"Clownish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first lady and her mistaken child—with a medley of singing and dancing, a bit of breakdown, of cancan, of jig, a bit of "Le Sabre de mon Pere," and of all memorable slang songs, given with the most grotesque and clownish spirit that ever inspired a woman. Each member of the company follows in his or her pas seul, and then they all dance together to the plain confusion of the amateur trio, whose eyes roll like so many Zuyder Zees, as they sit lonely and motionless ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... where I lived, you knave?" said the Lord Nigel, angrily. "'Sdeath! I shall have every clownish burgher from Edinburgh come to gaze on my distress, and pay a shilling for having seen the motion of ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... sheriffs' officers; Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, and Bull-calf, recruits; Feebee, at once a recruit and a woman's tailor, Pilch and Patch-Breech, fishermen (though these last two appellations may be mere nicknames); Potpan, Peter Thump, Simple, Gobbo, and Susan Grindstone, servants; Speed, "a clownish servant"; Slender, Pistol, Nym, Sneak, Doll Tear-sheet, Jane Smile, Costard, Oatcake, Seacoal, and various anonymous "clowns" and "fools." Shakespeare rarely gives names of this character to any but the lowly in life, altho perhaps we should cite as exceptions Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Ague-Cheek ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... awkward, clownish, ill-mannered, insulting, uncouth, bluff, coarse, impertinent, raw, unmannerly, blunt, discourteous, impolite, rude, unpolished, boorish, ill-behaved, impudent, rustic, untaught, brusk, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Turks were a good-natured people; that what would have been a deadly affront anywhere else was only a little freedom there: in short, they told him to think no more of the matter, and to try his fortune in another promenade. But the squire, though a little clownish, had some home-bred sense. "What! have I come, at all this expense and trouble, all the way to Constantinople only to be kicked? Without going beyond my own stable, my groom, for half a crown, would have kicked me to my heart's content. I don't mean to stay in Constantinople eight-and-forty ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and paws of meek wild beasts, and nondescript vegetables. And the lowest of all are those which have not even graceful models to recommend them, but arise out of the corruption of the higher schools, mingled with clownish or bestial satire, as is the case in the latter Renaissance of Venice, which we were above examining. It is almost impossible to believe the depth to which the human mind can be debased in following this species ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... investigations tend to show that honest Izaak's account is prejudiced, as Hooker in his will makes his "wel-beloved wife" sole executrix and residuary legatee, and his father-in-law was one of the overseers. Nevertheless Wood calls her "a clownish, silly woman, ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... floods, Possess'd with fear, and seeks his known abodes, His old familiar hearth and household gods. He falls; he fills the house with heavy groans, Implores their pity, and his pain bemoans. Young Silvia beats her breast, and cries aloud For succor from the clownish neighborhood: The churls assemble; for the fiend, who lay In the close woody covert, urg'd their way. One with a brand yet burning from the flame, Arm'd with a knotty club another came: Whate'er they catch or find, without their care, Their fury makes an instrument of war. Tyrrheus, ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... had once been attached to George Marteen, the Younger Brother, married for a convenience the clownish Sir Morgan Blunder. Prince Frederick, who had seen and fallen in love with her during a religious ceremony in a Ghent convent, follows her to England. They meet accidentally and she promises him a private interview. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... at times to glowering at Tom, when his rudeness passed bounds, in a way which made that young man at once uncomfortable and angry, and at times provoked him to clownish ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... you are participating in a carnival, portends that you are soon to enjoy some unusual pleasure or recreation. A carnival when masks are used, or when incongruous or clownish figures are seen, implies discord in the home; business will be unsatisfactory ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... when manners were softened that the language also was softened: before Francois Ier summoned women to his court, it was as clownish as we were. It would have been as good to speak old Celtic as the French of the time of Charles VIII. and Louis XII.: ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... ladies-of-the-bedchamber sold the public offices in the daylight; and the King, who was aware of it, thought it a subject for vulgar jokes with his intimates. Francis died in 1830 of bad humour at the Paris revolution, and was succeeded by Ferdinand II., to be known hereafter as Bomba—then a clownish youth, one of whose first kingly cares was to create ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... or rather look after them, are neither exactly town nor country. They have the clownish dress and boorish gait of the regular 'chaws,' with a good deal of the quick, suspicious, sour sauciness of the low London resident. If you can get an answer from them at all, it is generally delivered in such a way as to show ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... imprisoned damsel, whom he releases from the tree, Maudlin and Douce retiring the while to watch his success, which is small. Baffled, he again shuts the girl up in her natural cell, and his mother, coming forward, rates him soundly for his clownish ways, reading him a lecture for his guidance in his intercourse with women, in which she seems little concerned by the presence of her daughter. This latter, so far as it is possible to judge from the few speeches assigned ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... first. His clownish ways pleased the judge, the jury and the spectators. His ready tongue and infinite good humor made him a favorite. There may not be much law in Justice-of-the-Peace proceedings, but there is a certain rude equity which possibly answers the purpose better. And surely it is good practise ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... her cries, dashed at my schoolfellow in the way described. Several of the spectators now tried to seize the goat, but he being of extraordinary strength, butted and pushed so vigorously that several measured their length upon the earth, to the no small merriment of the clownish persons who had collected together to the burning of ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... forms upon which the mantle of mystery and romance could seem to hang more ungracefully than upon that of the uncouth and clownish Schalken—the Dutch boor—the rude and dogged, but most cunning worker in oils, whose pieces delight the initiated of the present day almost as much as his manners disgusted the refined of his own; ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... kind of potion; And though prescribed by Heaven, it goes against men's stomachs. So does it at fourscore too, when the soul's Mewed up in narrow darkness: neither sees nor hears. Pish! 'tis mere fondness in our nature. A certain clownish cowardice that still Would stay at home and dares not venture Into foreign countries, though better than Its own. Ha! what countries? for we receive Descriptions of th' other world from our divines As blind ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... King Harry, in all his gaiety and grace, ere the shock of his brother's death had fallen on him! At Thirsk, Malcolm told of the prowess and the knighthood of honest Trenton and Kitson, to somewhat incredulous ears. The two squires had been held as clownish fellows, and the sentiment of the country was that Mistress Agnes was well quit of them, and the rough guardianship by which they had kept off all other suitors. As mine host concluded, ''Tis a fine thing to ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to be noble, actually lived like peasants; that the count's brother had for some years been a servant to a gentleman he knew of; that the count himself was an exceedingly handsome man, but ignorant and clownish; that he could not even speak Italian; and that Margaret Fuller had become a good deal demoralized in Rome, and could neither write nor converse with her former brilliancy. Hawthorne accepted this statement and entered it in his diary with inferences of his own which ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... to be always a wag or clown among each group of animals,—some one species in which the amusing or the grotesque is prominent. Among these clownish fellows I should class the black vulture, or john-crow. He is not a crow at all, but gets that name probably because so historic a tribe as Corvus must have some representative, and the real crow, so common ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... about four in the afternoon, passed through another village somewhat larger than the former, which is called Soato. Here they found themselves so much exhausted with over fatigue and want of food, that they were compelled to sit down and rest awhile. The people, however, were a very uncourteous and clownish race, and teazed them so much with their rudeness and begging propensities, that they were glad to prosecute their journey to save themselves ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... recovered from his surprise he returned my assault with interest. I was nothing in his hands. I was game to be sure, for I was a gentleman; but he had the clownish advantages of bone and muscle. I felt as if I could have fought even unto the death; and I was likely to do so; for he was, according to the vulgar phrase, "putting my head into Chancery," when the gentle Columbine flew to my assistance. God bless the ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... talent and moral reality, or else she could never have been so great a humbug.... Toward the last there appears to have been a total collapse in poor Margaret, morally and intellectually; and tragic as her catastrophe was, Providence was, after all, kind in putting her and her clownish husband and their child on board that fated ship.... On the whole, I do not know but I like her the better, though, because she proved herself a very woman after all, and fell as the meanest of ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... certain delicacy,—his eye is bright and quick,—his lips play over the thought he utters as a pianist's fingers dance over their music, and his whole air, though it may be timid, and even awkward, has nothing clownish. If you are a teacher, you know what to expect from each of these young men. With equal willingness, the first will be slow at learning; the second will take to his books as a pointer or a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... abbreviated underclothing, for there are English prints which specialize in those in a more leering way, and they are not widely popular like the French print. But La Vie is produced by intelligent men. It is not a heavy lump of stupid or snobbish photographs. It does not leer. There is nothing clownish and furtive about it. It is the gay and frank expression of artists whose humour is too broad for the general; but, as a rule, there is no doubt about the fine quality of their drawings and the deftness ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... regarding them as a slow, shadowed, natural growth, finally fossilized in print, from the rhythmic cries of a barbaric dance-circle in its festal hour, there is a weighty school of critics who hold them to be the mere rag-tag camp-followers of mediaeval romance. See, for instance, the clownish ballad of Tom Thumbe, with its confused Arthurian echoes. Some of the events recorded in our ballads, moreover, are placed by definite local tradition at a comparatively recent date, as Otterburne, Edom o' Gordon, Kinmont Willie. ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... personal advantage do we hope for, when we are anxious to know whether those bodies are moving whose movements are concealed from us, and owing to what causes they revolve through the heavens? And who is there that lives according to such clownish maxims, or who has so rigorously hardened himself against the study of nature, as to be averse to things worthy of being understood, and to be indifferent to and disregard such knowledge, merely because ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... speak with great energy and precision, without being able to engage attention, because his observations were made in the Scotch dialect, which (no offence to lieutenant Lismahago) certainly gives a clownish air even to sentiments of the greatest dignity and decorum. — I have declared my opinion on this head to some of the most sensible men of this country, observing, at the same time, that if they would employ a few natives of England to teach the pronunciation of our vernacular tongue, in twenty years ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... And I'll have you know, the women's wants shall be considered, as well as yours. I think my lord and the colonel do you too much honour in offering to represent such a set of clownish, dirty, beggarly animals—Ah! I wish ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... with a man. Whereof I have more than once been minded to make experiment with this mute, no other man being available. Nor, indeed, could one find any man in the whole world so meet therefor; seeing that he could not blab if he would; thou seest that he is but a dull clownish lad, whose size has increased out of all proportion to his sense; wherefore I would fain hear what thou hast to say to it." "Alas!" said the other, "what is't thou sayst? Knowest thou not that we have vowed our virginity to God?" "Oh," ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... did my heart e'er tell me, I should be Condemned the flower of my youth to spend In this wild native region, and amongst A wretched, clownish crew, to whom the names Of wisdom, learning, are but empty sounds, Or arguments of laughter and of scorn; Who hate, avoid me; not from envy, no; For they do not esteem me better than Themselves, but fancy that I, in ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... /boh-zo'tik/ /adj./ [from the name of a TV clown even more losing than Ronald McDonald] Resembling or having the quality of a bozo; that is, clownish, ludicrously wrong, unintentionally humorous. Compare {wonky}, {demented}. Note that the noun 'bozo' occurs in slang, but the mainstream adjectival form would be 'bozo-like' or (in ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... scene appropriated to diversions less manly, but no less characteristic of the period than those of the staff and arrow. Beneath an awning, under which an itinerant landlord dispensed cakes and ale, the humorous Bourdour (the most vulgar degree of minstrel, or rather tale-teller) collected his clownish audience; while seated by themselves—apart, but within hearing—two harpers, in the king's livery, consoled each other for the popularity of their ribald rival, by wise reflections on the base nature of common folk. Farther ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a household, in Streatham, Miss Western would have been a lady condescending to her inferiors. These people were to her, certainly clownish—in short, the working classes. How was ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... spice of malice in him, which prompted him to speak evil of all, and to as many as he dared. After we had inspected the ruins of the emperor's villa, a clownish imbecile of a woman, professing to be the wife of the peasant who had made the excavations, came forth out of a cleft in the rock and received tribute of us—why, I do not know. The patriarch abetted the extortion, but Parthianly remarked, as we turned away, "Her ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... spread through my soul a delicious, all-pervading sense of uninterrupted happiness. No man, however rough, could thus associate with a delicate and refined woman without acquiring some of the elegance which distinguished her. I imperceptibly lost the clownish air which had so often bitterly mortified me; and as my perceptions became more acute I saw in my own manners all that could render me repulsive, and hastened ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... doomed to guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts? Would not the owl have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very title-page? and could it have been possible for me, with a moderate attention to decorum, to introduce any scene more lively than might be produced by the jocularity of a clownish but faithful valet, or the garrulous narrative of the heroine's fille-de-chambre, when rehearsing the stories of blood and horror which she had heard in the servants' hall? Again, had my title borne, 'Waverley, a Romance ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... listened.... I remember ... his shedding tears over a print representing a soldier lying dead in the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side, on the other his widow with a child in her arms. His person was robust, his manners rustic, not clownish. ... His countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. There was a strong expression of shrewdness in his lineaments; the eye alone indicated the poetic character and temperament. It was large and of a dark cast, and literally glowed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... evening and a part of it, while he, in his working clothes, his rugged, sun-browned features and hair tinged with gray, was a blot upon the scene. She who was so lovely, must be conscious of his rude, clownish appearance. He would have faced any man living and held his own on the simple basis of his manhood. Anything like scorn, although veiled, on Alida's part, would have touched his pride and steeled his will, but the words and manner ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... Educate a boy to tumbled hair and grimy hands, and he will go tumbled and grimy to his grave. Put a hundred boys together where they will have the appurtenances of a clown, and I do not believe there will be ten out of the hundred who will not become precisely to that degree clownish. I am not battling for the luxuries of life, but I am for its decencies. I would not turn boys into Sybarites, but neither would I let them riot into Satyrs. The effeminacy of a false aristocracy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... gates, leading out of the town in a northerly direction, several of the men on guard were assembled, amusing themselves at the expense of the departing peasantry, whose uncouth physiognomy and strange clownish appearance afforded abundant food for the quaint jokes and comical remarks of the soldiers. The market people were, for the most part, women, old men, and boys; the able-bodied men from the country ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... intelligent and a pious mother, he was placed, like Voltaire and Diderot, in an attorney's office. Dismissed with disgrace "as good for nothing but to ply the file," the young man was bound apprentice to an engraver, "a clownish and violent fellow," says Rousseau, "who succeeded very shortly in dulling all the brightness of my boyhood, brutalizing my lively and loving character, and reducing me in spirit, as I was in fortune, to my real position of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... flake floated down out of the dark pocket of packed clouds, then another and yet another, like timid kisses blown down upon the clownish brow of Broadway. A motorman shielded his eyes from the right merry whirl and swore in his throat. A fruit-cheeked girl paused in the flare of a Mammoth Store show-window, looked up at her lover and the flaky star that lit and ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... may appear, to be thought a well-bred Person has no small Share in this clownish Behaviour: A Discourse therefore relating to good Breeding towards a loving and a tender Wife, would be of great Use to this Sort of Gentlemen. Could you but once convince them, that to be civil at least is not beneath the Character of a Gentleman, nor even tender Affection towards one who ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... letter-writing. It is not a little depressing to think that in this very form and state is supposed, by the modern reader, to lurk the stealthiness of the husband of farce, the "rogue." One does not like the word. Is it not clownish to apply it with intention to the husband of Prue? He did not pay, he was always in difficulties, he hid from bailiffs, he did many other things that tarnish honour, more or less, and things for which he had to beg ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... always the case in towns, that some one in it is foolish or clownish. It happened to be so here; for a Maujeekewis was in the lodge; and after the young man had given his father-in-law presents, as he did to the first, this Maujeekewis jumped up in a passion, saying, "Who is this ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... sacred rites of the faith, and bands of comic masks filled the arena at times and delighted the audience by playing practical jokes on the spectators and each other. The solitary white woman attracted their clownish humour, and they danced in front of her balcony, shouting out rude witticisms that caused much amusement to the lookers-on. Fortunately the girl's command of the language, fairly good though it was, was insufficient to enable her to understand their coarse jests. But their intention to ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... a glossy garb of the finest black broadcloth, with a spotless vest of pearl-tinted satin, and immaculate white kids. His dark visage, small, peering black eyes, and low-bred, clownish aspect, contrasted strangely with the ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... Misrule With mimic pomp and march; And the burly Abbot of Unreason Forgets not that the blythe Yule season Demands his paunch at church; And he useth his staff While the rustics laugh,— And, still, as he layeth his crosier about, Laugheth aloud each clownish lowt,— And the lowt, as he laugheth, from corbels grim, Sees carven apes ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... morning, and the "crew" to which he had referred proved to be members of his own family—John and Will—whales as to size, and clownish. ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... the beginning of the feast a tall, clownish young man knelt before the Queen of the Fairies asking as a boon that to him might be given the first adventure that might befall. "That being granted he rested him on the floor, unfit through his rusticity for a ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... remember. Well, he was better than most. But the faces of your young people in general are not interesting—I don't mean the children, but the young men and women—and they are awkward and clownish in their manners, without the quaintness of the elder generation, who are the funniest old dears in ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... still, while another is speaking to you. You will not of course be so rude as to dig in the earth with your feet, or take your penknife from your pocket and pair your nails; but there are a great many other little movements which are scarcely less clownish. ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... tradition, the "obscurists" and the adversaries of profane science; and this inevitable struggle determined the first character of Russian literature, where the satiric element, which in essence is an attack on the enemies of reform, predominates. In organizing grotesque processions, clownish masquerades, in which the long-skirted clothes and the streaming beards of the honorable champions of times gone by were ridiculed, Peter himself appeared as a pitiless destroyer of the ancient ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... never a movement but it commended him. So it befell that when the one appeared gracious and the other ungracious, every trick of their bodies seemed to call out confirmation. Not that alone: but the more deeply Mr. Henry floundered in his brother's toils, the more clownish he grew; and the more the Master enjoyed his spiteful entertainment, the more engagingly, the more smilingly, he went! So that the plot, by its own scope and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... An awkward unseamanlike fellow; from a northern word implying a clownish dolt. A boatswain defined them as "fellows fitted with teeth longer than their ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... outcry was not even heard. And the simple country bumpkins, standing in a grinning row like so many Old Aunt Sallys at a fair, pulled off their caps and bowed, thinking it some company of great lords, and fetched a clownish cheer as the ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... gave great satisfaction to all the hearers, and the canon especially enjoyed it, for he had remarked with particular attention the manner in which it had been told, which was as unlike the manner of a clownish goatherd as it was like that of a polished city wit; and he observed that the curate had been quite right in saying that the woods bred men of learning. They all offered their services to Eugenio but he who showed himself most liberal ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Tiberius' nephew, Caligula's uncle, and a brother-in-law to Agrippina. Mr. Baring-Gould says that somewhere deep in him was a noble nature that had never had a chance: that the soul of him was a jewel, set in the foolish lead of a most clownish personality. I do not know; certainly some great and fine things came from him; but whether they were motions of his own soul (if he had one), or whether the Gods for Rome's sake took advantage of his quite negative being, and prompted ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... rote a coded praise, Unto a leering two-faced god falls prone, And smears with lust and fear his alternate days For monstrous imaginations to atone; For you, most instant, most ardent,—you are flown Like fumes to his clownish brain, and in his fear He dreams you a eunuch carved of pallid stone Warning, "Beware all ye who ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... dragged down to the lowest depths. All the finer sensibilities of character are deadened; all pride of personal appearance, all nice self-respect and proper regard for the good opinion of others, every sense of decorum, and at last every pretence of decency. Dignity of behavior yields to clownish silliness, and the person lately respected is now an object of pity and loathing. The great central convictions of right and wrong now find no place in his nature; conscience is quenched, dishonesty prevails. This is true both as to the solemn ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... edges, which, ought to have been smooth and gilded, were rugged and uneven like a ploughed field. It was hopeless to expect that a most discerning public should pay six shillings for a book of pastorals of such clownish appearance, when the sweetest rhymes, jingling like silver bells, and descriptive of angels and cupids, and the whole heaven of Greek and Roman mythology, were offered for a lesser sum, in settings resplendent with all the colours of the ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... or else to one in some village near, and there by himself take his pipe and pot," &c. "But so it is that, notwithstanding our author's great merits, he was but little regarded in the University, being observed to be more clownish than courteous, and always to go in an old antiquated dress. Indeed he was a mere scholar, and consequently must expect, from the greatest number of men, disrespect; but this notwithstanding, he was always a true lover of his mother, the University, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... is not very nice in your punctilios of ceremony; he is clownish, as a man may say: belching and calling of names have been allowed him time out of mind, by prescription: but, however, we are engaged in one common cause, and I ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... she heard young Carminatti's facetious remarks she laughed with marked impudence. Signer Carminatti was tall, with a black moustache, a hooked nose, well-formed languid eyes, lively and somewhat clownish gestures; he was at the same time sad and merry, melancholy and smiling, he changed his expression every moment. He was in the habit of appearing in the salon in a dinner-jacket, with a large flower in his button-hole and two or three fat diamonds on his chest. ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... remains of ancient art gave him a power of talking on the subject, which unfortunately bore more than due proportion to his talents of execution. His companion, a magnificent-looking man in form, and so far resembling the young barbarian, but more clownish and peasant-like in the expression of his features, was Stephanos the wrestler, well known in ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... observed severall children, and the most part of them dressed up in severall sorts of fashions: Some of them she hath a great fancy for, but then she doubts whether that be the newest mode or not. One seems too plain and common, which makes her imagine in her thoughts; that's too Clownish. But others stand very neat and handsom. 'Tis true, the Stuf and the Lining is costly and very dear; but then again it is very comly and handsom. And then again she thinks with her self, as long as I am at Market, I'd as good go through stirch ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... matron, who served out the dry bread and hot milk to the prefects, who carried the basins up and down the tables as deftly as Mr. Paul Cinquevalli. Everywhere was a prospect of raw faces and figures, which Charity had deliberately made as uncomely as possible by clownish garb and simple toilet. The children ate hungrily, and the place was full of the spirit of childhood, an adulterated spirit. The noise leaped and swelled on all sides in an exultant joy of itself, but if here and there a jet of jolly laughter shot from the stream, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... emperor, give a kind of zest to the genteel young god? Do not the pride, superciliousness, and selfishness of a certain aristocracy make it all the more regarded by its worshippers? and do not the clownish and gutter- blood admirers of Mr. Flamson like him all the more because they are conscious that he is a knave? If such is the case—and alas! is it not the case?—they cannot be too frequently told that fine clothes, wealth, and titles adorn a person in proportion as he adorns them; that if ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... be no meeting or general council of officers, except with the protector's consent, or by his orders. This vote brought affairs immediately to a rupture. The officers hastened to Richard, and demanded of him the dissolution of the parliament. Desborow, a man of a clownish and brutal nature, threatened him, if he should refuse compliance. The protector wanted the resolution to deny, and possessed little ability to resist. The parliament was dissolved; and by the same act, the protector was by every one considered as effectually dethroned. Soon ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... than the irregularity which is the reproach of the English theatre.' And this sound view of the importance of form, and of the barbarism to which our English genius is prone, from Goody Blake and Harry Gill up to the clownish savagery which occasionally defaces even plays attributed to Shakespeare, is collateral proof of the sanity and balance which marked the foundations of his character, and which at no point of his work ever entirely failed him. Byron's admiration for ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... the death-ship and the curving river is the thought of the older South,—the sincere and passionate belief that somewhere between men and cattle, God created a tertium quid, and called it a Negro,—a clownish, simple creature, at times even lovable within its limitations, but straitly foreordained to walk within the Veil. To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought,—some of them with favoring chance might become men, but in sheer self-defence we dare not let them, ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... this is how a mind acquires strength and precision. There may be here and there a licentious phrase, but there is no ground for alarm in that. It is not the least rude who are always the most pure, and even a rather clownish speech is better than that artificial style in which the two sexes seduce one another, and familiarise themselves decently with vice. 'Tis true our Swiss drinks too much, but after all let us not calumniate even vice; as a rule drinkers are cordial and frank, good, upright, just, loyal, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... that time they put no women into nunneries but such as were either one-eyed, lame, humpbacked, ill-favored, misshapen, foolish, senseless, spoiled, or corrupt; nor encloistered any men but those that were either sickly, ill-bred, clownish, and the trouble ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... possibly have possessed De Guiche to go to a wild-boar hunt by himself; that is but a clownish idea of sport, and only fit for that class of people who, unlike the Marechal de Grammont, have no dogs and huntsmen to hunt as ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... speaking. You do not assume, indeed, the solemnity of the pulpit, or the tone of stage-declamation; neither are you at liberty to gabble on at a venture, without emphasis or discretion, or to resort to vulgar dialect or clownish pronunciation. You must steer a middle course. You are tied down to a given and appropriate articulation, which is determined by the habitual associations between sense and sound, and which you can only hit by entering into the ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... saw here Cobbett, then a lad, who with a few halfpence in his pocket, and Swift's Tale of a Tub in his hand, had been so captivated by the wonders of the royal gardens, that he applied there for employment. The king, on perceiving the clownish boy, with his stockings tied about his legs by scarlet garters, inquired about him, and specially desired that he might be ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... dropped the juice of love-in-idleness upon the eyes of the wrong lovers. King Oberon tricks his capricious and resentful little queen, by the aid of the same juice, into the absurdest infatuation for a clownish weaver, who has come out with his mates to rehearse a play to celebrate Theseus's wedding, but has fallen asleep and {150} wakened to find an ass's head planted upon him. All comes right, as it ever ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... unbacked colt. untutored, unschooled (ignorant) 491. unkempt. uncombed, untamed, unlicked[obs3], unpolished, uncouth; plebeian; incondite[obs3]; heavy, rude, awkward; homely, homespun, home bred; provincial, countrified, rustic; boorish, clownish; savage, brutish, blackguard, rowdy, snobbish; barbarous, barbaric; Gothic, unclassical[obs3], doggerel, heathenish, tramontane, outlandish; uncultivated; Bohemian. obsolete &c. (antiquated) 124; unfashionable ; newfangled &c. (unfamiliar) 83; odd ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of problematical nature into the following sixteen classes: the sad, the extremely good or bad, star-gazers, scatter-brains, apathetic, misanthropic, doubters and investigators, reverent, critical, executive, stupid and clownish, naive, funny, anamnesic, disposed to learn, and blase; patience, foresight, and self-control, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... cap. 5. hath proved at large) as constitutions of their bodies, and temperature itself. In all particular provinces we see it confirmed by experience, as the air is, so are the inhabitants, dull, heavy, witty, subtle, neat, cleanly, clownish, sick, and sound. In [3148]Perigord in France the air is subtle, healthful, seldom any plague or contagious disease, but hilly and barren: the men sound, nimble, and lusty; but in some parts of Guienne, full of moors and marshes, the people dull, heavy, and subject to many infirmities. Who sees ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... Hervey came sauntering into camp at about four o'clock twirling his hat on the end of a stick in an annoyingly care-free manner. Tom Slade saw him passing Council Shack intent upon his acrobatic enterprise of tossing the hat into the air and catching it on his head, as if this clownish feat were the chief ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... profiting; and that to be appointed at the Masters discretion, eyther the Thursday, after the vsuall custom; or according to the best opportunity of the place.... All recreations and sports of schollars, would be meet for Gentlemen. Clownish sports, or perilous, or yet playing for money, are no way ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... capital picture of the ease and perfection with which the clownish chrysalis may be metamorphosed into the scarlet moth of war. Catch the animal young, and you may turn him into any shape you please. He will learn to wear silk stockings, scarlet plush breeches, collarless ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... beauty of the rounded sides, The mighty curving of the lordly breasts, The level lines of backs, the small, fine heads, And laugh'd and said, "The Gods will have it thus, The choicest of the earth for sacrifice; Let it be man, or maid, or lowing bull!" Where lay the witchcraft in their clownish words, To shake my heart? I know not; but it thrill'd, As Daphne's leaves, thrill to a wind so soft, One might not feel it on the open palm; I cannot choose but laugh—for what have I To do ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... writer, "the brutalities of Austria's white coats in the north, the unintelligent repression then characteristic of the house of Savoy, the petty spite of the duke of Modena, the mediaeval obscurantism of pope and cardinals in the middle of the peninsula, and the clownish excesses of Ferdinand in the south, could not blot out from the minds of the Italians the recollection of the benefits derived from the just laws, vigorous administration, and enlightened aims of the great emperor. The hard but salutary training which they had undergone ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... I was on my feet. She stood pointing up the slope. On the brow of it was a clownish, bad-looking fellow, a few inches taller than myself. He looked hostile, but I saw no reason to fear him, for he had no weapon, and my little friends had ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... his foresters frolicked it among the shepherds, Corydon came in with a fair mazer[1] full of cider, and presented it to Gerismond with such a clownish salute that he began to smile, and took it of the old shepherd very kindly, drinking to Aliena and the rest of her fair maids, amongst whom Phoebe was the foremost. Aliena pledged the king, and drunk ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... hopes reposed in our bosoms could not be disappointed, but ample redemption, with interest, was secure with us. Lastly, our common captivatrix of the love of all men (money), did not neglect the rectors of country schools, nor the pedagogues of clownish boys, but rather, when we had leisure to enter their little gardens and paddocks, we culled redolent flowers upon the surface, and dug up neglected roots (not, however, useless to the studious), and such coarse digests of barbarism, as with ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... the presumption of the youths, the former uneasy at the possible results of their ignorance. To the astonishment of the company, Ginevra rose, respect and modesty in every feature, as the youth, clownish rather than awkward, approached her, and almost timidly held out her hand to him. He took it in his horny palm, shook it hither and thither sideways, like a leaf in a doubtful air, then held it like a precious thing he was at once afraid of crushing by too tight a grasp, and of dropping from too ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... heavy, silent, stupid dinners, with the massive plate and the dark oak wainscoting, and the servants gliding about like ghosts at a festival in Acheron! What a relief it would have been even to have had a clownish footman spill soup over one's dress, or ice-cream down one's back, or anything to break the monotony of the entertainment! But, no; there we sat, Aunt Horsingham remarking that the "weather was dull" and the "crops looking very unpromising;" Aunt Deborah with her eyes fixed on a portrait ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... helplessly clownish trouble-seeking propensities, Charlie Chaplin's screen exploits are miracles of heroic dignity and of ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... Mathews was a rude, clownish, matter-of-fact man; he wanted some person to assist him in looking after the farm, and taking care of the stock; and he brought up Mary to fill the place of the son he had lost, early inuring her to ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... foolish to read. Wherefore I have (I say) used the common country phrase according to the person of the speakers in every Eclogue, as though indeed the man himself should tell his tale. If there be anything herein that thou shalt happen to mistake, neither blame the learned poet, nor control the clownish shepherd (good reader) but me that presumed rashly to offer so unworthy matter to thy survey."[336] Another phase of "decorum," the necessity for employing a lofty style in dealing with the affairs of great persons, comes in for discussion ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... compared with the episode of Tappe-coue or Tickletoby in Pantagruel:—"Villon, to dress an old clownish father grey-beard, who was to represent God the Father [at the performance of a mystery], begged of Friar Stephen Tickletoby, sacristan to the Franciscan Friars of the place, to lend him a cope and a stole. Tickletoby refused him, alleging that by their provincial statutes it was ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... He, above all others, needs to go abroad to study the tempers of men and learn their several fashions. "As to Country breeding, which is opposed to the Courts, to the Cities, or to Travelling: when it is merely such, it is a clownish one. Before a Gentleman comes to a settlement, Hawking, Coursing and Hunting, are the dainties of it; then taking Tobacco, and going to the Alehouse and Tavern, where matches are made for Races, Cock-fighting, and the like." As opposed to this life, Gailhard holds up the pattern ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... over a field met with a clownish fellow, to whom he spake in this manner. "Friend," quoth he, "what is a clock?" "A thing," answered the clown, "that shows the time of the day." "Why then," said Robin Good-fellow, "be thou a clock, and ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... richly-dressed form of one whom he speedily recognized as having but lately refused him redress when plundered by the Pathan soldiery. "Salam, Nawab Sahib!" said the man, offering a mock obeisance, with clownish malice, to his late oppressor. The scared and famished caitiff sate up and looked about him. "Why do you call me Nawab?" he asked. "I am a poor soldier, wounded, and seeking my home. I have lost all I have, but put me in the road to Ghausgarh, and I will reward you hereafter." Necessarily, the ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... with him; one of those who kept the gates replied, "Cyrus, O stranger, is not now at leisure, for he is drinking." To which Callicratidas answered, most innocently, "Very well, I will wait till he has done his draught." This time, therefore, they took him for some clownish fellow, and he withdrew, merely laughed at by the barbarians; but when, afterwards, he came a second time to the gate, and was not admitted, he took it hardly and set off for Ephesus, wishing a great many ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... grew blith, To hear the clownish Jest; How silly sots, as custom is, Do discant at ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... stories to tell. Persia and Ancient Rome sent their tyrants and their heroines to contest for public favour with home-born knaves and fools. Nor were the newcomers above borrowing the services of those same knaves and fools. The Vice was given a place, low clownish fellows were admitted to relieve the harrowed feelings, and our old acquaintance, Herod, was summoned from the Miracles ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... a clownish sort of boy among the boys—an expert mimic and impersonator. This talent made him popular and in his way a leader. He was a natural actor, and early showed marked ability as ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... take upon themselves such forms for the mere purpose of tipping tables and piano-fortes, rapping upon doors, windows, and empty skulls, misspelling their own names, and murdering Lindley Murray, and performing clownish tricks for the amusement ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the whole tragedy and comedy of a ham and beef carver's life. So you will get a view of the world as oddly coloured as Harlequin's clothes, with puffs of sentiment dear to the soul of Columbine, and Clownish fun with Pantaloonish wisdom and chuckles. When you were young, you used, I think, to enjoy a butterfly's kiss; and that, you remember, was when your mother brushed your cheek with her eye-lashes. And also when you were young you held a buttercup ...
— The Harlequinade - An Excursion • Dion Clayton Calthrop and Granville Barker
... of heaven, Fullest of love, and of most ample space, Receive you, as ye tell (upon my page Henceforth to stand recorded) who ye are, And what this multitude, that at your backs Have past behind us." As one, mountain-bred, Rugged and clownish, if some city's walls He chance to enter, round him stares agape, Confounded and struck dumb; e'en such appear'd Each spirit. But when rid of that amaze, (Not long the inmate of a noble heart) He, who before had question'd, thus resum'd: "O blessed, who, for death preparing, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... churches, which succeeded each other on the site of the Cathedral, but, they were deceived who have said that this bishop extirpated paganism from Rouen, and from the province. Saint-Ouen, who came after Saint-Romain, found the people clownish, superstitious, and idolatrous, in consequence of the negligence of some bishops, his predecessors. The inhabitants of the neighbouring country, were coarse, cruel and dishonest; morals and the sciences were cultivated only among the higher classes of society. We find in the ...
— Rouen, It's History and Monuments - A Guide to Strangers • Theodore Licquet
... expelled and driven from the city? What place is there either so deserted or so uncivilized, as not to seem to greet and to covet the presence of those men wherever they have arrived? What men are so clownish as not, when they have once beheld them, to think that they have reaped the greatest enjoyment that life can give? And what posterity will be ever so forgetful, what literature will ever be found so ungrateful, as not to cherish their glory with undying recollection? Enrol me ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... have possessed De Guiche to go to a wild boar-hunt by himself; that is but a clownish idea of sport, only fit for that class of people who, unlike the Marechal de Gramont, have no dogs and huntsmen, to hunt as ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... First, a tall, clownish youth falls before the queen and desires a boon, which she might not refuse, viz. the achievement of any adventure which might present itself. Then appears a fair lady, habited in mourning, and riding on an ass, while behind her comes a dwarf, leading a caparisoned war-horse, upon which was the ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... If—and I think we may—if we allow that every author has some especial quality with which, in more or less degree, he endows all his children—if we grant that Shakespeare's people are all meditative, even the sprightly Rosalind and the clownish Dogberry—if we allow that all our acquaintances in Dickens are a trifle self-conscious, in George Eliot conscientious to such an extent that even Tito Melema feels remorse for conduct which, granted his period and his character, would more naturally have given him satisfaction—then ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... Italy are known, Where none but only dead men wear a gown, On theatres of turf, in homely state, Old plays they act, old feasts they celebrate; * * * * * The mimic yearly gives the same delights; And in the mother's arms the clownish infant frights. Their habits (undistinguished by degrees) Are plain alike; the same simplicity Both on the stage and in the pit you see. In his white cloak the magistrate appears; The country bumpkin ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... pressure of toil and the entire want of society, Burns might have grown up the rude and clownish and unpopular lad that he has been pictured in his early teens. But in his fifteenth summer there came to him a new influence, which at one touch unlocked the springs of (p. 008) new emotions. This incident ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... They frequently learn from unbred or debauched servants, such language, untowardly tricks and vices, as otherwise they would be ignorant of all their lives. 'Tis a hard matter wholly to prevent this mischief," continues he; "you will have very good luck, if you never have a clownish or vicious servant, and if from them your children never ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... and robust: his manners rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which received part of its effect perhaps from one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's picture, but to me it conveys the idea that they are diminished as if seen in perspective. I ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... captain dream, as he ran his eyes over the rustic-looking passenger, that under that clownish hat was the busy brain that had trailed him and his crew down to ...
— The Dock Rats of New York • "Old Sleuth"
... Lord Carteret proposed the motion for the Address to the King, and went over much of the {90} same historical ground that Pulteney had traversed in the Commons. The Duke of Newcastle replied in his usual awkward and bungling fashion, with the uneasy attitudes and clownish gestures which were characteristic of him. He was not able to make any effective use of the King's message, and the Lord Chancellor read it for him. The division in the House of Lords showed seventy-nine votes and twenty-four proxies ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... alone, nursing his jealous mood, as though in this clownish fashion matters were to be mended. Did Cynthia but speak to Crispin, he scowled; did Crispin answer her, he grit his teeth at the covert meaning wherewith his fancy invested Crispin's tones; whilst did they chance to laugh together—a ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... give makes the boys a little less clownish in their manners, and more intelligent when spoken to by strangers. On the other hand, it has made them less contented with their lot in life, and less willing to work with their hands. The form which discontent ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hits," which are not lost upon the audience. In the practical jokes, the melodrama, the ranting bombast, and Bottom's ambition to play "a tyrant's vein," they recognise a satire on the amateur theatricals of the trades-guilds, the clownish horseplay of the "moralities" so-called. These crude plays, once so popular, have become the jest of an audience who pride themselves on a drama of higher ideals ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... this. In the beginning of the feast, there presented him selfe a tall clownish younge man, who falling before the Queene of Faeries desired a boone (as the manner then was) which during that feast she might not refuse: which was that hee might have the atchievement of any adventure, ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... was Lewis Orne. He had been a blocky, heavy-muscled redhead with slightly off-center features and the hard flesh of a heavy planet native. Even in the placid repose of near death there was something clownish about his appearance. His burned, ungent-covered face looked made up for some ...
— Operation Haystack • Frank Patrick Herbert
... I say," returned Blane. "Stead's a good-hearted lad, though clownish, and I'll do what I can ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in solemn silence, broken now and then by the stifled laughter of the onlookers, the strange meal proceeded; and when it was nearly at an end, a clownish fellow passed by, blowing on a rustic pipe. But for Don Quixote, who had transformed the inn into a castle, the fat publican into a powerful governor, and the vagabond damsels into high-born ladies, it was an easy matter to find in those rude notes a ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... they should be separated in pairs by the comma; as, "Interest and ambition, honour and shame, friendship and enmity, gratitude and revenge, are the prime movers in public transactions."—W. Allen. "But, whether ingenious or dull, learned or ignorant, clownish or polite, every innocent man, without exception, has as good a right to liberty as to life."—Beattie's Moral ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... reception-room, a very tall, lanky man came quickly forward to meet us. His manner seemed to me the perfection of courtesy. I was struck with the simplicity, kindness, and dignity of his deportment, so different from the clownish manners with which it was then customary to invest him. His face was a pleasant surprise, formed as my expectations had been from the poor photographs then in vogue, and the general belief in his ugliness. I remember thinking how much better-looking ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... a short clownish grub, would beare the whole carkase of an Oxe, and yet neuer tugged with him, like that so famous Milo, ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... more brandy, please. But your father had manners, after all. You are as rash as he; and in essential matters clownish—which he was not." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... not a staring likeness of the poet, I said and still say—"How awkward is the ensemble of the face! What a painful stare, with its goggle eyes and gaping mouth! The expression of this face has been credited with humour, bonhommie and jollity. To me it is decidedly clownish; and is suggestive of a man crunching a sour apple, or struck with amazement at some unpleasant spectacle. Yet there is force in the lineaments of this muscular face." The large photograph of the Monument lately issued by the New Shakspere ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... peace And swayed his voice. Among the people went Queen Bertha, breathing gracious charities, And saw but smiling faces; for the light Aye looks on brightened colors. Like the dawn (Beloved of all the happy, often sought In the slow east by hollow eyes that watch) She seemed to husked find clownish gratitude, That could but kneel and thank. Of industry She was the fair exemplar, us she span Among her maids; and every day she broke Bread to the needy stranger at her gate. All sloth and rudeness fled at her approach; The women blushed and courtesied as she passed, Preserving ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... it beare? Nihil pro nihilo, none in law; what it will doe vpon the stage I cannot tell, for there a man maye make action besides his part, when he hath nothing at all to say: and if there, it is but a clownish action that it will beare; for what can bee made of a Ropemaker more than a Clowne? Will Kempe, I mistrust it will fall to thy lot for a merriment one of these dayes." Strange Newes, Of the intercepting certaine Letters, ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... tic, a convulsive twitch of the nose, would agitate his face from time to time, and it was this that completed his resemblance to a rabbit. His merriment was just as likely to find issue in a nervous, metallic, sonorous outburst as in a muffled, clownish guffaw. He would stare at people from top to bottom and from bottom to top in a manner all the more insolent for its jesting character, and to add to the mockery he would detain his gaze upon his interlocutor's buttons, and his eyes would dance from the cravat to the trousers ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... laws, is not the dupe of ignorance, but the slave of passion, the victim of habit or necessity. To argue with strong passion, with inveterate habit, with desperate circumstances, is to talk to the winds. Clownish ignorance may indeed be dispelled, and taught better; but it is seldom that a criminal is not aware of the consequences of his act, or has not made up his mind to the alternative. They are, in general, too knowing by half. You tell a person of this stamp what is his interest; he says he does not ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... still living merit of the oldest New England families, glowing yet after several generations, encountered the founders of families, fresh merit emerging and expanding the brows to a new breadth, and lighting a clownish face with sacred fire. The Assembly was characterised by the predominance of a certain plain sylvan strength and ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... winter fire, and the very pleasing tittle-tattle of an antiquated maiden aunt, or the equally pleasing (tho' less loquacious) society of a husband, who, with a complaisance peculiar to husbands, responds—sometimes by a doubtful shrug, sometimes a stupid yawn, a lazy stretch, an unthinking stare, a clownish nod, a surly no, or interrogates you with a—humph? till bed time, when, heaven defend us! you are doom'd to be snor'd out of ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... asks the Prussian Official person. "If he write to request them, yes," answers Friedrich Wilhelm; "if he don't write, no." George does not write; pays for his post-horses;—flourishes along to Hanover, in absolute silence towards his clownish Brother-in-Law. You would say he looks over the head of him, as if there were no such clown in existence;—he has never yet so much as notified his arrival. "What is this? There exists no Prussia, then, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... order by his bitter tongue, and drew fresh students to her lectures by the attractions of his wit, his arguments, and last, but not least, his unrivalled cook and cellar. Above all he acted the part of a fierce and valiant watch-dog on her behalf, against the knots of clownish and often brutal sophists, the wrecks of the old Cynic, Stoic, and Academic schools, who, with venom increasing, after the wont of parties, with their decrepitude, assailed the beautifully bespangled ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... him hugely, and he thought he had never before seen anything half so funny; even the annual circus, with its train of animals, and dancers, and tumblers and clowns, could not equal it. The "Jolly Scourer" was extremely comical and clownish, evidently without trying to be so, while the circus clown's effort at comical acts and sayings detracts from the amusing effect of ...
— Under Fire - A Tale of New England Village Life • Frank A. Munsey
... none his like behind him. There still remained, indeed, in his party, many acute intellects, many eloquent tongues, many brave and honest hearts. There still remained a rugged and clownish soldier,—half-fanatic, half-buffoon,—whose talents discerned as yet only by one penetrating eye, were equal to all the highest duties of the soldier and the prince. But in Hampden, and in Hampden alone, were united all the qualities which, at such a crisis, were necessary to save the state,—the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... was outside of the business. "She is my elder," he said. Perhaps an existence like his, always solitary, reduced to the satisfaction of mere needs, deprived of money and all pleasures in youth, may explain to physiologists and thinkers the clownish expression of the face, the feebleness of mind, the vacant silliness of the man. His sister had steadily prevented him from marrying, afraid perhaps to lose her power over him, and seeing only a source of expense and injury in some woman who would certainly ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... Worlidge says, 'I am credibly informed that an ingenious gentleman living near the seaside laid on his lands great quantities, which made his neighbours laugh at him (as usually they do at anything besides their own clownish road or custom of ignorance),' and after a year or two's exposure to the weather 'they exceedingly enriched his land for many years after.' The bones then used were marrow-bones and fish bones, ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... length the wretched civil tumults may cease in England and Peace and Literature come back, but still with a return of the query what could possibly have become of the missing volume between London and Oxford, and into what clownish hands it might have fallen. In the third Strophe and Antistrophe there is a compliment to Rous as the faithful keeper of one of the most splendid libraries in the world, with acknowledgment of his kindness in seeking to have the missing volume replaced, so ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... But it may be doubted if her dainty attire, her air of distinction, and the refined delicacy of her flower-like face, had ever appeared to more advantage than as she sat, inwardly fuming, on that rude chair, in that rude room, amid its more or less clownish inmates. Prudence was very red in the face, and confused. As housemaid in Mr. Woodbridge's family, she knew Desire well, and felt a certain sort of responsibility for her on that account. She did not know whether ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... he had not the good fortune to please the greater number of the ladies. They observed that he was awkward and ungenteel, and had a heavy, clownish look; he was also silent and reserved, and had not said a single agreeable thing; if Mr Barlow chose to keep a school for carters and threshers, nobody would hinder him, but it was not proper to introduce such vulgar people to the sons of persons of fashion. It was ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... is, I think, in that or the Excise—besides another at Lord Lonsdale's table, where this poetical charlatan and political parasite licks up the crumbs with a hardened alacrity; the converted Jacobin having long subsided into the clownish sycophant [despised retainer,—MS. erased] of the worst prejudices of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... rusticanus-); his wealth, estimated at 6,000,000 sesterces (60,000 pounds), is mainly invested in his thirteen landed estates; he attends to the management of it in person systematically and with enthusiasm; he comes seldom or never to the capital, and, when he does appear there, by his clownish manners he contrasts not less with the polished senator than the innumerable hosts of his uncouth rural slaves with the elegant train of domestic slaves in the capital. Far more than the circles of the nobility with their cosmopolitan culture and the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... do, Dugald?" said the comrade, a ludicrous man with his paunch now far beyond the limit of the soldier's belt he used to buckle easily, wearing in a clownish notion of deference to this soldier's passing a foolish small Highland bonnet he had donned in ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... itself, they pronounced him whose name was written by the larger number, banished for ten years, with the enjoyment of his estate. As, therefore, they were writing the names on the sherds, it is reported that an illiterate clownish fellow, giving Aristides his sherd, supposing him a common citizen, begged him to write Aristides upon it; and he being surprised and asking if Aristides had ever done him any injury, "None at all," said he, "neither know I the man; but I am tired of hearing him everywhere called ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... my life have not made me an adept in talking with young ladies," said Paul. "Doubtless you think me rude and clownish, and perhaps you are right, but I hope I have nothing but true feelings at heart. You are fighting for your father in this election, Miss Bolitho, and I do not complain in the least. You hope he will win, and you are using every ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... was in general of a slow, solemn, Spanish turn of manners; "intolerably proud, too, since he got that English dignity," says Wilhelmina: he seemed always tacitly to look down on Friedrich Wilhelm, as if the Prussian Majesty were a kind of inferior clownish King in comparison. It is certain he showed no eagerness to get the Treaty perfected. Again and again, when specially applied to by Queen Sophie, on Friedrich Wilhelm's order, he intimated only: "It was a fixed thing, but not to be hurried,—English ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Bluff, blunt, outspoken, downright, brusk, curt, crusty. Boast, brag, vaunt, vapor, gasconade. Body, corpse, remains, relics, carcass, cadaver, corpus. Bombastic, sophomoric, turgid, tumid, grandiose, grandiloquent, magniloquent. Boorish, churlish, loutish, clownish, rustic, ill-bred. Booty, plunder, loot, spoil. Brittle, frangible, friable, fragile, crisp. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... moment silent. Then he laughed a little laugh—not a pleasant one. "Another of Time's clownish tricks!" he said to himself: "the earl the factor on the family-estate!" Donal did not like the way he took it, but saw how ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... which account I know not a little of their ways, and even something of their language." "Is the opinion which you have formed of them at all in their favour?" I inquired. "By no means, mon maitre; the men in general seem clownish and simple, yet they are capable of deceiving the most clever filou of Paris; and as for the women, it is impossible to live in the same house with them, more especially if they are Camareras, and wait upon the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... very truth, But ever and anon she spoke of the giant strength Of Willard Shafer, and of his wonderful feat Of lifting a traction engine out of the ditch One time at Georgie Kirby's. So Jenny inherited my fortune and married Willard— That mount of brawn! That clownish soul! ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... attendant on children to amuse them, or—why not?—an appendage to his daughter's state! Ah, Jesus Maria! such a state! such a muchacha! A picked-up foundling—a swineherd's daughter—to be ennobled by his, Pedro's, attendance, and for whose vulgar, clownish tricks,—tricks of a swineherd's daughter,—he, Pedro, was to be brought to book and insulted as if she were of Hidalgo blood! Ah, Caramba! Don Juan Peyton would find he could no more make a servant of him than he could make a ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... of 'Parliamentary idiocy'" (his New Year's wish), expressed at the beginning of 1910 the wish that "certain of the dignitaries of the Federation of Labor should cure themselves of a syndicalist and laborite idiocy, a form of idiocy not less dangerous or clownish than the other." ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... see Jolly Robin when he came to the swamp that afternoon. At least, the Hermit said he was much pleased. He had very polished manners for a person that lived in a swamp. Beside him, Jolly Robin seemed somewhat awkward and clownish. But then, Jolly always claimed that he was just a plain, ...
— The Tale of Jolly Robin • Arthur Scott Bailey
... occasion, said, "Bully," and "I thought it was great," with such absolute frankness and sincerity that Aladdin's heart almost warmed toward him. It was presently known all over the house that Aladdin had written the song. And some of the more clownish of the young people called for Author, ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... the famille Bearbinder, parents and daughter, together with Sir Hector Rumbush and a clownish son, who the former insists shall marry the sentimental Barbara Bearbinder, but who, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... indicated. Then there was good in him to the measure of admiring a woman like Alexa, though not of admiring a far better. He saw himself in danger of losing her; concluded influences at work to the frustration of his own; surmised that she doubted the character of his business; feared the clownish farmer-poet might have dazzled with his new reputation her womanly judgment; and felt himself called upon to make good his position against any and every prejudice she might have conceived against him! He would yield ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... dimensions. Addison observes that 'women are armed with fans, as men with swords, and sometimes do more execution with them.' The graceful carriage of each weapon was considered a test of high breeding. The clownish man was in danger of being tripped up by his sword getting between his legs: the fan held clumsily looked more of a burden than an ornament; while in the hands of an adept it could be made to speak a language ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... for the place even of a menial servant, they were too clownish and awkward for the presence of the lady of the house;—and once, when William (who had been educated at the free grammar-school of the town in which he was born, and was an excellent scholar), hoping to obtain the good opinion of a young clergyman whom he solicited for the favour of waiting ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... be well employed To speak of errors we can all avoid. Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope The careless lips that speak of so'ap for soap; Her edict exiles from her fair abode The clownish voice that utters ro'ad for road Less stern to him who calls his coat a co'at, And steers his boat, believing it a bo'at, She pardoned one, our classic city's boast, Who said at Cambridge mo'st instead of most, But knit her brows and stamped her angry foot To hear a Teacher ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... ordinary commonplace courtiers; the lovers, men and women in the condition of all conditions in which fairy-powers might get a hold of them; the quarrelling king and queen of Fairyland, with their courtiers, Blossom, Cobweb, and the rest, and the court-jester, Puck; the ignorant, clownish artisans, rehearsing their play,—fairies and clowns, lovers and courtiers, are all mingled in one exquisite harmony, clothed with a night of early summer, rounded in by the wedding of the king and queen. But I have talked enough about it. Let ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... us to imagine the disgust, the anger, possibly even the alarm, with which many may have beheld the floor now taken, not by Peyton Randolph, nor Richard Bland, nor George Wythe, nor Edmund Pendleton, but by this new and very unabashed member for the county of Louisa,—this rustic and clownish youth of the terrible tongue,—this eloquent but presumptuous stripling, who was absolutely without training or experience in statesmanship, and was the merest novice even in the ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler |
