|
|
|
More "Irony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the best of all her birthday presents. He called her the "stormy petrel" in reference to her birth in the wild month of March, and because she was such a fiery little person. When she took sides in an argument he would say, in mild irony: "The shouts of the women in the opposite camp were heard demanding ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... rarely shone my way," he said, with a touch of irony, for that paper was controlled by the Ridgway interest. "In its approval I ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... 'new-born strength of the world,'" she said, looking at him with observant, curious eyes, but without irony, "or is your name ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... of them. He had wit at will. He had humor that, when he pleased, was delicate and delightful. He had a satire that was good-natured or caustic, Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais, at his pleasure. He had talents for irony, allegory, and fable, that he could adapt with great skill to the promotion of moral and political truth. He was master of that infantine simplicity which the French call naivete, which never fails to charm, in Phaedrus ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... but as he was the greatest artist of them all, his individual revelation of his country's predicament did not lose its effect. Writing in prose he achieved a style of his own which went as near poetry as narrative prose can do. without using the wrong music: while over his realism or his irony he cast a tinge of that mixed modern and oriental fantasy which belonged to his temperament. He suffered in youth, and suffered badly, from the romantic malady of his century, and that other malady of Russia, both expressed in what M. Haumand terms his ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... was Aunt Varina alone who caught the ominous note, and saw the bitter curl of her lips as she spoke. Aunt Varina and her niece were the only persons there who knew Douglas van Tuiver well enough to appreciate the irony of ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... The irony of his lot did not strike him. Crimes which he had been guilty of had nothing to do with his present position. Instead, he stood arraigned for a treachery which had not been his, toward the one man to whom he had ever ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... brings forth an abandoned wreck of humanity, old Barabbas, the murderer. As Christ stands before them, blood-stained and crowned with thorns, half in hope and half in irony, Pilate invites them to choose. "Behold the man," he said, "a wise teacher whom ye have long honored, guilty of no evil deed. Jesus or Barabbas, ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... notable physiological effect—nay, even from its cumbrous and comical shape,—stands alone among the instruments of noise. And if it be true, as I have heard it said, that drums are covered with asses' skin, what a picturesque irony is there in that! As if this long-suffering animal's hide had not been sufficiently belaboured during life, now by Lyonnese costermongers, now by presumptuous Hebrew prophets, it must be stripped from his poor hinder quarters after death, stretched on a drum, and beaten night ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... times," said Tibble, in the tone of irony that was hard to understand. "He owneth the ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... less a moral philosopher than a preacher of virtue. Self-ordained as a censor and reformer, he directed his invective and irony principally against the Sophists, whose chief characteristic as to philosophy seems to have been the denial of objective truth, and thus, of absolute and determinate right. Socrates, in contrast with them, seeks to elicit duty from the occasions ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... faithful fellow," said De Roberval, with a tinge of irony in his hard voice. "But now tell me more plainly the ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... because the best men were to some extent partakers of it. Columbus was eager to make his great discovery pay well, to preserve the means of continued exploration. In one hand he lifted high the banner of possession with its promise of a cross, which direful irony fulfilled; with the other he kept feeding the ravenous nation with gold, to preserve its sympathy and admiration, that the supply of men and vessels should not fail. Las Casas himself, a just and noble man, the first advocate of the natural rights of men in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... was needed to fill my cup of bitterness, and this it was that specially occupied me as I dressed for dinner this evening. Two days more in this dead and fermenting city and my slavery would be at an end. Yes, but—irony of ironies!—I had nowhere to go to! The Morven Lodge party was breaking up. A dreadful rumour as to an engagement which had been one of its accursed fruits tormented me with the fresh certainty that I ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... disturbing a dog just quieting down after the preceding racket, he hurried into the village street, having made up his mind to face the inevitable and arouse the garage keeper. By the irony of fate he passed the cottage in which Police Constable Farrow was lying asleep and utterly unaware of the prevalent excitement, to join in which he would have kept awake all that night and ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... Gaelic for "A Little Hill of Sleep," but Dinky-Dunk brought forward the objection that there was no hill. Then I suggested "Barnavista," since about all we can see from the door are the stables. Then I said "The Builtmore," in a spirit of mockery, and then Dinky-Dunk in a spirit of irony suggested "Casa Grande." And in the end we united on "Casa Grande." It is marvelous how my hair grows. Olie now watches me studiously as I eat. I can see that he is patiently patterning his table deportment after mine. There's nothing that silent rough-mannered ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... it was an ill-favored scene, and the fact that it was a warm and peaceful day, with a radiant blue sky above, merely added to the irony. Although later I visited the War Zone three times and saw towns crowded with soldiers off duty, or as empty as old gray shells, nothing induced in me the same vicious stab of hatred for war as this scene. There is only one thing more abominable than war and that is the pacificist doctrine ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the antiquarians by its legend and reverse; the former Gallienoe Augustoe, the latter Ubique Pax. M. Spanheim supposes that the coin was struck by some of the enemies of Gallienus, and was designed as a severe satire on that effeminate prince. But as the use of irony may seem unworthy of the gravity of the Roman mint, M. de Vallemont has deduced from a passage of Trebellius Pollio (Hist. Aug. p. 198) an ingenious and natural solution. Galliena was first cousin to the emperor. By delivering Africa from the usurper Celsus, she deserved ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... of darkness!" he added in the silence. "The Jews were but little better than the Romans. They were looking for a king, a Solomon sort of king with temples and trappings and sizable authorities. Isn't it divine irony, that the Messianic Figure should appear in the very heart of this racial weakness of the Jews? And their lesson seems still unlearned. New York brings this home to-day.... So, to the Jews and the Romans, He was insignificant in appearance. ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... the Baltic and finding themselves upon the shores of the Dutch coast, when they were thought to be on the English side, lay it to the currents; but the same currents, as I am informed, do not prevail when steering in the opposite direction." The last is a neat stroke of irony. Flinders strongly recommended that the Admiralty should appoint an inspector of compasses, that there should be at every dockyard an officer for re-touching compasses, and that a magnet for re-touching should be ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... the young officer with an incredulous air bordering on irony. But Father Courtois insisted on his news ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... these ill-assorted companions is in Hawthorne's most subtle vein of irony, and would have delighted old Socrates himself. Meanwhile the young bride weaves a screen of twigs and leaves, to protect herself and her husband from ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... and as regards that class of writings, it may be doubted whether he has ever, in any age, or in any country, been excelled. The philosophy and deep thought of his reflections—the vigor and variety of his style—his rich flow of either panegyric or invective—his fine touches of irony—the glowing abundance and beauty of his metaphors—all these might separately claim applause; how much more, then, when all blended into one glorious whole! To give examples of these merits would be to transcribe half his works. Yet still ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... If there was any irony in his heart, his tongue did not show it. Indeed his manner betrayed little. Immobility had again replaced all tokens of anger, and immobility which only yielded now and then to a slight contortion more expressive of physical pain than of mental ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... of the anxious group immediately fell in deep disappointment and despair. But, of course, they did not fail to see the irony of Mr. Hill's remark. It did transpire that whenever a motion to adjourn was made by a Democratic member of the commission it was usually carried by a vote of eight to seven,—Mr. Justice Bradley voting in the affirmative ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... the facts of life, far beyond the actual horizon, like the affairs of a distant relation from whom one has nothing to hope, not even personal contact, and of whose wealth and greatness one does not boast much, because of the irony involved. Information upon all these matters was duly put before Elgin every morning in the telegrams of the Toronto papers; the information came, until the other day, over cables to New York and was disseminated by American news agencies. It was, therefore, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Adrian IV., the only Englishman who has sat in the chair of St. Peter, in virtue of the professed jurisdiction of the Papacy over all islands, by a strange irony, sanctioned the invasion of Ireland by Strongbow in the reign of Henry II. Three years ago I stood in the crypt of St. Peter's in Rome, and the Englishman who was with me expatiated on the appropriate ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... penetrated to the place with the pertinacity of a great explorer, and seemed prepared to hold it with all the unselfish arrogance of a patriot. It is said that the Frenchman not only welcomed Kitchener in the name of France, but invited him, with courteous irony, to partake of vegetables grown on the spot, a symbol of stable occupation. The story, if it be true, is admirably French; for it reveals at once the wit and the peasant. But the humour of the Englishman was worthily equal to the wit of the Frenchman; ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... irony is more powerful than abuse, let us set down here, without a word of comment, a ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... spoke of it as greatly planned. The opening of Marlowe's Faustus is very similar to Goethe's. His hero, wearied with unprofitable studies, and filled with a mighty lust for knowledge and the enjoyment of life, sells his soul to the Devil in return for a few years of supernatural power. The tragic irony of the story might seem to lie in the frivolous use which Faustus makes of his dearly bought power, wasting it in practical jokes and feats of legerdemain; but of this Marlowe was probably unconscious. The love story of Margaret, which is the central ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... minutely described, and all the mistakes the poor countrified Backfisch makes the first morning. She actually gets out of bed before she puts on her clothes, and has to be driven behind the bed curtains by her aunt's irony. This is an incident that is either out of date or due to the genius and imagination of the author, for I have never seen bed curtains in Germany. However, Gretchen is taught to perform the early ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... (whose Self-control came out in the same year as Sense and Sensibility), he does not scruple to declare that 'Miss Austen stands almost alone.' If he omits to lay stress upon her judgment, her nice sense of fitness, her restraint, her fine irony, and the delicacy of her artistic touch, something must be allowed for the hesitations and reservations which invariably beset ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... chance in Theodore Roosevelt's coming into the Presidency as he did, but there was irony as well. An evil chance dropped William McKinley before an assassin's bullet; but there was a fitting irony in the fact that the man who must step into his place had been put where he was in large measure by the very men who would least like to ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... equally wild, assailed the escort and the occupants of the wagons; for this was the rabble: poor citizens, freedmen, slaves, for whom no story of Hannibal and Carthage was too improbable. Nevertheless Sergius imagined he could discern a spirit of irony underlying much ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... without letting himself be intimidated by the tone of bitter irony adopted by the queen, "is the deed by which your Grace confirms the decision of the Secret Council which has named your beloved brother, the Earl of Murray, regent of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... which make up his collected—or more properly, selected—works (for there was much matter of evanescent interest not reprinted) sufficiently shows. Some things in his own line he has done perfectly; he has written many pages of magnificently mixed argument, irony, humour and eloquence, which, for sustained brilliancy, richness, subtle force and purity of style and effect, have simply no parallels; and he is without peer the prince of dreamers. The use of opium no doubt stimulated this remarkable faculty of reproducing in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... rather, Plant divine, of rarest virtue; Blisters on the tongue would hurt you. 'Twas but in a sort I blamed thee; None e'er prosper'd who defamed thee; Irony all, and feign'd abuse, Such as perplex'd lovers use At a need when, in despair To paint forth their fairest fair, Or in part but to express That exceeding comeliness Which their fancies doth so strike, They borrow ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... works as a fruit of faith—a proof of love to him that hath redeemed us, but not to recommend us to his favour. The picture of such a feast drawn by John Bunyan must make upon every reader a deep, a lasting, an indelible impression. How bitter and how true is the irony, when the Pharisee is represented as saying, "I came to thy feast out of civility, but for thy dainties I need them not, I have enough of my own; I thank thee for thy kindness, but I am not as those that stand in need of thy ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... of a dollar unearned and unspent, flitted through the narrow brain which some one, with the irony of ignorance or of knowledge, had mocked with the name of a great philosopher. Plato was not an untruthful lad, but he seldom had the opportunity to earn a dollar. His imagination, spurred on by the instinct of self-interest, rose ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... secret well," she said with mournful irony. "You reserved it for the one person whom it could most injure: my privilege ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... to him, and who, he now saw, loved him with her whole heart; but he was only an immaterial spirit, lighter even than the ether of space, and the unchangeable laws of the universe seemed to him but the irony of fate. As a spirit, he was intangible and invisible to those in the flesh, and likewise they were beyond his control. The tragedy of life then dawned upon him, and the awful results of death made themselves felt. He glanced at Sylvia. ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... no wrong," said MacGregor with gentle irony, "and neither can the law. Remember that, Philip, as long as you are in the service. The law may break up homes, ruin states, set itself a Nemesis on innocent men's heels—but it can do no wrong. It is the Juggernaut before ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... eccentric as Isabel had always supposed; and hitherto, whenever the girl had heard people described as eccentric, she had thought of them as offensive or alarming. The term had always suggested to her something grotesque and even sinister. But her aunt made it a matter of high but easy irony, or comedy, and led her to ask herself if the common tone, which was all she had known, had ever been as interesting. No one certainly had on any occasion so held her as this little thin-lipped, bright-eyed, foreign-looking woman, who retrieved an insignificant appearance ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... schemer, but a grave and blameless presbyter of Alexandria. Arius was a disciple of the greatest critic of his time, the venerated martyr Lucian of Antioch. He had a name for learning, and his letters bear witness to his dialectical skill and mastery of subtle irony. At the outbreak of the controversy, about the year 318, we find him in charge of the church of Baucalis at Alexandria, and in high favour with his bishop, Alexander. It was no love of heathenism, but a real difficulty of the gospel which led him to form a new theory. His ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... curtain was looped aside, of course this wonderful witness could not testify; but Prince let down the folds just before his departure, and the moment Bedney opened the blinds, there lay the truthful record of the awful crime. Verily, the 'irony of fate!' An overwhelming witness for the defence, only eighteen months too late, to save a pure, beautiful life from degradation and ruin. Well may Bedney ask, 'where is your corpus delicti?' Alfred Churchill, I wish you joy of the verdict, you ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... between science and common sense, on one side, and love, of various types, on the other. It is what Mr. Bernard Shaw has called a "drama of discussion"; it has the splendid movement of the best Shaw plays, unrelieved—and undiluted—by Shavian paradox, wit, and irony. We imagine that many audiences at the Fulton Theater were astonished at the play's showing of sheer strength as acted drama. Possibly it might not interest the general public; probably it would be inadvisable to present it to them. But no thinking person, with the ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... said Sir Kasimir, with a shade of irony in his tone. "It would be a troublesome siege; but the League numbers 1,500 horse, and 9,000 foot, and, with Schlangenwald's concurrence, you would ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that of the Reformation had been. "Facilis descensus Averni,"—this is the usual course. High mass was restored in Saint Paul's Cathedral, and in very few London churches were Gospel sermons yet preached. With bitter irony, liberty was granted to Bishop Ridley— to hear mass in the Tower Chapel. Liberty to commit idolatry was not likely to be used by Nicholas Ridley. The French Protestants were driven out, except a few named by the Ambassador; Cranmer, Latimer, Hooper, Coverdale, were cited before the Council; and ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... asked Kate. She was capable, wit and social strategist that she was, of assuming all this interest by way of leading an inept youth to make a fool and a braggart of himself for her amusement. But she showed not a glimmer of irony, neither in her mouth nor in her green-grey eyes. She spoke with the straight, sincere interest of a dairymaid listening to the self-told heroisms ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... one of his greatest feats in the kind of irony that appeals to a jury. And the audience deemed that the case was ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... playful aggression, in which the deeper underlying meaning was forgotten. So let me add that in manner, physical equipoise, and even in the mere details of dress, this figure indicated a certain aristocratic exclusiveness. It was the presentment of a king,—a king who by the irony of circumstances was just then waging war against all kingship; a ruler of men, who just then was fighting for the right of these men to govern themselves, but whom by his own inherent right he dominated. From the crown ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... forehead was burning, and as he pushed his hand across it, he seemed to read in the darkness under the laburnum-tree, "Jesus have mercy on Miles Tonken, Fellow. Anno 1545," and found a new meaning—an irony—in ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... you'll object to my taking handkerchiefs, too?" Sarah's look was a mixture of irony ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... declared, taking the sting from her emphasis by his prompt adoption of it. Dick had always had a wholesome way of thus appropriating to his own use such small shafts of maternal irony as were now and then aimed ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... asked in a pretty irony; "well, then, of co'se, sisteh or no sisteh, you muz' instan'ly go!" The steady tinkle of the sister's laughter as she passed with a chair provoked her own: "Yes, go! Me, I'll rimmain with her till Joy"—the nurse—"ritturn ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... talk of a new crusade, and Henry seems to have been the one European monarch who took the idea seriously. It is true that when Alexander VI. appealed in 1500 for funds to that end, the English King preferred to be excused; but the polite irony of his refusal was more than justified by his confidence that if the Pope got the money it would not be expended for the benefit of Christendom; moreover, he did actually hand over four thousand pounds. In fact, he took the Church as he found it. There ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... "Pharaoh! although I am a descendant of Jacob, whose sons sold their brother Joseph into Egypt, I do not deserve your irony. We are poor people, but the child ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... hurled its first shot. To Ferragut its report seemed mere irony. No one knew as he did the ship's ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... listened with singular attention and delight to the story-teller. This pleasure was painted on his face, and shone brightly in his eyes; from time to time a smile of good-humoured mockery flitted across his lips, but this was only the innocent offspring of irony which was raised in his good heart by Aphonia's boasting, (for very few story-tellers, you know, are free from this sin.) Reclining his shoulders against the back of his arm-chair, he shut his eyes, and, laying his broad hairy hand upon Andriousha's head, he softly, gently dallied with the boy's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... been really inspired?" he queried, with grave irony, keeping his back to the room, as if entranced by the contemplation of the town's colossal forms half lost in the night. He did not even look round when he heard the mutter of the word "Providential" from ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... finish. He thought it very possible that Master Randolph's sister was a coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of her own; but in her bright, sweet, superficial little visage there was no mockery, no irony. Before long it became obvious that she was much disposed toward conversation. She told him that they were going to Rome for the winter—she and her mother and Randolph. She asked him if he was a "real American"; she shouldn't have taken him for one; he seemed more like ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... reaching its still glades or rippling its hidden pools. He was extraordinarily intelligent and agreeable, and her heart beat faster when he was with her. He had a tall fair easy presence and a mind in which the lights of irony played pleasantly through the shades of feeling. She liked to hear his voice almost as much as to listen to what he was saying, and to listen to what he was saying almost as much as to feel that he was looking at her; but he wanted to kiss her, and she ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... the actual raid had taken place without his knowledge or consent, though when it was brought to his knowledge he abstained from taking any step to stop it. It may be conceded also that there were real grievances to be complained of. By a strange irony of fate some of the largest gold mines of the world had fallen to the possession of perhaps the only people who did not desire them; of a race of hunters and farmers intensely hostile to modern ideas, who had twice abandoned their homes and made long journeys into ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... he stood looking down at his wife's beautiful dusky head. Incredible to think it had ever lain on his breast, or that the fact of its cherishing there made no difference to her embryo heart! A tinge of irony came into his voice. "And I am willing to assure Madame Beattie," he proceeded, "in the way of evidence, that you have not in any sense taken me back, nor have you condoned anything I may ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... there, if you want to see comfort,' said he, with an irony that seemed almost savage, from the laugh which accompanied it. 'Isn't that a sweet death-chamber for one who all her life has had every thing that money ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... composition of these despatches was a source to Lord Roehampton of much gratification and excitement. They were of European fame, and their terse argument, their clear determination, and often their happy irony, were acknowledged in all the cabinets, and ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... the time. So far was he from being disgraced that he was given a new command. Later, when the Whigs came in, he was dismissed from the service, less, it seems, in blame for the disaster than for his Tory opinions. It is not an unusual irony of life that Vetch, the one wholly efficient leader in the expedition, ended his days ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... maiden beloved of Sigurd, has more than once been compared with the gracious and pathetic figure of Gretchen; and Earl Harald is one of the most successful attempts since Shakespeare to incarnate once again the Hamlet type of character, with its gentleness, its intellectuality, its tragic irony, and the defect of will which forces it to sink beneath the too heavy burden set upon its shoulders by fate. 'Sigurd Jorsalfar,' the last of the saga-plays, was planned as the second part of a dramatic sequence, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... while at Paris? Yes, most intimately. He was the pleasantest and most conversable member of the diplomatic corps while I was there; a man of good fancy, acuteness, irony, cunning, and egoism. No heart, not much of any science, yet enough of every one to speak its language: his forte was Belles-lettres, painting, and sculpture. In these he was the oracle of the society, and as such, was the Empress Catharine's private ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... right conduct will survive though religion be surrendered. It has perhaps not been generally observed that just as the virtuous agnostic is generally the child of Christian parents, so by a seeming irony he is {179} often found to be the father of Christian children: there is hardly a genuine case on record where "free-thought," Agnosticism, Rationalism, has descended from parents to children to the third or fourth generation without a ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... effective, and, to say truth, far better judged, was the irony of Voltaire, in his deservedly celebrated 'Letter on the Pretended ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... of a difficulty between our servants, but of an insult which Spain has received from France in the face of all Rome. Yes, all Rome has witnessed this insult, and these miserable Romans have even dared to dishonor us with irony and satire, and to mock and deride Spain, while they ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... glad, honored Master Scientist," he said in the flowery Oriental fashion that he affected in his irony, "to welcome you here. For me it is a memorable occasion. Your presence graces my home, and, however unworthily, distinguishes me, rewarding as it does aspirations which I have long held. I am humbly confident that great achievements ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... a dreadful irony in that useless life, prolonged in sleep beyond the limits of human age. Yet she had thought it worth the labour and care and endless watchfulness it had cost for years. And now her own, strong, young and fresh, seemed not ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... went down slowly in the boy's face, and a pride came up in his eye. He put his hand to his cap, with a little irony of deference, and lifted it off with the grace of a grown man. "I know it's my place. But the young lady may keep it—now. I'd rather be ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... hands determinedly, and, after a great deal of effort, managed to condense his thoughts upon the study he had in hand; and when, after a long morning's work, the rector smilingly complimented him upon his work, he looked up at him as if he thought it was meant in irony. ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... The grave irony of this poem so bespatters the theologian's God with his own mud that we dread the image and recoil. From the unsparing vigor of these lines we turn for relief to "Rabbi Ben Ezra" and "Prospice." In both of these we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... was the owner and master of a precise vocabulary well fitted to clothe and set forth a well-reasoned and lofty argument. He knew how to be both terse and diffuse, and can compress himself into a line or expand over a paragraph. He has touches of a grave irony as well as of a boisterous humour. He can tell an anecdote and elaborate a parable. Swift, we know, had not only Butler's Hudibras by heart, but was also (we may be sure) a close student of Marvell's prose. His great fault is a very common one. He is too long. He forgets how ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... for the King, her sarcasm for his courtiers. Perhaps little of this latter quality appears in the pages bequeathed to us, written, as they are, in a somewhat cold, formal style, and we may assume that her much-dreaded irony resided in her tongue rather than in her pen. Yet we are glad to possess these pages, if only as a reliable record of Court life during the brightest period of the ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... that she did not take warning from this reminder that Davy was by no means merely a tedious retailer of stale commonplaces. She said with fine irony—and with no show of anger: "It is always a shock to a lady to realize how coarse men are—how ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... could hope to have any interest in. "Not one among many, many Romans," said he, "has a family altar or an ancestral tomb. They have fought to maintain the luxury of the great, and they are called in bitter irony the 'masters of the world' while they do not possess a clod of earth that they may ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... of Man. They braved sudden death, death from thirst and starvation, death from prowling savages, death from the wild creatures,—all that the works of man might flourish where they had not feared to tread. It is the irony of fate that these old pioneers, many of whom hated civilization and were fleeing from her guiles, should have been the advance-guard of the very Power ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... stared at each other, slightly frowning. Stanley was the first to catch himself. "I'll see you at the office later," he said, and with a bow at the little figure on Josiah's arm he added with a touch of irony, "Perhaps I had better wait until ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... the woman Allan Gerard had chosen, Flavia thought in bitter wonder; this self-centred, hysterical girl whose love could not survive the marring of her lover's outward beauty. Isabel could not bear to go to him; the irony of it sank deep into the girl who could scarcely bear to stay away. But Flavia turned to the mute Rupert, holding her dignity steadily above her pitiful confusion of mind, striving, also, to ease this blow to Gerard, who was so little fit ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... ought to be tolerated in an habitual Humour, Whim, or Particularity of Behaviour, by any who do not wait upon him for Bread. Next to the peevish Fellow is the Snarler. This Gentleman deals mightily in what we call the Irony, and as those sort of People exert themselves most against these below them, you see their Humour best, in their Talk to their Servants. That is so like you, You are a fine Fellow, Thou art the quickest Head-piece, and the like. One would think the Hectoring, the Storming, the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the mass of the people was only what it was, even in those countries which we termed wealthy, it seems at first sight an utterly astonishing anomaly that at frequent intervals large numbers of competent and industrious work-people should find no work to do. The irony of the situation cannot be more tersely expressed than in the words, which a man is supposed to have uttered as he watched a procession of unemployed men: "No work to do. Set them to ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... on which he rests. How then are they meant to be understood? Is that saying, 'Rejoice, O young man! in the days of thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart and in the sight of thine eyes,' to be taken as a bit of fierce irony? Is this a man taking the maxims of the foolish world about him and seeming to approve of them in order that he may face round at the end with a quick turn and a cynical face and hand them back their maxims along ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Adrian. "How funny. Well, then, you must understand that this stick is but an emblem—a thing's sign. Now for the thing signified. Have you ever paused to moralize over the irony that determines the fates of families? Take, for example, a family that begins with a great man—a great soldier, a great saint, for instance—and then for evermore thereafter produces none but mediocrities. I hope you ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... words made Katharine Howard angry. This poor, heavy man had other matters for misgiving than to be badgered by a woman. But the irony was lost upon the King. ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... of the abominable dogkennels called houses was the group known as the Cit des Kroumirs, in the 13th arrondissement, which, by a strange irony, was built on land belonging to the Department of Public Assistance, which was let out by that body to a rich tenant, who sublet it to these lodging-house owners. This veritable den of infection and misery ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... would seem no wonder, if the two universities should strive with each other for the honour of his education, but it is certain the world have not coincided with this opinion of Mr. Welsted; who, by the way, can hardly be thought the author of such an extravagant self-approbation, unless it be an irony, which ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... But it is Thackeray's most artistic method which Mr. White recalls in his studies of scamps and snobs; he allows them, as Thackeray allows Barry Lyndon and the rest, to tell their own stories, and in their unconsciousness of their own natures he finds play for an irony as keen and graphic as anything in fiction. He deals with the actual English world, and the pleasure he gave us was such as to make us resolve to return to Thackeray's vision of his own contemporaneous English world at the first ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... that you've got over being driven up and that now you can stop flying and perch a few minutes?" inquired the little man with biting irony. ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... advice, can't you think of some way to make Sundays and holidays endurable to Ned, bless his big heart! Be a little easy on him, a little careless about his ways. Ned is such a simple fellow! Hard words, irony and sarcasm, complainings and scoldings cut him very deeply! Don't be offended, but don't you think that perhaps you could manage it to somehow keep Ned from flinging out of the house desperate and foolish every once in a while, on some Sunday or holiday? I'll tell you! Begin early—begin ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... hurt by the contempt which every one showed her poet, paid back scorn for scorn by going to her boudoir during these performances. She was followed by the prelate. His Vicar-General had just been explaining the profound irony of the epigram into which he had been entrapped, and the Bishop wished to make amends. Mlle. de Rastignac, fascinated by the poetry, also slipped into the ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... followed his fellow-prisoners to the block. On the eve of the fatal blow he moved his beard carefully from the reach of the doomsman's axe. "Pity that should be cut," he was heard to mutter with a touch of the old sad irony, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... Assyrian Prince; through life he retained his somewhat Asiatic appearance. His eyes were slightly narrowed, his black hair curled lightly over an extremely broad forehead. He spoke little and often in brusque phrase. For this reason he was frequently misunderstood, as the irony and sarcasm with which he sometimes spoke did not tend to make friends. But this attitude was only turned toward those who did not comprehend him and his ideals, or who endeavored to falsify what he believed in ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... up. The irony of the thing gripped him, and brought a wry smile to his tight lips. The body of Inaros, her dead lover, lay at her side; and Shabako's still figure was but feet away. Once again they were all together in death. The Kundrenaline had pierced the black veil of their silent tryst ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... mistake. He knew who it was. His mates did not see the smile of irony, of sly ridicule, which stirred his lips as he bowed to the passer. Immediately his rather handsome effeminate ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... in Boston in 1809—a stroke of purest irony on the part of fate, for he was in no respect a Bostonian, and it was to Bostonians especially that he was anathema. His parents were actors, travelling from place to place, and his birth at Boston was purely accidental. They had no home and no fortune, but lived from hand to mouth, in the most ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... saying. "It accounts for the strange feeling I had toward him when he asked me to help him do that infernal deed. I could not understand it then, but it is plain enough now. He is my son! And I have not only transmitted a tainted life to him, but helped to damn him in its possession! God! what irony! Of course the quack never knew that I, too, am living under a false name! I wonder if it is too late to stop him? Yes—it's done, and he is miles away! It's almost daybreak ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... mentioned Esther's name. Rather he was thinking with a gratitude which shook his very soul that fate had at least spared the innocent. Esther was safe. She did not love him. He felt sure of that now. Strange irony, that his deepest thankfulness should be that ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... who in those days at Moscow would have ecstatically licked the dust off my feet, and kissed the hem of my cloak.... I did not even allow myself to believe that I was enjoying the bitter satisfaction of irony.... What sort of irony, indeed, can a man enjoy in solitude? Well, so I have behaved for some years on end, ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... "you won't forget them. I shouldn't wonder if you prayed for them even. I am sure you are one of the faithful." There was more of suppressed misery than irony in his voice. "But is that likely to help when you don't so much as know what to ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... successor, on the other hand, did really initiate the reform of the clergy, but so drastic and unwise were his methods that the result was terrible and disconcerting—the development of a situation of which only the Catholic idealist could discern the full irony; no less than Schism, the rending of the ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... I wonder?" inquired the proprietor of the arm-chair, with cutting irony. "Whiney piney, whiney piney. I wish there were no such ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... statesmen, as Critias and Critobulus; some were politicians, in the worst sense of that word, as Glaucon; and some were young men of fashion, as Euthydemus and Alcibiades. These were all alike delighted with his inimitable irony, his versatility of genius, his charming modes of conversation, his adroitness of reply; and they were compelled to confess the wisdom and justness of his opinions, and to admire the purity and goodness of his life. The magic power which he wielded, even over men of dissolute character, is ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... beams to light the pyre. So Elijah's taunts came just when they were most biting, and none can say that they were undeserved. His fiery zeal and his naturally stern character broke out in the bitter irony with which he imagines a variety of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... fair-mindedness is called irony. Now irony is seriousness without solemnity. It assumes that man is a serio-comic animal, and that no treatment of his affairs can be appropriate which gives him a consistency and dignity which he does not possess. He is always a child and a savage. He is the victim of conflicting desires and ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... a sky without a cloud, completed the bitter irony of the spectacle. All this ruin, desolation, and wretchedness were the outward and visible signs of a series of revolutions. At St. Catherine the French travellers had been witnesses of the declaration of Brazilian independence; on the opposite side of ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... with a singular mixture of irony and compassion in his voice; "and it was hunger, then, that terrified you at last even more ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Nonkreem is a great place for iron; this is found in coarse red sandstone, or it may be fine granite, forming precipices; this is scraped or pushed down by iron rods, it is then washed by a stream turned off on to it: the stream is dammed up, and the irony particles by their weight fall to the bottom: they are very heavy, of a dull blackish appearance. All the streams are of a whitish colour, and the rocks are ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... an interrogative point, but the height of our affirmation is taken with it. It is a figure of speech and intensifies the affirmative with its irony. ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... insolence, the chorus close their ode and announce the arrival of a messenger from Troy. Talthybius, the herald, enters as spokesman of the army and king, describing the hardships they have suffered and the joy of the triumphant issue. To him Clytemnestra announces, in words of which the irony is patent to the audience, her sufferings in the absence of her husband and her delight at the prospect of his return. He will find her, she says, as he left her, a faithful watcher of the home, her loyalty sure, her honour undefiled. Then ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... accomplished its purpose, and science, especially the science of medicine, was strangled, almost to the death. Even the people of the time recognized the shortcomings of the physicians. Henricus Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), writing in 1530, said with pleasant irony that physic was "a certaine Arte of manslaughter," and that "well neare alwaies there is more daunger in the Physition and the Medicine than in the sicknesse itselfe." He also gives the following picture of a fashionable doctor ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... indeed of the sage's multifariousness will be portrayed in a simple narrative like the present. This casual private intercourse with Israel, but served to manifest him in his far lesser lights; thrifty, domestic, dietarian, and, it may be, didactically waggish. There was much benevolent irony, innocent mischievousness, in the wise man. Seeking here to depict him in his less exalted habitudes, the narrator feels more as if he were playing with one of the sage's worsted hose, than reverentially handling the honored hat which ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... many counters are to be brought together, Zuviel (too many), but says Zuviel wrongly for Zuwenig (too little) when there is too little butter on his bread. In this case the Zuviel (too much) sounds almost like irony, which, of course, is out of the question at his age. "Too much" and "too little" are confounded in the same way as 5 and 2. Yet, in another respect the memory has made a considerable gain. Expressions long since forgotten by those about ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... the latter part of your assertion; but their satisfaction will be nothing to equal mine," he said with cutting irony. "But you'll not 'dump' me ashore anywhere. I am going to land at ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... effect of some strong chemical, as nitrate of silver. In a figurative sense, as applied to language or character, these words are very closely allied. We say a sour face, sharp words, bitter complaints, caustic wit, cutting irony, biting sarcasm, a stinging taunt, harsh judgment, a tart reply. Harsh carries the idea of intentional and severe unkindness, bitter of a severity that arises from real or supposed ill treatment. The bitter speech springs from the ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... The slight touch of irony which Nina had thrown into her voice when she spoke of what was due to her lover even though he was a Jew was not lost upon her father. "Of course you would take his part against a Christian," ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... perceived that here was a weak attempt at irony, and went on with his investigations. He came to the last of the papers Mr. Caryll had handed him, glanced at it, swore coarsely, ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... it necessary to appeal to his friends in a very touching way. The friends of the divine are requested to return "Colenso on the Pentateuch," and another volume which they have borrowed. The advertisement has none of that irony which finds play in the notice, "The Gentleman who took a brown silk umbrella, with gold crutch handle, and left a blue cotton article, is asked to restore the former." The advertiser seems to speak more in sorrow and in hope than in anger, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... is going to blow up?" he inquired, with a tinge of irony. "Well, it isn't." He turned to me. "Here's where we shall stay for a while. You and the men are to cut a number of these pine trees for a house. Better pick out the little ones, about three or four inches through: they're easier handled. ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... shadow through the hills now, and Hale watched it sweep toward him with grim satisfaction at the fulfilment of his own prophecy and with disgust that, by the irony of fate, it should come from the very quarters where years before he had played the maddening part of lunatic at large. The avalanche was sweeping southward; Pennsylvania was creeping down the Alleghanies, emissaries of New York capital were pouring into the hills, the tide-water of Virginia ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... attacking Christianity has always approved itself to French Freethinkers. They regard the statement that he treated religious questions in a spirit of levity as the weak defence of those who know that irony and sarcasm are the deadliest enemies of their faith. Superstition dislikes argument, but it hates laughter. Nimble and far-flashing wit is more potent against error than the slow dull logic of the schools; and the great ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... words unspoken which he has come here to say—when he knows that the act may make me a public scandal, and that the words may send me to the scaffold!" Her color rose, and she smiled with a terrible irony as she looked for the first time at the door of the Room. "I shall be your widow," she said, "in half ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those who have been wise in their own ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whistle scream victory! When the "returning board" had sufficiently weighed this complicated electoral contest, it gravely decided that keeping the polls open for three days was "an unheard of irregularity." (J. N. Holloway, "History of Kansas," pp. 192-4.) This was exquisite irony; but a local court on appeal seriously giving a final verdict for Delaware, the transaction became a perennial burlesque on ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... French in my exercises at the Lycee my instituteur would have said I deserved to be shot. Pray allow me to make it a little more graceful." But the Prussian's ignorance of French syntax was only equalled by his suspicion of it. The maire's irony merely irritated him and his coolness puzzled him. "I give you thirty seconds to sign," he said, as he took out his watch and the inevitable revolver. The maire took up a needle-like pen, dipped it in the ink, and with a sigh wrote in ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... high degree, beautiful, accomplished. She thought that her first moment's consideration of the outrage—it was nothing less in her eyes—had given her the full material for thought. But every instant after threw new and varied lights on the affront. Her indignation was too great for passion; only irony or satire would meet the situation. Her cold, cruel nature helped, and she did not shrink to subject this ignorant savage to the merciless ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... silence that followed, Lenox looked blankly round the empty room:—the room where they should have spent their first evening together. Then the irony, the finality of it all, overwhelmed him, and he sank upon the nearest chair. "What have I done? . . . My God, what have I done?" he breathed aloud. And it is characteristic of the man that, for all his grinding sense of injury, he blamed himself more ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... living! Why, even living in the country has, it appears, no terrors for you. We hear of your walking about in the moonlight-you make your very trees talk, they tell us, in Italian—in Latin; you actually pass whole hours alone with the hamadryads!" There was just a suspicion of irony in Madame de Kerman's tone, in spite of its caressing softness; it was so impossible to conceive of anyone really finding nature endurable, much less pretending to discover in trees and flowers anything amusing ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... Troubert; Douai, Claes; Limoges, Madame Graslin; Besancon, Savarus and his misguided love; Angouleme, Rubempre; Sancerre, Madame de la Baudraye; Alencon, that touching, artless old maid to whom her uncle, the Abbe de Sponde, remarked with gentle irony: "You have too much wit. You don't need so much to ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... would rather have been shut up in a den with a hungry tigress. "I am quite at your service," he said with a bitter irony. "I suppose you have some very important communication to make, considering the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... his speech to its proper, and what would have been a perfect close, he suddenly changed his tone, and, in a strain of consummate and powerful irony, began to rally his antagonist. He assented to the gentleman's eulogium upon Lord Mansfield. It was deserved. He acknowledged the justice of his remarks in relation to himself (Hamilton) and his ephemeral fame; but he did not see why the gentleman should have included himself ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... as little of me as I do of them. The thought hit him suddenly and his broad face creased in a smile at the irony. Then the music started. ...
— The Happy Unfortunate • Robert Silverberg
... far from correct, for on the very next night Vertua presented himself at the Chevalier's bank again, and staked and lost much more heavily than on the night preceding. But he preserved a calm demeanour through it all; he even smiled at times with a sort of bitter irony, as though foreseeing how soon things would be totally changed. But during each of the succeeding nights the old man's losses increased like a glacier at a greater and greater rate, till at last it was ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... and second officers, eh?" exclaimed the stranger in a fine tone of irony. "My, but you air puttin' on style, Cap'n, and no mistake! I'm plain Abner Slocum, cap'n and owner of the schooner Kingfisher, sailin' out o' Nantucket; and my first, second, third, and fourth mate is all rolled ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... tempest, or a tornado; but his corruption is a monsoon; a trade-wind, blowing uniformly from one point of the compass, and wafting the wealth of India to the same port, in one certain direction." In his speech, however, in indulging his wit and irony, Sheridan gave vent to some sallies, which showed that he was convinced that Hastings had not received the presents for himself, but for his employers. Describing the accommodating morality of the court of directors, and their correspondence ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... hands. The old feeling of callousness and indifference to my fate was once more upon me, and as I gazed at the crazy-looking raft which I had constructed with such a lavish expenditure of painful toil, I smiled in grim irony of myself that I should have done so much to preserve that life which now seemed of such little worth, and which promised soon to become an unendurable burden to me. A reaction from the excitement that had sustained me during my labours had set in, and I am persuaded ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... conference—where they should send their wives and children. And one of these Frenchmen, the one who had been most ferocious in his condemnation of the German barbarian, said quite naively and with no sense of irony or paradox: "Of course, if we could find an absolutely open town which would not be defended at all the women folk and children would be all right." His instinct, of course, was perfectly just. The German "savage" had had three quarters of a million people in his absolute ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... philosophy, usually in ironical form, appended to each date; and the judge thought that these quips and fancies of Wilson's were neatly turned and cute; so he carried a handful of them around one day, and read them to some of the chief citizens. But irony was not for those people; their mental vision was not focused for it. They read those playful trifles in the solidest terms, and decided without hesitancy that if there had ever been any doubt that Dave Wilson was a pudd'nhead—which there hadn't—this revelation removed that doubt for good and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... constantly in mind that, as Lassalle said, "the sword is never right," and to shudder with him at the fact that "the Lie is a European Power"? In no previous war have we struck that top note of keen irony, the closing of the Stock Exchange and not of the Church. The pagans were more logical: they closed the Temple of Peace when they drew the sword. We turn our Temples of Peace promptly into temples of war, and exhibit our parsons as the most pugnacious characters in the community. I venture to affirm ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... with a few strokes of chalk so well hit the great violinist's head that one is at the same time amused and terrified at the truth of the drawing. "The devil guided my hand," the deaf painter said to me, chuckling mysteriously, and nodding his head with a good-natured irony in the way he generally accompanied his genial witticisms. This painter was, however, a wonderful old fellow; in spite of his deafness he was enthusiastically fond of music, and he knew how, when near enough to the orchestra, to read the music in the musicians' faces, and to judge the more ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... Fairholme; it was stranger still in view of what must soon be. The announcement of the engagement seemed to assume to write Finis to Harry as a factor in Blentmouth society. In that point of view the moment chosen for it was full of an unconscious irony. Janie would not have gone back to him now, and Neeld did not suspect her of any feeling which could have made that possible. It was merely odd that she should be putting an appropriate finish to a thing which in the meantime had been ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... that was just a whimper. Oh, irony of fate! Oh, cynicism incredible in its malignancy! Oh, cumulative touch! To deliver him this his enemy to strike, and to present him for ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... from door to door, he could have foreseen the great army of admirers who three centuries later should outbid each other at auctions, and make war in print over his experimental plates, his failures and his trial-proofs—now often exalted into "states"—the very irony of the thing would surely have brought him genuine satisfaction ...
— Rembrandt and His Etchings • Louis Arthur Holman
... shocked" and to "soothe the mind of the Empress with explanations," but he did not mend his infidelity. At Oto's request he built a residence for her at Chinu in the neighbouring province of Kawachi, and thereafter the compilers of the Chronicles, with fine irony, confine their record of three consecutive years' events to a repetition of the single phrase, "the Emperor ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... money was at a low ebb. All his regular income was diverted to the support of the large household in the country. He was too proud to appeal to his wealthy uncle. He hated also to think of Mrs. Purp's mortification if she learned that her star boarder was out of work. By a curious irony, when he got home he found a letter ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... with his volubility, for the news of his good-fortune had fired the man with a reckless disregard for money, and he turned to gaming as the one natural recourse of his ilk. As the irony of fate would have it, he won what the Canadian lost, together with the stakes of various others who played for a time with him and then gave up, wagging their heads or swearing softly ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... Meanwhile, so the irony of the fates ordered it, the two mates, each in charge of one of the Flamingo's lifeboats, were commanding crews made up entirely of Germans and Scandinavians, and pluckier and more careful sailormen could not have been wished for. The work was dangerous, and required more than ordinary ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... powerful horror, but it would have lacked the ethical beauty which Hawthorne gave it and which makes it significant beyond a mere feat of verbal legerdemain. And the subtile simplicity of "The Great Stone Face" is as far from Poe as the pathetic irony of "The Ambitious Guest." In all his most daring fantasies Hawthorne is natural, and, though he may project his vision far beyond the boundaries of fact, nowhere does he violate the laws of nature. He had at all times a wholesome ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... the value of all this work in industry. The Prime Minister, speaking last year on this subject, said, "It is a strange irony, but no small compensation, that the making of weapons of destruction should afford the occasion to humanize industry. Yet such is the case. Old prejudices have vanished, new ideas are abroad; employers and workers, the public ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... attention to sturgeon fishing. The roe they prepared and shipped abroad for the Russians' piquant table delicacy. The grim irony of it—half ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... 33 (which, because it exhibits an ancient text of a type like B, has been styled [with grim irony] 'the Queen of the Cursives') is more brilliant here than usual; exhibiting St. Mark's clause (4) thus,—[Greek: kai gar he lalia sou ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... conversation, they disappeared more and more from his public discourse. He would still now and then point his argument with expressions of inimitable quaintness, and flash out rays of kindly humor and witty irony; but his general tone was serious, and rose sometimes to genuine solemnity. His masterly skill in dialectical thrust and parry, his wealth of knowledge, his power of reasoning and elevation of sentiment, disclosed in language of rare precision, strength, and beauty, not seldom astonished ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... of the Lilies," repeated the cavalier, emerging from his revery. "How abundant beautiful names are in these unattractive localities! Since I have been travelling in this part of the country the terrible irony of the names is a constant surprise to me. Some place that is remarkable for its barren aspect and the desolate sadness of the landscape is called Valleameno (Pleasant Valley). Some wretched mud-walled village stretched on a barren plain and proclaiming its poverty ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... reason—perhaps he wants to pay up part of his debt to me, or maybe he has some scheme with money in it to unfold. He'll certainly try to overreach me again; but then once bitten twice shy. I'll be on my guard." Then with an attempt at irony ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... were not so beautiful!" she moaned as the first pale streaks of light in the east told her that day had finally dawned, and she crept stealthily back to bed again. Of course Jack, the wretch, was sleeping peacefully—that was the irony of fate! What did he know of suffering? But ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... for getting probate, I believe,' said Lady Le Breton, in a slight tone of irony; for to her mind any departure from the laws or language she was herself accustomed to use, assumed at once the guise of a rank and offensive provincialism. 'Your poor Aunt WOULD go and marry a Scotchman, and he a Scotch business man too; so of course we must expect to put ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... with that look, mingled of feeling and irony, which was very perplexing. The tone in which he spoke was really so full of tenderness for the girl, that Hope, who heard every word and felt every tone, was sure that Lawrence Newt pitied ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... faith—a proof of love to him that hath redeemed us, but not to recommend us to his favour. The picture of such a feast drawn by John Bunyan must make upon every reader a deep, a lasting, an indelible impression. How bitter and how true is the irony, when the Pharisee is represented as saying, "I came to thy feast out of civility, but for thy dainties I need them not, I have enough of my own; I thank thee for thy kindness, but I am not as those that stand in need of thy provisions, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Trirodov. "There appears to be a great resemblance at the first glance; but actually these two systems are as opposite as the poles. They are the affirmation and the denial of life, its Yes and its No, its irony and its lyricism. The affirmation, Yes, is Christianity; the denial, ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... so many and varied, language affords so rich a continuity of themes and the comic is here capable of passing through so great a number of stages, from the most insipid buffoonery up to the loftiest forms of humour and irony, that we shall forego the attempt to make out a complete list. Having stated the rule, we will simply, here and there, ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... a low laugh. "What irony! Well, that will last till Friday. But you must try and get more then. I will be here at the same time; no, the tide will not suit—at 8 a.m. We can come inside then. Did you ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... woman, one would have said, who could act as nobly as she could speak, yet who would prefer both to live and to express herself in a minor key. And Egremont was not unlike her in some essential points. The turn for irony was more pronounced on his features, yet he had the eyes of an idealist. He, too, would choose restraint in preference to outbreak of emotion: he too could be forcible if occasion of sufficient pressure lay upon him. And the probability remained, that ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... imaginary, imaginative impending, approaching imperious, imperial imply, infer in, into inability, disability ingenious, ingenuous intelligent, intellectual insinuation, innuendo instinct, intuition involve, implicate irony, sarcasm ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... drag his weary limbs across the pebbles of his Harmas; but he bore his eighty-seven years with a fine disdain for age and its failings, and although the fire of his glance and that whole, eager countenance still expressed his passion for the truth, his abrupt gestures, touched with irony, his simple bearing, and the extreme modesty of his whole person, spoke sufficiently of his profound indifference toward outside contingencies, for the baubles of fame and all the ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... Lion. She was a pr-r-retty wife for John Gourlay! The sight of her feebleness would have roused pity in some: Gourlay it moved to a steady and seething rage. As she stood helpless before him he stung her with crude, brief irony. ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... though willing on all right occasions to forget it. "Once," records Mr. Irwin, "when I remarked on the omission of his name in an article on 'Minor Poets' in one of the magazines, he said, with a smile, 'Perhaps I am among the major!'" That smile had just sufficient irony—no more. ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... most durable, and it so happens that these brilliant red sandstones are often composed of exceedingly rounded grains. Also some of the very red sandstone has an interfilling of a loose argillaceous irony matter detrimental to the stone as a building stone. The most durable of the red sandstones are those having a paler or grayer hue, like those of Woolton, Everton, and Runcorn. This distinction of color was ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... and disappointment, following on a season of overstrained and violent hopes, were the sharpest trial through which Wordsworth ever passed. The course of affairs in France, indeed, was such as seemed by an irony of fate to drive the noblest and firmest hearts into the worst aberrations. For first of all in that Revolution, Reason had appeared as it were in visible shape, and hand in hand with Pity and Virtue; ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... 13. IRONY is expressing ourselves in a manner contrary to our thoughts; not with a view to deceive, but to add force to our remarks. We can reprove one for his negligence, by saying, "You have ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... my word—you don't mean to say so—do you, Queen Amelia?' Miss Hartney returned in cold irony. 'Well then, my dear, you had better be wider awake to your own interests,' she went on, 'for your first attempt is going sadly against you already, poor child. I'm glad your choice pleases you, you are not fastidious—but to all appearances your regard is ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... you would have known better than to suggest the possibility of friendship between us. You are a poor judge of human nature, and conceited past my understanding, to imagine that it is a matter which is entirely optional with you." With the slow one-sided smile of irony which her face sometimes wore, she bowed slightly. Then, "You will excuse ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... It was the irony of fate that, on the one occasion when duty really summoned that champion popper-up-to-London to the Metropolis, he should be unable to answer ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... will be made clear to you, by a savage irony, that Play has yet spared you something, since your property is returned. For all that, if you bring a new hat with you, you will have to pay for the knowledge that a special costume is needed for ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... this was not to be, for Fate is fond of irony. The only man who ever braved the full dangers of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado was killed by a suburban train in Chicago while on his wedding-tour. Most bad men die in bed, tenderly cared for by trained nurses in white caps and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... he had been subjected by turns to all the varied and cruel tortures of nature. He had conquered his isolation, conquered hunger, conquered thirst, conquered cold, conquered fever, conquered labour, conquered sleep. A dismal irony was then the end of all. Gilliatt climbed to the top of the rock and gazed wildly into space. He had no clothing. He stood naked in the midst of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... to-day be considered a harmless piece of irony, The Shortest Way with Dissenters, in which Defoe, who was himself a dissenter, advocated banishment or hanging, he suffered the mortification of exposure for three days in the pillory and of imprisonment in the pestilent ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... attack our national character, we have two well-known essays in our ethical and casuistical literature that may with perfect safety be pitted against anything that either France or Italy has produced. Even if they are but a master's irony, let all ambitious men keep Of Cunning and Of Wisdom for a Man's Self under their pillow. Let all young men who would toady a great man; let all young ministers who would tune their pulpit to king, or court, or society; let all tradesmen and merchants ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... abominable dogkennels called houses was the group known as the Cite des Kroumirs, in the 13th arrondissement, which, by a strange irony, was built on land belonging to the Department of Public Assistance, which was let out by that body to a rich tenant, who sublet it to these lodging-house owners. This veritable den of infection and misery has now been demolished; but there are plenty of others ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... my work, Martha!—God's work! Haven't I babbled in the pulpit long enough about fatherhood and brotherhood, that I should shirk His irony when He takes me at ...
— The Servant in the House • Charles Rann Kennedy
... letter written by a little girl to a mother who had, it seems, allowed her family to see that she was inclined to be satisfied with something of her own writing. The child has a full and gay sense of the sweetest kinds of irony. There was no need for her to write, she and her mother being both at home, but the words must have seemed to her worthy of a pen:—"My dear mother, I really wonder how you can be proud of that article, if it is worthy to be called ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... race. The arrow that is to fly far must be discharged from a well distended bow: if, therefore, anything is necessary for greatness, it is a fierce and tenacious opposition, an opposition either of open contempt, or of malicious irony, or of sly silence, or of gross stupidity, an opposition regardless of the wounds it inflicts and of the precious lives it sacrifices, an opposition that nobody would dare to attack who was not prepared, like the Spartan of old, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... effects his transitions with consummate skill: note, e.g., the swift application he makes of the parable of the vineyard, v. 5-7, or the scathing retort he makes to those who complain of the monotony and repetition of his message (xxviii. 11).[1] [Footnote 1: The real irony of this passage, xxviii. 10-13, can only be appreciated ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... by Jeanne in an agony of doubts and fears. Then one evening, Julien watched her all through dinner with an amused smile on his lips, and evinced towards her a gallantry which was faintly tinged with irony. After dinner they walked up and down the baroness's avenue, and he whispered ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... in a quiet, kindly tone, as if they had been friends for years, "this is the place where Warwick fell"; and pointed down the field. "There in the corner of that croft they piled the noble dead like corn upon a threshing-floor. Since then," said he, with quiet irony, "men have stopped making English kings as the Dutch make dolls, of a ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... financial aspect of the case for the time being did not concern her. The death of her mother had been a stunning shock, and when she crossed over to the hotel—what irony, by the bye, to think she had been born there thirty-nine years ago, in the old inn that had preceded the twice rebuilt hotel!—when she crossed the street with Minna, it had been with blazing, tearless eyes and the desire to take the hotel manager ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... say!" The voice of the heavy man cut in with jeering irony. The gleam of his jade eyes came through narrow-slitted lids. "Well, did you take him back to the ranch for a necktie party, or did you bury him ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... extraordinary to Lydia Meredith that the girl showed no sign of her night's adventure when she came in to breakfast on the following morning. She looked bright. Her eyes were clear and her delicate irony as pointed as though she had ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... to be sure!" exclaimed Sanine, in surprise. There was a slight shade of irony in ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... elemental force destroy all other emotions. The situation at Kofn guard-house was one of these. The point at issue between these two men pierced to the bed-rock of national loyalty. Perhaps Blivinski was right. Love of country was part of their physical equipment, yet by the irony of circumstances they were ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... seem at first hearing to partake of the very same almost cruel irony as the condition of cure which had already proved hopelessly impracticable. He, too, says, 'Walk that you may be cured'; and He says it to a paralysed and impotent man. But the two things are very ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... appealed to rose to his feet. Turning toward the man who had called upon him, he gave him a look which ought to have made him sink to the floor with mortification, preliminary to saying with polished irony: ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... empty. I walked slowly to the quai, and then, turning to the left, approached the palace of the D'Orsays, which stood then, though to-day, in a fine irony, the broken walls alone remain, amid the new glory of republican Paris. I knew I was going in the wrong direction, and at length, with a queer feeling of shame, turned and crossed to the ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... who I am,' said Concha, in an irony which, under the circumstances, he alone could enjoy. Then he passed up the stairs and bade ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... strides up and down with a grim sense of the irony of fate. Once he was asked to marry Miss St. Vincent to save his fortune, now it is Miss Murray. He is a part of the business, to be bandied about and knocked down to the ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... events Montague followed day by day. He was passing through Wall Street that Thursday afternoon, and he heard the crowds singing. He turned away, bitter and sick at heart. Could a more tragic piece of irony have been imagined than this—that the man, who of all men had been responsible for this terrible calamity, should be heralded before the whole country as the one who averted it! Could there have been a more appalling illustration of the way in which the masters of the Metropolis ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... done his part well. His manner is bad. His selection, it seems to me, is open to grave censure, on broader grounds than the mere personally equational of which he speaks, and his choppings, and sub-titles, and so forth, are not commendable. The irony of literary history has apparently ordained that Mr. HENLEY should first patronise, and then "cut," both CAMPBELL and MACAULAY. Was the shade of MACAULAY disturbed when he learnt that Mr. HENLEY considered his "Battle of Naseby" ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... said Tibble, in the tone of irony that was hard to understand. "He owneth the dean as a ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not tell whether the irony of her tone was self-directed or addressed to himself—perhaps it comprehended them both. At any rate, he chose to overlook his own share in it in replying earnestly: "So much so, that I can't see how you can have left me nothing to add to what ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... those anxieties, have food in abundance and need not struggle to obtain it. Such is the Gentle, who swims blissfully in the broth of the putrefying adder. Others—and, by a strange irony of fate, these are generally the most gifted—only manage to eat by ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... yer ter de calaboose, an' git some news fer ter print," said Uncle Remus, with a touch of irony in his tone. "Some new nigger mighter broke ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... a note of weariness and irony. The feet of the horses made a sucking sound on the oozy ground. "I am half white," she said after a moment, and as the horses' hoofs struck the rocky trail again, she whipped up her mount and we galloped up ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... laughing matter, and yet, despite the gravity of the situation, I keenly appreciated the humor and irony that it involved. Arsene Lupin seized and bound like a novice! robbed as if I were an unsophisticated rustic—for, you must understand, the scoundrel had deprived me of my purse and wallet! Arsene Lupin, a victim, duped, ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... is it that when I also deal in the tragi-comic irony of the conflict between real life and the romantic imagination, no critic ever affiliates me to my countryman and immediate forerunner, Charles Lever, whilst they confidently derive me from a Norwegian author of whose language I do not know three words, and of whom I knew ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... my gaze," replied Ming-shu, with downcast eyes, and he plainly recognized that his presumption had been too maintained. "Yet," he added, with polished irony, "there is a well-timed adage that rises to the lips: 'Do not despair; even Yuen Yan once cast a missile ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... a hint of irony in the boatman's tone, and remembering the timidity he had shown when clutched by the squid, Colin felt that this was the chance ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... untroubled. Mrs. Kirke was a woman of marked beauty, whose sweet imperiousness, sympathy, humor, and tact made her the adored of the islanders. She not only spoke native well, but with a zest and sparkle, a silver ripple of irony, ridicule, and good-fellowship that carried everything before it. No kings ever bothered Mrs. Kirke. Even the redoubtable Tembinok, with forty boats full of armed savages, had been stemmed in his Napoleonic career and turned back by her from his projected invasion ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... control of legal skill. He cannot afford expert medical care, or proper hygienic conditions of life; he is lucky if he can get a measure of justice in the courts. To call such a situation one of equality is irony. It is certain that, far as we are yet from final solution of the problems of production, we are still farther from a solution of the problems of the distribution of wealth. "A new and fair division of the goods and rights ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... in the boy's face, and a pride came up in his eye. He put his hand to his cap, with a little irony of deference, and lifted it off with the grace of a grown man. "I know it's my place. But the young lady may keep it—now. I'd rather be ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... be given—whether to the man who conceived the idea, or to him who developed it, and whether or not Columbus intentionally appropriated the honor and glory exclusively—by the irony of fate, there stood a man at Toscanelli's elbow, as it were, when he wrote to the Genoese, who was destined to rob him of his great discovery's richest reward. This man was Amerigo Vespucci, after whom—though unsuggested ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... girl who had promised herself to him, and who, he now saw, loved him with her whole heart; but he was only an immaterial spirit, lighter even than the ether of space, and the unchangeable laws of the universe seemed to him but the irony of fate. As a spirit, he was intangible and invisible to those in the flesh, and likewise they were beyond his control. The tragedy of life then dawned upon him, and the awful results of death made themselves felt. He glanced at Sylvia. On ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... But, by the irony of progress, the orthodox churches are gradually coming around to the one much-despised Platonic conception of the naturally Immortal Immaterial Soul—the "pagan and heathen" idea, so much at variance with the opposing doctrine of the Resurrection ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... to change your mind and advise your mother," Lady Loring remarked with grave irony ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... Present, and the essay on Chartism, that Carlyle achieves the work he was chosen by gods and men to achieve; which possibly might not have been achieved by a happier or more healthy-minded man. He never rose to more deadly irony than in such macabre descriptions as that of the poor woman proving her sisterhood with the rich by giving them all typhoid fever; or that perfect piece of badinage about "Overproduction of Shirts"; in which he imagines the aristocrats ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... in reply, with the sarcasm of a schoolboy's debating society, "there are many people in this country who think that the party to which he belongs should go immediately into a hospital of a different kind, and which I shall not mention." This refined irony was a very gentle specimen of the insult and contumely which was poured upon Cobden and Mr. Bright at ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... however, I became known, and people used to say: "Oh, it is Rameau!" My resource was to throw out some words of irony to save my solitary applause from ridicule, by making them interpret it in an ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... the Irish Bar seems to infect even the officers of the Courts and the people who enter the witness-box. It is impossible, for example, not to admire the fine irony of the usher who, when he was told to clear the Court, called out: "All ye blaggards that are not lawyers ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... uppermost of them, the Heroic Epistle. I have read it so very often, that I have got it by heart; and now I am master of all its beauties, I confess I like it infinitely better than I did, though I liked it infinitely before. There is more wit, ten times more delicacy of irony, as much poetry, and greater facility than and as in the Dunciad. But what Signifies what I think? All the world thinks the same. No soul has, I have heard, guessed within an hundred miles. I catched ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... audacity or scorn, for they were full of tenderness and gentleness. The outline of that little head, . . . the delicate, fine features, the subtle curve of the lips, the mobile face itself, wore an expression of delicate discretion, a faint semblance of irony suggestive of craft and insolence. It would have been difficult to refuse forgiveness to those two feminine failings in her in thinking of her misfortunes, of the passion that had almost cost her her life. Was it not an imposing spectacle (still further magnified ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... only author to whom he could be compared in English, lost a bishopric for his wittiest performance." In later years Lord Murray[58] said, "After Pascal's Letters, it is the most instructive piece of wisdom in the form of Irony ever written." Macaulay declared that Sydney Smith was "universally admitted to have been a great reasoner, and the greatest master of ridicule that has appeared among us since Swift." Even now, after a century of publishing, Peter Plymley's Letters retain their preeminence. ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... Napoleon's Dalmatia into a province of the Habsburgs? And the list is endless. Jella[vc]i['c] was very probably deceived by Francis Joseph, who kept dangling before his eyes a vision of a "Greater Croatia." But, by an irony of history, this hope of union of the Southern Slavs was for the time flung very much into the background by the action of the Tzar, who rescued Austria when in 1849 she was again at variance with the Magyars. Kossuth had been furious at the Constitution promulgated in the spring of ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... who talks about the "Sublime and Solacing Doctrine of Theocratic Equality,"—all these are passages where we wonder whether the author sneered or blushed when he wrote. Certainly what has since been known as the Disraelian irony stings ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... What a question, Chevalier! Most willingly I will aid you in anything proper for a lady to do!" added she, with a touch of irony. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... away, a sentimental reminiscence of what the enigmatical gods have had their jest with, leaving only its gallant memory behind. The whole Conradean system sums itself up in the title of "Victory," an incomparable piece of irony. Imagine a better label for that tragic record of heroic and yet bootless effort, that matchless picture, in microcosm, of the relentlessly cruel revolutions ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... knew that, while she detained him, Clo had indeed dared the great adventure. For a moment Beverley thought of the pearls almost with distaste. That they should come to her to-day, when she cared for nothing in the world but the lost papers, was an irony of fate. She did not return to the boudoir. She forgot the mystery of the open door, and neglected to close it. She was nervously anxious to excuse herself to Sister Lake. Above all, it was her duty to defend Clo. She must confess ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... by the obnoxious or derided class; this tends to define the meaning. Or, again, the opposite result is produced, when the world refuses to allow some sect or body of men the possession of an honourable name which they have assumed, or applies it to them only in mockery or irony. ...
— Sophist • Plato
... said to her a dozen times a day? Now be a good little girl and have a good time. How could you be a good little girl and have a good time at the same time? The irony of it, when anybody with a grain of sense would know that the two do not go hand in hand! If she had stayed home that afternoon, she would have been good, but she would not have had a good time. As it was, she had ...
— The Hickory Limb • Parker Fillmore
... moment, so strange is the ordering of human affairs and so much irony is there in the lessons of life, we who were all ready to weep for the loss of our mainmast would have been only too glad to say good-bye to it. For while its fall augmented the shock, and made us in worse case that way, we were ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... something charming in a girl simply because she is a girl. It is in the ring of her laugh, in her irony, in her frankness or her coyness, in the way she does the commonest things,— puts on her scarf, or catches hold of your arm,—things that only too soon disappear in conventionalities, ceremonies, and proprieties. But there is no need of this change as concerns much ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... anxious indecision in Fabian's countenance, he added, with that bitter irony which formed a part of his character; "But after all, if this duty is so repugnant to you, I shall undertake it; for not having the least ill will against Cuchillo, I can bang him without a scruple. You will see, Fabian, that the knave will not ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... the incarnation, an expansion of the Nicene formula with reference to perversions of the faith by various heretics, and in conclusion a statement of Pelagius's own opinions regarding free will, grace, and sin. It is due to the irony of history that it should have been found among the works of both Jerome and Augustine, long passed current as a composition of Augustine, Sermo CCXXXVI, and should have been actually quoted by the Sorbonne, in 1521, in its articles against Luther. ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... without its compensations for a new writer. The 'equal popularity' of Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair is referred to. 'A very remarkable book,' the reviewer continues; 'we have no remembrance of another containing such undoubted power with such horrid taste.' There is droll irony, when Charlotte Bronte's strong conservative sentiments and church environment ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... with Dr. Sitgreaves, that no species of knowledge was to be despised; and, consequently, he was an empiric in everything but his profession. At first, indignation at the irony of his comrade kept him silent; but, suddenly changing his purpose, he answered the applicant with ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... governor-general and dependent, Mr. Hilary Vane, he had married a wife who had upset all his calculations. The lady discovered Mr. Flint's balance in the bank, and had proceeded to use it for her own glorification, and the irony of it all was that he could defend it from everybody else. Mrs. Flint spent, and Mr. Flint paid the bills; for the first ten years protestingly, and after that he gave it up and let ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... place in him. The irritability approaching to violence, which had attended every speech and infused itself into every movement since he came into the room, had left him. He spoke quietly, and with a touch of irony in his tone. He seemed more the man, but not a whit more prepossessing, and, if anything, less calculated to inspire confidence. The district attorney showed that he was baffled, and Dr. Perry moved uneasily in his ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... la Haye looked angry at the rather caustic irony with which I had sprinkled the dialogue; but he was still more vexed when, taking some gold out of my pocket, I returned to him the sum he had lent me in Vienna. A man never argues well except when his purse is well filled; then his spirits are pitched in a high ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... risk enough in the former course,—which his duty made imperative. He hardly dared to think of the past day's slaughter, which—there was no doubt now—had been due to the previous work of the spy, and how his brigade had been selected—by the irony of Fate—to suffer for and yet retrieve it. If she had had a hand in this wicked plot, ought he to spare her? Or was his destiny and hers to ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... fundamentally with Jolyon's liberty—the one thing on which his jaw was also absolutely rigid, a considerable jaw, under that short grizzling beard. Nor was there ever any necessity for real heart-to-heart encounters. One could break away into irony—as indeed he often had to. But the real trouble with June was that she had never appealed to his aesthetic sense, though she might well have, with her red-gold hair and her viking-coloured eyes, and that touch of the Berserker in her spirit. It ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... fun of it. As he well knew, they all feared and hated him for his trick of irony; but at least half a dozen of them desired his custom, for in St. Hospital (where nothing escaped notice) Brother Copas's fastidious extravagance in body-linen and his punctuality in discharging small debts were matters of common knowledge. Moreover, in their present mood each ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... long experience at times in sweeping and profound generalisations, which covered the whole field of Oriental thought and action, and at others in pithy epigrammatic sayings in which the racy humour, sometimes tinged with a shade of cynical irony, never obscured the deep feeling of sympathy he entertained for everything that was worthy ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... the letter written by a little girl to a mother who had, it seems, allowed her family to see that she was inclined to be satisfied with something of her own writing. The child has a full and gay sense of the sweetest kinds of irony. There was no need for her to write, she and her mother being both at home, but the words must have seemed to her worthy of a pen:—"My dear mother, I really wonder how you can be proud of that article, if it is worthy to be called a article, which I doubt. Such a unletterary article. I cannot ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... resenting Howard's good-humoured irony and putting on a supercilious look that brought out more strongly the insignificance of his face. "Journalism is not a career. It is either a school or a cemetery. A man may use it as a stepping-stone ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... perhaps, her present owner and possessor, Mr. Abner Nott. For by the irony of circumstances, Mr. Nott was a Far Western farmer who had never seen a ship before, nor a larger stream of water than a tributary of the Missouri River. In a spirit, half of fascination, half of speculation, he had bought her at the time of her abandonment, and had since mortgaged his ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... master dramatist of the new movement, while he does not reproduce the average Irishman, is just as natively Irish in his extravagance and irony as the old folk-tale of the "Two Hags"; Lady Gregory in her farces is in a similar way representative of the riot of West-Country imagination; and Mr. Yeats, if further removed from the Irishmen of to-day, is very like, in many ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... isthmus, where on one side was a steep descent to the shore of the little bay, and on the other the live rock hewn away to wall, shining and sparkling with crystals of a clear irony brown, they next clambered up a rude ascent of solid rock, and so reached what had been the centre of the seaward portion of the castle. Here they came suddenly upon a small hole at their feet, going right down. Florimel knelt, and peeping in, saw the remains of a small spiral ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... enjoyment, dabbling in art, patronizing music and the composers, seemingly with no prevision that the musicians whom they attached to their train, and who in the cases of Mozart and Haydn were at times treated but little better than lackeys, were destined by the irony of fate to occupy places in the temple of fame, ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... been the climax of his empty successes. It had been Boston's first oratorio of the season, and the wreath had been an unusually ponderous one. It had met him promptly at the end of his first number, and it had impressed him as a curious bit of irony, following as it did upon the closing phrases of Spe modo Vivitur. Were his crowns to be only the thornless, characterless ones that went with his profession? He bowed low, nevertheless, before the storm of applause, set up his trophy against the steadiest of the music ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... lowest Oolite lies is the Northampton Sands, an irony stratum of red ferruginous sand and sandstone, the upper portion of it also being called the Lower Estuarine deposit. It is from this stratum so many springs arise in various parts of the county, as ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... and still. Had I, by some strange irony, been led to this spot that I might witness the death of my foe? Was this the end of that long ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... unsatisfactory son," Bohemian and dilettante, frankly at odds with the Sinclair tradition—now standing, more or less, in that father's shoes; his heart centred on the old place and on the boy for whom he held it in trust; and the irony of it twisted his lips into a rueful smile. By his own over-concentration on Roy, and his secret dread of the Indian obsession, he could gauge what his own father must have suffered in an aggravated form, blind as he was to any point of view save his own. And there was Roy—like ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... the irony of fate, this one Indian became the model warrior of the tribe. As the confusion and uproar grew in intensity, one after another joined the dancing circle, until it seemed that every brave in the camp was leaping around the fire. Blue-eyed Indians, Bois-Brules, ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... beauty is not less, though of an opposite sort. Shakespeare's most profound sayings and most magical poetry are as often as not put in the mouths of his villains and his clowns. To genius, pain is purgation; ugliness, beauty in disturbance. It injects the acid of irony into success, and distils the attar of felicity from failure. It teaches that the blows of fate are aimed, not at us, but at our fetters; that death is swallowed up in victory, that the Hound of Heaven is none other than the ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... Vinsauf was the author of a well-known mediaeval treatise on composition in various poetical styles of which he gave examples. Chaucer's irony is therefore directed against some grandiose and affected lines on the death of Richard I., intended to illustrate the pathetic style, in which Friday is addressed as "O Veneris lachrymosa dies" ("O ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... that behind those grave eyes was a world of laughter, that beneath the solemn words was a gentle irony, and yet for the while he could not distinguish how much of tragedy there ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... Bienfilatre, l'Affichage celeste, la Machine a gloire, and le Plus beau diner du monde, betrayed a singularly inventive and keenly bantering mind. The whole order of contemporary and utilitarian ideas, the whole commercialized baseness of the age were glorified in stories whose poignant irony transported Des Esseintes. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... he wants to. Are you tired of sitting in prison? Go. Are you tired of going? Sit. They robbed you? Keep still. They beat you? Bear it. They have killed you? Stay dead. That's certain. And I'll carry off Savka; I'll carry him off!" His curt, barking phrases, full of good-natured irony, perplexed the mother. But his last words aroused ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... suggestion which I knew was ironically directed against myself, I did not care. So long as I was to be with my companions and of them, irony did not matter. I caught the twinkle in his eye and laughed. He was as joyous as Narcisse. The gladness of the July morning danced in his veins. He pulled the violin and bow out of the old baize bag and fiddled as we walked. It must have been an ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... readers who have no sense of humor and irony, the essay 'Of Love' unquestionably gives countenance to the theory that Francis Bacon was cold and passionless in all that concerned woman. Of the many strange constructions put upon this essay, not the least amusing and perverse is that which would ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... have been driven, by the long suppression of free thought and belief, added to the miseries brought about by the old regime, to take refuge in unrealities, and this has resulted in a kind of deformity of the national soul. It was a strange irony that even the aristocracy should end by falling victim to its own environment. Exploited by miracle-mongers, thrown off its balance by paroxysms of so-called mysticism, it disappeared from view in a welter of practices and beliefs ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... at the end of June one might have fancied a crisis had been reached. Curiously enough, by the irony of coincidence, the Reuters of that day contained the news that it had been stated in Parliament that, in the interests of the public, no statement would be made about the state of ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... acquiesced the banker. "In fact, I like the idea of staying here much better. It is more private, you know." He grinned significantly, but the woman's smile of faint derision changed merely to irony, which held steadily, making ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... I have never had the pleasure of meeting you before, sir," said the great railroad swallower and amateur Philanthropist with a tinge of railroad irony. ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... delay the enemy till European diplomacy, however slow of movement, could come to its aid, and ultimately to dispose the victor to accept terms consistent with its continued existence. It was an existence, of course, of sufferance, but one which grew better assured the longer it lasted. By an irony of the Osmanli position, the worse the empire was administered, the stronger became its international guarantee. No better example can be cited than the effect of its financial follies. When national bankruptcy, long contemplated by its Government, supervened at last, the ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... messenger from Troy. Talthybius, the herald, enters as spokesman of the army and king, describing the hardships they have suffered and the joy of the triumphant issue. To him Clytemnestra announces, in words of which the irony is patent to the audience, her sufferings in the absence of her husband and her delight at the prospect of his return. He will find her, she says, as he left her, a faithful watcher of the home, her loyalty sure, her honour undefiled. ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... to the man and outrage upon the laws of God, the common Parent of all mankind. There are those in this country—men too of large influence, however small their wit, who, aping miserably the masterly irony of Junius, speak of the black man as the "ward of the nation"—a sort of pauper, dependent upon the charity of a generous and humane people for sustenance, and even tolerance to dwell among them, to enjoy the blessing of a civilization ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... for the supremacy of the world. For England herself the event which accompanied it, the sudden withdrawal of William Pitt from office which took place in the very month of the treaty, was hardly less significant. To men of our day the later position of William Pitt seems one of almost tragic irony. An economist heaping up millions of debt, a Peace Minister dragged into the costliest of wars, he is the very type of the baffled statesman; and the passionate loyalty with which England clung to him through the revolutionary struggle is one of the least intelligible passages of ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... which he understood were to form the matter of discussion; but he skilfully affected to regard them as having originated with the imperialists, and not with the French king. In a long paper of instructions, in which earnestness and irony were strangely blended, he directed the ambassador to treat his good brother as if he were still exclusively devoted to the interests of England; and to urge upon him, on the ground of this fresh delay, that the interview should not take place ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... Twelve gunners were also hit, and the only field gun taken. The retiring Boers were swiftly followed up by Thorneycroft's column, however, and the gun was retaken, together with twenty of Kritzinger's men. It must be confessed that there seems some irony in the fact that, within five days of the British ruling by which the Boers were no longer a military force, these non-belligerents had inflicted a loss of nearly six hundred men killed, wounded, or taken. Two small commandos, that of ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his first wild Californian dream, his English visit, the revelation of Gray Eagle, the final collapse of his old beliefs, were whirling through his brain to the music of this clear young voice. And by some cruel irony of circumstance it seemed now to even mock his later dreams of expiation as it also called back his unhappy experience ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... Asiatic appearance. His eyes were slightly narrowed, his black hair curled lightly over an extremely broad forehead. He spoke little and often in brusque phrase. For this reason he was frequently misunderstood, as the irony and sarcasm with which he sometimes spoke did not tend to make friends. But this attitude was only turned toward those who did not comprehend him and his ideals, or who endeavored to falsify what he believed ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... greatly exalted by his poll, and referred freely on market days to his "plumpers," but as time went on the irony of the situation ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... turned on him. "You think you are sure of me, don't you?" she cried. And in her tone at once were defiance and irony. ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... children to come unto Me.' You are one of those who have come back again," replied the Baron with a touch of irony. ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... fond of telling funny stories in private conversation, they disappeared more and more from his public discourse. He would still now and then point his argument with expressions of inimitable quaintness, and flash out rays of kindly humor and witty irony; but his general tone was serious, and rose sometimes to genuine solemnity. His masterly skill in dialectical thrust and parry, his wealth of knowledge, his power of reasoning and elevation of sentiment, disclosed in language ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... to invade. invasor m. invader. inventar to invent. invierno winter. invitar to invite. ir to go; vr. to go away, depart; ir (with present part.), to go on —ing. iris m. rainbow. ironia irony. ironico ironic. irrealizable unrealizable. irritar to irritate. isla island. islamita m. Mohammedan. Italia Italy. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... explains men's pride in ships. "Ships are all right," as my middle-aged, respectable quartermaster said with much conviction and some irony; but they are not exactly what men make them. They have their own nature; they can of themselves minister to our self-esteem by the demand their qualities make upon our skill and their shortcomings upon our hardiness and endurance. Which is the more flattering ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... of things before you," he said in his softest tones, just touched with irony. "The fact of our engagement has been published. Our marriage is looked for by a host of friends and acquaintances, and even by the mere readers of the newspapers. All but at the last moment, on a caprice, an impulse you do not pretend to justify to one's intelligence, you declare it is all ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... mind of the Empress with explanations," but he did not mend his infidelity. At Oto's request he built a residence for her at Chinu in the neighbouring province of Kawachi, and thereafter the compilers of the Chronicles, with fine irony, confine their record of three consecutive years' events to a repetition of the single phrase, "the Emperor made a ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... was a lady of quite mature appearance, the remark was not without its little irony. The other man blew his horn by way of grace, at which Liza called out ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham
... effect, nay, even from its cumbrous and comical shape, stands alone among the instruments of noise. And if it be true, as I have heard it said, that drums are covered with asses' skin, what a picturesque irony is there in that! As if this long- suffering animal's hide had not been sufficiently belaboured during life, now by Lyonnese costermongers, now by presumptuous Hebrew prophets, it must be stripped from his poor hinder quarters after death, ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the bottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the maternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self delusion. That ironical note is not only daily apparent in real life; it sets the whole tone of feminine fiction. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... exercised that right with the most cruel vigor, and he fulfilled that duty with the fiercest heroism, and to make matters worse, the mysterious irony of fate had caused him to be born with the name of Lebeau, while an ingenious godfather, the unconscious accomplice of the pranks of destiny, had given him the Christian name ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... draws up a paper of counsels and rules for his own conduct—"Custumae aptae ad Individuum"—which might supply an outline for an essay on the arts of behaviour proper for a rising official, a sequel to the biting irony of the essays on Cunning and Wisdom ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... blowed an' puffy-like. Soon's I can talk good, I will. Young folks is allers got to be impatient. There's my darter, Matildy Jane, she ain't none too patient, you know—leastways, not onless it's with you, Jim,"—here a wink of the eye at Jim made evident the playful irony of the exception, for Jim was Matilda's bete noir, and a chronic warfare waged between the two,—"an' she says to me this mornin', says she, 'Pa,' says she,—an' ye might think I hadn't never learned her the Ten Comman'ments, leastways the one about ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... "Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom," a cosmopolitan swindler and adventurer. The book is Smollett's "Barry Lyndon," yet as his hero does not tell his own story, but is perpetually held up as a "dreadful example," there is none of Thackeray's irony, none of his subtlety. "Here is a really bad man, a foreigner too," Smollett seems to say, "do not be misled, oh maidens, by the wiles of such a Count! Impetuous youth, play not with him at billiards, basset, or ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... with anyone doing it in such a dreary place. Of all God-forsaken dustbins of Nature, I think the most heart-breaking are places like that bandstand, that were meant to be festive and are forlorn. I can fancy a morbid man feeling he must kill his rival in the solitude and irony of such a scene. I remember once taking a tramp in your glorious Surrey hills, thinking of nothing but gorse and skylarks, when I came out on a vast circle of land, and over me lifted a vast, voiceless structure, tier above tier of ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... task of cutting his mutton into very small pieces Mr Cupples replied: 'The most curious feature of it, in my judgement, was the irony of the situation. We both held the clue to that mad hatred of Manderson's which Marlowe found so mysterious. We knew of his jealous obsession; which knowledge we withheld, as was very proper, if only in consideration ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... however, who did most of the talking; Olive only inserted from time to time an inquiry, a protest, a correction, an ejaculation tinged with irony. None of these things checked or diverted her hostess; Olive saw more and more that she wished to please her, to win her over, to smooth matters down, to place them in a new and original light. She was very clever and (little by little Olive said to herself) absolutely ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... woman replied, with bitter irony in her tones, "I have come with my little girl to thank you for the present we received last night;—a ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... grimly given to be understood that the despatch is an ultimatum, and a last chance is being offered for the recreant ally to fulfil her pledge. To make it more plain, the document goes on with a kind of bilious irony: "The two German war-ships now in Samoa are here for the protection of German property alone; and when the Olga shall have arrived" [she arrived on the morrow] "the German war-ships will continue to do against ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... little family conference—where they should send their wives and children. And one of these Frenchmen, the one who had been most ferocious in his condemnation of the German barbarian, said quite naively and with no sense of irony or paradox: "Of course, if we could find an absolutely open town which would not be defended at all the women folk and children would be all right." His instinct, of course, was perfectly just. The German "savage" had had three quarters of a million people in his absolute power in ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the blended truth, irony, and wit with which Heloise dissuaded Abelard from open marriage. He compromised the affair, and contented himself with a secret marriage. "After a night spent in prayer," said he, "in one of the churches of Paris, on the following morning we received the nuptial blessing in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... River, this last vestige of his fortune which remained to him by pure chance. He had bought it as an investment for surplus funds. He had never even seen it. He would have smiled, if his face had been capable of smiling, at the irony of his owning ten million feet of Douglas fir and red cedar—material to build a thousand cottages—he who no longer owned a roof to shelter his head, whose cash resources were only a few ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... chief with biting irony, "my friend? You—the ringleader of those who despise my laws. You are my worst enemy. You pray for pity? No! for you I have no pity. It is my duty to have pity on my people over whom God placed me, and I am going to show them pity to-day; and that is my duty to ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... do no wrong," said MacGregor with gentle irony, "and neither can the law. Remember that, Philip, as long as you are in the service. The law may break up homes, ruin states, set itself a Nemesis on innocent men's heels—but it can do no wrong. It is ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... and 6 dilate with keen irony on the fate of the first half of Israel's sin—the calf. It was thought a god, but its worshippers shall be in a fright for it. 'Calves,' says Hosea, though there was but one at Beth-el; and he uses the feminine, as some think, depreciatingly. 'Beth-aven' or the 'house of vanity,' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Laterensis that, even though the people might have judged badly in selecting Plancius, it was not the less his duty to accept the judgment of the people.[42] Say that the people ought not to have done so; but it should have been sufficient for him that they had done so. Then he laughs with a beautiful irony at the pretensions of the accuser. "Let us suppose that it was so," he says.[43] "Let no one whose family has not soared above praetorian honors contest any place with one of consular family. Let no mere knight stand ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... going to blow up?" he inquired, with a tinge of irony. "Well, it isn't." He turned to me. "Here's where we shall stay for a while. You and the men are to cut a number of these pine trees for a house. Better pick out the little ones, about three or four inches through: they're easier handled. I'll be ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... conclusively proved itself to be the most potent of all known artificial agents in the promotion of vegetable growth, should be found in a district utterly lacking the slightest traces of vegetation of any kind. Lest such a statement should seem to savour of irony, we hasten to explain that the singular barrenness of this part of the country is largely due to the character of its climate, the deposits occurring in the midst of sandy deserts,[205] ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... very kindly man, father," I answered, in a tone of irony. "I see that perfectly. But do not let this matter cause you needless anxiety; for there is one very clear argument which must reassure both of us. If a veritable religious impulse urges Brother John the Trappist to make a public reparation, it will be easy to make him understand ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... lie thick in her streets. All the opposing forces of Church and State, of theology and politics, of philosophy and science, of literary and social and economic theory, have contended for mastery in the place which Matthew Arnold, with fine irony, described as "so unruffled by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!" Every succeeding generation of Oxford men has borne its part in these ever recurring strifes. To hold aloof from them would have been poltroonery. Passionately ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... sake," said Merryon, with grim irony. "The regimental morals are somewhat easily offended, and an outsider like myself can't be ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... sources. The 'Anti-Jacobin' shows Mr. Canning's power in his youthful exuberance. When I knew him it had been sobered, perhaps saddened, by the political contrarities and other incidents of more advanced life, but had lost none of its refinement of irony. Less obvious than the common wit of the world, it excited thought and refined it—one of the highest characteristics of ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... say is not shared by the large majority of Chinese. Persons who have committed political offenses in their own country find protection not only in America but in all countries in Europe, Japan, and other civilized lands. It is an irony of fate that since the establishment of the Chinese Republic, Manchu and other officials under the old regime, now find secure asylums in Hongkong, Japan, and Tsingtao, while hundreds of ex-Manchu officials have fled to the foreign settlements ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... convinced that those characteristics are not the essential characteristics. I am convinced that there is another Montaigne who has nothing in common with the Montaigne of convention and tradition. I am convinced that the scepticism, the Conservatism, the irony, the moderation, the affectation of humility, frivolity, pedantry, and innocent candour, are only a mask and disguise which Montaigne has put on to conceal his identity, that they are only so many tricks ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... Irony about this View Is, I fear, more true than new, Still the crowd's a great 'un; Heads and bodies hide from me Pictures that I wish to see; Smooth, fair maids ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... sun shine on the head of the crucified, if a bird lift up its joyous song in presence of a broken heart, it seems to us cruel. But beautiful is the unconscious irony of nature in comparison with that which exists in human circumstances. We have here an example of this before us. See these sparkling false diamonds, this red gauze finery, these ruins of theatrical ornament. ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... less brilliant than his gifted, short-lived younger brothers, Edward and Charles. He had an undistinguished career at Harvard, where he was graduated in 1821, ranking thirtieth in a class of fifty-nine. Lovers of irony like to remember that he was the seventh choice of his classmates for the position of class poet. After some desultory teaching to help his brothers, he passed irregularly through the Divinity School, his studies often interrupted by serious ill-health. "If they had ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... to observe the close interweaving, the subtle irony and contrasts, the perfect harmony of the details. We must review them quite briefly. To illustrate the first, Pedringano's letter is not the 'wonderful discovery' that usually saves lost situations in weak novels: it has been referred to by him ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... Gullion, who drunk Acheron dry in his passage over it, and grounded Charon's boat, but floated it again, by as liberal a stream of urine. It concludes with the following sarcastical, yet wholesome irony. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... physiognomist could at that moment have detected in the corner of Roblado's eye a very odd expression—a mingling of irony with a strong desire to laugh. In fact, the gallant captain could hardly keep from bursting out in the faces of his admirers, and was only restrained from doing so by the desire of keeping the joke bottled up till he could enjoy it in the company of the Comandante—to ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... a vein of misanthropic irony in most of what Anthony Thurston said, but the other man had the same blood ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... other, and shows the want of thoroughness and depth in Mrs. Jameson's intellect. She has taste, feeling and knowledge, but she cannot think out a subject thoroughly, and is unconsciously tainted and hampered by conventionalities. Her advice to the governesses reads like a piece of irony, but we believe it was not meant as such. Advise them to be burnt at the stake at once, rather than submit to this slow process of petrifaction. She is as bad as the Reports of the "Society for the relief of distressed and dilapidated Governesses." We have no more patience. We must go to ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Carpen: It were indeed a most stupendous mind Which, as the argonaut with mining pan Doth sift pure gold from ever present dross, Can Truth unmesh from Error's well spread net. Conditions intricate with taunting smile Of Fate's stern irony, have faced us here; But now the seething problem must be solved And vague uncertainty be swept aside. Shall the mestizos, as the ruling class, Be firm entrenched by our assisting hand, Or must we in the well marked path still tread And longer bear our burden which will bring No gratitude to ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... replied quickly, sure that her voice must betray the irony she felt. As if she cared, indeed, whether he ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... Sir, at being taxed with insincerity for my encomiums on Scotland. They were given in a manner a little too serious to admit of irony, and (as partialities cannot be supposed entirely ceased) with too much risk of disapprobation in this part of the world, not to flow from my heart. My friends have long known my opinion on this point, and it is too much formed on fact for me ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... not begin with thy irony-stop! I know all your organ tones, from the tenor of your kindness to the bourdon of your displeasure. Do you think I am not glad to have you here safe and sound? Do you think I have not been miserable about you since I knew of your sickness? Monsieur de Malfort will tell you whether I have ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... mother said to her a dozen times a day? Now be a good little girl and have a good time. How could you be a good little girl and have a good time at the same time? The irony of it, when anybody with a grain of sense would know that the two do not go hand in hand! If she had stayed home that afternoon, she would have been good, but she would not have had a good time. As it was, she had had a good time, but she had not been good. ...
— The Hickory Limb • Parker Fillmore
... world yet takes note of it, and that is his patience. If interrupted in a speech, he gave way and never answered sharply, nor used his position to the other's discomfiture. In his speeches there was no challenge, no vituperation, no irony, no arraignment. He assumed that everybody was honest, everybody just, and that all men were doing what they thought was best for themselves and others. His enemies were not rogues—simply good men who were temporarily in error. He impeached no man's motives; but ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... grand and simple irony in this not easily surpassed. Some very evident proofs had been given in England, that to deny the King's spiritual supremacy was "wilfully to be dead," although neither the King nor the Parliament had vouchsafed to inform the victims in what part of the Gospel the keys of the kingdom ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... was understood and appreciated. The poor fellow of twenty-seven had the innocence of a lad of sixteen. Another man, one of those distrustful, surly artists, would have noticed the diabolical look on Elie's face and seen the twitching of the hairs of his beard, the irony of his moustache, and the movement of his shoulders which betrayed the satisfaction of Walter Scott's Jew in ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... of irony which Nina had thrown into her voice when she spoke of what was due to her lover even though he was a Jew was not lost upon her father. "Of course you would take his part against a ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... this now as he looked on; and not without a sense of irony, he said under his breath, "Almost thou persuadest me ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... lurking irony in this speech; yet the softened accents of his father, in some measure, disarmed the youth of the bitterness he would have flung into his observation,—"That no man on earth, his parent excepted, should have dared to insinuate ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... may increase that which has been given him, but until now he has not created, but demolished. The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the game is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day. [To VOITSKI] I read irony in your eye; you do not take what I am saying seriously, and—and—after all, it may very well be nonsense. But when I pass peasant-forests that I have preserved from the axe, or hear the rustling of the young plantations set out with ...
— Uncle Vanya • Anton Checkov
... whole time I was with them, I never heard them indulge in a joke, or other levity, and the practice of it is apt to give offence: they are so accustomed to take what is said in its literal meaning, that irony was always considered a falsehood, in spite of explanation. They could not see the propriety of uttering what was not strictly true, for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... on the main point at issue, that of their violent death, are worded with marvellous dignity, coupled with a sad touch of irony. That engraved on the urn of Pompeius ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... lost caste by the way in which he made so many respectable Sabines fathers-in-law against their will, or that the wise Odysseus was a perfectly admirable gentleman in our sense of the word? Even in the sixteenth century, in the then most civilized country of the world, the grave irony with which Macchiavelli commends the frightful treacheries of Caesar Borgia would have had no point, if he had not taken it for granted that almost all who read his treatise would suppose him to be in earnest. In the same way dregs is explained simply as the sediment left after ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Saturday just previous, and his purse contained only four thalers. There was only one prospect left, and he went to a rich money lender, and in response to his request for relief in money difficulties, was met with this reply of irony and sarcasm from one who loved to indulge his enmity to the Christian faith. "You in money difficulties, or any difficulties, Mr. Loest! I cannot believe it; it is altogether impossible! you are at all times and in all places ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... though they persecuted certain Royalist poets of far inferior note. On the accession of Charles the Second he celebrated the event by a most singular piece called the Lamentation of Oliver's men, in which he assails the Roundheads with the most bitter irony. He was loyal to James the Second, till that monarch attempted to overthrow the Church of England, when Huw, much to his credit, turned against him, and wrote songs in the interest of the glorious Prince of Orange. He died in the reign of good Queen Anne. In his youth his ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... servants, and the 'Powers' of the hospital—all were sorry; yet they could not understand to the point of quite forgiving their vagaries. The twain were outcast, wandering each in a dumb world of his own, each in the endless circle of one or two hopeless notions. It was irony—or the French system—which had ordered the Breton Roche to get well in a place whence he could see nothing flatter than a mountain, smell no sea, eat no fish. And God knows what had sent Gray there. His story was too vaguely understood, for his stumbling ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... "The diamond does not know its own value," he said, and there was an inexpressible charm, and a touch of something like irony ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... conjure with, so he capitulated with a willingness that savored somewhat of suspended animation (so fearful was he that he might do something to disturb the dream before it came true). That was two years ago. With exquisite irony, Lady Bazelhurst decided to have a country-place in America. Her agents discovered a glorious section of woodland in the Adirondacks, teeming with trout streams, game haunts, unparalleled scenery; her ladyship instructed them to buy without ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... tribune was an earthquake. The tribune of France spoke, and every sentient being on this earth betook itself to reflection; the words sped into the obscurity, through space, at hazard, no matter where,—"It is only the wind, it is only a little noise," said the barren minds that live upon irony; but the next day, or three months, or a year later, something fell on the surface of the earth, or something rose. What had been the cause of that? The noise that had vanished, the wind that had passed away. This noise, this wind, was "the Word." A sacred force! ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... bedclothes against her mouth to prevent the sound of it penetrating the partition wall and reaching John Niel's ears, for his room was next to hers. Even in the midst of her suffering the thought of the irony of the thing forced itself into her mind. There, separated from her only by a few inches of lath and plaster and some four or five feet of space, was the man for whom she mourned thus, and yet he was as ignorant of it as though he were thousands of miles away. Sometimes at such acute ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... strange irony of Fate that we found ourselves reunited for a summer's outing, in a ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... paltry joke upon a grave and sensible though unsuspecting individual, he felt quite delighted at the feat; and took the person thus imposed upon into the number of his favorites. It was upon this principle among others that Norton, who pretended never to see through his flimsy irony, contrived to keep in his favor, and to shape him according to his wishes, whilst he made the weak-minded young man believe that everything he did and every step he took was the result of his own deliberate opinion, whereas in fact he was only ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... wise man, of which the Sophists, as he describes them in the Republic, are the imitators rather than the authors, being themselves carried away by the great tide of public opinion. Socrates approaches his antagonist warily from a distance, with a sort of irony which touches with a light hand both his personal vices (probably in allusion to some scandal of the day) and his servility to the populace. At the same time, he is in most profound earnest, as Chaerephon remarks. ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... "I beg to say that if I did give him any physic, the dose would be much to his advantage; but, however, my opinion is, that this invitation to breakfast is, after all, a mere piece of irony; and that, when we get to Walmesley Lodge, we shall not see anything of him; on the contrary, we shall probably find it's ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... any presents in one hut, the inmates of the next would not fail to tell us of it, accompanying their remarks with some satirical observation, too unequivocally expressed to be mistaken, and generally by some stroke of irony directed against the favoured person. If any individual with whom we had been intimate happened to be implicated in a theft, the circumstance became a subject of satisfaction too manifest to be repressed, and we were told of it with ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... The only irony allowed to poverty is to drive Justice and Benevolence to unjust denials. When a poor wretch has convicted Society of falsehood, he throws himself more eagerly on the mercy ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... shrink; she rather pressed forward and bent near, to acquaint herself perfectly with what was done; and once or twice asked a question as to the reason or the use of something. Dr. Harrison glanced up at her the first time—it might have been with incipient impatience—or irony,—but if either, it disappeared. He answered her questions straightforward and sensibly, giving her, and with admirable precision, exactly the information she desired, and even more than absolutely that. For everything else, the work went on in silence. When the doctor however was standing ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... while the dumb understand the whole show the person who's describing it quite accurately to them often knows nothing about it. Paradox, irony, blasted eternal cussedness of life! Did you ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... assures us that he laboured over The Nabob for eight months, mainly in his bed-room, sometimes working eighteen consecutive hours, often waking from restless sleep with a sentence on his lips. Yet, such is the irony of literary history, the novel is loosely enough put together to have been written, one might suppose, in bursts of inspiration or else more or less methodically—almost with the intention, as Mr. James has noted, of including every striking phase of Parisian life. For ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... it is a peculiar irony of fate that the very originator of the new trend in Greek thought was charged with and sentenced for impiety. We have already mentioned the singular prelude to the indictment afforded by the comedy of Aristophanes. We have also remarked upon the futility of looking therein for any actual ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... with careless irony. In reality the trial that was hanging over him worried him extremely. Olga Mihalovna remembered how on his return from the unfortunate session he had tried to conceal from his household how troubled he was, and how dissatisfied with himself. As an intelligent man ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... no doubt shrugged his shoulders, for in a tone of crushing irony and scorn, he exclaimed: "Noble ladies! whom do you call noble ladies, pray? The brainless fools who only think of displaying themselves and making themselves notorious?—the senseless idiots who pique themselves on surpassing ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... character shall appear dreadful, and even hateful, but not contemptible. But where a character of less note, a Shadwell or a Settle, crossed his path, the satirist did not lay himself under these restraints, but wrote in the language of bitter irony and immeasurable contempt: even then, however, we are less called on to admire the wit of the author, than the force and energy of his poetical philippic. These are the verses which are made by indignation, and, no more than theatrical scenes of ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... devoured them. They told of three determined attacks on the town on the third day after I had left, all successfully repulsed, and of a bombardment on the following Monday. The latter had been somewhat of a farce, and had done no damage, except to one or two buildings which, by an irony of fate, included the Dutch church and hotel and the convent. The shells were of such poor quality that they were incapable of any explosive force whatever.[26] After nine hours' bombardment, although some narrow escapes were recorded, the only casualties were one chicken ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... to have a brother!" observed Bertram with irony. "Well!—and what news, sweet Hugh, of ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... instinct as shows itself in our love of certain kinds of fiction. We know that some of the happy endings in the plays and in the novels are often far-fetched; but we like to have the happy endings, or the "poetic justice" endings, or the "irony of fate" endings, just the same. When the child makes up his endings to fit his sense of justice or beauty, we must not condemn him, as we are often tempted to do, by calling his fabrication a "lie," for that ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... she must have read them over many times, and dwelt upon them, there was an under-current of ridicule running through her tones and action—for she had personified the river-god—and when she was done, she criticised them with merciless irony. ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... most glad, honored Master Scientist," he said in the flowery Oriental fashion that he affected in his irony, "to welcome you here. For me it is a memorable occasion. Your presence graces my home, and, however unworthily, distinguishes me, rewarding as it does aspirations which I have long held. I am humbly confident that great achievements will result ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... more powerful horror, but it would have lacked the ethical beauty which Hawthorne gave it and which makes it significant beyond a mere feat of verbal legerdemain. And the subtile simplicity of "The Great Stone Face" is as far from Poe as the pathetic irony of "The Ambitious Guest." In all his most daring fantasies Hawthorne is natural, and, though he may project his vision far beyond the boundaries of fact, nowhere does he violate the laws of nature. He had at all times a wholesome simplicity, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... of the headquarters behind Verdun he found many old friends and companions. They greeted him with cheerful irony. ...
— The Broken Soldier and the Maid of France • Henry Van Dyke
... had left her eyes cold as she surveyed the scene. There was no sign of the expressed delight with which she had followed Nan at her first inspection of her new home. The recollection of it had even left her. Only a certain sense of the irony of it all occupied her. That, and a painful wonder as to when the dread under which she labored would materialize into the shattering of every hope ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... "No irony," said Robert, who, nevertheless, was pleased. "It merely proves that Areskoui had forgiven me, while he had not forgiven you two. But don't you notice ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in irony. She laughed, and broke away. She was free. As she sat on the top of the tram in the sunlight, she looked round her with tremendous delight. She had left something which had meant much to her. She ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... does, and it is commonly supposed to be no heavy fault in him or any other writer for the common public. Man cannot live by analysis alone, nor nourish himself on the secret delights of irony. And if Macaulay had only reflected the more generous of the prejudices of mankind, it would have been well enough. Burke, for instance, was a writer who revered the prejudices of a modern society as deeply as Macaulay did; he believed society to be founded on prejudices and ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... said that to me I should have laughed—you don't suspect the irony in it" Hilda said. "Pray who is to ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... in Bantry Bay with the ships of Hoche's unlucky expedition; he landed with Humbert in Donegal, and saw the Race of Castlebar; he had some marvellous experiences in the West Indies, and everywhere the devotion of women facilitated his hairbreadth escapes. There need be no irony in repeating that avowed fiction can have no chance at all in competition ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Gabler.' Dennery might envy the ingenuity with which Consul Bernick is tempted to insist on the fatal order that seems for a season to be the death-sentence of his own son; and Sardou would appreciate the irony of Nora's frantic dance at the very moment when she was tortured by deadly fear. But these theatric devices, in Dennery's hands or in Sardou's, would have existed for their own sake solely; but in Ibsen's, ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... worn-out instincts, old conservative Athenians who let themselves go—"for the sake of happiness," as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated—and who had continually on their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led, IRONY was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the "noble," with a look that said plainly ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... to be a late and "literary" presentation of the stately society it describes, rank it much higher as such. Its author was a bitter enough satirist if he wrote, as he most probably did, the famous Quinze Joyes de Mariage, one of the most unmitigated pieces of unsweetened irony—next to A Tale of a Tub and Jonathan Wild—to be found in literature; but not couched in narrative form. The same quality appears of course in the still more famous farce of Pathelin, which few good judges deny very stoutly to him, though there ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction, to set off the meanest things. The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity, is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The little is made great, and the great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or weep. It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... to view her and amuse itself with her antics. For the first time she saw that smile which was not on any particular face, but which, nevertheless, hovered over all faces and seemed to fill the theater; it was a smile of indulgent and unconscious irony, a smile of crushing superiority that is seen on the faces of older people when they watch the playing of ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... of the power of that God whom he was blaspheming; but Job cuts short his harangue, and ends it for him in a spirit of loftiness which Bildad could not have approached; and then proudly and calmly rebukes them all, no longer in scorn and irony, but in high tranquil self-possession. "God forbid that I should justify you," he says; "till I die I will not remove my integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go. My heart shall not reproach me so long as ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... cultivated through study and social intercourse, such as we find in France and England. His conversation indicated the tact of circumstances, like that of the hunter in pursuit of his prey. His spirit seemed a cold, keen sword-blade, which freezes while it wounds. I felt a profound irony in his mind, which nothing great or beautiful could escape, not even his own fame, for he despised the nation whose suffrages he sought... "—"With him, everything was means or aims; spontaneity, whether for good or ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... I was told that I was doing a rash thing, a dangerous thing—that before your twenty-fifth birthday the bad blood would out; that you would, in short, have shot a man. And the prophecy has come true. By an irony of chance it has happened on the very last day. And by another irony you picked your victim from among the ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... powerful aids furnished by the pen to the solution of the burning question of their time. Lord Murray called the Plymley letters "after Pascal's letters the most instructive piece of wisdom in the form of irony ever written." Worldly wealth came later; but in wit, wisdom, and kindly helpful cheerfulness, from youth to age, ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... praising the writers of his own age, ventured to disparage some of the great authors of the ancient classics. Boileau lashed himself into a fury of opposition and hurled strident insults against the heretic. Racine, more adroit, pretended to think that the poem was a piece of ingenious irony. Most men of letters hastened to participate in the battle. No doubt Perrault's position was untenable, but he conducted his defence with perfect temper and much wit; and Boileau made himself not a little absurd by his violence and his obvious longing to display the extent ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... traveller, he had, at thirty years of age, seen all that was to be seen, he had visited India and Japan, drunk camel's milk under the tents of the Kirgheez, and eaten dates with the Kabyles, and narrated with a sort of appetizing irony, love adventures which might have seemed romantic brag, if it were not that he lessened their improbability by his raillery. He was a kind of belated Byron, who might have been cured of his romantic tastes by the ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... of eight books, the first of which, in irony of some histories which had previously been published, gives a description of the world and a history of its creation, and in brief, the story of Noah and the discovery of America, and a dissertation on the origin of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... at last. It is an irony of Fate. There are a hundred thousand of them there, the best blood of Russia, and the most charming and delightful people in Europe in themselves, though now almost entirely destitute of means. A large Russian army without ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... very ill of, when they keep such good company, and walk hand in hand with so much compassion and generosity; adulation so loathsome, that you would spit in the man's face who dared offer it to you in a private company, unless you interpreted it as insulting irony, you appropriate with infinite satisfaction, when you share the garbage with the whole stye, and gobble it out of a common trough. No Caesar must pace your boards—no Antony, no royal Dane, no ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... you and me; and your fate for all time, your future weal or woe is rather a costly shuttlecock to be tossed to and fro in a game of words. I do not come to bandy phrases, and in view of your imminent peril, I cannot quite understand your irony." ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... this last decidedly hackneyed, not to say silly remark, Andrea laughed frankly as if to forestall the lady's smile, whether of incredulity or irony. But Elena remained perfectly serious. Was she listening, or was she thinking of something else? Did she accept that kind of speech, or was she, by her gravity, amusing herself at his expense? Did she ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... objectors the irony and the oratory of a Chalmers was directed with what was held to be overwhelming effect. If the telescope had shewn us wonderful things, there was another instrument, he said, which had been given to us {20} about the same time. If by the telescope we had ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... and how little we remembered her as the great man wanted her remembered. For what Shakespeare must have desired, to have been able to write with such divine despair, was that the lady should live... and now we have no real interest in her.... The irony of it is that if he had cared more for the poem than for the lady the sonnet would be only obvious, imitative rhetoric and no one would ever have read it after ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... to laugh and Guillaume realised all the good-natured irony of his laugh. While admiring him as a great savant, he had hitherto suffered at seeing him lead such a bourgeois life, accepting whatever appointments and honours were offered him, a Republican under ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... By the irony of fate, Aunt Eliza, of all people, turned out to be the Dea ex machina: which thing fell out in this wise. It was that lady's obnoxious practice to issue forth, of a Sunday afternoon, on a visit of state to such farmers ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... short of sudden death, and even then he'd feel himself ill used. Stay at home because I felt faint? It would be as much as my place is worth," said Bertie with a smile of which Judith could not understand the fine irony. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... porphyry, garnet, and such like. Sometimes he had a day in the woods, and there, too, the boy's attention was excited by the peculiar geological curiosities which came in his way. While searching among the rocks on the beach, he was sometimes asked, in irony, by the farm-servants who came to load their carts with sea-weed, whether he "was gettin' siller in the stanes," but was so unlucky as never to be able to answer in the affirmative. When of a suitable age he was apprenticed ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... much as a Michael Angelo, hewing, with heat and haste, at one of his terrible pieces of statuary. He characterizes the miser severely; he lashes the proud wicked man whom he sees pompously hearsed into Hell; with stern irony he pursues the beauty from her looking-glass ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
