"Drollery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... friend or two to dinner with him, and would entertain them most hospitably, and with increasing frequency, as his means became rapidly more ample. He was also fond of the theatres, taking special delight in comedies and farces, however broad, and even pantomimes. With what solemn drollery he would afterwards dwell on the feats of Clown and Pantaloon! I am here, however, speaking of several years ago; for latterly he said, "It was a very hard thing to find any thing to laugh at in a pantomime, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... sorts of antics, to the utter amazement of the spectators. When the chaplain endeavored, by serious advice and admonition, to bring him to a proper sense of his dreadful situation, he grinned, made faces at him, tried to tickle him, and played a thousand other pranks with such astonishing drollery, that the gravest countenances became cheerful, and the saddest hearts glad. The soldiers who attended at the gallows were so delighted with his merriment, which they deemed magnanimity, that the sheriffs began to apprehend a rescue, and ordered the hangman instantly to do his duty. He ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... beautifully husbanding his resources for him—dangled, naturally, with no small vividness, before the wistful gentlewomen, to whom, if he had but had the initiative, he might have made the most princely presents. Such was the oddity, not to say the rather tragic drollery, of the situation: that Henry's idea of a present was ten cents' worth of popcorn, or some similar homely trifle; and that when one had created for him a world of these proportions there was no honest way of inspiring ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... this diversion of tearing them to pieces, still flattering herself that her present wit and drollery would prevail with Ormond, as she had found it prevail with most people against an absent friend. But Ormond thought upon this occasion she showed more flippancy than wit, and more ill-nature than humour. He was shocked at the want of feeling and reverence for age with which she, a young girl, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... looked at each other with a growing drollery on either face, and presently broke into ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... competitors. In lucid ingenious talk and logic, in all manner of brilliant utterance and tongue-fence, I have hardly known his fellow. So ready lay his store of knowledge round him, so perfect was his ready utterance of the same,—in coruscating wit, in jocund drollery, in compact articulated clearness or high poignant emphasis, as the case required,—he was a match for any man in argument before a crowd of men. One of the most supple-wristed, dexterous, graceful and successful fencers in that kind. A man, as Mr. Hare has said, "able to argue with four ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... practical jokes and unmerciful "guying" are the characteristic wit, and such smart tricks as bumping an unsuspecting comrade's head against the wall are applauded with shrieks of admiring laughter. The onlookers may be excused for their tacit countenance of the rudeness, since some element of drollery—that might have been wit, under better conditions—compels a smile, in spite of a dignified disapproval of the performance. A young student, unused to such scenes, standing a little apart from such a group once remarked judicially to a lady near him, "I do not care for such dare-devil sociability." ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... nor rhetorical, he is apt to drop into mere mechanical flatness. But nobody has described more vigorously all the meaner forms of selfishness, stupidity, and sycophancy engendered under 'that fatal drollery,' as Tancred describes it, 'called a parliamentary government.' The pompous dulness which affects philosophical gravity, the appetite for the mere dry husks and bran of musty constitutional platitude which takes the airs of political wisdom, the pettifogging cunning which supposes the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the recipient of one of the most amusing and yet most virulent attacks which even that controversial age produced. "The whole pamphlet," Mr. Collins truly says, "is inimitable. Its irony, its humour, its drollery, are delicious." ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... clew to man's relation with the unseen and eternal that we miss in Shakspere. He fails to show one trait which belongs to human nature as truly as Hotspur's courage or Falstaff's drollery. He nowhere depicts a life controlled by a moral ideal, deliberately chosen and resolutely pursued. His world is rich in passion, but deficient in clear and high purpose and soldierly resolve. The metal of mastery is lacking. He shows us life as a wonderful ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... learn to bear with the negro, because he has qualities necessary to fill up the harmony of life. As a general thing, the Irish servants are perhaps more honest, and dull as they seem, have more head; but the negro has more heart. His nature is irrepressible and joyous; he is full of comicality and drollery, of fun, jeers, jokes, yah-yas, and merriment; and this element will be needed in our midst to temper our puritan and national seriousness. He loves music whether sad, burlesque, or gay; is devoted to those who treat him worthily, his affections being easily ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... not lived by rule (on her showing) she would have lived infallibly by riot. Her rules and her riots, her reservations and her concessions, all her luxuriant theory and all her extravagant practice; her drollery, that mocked at her melancholy; her imagination, that mocked at her drollery; and her wonderful manners, all her own, that mocked a little at everything: these were part of the constant freshness which made those ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... of James Smith, of the Rejected Addresses, that "if he had not been a witty man, he would have been a great man." Hood's humor and drollery kept in the background the pathos and beauty of his sober productions; and Dr. Holmes, we suspect, might have ranked higher among a large class of readers than he now does had he never written his ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... repressing all emotion, the unchangeable coolness of Dagobert never failed him; and, though few were less given to drollery, he was now and then highly comic, by reason of the imperturbable gravity with ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... considered immensely humorous and diverting in their day. Burke complimented her on "her natural vein of humor," and another eminent critic speaks of "her sarcasm, drollery, and humor;" but it would be almost impossible to find a passage for quotation that would now satisfy on these points. Even Jane Austen's novels, which strangely retain their hold on the public taste, are tedious to those who dare to think for themselves ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... These disappointments he not only took with imperturbable good humour, but rejoiced with a particular relish over his nephew's success in the same field. 'I glory in the professor,' he wrote to his brother; and to Fleeming himself, with a touch of simple drollery, 'I was much pleased with your lecture, but why did you hit me so hard with Conisure's' (connoisseur's, QUASI amateur's) 'engineering? Oh, what presumption! - either of you or MYself!' A quaint, pathetic figure, this of uncle John, with his dung cart and ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... how to make them real and how to carry them through moving and thrilling scenes with unconscious heroism and often with equally unconscious dry drollery."—The Outlook. ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... conspicuously happy one. Prof. Stowe, who seemed so much like a myth to the general public, was a man of great learning and keen intelligence, unimaginative as he says himself, but richly endowed with "a certain broad humor and drollery." His son tells us that he was "an inimitable mimic and story-teller. No small proportion of Mrs. Stowe's success as a literary woman is to be attributed to him." The Sam Lawson stories are said to be a little more his than hers, being "told as they came from Mr. Stowe's lips with little ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... cognizance whatever of the young man's tone and smile. First-class humorists are, as is well known, remarkable for the immovable solemnity of their features. Clement promised himself not a little amusement from the curiously sedate drollery of the venerable Deacon, who, it was plain from his conversation, had cultivated a literary taste which would make him a more agreeable companion than the common ecclesiastics of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... what is called 'the world' that I'm afraid I'm very ready to take drollery for a serious ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... looked at the charming child, to whom Lord Petherton was talking with evident kindness and gaiety—a conjunction that evidently excited Mitchy's interest. "May WE then know her?" he asked with an effect of drollery. ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... the first year of its life, and he named them Puss, Bess, and Tiney. He built them houses to sleep in, and always kept them near him. Bess, who died soon after he was full grown, "was," writes Cowper, "a hare of great humor and drollery. Puss was tamed by gentle usage; Tiney was not to be tamed at all." Once poor Puss was sick. His master nursed him with the greatest care. He says: "No creature could be more grateful than my patient ...
— Harper's Young People, January 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Presbyterian charge of Popery, as it is managed by Mr. Baxter in his Treatise on the Grotian Religion. Dr. Parker likewise preached up the doctrine of Non-resistance, which slavish principle is admirably calculated to prepare the people for receiving any yoke. Marvel, whose talent consisted in drollery, more than in serious reasoning, took his own method of exposing those opinions. He wrote a piece called The Rehearsal Transposed, in which he very successfully ridiculed Dr. Parker. This ludicrous essay met with several answers, some serious, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... loved originality and drollery of all kinds, was apparently very fond of this old man, and rang the bell for more tea to stop his coughing. It was ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Voltaire was, indeed, not inhuman; but he venerated nothing. Neither in the masterpieces of art nor in the purest examples of virtue, neither in the Great First Cause nor in the awful enigma of the grave, could he see anything but subjects for drollery. The more solemn and august the theme, the more monkey-like was his grimacing and chattering. The mirth of Swift is the mirth of Mephistopheles; the mirth of Voltaire is the mirth of Puck. If, as Soame Jenyns oddly imagined, a portion of the happiness of Seraphim and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a careless, desultory way. His tone was loud yet not declamatory, at first in a grumbling, grandfatherly, half-humorous, querulous accent that riveted every ear instantly. A sort of drollery of a contagious kind haunted it. Here and there a member tittered in expectation ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... have it. There are eight translations into English alone; but it is always impossible for the translator to render its true spirit or to give it full justice. With all its vivacity and drollery, its delicate satire and keen ridicule, it has a mournful tinge of melancholy running through, and here and there peeping out, only to have been gathered from such experience as his. He wrote with neither bitterness nor a diseased imagination, ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the mountain," as the phrase, often heard in Sulaco, went, could also be seen in the drawing-room of the Casa Gould. He sat with modest assurance at some distance from the tea-table. With his knees close together, and a kindly twinkle of drollery in his deep-set eyes, he would throw his small and ironic pleasantries into the current of conversation. There was in that man a sort of sane, humorous shrewdness, and a vein of genuine humanity so often found in simple old soldiers of proved courage who have seen ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... seldom held it above half a year, or a year at most; "And then," said he, "we go to the uplands again and fetch another;" so that marrying of wives was reckoned a kind of good farm to them. It is true the fellow told this in a kind of drollery and mirth; but the fact, for all that, is certainly true; and that they have abundance of wives by that very means. Nor is it less true that the inhabitants in these places do not hold it out, as in other countries, and as first you seldom meet with very ancient people ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... seem as if there were a certain drollery of art which leads men who think they are doing one thing to do another and very different one. Thus, men have set up in their painted church-windows the symbolisms of virtues and graces, and the images of saints, and even of Divinity itself. Yet now, what does the window do but mock the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... expressed his delight in the prospect, and kissed the Prioress's hand, but the heavy door was already being opened, and with an expressive look of drollery and resignation, the good lady withdrew her hand, hastily brought her Benedictine hood and veil closely over her face, and rode into the court, followed by her suite. Anne had time to let her hand be kissed by Sir Giles ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... him! blind and dumb, Deaf and dumb, Twirl the carle so troublesome! Kinsman, once so full of glee, Kinsman, where's thy drollery, Where thy tricks, thou cunning one? All thy tricks are spent and past, To the devil gone at last Like a silly fop thou'lt prate, Like a washerwoman rate. Thou art but a simpleton. Now thou mayest—more shame ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... me in the strangest quiet way imaginable. 'You insulted Lady Featherstone at Ohlau, Mr. Wogan,' said he, 'one evening when she hid behind your curtain. It was a very delicate piece of drollery, no doubt. But I shall be glad to show you another, view of it.' It is strange how that had rankled in his thoughts. I liked him for it,—upon my soul, I did,—though it was the only thing I liked ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... wounded who have been invalided home were asked whether this humor in the trenches is the real thing, or only an affected drollery to conceal the emotions the men feel in the face of death; but they all declare that it is quite spontaneous. One old soldier, well accustomed to being under fire, freely admitted that he had never been with such a cheery and courageous lot of youngsters ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... of the times determines the standard of wit. At various periods in the world's history, men have been amused by strange and differing forms of drollery; what seemed excruciatingly funny to our grandparents does not strike us as being at all entertaining. Each generation has its own idea of humour, and its own fun-makers, varying as ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... characters, a circumstance which an imaginative boy of ten, named John Milton, was not to forget. "Pan's Anniversary," late in the reign of James, proclaimed that Jonson had not yet forgotten how to write exquisite lyrics, and "The Gipsies Metamorphosed" displayed the old drollery and broad humorous stroke still unimpaired and unmatchable. These, too, and the earlier years of Charles were the days of the Apollo Room of the Devil Tavern where Jonson presided, the absolute monarch of English literary ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... this letter alludes, has little of the spirit of malice and drollery, so rife in his earlier ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... The man has a passion for your Vittoria; for her voice solely, I believe. He is considered, no doubt truly, a great connoisseur. He could have a passion for nothing else, or alas!' (the duchess shook her head with doleful drollery) 'would he insist on written securities and mortgages of my private property when he lends me money? How different the world is from the romances, my Laura! But for De Pyrmont, I might fancy my smile was really incapable of ransoming an empire; I mean an emperor. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this Knox has a vein of drollery in him; which I like much, in combination with his other qualities. He has a true eye for the ridiculous. His History, with its rough earnestness, is curiously enlivened with this. When the two Prelates, entering ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... be the guest of this earthen hospitality,—how much beauty, love, and heartbreak are to be covered in that pit of clay. All we remember of Ophelia reacts upon us with tenfold force, and we recoil from our amusement at the ghastly drollery of the two delvers with a shock of horror. That the unconscious Hamlet should stumble on this grave of all others, that it should be here that he should pause to muse humorously on death and decay,—all this prepares ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... was in extreme good-humour, repeated epigrams, ballads, anecdotes, stories, which, as Madame S'evign'e says, put one in mind " "de sa d'efunte veine." The Countess was not in extreme good-humour, but in the best-humoured ill-humour in the world; contested every thing with great drollery, and combated Mrs. Cleveland on Madame Maintenon's character, with as much satire and knowledge of the world as ever I heard in my life. I told my Lord Bath General Wall's foolish vain motto, "Aut Caesar aut nihil." He replied, "He is an impudent fellow; he should have taken 'Murus ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... noisy; and over all, with moonlight calmness and steadiness, Mary Pitkin ruled and presided, dispensing to each his portion in due season, while Diana, restless and mischievous as a sprite, seemed to be possessed with an elfin spirit of drollery, venting itself in sundry little tricks and antics which drew ready laughs from the boys and reproving glances from the deacon. For the deacon was that night in one of his severest humors. As Biah Carter afterwards remarked of ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... kind of literature. And Dibdin, the Macaulay of bibliography, loses his head in admiration of the "entertaining volume," extolling the figures without stint for "merit in conception and execution," "bold and free pencilling," "spirit and point," "delicacy, truth, and force," "spirit of drollery," &c., &c.; summarising thus, "few books are more pleasing to the eye, and more gratifying to the fancy than the early editions of the 'Stultifera Navis.' It presents a combination of entertainment to which the curious can ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... soon after he was full grown, and whose death was occasioned by his being turned into his box, which had been washed, while it was yet damp, was a hare of great humour and drollery. Puss was tamed by gentle usage; Tiney was not to be tamed at all; and Bess had a courage and confidence that made him tame from the beginning. I always admitted them into the parlour after supper, where the carpet ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... station,—or how far he had power to hurt him hereafter;—but if it was a dirty action,—without more ado,—The man was a dirty fellow,—and so on.—And as his comments had usually the ill fate to be terminated either in a bon mot, or to be enlivened throughout with some drollery or humour of expression, it gave wings to Yorick's indiscretion. In a word, tho' he never sought, yet, at the same time, as he seldom shunned occasions of saying what came uppermost, and without much ceremony;—he had but too many temptations in life, of scattering ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... hopeless patients of a mad-doctor rather,—exhibitions of folly betraying itself in spite of existing reason and prudence. He not poetically, but painfully exaggerates every trait; that is, not by the drollery of the circumstance, but by the ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... necessity cover a scheming heart. It may, however, be noticed that a good many members of the Bradshaw family possess a keen and rather sinister sense of the humorous, inherited doubtless from their great ancestor, the dry wag who wrote that monument of quiet drollery, Bradshaw's Railway Guide. So with the hero ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... reader may like to see a few "specimens" of some notes which Lamb took the pains to make on two of the tales that were shown to him. I give these the rather that there is occasionally blended with their critical nicety of tact, a drollery that is very characteristic of the writer. I shall leave these notes and verbal criticisms to speak for themselves, after merely explaining that they are written on separate bits of paper, each note having ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... pique that was apparent in the soldier's manner; but, after following the train of her own thoughts in silent enjoyment for a moment longer, she seemed to yield to their drollery, and laughed until her dark eyes flashed with merriment. Cecilia did not assume the severe gravity with which she sometimes endeavored to repress, what she thought, the unseasonable mirth of her cousin; and the wondering Griffith fancied, as he glanced his eye from one to the other, that ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... boy who had exhibited such coolness and daring on the day of his father's death, many stories are told after he reached manhood. "He was naturally a man of considerable genius," says one who knew him. "He was a man of great drollery. It would almost make you laugh to look at him. I never saw but one other man who excited in me the same disposition to laugh, and that was Artemus Ward. Abe Lincoln had a very high opinion of his uncle, and on one occasion remarked that Uncle Mord had ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... fine, savory herbs, such as Drollery, which is always in season, or Pleasant Reminiscence, which no one need be without, as it keeps for years, ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... two faces, and for once was minded to let both be seen, enjoyed the Frenchman's perplexity. He wished to stand well with Flavia, and here was a rare opportunity of exhibiting at once his friendliness and his powers of drollery. He was surprised, therefore, and taken aback, when a grave voice cut ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... may be considered as unique there is nothing like it in any language. For drollery, knowledge of the world, various satire, general utility, united with great vivacity of composition, Gil Blas is unrivalled: but, as a merely agreeable book, the Memoirs of Grammont perhaps deserve that character more than any which was ever written: it is pleasantry throughout, ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... d'Alfarache, Lazarillo de Tormes, or Estevanillo Gonzalez might have sat:—faces that almost make one in love with roguery, they seem so full of vivacity and enjoyment. There was all the knavery, and more than all the drollery of a Spanish picaroon in the laughing eyes of the English apprentice; and, with a little more warmth and sunniness of skin on the side of the latter, the resemblance between them ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... hear his stout figure, in black, with florid face, and powdered hair, his raised and clasped hands,—rushing out of the lockup-house scene in all the fervid extasy of a father rejoicing at the escape of his son from destruction. In Crack, Dozey, Nipperkin, and other drunken characters, his drollery was irresistible. His intoxication displayed as much discrimination as his pathetic performances. Who can forget his stare in being detected in his fuddling as Dozey, and his plea for drinking to "wa-ash down your honour's health:" or his anti-polarity as Nipperkin, when his very ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... Irish actors I knew were Barry Aylmer, James Foster O'Neill, and Hubert O'Grady. They were impersonators of what were known as "Irish parts," and being genuine Irish Nationalists, as well as actors, did much to elevate the character of such performances. For with them, all the wit and drollery were retained, while they helped, by their example, to banish the buffoonery that used to characterise ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... person often frequented Whitelocke, his countryman, and his house, and after some time made a request to Whitelocke to speak to the Queen in his favour. Whitelocke, knowing that ambassadors' offices ought not to be cheap, told Symonds in a kind of drollery that surely he could not expect such a courtesy from him, since, being an Englishman, he had not acquainted the English Ambassador with any matter of consequence, nor done any service to his country, since Whitelocke's arrival here; that when he ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... allow me to tell him all about it, and this was his reply. 'Our Lord made that promise long before the discovery of America and the establishment of the peculiar institutions of this country. If he had lived at this day, I reckon,' he continued with a look of drollery, 'he would have said "Ask and ye shall receive—if you aint a nigger." I can't take you into my school because you are black, but I'll send you down to the American Missionary school at Chattanooga. You can ask and receive there whether you are ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 42, No. 3, March 1888 • Various
... nature, in reasserting herself, had made deliberate selection of its agent. The pure poet of Comus, the man who had publicly boasted his chastity, had trained up a pupil to become the editor of an immodest drollery! Another and more original production of John Phillips, the Satyr against Hypocrites, was an open attack, with mixed banter and serious indignation, on the established religion. "It affords," says Godwin, "unequivocal indication ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... tremendous bang at the end of the andante movement. He is said to have invented this part in order to arouse the attention of the audience and make the ladies scream. Again, in the 'Toy Symphony,' he shows a child-like appreciation of drollery in producing genuine music out of such toy instruments as tin whistles, jew's-harps, toy trumpets, etc. The 'Toy Symphony' was composed at Eisenstadt, where, having visited a village fair and purchased a number of toy instruments, Haydn was seized with the idea of making ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... heroes of romance and high comedy. The theatre-going public and his admirers—the terms are synonymous—may breathe again. ALEXANDER is surprisingly good as Dr. Bill, and the serious earnestness with which he invests the part intensifies the drollery of the complications. And to think that the adapter of this gay and festive piece should be none other than the sentimental troubadour, song-writer and composer, author of a Lyceum Tragedy and other similar trifles, Mr. HAMILTON AIDE!! "Sir," in future ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... moment, from its bepuffed and distorted appearance, to an expression of arch and coquettish benignity, I gave my lady a pat on the one cheek, and a kiss on the other, and without saying one syllable (Furies! I could not), left her astonished at my drollery, as I pirouetted out of the room in a ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... serious bullying was uncommon, and not unfrequently a hideous retribution befell a bully through some "big fellow" resolving to wreak on him what he inflicted on others. We can recall one very bright, brilliant youth, now high in the Indian civil service, whose drollery when bullying was irresistible, even to those who knew their turn might come next. "Come here, F——," we remember his saying to a fat youth of reputed uncleanness: then dropping his voice to a tone of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... seems to have nothing in the least to do with wisdom? Nay, so far is he from the affectation of being accounted wise, that he is content, all the rights of devotion which are paid unto him should consist of apishness and drollery. Farther, what scoffs and jeers did not the old comedians throw upon him? O swinish punch-gut god, say they, that smells rank of the sty he was sowed up in, and so on. But prithee, who in this case, always merry, youthful, soaked in wine, and drowned in pleasure, who, ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... said Don Alvaro; "but though he had the name of being very droll, I never heard him say anything that had any drollery in it." ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... turf and in field sports; he subsequently found his chief entertainment in literary avocations. As a poet, he had been better known if his efforts had been of a less fragmentary character. The general tendency of his Muse was drollery, but some of his lyrics ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... peculiar. An ignorant nation is brutal, but an uneducated community in the midst of an enlightened nation is quaint, unconsciously softened by the cultivation and refinement of institutions that lie far away. In such communities live poets with lyres attuned to drollery. Moved by the grandeurs of nature, the sunrise, the sunset, the storm among the mountains, the tiller of the gullied hill-side field is half dumb, but with those apt "few words which are seldom spent in vain," he charicatures his own sense of beauty, mingling rude metaphor with ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... was inclined to think the old gentleman had really an afterpart of his story in reserve; but he sipped his wine and said nothing more; and there was an odd expression about his dilapidated countenance that left me in doubt whether he were in drollery or earnest. ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... full of drollery as ever it can hold; 'tis like an orange stuck with Cloves as for conceipt."—The Rehearsal, 1671, act iii, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... bright, pointed sayings, in fine little touches of humor, in amusing anecdotes and incidents of her own experience, which she related with astonishing ease and fluency, sometimes also in downright girlish fun and drollery; and all was rendered doubly attractive by her low, sweet woman's voice and her merry, fitful laugh. Yet these things were but the sparkle of a very deep and serious nature. Even then her religious character was to me wonderful. She seemed always to know just what was prompting her, ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... what I most required; upon which the learned doctor observed, with proper gravity, that brandy would probably be the most efficacious remedy, as he had often heard that English soldiers lived entirely on exciting drinks. Ill as I was, I could scarcely refrain from laughing at the drollery of ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... disappeared, another drollery was exhibited, called the "Fool and his Five Sons," the names of the hopeful offspring of the sapient sire being Pickle Herring, Blue Hose, Pepper Hose, Ginger Hose, and Jack Allspice. The humour of this ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... spirit moved no one to open his mouth. I judged at last that the horses had been baited sufficiently, silently showed my watch to the postilions, who, with ourselves, got up and went away without a word having been said to mar the quaint drollery of the incident. ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... aback by her sharp tone, gave a long whispered whistle, and pretended to hide under the table. He had a certain gift of drollery which made it difficult not to laugh even at his most foolish antics, and Marian was giving way in spite of herself when she found Douglas bending over her and saying, in ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... the vague of that far-off time another face and figure, as essentially New En&land as this, and yet so different, relieve themselves. Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as far as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized Yankee. He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking, and he so became a literary product of a rarer and stranger sort than our literature ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and looked like walking bushes. In this costume they crept from one visitor to another. Such a boy covered with leaves and his head adorned with twigs is called a "Pfingstkonig" [Whitsuntide-King]. This drollery is ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... come Mr. Battersby; and we falling into a discourse of a new book of drollery in verse called Hudebras,[33] I would needs go find it out, and met with it at the ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... well as I remember, of indignant protest; and, in the act, the packet slipped from my fingers, glanced between the railings, and fell and sunk in the river. I stood a moment petrified, and then, struck by the drollery of the incident, gave way to peals of laughter. I was still laughing when my stepmother reappeared, and the maid, who doubtless considered me insane, ran off to join her; nor had I yet recovered my gravity when I presented myself before the lawyer to solicit a ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... trinkebla. Drip guteti. Drive away (expel) forpeli. Drive (in carriage) veturi. Drive back (repel) repeli, repusxi. Drivel (to slaver) kracxeti. Driver (car, etc.) veturisto. Droll ridinda, sxerca. Drollery sxerco—ado. Dromedary unugxiba kamelo. Drone burdo. Droop (pine) malfortigxi. Drop guto. Dropsy akvosxvelo. Dross metala sxauxmo. Drought senpluveco. Drove (cattle) bestaro, brutaro. Drown droni. Drown (trans.) dronigi. Drowsy dorma. Drub (beat) bati. Drudge laboregi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... faculties, and are named, not too subtly, the Armstrong gate. This, indeed, is the American beauty of ranch humour, a flower of imperishable fragrance handed to the visitor—who does the lifting with guarded drollery or triumphant snicker, as may be. Buck Devine or Sandy Sawtelle will achieve the mot with an aloof austerity that abates no jot unto the hundredth repetition; while Lew Wee, Chinese cook of the Arrowhead, fails not to brighten it with a nervous giggle, impairing ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... rides on fine days, battledore and shuttlecock on wet ones, music, singing, paper games, giggling and making giggle, and sometimes dancing in the hall—Mr. Frank Fordyce joining with all his heart and drollery in many of these, like the boy ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hurriedly into a great heap of earth at the other end of the shelter. We quickly uncovered Walter, a lad who had kept us laughing at his drollery on many a rainy night. The earth had been heaped loosely on him and ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... new circumstances and ideas must necessarily make in this respect. Meanwhile I would strive to reverence man as man, irrespective of his birthplace. A stranger in a strange land is always to me an object of sympathy and interest. Amidst all his apparent gayety of heart and national drollery and wit, the poor Irish emigrant has sad thoughts of the "ould mother of him," sitting lonely in her solitary cabin by the bog-side; recollections of a father's blessing and a sister's farewell are haunting ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Sebas. A living drollery.[431-7] Now I will believe That there are unicorns; that in Arabia There is one tree, the phoenix throne;[431-8] one phoenix At this hour ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... to carry poetry almost to its perfection. But to write a panegyric on Shakespear appears as unnecessary, as the attempt would be vain; for whoever has any taste for what is great, terrible, or tender, may meet with the amplest gratification in Shakespear; as may those also have a taste for drollery and true humour. His genius was almost boundless, and he succeeded alike in every part of writing. I cannot forbear giving the character of Shakespear in the words of a great genius, in a prologue spoken by Mr. Garrick when he first ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... sought guest in pleasant country-houses, where his zeal for country sports, his knowledge of and fondness for horses, his capital equestrianism, and inexhaustible fund of humor, made him as popular with the men as his sweet, genial temper, good breeding, musical accomplishments, and infinite drollery did with the women. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... was simple. In his countenance there was a mixture of goodness, solemnity, and drollery, which fixed every eye that beheld it. No one was more generally loved or revered; no one less assuming or more pleasing in his manner. Seeing his external simplicity, persons with whom he was arguing were sometimes tempted ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... of my Bob being Number Three!" murmured Catherine, with that plaintive drollery of hers which I had found irresistible ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... of great drollery, and it would almost make you laugh to look at him. I never saw but one other man whose quiet, droll look excited in me the disposition to laugh, ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... to-night," whispered a thin man, who looked like a tailor, seated on the other side of Leonard. Time flies,—an hour. Look again at the Dutch clock. John Burley is grand, he is in his zenith, at his culminating point. What magnificent drollery! what luxuriant humour! How the Rabelais shakes in his easy-chair! Under the rush and the roar of this fun (what word else shall describe it?) the man's intellect is as clear as gold sand under a river. Such wit and such truth, and, at times, such a flood ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the onely drinking: and for thy walles a pretty slight Drollery, or the Storie of the Prodigall, or the Germane hunting in Waterworke, is worth a thousand of these Bed-hangings, and these Flybitten Tapistries. Let it be tenne pound (if thou canst.) Come, if it were not ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... round the peg, and every time the gust struck the sail he was lifted from his seat by the crowding of the oar and the haul of the rope. His muscles swelled tense and rigid—the sweat poured from his face; but he laughed when Lincoln, with reckless drollery, began to shout a ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... old gentleman, maddened by a bluebottle, smashes all his furniture and breaks every window-pane but one—where the bluebottle is. And in all these scenes one does not know which is the most irresistible, the most inimitable—the mere drollery or the dramatic truth of gesture ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... you that we almost never hear war talk. We did hear some while our local clown was home, but how much was true and how much his imagination I don't know. Anyway, his drollery made us all laugh. His mother-in-law had died since he left, and when his wife wept on his shoulder, he patted her on the back, and winked over his shoulder at his admiring friends, as he said: ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... masters who ever made studies of the shrew in fiction or in history have never, after all, given us a strictly scientific definition of the creature. They let her exhibit herself in all her drollery or her hatefulness, but they act in somewhat lordly fashion by leaving us to frame our definition from the picturesque data which they supply. Mrs. Mackenzie, in "The Newcomes," is repulsive to an awful degree, but the figure is as true as true can be, ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... invincible one. [Footnote: I am indebted for this "marchen" to Maria Saksis, a very intelligent Penobscot woman, a widow of a former governor, whom I met at North Conway, in the White Mountains, N. H. In her dialect Glooskap is invariably called Glus-gah-be. She told it with that admirable dry drollery, characteristic of a good story-teller in a race where there are no bad ones. The exquisite humor and humanity of this little legend, placed as a pendant to the stupendous successes of the giant hero, are such as to entitle its Indian author ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... x. of the Vienna edition of Schiller are some ludicrous verses, almost his sole attempt in the way of drollery, bearing a title equivalent to this: 'To the Right Honourable the Board of Washers, the most humble Memorial of a downcast Tragic Poet, at Loeschwitz;' of which Doering gives the following account. 'The first part of Don Carlos being already printed, by Goeschen, in Leipzig, the poet, pressed ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... characterized by the oddity and drollery which distinguish Mr. Stockton's from that of the ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... relied less on drollery of incident and indulged more in play upon words than Lever, but the humor of both is essentially of the same kind and drawn from the same source. Compared with much of our American humor, it has a spontaneousness, and above all a lovable quality, that ours lacks. The boy who has laughed over ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... Tayleure (a distinguished double bass), and Vaughan. In "Bombastes Furioso," King Artaxomines was personated by Mr. Richmond; Fusbos by Mr. Clay; General Bombastes by Mr. J. H. Parr, who elicited shouts of laughter by his drollery and admirable acting. Miss Grant, of the Theatre Royal Company, played Distaffina. The house was crowded in every part, the whole town seemed to take an interest in the matter, and every nerve was strained to command success. In fact ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... of music is of the first importance. Whatever his works may "mean," they contain a rhythmic vitality which will keep them alive for ever, and their "child-like cheerfulness and drollery" will charm away care and sorrow as long as the world ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... Green Mountain lad, a broad smile playing over his fine face, as he regarded the drollery of his new acquaintance. "I shall need many suggestions, no doubt, for I feel almost lost in this great city. I had no idea it was so large. I was never here before, and do not know where to go ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... fin'ly finishin' up with an A—men that carries him quarter way 'round the track 'fore he c'n pull up." They all laughed except Miss Verjoos, whose gravity was unbroken, save that behind the dusky windows of her eyes, as she looked at John, there was for an instant a gleam of mischievous drollery. ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... of his Mormon experience, have been preserved, and I have some doubts if any one of his lectures, except the Mormon one, was ever fairly written out. "The Babes in the Wood," as a lecture, was a pure and unmitigated "sell." It was merely joke after joke, and drollery succeeding to drollery, without any connecting thread whatever. It was an exhibition of fireworks, owing half its brilliancy and more than half its effect to the skill of the man who grouped the fireworks together and let them off. In the hands of any other pyrotechnist the squibs ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... racial characteristics of humor, we should pay tribute to the Spanish in the person of Cervantes, for Don Quixote is a mine of drollery. But the bulk of the humor among all the Latin races is of a sort that our more prudish standards cannot approve. On the other hand, German humor often displays a characteristic spirit of investigation. ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... in with 'Little Prudy.' Compared with her, all other book-children are cold creations of literature; she alone is the real thing. All the quaintness of children, its originality, its tenderness and its teasing, is infinite uncommon drollery, the serious earnestness of its fun, the fun of its seriousness, the naturalness of its plays, and the delicious oddity of its progress, all these united for dear Little Prudy to embody them."—North ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... assumption there appeared a series of really familiar epistles, either remonstrating with or speaking of the "Gineral," or, as the Major latterly styled the President, "the Govermint;" no less admirable for the political acumen they display than for a caustic drollery, which is enforced with shrewd Yankee humour, and in the singular phraseology current amongst 'Uncle Sam's' kindred. These letters have been collected, and are published both in America and in England; and although neither the purity of the politics or the dialect of the honest Major can be ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... we've talked—of real things—out there in our own—" She laughed a little, a serene murmur of drollery which came to her when she was at peace. "We've been engaged since November, but we only got engaged to be married to-day—just as our wedding's to be in June, but goodness knows when our marriage ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... carried; but when Alice said those last cold words, "Pray do not ask me," she released the grasp, and left the letter where it was. "I suppose he won't bite me, at any rate," she said, and she assumed that look of childish drollery which she would sometimes put on, almost with a grimace, but still with so much prettiness that no one who saw ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... calculated to inspire that love of country which every reminiscence of the struggle for independence calls forth. The favourite air is the so-called national one of "Hail, Columbia," although this is but second to the fantastic drollery of "Yankee Doodle;" the latter is vociferously called for at all places of amusement, and excites in the audience, at such places of resort, almost frantic sensations. This is the more remarkable, as it was originally composed by an Englishman, and, as it is so intimately connected ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... that and the flashy passages with which it is interlarded. From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step. You laugh and are surprised that any one should turn round and travestie himself: the drollery is in the utter discontinuity of ideas and feelings. He makes virtue serve as a foil to vice; dandyism is (for want of any other) a variety of genius. A classical intoxication is followed by the splashing ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... we ventured to ask His Highness for his autograph. The Prince, who has perhaps a more exquisite sense of humour than any other sovereign of Europe, declared with a laugh that he had no pen. Still roaring over this inimitable drollery, we begged the Prince to honour us by using our ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... being often found that the images with which the memory is furnished, like those pictures hung up before the eyes of pregnant women at Sparta, produce insensibly a likeness to themselves in the offspring which the imagination brings forth. The admirable drollery in Congreve about Lady Froth's verses on ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... straddling his legs, chewing a straw, and shouting his views on the Muirtown races to friends at the distance of half a street. When he was in good humour he would nod to the lads and wink to them with such acuteness and drollery that they attempted to perform the same feat all the way home and were filled with despair. It did not matter that we were fed, by careful parents, with books containing the history of good men who began life with 2s. 11d., and died leaving a quarter of a million, made by selling soft ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... speech, which pleased the farmers with its shrewdness and drollery, feeling at a ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... quiet inert John Martindale, although the bold and gay temper of his companion appeared to be in its own element; and in truth it was as if there was nothing that came amiss to Percival Fotheringham, who was equally ready for deep and scholarly dissertation, or for boyish drollery and good-natured tricks. He had a peculiar talent for languages, and had caught almost every dialect of the natives, as well as being an excellent Eastern scholar, and this had led to his becoming attached to the embassy at Constantinople, ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... contrary, was an original genius, though frequently imitative of Moliere. He possessed the comic spirit, gaiety, animation, the sense of drollery, and a prodigious capacity for humorous verse of great flexibility and incredible ease, highly superior in point of form to that of Boileau and even of Moliere, for he suggests a Scarron perfected by Moliere himself and by the Italian poets. Still alive and probably imperishable are such works as ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet |
