"Comic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I often said you lacked humor?" says Mrs. Bohun, with a little airy laugh; "and now I am sure of it. I thought it intensely comic; such a situation! I should like to have seen your face when the curtain was drawn, if you had been the ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... already been whispered to the ground," answered Philaemon, smiling: "If it were not so, the comic writers would not be able to give with impunity such grotesque and ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... omit to relate something which may serve to give a notion of the size of this great work, and is at the same time highly comic. It must first be mentioned that I had forbidden all the men who lived at my cost to bring light women into my house or anywhere within the castle precincts. Upon this point of discipline I was extremely strict. Now may lad Ascanio loved a very handsome ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... big beard, sipped his tea, chatted over his misfortunes in a half-comic, half-serious tone, and ended by promising his sister that he would do his very best to make himself agreeable to the Widow Bold. Then Charlotte followed her father to his own room, softened down his wrath, and persuaded him to say nothing more about the Jew bill ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... Americans have no monopoly of patriotic enthusiasm and good faith. Englishmen return thanks to Providence for not being born anything but an Englishman, in churches and ale-houses as well as in comic operas. The Frenchman cherishes and proclaims the idea that France is the most civilized modern country and satisfies best the needs of a man of high social intelligence. The Russian, whose political and social estate does not seem enviable ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... were chiming the hour of ten on the following morning when a page from the Savoy approached the shop of Mr. Jarvis, bootmaker, which is situated at no great distance from the hotel. The impudent face of the small boy wore an expression of serio-comic fright as he pushed open the door ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... animal the while. The naturally docile filly responded to the voice she had heard from earliest colthood and soon let Elizabeth approach close enough to put her hand on the bit. The seriousness of the affair gave way to the comic when the horse began to snatch bits ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... cartoon, that conferred on Punch a wholesome influence in politics. Mr. Albert Smith made his debut in this wise:—At the birth of Punch had just died a periodical called (I think) the Cosmorama. When moribund, Mr. Henry Mayhew was called in to resuscitate it. This periodical bequeathed a comic census-paper filled up, in the character of a showman, so cleverly that the author was eagerly sought at the starting of Punch. He proved to be a medical student hailing from Chertsey, and signing the initials A.S.—'only,' remarked Jerrold, two-thirds of the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... graced the "Beggars' Opera," but the audiences took the will for the deed, applauded his gaiety of action, and quickly pardoned his lyric short-comings. We are equally lenient nowadays to many a comic-opera comedian, so called. Chetwood tells us that Walker was the supposed author of two pieces, "The Quakers' Opera," and a tragedy styled "The Fate of Villainy." The latter, it appears, "he brought to Ireland ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... comic gesture of deprecation. I went on: "But I am going to stay here and find out the truth, though it may be a foolish undertaking. And if he is ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... some extent this mood is familiar to all minds endowed with the true speculative genius. The philosopher has always tended to become unfit for practical life; his unfitness, indeed, is one of the comic motives, so to speak, of literature. But a mood which, in the great majority of thinkers, is intermittent, and is easily kept within bounds by the practical needs, the mere physical instincts of life, was in Amiel almost constant, and the natural impulse of the ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lips which were absolutely boyish in their anticipation of sheer delight as she approached; and then, after one glance at her face, his own changed with a suddenness, which, to a disinterested observer, would have been almost comic. ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... though they be not the most mature, yet ought, as kindred of the Muses, to precede them. Besides which, being drawn on one side by the tragic Melpomene, with more matter than spirit, and on the other side by the comic Thalia, with more spirit than matter, it came to pass that, oscillating between the two, he remained neutral and inactive, rather than operative. Finally, the dictum of the censors, who, restraining ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... from all quarters. Afterwards, expelled the church, he travels over the world; and at last for the sake of glory burns himself publicly at Olympia about A.D. 165. His end is described in a tragico-comic manner, and a legend is recounted that at his death he was seen in white, and that a hawk ascended from ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... would have been crushed to death, but not a man stumbled. They came ashore with a slow, regular, almost dancing gait, humming a low monotonous chant, as if to enable them to step in time, and making serio-comic motions with arms and hands, until they deposited safely in a cart a weight that might have ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... not receive me, and I only had the honour of speaking to his secretary, who, if the fact deserve to be recorded, was an abbe named Fleuriel. This personage, who was an extraordinary specimen of impertinence and self-conceit, would have been an admirable study for a comic poet. He had all the dignity belonging to the great secretary of a great Minister, and, with an air of indifference, he told me that the Count was not there; but M. de Blacas was there, and I ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... daughter!' said the old doctor, shaking his head at her with a comic fierce expression of countenance, which Fleda perfectly understood and laughed at accordingly. Then as the two children with the dog went off into the other room, he said, turning to his niece and ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... actor on stage: he can see the audience but he can't look at them, unless he's a narrator or some sort of comic. I wasn't the first (Grendel groks!) and only scared to death of becoming the second as Siddy walked me out of the wings onto the stage, over the groundcloth that felt so much like ground, with a sort of interweaving policeman-grip on ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... that it is, it leaped forth, after a long period of travail, full-fledged and panoplied, and on its lips were these words: "What fools these mortals be!" Dame Eddy gets good returns from the sacrilegio-comic tour of her progeny around the country. Intellectual Boston is at her feet, and Boston pays well for ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... Betty standing in front of a booth, talking to a comic policeman. She was dressed in the costume of an Egyptian snake-charmer: her tawny hair was braided and drawn through brass rings, the effect crowned with a glittering Oriental tiara. Her fair face was stained to a warm olive glow and on her arms and the half moon of her back writhed ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... infinitive (posse, to which me is to be supplied, and beneficia deberi), and then by a clause with ut (uti; that is, ut—uterer). Secundum ea, 'next to,' or 'next after this,' according to the etymology of secundum from sequor. [83] In manu fuit, an expression not uncommon in the comic poets; in manu alicujus est, 'it is in a person's power.' [84] 'At a time when the good fortune of the Romans did not render it so desirable to enter into connection with them as their fidelity and trustworthiness.' [85] 'Do not allow me in vain to pray for ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... illusion. There used to be a saying that cross-eyed people could not be honest. Similarly, perhaps, Newman thought the appearance of bow-legs would increase the villainy of his pirate. Certainly, no such blood-curdling ruffian has been seen out of comic opera. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... may have the dignity and nobleness of the Cid—you may be another Talma: but pass the Channel—show yourself to the English, and in spite of yourself you will become as comic as Arnal. Arnal! do I say? why, he would not make them laugh so much as you do; and they would consider our inimitable comedians, Levassor and Hoffmann, as serious personages. Do not be angry. They would only laugh the more. In this respect the English are wanting in good taste and indulgence. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... comic pictures better than anything," declared Andy. "I hate those serious ones. They're generally so ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... or pills for the passions: More of Enoch's morality: Turl improves, yet is still unaccountable and almost profane: Consecrated things: Themistocles and vengeance: A love scene: More marriage plots: And a tragi-comic denouement: The fate of Themistocles: The manuscript ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... was general and very interesting. Mr. Airy says, 'The best of a good dinner is the amount of talk.' He talked of the great 'Leviathan' which he and Struve had just visited, then anecdotes were told by others, then they went on to comic poetry. Mr. Airy repeated 'The Lost Heir,' by Hood. General Sabine told droll anecdotes, and the point was often lost upon me, because of the local allusions. One of his anecdotes was this: 'Archbishop Whately did not like a professor named Robert Daly; he said ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... personages who were present. The manager of the company, Marescalchi by name, had entered into an arrangement with the Governor of Valentia to bring the company there in September to play comic opera in a small theatre which had been built on purpose. Italian opera had hitherto never been presented at Valentia, and Marecalchi hoped to make a good deal of money there. Madame Pelliccia knew nobody in Valentia, and wanted a letter of introduction to someone there. She ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... birth. I used to sit and study the heavens before I could walk, and my nurse, a wise and shrewd woman, predicted that I should become a great astronomer; but instead of the works of Herschel being put into my hands, I was satiated with the vilest comic toy books, and deluged with the frivolous nursery literature now happily a thing of the past. At odd times my old leaning towards serious reflection and ambition for high art come over me, but there ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... although he had never slept more than five hours at a time since returning to Opal. Getting up he found a little radio and turned it to a frequency which occasionally caught some of the stations above. A hill-billy band was playing, and a comic was singing: "So I kissed her little ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... or lessening the distance between us, for a hundred yards. But was it possible for us to hold out? How I prayed we might! We neared Clump again. The comic sight cheered me. Truly, if hopping about and entreaties could help us, what aid must that old nigger give us. I almost expected to see him soar off to us, he looked so like ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... worked and studied, and accomplished great things musically, then the Elector of Bavaria invited him to write a comic opera for the Carnival, which invitation the boy joyfully accepted, and at once set to work on the none too easy task. He was now at home again, and his father and Nannerl listened eagerly to his themes, as bit ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... not true, you fraud?" she said, with comic indignation. "You deny that since we met up at the Hermitage you have been taking all your walks in this neighborhood? Dios mio! What a monster of falsehood have we here? And how brazenly ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... at this period of his celebrity, the inimitable comic actor, Poitier, in a farce called "Les Danaides" that was making a furor—a burlesque upon a magnificent mythological ballet, produced with extraordinary splendor of decoration, at the Academie Royale de Musique, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... laughing reply. "Bless my loose ribs! but I wouldn't miss him for anything. He's in a new play called 'Up in a Balloon Boys.' It's great!" and Mr. Damon named a certain comic moving picture star in whose horse-play Mr. Damon took a curious interest. Tom and Ned were glad enough to go, Tom that he might have a chance to do a certain amount of thinking, and Ned because he was still boy ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... I could never pick up any certain Intelligence, when he relinquish'd the Stage. I know, it has been mistakenly thought by some, that Spenser's Thalia, in his Tears of the Muses, where she laments the Loss of her Willy in the Comic Scene, has been apply'd to our Author's quitting the Stage. But Spenser himself, 'tis well known, quitted the Stage of Life in the Year 1598; and, five Years after this, we find Shakespeare's Name among the Actors in Ben Jonson's Sejanus, which first made its Appearance ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... in Hazlitt's own lifetime, namely, that of the second edition in the case of the Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, the lectures on the poets and on the age of Elizabeth, and the Spirit of the Age, and the first edition of the Comic Writers, the Plain Speaker, and the Political Essays. A slight departure from this procedure in the case of the essay on "Elia" is explained in the notes. "My First Acquaintance with Poets," and "Of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... stealthily watching on his face, was called up by the remembrance of the admiration which his daughter had evidently called forth. Harry watched the smile, and in his heart called the new partner "lucky," and "cute," and looked at Charlie's discontented face with a comic astonishment that would have excited some grave astonishment to their host, if by any chance he had looked up to see. Though why Charlie should look discontented about it, Harry ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... Ambrose was a great success. He stayed some four or five days, and saw everything that was to be seen, and enjoyed it all in a sort of reverent way which was almost comic. Tom devoted himself to the work of cicerone, and did his best to do the work thoroughly. Oxford was a sort of Utopia to the Captain, who was resolutely bent on seeing nothing but beauty and learning and wisdom ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... the thought of having passed through the dangers and hardships, with which a journey through the desert is ever accompanied, had opened every heart, and attuned their minds to jest and gayety. Muley, the young and merry merchant, went through a comic dance, and sang songs thereto, which elicited a laugh, even from Zaleukos, the serious Greek. But not content with having raised the spirits of his comrades by dance and merriment, he also gave them, in the best style, the story he had promised, ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff
... characters of your friends. You must excuse me, but it seems to me odd that Miss Minerva Tattle, who used to treat serious things so lightly, should now be treating light things so seriously. You ought to frequent the comic opera more, and dine with Mrs. Potiphar once a week. If your good humor can't digest such a hors d'oeuvre as little Mrs. Vite, what will you do with such a piece de resistance as ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... performed. The "Adelphi Theatre," in the Strand, near Southampton Street, was rebuilt in 1858, when it had for a quarter of a century been celebrated for melodramas, and for the attractiveness of its comic actors. The "Lyceum Theatre," or "English Opera House," at the corner of Wellington Street, Strand, was built in 1834 as an English opera-house, but its fortunes were fluctuating, and the performances not of a definite kind. This was the house latterly taken over by ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... dropped open in a comic look of dismay. "You mean this here ole earth we live on is gettin' all busted up ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton
... hour, and Paul made acquaintance with the poverty-stricken artist who could not take his mistress to the ball because she had no stockings fit to go in, and who hit on the expedient of painting stockings on her legs. How simply and innocently comic the episode was to the child's mind, to be sure! and how harmless were the naughtiest adventures exposed under the lifted roofs when the lame devil waved his crutch from the top ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... the bell and the door flew open. Sounds of laughter and comic songs issued from the abode and in a second they were in the crowded drawing room. It was packed with all the Elite and a stout duchess with a good natured face was singing a lively song and causing much merriment. The earl strode forward at sight of two new comers. Hullo Bernard old boy he cried ...
— The Young Visiters or, Mr. Salteena's Plan • Daisy Ashford
... these literary and dramatic associations of Brompton Square, Liston resided for some time at No. 40, Mr. Yates and Mr. John Reeve at 57 and 58; and that pair of comic theatrical gems, Mr. and Mrs. Keeley, have been inhabitants ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... to which the doctor could not consent; but he was utterly unable to refrain from laughing. There was an earnest look of entreaty about Sir Roger's face as he made the suggestion; and, joined to this, there was a gleam of comic satisfaction in his eye which seemed to promise, that if he received the least encouragement he would put his threat into execution. Now our doctor was not inclined to taking any steps towards subjecting his learned brother to pump discipline; ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... of the head and tail pieces of the several pages. We think with Mr. Hood, that "In the Christmas Holidays, or rather, Holly Days, according to one of the emblems of the season, we naturally look for mirth. Christmas is strictly a Comic Annual, and its specific gaiety is even implied in the specific gravity of its oxen." So much for the design, which is far more congenial to our feelings than the thousand and one sonnets, pointless epigrams, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... opposition, recriminated with double acrimony and greater success. While Alexander Garden, to keep his flock from straying after this strange pastor, expatiated on the words of Scripture, "Those that have turned the world upside down are come hither also." Whitfield, with all the force of comic humour and wit for which he was so much distinguished, by way of reply, enlarged on these words, "Alexander the coppersmith hath done me much evil, the Lord reward him according to his works." In short, the pulpit was perverted by both into the mean purposes of spite and malevolence, and every one ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... untiring artist who knew his end and the means to attain it; but there is still a trace of infantile criticism to be found in Aristotle—i.e., in the naive concession he made to the public opinion that considered Homer as the author of the original of all comic epics, the Margites. If we go still further backwards from Aristotle, the inability to create a personality is seen to increase; more and more poems are attributed to Homer; and every period lets us see its degree of criticism by how much and what it considers as Homeric. In this backward ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the King On Tuesdays at Tom's does appear, And when he does talk or does sing, To him ne'er a one can come near. For he talks with such ease and such grace, That all charm'd to attention we sit, And he sings with so comic a face That our sides are just ready ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... Pardoner's descent into hell, in the 'Four P.P.,' is one of the most capital passages in our comic poetry" ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... meantime had quitted the place, and now, to amuse the Ghent citizens, a couple of little boys came to the cafe and set up a small concert: one played ill on the guitar, but sang, very sweetly, plaintive French ballads; the other was the comic singer; he carried about with him a queer, long, damp-looking, mouldy white hat, with no brim. "Ecoutez," said the waiter to me, "il va faire l'Anglais; c'est tres drole!" The little rogue mounted his immense brimless hat, and, thrusting his ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... treasure and distinguished people travelled under the care of an armed escort. A large city like York was practically self-supporting in public amusements. The fifteenth century saw the full development of the religious mystery plays, and the allegorical morality plays, which with their comic interludes had become popular from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The feast of Corpus Christi (instituted about 1263) was the most important time in the year for the playing of these typically mediaeval dramas. Begun more than three centuries earlier within the Church and performed ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... fret of spring alert in every sap cell. I have seen the little birds as they hopped among said leaves and commented upon the scarcity of worms. I have seen the buxom flowers as they curtsied and danced above your flower-beds like a miniature comic-opera chorus. And ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... cheerful here," Al'mah said almost gaily. "Sometimes I have four or five convalescents in here, and they like a little gaiety. I sing them things from comic operas—Offenbach, Sullivan, and the rest; and if they are very sentimentally inclined I sing them good old-fashioned love-songs full of the musician's tricks. How people adore illusions! I've had here an old Natal sergeant, over sixty, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of ancient poets rise, In some one excellence their merit lies; What depth of learning old Pacuvius shows! With strong sublime the page of Accius glows; Menander's comic robe Afranius wears, Plautus as rapid in his plots appears, As Epicharmus; Terence charms with art And grave Coecilius sinks into the heart. These are the plays to which our people crowd, 'Till the throng'd playhouse ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... the girl, who exclaims to her deliverer, "Take me, O stranger, for thine handmaiden, or wife, or slave." Professor Murray, who cites this line in his History of Greek Literature, remarks with comic naivete: "The love-note in this pure and happy sense Euripides had never struck before." But what is there so remarkably "pure and happy" in a girl's offering herself as a slave to a man who has saved her life? Were not Greek women always expected to assume that attitude of inferiority, submission, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... sit indoors writing—articles; verses for the comic papers; a novel I've been "at" for three years, and concerning which I have dreams; a children's book, in which the imagination has free rein; and another book which is to last as long as myself, since it is an honest record of my soul's advance or retreat in the struggle of life. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... murmured a bit myself, striving to convey an active incredulity that yet might be vanquished by facts. The lady quite ignored this, diverging to her own opinion of New York. She tore the wrapper from a Sunday issue of a famous metropolitan daily and flaunted its comic supplement at me. "That's how I always think of New York," said she—"a kind of a comic supplement to the rest of this great country. Here—see these two comical little tots standing on their uncle's stomach and ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... a European comic variation of the scientific name Tarantula. It is applied in Australia to a spider belonging to a quite different genus, Voconia, a perfectly harmless spider, though popularly supposed to be poisonous. It has powerful mandibles, but will attack ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... characters of a lower type, not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the Ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... the history of the artist's career is but the history of his works, of his innumerable illustrations to books, and the sketchbooks, comic panoramas, and humorous cartoons he published on his own account. Besides, I am not writing a life of George Cruikshank, and all this time I have been keeping him on the threshold of the city of Mexico. Let it suffice to say, briefly, that in 1841 came a stand-point in his life, through the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... real horror now and then, with intervals of miscellaneous business. In one sense, indeed, the process will not stand even the slightest critical examination: for it is soon seen to consist of a succession of serious mystifications and non-comic much-ados-about-nothing. But these "ados" are most cunningly made (her last book, The Italian, is, perhaps, the best place to look for them, if the reader is not taking up the whole subject with a ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... consulting room Rab was filled with suspicion and uneasiness; he was "grim and comic," and eyed all three. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... or decency was never once outraged. They always stop short of a certain point,—the point where wit degenerates into mockery, and liberty into license: nature is never put to shame, and will commonly bear much more. Especially to the American sense did their humorous and comic strokes, their negro-minstrelsy and attempts at Yankee comedy, seem in a minor key. There was not enough irreverence and slang and coarse ribaldry, in the whole evening's entertainment, to have seasoned one line of some of our most popular comic poetry. But the music, and the gymnastic, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... very comic the way people have of being so particular about the second and fourth commandments, and breaking all the rest with the greatest comfort. For me, I try to keep all the rest rather carefully, and let the second and fourth take care ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... superseded by the Gentleman's Magazine, started by Cave in the next year. Johnson saw in it an opening for the employment of his literary talents; and regarded its contributions with that awe so natural in youthful aspirants, and at once so comic and pathetic to writers of a little experience. The names of many of Cave's staff are preserved in a note to Hawkins. One or two of them, such as Birch and Akenside, have still a certain interest for students of literature; but few have heard ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... of us in England now? Do they regard us as heroes or damned fools for stopping here?" asked an officer of the King's Royal Rifles with comic seriousness. This question was transmitted in a slightly varied form by heliograph signal to our comrades south of the Tugela one day, and the answering flashes came back, "You are heroes; not——" Here the message ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... know are inclined to think that the check-suited fellow countryman is a creation of the French and German comic press. Those who have lived outside of England for some considerable number of years have learned better. The late Senator Hoar in his Autobiography of Seventy Years has some very shrewd remarks about Matthew Arnold. The Senator had a cordial ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... species of writing, the pleasure from which is in part derived from the preparation and previous expectation of the reader. A portion of that awkwardness is felt which hangs upon the introduction of songs in our modern comic operas; and to prevent which the judicious Metastasio (as to whose exquisite taste there can be no hesitation, whatever doubts may be entertained as to his poetic genius) uniformly placed the aria at the end of the scene, at the same time that he almost always raises and impassions ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... invitingly in its crotch; away high up upon its straight and graceful stem, birds of magnificent plumage are flitting from tree to tree, making the grove vocal with their notes; monkeys, mischievous, but not considered dangerous, dance overhead upon the boughs, and with comic antics provoke a smile. With gentle breezes wafting perfumes such as Gouraud never was gladdened with in his most happy ambrosial dreams, and glimpses of the blue sky, seen partially through the waving foliage, which gently moves ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... assumed all the chief tragic and comic parts except when he modestly retreated to make way for the London stars, who came down occasionally to Chatteris, was great in the character of the 'Stranger.' He was attired in the tight pantaloons ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... there was a comic aspect to Stonor's dismay. His brain was whirling. This hardy young villain married to the exquisite Clare! This the saviour of the Indians! This the high-minded gentleman whose diary Clare had read to him! It was inexplicable. Yet Stonor ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... a brown; and they were beautifully set in a face of that 'pinched oval' kind which is rather rare in England. Mary as listener would have atoned to me for any defects there may have been in dear old William's work. Nevertheless, I sometimes wished this work had some comic relief in it. Publishers, I believe, shared this wish; hence the eternal absence of William's name from among their announcements. For Mary's sake, and his, I should have liked him to be 'successful.' But at any ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... of comic writers in Greek and in the opinion of many, in any language, is the only one of the Attic comedians any of whose works has survived in complete form He was born in Athens about the middle of the fifth century B C, and had his first comedy produced when he was so young that ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... This is that which throws him into natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur: he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass, the tragic and the comic indifferently and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point, finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the scrutiny of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... London at this moment, and consider what evidence they afford of this boasted advance and superiority. Time was when the versatile powers of Garrick enchanted the audience; and exhibited alternately the perfection of the comic and the dignity of the tragic muse. Mrs Siddons, supreme in greatness, has trod those boards; Kemble, the "last of all the Romans," has, in comparatively recent times, bade them farewell. Miss O'Neil, with inferior soul, but equal physical powers; Kean, with the energy, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... at a large town that I know well. Two hours to wait. I turn in to a Follies show. There is usually one going on, run by this or that division, all soldiers, but looking very odd in their paint and ruffles. But what a curious concert. The first I've seen out here. The comic Scot vastly popular; but even more so are hideously sentimental songs all about the last bugle and death and my dead friends under the earth and eternal sleep. You know? However, they love it, and the dismal piano ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... is for one of the legatees also. I suppose that he finds probate and divorce an interesting subject, because he is always writing books about them. Next to him is Howles, who, my brother says, is the best comic actor in the court. The short gentleman in the middle is Telly; he reports for the Times. You see, as this is an important case, he has got somebody to help him to take it—that long man with a big wig. He, by-the-way, writes novels, like you do, only not half such good ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... Day; particularly of the state of female society at the present time; which we think has never been so thoroughly examined, and so attractively depicted. It is, in the true sense of the word—a lady's book. Some of the comic personifications would not disgrace the author of the School ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... a brass band. "In a few weeks," he said, "I had beat myself into the more enviable position of snare drummer. Then I wanted to travel with a circus, and dangle my legs before admiring thousands over the back seat of a Golden Chariot. In a dearth of comic songs for the banjo and guitar, I had written two or three myself, and the idea took possession of me that I might be a clown, introduced as a character-song-man and the composer of ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... marrow. Her cooking surprised me. I had warned young Bute that it might be necessary to regard this dinner rather as a joke than as an evening meal, and was prepared myself to extract amusement from it rather than nourishment. My disappointment was agreeable. One can always imagine a comic dinner. ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... complimented, or in any way preferred for this act of gallantry, it might have been less appreciated, but it was an act of purely chivalrous courtesy to two strange ladies in humble position, and his only reward was our poor thanks and the approval of his own generous heart. It must have had its comic side, too, to see a major of the regular Confederate service, who had done battle on the field where glory was to be won, groping in the dismal dark of the night and running the risk of being severely hurt, possibly of being killed, by dogs, practicing war ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... generous to the philosopher in the gifts of soul, was unkind to him in the matter of his person. His face was ugly as a satyr's, and he had an awkward, shambling walk, so that he invited the shafts of the comic poets of his time. He loved to gather a little circle about him in the Agora or in the streets, and then to draw out his listeners by a series of ingenious questions. His method was so peculiar to himself that it has received ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... purchasers speedily bought, not only his three pink bottles, but his green ones, his blue ones, his pills, his pomades, and his perfumed medicinal soaps that were to soften the skin, strengthen the joints, and promote longevity. After this, he sang a comic song of innumerable verses (with horn obligato) and delivered a discourse, in which he said there had never been more than three great men in the world, Louis the Fourteenth, Alexander the Great, and Hippocrates, the ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... we all know, the three modern centuries. We all are equally familiar with its prodigious results. Not one of them has, as yet, added to human happiness: not one but has been increasingly misused to the misery of man. There is in the tragedy something comic also, which is the perpetual puzzlement of these the very authors of discovery, to find that, somehow or other, discovery alone does not create joy, and that, somehow or other, a great knowledge can be used ill, as anything else can be used ill. Also in their bewilderment, many turn to a yet further ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... as usual. It is a strange little world in itself. The comic and the tragic are blended weirdly together, and nature is unimaginably beautiful. I wish you could see this snow. It has an attraction for me, and I am sure it would have for you. I think you understand more about the meaning of beauty than I do. When I see a magnificent ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... that was tastefully decorated, and where the visitors did justice to the good things provided, and the small hours, and dancing, and our host and hostess, and respected fellow-townsmen; also divers young ladies sang very nicely, and a young Mr Somebody favoured the company with a comic song. ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... other type, but it certainly has many of the same characteristics. Calkins defines a sense of humor as "enjoyment of an unessential incongruity.... This incongruity must be, as has been said, an unessential one, else the mood of the observer changes from happiness to unhappiness, and the comic becomes the pathetic. A fall on the ice which seemed to offer only a ludicrous contrast between the dignity and grace of the man erect and the ungainly attitude of the falling figure ceases utterly to be funny when it is seen to entail some physical injury; and wit which burns ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... nevertheless, mental deformities, and their unfortunate victims are dwellers in the borderlands. Mild forms of these types of degeneration are very abundant. The effeminate, cigarette-smoking, soda-drinking young man of the comic weeklies, and the loud, horsy, slang-using, vulgar, masculine young woman ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... is sometimes the case, to murder a passage from Paradise Lost, or Macbeth. Sometimes a fault is committed on the part of the teacher, by permitting a pupil to confine his selections to one favorite class. I have observed in certain schools, that one particular boy would always appear in a comic piece, another in a tragic, and so on. It would be better for the teacher to require each pupil to speak a variety of pieces, so as to secure a more general and comprehensive culture than would result from practice on ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... directly after instead of comic, for, uttering a fierce oath, the man sprang up, pulled out his cutlass ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... in connection with the Argus, the Age, and the Sydney Herald, and also independently by printing firms in Sydney and Adelaide. The two Melbourne ones are by far the best, but they are very dear at a shilling. The same may be said of the comic papers at sixpence. The political cartoons in the Melbourne Punch are often excellently imagined, but the execution is not remarkable, and the reading matter is wretched. The conceptions of the cartoons are also frequently coarse. The Society ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... like a tutor, a recalcitrant house-painter, who sang and acted not amiss. The mother was the genius of the party, so far as genius can be spoken of with regard to such a pack of incompetent humbugs; and her husband could not find words to express his admiration for her comic countryman. "You should see my old woman," said he, and nodded his beery countenance. One night they performed in the stable-yard, with flaring lamps—a wretched exhibition, coldly looked upon by a village audience. Next night, as soon as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... came forward, his eyes ran over me from head to foot. So did Captain Cecchi's; but I hardly noticed; these uniforms, these formalities, these war precautions, were like a dash of comic opera. I was not taking them seriously in the least. The Britisher gestured me toward a seat, but it seemed superfluous for so brief an interview, and I remained standing with my hands ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... observed that Mr Seagrove had a great deal of comic talent; he was an excellent mimic, and could alter his voice almost as he pleased. It was a custom of his to act a scene as between other people, and he performed it remarkably well. Whenever he said that anything he was going to narrate was "as good as a comedy," it was generally ...
— The Three Cutters • Captain Frederick Marryat
... hem-stitched bands, poured in upon him. He burned with angry blushes when his mother, smiling meaningly, passed them over to him. "Put them away, mother; I don't want them," he would growl out, in a distress that was half comic and half pathetic. He would never taste of the tempting viands which were brought to him. "How you act, Thomas!" his mother would say. She was secretly elated by these feminine libations upon the altar of her son. They did not grate upon her sensibilities, ...
— Evelina's Garden • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... has drawn so many and so varied characters. It would be as absurd to interpret all of these as caricatures as to deny Dickens his great and varied powers of creation. Dickens exaggerated many of his comic and satirical characters, as was his right, for caricature and satire are very closely related, while exaggeration is the very essence of comedy. But there remains a host of characters marked by humour and pathos. Yet the pictorial presentation of Dickens's characters ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... plays are replete with evidences of the influence upon him of the actors whom he had in charge. It is patent, for example, that the same comedian must have created Launce in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Launcelot Gobbo in the Merchant of Venice; the low comic hit of one production was bodily repeated in the next. It is almost as obvious that the parts of Mercutio and Gratiano must have been intrusted to the same performer; both characters seem made to fit the same histrionic temperament. If Hamlet were the hero of a novel, we should ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... first medal? And do you remember the breakfast at Ledoyen's on Varnishing Day? There were more than twenty-five at a table intended for ten. What follies we committed, especially that little, little—what did he call himself—I mean that little comic fellow, who was always making portraits which resembled no one? Oh, yes, Tavernier! And you took me home with you to your studio, where you had two great manikins which frightened me so, and I called to you, and you came in to reassure me. Oh, how heavenly all that was! ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... publish Salmagundi, a magazine containing humorous articles on the social life of New York. This became so popular that twenty numbers were issued. Having found so much of interest in the life of his native city, Irving next wrote a comic History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, dealing with the early period when the city was ruled by the Dutch. The novel way in which this work was announced would do credit to the most clever advertiser. About ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... form, a bull-like individual, stood above them. The young knight gazed upon his interlocutor with a comic eye. ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... silk, six handkerchiefs, and a tooth-brush," said Tarling promptly and the girl stared at him in comic dismay. ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... are of various speech and race, preoccupied with divers interests and cares. Necessity and the waiter drive them all to a sepulchral syssition, whereof the cook too frequently deserves that old Greek comic epithet—hadou mageiros—cook of the Inferno. And just as we are told that in Charon's boat we shall not be allowed to pick our society, so here we must accept what fellowship the fates provide. An English spinster retailing paradoxes culled to-day from Ruskin's handbooks; an ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... I could not be, I was shaking so with laughter. If you could have seen the silly old thing, like a wizened monkey, with dyed hair and an eye-glass—it was too comic! I only told you because you said the sentence 'begin with you,' and I wanted to know if it ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... here; this is very nice, being put on to the tricks of the trade, but the money end of it isn't cutting much ice, and isn't there any way you can just buy things—the way you do in Cincinnati? Can't you get their stuff without making a comic ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... the President, he met with a hearty reception, and Mr. Lincoln, taking him into a private room, repeated to him a story from a comic article by Orpheus C. Kerr, satirically criticising the conduct of the war. It was a story about Captain Bob Shorty and the Mackerel Brigade and the Anaconda Policy— something about generals in the field being hampered by a flood of orders. When he had finished his story, he told General ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Post (Mr. Bryant himself, we have no doubt), writes: "It is esteemed a mark of a vulgar mind, to divert one's self at the expense of a drunken man; yet we allow ourselves to be amused with representations of drunkenness on the stage and in comic narratives. Nobody is ashamed to laugh at Cassio in the play of Othello, when he has put an enemy into his mouth to steal away his brains. The personation which the elder Wallack used to give us some years ago, of Dick Dashall, very ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... birthday. She assembled a few old friends at dinner, and did the honors with all the brilliancy of her brightest days. She told a variety of anecdotes with infinite drollery, and after dinner sang a broadly comic song ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... before all a supporter of the Union. One or another of these three courses, sooner or later, every man of the President's following chose. We shall see presently the relative strength of the three groups into which that following broke and what strange courses sometimes tragic, sometimes comic—two of the three pursued. For the moment our concern is how the division manifested itself among the heads ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... without mischief to herself, always humiliated her more than anything else, and made her ready to leave all to their mercy, save for deference to Edgar, and gratitude to Felix. Robina would look on soberly enough in admiration; but Lance's notions of art were comic, and Fulbert's were arbitrary, and both were imperiously carried out with due contempt for the inferior sex, and were sure to infect both ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to music to celebrate coffee. Brittany has its own songs in praise of coffee, as have other French provinces. There are many epics, rhapsodies, and cantatas—and even a comic opera by Meilhat, music by Deffes, bearing the title, Le Cafe du Roi, produced at the Theatre Lyrique, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... in his outposts, he gave the order to fire the powder, and a part of the magazine was actually destroyed when Marmont (who above all things hated ridicule, and was severely taxing the respect of his beautiful army by these serio-comic excursions after a raw militia) withdrew his troops and retired in an abominable temper ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... as myself, with this difference, that whereas he, looking upon the adventure as a comic one, only laughed, I who found it too tragic shuddered ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... And when he at last found it was vain, he suddenly broke the whole business down. Hitherto he had been teaching them a grand tragedy; he tore the tragedy in morsels, and came next day with a compact little comic trifle. To this they took more kindly; he presently knocked it all into their smooth ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... did not understand, something, however, that imposed reverence and profound respect. For the first time in his life, embarrassment seized upon him, upon this joker, this wearer of clothes, this teller of funny stories, with his large, red ears, bald head and comic actor's face. He stammered confusedly and took himself away, for the moment abstracted, serious, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... had but a poor funeral after all," is Thady's remark; and you see with the kindly double vision of the humorist Thady's sincere regret for the circumstance that would most have afflicted the deceased, as well as the more obviously comic side of Thady's comment and Sir Condy's lifelong aspiration. Indeed, the whole narrative is shot with many meanings, and one never turns to it without a renewed faculty ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... "Plautus, the great comic Latin poet, was once a miller's lad. Machiavelli wrote The Prince at night, and by day was a common working-man like any one else; and more than all, the great Cervantes, who lost an arm at the battle of Lepanto, and helped to win that famous day, was ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... more hopeless farce of Micawber. Therefore, both Emily and Micawber are shipped off to a vague colony where changes come over them with no conceivable cause, except the climate. The tragic woman becomes contented and the comic man becomes responsible, solely as the result of a sea voyage and the first sight ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... Department plotted to advertise the navy and encourage recruiting. In moving pictures, in the form of a story, with love interest, villain, comic relief, and thrills, it would show the life of American bluejackets afloat and ashore, at home and abroad. They would be seen at Yokohama playing baseball with Tokio University; in the courtyard of the Vatican receiving ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... names. We have known districts where the word Smith itself, even without the fictitious dignity of y in the middle and e at the end, was pronounced with great veneration. Jones—elsewhere sacred to the comic muse—is of as potent syllable—unluckily it has only one—along the banks of the Usk, as Scott or Douglas on the Nith and Yarrow. And such is the effect of territorial or moral association, that we shall willingly withdraw an objection we made to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... think how comically [comic] it looked hopping about the bar, quite as much at home as a tame squirrel ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... looked so deplorably miserable, and at the same time so comic, that it was impossible to avoid smiling, and as he saw ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... in fine order, and was painted like all the king's miniature fleet—white outside, and bright salmon inside. One glance at his boat's crew showed me that they were all armed—in a flashy melodramatic style, like the Red Indians of a comic opera, each naked native having a brace of revolvers buckled to a broad leather belt around his waist, from which also hung a French navy cutlass in a leather sheath. They were all big, stalwart fellows, though no one of them was as tough a customer to deal with as our Tepi, who ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke
... coachman as a sort of Russian Sancho Panza, gives Gogol a magnificent opportunity to reveal his genius as a painter of Russian panorama, peopled with characteristic native types commonplace enough but drawn in comic relief. "The comic," explained the author yet at the beginning of his career, "is hidden everywhere, only living in the midst of it we are not conscious of it; but if the artist brings it into his art, on the stage say, we shall ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... "Quite comic, isn't it, my dear? What foolish things mothers are, aren't they? Just as fond of their bairns as ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... singers. They attend late suppers, it is true, but they ride home in luxurious carriages and never risk their golden voices in this careless if romantic fashion. And in New York nobody took the trouble to serenade anybody else, unless paid in advance and armed with a police permit. As for being a comic-opera star, he refused to admit the possibility; and he relegated this well-satisfied constellation to the darks of limbo. He had heard ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... mother," said the girl. "I have a big, grown-up, married brother, and he knows I wouldn't change from one party unless it was all right." She laughed amusedly at the young man's comic gesture of bewilderment. "You think we American ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... race!" he said; "always ready to claim what it hasn't got, and mistake its ounce of brass filings for a ton of gold-dust. You have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you possess that. This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things—broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... with the small brown surtout, white stockings and shoes, is in the comic line; the mixed air of self-denial, and mental consciousness of his own powers, with which he acknowledges the call of the chair, is particularly gratifying. 'Gen'l'men,' says the little pompous man, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... all that bitter tragi-comic record of human frailty which we call History a sadder story than this of the Princess Anne, the natural daughter of the splendid Don John of Austria, natural son of the Emperor Charles V. and, so, half-brother to ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... mischief shone forth as light radiates from a lantern. He, pausing before the sleeping Barndale, blushed not, but poked him in the ribs with the end of his walking-stick, and regarded him with an eye of waggish joy, as who should say that to poke a sleeping man in the ribs was a stroke of comic genius whereof the world had never beheld the like. He sat on his stick, cocked Mr. Barndale's hat on one side, and awaited that gentleman's waking. Mr. Barndale, languidly stretching himself, arose, adjusted his hat, took a great drink of iced ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... August, when 286 men were put out of action. During this tour the Huns loosed a number of small balloons, which drifted behind our lines, scattering leaflets. These effusions, written in French for the benefit of the civil population, commented with brazen and comic impudence on the action of French aviators in bombing innocent German towns. The German military authorities, they amusingly remarked, believing that the French were incapable of such barbarity, thought that the airmen must have mistaken their objectives. But, no! The origin ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... which the Bugle established was not one to be envied. It is true that the account printed of the cause of the explosion, dramatically completed with the Professor's tragically sudden death, caused a great sensation in London. The comic papers of the week were full of illustrations showing the uses to which the Professor's instrument might be put. To say that any sane man in England believed a word of the article would be to cast an undeserved slight upon the intelligence of the British ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... tragic-comic dinner she had not seen Russell, nor caught even the remotest chance glimpse of him; and it was curious that she should encounter him as she went upon such an errand as now engaged her. At a corner, not far from that tobacconist's shop she had just left ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... encircled the fire that night, under the leafy branches of the forest, and smoked their pipes in concert, while Wabisca busied herself in clearing away the remnants of their evening meal, they waxed communicative, and stories, pathetic, comic, and tragic, followed each other in ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... a Pulcinella," the Moon told me. "The public applaud vociferously directly they see him. Every one of his movements is comic, and is sure to throw the house into convulsions of laughter; and yet there is no art in it all—it is complete nature. When he was yet a little boy, playing about with other boys, he was already Punch. Nature had intended him for it, and had provided him with a hump ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... was very clumsy in all his ways, and Guy, looking on, seemed to derive considerable amusement from his performance. "I always did like Joe," he remarked. "There's something about his mechanism that is irresistibly comic. Oh, do leave him alone, Sylvia! Let him arrange the thing upside ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... composing, Fortune donned the tragic robes of Nemesis. Years of pain followed, which could not abate the spirits or disturb the geniality of the sufferer, but did somewhat abate the power and disturb the serenity of his work. Then came the inevitable end of all life dramas, whether comic or romantic or tragic, and friends who had known him stood round his grave and listened sadly to the touching words in which Emile Zola expressed not merely his own grief but that of many thousands throughout the civilized world. Here was a life more winsome, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... bright and lovely possession again. It was the first beautiful thing he had ever possessed. He was the darling of fond and indulgent parents and his nursery was crowded with hideous rag and sawdust dolls, golliwogs, comic penguins, comic lions, comic elephants and comic policemen and every variety of suchlike humorous idiocy and visual beastliness. This figure, solid, delicate and gracious, was a thing ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... painted onto th' face a smile iv sickenin' silf-complacency that is positively disgustin'. No artist iv our day has succeeded so well in showin' up th' maneness iv th' people he has mugged. We ondershtand that th' atrocious Higbie paid wan hundherd thousan' dollars f'r this comic valentine. It is worth th' money ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... to Philadelphia to give a reading in Camden in conjunction with George W. Cable. It chanced that his friend, Francis Wilson, was opening that same evening in Philadelphia in a new comic opera which Field had not seen. He immediately refused to give his reading, and insisted upon going to the theatre. The combined efforts of his manager, Wilson, Mr. Cable, and his friends finally persuaded him ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... these productions from a literary and dramatic point of view, they are by no means devoid of a fair share of shrewd humour and pointed vivacity, and are, moreover, not unimportant contributions, especially when their early date is considered, to the illustration of manners. The low-comic view predominates in most of them, and we meet with occasional grossnesses which, so far as "Jack Juggler" itself is concerned, are the more remarkable when it is recollected that the performance was presented by youths. In none ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... sharpness of the commodities. The razors proved scarcely worth a farthing to the clown who bought them for eighteen-pence, and were fit to shave nothing but the beard of an oyster. We trust that the "Comic Latin Grammar" will be found to cut, now and then, rather better, at least, than that comes to; and that it will reward the purchaser, at any rate, with his pennyworth for his penny, by its genuine bona fide contents. ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... seeking inspiration for speech from that source. The other man, Backlos, was a tall, hawk-featured man with a sweeping black moustache, who needed only gaudy habiliments to make him the ideal pirate king of the comic opera stage. It was ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... relieved by a suicide—opens the last act: one of the anglers having finished a comic song—which from its extreme gravity forms an appropriate dirge to the forthcoming felo-de-se—goes off with his companion to leave the water clear for Barbara Allen, who enters, takes an affecting leave of her laird lover, and straightway drowns herself. Jack Ketch is now, by a rapid change ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... O. Henry. The second volume suffers the fate of all sequels in endeavouring to revive after a lapse of years the pranks and passions of the poet Tricotrin. The first five stories in the volume, while they do not attain the excellence of "The Tragedy of a Comic Song," are worthy stories in the same kind. The other seven stories are frankly mawkish in content, although redeemed by Mr. Merrick's ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... pretty little, insignificant, crumpled face, and laughs all over its face till it has no eyes, and then stops laughing suddenly, and the eyes shine out, twinkling and dancing like stars reflected in running water, and it stamps its little foot upon the stage in a comic passion—and—nous verrons. It sold oranges in the pit, folks tell me, a year ago. It may be selling sinecures and captaincies in a year or two, and putting another shilling in the ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... ornaments as bait for entrapping lovers, and many a squib expressing this theory appeared in the newspapers. These cynical notes no more represented the general opinion of the people than do similar satires in the comic sheets of to-day; but they are interesting at least, as showing a long prevailing weakness among men. The following sarcastic advertisement, for instance, was written by ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... narrative of this kind, that objections precisely similar to theirs were long ago raised, and long ago disposed of, in the case of Parliamentary reports, newspaper articles, society papers, and comic publications of all kinds; and, further, that I have never received the slightest intimation that my literary methods were displeasing to the illustrious personages whom my ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... a great deal more, with tipsy profundity and a serio-comic air, and keeping his eye all the time on Mrs Sliderskew, who was unable to hear one word, Mr Squeers concluded by helping himself and passing the bottle: to which Peg did ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... will be short, and having quickly hurl'd This line about, live thou throughout the world; Who art a man for all scenes; unto whom, What's hard to others, nothing's troublesome. Can'st write the comic, tragic strain, and fall From these to pen the pleasing pastoral: Who fli'st at all heights: prose and verse run'st through; Find'st here a fault, and mend'st the trespass too: For which I might extol thee, but speak less, Because thyself art coming to the press: ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... girl in the case. In quick succession had come our visit to the Carter place, the finding of the rest of the telegram, my seeing Alison there, and the strange interview with Mrs. Conway. The Cresson trip stood out in my memory for its serio-comic horrors and its one real thrill. Then—the discovery by the police of the seal-skin bag and the bit of chain; Hotchkiss producing triumphantly Stuart for Sullivan and his subsequent discomfiture; McKnight at the station with Alison, and ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... than put us in rising spirits. It convinced the Armenians! That foolish jargon, picked up from comic papers and the penny dreadfuls, convince more firmly than any written proof the products of the mission schools, whose one ambition was to be American themselves, and whose one pathetic peak of humor was the occasional glimpse of United States ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... certainly his voice danced as it sang. There was no other time so gay, except it was Purim—the feast to celebrate Queen Esther's redemption of her people from the wicked Haman—when everybody sent presents to everybody else, and the men wore comic masks or dressed up as women and performed little plays. The child went about with a great false nose, and when the name of "Haman" came up in the reading of the Book of Esther, which was intoned in a refreshingly ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... song," there is often a vein of comedy in their lives. If we could transport ourselves to Miller's Hotel, Westminster Bridge, on a certain afternoon in the early spring of 1811, we should behold a scene apparently swayed entirely by the Comic Muse. The member for Shoreham, Mr. Timothy Shelley, a handsome, consequential gentleman of middle age, who piques himself on his enlightened opinions, is expecting two guests to dinner—his eldest son, and his son's friend, T. ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow |
