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More "Witty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... introducing a protegee into society, a form of log-rolling which is far more prevalent than people imagine. Whether the girl's entrance into London society had been paid for or not I am unable to say, but she had quickly established herself as a success. It was generally agreed that she was both witty and charming, the kind of girl men easily run after, but not ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... Bonhomme Richard. This was in compliment to Franklin, who was often called "Poor Richard" by his admiring countrymen, because for many years he had published "Poor Richard's Almanac," filled with wise and witty sayings. ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... about to make, the ceremonies were begun. There was a political part to be played by the Doge, in which the people took particular interest; and to behold which, indeed, was the strongest reason of their impatience. The government of Venice, as was remarked by quaint and witty James Howell, was a compound thing, mixed of all kinds of governments, and might be said to be composed of "a grain of monarchy, a dose of democracy, and a dram, if not an ounce of optimacy." It was in regard to this dose of democracy, that the government ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... contributed to what Dekker called the poetomachia or war of the theatres as recent critics have named it. This play as a fabric of plot is a very slight affair; but as a satirical picture of the manners of the time, proceeding by means of vivid caricature, couched in witty and brilliant dialogue and sustained by that righteous indignation which must lie at the heart of all true satire—as a realisation, in short, of the classical ideal of comedy—there had been nothing like Jonson's comedy ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... and less given to gestures than the Notary, thinner and shorter; but he was terrible at masquerade, ball, or village diet, for they said of him that he had a sting in his tongue. He could make up such witty jests that you might have had them printed in the almanac; they were all so malicious and pointed. He had formerly been a man of property, but he had entirely squandered his inheritance from his father, and his brother's estate as ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... "New Monthly," both before and after the advent of Mr. Hook, was John Poole, the author of "Little Pedlington," "Paul Pry," and many other pleasant works, not witty, but full of true humor. He was, when in his prime, a pleasant companion, though nervously sensitive, and, like most professional jokers, exceedingly irritable whenever a joke was made to tell against himself. It is among my memories, that, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... the poetry of life need not always be solemn, any more than life itself need not always be sober. It may be gay, witty, humorous, satirical, disbelieving, farcical, even broad and reckless, since life is all these; but it must never be insincere. Insincerity, which is not always one of the greatest sins of the moral universe, becomes in the world of art an ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... the gaiety of "mischievous and fine Champagne," as Michelet said. Assuredly, there were hours in which good humor reigned over master and pupils, and we seem to see the smile that accompanied the witty sallies, and the radiance of that kindly charm which illuminated the dry juridic discussions. All this forms an attractive whole, and everyone may feel the attraction; for the commentaries on the Bible, which can be read with pleasure and without mental fatigue, are intelligible to persons of most ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... a sheet in the wind's eye after dinner, especially after Rhone wine, his favourite weakness. He would then remark on the warmth of his feeling for Anastasie, and with inflamed cheeks and a loose, flustered smile, debate upon all sorts of topics, and be feebly and indiscreetly witty. But the adopted stable-boy would not permit himself to entertain a doubt that savoured of ingratitude. It is quite true that a man may be a second father to you, and yet take too much to drink; but the best natures are ever slow to accept ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... suggesting and advising new ventures which his associates and hirelings carried out. He was, to look at, a phlegmatic type of man—short, stout, wrinkled about the eyes, rather protuberant as to stomach, red-necked, red-faced, the least bit popeyed, but shrewd, kindly, good-natured, and witty. He had, because of his naturally common-sense ideas and rather pleasing disposition built up a sound and successful business here. He was getting strong in years and would gladly have welcomed the hearty cooperation of his son, if the latter had ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... expressing a great desire to know his "distinguished sister." At all events, the thing was done, and Lettice must now be definitely accepted as a writer of books. What chiefly puzzled him was to think where she had learned her wisdom, how she came to be witty without his knowing it, and whence proceeded that intimate acquaintance with the human heart of which the critics were talking. He had not been accustomed to take much account of his sister, in spite of her ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... province as a genuine Valois; and he distinguished himself, like the rest of his homonyms, by excellent manners, which proved him a man of society. He dined out every day, and played cards every evening. He was thought witty, thanks to his foible for relating a quantity of anecdotes on the reign of Louis XV. and the beginnings of the Revolution. When these tales were heard for the first time, they were held to be well narrated. He had, moreover, the ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... say how warm a welcome he accorded to this suggestion, but it was dangerously sweet to him, and he had self-understanding enough to recognise that fact. But he was in no mood to struggle against whatever Fate might bring. He was not coxcomb enough to conceive himself likely to be dangerous to a witty and experienced woman of the world, and as to what might happen to himself he did not care. He was desolate enough to be desperate, and if in two short days he had learned to believe that the final loss of the new interest ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... was the case of Tobie Matthew, son of the Archbishop of York, converted during his travels in Italy. This witty and frivolous courtier came home and faced the uproar of his friends, spent a whole plague-stricken summer in Fleet arguing with the Bishops sent to reclaim him, and then was banished. After ten years he reappeared at Court, as amusing as ever, the protege of the Duke of Buckingham. But under ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... Nellie in J.C.'s admiration for herself, that she failed to see his growing preference for Maude, whom she frequently ridiculed in his presence, just because she thought he would laugh at it, and think her witty. But in this she was mistaken, for her ridicule raised Maude higher in his estimation, and he was glad when at last an opportunity occurred for ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... received, although two lines in an epigram "On a Cock at Rochester," by the witty Sir Charles Sedley, imply that the cock suffered this annual barbarity by way of punishment for St. Peter's crime, in denying ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various
... Tragedy, he has doubly offended against that Historical Resemblance. For first whereas Menenius was an eloquent Person, Shakespear has made him a downright Buffoon. And how is it possible for any Man to conceive a Ciceronian Jack-pudding? Never was any Buffoon eloquent, or wise, or witty, or virtuous. All the good and ill Qualities of a Buffoon are summ'd up in one Word, and that is a Buffoon. And secondly, whereas Shakespear has made him a Hater and Contemner and Villifier of the People, we are assur'd by the ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... Moliere and Shakespeare alone in her own room than she ever received, even at the height of her fame, from her triumphs before the world. There was, no doubt, a great craving in her nature for innocent pleasures and excitement. She loved gay scenes, bright lights, beautiful clothes, lively music, witty conversation. She had been born for the brilliant Courts of the eighteenth century when life in each class was more highly concentrated than is possible now—when love was put to severer tests, hatred permitted a crueller play, politics ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... being "a well-dressed man, polite and confident, with hair powdered and tied in a queue." He stooped slightly, and did not move with the grace or ease one would have expected from so experienced a soldier, but he had "great authority of manner," and was uniformly "courtly, witty and charming." During one of those legal battles in which he had only one rival (Hamilton) it was reported of him that "Burr conducted the trial with the dignity and impartiality of an angel but with the ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... him of the College de France. When I first arrived, I went to hear an old Academician who taught five hundred youths that Corneille was a haughty and powerful genius; Racine, elegiac and graceful; Moliere, inimitable; Voltaire, supremely witty; Bossuet and Pascal, incomparable in argument. A professor of philosophy may make a name by explaining how Plato is Platonic. Another discourses on the history of words, without troubling himself about ideas. ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... extracted it. It was the wit he was after, the pure jewel, and he would pick it up out of the mud or dirt just as readily as from a parlour table." In any case his best remembered utterances of this order, when least fit for print, were both wise and incomparably witty, and in any case they did not prevent grave gentlemen, who marvelled at them rather uncomfortably, from receiving the deep impression of what they ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... by the modern historian and traveller as lively, versatile, and witty. "The love of liberty and independence does not seem to be rooted out of the national character by centuries of subjugation. They love to command; but though they are loyal to a good government, they are apt readily to rise when their rights ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... to be a professional talker, and became a writer, bold and witty, against everything that seemed to him to want foundation for the honour that it claimed. He attacked the gods of Greece, and the whole system of mythology, when, in its second century, the Christian Church was ready to replace the forms of heathen worship. ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... on "Light" is pretty and witty, and the turn on the dear little letter does not dishonour ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... bottles. This touch is one of many that makes the book, in spite of its obvious shortcomings, valuable as a picture of German character and manner. It is impossible to imagine Gretchen in a French or English story of the same class. The French girl would be more adroit and witty; the English girl would expect young men to wait on her; and neither of them would gush as Gretchen did about her old ladies. "My readiness to serve them knew no bounds. To arrange their seats to their liking, to give them stools for their feet and ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... to Clara's morning reception, Pani Korytzka came up to me, and, with that witty, aggressive air of hers, asked me in presence of some dozen people from the musical world and Warsaw society, in ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... barrel-shaped, slatted sun-bonnet made out of spotted calico. They were boisterous and even amusing, had they not been well armed and apparently without fear or reverence for any authority or individual. For the present, the Irishman was evidently in command, by virtue of his witty tongue. ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... increase of cheering and waving of hats- While the little boys squealed, and made noises like cats— The Glugs gave approval to Sym's second rhyme. And some said 'twas thoughtful, and some said 'twas prime; And some said 'twas witty, and had a fine end: More especially ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... as good as its name or half as good as some of the undeniably clever things it contains, it might be accepted as a very fair book of its kind. It was written with the evident intention of saying brilliant and witty things; but this brilliance and wit sometimes miss their effect, as, for instance, on the very first page, where Dick Steele's famous compliment is bestowed upon Lady Mary Wortley Montagu instead ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... be borne even here, but it often ascends the pulpit itself, and the declaimer in that sacred place is frequently so impertinently witty, speaks of the last day itself with so many quaint phrases, that there is no man who understands raillery but must resolve to sin no more. Nay, you may behold him sometimes in prayer, for a proper delivery of the great truths he is to ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... am shrouded in impenetrable gloom-de-ay, For I feel I'm being driven to my doom-de-ay, By an aggravating ditty Which I don't consider witty; And they call the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... the former voluble, Douglas curiously silent. For it had been an afternoon of events, the final rehearsal of a play of which great things were expected, and which was to take London by storm. Drexley had always had faith in his friend. He believed him to be a clever, even a brilliant, writer—witty, original, unique in his own vivid and picturesque style. But even Drexley had never believed him capable of such work as this. Without the accessories of costume, and lights, and continuity, the story which ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... Marguerite, with a shrug of her graceful shoulders, "'tis impossible to hate Sir Percy for anything; his witty sallies would disarm even Madame ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... eyes are addicted to blood-shot, are naturally proud, disdainful, cruel, without shame, perfidious and much inclined to superstition. But he whose eyes are neither too little nor too big, and inclined to black, do signify a man mild, peaceable, honest, witty, and of a good understanding; and one that, when need requires, will be serviceable to ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... morning. The Metropolitan Tower was singing, bright ivory tipped with gold, uplifted and intensely glad of the morning. The buildings walling in Madison Square were jubilant; the honest red-brick fronts, radiant; the new marble, witty. The sparrows in the middle of Fifth Avenue were all talking at once, scandalously but cleverly. The polished brass of limousines threw off teethy smiles. At least so Mr. Wrenn fancied as he whisked up Fifth Avenue, the skirts of his small blue double-breasted coat wagging. ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... cuffing Blackstone and Coke with merciless sarcasm. Mrs. Elizabeth L. Saxon of Louisiana spoke with great effect on "Woman's Intellectual Powers as Developed by the Ballot." These two Southern ladies are alike able, witty and pathetic in their appeals for justice to woman. Mrs. May Wright Sewall's essay on "Domestic Legislation," showing how large a share of the bills passed every year directly effect home life, was very suggestive ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... passed two years at Paris under the guardianship of Mesdames the daughters of His Most Christian Majesty, and who was the life and soul of the Court of X—-, the gayest of the gay, the idol of her august father-in-law, and, indeed, of the whole Court. She was not beautiful, but charming; not witty, but charming, too, in her conversation as in her person. She was extravagant beyond all measure; so false, that you could not trust her; but her very weaknesses were more winning than the virtues of other women, her ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... much froth had been blown off. As Thomas Fuller says, there were 'fewer persons, but not fewer men,' after the poltroons had disappeared. The second test, 'a purgatory of water,' as the same wise and witty author calls it, was still more stringent. The dwindled ranks were led down from their camp on the slopes to the fountain and brook which lay in the valley near the Midianites' camp. Gideon alone seems to have known that a test was to be applied there; but he did not know what it was to be till they ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... vice itself when it is convivial and amusing. It should be remembered, however, that his comedies while more realistic are not so real as his tragedies. They are, as he himself insists, entertainments; to which jovial sensuality, witty falsehood, and even hypocrisy when it is not morose are admitted, as diverting in their very aberration from the mean rule of life. So that a touch of rascality is a genuine element in comedy, as a touch of ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... was a witty wight, And had o' things an unco slight! Auld Reekie aye he keepit tight And trig and braw; But now they'll busk her like a ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... themselves in the concerns of foreign countries. Few of us before steam had shortened distance really knew England. Voltaire had by turns glorified and ridiculed it; De Stael had shown it to us in an agreeable book; the witty letters of Duvergier de Hauranne had revealed the secrets of its electoral system. Your correspondence of 1841 completed the work." He might pertinently have added, "Because you are about the only French newspaper writer who ever thoroughly understood the English language, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... this joke, but the laughter was even louder when Uncle Richard added, "I think you have earned your breakfast as well." They thought the remark so wonderfully witty, that they laughed as if they would never stop, and the joke about "Uncle Richard's breakfast" was a proverb both with them and their successors ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... lovely enough to inspire fervor and homage and love in all masculine minds. She was witty and talented. Carmichael said she was one of the most beautiful women in Europe. Later he modified this statement by declaring that she was the most beautiful woman in Europe or elsewhere. Yet, often she went about as one in a waking dream. There ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... grouped the statesmen who had been promoted by him, and worked in sympathy with him: for instance Bacon the Keeper of the Seals, whom the Queen regarded as the oracle of the laws, and who also amused her by many a witty word; Mildmay, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who though adhering to the principles now adopted yet gladly favoured the claims of Parliament, and even the tendencies of the Puritans; Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State, who had once suffered exile ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... talk yourself, you think how witty, how original, how acute you are; but when another does so, you are very apt to think only—What a ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... went on, "had asked her if her father was always in the jovial and witty vein in which he had been ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... to be witty at the expense of those for whom she had no liking had led Hodder to discount the sketch. He had not disliked Mr. Plimpton, who had done him many little kindnesses. He was good-natured, never ruffled, widely tolerant, hail-fellow-well-met with everybody, and he had enlivened ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... "She can afford to fling out one or two by the way. Yes; I would like to know him, the ex-cardinal; he looks witty and shrewd, and at the same time an idealist.... But how late they are in beginning. My watch is seldom right, but I imagine it ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... "Khassa-ni"; Khusyatani (vulg.) being the testicles, also called "bayzatan" the two eggs) a double entendre which has given rise to many tales. For instance in the witty Persian book "Dozd o Kazi" (The Thief and the Judge) a footpad strips the man of learning and offers to return his clothes if he can ask him a puzzle in law or religion. The Kazi (in folk-lore mostly a fool) fails, and his wife bids him ask the man to supper for a trial of wits on the same condition. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... of my larger headings. Do not make fun of your friend's little mishaps, little stupidities, losing her luggage, having said the wrong thing, or having a black on her face when she especially wished to look well! Your remark may be witty, but it does not really amuse the victim. I know it is very good for people to be chaffed, and I do not wish them to lose this wholesome bracing. And yet we have a special clinging to some tactful friends who never ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... those external activities which I have spoken of as being hostile to poetry. Although he perceives his subject with the right urgency, he is unwilling to be quite loyal to his perception. He makes some concession to the witty insincerity of the society in which he lives, and his poetry is soiled by the contact. It is not destroyed, not even changed in its nature, but its gold is left for ever twisted in a baser metal with which it does not ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... development. Among his sacred works the "Stabat Mater" is the most popular. It contains some very beautiful chromatic writing, and is really an art work of distinguished merit. His latest work was the "Messe Solennelle" (1864). Rossini was fond of good living, very witty in conversation, and his house was frequented by the most brilliant wits and the best artists of the thirty years between "William ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... that. We girls remember all the clever things we hear, and use them. Do you see the young person in black and white with the red-nosed man—the one who looks as if he were smelling a rose? Well, she's in our company, and she's very popular at these parties because she's so witty. As a matter of fact, she memorizes the jokes in all the funny papers and springs them as her own. Her men friends say she's too original to ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... delightful, in fact!" cried Elizabeth, clapping her little hands. "How will Munnich curse himself for cruelty which now comes home to himself! That is very witty in you, Herr Lestocq; very laughable, is it not, Alexis? But, Alexis, you do not laugh at all; you look sad. What is the matter with you? Who has ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... essays. I would call out a word or a phrase, and we would all start to write. The children loved the method; it allowed so much play for originality. For example, when I gave the word "broken" one girl wrote of her broken doll, another of a broken tramp, another of a broken heart; a boy wrote a witty essay on being stoney broke, another wrote ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... uncle," returned the other. "He said he had permission to call for me. Ah! he is never angry at a little jest, so long as it is innocent. I heard a gentleman say last night that 'he was by nature witty, by industry learned, by grace godly.' What think ye of ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... of course, Becker. I have formed an opinion of this gentleman, largely from his printed despatches, which I am at a loss to put in words. Astute, ingenious, capable, at moments almost witty with a kind of glacial wit in action, he displayed in the course of this affair every description of capacity but that which is alone useful and which springs from a knowledge of men's natures. It chanced that one of Sewall's early moves played into his hands, and he was swift ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the patron repents his benefactions or demands sacrifice of freedom in exchange for them, he had better take them back: yet a remonstrance so disarming, infused with such a blend of respect and playfulness, such wealth of witty anecdote and classical allusion, that we imagine the fretfulness of the appeased protector evaporating in admiration as he reads, the answer of affectionate apology and acceptance dictated ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... ability, as Congreve,—and defiled the stage. The Pilgrim's Progress of Bunyan (1628-88) is written in a plain, unaffected style, and is the most popular work of that age. In sharp contrast with Bunyan is Butler's Hudibras, a witty satire, in doggerel verse, upon Puritanism. The principal writer, prior to Queen Anne, is Dryden (1631-1700). We have passed now from the Romantic school of poetry, in which Shakspeare is the most exalted name, to the Classical school. In the age of Queen Anne, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... appear to think that more than one glance of the eye is needful to take them in. Notwithstanding his rank, he had taken life as a joke from which he was to get as much amusement as possible; and yet, although he knelt at his own shrine only, he was kind, polite, and witty, after the fashion of those noblemen who, having finished their training at court, return to live on their estates, and never suspect that they have, at the end of twenty years, grown rusty. Men of this type fail in tact with imperturbable ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... plagued with both. While going through with the toasts, his mind was busy with poor Henry Vail suffering in a smallpox hospital. In his graceful response to the sentiment, "The President of the Hasheesh Club," he alluded to the retiring president, and made some witty remark—I forget what—about his being a denizen of Lexington Avenue; but in saying Lexington Avenue he came near slipping into Huckleberry Street, and in fact he did get the first syllable out before he checked ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... be pleased to censure with pity The present estate of our once famous city; Let her still be govern'd by men just and witty, Te ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... of rhetoric. By Damascenus is styled (Opera, tom. i. p. 623.) Spanheim's Apology for the Synod of Constantinople (p. 171, &c.) is worked up with truth and ingenuity, from such materials as he could find in the Nicene Acts, (p. 1046, &c.) The witty John of Damascus converts it into slaves of their belly, &c. Opera, tom. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... his life, John's conduct was such that he became in a very short time the favorite pupil in the school; and his kindly, generous, and ambitious nature won him many friends. He was soon noted for his witty remarks, made in a manner so droll and unpretentious that often merry bursts of laughter were heard from his teacher ...
— How John Became a Man • Isabel C. Byrum
... employments of the brain, I have thought fit to make invention the master, and to give method and reason the office of its lackeys. The cause of this distribution was from observing it my peculiar case to be often under a temptation of being witty upon occasion where I could be neither wise nor sound, nor anything to the matter in hand. And I am too much a servant of the modern way to neglect any such opportunities, whatever pains or improprieties ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... courtiers. That pedantry which had dictated the excessive admiration of metaphysical conceits, was not the characteristic of the court of Charles II., as it had been of those of his grandfather and father. Lively and witty by nature, with all the acquired habits of an adventurer, whose wanderings, military and political, left him time neither for profound reflection nor for deep study, the restored monarch's literary taste, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... question as to India than as to any other country in the world," said the Hindu. "Some years ago, when Mr. Dilke was traveling in this country, a witty officer of one of the hill-stations remarked to him that all general observations about India were absurd. This is quite true. How could it be otherwise? Only consider, for example, the languages of India—the Assamese, with its two branches of the Deccan-goel and the Uttar-goel; the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... real problem, a respectable administration for the city—a practical end which could easily be accomplished by practical action. From day to day he kept this up, publishing a splendid series of articles, humorous, witty, satirical, eloquent, bold, with a dominant strain of sincerity and plain common sense. As his associates had predicted, a storm gathered and burst in fury about the News-Record. It was denounced by "leading citizens," including many of the clergy. Its "esteemed" contemporaries ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... her. She said she would follow me into the gallery. Now to make my approaches. Hem, hem! Ah ma- [bows.] dam! Pox on't, why should I disparage my parts by thinking what to say? None but dull rogues think; witty men, like rich fellows, are always ready for all expenses; while your blockheads, like poor needy scoundrels, are forced to examine their stock, and forecast the charges of the day. Here she comes, I'll seem ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... which I conceive to be that of a plain orator, but still of a great one, and one of a genius very kindred to the Attic; since whatever is witty or pleasant in a speech is peculiar to the Attics. Not, however, that all of them are facetious: Lysias is said to be tolerably so, and Hyperides; Demades is so above all others. Demosthenes is considered less so, though nothing appears to me to be more well-bred than he is; but he was ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... talent. One might study to be good company, not to be funny or witty, but she might study the art of expressing herself; not to air her knowledge, that would be vulgar, but to store her memory with a fund of information concerning the great paintings and works of art, ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... as we always used to call him, I may say that I never knew but one man equal to him in the quickness and continuance of witty speech. That one man was Charles Lever—also an Irishman—whom I had known from an earlier date, and also with close intimacy. Of the two, I think that Lever was perhaps the more astounding producer of good things. His manner was ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... be explained, is quite well known to you. That is a little surprise I have prepared for you. She is 'Thomas Plantagenet,' the gifted authoress of that witty and daring book, "A Soul Untrammelled," and quite an excellent woman in her way,—only it is such a crooked way. Her real name is Milton. She is a widow and a charming one, only ten years older than Jessie, and she is always careful to dedicate her more daring works to the 'sacred memory of my ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... in Rosanne that was foreign to her family. And the cruel streak in her character which betrayed itself in cutting comments, as bright as they were incisive, and tiny acts of witty malice were incomprehensible to her kindly-natured mother and sister. Furthermore, her hatred, when it was aroused, seemed to possess the mysterious quality of a curse. For instance, it appeared to be enough for her to give one dark glance at someone she intensely disliked or ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... For learning, wit, and wisdom, famed;) Was struck with love, esteem, and awe, For persons whom he never saw. Suppose Cadenus flourish'd then, He must adore such godlike men. If one short volume could comprise All that was witty, learn'd, and wise, How would it be esteem'd and read, Although the writer long were dead! If such an author were alive, How all would for his friendship strive, And come in crowds to see his face! And this she ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... brain. He was a handsome man, and he was not wholly unaware of the fact. In him was the pride of the North American Indian, and a little of the reserve of the savage. His silence was always eloquent, and in it was neither stupidity nor vacuity. With friends he was witty, affable, generous, lovable. In business negotiation he was rapid, direct, incisive; or smooth, plausible and convincing—all depending upon the man with whom he was dealing. He often did to others what they were trying to do to him, and he did it first. He had the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... has made it king, and granted to it, to it only, the authority and sovereignty of saving souls, he has magnified not only his love, but his wisdom and his prudence before the sons of men. This, then, is his great device, the master-piece of all his witty inventions; and, therefore, it is said, as was hinted before, in this thing he hath proceeded towards us in ALL wisdom and prudence ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... (international unit of money, 284). spez-o clearing (financial); elspezi, to disburse, expend, spend; enspezi, to take in, receive (funds). spinac-o spinach. spir-i to breathe; elspiri, to exhale. spite (prep.), in spite of. sprit-a witty. staci-o station (railway, boat, etc.). stamp-i to mark officially, stamp. standard-o standard, flag. stan-o tin (metal). stang-o pole. star-i to stand (239). stat-o state (of being), condition. stel-o star. stenografi-o shorthand, ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... master of the horse to King John the Second. He was of moderate stature, having a fair and pleasing countenance, with a venerable beard reaching below his girdle to which he wore it knotted. When angry his looks were terrible; but when pleased his manners were merry, pleasant, and witty. He was buried in a chapel which he built near the gate of the city of Goa, dedicated to Our Lady of the Mountain, but, after a long resistance from the inhabitants of Goa, his bones were transferred to the church of Our Lady ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... mastery of form. He was a close student of Horace; he tried successfully the most exacting of exotic verse-forms, and enjoyed the distinction of having written the only English example of the difficult Chant-Royal. Graceful vers de societe and bits of witty epigram flowed from him without effort. But it was not to this often dangerous facility that Bunner owed his poetic fame. His tenderness, his quick sympathy with nature, his insight into the human heart, above ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... most popular of the Park speakers was the Antiguan. His arguments were so clever it was obvious that he was well and widely read. His absolute understanding of the crowd and his witty repartee used frequently to cause his opponents to lose their tempers, and that was always their undoing. The crowd as a rule was very fair and could easily distinguish arguments from abuse. Thus, on one Sunday the debate was as to whether nature ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... Rabelais—Prior, lively, familiar, and amusing—Rowe, solemn, florid, and declamatory—Pope, the prince of lyric poetry; unrivalled in satire, ethics, and polished versification—the agreeable Parnel—the wild, the witty, and the whimsical Garth—Gay, whose fables may vie with those of La Fontaine, in native humour, ease, and simplicity, and whose genius for pastoral was truly original. Dr. Bentley stood foremost in the list of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... clients); belonging properly to no party or—which was much the same—to the party of material interests, which was dominant in the courts and was pleased with the eloquent pleader and the courtly and witty companion. He had connections enough in the capital and the country towns to have a chance alongside of the candidates proposed by the democracy; and as the nobility, although with reluctance, and the Pompeians voted for him, he was elected by a great ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... her. Aaron looked at her and she at him. She, as she reclined there in bed in a sort of half-light, well made-up, smoking her cigarettes and talking in a rather raucous voice, making her slightly rasping witty comments to the other men in the room—of course there were other men, the audience—was a shock to the flautist. This was the bride of the moment! Curious how raucous her voice sounded out of the cigarette smoke. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... And the little witty man again interposed: "If you go with us, publican, you'll have two cheeks, a right and a left. But ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... will not find me so black as I am painted."[1094] Beza might have been pardoned, had he permitted the cardinal's professions somewhat to shake his convictions of the man's true character. He was, however, placed on his guard by the pointed words of a witty woman. Madame de Crussol, who had listened to the entire conversation, as she shook the cardinal's hand at the close of the evening, significantly said, in a voice loud enough to be heard by all: "Good man for to-night; but to-morrow—what?"[1095] The covert prediction ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... great slamming of doors men rushed out to do battle for the peace of the great city. Meanwhile all the high windows had been filled with night-capped heads, and some of these people even went so far as to pour water down upon the combatants. They also sent down cat-calls and phrases of witty advice. The sticks clattered together furiously; once a man with a bloody face staggered past us; he seemed to have been whacked directly on the ear by some uneducated person. It was as fine a shindy as one could hope to witness, and I was ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... profound calm. The uniform and steady pull of the crew, directed in their time by the wild chaunt of the steersman, with whom they ever and anon join in fall chorus—the measured plash of the oars into the calm surface of the water—the joyous laugh and rude, but witty, jest of the more youthful and buoyant of the soldiery, from whom, at such moments, although in presence of their officers, the trammels of restraint are partially removed—all these, added to the inspiriting sight of their gay scarlet uniforms, and ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... certainly very well informed, logical and convincing, besides being quite witty. He proved to the satisfaction of all present that alcohol was not nutritious; that it awakened a general and unhealthy physical excitement; and that it hardened the tissues of the brain. He proved by reports of analyses, that adulteration, and ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... that lightning never struck the same place twice, yet, though it fell to him to welcome the Association, it had also fallen to him to respond to this vote of thanks. He had asked Secretary Beard what he would say on this occasion, and was answered, in his witty way, "Tell us Godspeed, and we are glad to get rid of you." Dr. Seaver felt that the local people were the recipients, and the visitors the benefactors in what had been done. The President had inspired ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... adapted to answer the end proposed by the publisher—that of providing, in a handy form, a compendium of wise and witty sayings, choice ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... and words accented on the last syllable, ending with a single consonant that is preceded by a single vowel, double that consonant when they assume another syllable that begins with a vowel; as, wit, witty; thin, thinnish; to abet, ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... are saying to Francis may be very gallant and witty, nephew," cried the General, "but it is not polite to leave the card-table in ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... a fit of laughter; shout, split, roar. shake one's sides, split one's sides, hold both one's sides; roar with laughter, die with laughter. Adj. amusing, entertaining, diverting &c v.; recreational, recreative, lusory^; pleasant &c (pleasing) 829; laughable &c (ludicrous) 853; witty &c 842; fun, festive, festal; jovial, jolly, jocund, roguish, rompish^; playful, playful as a kitten; sportive, ludibrious^. funny; very funny, hilarious, uproarious, side-splitting. amused &c v.; pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw [Pope]; laughing ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to the lower end of the room. Ellis was sitting in a chair, stupid and maudlin, and two or three thoughtless girls were around his chair laughing at his drunken efforts to be witty. The shocked mother did not speak to him, but shrunk away and went gliding from the room. At the door she said to the waiter who had followed her out, drawn by a ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... there no competent Judge that findeth them wanting in those Ancient ones, and that doth not much more admire that smoothly equall neatnesse, continued sweetnesse, and flourishing comelinesse of Catullus his Epigrams, than all the sharpe quips and witty girds wherewith Martiall doth whet and embellish the conclusions of his. It is the same reason I spake of erewhile, as Martiall of himselfe. Minus illi ingenio laborandum fuit, in cuius locum materia successerat. [Footnote: Mart. Praf. 1. viii.] "He needed the lesse worke with his wit, in place ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... health, everyone received me with open arms; poor and looking sick, no one shewed me any consideration. With a full purse and the tone of a conqueror, I was thought witty, amusing; with an empty purse and a modest air, all I said appeared dull and insipid. If I had become rich again, how soon I would have been again accounted the eighth wonder of the world! Oh, men! oh, fortune! Everyone avoided me as if the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of the talents and character of Johnson is to be found in Boswell's Life of him. The man was superior to the author. When he threw aside his pen, which he regarded as an incumbrance, he became not only learned and thoughtful, but acute, witty, humorous, natural, honest; hearty and determined, "the king of good fellows and wale of old men." There are as many smart repartees, profound remarks, and keen invectives to be found in Boswell's "inventory of all he said," as are recorded of any celebrated man. The life ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... sequestration,—yet I question whether so much good was done by these towards the stability of the cause of the Protestant Religion and King George, or so much harm to that of the Pretender, Popery, brass money, and wooden shoes, as by a little series of Pamphlets put forth by the witty Mr. Henry Fielding, a writer of plays and novels then much in vogue; but a sad loose fish, although he afterwards, as I am told, did good service to the State as one of the justices of peace for Middlesex, and helped to put down many notorious gangs of murderers, highwaymen, and footpads infesting ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... to become a country gentleman, patriot, reformer, financier, and what not, always good-looking (he had been very handsome), pleasing, intelligent, cultivated, agreeable as a man can be who is not witty and who is rather pompous and slow, after many years of retirement, in the course of which he gave to the world his lucubrations on corn and currency. Time and the hour made him master of a large but encumbered estate and member for his county. Armed with the importance of representing ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... true storybut Miss Wardour, she is so sly and so witty, that she has made it just like one romanceas well as Goethe or Wieland could have done it, by ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the pastor, "originated in a jest, many, many years ago, when a circle of very brilliant, witty, and elegant ladies in London, met at the house of Mrs. Vesey, to listen to and take part in the conversation of some of the most gifted and learned men England has ever produced. One of those gentlemen, Stillingfleet, who always wore ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... dexterity of plot, glancing play at witty talk, characters really human and humanly real, spirit and gladness, freshness and quick movement. 'Half a Rogue' is as brisk as a horseback ride on a glorious morning. It is as varied as an April day. It is as charming ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... visitor from a remote planet could fully realize the significance of the bewildering phenomena that meet one's gaze here every day without exciting wonder.... The sprightly people who form the rind of the politico-social world ... are wont to launch winged words and coin witty epigrams when characterizing what they irreverently term the efforts of the Peace Conference to square the circle; they contrast the noble intentions of the delegates with the grim realities of the workaday world, which appear to mock their praiseworthy ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... celebrated Mademoiselle Mars, stationed among the troops, in order to view the imposing military spectacle. The emperor, approaching the spot, and addressing her, said, "What do you do here, Mademoiselle? this is no place for you."—"Sire," answered the witty and animated daughter of Thalia, "I come to behold a real hero; I am tired of seeing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... wish to make our conversation appear witty, and we succeed, perhaps at the expense of charity, by using expressions of raillery, jest, or mockery, without perceiving that we give pain to our neighbor. A person addicted to this vice receives as much prejudice from it as the one who is the object of it, and a frequent use of unkind ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... two daughters, though to the same discipline subjected. Grave was the elder born and thoughtful, even beyond her years, Night upon her tresses, but the star of morning in her heart. Exceeding fair was the younger, and witty, and full of grace, Winning with her sunny ringlets, the notice of all beholders. Different also were their temperaments, one loving like the Violet Shaded turf, where the light falls subdued through sheltering branches, The other, ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... those journals, as well as occasionally to The Star, which belonged to a brother of Stuart. Southey and Wordsworth's contributions to Stuart's papers were principally poetry. Charles Lamb's contributions were principally short, witty paragraphs, which he contributed to any of the papers that would receive them, and for which he received the magnificent remuneration of sixpence each! Coleridge had first appeared in the newspaper world as a contributor of poetry to The Morning Chronicle, but was soon after regularly engaged ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... and Keats, with Sheridan, the orator and dramatist, and Sterne, the humorist, belong to this reign; so, too, does the witty satirist, Sydney Smith, and Sir Walter Scott, whose works, like those of Shakespeare, have "made the dead past live again." Then again, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen have left admirable pictures of the age in their stories of Irish and English life. Coleridge and Wordsworth began to attract ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... he'd smirk, and bow, and try to be clever and witty, and all the time he'd be either patting himself on the back for his luck, or envying or hating me," thought Jimmy. "When I let the people out in Yimville think I was him, it was a joke; but this is a serious matter and—it's positively indecent! ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... Baron turned to Seraphina for approval he found her frozen. "You are pleased to be witty, Herr von Gondremark," she said, "and have perhaps forgotten where you are. But these rehearsals are apt to be misleading. Your master, the Prince of Gruenewald, is ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... than the Grand Conde of his Marshal's baton, where agitation without object or resources is perpetual, where, from the floor-scrubber to the dramatist, from the academician to the simpleton who gets muddled over the evening newspaper, from the witty courtier down to his philosophic lackey, each one revises Montesquieu with the self-sufficiency of a child which, because it is learning to read, deems itself wise; where self-esteem, in disputation, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and, in effect, victorious and glorious struggle for himself as king. Daily and hourly vigilant to do so, often enough by soft and even merry methods,—for he was a witty, jocund man, and had a fine ringing laugh in him, and clear pregnant words ever ready,—or if soft methods would not serve, then by hard, and even hardest, he put down a great deal of miscellaneous anarchy in Norway; was especially busy against heathenism (devil-worship and its rites): ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... to do with the facts which they expressed; that the troops were in the one case actuated simply by the animal passion of hope, in the other simply by the animal passion of fear. This abuse of the word moral has crossed, I am sorry to say, the Atlantic; and a witty American, whom we must excuse, though we must not imitate, when some one had been blazing away at him with a revolver, he being unarmed, is said to have described his very natural emotions on the occasion, by saying that he felt dreadfully demoralised. ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... "Spectator," its near neighbor Steele; the "Gentleman's Magazine," a long run this, but not complete; rare Ben Jonson, rubbed at the joints; Spenser's "Faerie Queen," with marginal notes in a contemporary hand; the "History of the Valorous and Witty Knight Errant," in sable morocco, with armorial decorations; Tacitus in all his atrocity, Herbert, ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... consequence enough to be elected a member of the Royal Society in 1662. Previous to this he had been introduced, through Herringman, to Sir Robert Howard, son of the first Earl of Berkshire, and a relation of Edward Howard, the author of "British Princes," and the object of the witty wrath of Butler. Sir Robert, too, had a poetical propensity, and Dryden and he became and continued intimate for a number of years, the poet assisting the knight in his literary compositions, particularly ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... the printing-presses of the Frondeurs, who thought, and perhaps rightly, that an ink-bottle could work more harm than a cannon. Many were witty and laughable, but this one was merely a string of vulgar abuse ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... the end of that unfortunate, all my bitterness against her went out of me, and in my heart I set myself to find excuses for her. Witty and cultured in much; in much else she had been as stupid as the dumb beast. She was irreligious as were many because what she saw of religion did not inspire respect in her, and whilst one of her lovers had been a prince of the Church another had been the ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... everything impious or revolutionary,—and above all, correspond confidentially upon "different subjects of his choosing" with the Abbe d'Aigrigny,—an amusement, moreover, which was very agreeable; for the abbe was the most amiable man in the world, the most witty, and above all, the most obliging. The following is an historical fact, which requires the bitter and vengeful irony of Moliere or Pascal ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... a small explosion of hilarity. "I don't know whether you are a French girl, or what you are," I said, "but you are very witty." ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... Hastening in my innocence to clear myself of what I regard as an accusation of credulity and ignorance, I assure them earnestly that I know ten times as much of economics and a hundred times as much of practical administration as Marx did; that I knew Engels personally and rather liked him as a witty and amiable old 1848 veteran who despised modern Socialism; that I regard Bebel and Singer as men of like passions with myself, but considerably less advanced; and that I read Das Kapital in the year 1882 or thereabouts, and still consider it one of the most important books of the ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... up for a king, gratified his passion for royalty by becoming the king-maker. The Colonel was exceedingly accomplished, a very fair scholar, knew most modern languages. In painting an amateur, in music a connoisseur; witty at times, and with wit of a high quality, but thrifty in the expenditure of it; too wise to be known as a wit. Manly too, a daring rider, who had won many a fox's brush; a famous deer-stalker, and one of the few English gentlemen who still keep ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he was as sober and sincere as could be desired. Any one might have lectured him for an hour without doing as much good as that little call and the chat that grew out of it, for, though nothing very wise or witty was said, many things were suggested, and every one knows that persuasive influences are better than any amount of moralizing. Neither Polly nor Will tried to do anything of the sort, and that was the charm of it. Nobody likes to be talked to, but nobody can resist the ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... to catch her mother's criticism of the book: light, perhaps, but witty, and with a little tang of harmless satire that always took his fancy. But she was not there. He sighed impatiently; was it possible he ...
— The Courting Of Lady Jane • Josephine Daskam
... we are sometimes cruel to our dear teachers," laughed Laura. "But if they are too serious they are such a temptation to us witty ones." ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... Clara was to render her distrustful of her later antagonism. She had unknowingly passed into the spirit of Miss Dale, Sir Willoughby aiding; for she could sympathize with the view of his constant admirer on seeing him so cordially and smoothly gay; as one may say, domestically witty, the most agreeable form of wit. Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson discerned that he had a leg of physical perfection; Miss Dale distinguished it in him in the vital essence; and before either of these ladies he was not simply a radiant, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... should early form a taste for good reading. In the choice of books, as in the choice of friends, there is but one rule,—choose the best. A witty gentleman, having received an invitation from a wealthy but not very refined lady, on arriving was ushered into her library, where she was seated surrounded by richly-bound books. "You see, Mr. X.," she said, "I never need ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... last days of his shattered life James Harrington married an old friend of the family, a witty lady, daughter of Sir Marmaduke Dorrell, of Buckinghamshire. Gout was added to his troubles; then he was palsied; and he died at Westminster, at the age of sixty-six, on September 11, 1677. He was buried in St. Margaret's Church, by the grave of Sir Walter Raleigh, ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... extant, make two folio volumes.—His treatise, de jure regni apud Scotos, was condemned by act of parliament, about two years after his death, which happened at Edinburgh on the 28th of September, 1582. These pamphlets going under the name of the witty exploits of George Buchanan, seem to be spurious, although it is true he pronounced many witty expressions, many of which have (I suppose) never been committed to writing, and some of which I could ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... court of his own. The distinction of ranks was as yet strongly marked—a state of things ardently to be desired by the dramatic poet. In conversation they took pleasure in quick and unexpected answers; and the witty sally passed rapidly like a ball from mouth to mouth, till the merry game could no longer be kept up. This, and the abuse of the play on words (of which King James was himself very fond, and we need not therefore ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... fragments of his numerous songs continued for ages to be repeated in the country, but it is feared, from all the changes which have taken place in the circumstances of the natives, that these are now irretrievably lost. Many of his witty sayings became proverbial in the island. He was one of the first sportsmen in the country, and was considered one of the most successful deer stalkers of his day. Along with his other accomplishments he was an excellent performer on the violin, and in this respect he had no equal in ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... cautious young noblemen would talk with Kalora, and, finding her bright-eyed, witty, ready in conversation and with enthusiasm for big and masculine undertakings, be attracted to her. At the same time her father decided that there was no reason why her pitiful shortage of avoirdupois ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... met the Archbishop of Minsk, once Rector of the Theological Academy at Petrograd. He had lost his diocese and lost his academy; a little old, stooping, grey-haired man, very witty, very sardonic and indulging in endless pleasantries at the expense of us all. He drank to England but not to Lloyd George. He drank to meeting me again—in Moscow. He drank to Serbia, and hoped they'd raise ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... the sun was shining brightly in a blue sky. I minded me with silent thanksgiving of all the good cheer yestereve had brought us, and of the wisdom and faithfulness of our good friends. Many a wise and a witty word uttered over their wine came back to me then; and I was wondering to myself what new plot had been brewing between my godfather and Uncle Tucher, whereas I had marked them laying their heads together, when behold, the stable-lad from ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... eighteenth century for his frequent visits to his brother wits, Addison and Steele. It was strange how many common sayings of to-day were his in origin such as, "There is none so blind as they that won't see," and, "A penny for your thoughts." Like many witty people, he must needs have his little joke. He was made Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin, in 1713, and was accustomed to preach there each Sunday afternoon, and was said to have preached on the same subject on sixteen consecutive occasions. On making his seventeenth appearance ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... the other day that some one recommended me to your Magazine after dinner, saying it contained an exceedingly witty article upon—I forget what. I give you my honor, sir, that I took up the work at six, meaning to amuse myself till seven, when Lord Trumpington's dinner was to come off, and egad! in two minutes I fell ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... trained to be a soldier; and until he was sixty years old the man belonged to the State absolutely. And all those years he ate his black broth at a public mess, seasoned only with fatigue and hunger. A witty Athenian said he did not wonder the Spartans were brave in battle, for death was ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 25, April 29, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... from a personal interview with the king, trusting rather to the efforts of his friends, many of whom were in high favor at Versailles. But one day he happened to light upon an old copy of "Poor Richard's Almanac," that unique publication in which Benjamin Franklin printed so many wise maxims and witty sayings. As Jones listlessly turned its pages, his eye fell ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... four are somewhat less; and I send them all painted unto your Lordship with the voyage. And the parchment wherein the picture is was found here with other parchments. The people of this town seem unto me of a reasonable stature, and witty, yet they seem not to be such as they should be, of that judgment and wit to build these houses in such sort as they are.... They travel eight days' journey unto certain plains lying towards the North Sea. In this country there are certain skins, well dressed; and they dress them ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... not at all, of the public; they wrote letters to their lovers and friends, memoirs of their every-day lives, romances in which they gave portraits of their familiar acquaintances, and described the tragedy or comedy which was going on before their eyes. Always refined and graceful, often witty, sometimes judicious, they wrote what they saw, thought, and felt in their habitual language, without proposing any model to themselves, without any intention to prove that women could write as well as men, without affecting manly views or suppressing womanly ones. One may say, at least ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... two jovial and witty Irishmen. They were common laborers. One was a hodcarrier, and a strapping fellow. When he arrived at the institution, he was at once placed in the violent ward, though his "violence" consisted of nothing more than an annoying ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... leg that was shot at Quebec and Saratoga," said the plucky and witty officer, "and bury it with the honors of war, and hang the rest of your ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... for amateurs, elegant suppers for gay ladies, and special soirees for the learned and the witty. He was not particular as to the means of doing business; thus he trafficked in everything,—for the sale of a living, or the procuration of a mistress—for he had associates in all ranks, among all ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... Dr. Ianson, who had been laughing so much that he quite forgot dinner was behind time, "my dear Miss Bowen, your friend is the most amusing, witty, delightful person. It is quite a pleasure to have such a man at ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... Thy whole munificence, thy whole magnanimity, thy whole generosity, to the living lights of thy sullen region of toil, trimming, and tribulation, of the dulness of dukes and the mountainous fortunes of pinmakers—is exactly L1200 a-year! and this to be divided among the whole generation of the witty and the wise, of the sons and daughters of the muse,—the whole "school of the prophets," the lustres of the poetry and the science of England! L1200 a-year for the only men of their generation who will be remembered for five minutes by the generation to come. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... Credulous, what, not a Word? not a Compliment? Hah,—be brisk, Man, be gay and witty, talk ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... hostess knows that even when she brings together the group of mature folks, and even when they are wise and witty, she must be prepared adroitly to inspire the conversation or it may flag at times. How much more does the conversation need direction where we have the same group every day composed largely of immature persons! When you have thought of all the portions and all the plates, have ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... but one of blankest boredom. Bored and cross, hardly ever speaking to the person with them, their friends drove up and down every afternoon, and she and Susie did the same, as silent and as bored as any of them. A few unusually beautiful, or unusually witty, or unusually young persons appeared to find life pleasant and looked happy, but they avoided Susie. Her set was made up of the dull and plain; and all the amusing people, and all the interesting people, turned their backs with one accord on ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... Mrs. Bargrave could hatch such an invention as this from Friday noon till Saturday noon, supposing that she knew of Mrs. Veal's death the very first moment, without jumbling circumstances, and without any interest too; she must be more witty, fortunate, and wicked too, than any indifferent person, I dare say, will allow. I asked Mrs. Bargrave several times, if she was sure she felt the gown? She answered modestly, If my senses be to be relied ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... to make some witty reply to this sportive reproach, when the Duke de Bouillon announced to the duchess that she must prepare herself ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... displeases them: Every man will grant me this; but then, by a particular kindness to himself, he draws his own stake first, and will be distinguished from the multitude, of which other men may think him one. But, if I come closer to those who are allowed for witty men, either by the advantage of their quality, or by common fame, and affirm that neither are they qualified to decide sovereignly concerning poetry, I shall yet have a strong party of my opinion; for most of them severally will exclude the rest, either from the ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... taken sufficient care that theory shall have little influence on practice. The most diligent inquirer is not able long to keep his eyes open; the most eager disputant will begin about midnight to desert his argument; and, once in four-and-twenty hours, the gay and the gloomy, the witty and the dull, the clamorous and the silent, the busy and the idle, are all overpowered by the gentle tyrant, and all lie down ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... from the library, or an extra man at her dinner-table, Carrington was pretty certain to help her to the one or the other. Old Baron Jacobi, the Bulgarian minister, fell madly in love with both sisters, as he commonly did with every pretty face and neat figure. He was a witty, cynical, broken-down Parisian roue, kept in Washington for years past by his debts and his salary; always grumbling because there was no opera, and mysteriously disappearing on visits to New York; a voracious devourer of French and German literature, especially of novels; a man who ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... distinguished from a mere copy. The third cause may be found in the reader's conscious feeling of his superiority awakened by the contrast presented to him; even as for the same purpose the kings and great barons of yore retained sometimes actual clowns and fools, but more frequently shrewd and witty fellows in that character. These, however, were not Mr. Wordsworth's objects. He chose low and rustic life, 'because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil, in which they can attain their maturity, are less ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... for the centre table, witty enough for after dinner, and wise enough for the study and the school-room. One of the beautiful lessons of this work is the kindly view it takes of nature. Nothing is made in vain not only, but nothing is made ugly or repulsive. A charm is thrown around every object, and life suffused ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... voracious haste, but that appeared to be the custom of the country, and Agatha could find no great fault with their manners or conversation. The latter was, for the most part, quaintly witty, and some of them used what struck her as remarkably fitting and original similes. Indeed, as the meal proceeded she became curiously interested in the men and ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... my last, given some Account of my intended Summer Library, it cannot appear strange, if I should already have anticipated a Part of my Pleasure, and dipped into some of the promising Authors I mentioned. The witty Quevedo, in one of his visionary Prospects of Hell, fancies, he sees an Astrologer creeping upon all Four; with a pair of Compasses betwixt his Teeth; his Spheres, and Globes about him; his Jacob's ...
— The Theater (1720) • Sir John Falstaffe
... it necessary to see the poem. It was probably witty, if not wise, and wisdom need not intrude its grave face always into the freedom of the Friday nights; indeed, she rather winked at the performance, as she and her associate principal were to be out of town on that night, and "high ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... Nature. It was a generally received opinion that the nightingale, to keep himself awake in the night, sat on a tree of thorn, so that if he nodded he would be pricked in the breast. The learned and witty Dr. Thomas Fuller thus alludes to it:—'I am sure the nightingale which would wake will not be angry with the thorn which pricketh her breast when she noddeth.' How useful would it be if a thorn could be so placed as to prick those who ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... or Mephistopheles, renamed Caesar, wears the shape of the Deformed Arnold. It may be that Byron intended to make Olimpia bestow her affections, not on the glorious Achilles, but the witty and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... Bachelor of the Stool, who made the speech on Ash Wednesday, when the senior Proctor called him up and exhorted him to be witty but modest withal. Their speeches, especially after the Restoration, tended to be boisterous, and even scurrilous. "26 Martii 1669. Da Hollis, fellow of Clare Hall is to make a publick Recantation in the Bac. Schools for his Tripos speeche." The Tripos verses still ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... nor had Ducrow arisen to shed the light of classic taste and portable gas over the sawdust of the circus; but the whole character of the place was the same, the pieces were the same, the clown's jokes were the same, the riding-masters were equally grand, the comic performers equally witty, the tragedians equally hoarse, and the 'highly-trained chargers' equally spirited. Astley's has altered for the better—we have changed for the worse. Our histrionic taste is gone, and with shame we confess, that we are far more delighted and amused with the audience, than with ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... which he knew not what to answer. "Why did he go back to the Bertaux now that Monsieur Rouault was cured and that these folks hadn't paid yet? Ah! it was because a young lady was there, some one who know how to talk, to embroider, to be witty. That was what he cared about; he wanted town misses." And ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... that the theatre under such conditions shall be talkative, witty, full of neat swift caricaturing, improvised, unselfconscious; at its worst, glib. Boisterous action often, passionate strain almost never. In Echegaray there are hecatombs, half the characters habitually go insane in the last act; tremendous barking but no bite of real intensity. Benavente ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... was desired by two witty peers To tell them the reason why asses had ears? 'An't please you,' quoth John, 'I'm not given to letters, Nor dare I pretend to know more than my betters; Howe'er, from this time I shall ne'er see ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... left, by the furnishing department. They made a mistake, and found themselves in the salons devoted to made linen, where Mrs. Cockayne hoped her husband would not make his daughters blush with what he considered to be (and he was much mistaken) witty observations. He was to be serious and silent amid mountains of feminine under linen. He was ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... defences would attract his attention, and that a sudden attack by Farnese might be the result. Sir John was not aware however, of the minute and scientific observations then making at the very moment when Mr. Garnier was entertaining the commissioners with his witty and instructive conversation—by the unobtrusive menial who had accompanied the Secretary to Ostend. In order that those observations might be as thorough as possible, rather than with any view to ostensible business, the envoy of Parma now declared that—on account of the unfavourable state ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the pernicious consequences of rebellion, and popular insurrections. I believe no man, who loves the government, would be glad to see the rabble in such a posture, as they were represented in our play; but if the tragedy had ended on your side, the play had been a loyal witty poem; the success of it should have been recorded by immortal Og or Doeg[21], and the rabble scene should have been true Protestant, though a whig-devil were ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... chance on which I'm calculating when I venture to accept your comic opera from an unknown beginner. It's clever, there's no denying that, and I hope the fact won't be allowed to tell against it: but the music's bright and lively; the songs are quaint and catching; the dialogue's brisk and not too witty; and there's plenty of business—plenty of business in it. I incline to think we can get together a house at the Ambiguities that'll enter into the humour of the thing, and see what your play's driving at. How did you learn all about stage requirements, though? I never saw ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... with decent people. Either they undertake to appease the offended person or, better still, you say something witty, you tell some comic story, perhaps one of those you have yourself heard at table, either in Aesop's style or in that of Sybaris; all laugh and the ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... the Baron turned to Seraphina for approval, he found her frozen. 'You are pleased to be witty, Herr von Gondremark,' she said, 'and have perhaps forgotten where you are. But these rehearsals are apt to be misleading. Your master, the Prince of Grunewald, is ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ditty, both wise and witty, In this social city have I heard since then (With the glass before me, how the dream comes o'er me, Of those Attic suppers, and those vanished men). But no song hath woken, whether sung or spoken, Or hath left a token of such joy in me As "The Bells of Shandon That sound ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... were not many men as awkward as he was, or as uninteresting. Certainly, little Baron de Isombal would never have asked her in such a manner: "Do you want me to help you?" He would have helped her, he was so witty, so funny, so active. But there! He was a diplomatist, he had been about in the world, and had roamed everywhere, and, no doubt, dressed and undressed women who were arrayed ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... ultra-modern girl, gay, sparkling, witty, brilliant, temperamental; busily enjoying every minute of life; clad always in the most down-to-the-moment styles. He imagined her as popular, colorful, a wonderful companion for a happy, festive mood; a street that looked upon her companion streets ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... decidedly ugly, always badly dressed, and naturally so independent, so irregular in his private life, that the illustrious nymph, dreading some catastrophe, soon remitted the sculptor to love of the arts. Sophie Arnould made some witty remark on the subject. She was surprised, I think, that her colleague was able to ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... related to both of us," replied the witty son of Erin, and there were two monkeys on ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... about sixty-five. "Duc de Penthievre," Egalite's father-in-law, was Toulouse's son; Maine has left a famous Dowager, whom we see. Nothing more of notable about the one or the other.] She was never very beautiful; but had a world of grace and witty intelligence; and knew a Voltaire when she saw him. Was the soul of courtesy and benignity, though proud enough, and carrying her head at its due height; and was always very charming, in her lofty gracious way, to mankind. Interesting to all, were it only as a living fragment of the Grand ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... of Canada's story reads more like Russia than America, and shows to what length men will go when special privileges rather than equal rights prevail in a country. Gourlay met these infamous measures by penning some witty doggerel, headed "Gagged, gagged, by Jingo!" The editor in whose paper Gourlay's writings had appeared, was arrested, and the offending sheet was compelled to suspend. Gourlay himself is arrested for sedition and libel ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... mere stripling, Picked up in the field almost dead, With the blood through his sunny hair rippling From the horrible gash in the head. They say he was first in the action: Gay-hearted, quick-headed, and witty: He fought till he dropped with exhaustion At the gates ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... very witty," Miss Newville remarked. "He asked the selectmen several times to give their attention to a quagmire in the road near his house. After long delay, they stepped into a chaise and rode to the spot. Suddenly they found ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... and treated at a distance with profound respect by the king who had put her away. Louis married, in 1499, his predecessor's widow, Anne, Duchess of Brittany, twenty-three years of age, short, pretty, a little lame, witty, able, and firm. It was, on both sides, a marriage of policy, though romantic tales have been mixed up with it; it was a suitable and honorable royal arrangement, without any lively affection on one side or the other, but with mutual esteem and regard. As queen, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... this recommendation they were all discharged from prison, and taken down stairs. After they had finished their fund of stories, and had not a word more to say, they were remanded back to prison, and one, who called himself Don Quixotte, was set at liberty. This man, being extremely witty, afforded fine sport for William, (for that was our proprietor's name.) Indeed, for more than a fortnight he kept the whole house in what is called good humour. After Quixotte had concluded his harangues, William ...
— The Village in the Mountains; Conversion of Peter Bayssiere; and History of a Bible • Anonymous
... were three of them to meet daily, to study and to ponder over. And types as far apart as the three points of a triangle; the man at her side, young, witty, agreeable; Cathewe, grave, kindly, and sometimes rather saturnine; Breitmann, proud and reserved; and each of them having rung true in some great crisis. If ever she loved a man . . . The thought remained unfinished and she glanced up and met Fitzgerald's eyes. They ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... clinics, and cry out that if the State fights disease for us it makes us paupers, though they never say that if the State fights the Germans for us it makes us cowards. Fortunately, when a habit of thought is silly it only needs steady treatment by ridicule from sensible and witty people to be put out of countenance and perish. Every year sees an increase in the number of persons employed in the Public Health Service, who would formerly have been mere adventurers in the Private Illness Service. To put it another way, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... the same old law-breaker is to keep them? What cheer can the religious sentiment yield, when that is suspected to be secretly dependent on the seasons of the year and the state of the blood? I knew a witty physician who found the creed in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian. Very mortifying is the reluctant experience ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... are men who are born good just as others are born witty. What I mean is his nature. No simpler, more scrupulously delicate soul had ever lived in such a—a—comfortable envelope. How we used to laugh at Davidson's fine scruples! In short, he's thoroughly humane, and I don't imagine there can be much of any other sort of ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... grave, elderly sort,—Jenny sat in a corner taking notes of the gay scene, while Ethel yawned. But the Mouse got many a crumb of good conversation as she nestled close to Mrs. Homer, drinking in the wise and witty chat that went on between the friends who came to pay their respects to the Professor and his interesting wife. Each night Jenny had new and famous names to add to the list in her journal, and the artless pages were rich in anecdotes, descriptions, ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... him with the boyish trick he had just perpetrated. It might so easily have had fatal consequences. Goring, himself began to think it not so witty as he ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... thoroughly known, Jess was one of the most delightful companions possible to a man like John Niel. Never, till this long tete-a-tete at Pretoria, had he guessed how powerful and original was her mind, or how witty she could be when she liked. There was a fund of dry and suggestive humour about her, which, although it would no more bear being written down than champagne will bear standing in a tumbler, was very pleasant to listen to, more especially as John soon discovered that he was the ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... has burst away from its former submission, and in its independence has made the most important announcement of the sentence,—the witty climax. Emphasis is, to a large degree, a matter of position, but position cannot emancipate any clause from the thralldom of subordination. To emphasize one idea, subordinate ancillary ideas; make them take their proper rank in ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... these extracts is the story of the Cheshire Cat, which "vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end [20] of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone." Was this a witty or a happy hit at idealism, to illustrate ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... democracy, a life of singular activity had sprung up in that city, which was inhabited chiefly by mariners, fishermen, and artisans. The sentiments and conduct of the population, more wealthy than noble, discarded all earnestness amidst the giddy bustle and witty brilliance of their daily life, and oscillated between the grandest boldness of enterprise and elevation of spirit on the one hand, and a shameful frivolity and childish whim on the other. It may not be out of place, in connection with a crisis wherein the existence or destruction of nations of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... not always the speaker. Here it seems as though we should draw an important distinction between the WITTY (SPIRITUEL) and the COMIC. A word is said to be comic when it makes us laugh at the person who utters it, and witty when it makes us laugh either at a third party or at ourselves. But in most cases we can hardly make up ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... suppose the real John to be old, dull and ill-looking. But as the Higher Powers have not conferred on men the gift of seeing themselves in the true light, John very possibly conceives himself to be youthful, witty, and fascinating, and talks from the point of view of this ideal. Thomas, again believes him to be an artful rogue, we will say; therefore he is so far as Thomas's attitude in the conversation is concerned, an artful rogue, though really simple and stupid. The ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... "Witty above her sex, but that's not all, Wise to Salvation was good Mistress Hall, Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this Wholly of him with whom she's now in blisse. Then, passenger, hast nere a tear To weep with her that wept with all That wept, yet ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... we know that Pope, was merely an ingenious fabulist; nay, more than this, that all the nations of past time were ingenious fabulists also, to whom the universe was a lyrical drama, and by whom whatsoever was said about it was merely a witty allegory, or a graceful lie, of which the entire upshot and consummation was a pretty statue in the middle of the court, or at ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... eye-lids, if the reader should be a critic. He had brought a book from his daughter's book-case. He remembered the volume—it was called A Book of a Thousand Stories—as the one his daughter Mary read aloud one evening, when the witty turns of speech put all the company into the best of humor. But, somehow, the wit had now lost its point—the joke had lost its zest—and let him try as he would to collect his scattered thoughts, and let him set his eyes on his book never so firmly, his fancy would go on long ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... woman, whom everybody seemed to like. She was different from the ordinary type; the kind of woman whom a man could not help respecting. She contrasted favourably with some of his recent female acquaintances who, however charming or witty, dissatisfied him in this or that particular. His cousin's devotion to child and husband appealed to his heart. She seemed to be ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... seem a Defect (says he) in the antient Stage, that the Characters introduc'd were so few, and those so common, as a covetous old Man, an amorous young, a witty Wench, a crafty Slave, a bragging Soldier. The Spectators met nothing upon the Stage, but what they met in the Streets, and at every Turn. All the Variety is drawn only from different and uncommon Events; whereas if the Characters are so too, the Diversity ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... polish, erudition, judgment, and dignity. In Leopardi, philosophical acumen equals the elegance of his style. Giordani (d. 1848), as a critic and an epigraphist, deserves notice for his fine judgment and pure taste, as do Tommaseo and Cattaneo, who are both epigrammatic, witty, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... The fact that I like it is a proof that it's bad, bad art, if it's a proof of anything. I never really admire anything good, can't bear, simply can't bear old masters, or"—I dimly recollected some witty essays by my brilliant fellow-countryman Mr. George Moore—"I detest Corot. My favourite artist ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... Chesterfield's Works says (ii. 3l9), 'that being desirous of giving a specimen of his Lordship's eloquence he has made choice of the three following speeches; the first in the strong nervous style of Demosthenes; the two latter in the witty, ironical manner of Tully.' Now the first of these speeches is not Johnson's, for it was reported in The Gent. Mag. for July, 1737, p. 409, nine months before his first contribution to that paper. In spite of great differences this report and that in Chesterfield's Works are substantially ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... for a matter of a half-hour in the fashion aforetime recorded—not very wise nor witty talk, if you will, but very pleasant to make. There were many pauses. There was much laughter over nothing in particular. There were any number of sentences ambitiously begun that ended nowhere. Altogether, it was just the sort of talk for ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... book-writing, lecturing, propagandist population of England has been bitten by him; it re-writes and popularises him; it even talks his jargon when it is criticising him. It began by regarding him as a brilliant and witty writer whom no one could take seriously; it now regards him as a serious, and indeed responsible, thinker whose wit is a matter of harmless inspiration, and ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... all these together, it is impossible to hate honest Jack Falstaff; If you observe them again, it is impossible to avoid loving him; He is the gay, the witty, the frolicksome, happy, and fat Jack Falstaff, the most delightful Swaggerer in all Nature.— You must love him for your own sake,—At the same time you cannot but love him for his own Talents; And when you have enjoy'd them, you cannot ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... said the spider, "you're witty and you're wise. How handsome are your gauzy wings, how brilliant are your eyes! I have a little looking-glass upon my parlour shelf, If you'll step in one moment, dear, you shall behold yourself." "I thank you, gentle sir," she said, "for what you're pleased ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... It is considered bad form to interrupt digestion with speech, as such a practice tends to draw the vital powers, it is said, away from the stomach to the head. Our forefathers were expected to shine in conversation, and be wise and witty while gulping their food between brilliant passages. I sat down at a table to which I was marshaled by a grave and reverend seignior in an imposing uniform. As I took my seat my weight set some machinery in motion. A few feet in front of me suddenly rose out of the table ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... of what was long to rule, in their slight framework of fable; the handling of the scenes by the way, the characterization, the natural dialogue, the vraisemblance of setting, the witty irony of observation, these are the elements of interest. Jane Austen's plots are mere tempests in tea-pots; yet she does not go to the extreme of the plotless fiction of the present. She has a story to tell, as Trollope would say, and knows how to tell it in such ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... so soft it was to the palate. The conversation, at first somewhat desultory, grew more concentrated as the time went on, though Zara spoke little and seemed absorbed in her own thoughts more than once. The Prince, warmed with the wine and the general good cheer, became witty and amusing in his conversation; he was a man who had evidently seen a good deal of the world, and who was accustomed to take everything in life a la bagatelle. He told us gay stories of his life in St. Petersburg; ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... besides of a luxuriant nature, an artist by instinct, and witty fellow; he loved arguments ad hominem, and defended the weak side tooth ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... adore her, and some don't care for her at all. It depends a good deal on yourself. She likes the ones who work, but she can be dreadfully sarcastic if she thinks you're stupid or lazy. She's fearfully clever, and says such witty things sometimes. Half-a-dozen of the girls absolutely worship her, but she's very fair, and won't have favourites. I like her better ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... dedicated to him the beautiful Ossianic one-act opera Uthal. The direct results of his teaching at the conservatoire were the steady, though not as yet unhealthy, decline of French opera into a lighter style, under the amiable and modest Boieldieu and the irresponsible and witty Auber; for, as we have seen, Cherubini was quite incapable of making his ideals intelligible by any means more personal than his music; and the crude grammatical rules which he mistook for the eternal principles of his own and of all music had not the smallest use ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... a mystery. Peter was neither particularly glib nor witty. Instinctively he knew the values of the full moon, the stars, and he had the look of a young man who has drunk at the fountain of life on more than one occasion, finding the waters thereof bitter, with a trace of sweetness and a ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... ass's milk, Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel? Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? P. Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings, This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings; Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys, Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'er enjoys: So well-bred spaniels civilly delight In mumbling of the game they dare not bite: Eternal smiles his emptiness betray, As shallow streams run dimpling all the way. ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... roar. shake one's sides, split one's sides, hold both one's sides; roar with laughter, die with laughter. Adj. amusing, entertaining, diverting &c v.; recreational, recreative, lusory^; pleasant &c (pleasing) 829; laughable &c (ludicrous) 853; witty &c 842; fun, festive, festal; jovial, jolly, jocund, roguish, rompish^; playful, playful as a kitten; sportive, ludibrious^. funny; very funny, hilarious, uproarious, side-splitting. amused &c v.; pleased with a rattle, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... The former was a trying affair. Some twelve thousand citizen-soldiers had to turn out, fully rigged and equipped, by early dawn, ready for any amount of drill and evolution. Many were the stories—more witty than generous—of the whereabout of their uniforms and accoutrements; as to their being deposited in Lombardian hands, or wholly used up since the last grand field-day some three years before. Such ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... voice vibrated with expression and the mock-serious bantering tones in which she delivered Rosalind's witty speeches caused Mr. Southard to smile and nod approvingly as she gave full value to the immortal lines. Her change of voice from Rosalind to Orlando was wholly delightful, and so charmingly did she depict both characters that when she ended with Orlando's exit she received a little ovation ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... it peace, Jehu,? What hast thou to do with peace? turn thee behind me. Peace is not the matter, but following, and party. Contrariwise, certain Laodiceans, and lukewarm persons, think they may accommodate points of religion, by middle way, and taking part of both, and witty reconcilements; as if they would make an arbitrament between God and man. Both these extremes are to be avoided; which will be done, if the league of Christians, penned by our Savior himself, were in two cross clauses thereof, ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... it was used by Robert Wilson for a contest in extempore versification. Francis Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, writes: "And so is now our witty Wilson, who for learning and extemporall wit in this faculty is without compare or compeere, as, to his great and eternal commendations, he manifested in his challenge at the ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... nature. They had fiery Slavonic blood in their veins, and Slavonic hearts beat high with hope in their bosoms. They had all the delightful Slavonic zeal, the Slavonic dash, the Slavonic imagination. They were easy to stir, they were swift in action, they were witty in speech, they were mystic and poetic in soul, and, like the Irish of the present day, they revelled in the joy of party politics, and discussed religious questions with the keenest zest. With them religion came first and foremost. All their poetry was religious; ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... is chiefly notable as affording the first sign that Fielding was now leaving party politics for the wider, and much duller, field of Constitutional liberty. A man might die for the British Constitution; but to be witty about it would tax the resources of a Lucian. And, accordingly, in place of that gay young spark Mr Pasquin, who laid his cudgel with so hearty a good will on the shoulders of the offending 'Great Man,' there now steps out a ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... more popular in England than he had ever been in America, and he openly admitted that he disliked to resign his position. Professor Child said, in 1882: "Lowell's conversation is witty, with a basis of literary cramming; and that seems to be what the English like. He went to twenty-nine dinner parties in the month of June, and made a speech ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... Bremen, a personage of very different character from himself. Adalbert, while a churchman of great ability, was a courtier full of ambitious views. He was one of the most polished and learned men of his time, at once handsome, witty, and licentious, his character being in the strongest contrast to the stern harshness of Hanno and the coarse manners of the nobles of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... return from a war that was just ended, in which they bad distinguished themselves by their great bravery, came to visit Leonato. Among these were Don Pedro, the Prince of Arragon, and his friend Claudio, who was a lord of Florence; and with them came the wild and witty Benedick, and he was a ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... he exposed himself to the ridicule of this most discerning body, not less witty than virtuous. Of shame he was incapable. He would again and again rise in his place, totally forgetful of past flagellation, and again and again convince Mr. Speaker and the honorable members: persisting to labour, in the hope of making them all as profound reasoners as himself. No matter ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... began to drop in, among them Mr Doubleday, who was very witty on the subject of my appointment, and told Wallop he understood I was to be admitted into partnership next week, and would ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... neighbourhood gave him standing better than that of many an upstart baronet or knight, and with it health and wealth. He had a wife who was acknowledged universally to be one of the most beautiful, charming, and witty women in the county, whose devotion to himself was so marked and open that it became a public jest; who had, moreover, presented him with healthy and promising offspring. In addition to all these good things he had suddenly become in his own line one of the most ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... good spirits and good humour, except the Countess, whose vacant mind, overcome by the languor of idleness, would neither suffer her to be happy herself, or to contribute to the happiness of others. Mademoiselle Bearn, attempting to be witty, directed her badinage against Henri, who answered, because he could not well avoid it, rather than from any inclination to notice her, whose liveliness sometimes amused, but whose conceit and insensibility often ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
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