"Comic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "He's a comic-opera sailor, all right; but Lordy! what a man he'll make with his feet on dry earth! Let go my anchor, hey? By Godfrey, he can let go the forestay when we're going about, and I'll forgive ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... the face. It seemed that he had worked his way out to Bombay and back again. He had been reporter to half-a-dozen provincial papers. He had been tutor to Somebody's son at some place not specified. He had tried his hand at comic journalism in London and at cattle-driving in Texas, and had been half-way to glory as a captain of irregulars in the Soudanese war. No, nobody was more surprised than himself when that mystic old ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... arranged between the painter and my brother that they should depart the next day but one; they then began to talk of art. "I'll stick to the heroic," said the painter; "I now and then dabble in the comic, but what I do gives me no pleasure, the comic is so low; there is nothing like the heroic. I am engaged here on a heroic picture," said he, pointing to the canvas; "the subject is 'Pharaoh dismissing Moses from Egypt,' after the last plague—the death of the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... standing by the dresser, gazing at her in a comic manner. He had laid off his hat and gloves and was now fidgeting with the little toilet pieces which were nearest him. He hesitated to believe that the pretty woman before him was involved in anything so unsatisfactory ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... friend to the theatre, where a comic piece was being performed. In his young days Warren had been very partial to plays of that kind, and his joyous peals of laughter on such occasions still rang in the ears of his friend. But the attempt was a complete failure. Warren watched the performance without showing the slightest interest, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... your suggestion, signora, that we should issue satirical pamphlets, or attempt to run a comic paper? That last, I am sure, ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... character there was an element too prosaic, and too practical, to permit her thoughts to dwell long in a region lifted far above the earth. It was inevitable, therefore, that the notion should presently strike her as supremely comic and, quickly leaping to the floor, she let out the one word which, however adequately it may have expressed her conflicting emotions, is never by any chance to be found in the vocabulary ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... thing," said Small, with a very peculiar expression, which might almost be construed into serio-comic, could we suspect the benevolent doctor of any such waggery, "that can possibly throw a shade over our present felicity. Lady Rookwood ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... appeared February 1, 1899, and scored as promptly as "One Night." The demand for the booklets was phenomenal, and Mr. Kountz received thousands of friendly letters applauding him for his humor. He also received flattering offers from the leading comic weeklies, the metropolitan dailies, and great advertisers throughout the Union. He declined them all, being primarily a business man, and carrying literature ...
— Billy Baxter's Letters • William J. Kountz, Jr.
... once outraged. They always stop short of a certain point,—the point where wit degenerates into mockery, and liberty into license: nature is never put to shame, and will commonly bear much more. Especially to the American sense did their humorous and comic strokes, their negro-minstrelsy and attempts at Yankee comedy, seem in a minor key. There was not enough irreverence and slang and coarse ribaldry, in the whole evening's entertainment, to have seasoned one line of some of our most popular comic poetry. But the music, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... personal deficiencies as an actor on his first visit to Court; he was to come supported by actors of the highest eminence in their generation. Directions were given that the greatest of the tragic actors of the day, Richard Burbage, and the greatest of the comic actors, William Kemp, were to bear the young actor-dramatist company. With neither of these was Shakespeare's histrionic position then or at any time comparable. For years they were leaders of ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... offensive manners, had disarmed him except in resentment.[1113] The Times spoke of him as of "secondary rank,"[1114] and the Tribune, the great organ of the party, had declined to put upon him the seal of its approval. Besides, his vanity and arrogance, although not yet a fruitful subject of the comic literature of the day, disparaged almost as much as his brilliant rhetoric exalted him. Careful observers, however, had not failed to measure Conkling's ability. From Paris, William Cullen Bryant wrote his friends to make every effort to nominate him, and Parke ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... prefacer confesses failure. It is the turn of the reader. He may welcome the sketches in book form; he may turn scornfully from them and leave them to moulder in the stock-room of Messrs. Covici-McGee. To paraphrase an old comic opera lyric: ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... the indescribable, inestimable, unmistakable impress of genius. Chaucer, had he been a Galloway man, might have written it, only he would have been more garrulous, and less compact and stern. It is like Tam o' Shanter, in its living union of the comic, the pathetic, and the terrible. Shrewdness, tenderness, imagination, fancy, humor, word-music, dramatic power, even wit—all are here. I have often read it aloud to children, and it is worth any one's while to do it. You will find ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... abreast rapidly, made their way to the station like three grotesque figures in a comic newspaper. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... jargon of the spirits of 'The Love Lucifer,' the same style and character evinced by those to whom they may have been introduced by the 'mejums.' The two Bulwers, the Howitts, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Halls, the De Morgans, &c., have taken a deep interest in these half-comic, half-serious, and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Presbyterianism. She had long conducted herself prudently, but, when she gave way to her indignation, she only used such language as we find on many pages of Wodrow, in the mouths of many Covenanters. Indeed, though Manse is undeniably comic, she also commands as much respect as the Spartan mother when she bids her only son bear himself boldly in the face of torture. If Scott makes her grotesque, he also makes her heroic. But Dr. McCrie could ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... off to survey his prisoner. "I believe you're harmless enough to have the use of your legs and mouth." With a comic bow the little doctor added, "M'sieur, I'm going to ask you to drive us back to Fort Smith, and if you so much as look the wrong way out of your eyes I'll blow off your head. You and your friend are to answer for the killing of Pierre Thoreau and for ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... three great tragic poets of Greece were natives of Attica. AEschylus, the earliest of the three, had recently died in Sicily; but Sophocles was now at the full height of his reputation, and Euripides was rapidly rising into notice. Aristophanes, the greatest of the Grecian comic poets, was also born in Attica, and exhibited plays soon after the beginning of the Peloponnesian war. Herodotus, the Father of History, though a native of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, resided some time at Athens, and accompanied a colony which the Athenians sent to Thurii in Italy. Thucydides, ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... rudeness or greed. He was as scrupulous of his Mess Rules as a Roman Catholic Priest is of his conduct at High Mass. To the newly-joined Subaltern, Guest Night conveyed the holy impression of a religious rite. But here was a comic demonstration of the fact that the strictest training is only, after all, a veneer. Two Senior Officers were actually squabbling about a quarter-pound tin of marmalade! The Subaltern could not help smiling. The incident merely showed how raw and jagged the Great ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... Comics: "These are the publications which have attracted most public attention, both here and overseas, and in particular the type of comic known as the 'crime' or 'horror' comic has come in for a great deal of severe criticism. It is true that reading of a mildly bloodthirsty nature directed at the juvenile market is no new thing. ...
— Report of the Juvenile Delinquency Committee • Ronald Macmillan Algie
... the soul of Cratinus—passable: Aristophanes—racy: Plato—exquisite—not your Plato, but Plato the comic poet; your Plato would have turned the stomach of Cerberus—faugh! Then let me see! there were Naevius, and Andronicus, and Plautus, and Terentius. Then there were Lucilius, and Catullus, and Naso, and Quintus Flaccus,—dear Quinty! as I called him when he sung a seculare for my amusement, while ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... out into the darkness as though sucking in the air when the sash was raised and the thing which had been only a dim babel of wordless sounds a moment before, became now the riotous laughter and the ribald comments of men upon the verses of a comic song which one of ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... is a standard theme for playwrights; what the Scotch were to Johnson, Lamb, and Sidney Smith, is the native of Provence or Brittany to the comic writers of the metropolis,—a nucleus for wit and an occasion for practical jokes. One of the late pieces, called 'My Uncle,' turned upon the devices of a wild youth to obtain money from his simple-hearted relative in the country. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Courteney's urging, "Harriet" chanced to be acting a ludicrous dismay before a transient dilemma in which, as in Ramsey's, staying threatened disaster yet good faith said stay—Ramsey's own present actual case except that Harriet's was comic. A hundred beholders laughed, and then turning and peering at the dim, central figure of Ramsey suddenly redoubled the laugh and presently redoubled ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... kitchen. A few shots were fired, but the Taube was far too high up to be hit. Max, the Joos' cousin, went out and "tirait," to the admiration of the women-kind, and then, of course, "Papa" had to have a try. The two men, with their little gun and their talk and gesticulations, lent a queer touch of comic opera to the scene. The garden was so small, the men in their little hats were so suggestive of the "broken English" scene on the stage, that one could only ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... you last," he continued, "I have been very nearly like it. I couldn't travel alone, I bought silly comic papers, I played nap with young men who talked of nothing but their 'shop' and their young ladies. I have been to a public-house, drunk beer, and shaken hands with the barmaid. I was even disappointed when one of them—a creature with false hair, a loud, ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pictorial caricatures have come down to us which indicate that the religious and other questions of the day were often treated in somewhat the same spirit in which our comic papers deal with political problems and discussions now. We find, for instance, a correspondence between Leo X and the devil, and a witty dialogue between Franz von Sickingen and St. Peter at the gate of ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... a day passes that we don't find out a new trap, or a new gun-barrel, or something; we spend about fifteen millions a year each in our traps, take it altogether; and I don't see how we're to do with less." A highly comic state of life for two private gentlemen! but for two nations, it seems to me, not wholly comic. Bedlam would be comic, perhaps, if there were only one madman in it; and your Christmas pantomime is comic, when there is only one clown in it; but when the whole world turns clown, and ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... yourself, granny! Ha, ha, ha! ho, ho, ho! haw, haw, haw!" shouted a mirthful voice, while an indescribably comic face, half cat and half baby, appeared for a single glimpse above the burdock leaf behind which the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... mildly didactic, and slowly Isidore Diamantstein came to forsake the paths of evil and to spend long afternoons in the serene and admiring companionship of Morris Mogilewsky, Patrick Brennan and Nathan Spiderwitz. But when, early in December, he found a stranded comic valentine and presented it, blushingly, to Eva Gonorowsky, Miss Bailey found that success ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur: he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass, the tragic and the comic indifferently and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point, finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the scrutiny ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... the city on which the sun went down that night, and many were the quaint, sagacious, and comic remarks made by the men as they sat round their various mess-tables in the forecastle of the Roving Bess, speculating noisily and half-seriously on the possibility of getting a run into the interior ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity for suffering which makes man August in the eyes of men) have their source in weaknesses which ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... Beaumont and Fletcher are almost supreme. Their plays are in general most truly delightful. I could read the Beggar's Bush from morning to night. How sylvan and sunshiny it is! The Little French Lawyer is excellent. Lawrit is conceived and executed from first to last in genuine comic humour. Monsieur Thomas is also capital. I have no doubt whatever that the first act and the first scene of the second act of the Two Noble Kinsmen are Shakspeare's. Beaumont and Fletcher's plots are, to be sure, wholly inartificial; ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... come about very much as David had desired and anticipated, and our friend had met quite a number of the "summer people," having been waylaid at times by the rector—in whose good graces he stood so high that he might have sung anything short of a comic song during the offertory—and presented willy-nilly. On this particular Sunday he had lingered a while in the gallery after service over some matter connected with the music, and when he came out of the church most of the people had made their way down the front steps and up ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... St. Ambrose was a great success. He stayed some four or five days, and saw everything that was to be seen, and enjoyed it all in a sort of reverent way which was almost comic. Tom devoted himself to the work of cicerone, and did his best to do the work thoroughly. Oxford was a sort of Utopia to the Captain, who was resolutely bent on seeing nothing but beauty and learning and wisdom within the precincts of the University. On one or two occasions ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... allowed much freedom in its development, was not neglected. A preceptor was on the spot in the person of the fourth inmate of Nohant, an old pedagogue, Deschartres by name, formerly her father's tutor, who had remained in Madame Dupin's service as "intendant." The serio-comic figure of this personage, so graphically drawn by George Sand herself in the memoirs of her early life, will never be forgotten by any reader of those reminiscences. Pedant, she says, was written in every line of his countenance and every movement that he made. He was possessed of some varied ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... be baseness in a voluntary soldier; in the Germans it means only that the war is not their own war; that they are fighting as slaves, not as free men. The idea that we could ever live under the rule of these people is merely comic. To do them justice, they do not now entertain the idea, though they have dallied with ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... the morning to offer us the centre box in the theatre, it being the benefit night of Donna Inocencia Martinez from Madrid, a favourite of the public, and, in fact, a pretty woman and good comic actress. The theatre is small, and, they say, generally deserted, but last night it was crowded. The drop-scene represents the fine arts, who are so fat, that their condition here must be flourishing. We were, however, agreeably disappointed ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... credulous, when you were boys and some of you youths, and they accused me altogether in my absence, when there was no one to defend me. But the most unreasonable thing of all is, that it is not possible to learn and mention their names, except that one of them happens to be a comic poet.[1] Such, however, as, influenced by envy and calumny, have persuaded you, and those who, being themselves persuaded, have persuaded others, all these are most difficult to deal with; for it is not possible to bring any of them ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... Richard's Almanack gives it twice, as "the foot of a master is the best manure" and "the eye of a master will do more work than both his hands." It is perennial in its appeal. The present editor saw it recently in the German comic paper Fliegende Blaetter. But the jest is much older than Cato. It appears in Aeschylus, Persae, 171 and Xenophon employs ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... you two stay sleepily there, looking at the stars like two cats, when I am trying to lure you indoors with the latest comic-opera music! Meinheer van Hert, Mister Pym says, will you ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... one man who was almost altogether and absolutely comic, and yet a man of sense, fidelity, courage, and worth, but over his entire nature the comic ruled supreme—the late Sir Adam Ferguson, whose very face was a breach of solemnity; I dare say, even in sleep he looked a wag. This was the way in which everything appeared to him first, and often last ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... scenic representations and for the picturesque splendour with which they were carried out. The literary gilds, named Chambers of Rhetoric, never took such deep root elsewhere; and in the performance of Mystery Plays and Moralities and of lighter comic pieces (chuttementen and cluyten) many thousands of tradespeople and artisans took part. In the 17th century all the Chambers of Rhetoric had disappeared with the single exception of the famous "Old Chamber" at Amsterdam, ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... below the rest of their species. The unconcealed hostility with which they regard us is a marvellous contrast to the natural or purchasable civility or servility which prevails on British steamers. It has its comic side too, and we are content to laugh at it, and at all the other oddities of this ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... Past bury its dead" would be a better saying if the Past ever died. The persistence of the Past is one of those tragi-comic blessings which each new age denies, coming cocksure on to the stage to mouth its ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... any of his own compositions aloud—whether literary or official—he hurried over the unimportant parts at such a rate that his listeners had hard work to follow him; but those places which are called 'strong touches' in a picture he emphasised with almost comic pathos; he screwed up his mouth as he read, and looked round to see if his listeners caught the points, so that he often upset both his own and their equilibrium. Owing to this habit he was conscious that he did not read well, and was always uncommonly pleased if anybody else would relieve him of ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... entirely of white people, and including many of the highest officers in the Department, evidently caused great embarrassment to performers so unaccustomed to the stage. Not a single song which could be called comic was included in the programme; and, with the exception of a few patriotic airs, the songs were of the 'Lily Dale,' half-mournful sort. Between the pieces there was the customary telling of anecdotes and cracking of jokes, some of which were quite amusing, while others excited laughter ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... o'clock when Mamie, having, at a modest estimate, seen five hundred persecuted heroes, a thousand ill-used heroines, several regiments of cowboys, and perhaps two thousand comic men pursued by angry mobs, returned from her ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... to the group of girls, flushed and lovely beyond compare, holding up the ravished end of that golden braid with a comic dismay, while her despoiler laughed coarsely from a distance and pinned the trophy to his coat lapel. I now saw that blasting was too merciful. He should be removed by a slower process if the thing could as ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... laughed, too, saying: "Quite right, Mr. Cameron. It's only bluff with, us; we never work. Life is one continual comic opera." ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... to such an extent within the last generation or two: her outlook has so broadened, her intellect so developed that she has strayed very far from man's ideal and, consequently, man hesitates to marry her. There is something comic about the situation, and at Olympian dinner-tables I feel sure the gods would laugh at ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... certain Intelligence, when He relinquish'd the Stage. I know, it has been mistakenly thought by some, that Spenser's Thalia, in his Tears of his Muses, where she laments the Loss of her Willy in the Comic Scene, has been apply'd to our Author's quitting the Stage. But Spenser himself, 'tis well known, quitted the Stage of Life in the Year 1598; and, five Years after this, we find Shakespeare's Name among the Actors in Ben Jonson's Sejanus, which first ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... most serio-comic affairs that occurred during my service, may be worth the narration. Shortly after reaching Randolph, one of our sergeants named Brown imported his better-half from Memphis, and for some days they agreed remarkably ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... loved Cicero too well; yet his repentance was but short-lived, since he caused the monks of the Mount of Olives to pass their nights in copying the Ciceronian dialogues, and did not shrink himself from expounding the comic and lyric poets to the ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... and, despite a certain fulness, he was well-proportioned; strength, however, untrammelled, powerful, raw strength was his salient characteristic. Heimert's frame, too broad and too short, and crowned by its mask of a comic clown, looked almost deformed by ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... Natal Carbineers gave an open-air concert to a big audience. A good many women and girls came. As usual the sailors had the best of it in the comic songs, but the event of the evening was "The Queen." Though the Boers must have seen our lights, and perhaps heard the shout of "Send her victorious," they did not fire, not even when the balloon, fresh charged at the gas-works, stalked ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... his fellow-men, and undertakes to right a private wrong by running amuck against society in another part of the world, is a figure upon which we decline to waste our sympathy. We have no place for him in our scheme of art unless it be in comic opera or in the penny dreadful. Emotionally we have lost touch with him as we have with Byron's Corsair. When he stalks across the serious stage and rages and fumes and wipes his bloody sword, we are inclined to smile or to yawn. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... God," replied the grandfather, "he were as good an actor as Monrose." The words struck young Moliere, he took a disgust to his tapestry trade, and it is to this circumstance France owes her greatest comic writer. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Oregon. You could have thrown a brick from their office windows and hit far better land speculations, but they had the common fault of believing that things far away from home are necessarily and always the best. The demand rose for bigger, fatter newspapers, with comic sections and plenty of purple ink, and the Post's owners found themselves unable to supply it. In fact they had to retort by mortgaging their property to the hilt and cutting expenses to rock-bottom. These were dark days ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... ours, which appears in a comic aspect in this article in The Cave, continued throughout the nineteenth century, and withstood the shock of the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny without apparently being in any way shaken; it is breaking now, indeed, under the humiliations ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... all this—No, wait a minute, Merle—come and kiss old Brownie." She knew the ritual now—he could go over it all again and again, and each time with the same happy wonder. Was it odious of her that she was beginning to find it a little comic? And how did it come about that often, when she might be filled with the deepest longing for him, and he burst in upon her boisterously, hungry for her caresses, she would grow suddenly cold, and put him aside? What was the matter? Why did ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... written in conjunction with J.H. Reynolds, his brother-in-law. This was followed by "Whims and Oddities," in prose and verse; "National Tales," and "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," a book full of imaginative verse. Hood's rich sense of humor found scope in his "Comic Annual," appearing through ten successive years, and his collection of "Whimsicalities." Among his minor poems, "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... is to be the spectator of my own life-drama, to be fully conscious of the tragi-comedy of my own destiny; and, more than that, to be in the secret of the tragi-comic itself. ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... small events of life made no impression, thought no more of Miss Wilkeson that evening, but smoked three pipes, told two funny stories, sang one comic song, and then went home, having previously exacted from the three bachelors a promise to call at his rooms and see at least one half of the panorama completed, on ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... upon his company. "I am really touched," he wrote afterward to the parents of two of the visiting boys, "at the way in which your children as well as my own treat me as a friend and playmate. It has its comic side. They were all bent upon having me take them; they obviously felt that my presence was needed to give zest to the entertainment. I do not think that one of them saw anything incongruous in the President's getting as bedaubed with ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... little coward," shouted Esau, who brightened up directly he found that some one had cut a worse figure than he. "I say," he continued, with a forced laugh, "doesn't he look comic up there?" ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... faint pink-and-gray glow he was up and out upon the gallery. He cut a comic figure standing there in his shirt in the half light, with the dewlap at his throat dangling grotesquely in the neck opening of the unbuttoned garment, and his bare bowed legs showing, splotched and varicose. He kept his eyes fixed on the skyline below, to the south. Buzzards are early ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... looked down, not unkindly, on his broad, white, shaven face, round and smooth as her own disc, encircled with a thin fringe of white hair and whiskers. Indeed, he looked so like the prevailing caricatures in a comic almanac of planets, with dimly outlined features, that the moon would have been quite justified in flirting with him, as she clearly did, insinuating a twinkle into his keen, gray eyes, making the ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... moment, to read all the laws of Nature in the one object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic to those who do not share the philosopher's perception of identity. To him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws. Though he meant to be just, he seemed haunted by a certain chronic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... into somnambulism and delirium. In her waking state she was a modest well-behaved girl, and spoke but little. In the somnambulic state, she appeared quite another being; evinced considerable powers of mimicry; sang comic songs; was obedient to every motion of her magnetiser; and was believed to have the power of prophesying the return of her illness — the means of cure, and even the death or recovery of other patients ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... a blooming old funk for about three days and three nights and now I am told I am a hero. Isn't that fine?" Certainly they deserved all the praise they got. In a battle there is always the mixture of the serious and the comic. One Turco, more gallant than his fellows, refused to leave the line and joined the 16th Battalion. He fought so well that they decided to reward him by turning him into a Highlander. He consented to don the kilt, but ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... innocence and goodness. And it was surely a happy stroke of that capricious Fortune to whom Fielding so often refers, to allot a Harlequin Chamber for the birth of the author of nineteen comedies; and yet more appropriate to the robust genius of the Comic Epic was the accident that placed on the wall, beneath the window of his birth-room, a jovial jest in stone. For here some sixteenth-century humorist had displayed the arms of Abbot Beere in the form of a convivial rebus or riddle—to wit, a cross ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... the King On Tuesdays at Tom's does appear, And when he does talk or does sing, To him ne'er a one can come near. For he talks with such ease and such grace, That all charm'd to attention we sit, And he sings with so comic a face That our sides are ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... both in ease and in accuracy, but never lost either its force or its resonance. It ran up and down the whole gamut of the English tongue, from sesquipedalian classicisms (which he generally used to heighten a comic effect) to one-syllabled words of the homeliest Anglo-Saxon. His punctuation was careless, and the impression produced by his written composition is that of a man who wrote exactly as he spoke, without pause, premeditation, or amendment; who was possessed by the subject on which he was writing, ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... football with all the desired bullishness. He had hammered ragtime on the piano like the best ordinary man in the University. With his father he rode to hounds hell for leather, and he wrote comic stuff in a Yale magazine which made him admiringly regarded as a sort of junior George Ade. It was only in secret, and then with a sneaking sense of shame, that he allowed his idealistic side to feed on Browning and Ruskin, ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... would catch sight of him, and if her hands were in the wash-tub, or otherwise engaged, she would cry to the nurse- boy, "Abel, he be off! Jan's off." A comic result of which was that Jan generally announced his own departure in the same words, though not always loud enough to ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... to leave the subject without a passing reference to its effect on the imagination. We are all familiar with comic paper mosquito stories, and some of them are very good. But until actual experience takes you by the hand and leads you into the realm of pure fancy, you will never know of what improvisation the ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... a perpetual state of tension and self-defense; we ought not to be left in doubt whether the speaker is jesting or serious, mocking or tender. Moreover, banter is not humor, and never will be. I think, indeed, that the professional wit finds a difficulty in being genuinely comic, for want of depth and disinterested feeling. To laugh at things and people is not really a joy; it is at best but a cold pleasure. Buffoonery is wholesomer, because it is a little more kindly. The reason why continuous sarcasm repels us is that it lacks two things—humanity ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... promotion a rapidly-increasing prosperity came upon Jane's young man. One day we learned that Mr. Maynard had given William a book. "'Smiles' 'Elp Yourself,' it's called," said Jane; "but it ain't comic. It tells you how to get on in the world, and some what William read to me ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... with tramps and similar derelicts has long been a theme for comic paper and vaudeville jest. Though, heaven knows, the inside of a moving box-car has few jocose features, except in the imagination of humorous artist ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... well-being of men, "to inform men in the best reason of living."[423] Himself a writer for the theatre, Jonson is naturally more concerned with comedy and tragedy than he is with any narrative forms of poetry. And to him the office of the comic poet is "to imitate justice and instruct to life—or stirre up gentle affections."[424] In Timber he iterates the same praise of poetry as being no less effective than philosophy in instructing men to good life, and informing their manners, but as even more effective in that it persuades men ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... had confided the fact of his college training to her, and he was really thinking just then that he would like to give them a serio-comic song, for which he had been famous with his class. He borrowed the violin of a Kanuck, and, sitting down, strummed upon it banjo-wise. The song was one of those which is partly spoken and acted; he really did it very well; but the Willett and Witherby ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... him. He listened angrily at the contradictory utterances. He felt the ignominy of our country's being at such a depth. He knew Germany too well to suppose that she could be deterred by President Wilson's messages. He saw something comic in shaking a long fore-finger and saying, "Tut, tut! I shall consider being very harsh, if you commit these outrages three more times.." To shake your fist at all, and then to shake your finger, seemed to Roosevelt almost imbecile. Cut off from serving the cause of American patriotism in any ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... construction is as follows. There is one main intrigue carried out by the high comedy characters, and a secondary intrigue, or underplot, by the low comedy characters. The former is by no means purely comic, but admits the presentation of the noblest motives, the strongest passions, and the most delicate graces of romantic poetry. In some of the plays it has a prevailing lightness and gayety, as in As You Like It and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Irish nation, for persevering in this usage from time immemorial. The Editor, however, has observed some alarming symptoms, which seem to prognosticate the declining taste for the Ullaloo in Ireland. In a comic theatrical entertainment, represented not long since on the Dublin stage, a chorus of old women was introduced, who set up the Irish howl round the relics of a physician, who is supposed to have fallen under the wooden sword of Harlequin. After the old women have continued their Ullaloo ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... humor, and who, of themselves, would not think of laughing at things at which they do nevertheless laugh heartily because they see others laugh. As for those who have a ready wit and a sense of the comic, do they not enjoy the success of their jokes as much, if not more, than their jokes themselves? Their mirthfulness, then, at least, grows with the joy of spreading it. Very often it happens that many good humorists are temperamentally far from ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... to square with their shallow mechanical taste. The old fairy superstition, the old legends and ballads, the old chronicles of feudal war and chivalry, the earlier moralities and mysteries, and tragi-comic attempts—these were the roots of his poetic tree—they must be the roots of any literary education which can teach us to appreciate him. These fed Shakespeare's youth; why should they not feed our children's? Why indeed? That inborn delight of the young in all ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... was so called from escuocia, a cold hand! Ireland, which is Irlanda in Spanish, means, in Basque, Ira-Landa, i.e., meadow of fern: and so on to the end of the chapter, in a strain which becomes highly comic. Another writer followed in his steps,—Don Juan de Erro y Aspiroz,—who surpassed him in absurdity; proving to his own satisfaction, not only that the Basque is ancient, but that its alphabet furnished one to the Greeks, and that the ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... architect by the ruin of buildings, lawyers and officers of justice by the suits and contentions of men: nay, even the honour and office of divines are derived from our death and vices. A physician takes no pleasure in the health even of his friends, says the ancient Greek comic writer, nor a soldier in the peace of his country, and so of the rest. And, which is yet worse, let every one but dive into his own bosom, and he will find his private wishes spring and his secret hopes grow up at another's expense. Upon ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... music for this event will be supplied by the celebrated Irish piper, Mr. Dinny Dempsey, who will also be seen on the stage in native Irish costume and full regalia. Then, Smith, you can trot out one of your well-known comic monologues that you are so famous in. After that we'll wind up with 'The Strollers' Medley,' in which all the company will take part, and Daisey De Vere can do a favorite stunt of dancing now and then to fill up the gap. Now, then, go to work. Get the people busy and have them ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... in that wild state of hilarity when she seemed to carry all before her. Her sisters could not help laughing every time Betty opened her lips, and it was the same during recess. When many girls clustered round her with their gay jokes, they became convulsed with laughter at her comic replies. ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... reached Beaulieu I had had more than enough of the wild spirits of my comic postman. On entering the town he insisted upon taking me to a hotel which he said he could recommend to me with as much confidence as if I were his brother. Then he left me; but I had not seen the last of him. He presently returned, while I was enjoying the luxury of a quiet ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... safe to hiss him from the manager's box. The venerable augurs of the literary or scientific temple may smile faintly when one of the tribe is mentioned; but the farce is in general kept up as well as the Chinese comic scene of entreating and imploring a man to stay with you, with the implied compact between you that he shall by no means think of doing it. A poor wretch he must be who would wantonly sit down on one of these bandbox reputations. A Prince-Rupert's-drop, which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... were of violations of laws such as it had been my religion to observe since I was a boy, and little except of the comic, ridiculous side of them all. The serious matters of life, if 'twas to judge by what he spoke to me that night, had small interest for him. But the queer power of the man! Had it been light where he could ...
— The Trawler • James Brendan Connolly
... of Aristophanes has not spared the Dionysiac festivals. But the raillery and sarcasm of a comic writer must always be received with many grains of allowance. He has, at least, been candid enough to confess that no one could be initiated who had been guilty of any crime against his country or the public security.—Ranae, v. 360-365.—Euripides makes the chorus in his Bacchae ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... began to publish Salmagundi, a magazine containing humorous articles on the social life of New York. This became so popular that twenty numbers were issued. Having found so much of interest in the life of his native city, Irving next wrote a comic History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, dealing with the early period when the city was ruled by the Dutch. The novel way in which this work was announced would do credit to the most clever advertiser. About six weeks before the book was published, appeared this ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... excellent in his way. La Ducloa and La Raisin were also very good; the charms of the latter had even penetrated the thick heart of our Dauphin, who loved her very tenderly: her husband was excellent in comic parts. There was also a very good harlequin, and as good a scaramouch. Among the best performers at the Opera were Clediere, Pomereuil, Godenarche, Dumenil, La Rochechouard, Maury, La Saint Christophe, La Brigogne, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... "the leading man of the Grand Duke's Opera House" the most original type in comic fiction since we ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... spokesman of the two MacLachlans in his hurried Cowal Gaelic, and his neighbour, echoing him word for word in the comic fashion they have in these parts; "Taing! taing! I never louted to the horseman that rode over me yet, and I would be ill-advised to ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... comic performances of the Athenians were usually brought out at a festival of Bacchus, which lasted for three days. The first of these was devoted to the tapping of their wine-casks; the second to boundless jollity (Plato specifies a town, but not ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... insisted, and soon after the second Iphigenie appeared. The first night the opera did not greatly please; the next night proved a comic tragedy, as the prima donna was intoxicated. After a couple of days' imprisonment she returned and sang well. But the war between the two factions continued till the death of Gluck, and ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... The comic drama of Rome, though it continued to be more or less a translation or an imitation of the Greek, was cultivated with distinguished success by two writers of genius, several of ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... moment in comic dismay. Really this country girl was growing too much for him in ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... his living by comic sketches, and all but lost it again by tragic poems. So he was just the man to be chosen king of the fairies, for in Fairyland ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... vitality again, to get them interested in life again, and to make them keen and alert. As they had been dehumanized by war, so he rehumanized them by natural means. He had a farm, with flowers and vegetables, pigs, poultry, and queer beasts. A tame bear named Flanagan was the comic character of the camp. Colonel Campbell found a thousand qualities of character in this animal, and brought laughter back to gloomy boys by his description of them. He had names for many of his pets—the game-cocks and the ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... breaking out in the company, headed by the clown, who you may recollect was a terribly peevish, fractious fellow, and always in ill-humor. I had a great mind to turn him off at once, but I could not do without him, for there was not a droller scoundrel on the stage. His very shape was comic, for he had to turn his back upon the audience and all the ladies were ready to die with laughing. He felt his importance, and took advantage of it. He would keep the audience in a continual roar, and then come behind the scenes and ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... that cross-eyed people could not be honest. Similarly, perhaps, Newman thought the appearance of bow-legs would increase the villainy of his pirate. Certainly, no such blood-curdling ruffian has been seen out of comic opera. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... round volley of abusive epithets nobody could surpass him. One of his droll comic sentences was often worth a speech of an hour in putting down an opponent, or in gaining supporters to his side. At Nisi Prius, he turned his mingled talent for abuse and drollery to great effect. He covered a witness with ridicule, or made a cause so ludicrous, that the real grounds ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... some little time to find everything, and when I got back to Dennis another song had begun. A young sailor I did not know was singing it, and the less said about it the better, except that it very nearly led to a row. It was by way of being a comic song, but except for one line which was rather witty as well as very nasty, there was nothing humorous about it, unless that it was funny that any one could have been indecent enough to write it, and any one else unblushing enough to sing it. I am ashamed to say I had heard some compositions ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Age, Table Talk, The Plain Speaker, The Round Table (including the Conversations with Northcote and Characteristics), Lectures on the English Poets and Comic Writers, Elizabethan Literature and Characters of Shakespeare, Sketches and Essays (including Winterslow)—represent the work, roughly speaking, of the last twenty years of Hazlitt's life; for in the earlier and longer period he wrote very little, and, indeed, declares ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... late, or I should have come on foot), and found myself in a large crowd of people who, I am happy to state, were put into excellent spirits by my arrival. Having nothing to look at but the mud and the closed doors, they looked at me, and highly enjoyed the comic spectacle. My modesty inducing me to draw off, some hundreds of yards, into a dark corner, they at once forgot me, and applied themselves to their former occupation of looking at the mud and looking in at ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... proofs and passages not yet published. She described to us 'Boffin,' out of Our Mutual Friend, as admirable. He shows all to Forster before-hand, and consults him as to plot, characters, etc. He has a humorous fashion of giving his little boys comic names; later to appear in his stories. Thus, one known as 'Plorn,' which later appeared as 'Plornish.' This is a pleasant picture of the great writer's domestic life, and it gives also a faint 'adumbration' ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... into a narrative of this kind, that objections precisely similar to theirs were long ago raised, and long ago disposed of, in the case of Parliamentary reports, newspaper articles, society papers, and comic publications of all kinds; and, further, that I have never received the slightest intimation that my literary methods were displeasing to the illustrious personages whom my narratives are ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward |
