"Buffoonery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the great neglect and scorn of preaching ariseth from the practice of men who set up to decry and disparage religion; these, being zealous to promote infidelity and vice, learn a rote of buffoonery that serveth all occasions, and refutes the strongest arguments for piety and good manners. These have a set of ridicule calculated for all sermons and all preachers, and can be extremely witty as often as they please upon the ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... captain, who thought my mirth out of place, hurried out to render an account of the affair to the proveditore-generale, and I went to the coffee-house, not doubting for one moment that his excellency would laugh at the captain, and that the post-mortem buffoonery would greatly amuse the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... private citizens".(2) Security and peace of mind, in this world and for the next, were, we know not how, borne into the hearts of Pindar and Sophocles in the Mysteries. Yet, if we may at all trust the Fathers, there were scenes of debauchery, as at the Mysteries of the Fijians (Nanga) there was buffoonery ("to amuse the boys," Mr. Howitt says of some Australian rites), the story of Baubo is only one example, and, in other mysteries than the Eleusinian, we know of mummeries in which an absurd tale of Zeus is related in connection with an oak log. Yet surely there was "something sacred" in ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... was radiant with devout simplicity. To a soul so pure and brave and feminine may I never be guilty of applying a hard and technical criticism! He is little to be envied who reads Don Quixote's assault upon the windmills as a chapter of mad buffoonery. An ideal knight, without fear or reproach, subject to disaster and ridicule, august from his faith in God and the manly consecration of his life,—is he not rather the type of a Christian sanity? No doubt, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... his crimes and brought about the happy catastrophe of the piece, is left to sneak off unrewarded. As to Florian, though obviously intended for the hero of the tale, he is a strange nondescript, in whose language the author has given buffoonery by way of wit, and bombast by way of dignity. The Count De Valmont is a most interesting personage, and so is ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... mess, and when he did found some things of which he did not approve. Barristers, it appears, are still capable of indulging in such tastes as were once gratified by the game of 'High Jinks,' celebrated in 'Guy Mannering.' The Circuit Court was the scene of a good deal of buffoonery. It was customary to appoint a 'crier'; and Fitzjames, 'to his infinite disgust, was elected on account of his powerful voice. He stood it once or twice, but at last broke out in a real fury, and declared he would never come to the Circuit Court again, calling it by very strong names. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... would have languished often but for the social buffoonery of the clever Larry Beers, who devised new diversions and stimulating mental condiments for the jaded brains of that gilded cult. His table ballets, his bizarre parlor circuses, his cunningly devised fads in which he set forth his own inimitable antics, won him the motley and the cap ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... make the religious festivals of the Greeks appear as amusements and diversions, was that ridiculous buffoonery that constituted so great a part of them: it would be tedious to enumerate one half of these buffooneries; but let a few serve as a specimen. At a festival held in honor of Bacchus, the women ran about for a long time seeking the god, who, they pretended, had run away from them: this done, ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... out of a brief and solemn church function, which followed a Latin ritual. In time German superseded the Latin, but without replacing it entirely; the performances increased greatly in scope, took in elements of fun, buffoonery and diablerie, outgrew the churches and became great popular festivals, which were usually held in the market-place. The performance of an Easter play together with a preceding passion play might occupy several hundred ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... scramble down the length of the room, Miss Cobb with her thin, bare little arms flung up over her head, Miss Kinealy tugging and then riding in high buffoonery over the bare floor, firmly secured to ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... nature. Thus prepared, they could take in everything, sanguinary ferocity and refined generosity, the brutality of shameless debauchery, and the most divine innocence of love, accept all the characters, wantons and virgins, princes and mountebanks, pass quickly from trivial buffoonery to lyrical sublimities, listen alternately to the quibbles of clowns and the songs of lovers. The drama even, in order to satisfy the prolixity of their nature, must take all tongues, pompous, inflated ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the church itself did little to remove the barbarism prevailing among the common people, for, in point of fact, buffoonery, immodesty, and cruelty had intruded into the very ceremonial of religion. Never were there more disgusting exhibitions of the low state of the public morals than when the occurrence of pestilence, drought, or some other signal visitation of the displeasure of ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... he at one moment talks of his desolation, and says that, "leaving England without regret," he has thought of entering the Turkish service; in the next, especially in the stanzas to Hodgson, he runs off into a strain of boisterous buffoonery. On the 2nd of July, the packet, by which he was bound, sailed for Lisbon and arrived there about the middle of the month, when the English fleet was anchored in the Tagus. The poet in some of his stanzas has described the fine view of the port and the disconsolate dirtiness of the city itself, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... This buffoonery, joined to the strange figure of the poor lady, had almost thrown Miss Stewart into hysterics; for the princess of Babylon, after this accident, was quite flat on one side, and immoderately protuberant ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... with a very different purpose, has left an elegy, in which he darkly hints at and bemoans the fate of the ill-starred young person, whose very uncommon calamity Whitelaw, Dunlop, and Milne thought a fitting subject for buffoonery and ribaldry. This bard of milder mood was Andrew Symson, before the Revolution minister of Kirkinner, in Galloway, and after his expulsion as an Episcopalian following the humble occupation of a printer in Edinburgh. He furnished ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... of the Imperial family, as we have already said, everything has been done for the Russian stage that could possibly be done, and is done no where else. The extremest liberality favors the artists, schools are provided in order to raise them from the domain of gross buffoonery to that of true art, the most magnificent premiums are given to the best, actors are made equal in rank to officers of state, they are held only to twenty-five years' service, reckoning from their debut,—and ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... be found among the supporters of the movement, the monastic orders as a whole repelled it with unswerving obstinacy. The quarrel only became more bitter as years went on. The keen sarcasms of Erasmus, the insolent buffoonery of Hutten, were lavished on the "lovers of darkness" and of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... additions, for which the distinguished coadjutors are responsible, reek with mawkish sentimentality, inane vapidity, or vulgar buffoonery. Most of the leading characters are duplicated or triplicated. Miranda has a sister, Dorinda, who is repellently coquettish. This new creation finds a lover in another new character, a brainless youth, Hippolito, who has never before seen a woman. Caliban becomes ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... of his lecture at Sepulchre's caused it to be asserted by his enemies, that his enthusiastic style of preaching was but stage buffoonery. (See p. 100.) ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851 • Various
... A.D. 1314, of Jacques du Bourg-Molay, Grand Master of the Templars; and purports to be a sort of canticle, with solo and chorus, composed two centuries after the event by a Flemish canon of Ypres, to be sung at hocktide and festivals. The childishness and devout buffoonery of an old miracle play are imitated here, as in Swinburne's "Masque of Queen Bersabe." This piece and "Holy Cross Day" are dramatic, or monodramatic, grotesques; and in their apprehension of this trait of the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... from London—the Aberdeen doctors and professors might have rushed to hear his address; or if he had been a famous music-hall singer or an imitation negro minstrel, the public at large might have flocked to be amused and degraded by his parrot-like buffoonery; but as he was only a working shoemaker from Banff, with a heaven-born instinct for watching and discovering all the strange beasts and birds of Scotland, and the ways and thoughts of them, why, of course, respectable Aberdeen, high or low, would have nothing in particular to ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... so that I did not for one moment suppose that it was really George Eliot, or that she would countenance that particular sort of buffoonery, and the incident made no impression upon me at all. I had already taken my hands off the table, when someone—Mr Kitchener, I think—banged it down four times, and then triumphantly observed: "Yes, of course, you will see somebody during the night, or rather ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... Rochester I expect nothing but pot-house buffoonery; but I take it vastly ill on your part, George, to join in making me ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... auditory; whereas, Mr. Home, the modern author, knew how to be refined in the very midst of grief and passion; to represent death, not merely as awful, but graceful and pathetic; and never condescended to degrade the majesty of the Tragic Muse by the ludicrous apposition of buffoonery and familiar punning, such as the elder playwright certainly had resort to. Besides, Mr. Home's performance had been admired in quarters so high, and by personages whose taste was known to be as elevated ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was passionate and irregular. He had no humor, and the comic portions of Faustus are scenes of low buffoonery. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... talent for impromptu buffoonery might perhaps have in time created a genuine native comedy, so the powerful and earnest rhetoric in which the deeper feelings of the Roman always found expression, might have assumed the tragic garb and woven ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... so closely,—as every reader can see for himself, by reading the play in Dyce's edition, and comparing it with the notes under the text,—that sometimes whole scenes are copied, and even whole speeches, as, for instance, that of the Emperor Charles V. The coarse buffoonery, in particular, of which the work is full, is retained word for word. Of the countless absurdities and prolixities of the Volksbuch, Marlowe has, of course, omitted a great deal, and condensed the story to the tenth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... youth, as he often confessed and lamented, he was gay, giddy and profligate; so fondly attached to the stage, that he joined a company of strolling actors and vagabonds, and spent a part of his life in that capacity. At this period it is probable he learned that grimace, buffoonery and gesticulation which he afterwards displayed from the pulpit. From an abandoned and licentious course of life he was converted; and, what is no uncommon thing, from one extreme he run into the other, and became a most zealous and indefatigable teacher of religion. Having studied some time at Oxford, ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... Montague, of modern times, are generally received as some of the best specimens extant of epistolary composition. The letters of Charles Lamb are a series of brilliances, though of kaleidoscope variety; they have wit without buffoonery, and seriousness without melancholy. He closes one of them by subscribing himself his friend's "afflicted, headachey, sorethroaty, humble ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... organisation or stage management could influence, impressed the English journalists and Members of Parliament even more than the gigantic scale of the demonstration. There was not a trace of the picnic spirit. There was no drunkenness, no noisy buffoonery, no unseemly behaviour. The Ulster habit of combining politics and prayer—which was not departed from at Balmoral, where the proceedings were opened by the Primate of All Ireland and the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church—was jeered at by people who ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... feelings without disgrace, and will be the gainer by the pleasure. But the inevitable consequence is that he who begins by weeping at the sorrows of others, will end by weeping at his own. The same is true of comedy,—you may often laugh at buffoonery which you would be ashamed to utter, and the love of coarse merriment on the stage will at last turn you into a buffoon at home. Poetry feeds and waters the passions and desires; she lets them rule instead of ruling them. And therefore, when we hear the encomiasts of Homer ...
— The Republic • Plato
... to the Bible will be admitted at once. But there is great credit due to the writer (or writers) who could keep so true a sense of proportion that in scenes even of coarse derision, almost bordering on buffoonery, the central figure remained unsoiled and unaffected by his surroundings. A writer less filled with the religious sense must have been strongly tempted to descend to biting dialogue, in which his ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... the existence of the moon. . . . Christianity is itself so jolly a thing that it fills the possessor of it with a certain silly exuberance, which sad and high-minded Rationalists might reasonably mistake for mere buffoonery." But if this is his own psychology he faces too the special difficulty of theirs—the main and towering barrier that he wished but hardly hoped to surmount. He was the first person, I think, to see that Free Thought was no longer a young movement, but old ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... harlequin, stuck in his hat, instead of the rabbit's tail, its prescribed ornament, a peacock's feather of excessive length. This new appendage, which repeatedly got entangled among the scenery, gave him an opportunity for a great deal of buffoonery. There was some inclination to punish him; but it was presumed that he had not assumed the feather without authority.-NOTE BY ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... to tire of this deliberate imprisonment, and to reduce buffoonery to a modern science. His father was a rich man, and he was an only child. Therefore he was able to gratify the supposed whims, which were no whims at all. He could get up surprise parties, which really bored him, carry out elaborate practical jokes, give ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... taken hold of Rose Pompon with his right hand, and of the Queen with his left, in order to advance between the two, in which figure he showed off his buffoonery to the utmost extent, when the door again opened, and the same waiter, who had called out Jacques, approached Cephyse with an air of consternation, and whispered in her ear, as he had ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... happily I am not. What has this to do with your defence of buffoonery, and apotheosis of ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... day at noon. Most of the shops, especially those that dealt in provisions, were open and full of vociferous customers, while every alehouse was a pandemonium. The street was choked with townspeople and soldiery; lanterns flickered and torches flamed; oath and jest, bravado and buffoonery, filled the air. ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter. True wit, or sense, never yet made anybody laugh; they are above it: They please the mind, and give a cheerfulness to the countenance. But it is low buffoonery, or silly accidents, that always excite laughter; and that is what people of sense and breeding should show themselves above. A man's going to sit down, in the supposition that he has a chair behind him, and falling down upon his breech for want of one, sets a whole company ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... is Elijah. I am the Wandering Jew," said Klesmer, flashing a smile at Miss Arrowpoint, and suddenly making a mysterious, wind-like rush backward and forward on the piano. Mr. Bult felt this buffoonery rather offensive and Polish, but—Miss Arrowpoint being there—did not like ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... must pardon me, I can't help laughing), that an absolute lover would have concluded the poor creature to have had darts, and flames, and altars, and all that in his breast. Araminta, come, I'll talk seriously to you now; could you but see with my eyes the buffoonery of one scene of address, a lover, set out with all his equipage and appurtenances; O Gad I sure you would—But you play the game, and consequently can't see the miscarriages obvious ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... very popular at Rome, certainly never so much as the sports of the circus. Besides comedies and tragedies, the Romans had a species of drama peculiar to their country, called the Atellane farces, which were, in general, low pieces of gross indecency and vulgar buffoonery, but sometimes contained spirited satires on the character and conduct of ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... Repeal to a question of national welfare, a man is pledged to sincerity. Had he seven devils of mockery and banter within him, for that hour he must silence them all. The foul fiend must be rebuked, though it were Mahu and Bohu who should prompt him to buffoonery, when standing ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... by this kind of buffoonery. He issued comic proclamations and almanacs, and even produced short farces in which his wife performed with him. From one of these farces Moliere is supposed to have borrowed the ideas for his sack-scene ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... the most mischievous creatures that can enter into a civil society. His satire will then chiefly fall upon those who ought to be the most exempt from it. Virtue, merit, and everything that is praiseworthy, will be made the subject of ridicule and buffoonery. It is impossible to enumerate the evils which arise from these arrows that fly in the dark; and I know no other excuse that is or can be made for them, than that the wounds they give are only imaginary, and produce nothing more than a secret shame or sorrow in the ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... qualifications of a fine orator, a good voice, graceful gesture, and forcible elocution. Warburton justly remarked, "Sometimes he broke jests, and sometimes that bread which he called the Primitive Eucharist." He would degenerate into buffoonery on solemn occasions. His address to the Deity was at first awful, and seemingly devout; but, once expatiating on the several sects who would certainly be damned, he prayed that the Dutch might be undamm'd! He undertook to show the ancient use of the petticoat, by quoting the ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... immediate. A cloud had hung over the assembly. It might have broken into terror; it broke into delight. Mad merriment seized the whole House. Nothing pleases the great chambers of sovereign man so much as buffoonery. It is their ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Great Man's Masterpieces, and utterly fail: especially when two much better men have been before one. One excuse is, that Shelley and Dr. Trench only took parts of these plays, not caring surely—who can?—for the underplot and buffoonery which stands most in the way of the tragic Dramas. Yet I think it is as a whole, that is, the whole main Story, that these Plays are capital; and therefore I have tried to present that whole, leaving out the rest, or nearly so; and altogether the Thing has become so altered ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... misery when the excitement was over. Tragedies deep and dire were the chief favourites. Comedy brought with it too great a contrast to the inner despair: when such were attempted, it was not unfrequent for a comedian, in the midst of the laughter occasioned by his disporportioned buffoonery, to find a word or thought in his part that jarred with his own sense of wretchedness, and burst from mimic merriment into sobs and tears, while the spectators, seized with irresistible sympathy, wept, and the pantomimic revelry was changed to a real exhibition ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... contrived by fortune. Among those pursuing with John it happened that there was Uliaris, the aide of Belisarius. Now this man was a passionate fellow and well favoured in strength of heart and body, but not a very serious man, but one who generally took delight in wine and buffoonery. This Uliaris on the sixth day of the pursuit, being drunk, saw a bird sitting in a tree at about sunrise, and he quickly stretched his bow and despatched a missile at the bird. And he missed the bird, but John, who was behind it, he hit in the neck by no will of his own. And since the wound was ...
— History of the Wars, Books III and IV (of 8) - The Vandalic War • Procopius
... the man's dead wife. The short story, in which the author deliberately shakes our nerves and then soothes away our fears by accounting naturally for startling phenomena, is an amazingly popular type. It reappears continually in different guises. Occasionally it merges into pleasant buffoonery. Die Geistertodtenglocke, for instance, a story in the Dublin University Magazine (1862), is a burlesque, in which the mysterious tolling of a bell is explained by the discovery that a cow strolled into the ruin to ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... his own discernment hindered him from suspecting any weakness or mistake. He wondered that his wit was so little understood, but expected that his audience would comprehend it by degrees, and persisted all his life to shew by gross buffoonery, how little the strongest faculties can perform beyond the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... finds that she is rather depressing—that his vanity is almost as painfully damaged by her emotional inertness as it would have been by a too provocative and hedonistic spirit. For the thing that chiefly delights a man, when some, woman has gone through the solemn buffoonery of yielding to his great love, is the sharp and flattering contrast between her reserve in the presence of other men and her enchanting complaisance in the presence of himself. Here his vanity is enormously tickled. To the world in general ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... store of talk. His words gushed forth abundantly in original remarks, laughable images, the metaphors that flow from the comic genius of crowds. He had the natural picturesqueness of the unadulterated farce. He was brimming over with amusing stories and buffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all repertories of house-painter's nonsense. Being a member of divers of the low haunts called lists, he knew all the new tunes and ballads, and he was never tired of singing. He was amusing, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt |
