine basis of necessity upon which to organize the expensive and disastrous expedition against the Mormons. The real cause, perhaps, should be attributed to the clamour of other religious ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... to bribe the Mayor to go away just to save his infernal biography from being wasted? You simply can't have a convincing colloquy on these lines between the tragic figure of the disillusioned and embittered hero and this farcical jackanapes. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various
... philosophy of the Mime, Sophron, was so pure that Plato kept a book of his poems under his pillow when on his death-bed. Besides these Moralities, as they were termed, there were, in addition, light pieces of a farcical kind, in the portrayal of which the Mimes were equally as successful as ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... that, although he had given up revue writing in favour of transforming farcical plays, he felt that he might make an appeal to the authors of revue (who often exceeded the audience in number) to join in this very laudable campaign. Speaking as one of the two-and-twenty Hippodromios, although ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... that the invasion of Pennsylvania is nothing, a mere tempest in a tea-pot. Whom do they hope to humbug in this way? The disgrace is nameless, only they are callous enough not to feel it. Their cheeks can no more redden.... However, Stanton is not so optimist. It would look so farcical if it were not so deadly to witness. Hooker groping his way after Lee; Lincoln and the all-knowing head-quarters in the utmost darkness about Lee, his army, his movements, and his plans. And all this while the country, the people, is kept officially ignorant ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... runs into me—and does me any damage—I shall sue him and you too!" declared Mr. Bunn. "This is a farcical idea, anyhow. You said I might get a chance to do some Shakespearean work up here; but so far I ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Snowbound - Or, The Proof on the Film • Laura Lee Hope
... season, but one which had beneficial results, was the strike of the Detroit players, entailing the staging of a farcical game in Philadelphia between the Athletics and a team of semi-professionals. This incident grew out of an attack on a New York spectator by Ty Cobb while in uniform and the immediate suspension of the player for an ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... their own troops. This threw upon the governors and legislatures of the loyal States responsibilities of a kind wholly unprecedented. A long period of profound peace had made every military organization seem almost farcical. A few independent military companies formed the merest shadow of an army; the state militia proper was only a nominal thing. It happened, however, that I held a commission as Brigadier in this state militia, and my intimacy with Governor Dennison ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... the Ramsgate sands looking for Toole. I did not really expect to see him, and I had no reason to believe he was in Ramsgate, but I thought if providence were kind to him it might throw him in my way. I wanted to do him a good turn. I had written a three-act farcical comedy at the request of an amateur dramatic club. I had written out all the parts, and I think there were rehearsals. But the play was never produced. In the light of after knowledge I suspect some of those actors ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... in the mausoleum of the first Stovik, his ancestor. No royal name was cut, but the place of his burial was deeply graved in the hearts of all present. Had he lived he had been a farcical king, but dead he was as imposing as the grandest monarch ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... an "Original Farcical Romance"? The immediate reply is that The Amazons, by Mr. PINERO, is a specimen of the genus. To see The Amazons ought to supply the terms of the required definition. I have seen it, and yet the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... of this crime? The arrest of ORRIN and Durfee as the murderers by a Mormon officer; a farcical hearing by a coroner's jury, with a verdict of assassins unknown; distrusted participants in the crime themselves the object of the Mormon spies and would-be assassins; the robbery of a neighbor who dared to condemn the crime; a vain appeal by Mrs. Parrish ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... arrows of whose ridicule are more sharp, in proportion as they are more polished. That reformers should abound in obscenities, as is the case of the two Roman poets, is surely an impropriety of the most extraordinary kind; the courtly Horace also sometimes sinks into mean and farcical abuse, as in the first lines of the seventh satire of the first book; but Boileau and Pope have given to their Satire the Cestus of Venus: their ridicule is concealed and oblique; that of the Romans direct and open. The tenth satire of Bioleau on women is more ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... supper Duke Carl amuses his companion with caricature, amid cries of cheerful laughter, of the sleepy courtiers entertaining their martial guests in all their pedantic politeness, like people in some farcical dream. A priest, and certain chosen friends to witness the marriage, were to come ere nightfall to the grange. The lovers heard, as they thought, the sound of distant thunder. The hours passed as they waited, and what came at ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... the author's versatility is this farcical, humorous satire on the art nouveau of to-day, Mr. Chambers, with all his knowledge of the artistic jargon, has in this little novel created a pious fraud of a father, who brings up his eight lovely daughters in the Adirondacks, where they wear pink pajamas and eat nuts and fruit, and listen ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... persuade, not to dictate, and I know that the tempers of you men of Theos are easily kindled. Nicholas of Reist brings to-day a forgotten descendant of the Tyrnaus family, and with your consent would make him King. I say with your consent, because the House of Laws is nothing to-day but a farcical assembly, and they will do what Reist bids them. The real decision rests with you. Listen. Russia will refuse to recognize this man. If you accept him her restraining hand upon Turkey will be removed. Russia herself may not think it worth ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... Tarkington's studies of boy life (especially Penrod), and of adolescence (especially Seventeen and Clarence). Judged by your own experience and observation, are they presented with true knowledge and humor, or are they a farcical skimming of surface eccentricities? Compare them with Mark Twain's books about boys and with Howells's ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... the flagellation of several pieces of property of either sex. The sight of their beating had the effect of a gentle tickling upon me. The tone of my system was restored. I grew gay and lightsome. I exchanged jokes with the overseer. He appreciated my mood, and gave a farcical turn to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... himself in the same boat as both the local Governor and the Chief of Gendarmery: with the result that the whole trio were reduced to a frame of mind in which they were only too glad to turn to him (Samosvitov) for advice. The ultimate and farcical upshot was that report came crowding upon report, and that such alleged doings were brought to light as the sun had never before beheld. In fact, the documents in question employed anything and everything as material, even to ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... a favorable award is assured us. If we want Texas, we send an army after it. Every case that does not rouse our anger. Let the Maine blow up and we fight. A treaty with an elastic exception like this is a farcical ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... the Shrew." In the hands of a lesser author it would have lost its comedy and degenerated purely into farce, restricting itself to more ignoble aims and to a more indulgent public. For farce, after all, is farcical, and the mood for its appreciation is not one which is sympathetic to any great or moving thing. And in the hands of interpreters less than intelligently fine, the play may still descend into the lower class; but this cannot be done without degrading it beyond any likeness ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... his arguments, losing all self-control, he flung his felt hat on the floor, continued to rage and rail against me, and, no result coming of it, dashed at last, in a towering passion, out through the door, which he slammed behind him. There was a farcical ending to the scene, since he was obliged to ring at the door again for his hat, which, in his exasperation, he had forgotten. This was a kind of private prologue to the ecclesiastical drama which from the year 1871 upwards was enacted in most of the pulpits of the country. Only the parsons ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... animal discovered in the Wicklow Mines,[G] which were worked some fifty years back, but which, for want of capital or perseverance, only furnished a few Cronobane halfpence, and materials for a musical farce to one of the most delightful farcical Irish writers of ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... ever rare at Paris, was the happy portion of the genius of this Frenchman. Hence he delighted to try his farcical pieces, for we cannot imagine that they were his more elevated comedies, on his old maid-servant. This maid, probably, had a keen relish for comic humour, for once when Moliere read to her the comedy of another writer as his own, she soon detected ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... marriage law? How much better am I after all than the poor girl in the street, who is forced to it by misery? To be sure, I believe there is some farcical phrase in the bargain about promising to love none other,—a bare-faced attempt to outwit Nature,—at which Nature laughs. Yet this other woman, proud, high-minded, unselfish, hitherto above reproach, ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... had no reason to feel called upon to talk about anything more serious to a stranger at a house party. But it was the manner of the man, his whole personality. For Freddie was a man of fashion, with all the exaggerated and farcical mannerisms of the dandy of the comic papers. He wore a conspicuous and foppish costume, and posed with a little cane; he cultivated a waving pompadour, and his silky moustache and beard were carefully ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... as somewhat farcical, but it must be remembered that Mivanway was the daughter of a Gospeller of the old school, and had been brought up to beliefs that were not then out ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... followed that Old Sarum, with all its grand recollections, is but a collection of mounds and hollows,—as much a tomb of its past as Birs Nimroud of that great city, Nineveh. Old Sarum is now best remembered by its long-surviving privilege, as a borough, of sending two members to Parliament. The farcical ceremony of electing two representatives who had no real constituency behind them was put an end to by ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... but slightly farcical. Every tack you make lands you in a different port—with a woman waiting in every one of them." The first notes of the overture ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... stayed on, as every one knows, when the Lyceum as a personal enterprise of Henry's was no more—when the farcical Lyceum Syndicate took over the theater. I played a wretched part in "Robespierre," and refused L12,000 to go to ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... and sometimes fear that I cannot go through with the engagements of the winter. But I have never stopped yet in fulfilling what I have undertaken, and hope I shall not be compelled to now. How farcical seems the preparation needed to gain a few moments' life; yet just so the plant works all the year round for a ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the situation of Garrick, as thus described, does the biographer find himself at the threshhold of this concluding chapter. It is not his fault, however, that comic or rather farcical incidents must follow so closely upon the pathetic. But "the course of true love never did run smooth"—a fact of which, as the reader has already seen, my unfortunate friend Wheelwright had had some knowledge, early in his wedded life—and of which he was ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... number of versions, one by the author's son, Charles "the Younger," one by Mr. Hollingshead, and so on. It is a favorite piece for charitable benefits, and a number of well-known performers often volunteer to figure as "Gentlemen of the Jury." Buzfuz has been often played by Mr. Toole, but his too farcical methods scarcely enhanced the part. The easiness of comedy is essential. That sound player Mr. James Fernander is the best Buzfuz that ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... deserve more than passing notice. In the earlier ones, at least, we still find a tendency to introduce extraneous elements. Thus Gl' Intricati, printed in 1581, and acted a few years before at Zara, the work of Count Alvise, or, it would appear, more correctly Luigi, Pasqualigo, contains a farcical and magical part combined with some rather coarse jesting between two rogues, one Spanish and one Bolognese, who speak in their respective dialects. Another play in which a comic element appears is Bartolommeo Rossi's Fiammella (1584), ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... saluting. The arms of men were never still. It was like the St. Vitus disease. Tommies and Jocks saluted every subaltern with an automatic gesture of convulsive energy. Every subaltern acknowledged these movements and in turn saluted a multitude of majors, colonels, and generals. The thing became farcical, a monstrous absurdity of human relationship, yet pleasing to the vanity of men lifted up above the lowest caste. It seemed to me an intensification of the snob instinct in the soul of man. Only the Australians stood out against it, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... and personal peculiarities stand for character, that he is sometimes turgid when he would be impressive, sometimes stilted when he would be fine, that his sentiment is often false and worked up, that his attempts at tragedy are melodramatic, and that sometimes his comedy comes near being farcical. His whole literary attitude has been compared to his boyish ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... extemporized comedy, and all the spirited incidents of a cleverly sustained masquerade. I had never seen before anything in the least comparable to this magnificent fete. I moved along, indolently, in my domino and mask, loitering, now and then, to enjoy a clever dialogue, a farcical song, or an amusing monologue, but, at the same time, keeping my eyes about me, lest my friend in the black domino, with the little white cross on his ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... well acquainted with the original; and when he was "translated" by Puck, he bore the ass's head, his newly-acquired dignity, with an appearance of conscious greatness, which made the metamorphosis, though in itself sufficiently farcical, irresistibly comic. He afterwards displayed the same humour in his frolics with the fairies, and the intercourse which he held with Messrs. Cobweb, Mustard-seed, Pease-blossom, and the rest of Titania's cavaliers, who lost all command of their countenances at the gravity ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... maxim that a monk out of his cloister is like a fish out of water; and doubtless many days which he could spare from the instruction of youth at St. Edmund's Bury were spent about the London streets, of the sights and sounds of which he has left us so vivacious a record—a kind of farcical supplement to the "Prologue" of the "Canterbury Tales." His literary career, part of which certainly belongs to the reign of Henry V, has some resemblance to Chaucer's, though it is less regular and less consistent with itself; and several of his poems bear more or less distinct traces of Chaucer's ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... Upon the farcical trial that resulted in the predetermined sentence of death, Miss Cavell courageously and freely admitted her assistance in the specified cases of escape. When she was asked why she did it, she declared her fear that if she had not done so the men would have been shot by the Germans. Her ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... affair with Verres, there are two matters to interest the reader—indeed, to instruct the reader—if the story were sufficiently well told. The iniquity of Verres is the first—which is of so extravagant a nature as to become farcical by the absurdity of the extent to which he was not afraid to go in the furtherance of his avarice and lust. As the victims suffered two thousand years ago, we can allow ourselves to be amused by the inexhaustible fertility of the man's resources and the ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... Consciousness that we are mov'd as we ought to be, and that we consequently have Sentiments suitable to the Dignity of our Nature. For these and many other Reasons, too long to mention here, I must confess myself to be an Enemy also to all ludicrous Epilogues and Farcical Pieces, at the End of Tragedies; and must think them full as ridiculous as if we were to dress a Monarch in all his Royal Robes, and then put a ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... feet, which are most like a very shuffling anapaest—the verse which appears in the comedies of Udall and Still—held its ground. We have it in the morality of the New Custom, printed in 1573, but no doubt written earlier, in the Interlude of The Trial of Treasure, in the farcical comedy of Like Will to Like, a coarse but lively piece, by Ulpian Fulwell (1568). In the very curious tragi-comedy of Cambyses this doggerel appears partly, but is alternated with the less lawless but scarcely more suitable "fourteener" ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... whenever any affair of an interesting nature was pending, nothing could make her refrain from joining any company which might be in the house;—nothing;—not even O'Grady himself. At such times, too, she became strangely excited, and invariably executed one piece of farcical absurdity, of which, however, the family contrived to confine the exercise to her own room. It was wearing on her head a tin concern, something like a chimney-cowl, ornamented by a small weathercock, after the fashion of those which surmount church-steeples; ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... cheap cabinets, and the ready-made black and gilt overmantel, with its panels of swans, hawthorn-blossom, and landscapes sketchily daubed on dead gold—surely it had all been transferred bodily from the stage of some carelessly mounted farcical comedy! ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... boisterous kind was needed, and this was supplied by Eaton Stannard Barrett, who, in 1813—five years before Northanger Abbey appeared—published The Heroine or The Adventures of Cherubina. In this farcical romance it is clearly Barrett's intention to make so vigorous an onslaught that "the Selinas, Evelinas, and Malvinas who faint and blush and weep through four half-bound octavos" shall be, like Catherine Morland, "humbled to the dust." Sometimes, indeed, his farce ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... princes at their banquet. The Poets carry the popular sentiments to a keener and more splendid pitch; but let it always be remembered that it is the popular sentiments that they are carrying. No man ever wrote any good poetry to show that childhood was shocking, or that twilight was gay and farcical, or that a man was contemptible because he had crossed his single sword with three. The people who maintain this are the ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... properly speaking, musical farce, is becoming more and more popular in both Europe and America it is also becoming proportionately more farcical; although in many theaters it is staged as often as the more serious drama, in some having exclusive dominion; and although theater managers find that these plays draw bigger crowds and fill their houses better than any other, in the large cities ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... regrettable surroundings have in the smallest degree impaired the exquisite and waxen bloom of our author's sympathetic characters. Far from it. Of the young and oh-so-good-looking millionaire (weary of pleasures and palaces, too weary even to dismiss his preposterous and farcical butler—lacking, in effect, the definite object); of the heroine's young brother, crook in embryo, but reclaimable by influence of hero; and of the peach-like leading lady herself, I can only say that each is worthy of the rest, and all of a creator who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... appearance of the critique in the 'Edinburgh Review' Sent to Mr. Harness Success of the satire The author's regret in having written it Refusal to republish it Attempted publication of Englishman, Otway's three requisites for an Envy Ephesus, ruins of EPIGRAM on Moore's Operatic Farce, or Farcical Opera Erskine, Lord, his eloquence his famous pamphlet See, also Essex (George-Capel), fifth Earl of Euxine, or Black Sea, description of Ewing, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... this was the farcical element, but managers have found that this is much needed in plays, and though many of them would prefer to eliminate the "horse-play" the audiences seem to demand it, and managers are prone to cater to the tastes of their audiences when ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... But what can be the object of it in this case? Wayne knows (or if he is too mad to know anything, at least Turnbull knows) that there is not, and never has been, the smallest chance of support for him outside; that the mass of the sane modern inhabitants of London regard his farcical patriotism with as much contempt as they do the original idiotcy that gave it birth—the folly of our miserable King. What Wayne and his horsemen are doing nobody can even conjecture. The general theory round here is that he is simply a traitor, and has ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... exhibit more strikingly the farcical nature of public meetings, and the hollowness, worthlessness, and accidental character of popularity, than the circumstances of Durham's arrival here. He has done nothing in Canada, he took himself off just as the fighting ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... presented by two popular actors—the nurse undoubtedly acted by a man. If we examine the structure of the play very closely, we notice that these two figures and the elements touching them, appear only as farcical interludes, which, with our love of the logical and harmonious, must strike ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... for but against his theory. Burchell himself tells us that Bushman girls "are most commonly betrothed" when about seven years old, and become mothers at twelve, or even at ten. To speak of choice in such cases, in any rational sense of the word, would be farcical even if the girls were free to do as they please, which they are not. With regard to the Fuegians, Darwin cites King and Fitzroy to the effect that the Indian obtains the consent of the parents by doing them some service, and then attempts to ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... require. Louis also by force of arms compelled his nobles to desist from robbing the merchants, dealers, and the poor of their property. At this period the Fete des Fous, or feast of madmen was celebrated to its full extent, and anything more absurd, more farcical, or more irreverential cannot well be imagined. Dulaure, in his voluminous History of Paris, gives a most detailed account of this extraordinary mockery, of which I will give my readers a ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... seem always gay; but do not be deceived; I have two kinds of gayety, Jeanne; my gayety gay, and my gayety sad. I have neither the strength nor the courage to be bad, angry, nor malicious, as others are, that always passes over with me in words more or less farcical. My cowardice and my weakness of body have prevented me from becoming worse than I am. It needed the chance of this lonely hut, where there was neither cat, nor, above all, a dog, to have urged me to steal. And then, again, it chanced to be a fine moonlight night; for alone, and in the dark, I am ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... 'laws,' expressed in moral teaching, supposed to be in conformity with the institutes of their God. Worship takes the form, as at Eleusis, of tribal mysteries, originally instituted, as at Eleusis, by the God. The young men are initiated with many ceremonies, some of which are cruel and farcical, but the initiation includes ethical instruction, in conformity with the supposed commands of a God who watches over conduct. As among ourselves, the ethical ideal, with its theological sanction, is probably rather above the moral standard of ordinary practice. ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... him as to anybody, but money was their life. For the first time he had the banks in his power; he could afford to laugh; and the whole community was in the same position, though few laughed. All sat down on the banks and asked what the banks were going to do about it. To Adams the situation seemed farcical, but the more he saw of it, the less he understood it. He was quite sure that nobody understood it much better. Blindly some very powerful energy was at work, doing something that nobody wanted done. When Adams went to his bank to draw a hundred ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... murders, rapes, and parricides, to that charnel-house of horrors[1]. His turn for comedy being at least equal to his success in the blood-stained buskin, Mr Ravenscroft translated and mangled several of the more farcical French comedies, which he decorated with the lustre of his own great name. Amongst others which he thus appropriated, were the most extravagant and buffoon scenes in Moliere's "Bourgeois Gentilhomme;" in which Monsieur Jourdain is, with much absurd ceremony, created a Turkish ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... the poems could never be recognized in such a garb. The tongue of Burns can be spoken only by a born Scot; and our Yankee, which is rather a grotesque English than a dialect, is unfortunately so associated with the coarse and the farcical—Lowell's little poem of "'Zekel's Courtship" being the single exception—that it seems hardly adapted to the simple and tender fancies of Hebel. Like the comedian whose one serious attempt at tragic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... am not, Mrs Fyne," I said. "I didn't know I was expected to be serious as well as sagacious. No. That science is farcical and therefore I am not serious. It's true that most sciences are farcical except those which teach us how ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... and serious part of these two plays founded on the story of Henry IV is not inferior to the comic and farcical. The characters of Hotspur and Prince Henry are two of the most beautiful and dramatic, both in themselves and from contrast, that ever were drawn. They are the essence of chivalry. We like Hotspur the best upon the whole, ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... from his travels in Spain, Italy and Greece. This twofold character of the poet it is that is revealed in his best poems, "Childe Harold" and "Don Juan." He used both works as receptacles for the most incongruous ideas. "If things are farcical," he once said to Trelawney, "they will do for 'Don Juan'; if heroical, you shall have another canto of 'Childe Harold.'" This means of disposing of his poetic ideas accounts for the great volume of Byron's verse as well as for its inequality. That "Don Juan" was never finished ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... dread of love's allurements the Sabbath would have become quite dull and wearisome, had not the conductresses cleverly made the most of its comic side, enlivening it with farcical interludes. Thus, the opening scene in which Satan, like the Priapus of olden times, bestowed his coarse endearments on the Witch, was followed by another game, a kind of chilly purification, which the sorceress underwent with much grimacing, and a great show of unpleasant ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... than by the pregnant terms in which it is couched. It often creates a misery and anxiety far away from the place wherein it is indited, not because it is understood, but because it is misunderstood and exaggerated by the recipient. While the student considers it a farcical proceeding, it is a leaf of tragedy to fathers and mothers. Then the thing is explained. The offence is sifted. The father finds out that less than a dozen morning naps are all that is necessary to bring about this stupendous correspondence. The ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... It was a farcical ending to a very arduous thirty-six-hour campaign, and Ross, feeling like a man who, having rolled a huge stone to the top of a hill, has been ordered to drop it, said, "I insist on the maximum penalty of the law, Justice Higley, especially for ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... comrades there existed a freemasonry that made them all sense a thing beyond the ken of most of their elders. Perhaps this was because the elders, being blind in their superior wisdom, saw neither this thing nor the communion that flourished. They saw only the farcical joke. But His Honor, Judge Priest, to cite a conspicuous exception, seemed not to see ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... remark of Beau Brummell's on the cut of his coat. Humour, Satire, Irony, pounce on it altogether as their common prey. The Comic spirit eyes but does not touch it. Put into action, it would be farcical. It is too gross ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... civilisation of Europe; and if we live long enough we shall see what we do see. Mahatmas are really the distinctive feature of Theosophy; it is absolutely nothing without them; and, in our opinion, they are a most farcical swindle Madame Blavatsky created these out of her own fertile imagination, she put them where they could not be found, and she said, "If you want to know anything about them come to me; I am the chosen vehicle of their sublime ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... of his oration made him reach out another clutching hand to the vanished reporter. "But it's farcical, father, to be always interviewed by a ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... members of Wattier's Club was Bligh, a notorious madman, of whom Mr Raikes relates:—'One evening at the Macao table, when the play was very deep, Brummell, having lost a considerable stake, affected, in his farcical way, a very tragic air, and cried out—"Waiter, bring me a flat candlestick and a pistol." Upon which Bligh, who was sitting opposite to him, calmly produced two loaded pistols from his coat pocket, which he placed on the table, and said, "Mr Brummell, if you are really desirous ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... spiritualism, table rappings, and such things, because they were undignified, because the ghosts cracked jokes or waltzed with dinner-tables. I do not share this objection in the least. I wish the spirits were more farcical than they are. That they should make more jokes and better ones, would be my suggestion. For almost all the spiritualism of our time, in so far as it is new, is solemn and sad. Some Pagan gods were lawless, ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... (I heard the men in that lonely ship were dying of fever at the rate of three a day) and went on. We called at some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... concluding decade of the sixteenth century, came a series of realistic stories depicting chiefly, in more or less farcical spirit, the life of the poorer classes. They belonged mostly to that class of realistic fiction which is called picaresque, from the Spanish word 'picaro,' a rogue, because it began in Spain with the 'Lazarillo de Tormes' of Diego de Mendoza, in 1553, and because its ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... might say, however fantastical. And yet I believe the absurdity of that barber to be among the great evils that have brought death nearer to man; whimsical and farcical as it was, yet a thing deadlier than Helen's beauty or Tamerlane's love of skulls. For just as character is outwardly shown so outward things react upon the character; and who, with that daring barber's ludicrous fancy visible always on his face, could quite go ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... the sound of Commodore Preble's guns a strange, almost farcical, intervention in the Tripolitan War was preparing. The scene shifts to the desert on the east, where William Eaton, consul at Tunis, becomes the center of interest. Since the very beginning of the war, this energetic and enterprising Connecticut ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... mere figure in an idyll, the ornament of a rural mask, a god of the garden, instead of the sovereign director of the universal forces, and stern master of the destinies of men. Chaumette's commemoration of the Divinity of Reason was a sensible performance, compared with Robespierre's farcical repartee. It was something, as Comte has said, to select for worship man's most individual attribute. If they could not contemplate society as a whole, it was at least a gain to pay homage to that faculty in the human rulers of the world, which ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... now a few restless spirits, who fancied that, as seen from their limited opportunities to judge correctly, the appropriations had not been judiciously made during the past few years, determined to appoint this Committee from among the Pastors. The Elders, well knowing that the farcical proceeding would in time come to naught, concluded to offer no opposition to the movement. The Committee was accordingly appointed and proceeded to the discharge of its duties. At the first meeting, however, it was found that the Committee was unable to proceed for want ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... addressed himself to the only person of ultimate importance—namely, Mrs. Cole. He lay down on all fours, looked up directly into her face, bared his teeth this time in a smile and not in a growl, and wagged his farcical tail. ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... DRAWCANSIR in two acts (Larpent 96) which is here reproduced in facsimile.[1] It is an interesting example of that mid-eighteenth-century phenomenon, the afterpiece, from a period when not only Shakespearean stock productions but new plays as well were accompanied by such farcical appendages.[2] This particular afterpiece is worth reproducing not only for its catalogue of the social foibles of the age, but as an illustration of satirical writing for the stage at a time when dramatic taste often wavered toward the sentimental. ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... pronouncements of these genteel chinovniks who were anxious to train the Jewish masses in the fear of Russian bureaucracy and inculcate in them polite manners aroused the attention both of the Russian and the foreign press. It was universally felt that these farcical performances of uncouth administrators were only the manifestations of a bottomless hatred, of a morbid desire to insult and to humble the Jews, and that these administrators were capable at any moment to proceed from moralizing to more tangible ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... proper pitch. Was there ever seen such radiancy of valor? Very radiant indeed;—yet, it seems to me, gone somewhat into the phosphorescent kind; shining in the dark, as fish will do when rotten! War has actually its serious character; nor is Death a farcical transaction, however high your genius may go. But what then? it is the Marechal's trade to keep these poor people at the cutting pitch, on any terms that will hold ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... was to Mr. Pickwick's watch, that we owe the diverting and farcical incident of the double bedded bedroom—and indeed we have here all the licensed improbabilities of a Farce. To forget his watch on a hotel table was the last thing a staid man of business would do. How could he be made to forget it? "By winding it up," said the author. "Winding up his watch, ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... well, I am a farcical character myself, after all. Don't touch a hair of that duck's head, HEDVIG. Come to my arms and all ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 30, 1891 • Various
... charmingly wicked person. The stories are well written, with a pleasant humour of a farcical ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... on a large scale, but whose sense of fitness and harmony was weak. So also the Roccabonella fragments, in spite of a rugged, rough-hewn appearance, show an absence of ethical and intellectual qualities; while the fussy and breathless reliefs round the choir of the Santo are farcical in several respects. There was another man influenced by Donatello, who must be nameless pending further investigation: his style cannot be identified with anything on the great altar, but he was a sculptor of immense power. He made the so-called shrine of Santa Giustina in London,[211] ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... Assommoir—-contain striking and amusing scenes, no doubt, but scenes which are often suggestive of the stage, while description, dissertation, explanation too frequently take the place of life. His best work after all is to be found in the books that are almost wholly farcical, Le nez d'un notaire (1862); Le roi des montagnes (1856); L'homme a l'oreille cassee (1862); Trente et quarante (1858); Le cas de M. Guerin (1862). Here his most genuine wit, his sprightliness, his vivacity, the fancy that was in him, have free play. "You will never ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to her original, Mrs. Behn has dealt with the somewhat rude material in a very apt and masterly way: she has, to advantage, omitted the old King, Emanuel, King of Portugal, Alvero, father to Maria (Florella), and the two farcical friars, Crab and Cole; she adds Elvira, and whereas in Lust's Dominion the Queen at the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... betray the woman to whom he owes his present prosperity, for he is prosperous and has a snug little balance at his bank. Besides, even though we took the matter in hand, what could we do? There is no evidence against him or against the woman. The farcical proceedings in the coroner's court had tied ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... a good and even a brilliant letter writer, but often and often she would tear up what she had written and begin again. There was not much news in Bryngelly; it was difficult to make her letters amusing. Also the farcical nature of the whole proceeding seemed to paralyse her. It was ridiculous, having so much to say, to be able to say nothing. Not that Beatrice wished to indite love-letters—such an idea had never crossed her mind, but rather to write as they had talked. Yet when she tried ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... innings, and decided to bat, despite the fact that the wicket was drying after rain, under the influence of a steady south-west wind and occasional bursts of sunshine. Would any captain in Stott's second year have dared to take first innings under such conditions? The question is farcical now, but not a single member of the Hampdenshire Eleven had the least conception that the Surrey captain was deliberately throwing away his ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... only one which was absolutely correct. Any rapid eye test which pretended to determine whether there was sixty-one per cent. or fifty-nine per cent. of Red Fife wheat in a given sample struck the Farmers' Representative as farcical; yet this was sufficient to make the difference of a grade and sometimes a difference of seven cents per bushel in ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... alleged "intense excitement" which was again paraded as a menace to induce him to return the arms. If he was originally surprised at the reported excitement he was now still more astonished to find that it did not exist except in the insurrectionary zeal of those who were performing this farcical role purely for its theatrical effect. A majority of the "prominent citizens," who had been convoked as a part of the stage retinue to intimidate him by the threat of a mob, had not yet even heard of ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... was amusing his victorious troops, and seeking to annoy the disaffected Seleucians, by the performance of a farcical ceremony. He spread the report that Crassus was not killed but captured; and, selecting from among the prisoners the Roman most like him in appearance, he dressed the man in woman's clothes, mounted him upon a horse, and requiring him to answer to the names of "Crassus" ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... contortions and windings of the body with which he climbed up onto the platform, and then the grimaces that he made as his large round head peered over the top of the desk, might have struck any less solemn assemblage as farcical. He wore an old shiny black frock coat and a white rather grimy tie fastened in a sharp little bow. His face was lined like a map, his cheeks seamed and furrowed, his forehead a wilderness of marks, his scanty hair brushed straight back so that the ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... had returned from the Transvaal) got word of the plot they wired urgent messages to their friends in Parliament that Mr Redmond's selection was the only one that could give the leadership anything better than a farcical character. Result—Mr Redmond was elected by a very considerable majority, and Mr Dillon had further reason for having his knife in his former friend ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... STEPHENSON ("B.C." makes him quite a classic—date uncertain, so his plot may have been done in collaboration, with PLAUTUS or TERENCE) has reproduced from the French a neatly-constructed One-Act piece, in which are all the possibilities of a Three-Act Criterion or Palais Royal Farcical Comedy. So rapid is the action, all over in about forty-five minutes, and so much to the point of the plot is the dialogue, that an inattentive auditor would soon lose the thread of the argument, never to pick it ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 6, 1892 • Various
... duel had so many farcical features, and Miss Todd had unwittingly been so much to blame for it, that one can easily see that it might have had considerable influence on the relations of the two young people. However that may be, something had made Mr. Lincoln ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... the Wicklow Mines,[G] which were worked some fifty years back, but which, for want of capital or perseverance, only furnished a few Cronobane halfpence, and materials for a musical farce to one of the most delightful farcical Irish writers of his time;[H] ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... recites to Pump, the innkeeper, the gallant innkeeper who, against all opposition, keeps the flag flying and the flagon full. If the book is a little overdrawn it is, no doubt, because the subject is slightly farcical; the arguments of the Oriental are well put, and, if the discussion of the merits of vegetarianism are a little wearisome, the poetry ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... The farcical failure of Dr. Jameson was the outcome of those endeavours. The unspeakable cowardice of his Johannesburg confederates was the chief feature of that puny attempt. Laurels, like those gained by Lord Peterborough, Warren Hastings, ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... case, Tony is a doomed man," commented Myra, with a mocking laugh. "But perhaps the fact that I do not love you will induce you to spare his life," she added hastily. "Don't you find it rather difficult to be melodramatic and to talk farcical nonsense before breakfast, ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... the irony of the argument, and their laugh did much to do away with the constraint, the tension of their mood. More gayly she mentioned certain farcical incidents. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... two-faced, anyway. I'll say that for you," was the apparently magnanimous concession made by one comedian to another in a recent farcical play. The other was beginning to express his gratification when the speaker continued: "If you were, you wouldn't have come out with that one." Again, you observe, there is no answer to this kind of attack. Hence, I suppose, its popularity. And yet perhaps to take refuge in a smug sententiousness, ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... CRAMINATION. A farcical word, signifying the same as cramming; the termination tion being suffixed for the sake ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... home on the Schuylkill. In the centre of a large lawn stood a double mansion of stone, and a little to each side were seen outhouses for servants and kitchen use. The open space toward the water was extensive enough to admit of the farcical tilting of the afternoon. A great variety of evergreen trees and shrubs gave the house a more shaded look than the season would otherwise have afforded. Among these were countless lanterns illuminating the grounds, and from the windows on all sides a blaze of light was visible. Back of the house ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... Vice-Queen of the Adriatic: it was prolonged to double by the thick and clinging mist-fog. The sea-city was enjoying her usual lethargy of repose after the excitement of the 'geographical Carnival,' as we called the farcical Congress of last September. She is essentially a summering place. Her winter is miserable, neither city nor houses being built for any but the finest of fine weather; her 'society'-season lasts only four months from St. Stephen's Day; her traveller-seasons are spring and autumn. We ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... that President Krueger and his friends realise the gravity of the situation. Even now the State Secretary is doing things which would be almost farcical if the times ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... I don't doubt the Bible is all right in making the laws it does. After the first heat of my anger was over, I saw the whole thing in its proper bearings. Those laws about priests were only intended for the days when we had a Temple, and in any case they cannot apply to a merely farcical divorce like yours. It is these old fools,—I beg your pardon,—it is these fanatical Rabbis who insist on giving them a rigidity God never meant them to have, just as they still make a fuss about kosher meat. In America ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... If you try to be nice, try to placate them, you'll simply get into hotter water. They don't understand such things. They think they are uncovering a vast conspiracy. Cinderella Cotillion Coterie! Gad, of all the farcical happenings I have come across even ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... oration made him reach out another clutching hand to the vanished reporter. "But it's farcical, father, to be always interviewed by a paper ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... Italy and Greece. This twofold character of the poet it is that is revealed in his best poems, "Childe Harold" and "Don Juan." He used both works as receptacles for the most incongruous ideas. "If things are farcical," he once said to Trelawney, "they will do for 'Don Juan'; if heroical, you shall have another canto of 'Childe Harold.'" This means of disposing of his poetic ideas accounts for the great volume of Byron's verse as well as for its inequality. That "Don Juan" ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... comedy, or, more properly speaking, musical farce, is becoming more and more popular in both Europe and America it is also becoming proportionately more farcical; although in many theaters it is staged as often as the more serious drama, in some having exclusive dominion; and although theater managers find that these plays draw bigger crowds and fill their houses better than any ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... by allegorical representations. When popular interest in these dramas began to lag, current topics were introduced into the dialogue, and characters from real life appeared on the stage for the first time. Early in the sixteenth century John Heywood invented a farcical composition called The Interlude to relieve the tiresome monotony of existing plays. But it was in 1540 that the first comedy appeared, and it is not too much to say that this play marks the beginning of modern English drama. Nicholas Udall, head master of Eton College, being accustomed to write ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... squatter; and to shoot at him seemed equally ridiculous. Either alternative, upon reflection, appeared the very essence of absurdity: and, having ample time to reflect, while awaiting the signal, I could not help thinking how farcical was ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... a private meeting to attend to-night. Should he attend it or not? His situation had become farcical. Was it not his plain duty to withdraw at once from the political contest, that a serious candidate might as soon as possible take his place? Where could he discern even the glimmer of a hope in this sudden darkness? His heart ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... was becoming rather a farcical dissertation upon the relations that should obtain between states, irrespective of size, when it was broken off by a cry from Tambi, who, with another lantern hanging overside at the end of his arm ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... hypocrisies that hedge round that honourable institution, but just forgot that serious argument cannot easily be conveyed through the medium of fantastically impossible and uninteresting people in an extravagantly farcical situation. The play was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... maintenance of order, the judges, prosecuting attorneys, sheriff and drawers of jurors, and every other of court of law are in the hands of a despotic cabal who excessively tax, and whose courts convict all those who oppose them, and exonerate by trial the most farcical, the vilest criminal, rob and murder in broad day light, often at the bidding of their protectors. Such a status for a people claiming to be civilized seems difficult to conceive, yet the above was not an hypothesis of condition, but the actual one that existed in California and San Francisco, ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... very young, Durkin remembered. He had toyed with art for two winters in Paris, so scene by scene he had been able to translate the little drama that had appeared so farcical and Frenchy to ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... protest. All the same, however, when people won't make restoration, things must be taken from them. What worries me is that Bergaz should have sold himself just now. The public prosecutor will use that farcical burglary as a crushing argument when he asks the jury ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... did," returned Mr. Calverley. "You informed me—which was your duty as a friend—of this curmudgeon's boast that he would have me horsewhipped if I dared venture into England. You will readily conceive that any gentleman of self-respect cannot permit such farcical utterances to be delivered without appending a gladiatorial epilogue. Well! what are the ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... obedience: a soldier is, of all descriptions of men, the most completely a machine; yet his profession inevitably teaches him something of dogmatism, swaggering, and sell-consequence: he is like the puppet of a showman, who, at the very time he is made to strut and swell and display the most farcical airs, we perfectly know cannot assume the most insignificant gesture, advance either to the right or the left, but as he is moved by his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... sound of Commodore Preble's guns a strange, almost farcical, intervention in the Tripolitan War was preparing. The scene shifts to the desert on the east, where William Eaton, consul at Tunis, becomes the center of interest. Since the very beginning of the ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... thus: "If the character of Hamlet be entirely omitted, the play must suffer, even though Henry Irving himself be cast for the title-role." Anyone going to the theatre in this spirit would be likely to be less disappointed by performances that were comic or even frankly farcical. Latterly, when he grew slightly deaf, listening to any kind of piece became too much of an effort; nevertheless, he continued to the last the habit of going to ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones
... her letters (I heard the men in that lonely ship were dying of fever at the rate of three a day) and went on. We called at some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... a teacher who lacks a sense of humor to teach a bit of English that abounds in humor, by means of the textual notes. The notes are bad enough, in all conscience, but the teacher's lack of humor piles Ossa upon Pelion. The solemnity that pervades such mechanical teaching would be farcical were it not so pathetic. The teacher who cannot indulge in a hearty, honest, ringing laugh with her pupils in situations that are really humorous is certain to be laughed at by her pupils. In her work, as in Lincoln's, a sense of humor will often ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... apartments, whenever any affair of an interesting nature was pending, nothing could make her refrain from joining any company which might be in the house;—nothing;—not even O'Grady himself. At such times, too, she became strangely excited, and invariably executed one piece of farcical absurdity, of which, however, the family contrived to confine the exercise to her own room. It was wearing on her head a tin concern, something like a chimney-cowl, ornamented by a small weathercock, after the fashion of those which ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... antiquity more or less remote. Thus it is easy to conceive the delight of the music-loving people of Naples when they found that the opera which they adored could be enjoyed in combination with a mirthful and even farcical story, interpreted by characters who might have stepped out of one of their own market-places. But, apart from the freedom and variety of the subjects with which it dealt, the development of opera buffa gave rise to an art-form ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... the exquisite and waxen bloom of our author's sympathetic characters. Far from it. Of the young and oh-so-good-looking millionaire (weary of pleasures and palaces, too weary even to dismiss his preposterous and farcical butler—lacking, in effect, the definite object); of the heroine's young brother, crook in embryo, but reclaimable by influence of hero; and of the peach-like leading lady herself, I can only say that each is worthy of the rest, and all of a creator ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... and assumes the judge? He is the treasurer and secretary of an Union that does not number three hundred persons; yet in that small Union, of which he is dictator, there has been as much rattening, and more shooting, and blowing-up wholesale and retail, with the farcical accompaniment of public repudiation, than in all the other Unions put together. We consider the entrance of this ingenuous personage on the scene a bad omen, and shall watch all future proceedings with ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... seeking to divide the fund among various sects and localities, used arguments often plausible and sometimes forcible. These I dealt with on various occasions, but especially in a speech before the State Senate in 1865, in which was shown the character of the interested opposition, the farcical equipment of the People's College, the failure of the State Agricultural College, the inadequacy of the sectarian colleges, even though they called themselves universities; and I did all in my power to communicate to ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... exasperated, and struck the table, swallowing up Paris with each draught of beer. Fagerolles, very calm, retained his usual smile. He had accompanied them for the sake of amusement, for the singular pleasure which he found in urging his comrades into farcical affairs that were bound to turn out badly. At the very moment when he was lashing their spirit of revolt, he himself formed the firm resolution to work in future for the Prix de Rome. That day had decided him; he thought it idiotic to ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... oppose Mr Redmond's election to the chair, but when Mr O'Brien and Mr Davitt (who had returned from the Transvaal) got word of the plot they wired urgent messages to their friends in Parliament that Mr Redmond's selection was the only one that could give the leadership anything better than a farcical character. Result—Mr Redmond was elected by a very considerable majority, and Mr Dillon had further reason for having his knife in his former friend ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... thoughts I take note of a little scene of comedy, or perhaps of a farcical kind, which is going on near me, in which two 'Harrys' of the purest kind were engaged, and whose oddities lightened the tediousness of the passage. One had seen foreign parts, and was therefore regarded with reverence ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... issue from their cave. When they have to rise into the air, little devils of stuffed brown cloth are substituted, or perhaps live chimney-sweeps, who swing suspended and smothered in rags. The accidents which happen are sometimes tragical, sometimes farcical. When the ropes break, then infernal spirits and immortal deities fall together, laming and sometimes killing each other. Add to all this the monsters which render some scenes very pathetic, such as dragons, lizards, tortoises, and large toads, which promenade the theatre ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... I shall go as I am. (Gloomily) After all, I don't know why I should mind one more farcical touch to my situation. A grown man that doesn't know how to ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... hand, if we succeed in our efforts to separate from her, the benefit to England will be second only to our own. This might strike us strangely, but 'tis true, not the less true because the English people could hardly understand or appreciate it now. The military defence of Ireland is almost farcical. A free Ireland could make it a reality—could make it strong against invasion. This would secure England from attack on our side. No one is, I take it, so foolish as to suppose, being free, we would enter quarrels not our own. We should remain neutral. Our ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... rocks cover her from the gaze of men. She upbraided herself for her blindness to the most obviously important aspect of the situation. Now that she saw it, her zeal to "pay," by doing penance in public, became tragic and farcical at once. The absurdity of making satisfaction to Mrs. Rodman and Mrs. Clay, to Fanny Burnaby and the Brown girls, by calling in the law, when less suffering—to her father at least—would give them actual cash, was not the least ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... that actually saw Jeanne herself was the open space round the rising nave of St. Ouen, then called the Cemetery, where we have already watched the farcical royalty of the Revolte de la Harelle (p. 152). In thus tracing her footsteps, where we may still find them, I shall be showing you what little is left of the Rouen of the English occupation. Few of the towers and spires that ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... ever since the struggle with Spain. As a designation for movements aimed at securing rotation in office, and hence control of the treasury, it was appropriate enough! At all events, whether serious or farcical, the commotions often involved an expenditure in life and money far beyond the value of the interests affected. Further, both the prevalent disorder and the centralization of authority impelled the educated ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... rideau [Fr.], interlude, afterpiece^, exode^, farce, divertissement, extravaganza, burletta^, harlequinade^, pantomime, burlesque, opera bouffe [Fr.], ballet, spectacle, masque, drame comedie drame [Fr.]; melodrama, melodrame^; comidie larmoyante [Fr.], sensation drama; tragicomedy, farcical-comedy; monodrame monologue; duologue trilogy^; charade, proverbs; mystery, miracle play; musical, musical comedy. [movies] western, horse opera; flick [Coll.]; spy film, love story, adventure film, documentary, nature film; pornographic film, smoker, skin flick, X-rated ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... verdict and the prisoner was invited to acknowledge the regularity of the proceedings in the farcical trial by signing the record. To this Rizal demurred, but after a vain protest, ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... preference. The charms of the Journey, its grace, wit, and urbanity, are thoroughly congenial to that most graceful of languages, and reproduce themselves readily enough therein; while, on the other hand, the fantastic digressions, the elaborate mystifications, the farcical interludes of the earlier work, appear intolerably awkward and bizzare in their French dress; and, what is much more strange, even the point of the double entendres is sometimes unaccountably lost. Were it not that the genuine humour of Tristram Shandy in a great measure evaporates in ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... been of farcical ease. Not her prospective millions nor her conquering loveliness, either of which might eventually have gained the entree for her, would have sufficed to set her on the throne. Shrewd social critics ascribed her effortless success to what Lord ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... papers devoted to the Commune asserted, on the following day, that two hundred and fifteen battalions were assembled on that day, and that the average strength of each corps was one thousand men. Who could have believed that the Place de l'Hotel de Ville was capable of accommodating so many! This farcical assertion of the two hundred and fifteen battalions has passed ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... serious moods, and caricatured in the comic. The English are always inadequate observers; they seem too full of themselves to have eyes and ears for any alien people; but as far as an Englishman could, Dickens had caught the look of our life in certain aspects. His report of it was clumsy and farcical; but in a large, loose way it was like enough; at least he had caught the note of our self-satisfied, intolerant, and hypocritical provinciality, and this was not altogether lost in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... content by the two comic figures, Mercutio and the nurse, probably presented by two popular actors—the nurse undoubtedly acted by a man. If we examine the structure of the play very closely, we notice that these two figures and the elements touching them, appear only as farcical interludes, which, with our love of the logical and harmonious, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... realized the futility of launching their candidacy, and their followers either voted for the official candidate or refrained from voting. In this connection I am reminded of the convincing political speeches attributed to one of the foremost men of La Vega during the farcical campaigns preceding the elections of Heureaux. He is quoted as saying: "My friends, this Republic is founded on the free and unrestricted suffrage of its citizens. It is the proud boast of the Dominican that under the constitution he may vote as he pleases. You are ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... and return to the Stick'ems; but as a last word I would say, in all seriousness, that wildly farcical though that celebrated utterance may be, there underlies it an absolutely true valuation of the fundamental bed-rock of war. To emulate the deeds of others and go one better, to put the men in good heart with their tails ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... the next is an old man, and so forth. These plays are of very ancient composition, and their stories cast in remote times. They appeared to me very dull, on the whole, but were relieved by startling mechanical contrivances, and a kind of farcical broad humour, and detached passages of great vigour and power expressed in language highly poetical, but somewhat overcharged with metaphor and trope. In fine, they seemed to me very much what the plays of Shakespeare seemed to a Parisian in the time of Louis XV., ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the comedies of Udall and Still—held its ground. We have it in the morality of the New Custom, printed in 1573, but no doubt written earlier, in the Interlude of The Trial of Treasure, in the farcical comedy of Like Will to Like, a coarse but lively piece, by Ulpian Fulwell (1568). In the very curious tragi-comedy of Cambyses this doggerel appears partly, but is alternated with the less lawless but scarcely more suitable "fourteener" ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... series of incidents which threw the House into convulsions of rancorous scorn and farcical laughter. Earlier in the evening there had been a speech by Mr. Kenyon. Words fail to describe the kind of speech Mr. Kenyon delivers. Sometimes one is doubtful as to the sex of the speaker, for he moans out ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... condemns[35], the scene in which Periplecomenus shouts out to Philocomasium so loudly that the soldier's household could not conceivably help hearing, whereas he is supposed to be conveying secret information.[36] If carried out in a broadly farcical spirit, the scene becomes ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... study of a thing new to him. It was like him, too, to have conceived and risked all upon this last desperate and madcap scheme—this message to a poor, crazed fanatico cruising about with his grotesque uniform and his farcical title. But his companions had been at their wits' end; escape had seemed incredible; and now he was pleased with the success of the plan they ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... have made an excellent short story, but to pursue its farcical developments through three hundred pages requires a considerable amount of perseverance. The scene of Mr. PETER BLUNDER'S book is laid in tropical Jallagar, where the British Resident was keener on cats than on his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... were betrayed. Most of them quietly dispersed towards their homes. That night Mat was seized in his bed, and within a few minutes afterwards was in goal. He felt that the game was up, that all his bright hopes, like those of many another noble Irish heart before him, had ended in farcical nothingness. Disaster followed upon disaster. When he made his appearance in court he saw upon the witness table one of his most trusted friends, who was about to give the evidence that would ensure ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... modern man, who was pre-eminently capable of realising the strangest and most contradictory beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic, and the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcical bathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat. He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist in raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist. It is indeed difficult to account for the clinging curse ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... M. G. Lewis, exhibits not only a faithful copy of the spirited, loose, and flowing versification of that singular author, but a very just representation of that mixture of extravagance and jocularity which has impressed most of his writings with the character of a sort of farcical horror."—JEFFREY, Edinburgh Review. ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... on record. They relate that during Xavier's sojourn in Bungo he had numerous public debates—one continuing for five days—with Buddhist priests, but even Fernandez not being available as an interpreter, these debates must have been either farcical or imaginary, though brilliant results are claimed for them by the Church historians. That Xavier himself was not satisfied is proved by his determination to transfer his ministrations to China, for he said, "if the Chinese adopt the Christian religion, the Japanese ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... part of these two plays founded on the story of Henry IV is not inferior to the comic and farcical. The characters of Hotspur and Prince Henry are two of the most beautiful and dramatic, both in themselves and from contrast, that ever were drawn. They are the essence of chivalry. We like Hotspur the best upon the whole, perhaps because he was unfortunate.—The ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... energies. There is no passion in Hamlet when there has been no love. And he had always held his uncle in slight esteem—foreboded something from his smiling insincerity. He never mentions him without an expression of contempt, hardly acknowledges him as king; he is a thing—of nothing—a farcical monarch—"a peacock"—and, in this particular act, no dread usurper, but a "cut-purse of the realm." Whether he designed to wait or was prepared to strike, his future was still intact, his energy unimpaired. His mother remained to him, now doubly dear and doubly great, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... late years in Germany very good evidence of the excellent results flowing from thorough methods, and the recent legislation in Massachusetts against the gypsy moth (Ocneria dispar), which at one time threatened to become farcical, has, fortunately, proved more than usually successful; the commission appointed to deal with the subject having worked with energy ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... allowed to look for himself. He was conducted to the great vaulted rooms of the Temple, to the vast ballrooms of the Palais Cond, where herded the condemned and those still awaiting trial; he was allowed to witness there the grim farcical tragedies, with which the captives beguiled the few hours which separated them ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... is evident from the opening scene, that Shakespeare, even in dealing with classical subjects, laughed at the classic fear of putting the ludicrous and sublime into juxtaposition. After the low and farcical jests of the saucy cobbler, the eloquence of Marullus 'springs upwards like a ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... famous sons. It is certain that the experience of these weeks at Harper's Ferry gave John A. Andrew the prompting to the extraordinary zeal with which he entered upon the duties of his gubernatorial office less than two years afterward. The whole trial seems farcical; but we must admit that a show of fairness was had, and, considering the ferocity with which the old man was attacked when down in the Engine House, the only wonder is that he was granted a trial at all. Through all the trying hours of that ordeal how like a hero did he deport ...
— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe
... the human race goes free again. If it fail—and God forbid!—then the whole world will lie in the grip of Flint and Waldron! With our other centers broken up and under espionage, our press forced into impotence—save our underground press—and political action now rendered farcical as ever it was in Mexico, when Diaz ruled, we have ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... Jonathan—had long been noted as a droll. A grin was as much a part of his stock apparel as tow breeches or a palm-leaf hat. The negro, too, had from time immemorial been portrayed upon the stage and in fiction as an irrepressible and inimitably farcical fellow. But the "Southern gentleman" was a man of different kidney from either of these. A sardonic dignity hedged him about with peculiar sacredness. He was chivalrous and baronial in his instincts, surroundings, and characteristics. He was nervous, excitable, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... a smile at all, chevalier; it was the torture which came of snuff getting into its nostrils, and when the beast made that uncanny noise and snapped its jaws together, it was simply the outcome of a sneeze. The thing would be farcical if it were not that tragedy hangs on the thread of it, and that a life, a useful human life, was destroyed by means of it. Yes, it was clever, it was diabolically clever; but you know what Bobby Burns says about the best-laid schemes ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... was their life. For the first time he had the banks in his power; he could afford to laugh; and the whole community was in the same position, though few laughed. All sat down on the banks and asked what the banks were going to do about it. To Adams the situation seemed farcical, but the more he saw of it, the less he understood it. He was quite sure that nobody understood it much better. Blindly some very powerful energy was at work, doing something that nobody wanted done. When Adams went to his bank to draw a hundred dollars ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... was in a fair way to find himself in the same boat as both the local Governor and the Chief of Gendarmery: with the result that the whole trio were reduced to a frame of mind in which they were only too glad to turn to him (Samosvitov) for advice. The ultimate and farcical upshot was that report came crowding upon report, and that such alleged doings were brought to light as the sun had never before beheld. In fact, the documents in question employed anything and everything as material, even to announcing that such ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... "I should so like to take myself and my troubles seriously once in a while. No sooner do I try, but something perfectly farcical is sure to happen. If I tell you this, promise me you won't laugh. It's indecent for me to laugh; mamma would never forgive me. The old dear! I'm ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... others than the actual living wife, sometimes with her consent, sometimes without it. One old gentleman, whose name is not to be mentioned, was sealed thus for eternity to Martha Washington and to Empress Josephine. It sounds farcical and foolish in the extreme; fit only to be counted as a silly joke, unworthy the attention of a sane soul for a minute; but it is terribly sober when it is remembered that there are hundreds of thousands of innocent, honest, and unsuspecting Mormons who really ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... also gave him some hints. Trifling and irritating conceits abound in the 'Two Gentlemen,' but passages of high poetic spirit are not wanting, and the speeches of the clowns, Launce and Speed—the precursors of a long line of whimsical serving-men—overflow with farcical drollery. The 'Two Gentlemen' was not published in Shakespeare's lifetime; it first appeared in the folio of 1623, after having, in all probability, ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... but at the time he had a notion that the public would find something humorous and attractive in the spectacle of a popular actress's leg swathed in several layers of stocking. So he made a show of Blanche Bates. The public refused to be amused at the farcical study in comparative anatomy, and when Mr. Belasco's friends began to fault him for having pandered to a low taste, and he felt the smart of failure in addition, he grew heartily ashamed of himself. His affairs, moreover, began ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... placed in the mausoleum of the first Stovik, his ancestor. No royal name was cut, but the place of his burial was deeply graved in the hearts of all present. Had he lived he had been a farcical king, but dead he was as imposing as the grandest monarch ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... that other Spider's web, and out of his thought makes something that shall instruct or thrill us. To protect our 'bone,' we have the police, invented for the express purpose. To protect the book, we have none but farcical means. Place a few bricks one atop the other; join them with mortar; and the law will defend your wall. Build up in writing an edifice of your thoughts; and it will be open to any one, without serious impediment, to abstract stones from it, even to take the ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... bore, in the hope that she may end his career. Once started on the wrong tack, he works out his evidence with convincing logic, and ties up the whole neighbourhood in the toils of his misconception. The book is full of the wittiest dialogue and the most farcical situations. It will be as certain to please all lovers of Irish humour as the immortal "Experiences of an ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... the national dance appear, and take the place of the two advocates for a time. These combatants soon re-commence their struggle; and, at length, the judge is called upon to pronounce between them. A farcical kind of consultation ensues between the judge and the ministers around, who are supposed to send messengers even to the king himself by their ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... impossible to read them without discerning in them all the powers which afterwards produced "Evelina" and "Cecilia"; the quickness in catching every odd peculiarity of character and manner; the skill in grouping; the humour, often richly comic, sometimes even farcical. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... of my spirits, and sometimes fear that I cannot go through with the engagements of the winter. But I have never stopped yet in fulfilling what I have undertaken, and hope I shall not be compelled to now. How farcical seems the preparation needed to gain a few moments' life; yet just so the plant works all the year round for ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... upon the college duels as very farcical affairs: true, but considering that the college duel is fought by boys; that the swords are real swords; and that the head and face are exposed, it seems to me that it is a farce which had quite ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... than a man. Next to receiving them she loved to answer them. She was a good and even a brilliant letter writer, but often and often she would tear up what she had written and begin again. There was not much news in Bryngelly; it was difficult to make her letters amusing. Also the farcical nature of the whole proceeding seemed to paralyse her. It was ridiculous, having so much to say, to be able to say nothing. Not that Beatrice wished to indite love-letters—such an idea had never crossed her mind, but rather to write as they had talked. ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... satellites of the Court despised the wicked fribble who wore the crown of England. Faithless to women, faithless to men, a coward, a liar, a mean and grovelling cheat, George IV. nevertheless clung to a belief in his own virtues; and, if we study the account of his farcical progress through Scotland, we find that he imagined himself to be a useful and genuinely kingly personage. No man, except, perhaps, Philippe Egalite, was ever so contemned and hated; and until his death he imagined himself to be a good man. In all that wild set who disgraced ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... losing his abstracted look, the eyes beneath those ridiculous lenses coming to a sharp bright focus with tiny livening flecks in the gray of the iris; and the way the change lifted his features from mediocrity to the alertness of a terrier. It was absurd, it was farcical ... and it was ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... looking for Toole. I did not really expect to see him, and I had no reason to believe he was in Ramsgate, but I thought if providence were kind to him it might throw him in my way. I wanted to do him a good turn. I had written a three-act farcical comedy at the request of an amateur dramatic club. I had written out all the parts, and I think there were rehearsals. But the play was never produced. In the light of after knowledge I suspect some of those actors must have been of quite professional calibre. You understand, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Milanese extremely. Seated between these two distracted brains, one so noble and the other so common, and making game of each other to the great entertainment of the crowd, there was a moment when the Count found himself wavering between the sublime and its parody, the farcical extremes of human life. Ignoring the chain of incredible events which had brought them to this smoky den, he believed himself to be the plaything of some strange hallucination, and thought of Gambara and ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... an approving, unnatural week, in my farcical character, bridling my resentment and hiding my mortification with pretty phrases; and then I went up to town and drowned my sorrows in the summer sales. I took John with me. I may have been Cecily's mother in theory, but I was John's wife ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... taken some soup, and a couple of eggs, and drank nothing but water; my tongue is discolored; and without medicine and tonics, whatever my farcical doctor may say, my digestion will ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... it all!—I dreamed of a free, happy country, of a free, happy people prospering and blessed when the tyrant was overthrown—I thought I could help on this glorious time; and what happens? I am struck down by the hand of a friend in a miserable squabble; inglorious, farcical!—O Ireland, Ireland! the follies of your own children may be a greater curse to you in the days to come than have been the crimes of the stranger who has ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... the belles lettres, the imagination loves to play upon it. What will it be like? What treasures lie concealed in it? What delights has it in store for us? In our curiosity we are like the boy in Mr. Pinero's farcical comedy: 'It is the 'orrible uncertainty wot we craves after.' No one can tell what may nestle in the recesses of new leaves. Not even in reference to well-known writers can we be positively sure. They may belie their reputation. The illustrious Smith may make a failure; the ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... stood valiantly by him, and his face revealed nothing of the humiliation he must feel in playing out his farcical role of friendship before the eyes of the man to ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... of the season, but one which had beneficial results, was the strike of the Detroit players, entailing the staging of a farcical game in Philadelphia between the Athletics and a team of semi-professionals. This incident grew out of an attack on a New York spectator by Ty Cobb while in uniform and the immediate suspension of the player for ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... London, 1857, p. 5, and passim; and for a passage giving the keynote of the whole, with a most farcical note on coprolites, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... said Crayshaw with farcical meekness of voice and air, "quite the contrary. It was that I've met with a serious accident. I've ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... drugging the public mind of their section for more than thirty years, and until at length they have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the Government the day after some assemblage of men have enacted the farcical pretense of taking their State out of the Union who could have been brought to no such thing ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... absence of all rational common sense, in the vast numbers of persons deluded by such processes. In this aspect (the total absence of right reason and real religion demonstrated by these ludicrous and blasphemous juggleries in our Christian communities), that which was farcical in the lowest degree became tragical in the highest. I only witnessed this one mesmeric exhibition, on the occasion of this visit paid to us by Mr. Townsend and Alexis, until several years afterwards, in the house of ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Kingsley always reflected some of his own happiness. It is not wit nor subtle humour, but a combination of pure mirth with the enthusiasm of warm friendship, that maintains one's interest in the simple life of the new Drumston. There is an abundance of farcical fun and playfulness which force laughter, and never approach an unkindness. The men avoid being smart at each other's expense; and if they cannot claim to be clever or heroic, they are at least good fellows, any one of whom might serve as ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... The razor, it turned out, was untempered and dull and was used to imbue boy apprentices with the confidence of the experienced barber. Hence it was in a sheath and, for the reason given above, the servant was not alarmed when the blade was snatched nor did Eumolpus break in upon this farcical death scene. ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... Johnsonianly upon lettered topics, puffing unending Virginia cigarettes, gazing with shy humor through thick-paned spectacles—well, on Friday, June 23, 1916, Bob and I decided to collaborate in writing a farcical novel. It is still unwritten, save the first few chapters. I only instance this to show how ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... was Irene at feud with everybody? As for Una Meredith being hateful to anybody, the idea was so farcical that Rilla had much ado to keep from laughing ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... whole period of my stay in England I was mixed up in a farcical comedy which I had to play out from start to finish. I happened to get acquainted with the widow of some departed high Anglo-Indian official. She was good enough to call me by the pet-name Ruby. Some Indian friend of hers had composed a doleful poem in English in memory ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... disappear without leaving the faintest trace of the manner of his presumed death, while in German East there were unscrupulous despots—the disciples of atrocious kultur—only too ready to condemn an Englishman without even the farcical formality of a court-martial. ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... of farce comedy, this play of the "Taming of the Shrew." In the hands of a lesser author it would have lost its comedy and degenerated purely into farce, restricting itself to more ignoble aims and to a more indulgent public. For farce, after all, is farcical, and the mood for its appreciation is not one which is sympathetic to any great or moving thing. And in the hands of interpreters less than intelligently fine, the play may still descend into the lower class; but this cannot be done without degrading it beyond any likeness ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
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