"Satiric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thieves; it gleams before him for an instant like the coin spun in the air by the conjurer or thimble-rigger, and then vanishes for ever. Yet I have found few men keen enough to penetrate the delusion; it would seem they love to be deluded, and by their conduct justify the satiric ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... irrelevance of the shotgun, the one unessential thing in the studio, and point with rising temper to the statuette. It had, alas! been a birthday present from Ann Marvin, whose statuettes, fashionable and satiric, were famous. ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... takes a thousand years to reach us, the magnitude of the lie seems to me inartistic." The paralysing impudence of such remarks left everyone quite breathless; and even to this day this particular part of Shaw's satiric war has been far less followed up than it deserves. For there was present in it an element very marked in Shaw's controversies; I mean that his apparent exaggerations are generally much better backed up by knowledge ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... considerable, but it is also distinguished; it is a faculty which in the same measure and degree nobody else has possessed. On one side he had the gift of singing those admirable songs of which we have been talking. On the other, he had the gift of right satiric verse to a degree which only three others of the great dead men of this century in England—Canning, Praed, and Thackeray—have reached. Besides all this, he was a "considerable man of letters." But your considerable men of letters, after flourishing, turn to dust in their season, and ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... Highly satiric in his quiet way, La Bruyere knew how to be. Witness the following thrust at a contemporary author, not named by the satirist, but, no doubt, recognized by the public of ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... of the life of "Thrums," with special reference to the ways and character of the "Old Lights," the stubborn conservative Scotch Puritans; it contains also a most amusing and characteristic love story of the sect (given below), and a satiric political skit. 'A Window in Thrums' is mainly a series of selected incidents in detail, partly from the point of view of a crippled woman ("Jess"), sitting at her window and piecing out what she sees with great shrewdness from her knowledge of the general current of affairs, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Holmes, who is matchless among you for wit; A Leyden jar always full charged, from which flit The electrical tingles of hit after hit. His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyric Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satiric; In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes That are trodden upon are your own ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... and no more, just so many speeches and none other, were the work of Shakespeare's or of some other hand. Throughout the first act his presence lightens on us by flashes, as his voice peals out by fits, from behind or above the too meanly decorated altar of tragic or satiric song: in the second it is more sensibly continuous; in the third it is all but utterly eclipsed; in the fourth it is but very rarely intercepted for a very brief interval in the dark divine service of a darker Commination Day: in the fifth it predominates generally ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... day when a fair was held in the square, beneath our windows: Shelley read to us his "Ode to Liberty"; and was riotously accompanied by the grunting of a quantity of pigs brought for sale to the fair. He compared it to the 'chorus of frogs' in the satiric drama of Aristophanes; and, it being an hour of merriment, and one ludicrous association suggesting another, he imagined a political-satirical drama on the circumstances of the day, to which the pigs would serve as chorus—and "Swellfoot" was begun. When finished, it was transmitted ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... himself,—mates, so to say, and companions, and whom he therefore addressed as such.... So that originally this kind of poetry was the exponent of a peculiar sort of feeling prevailing among the people, and had nothing whatever to do with the didactic or satiric, although at a later period satiric allusions began ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... that clairvoyance which marks some of his utterances about himself, the "full-blooded egotism" which developed in him during his last year of mental and moral starvation at Grimstad. Through the whole series of his satiric dramas we see the little narrow-minded borough, with its ridiculous officials, its pinched and hypocritical social order, its intolerable laws and ordinances, modified here and there, expanded sometimes, modernized and brought up to date, but always recurrent ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... other disturbances to the friendship. Lucy was "too much the village belle," he complained; and took a satiric attitude toward his competitors, referring to them as her "local swains and bumpkins," sulking for an afternoon when she reminded him that he, too, was at least "local." She was a belle with older ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... with the mistress. Thence the queen inferred great intimacy, and thenceforwards Lord Chesterfield could obtain no favour from court- and finding himself desperate, went into opposition. My father himself long afterwards told me the story, and had become the principal object of the peer's satiric wit, though he had not been the mover of his disgrace. The weight of that anger fell more disgracefully on the king, as I shall ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... came out in front of the target. Sir Howard again slapped his host on the shoulder, shoving him playfully forward to take the first shot. The shoulder and arm he touched seemed unnaturally stiff and angular. Mr. Jenkins was holding his gun in an attitude more awkward than any that his satiric ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... my jeux de mot, No lip is loosed in laughter; I send them to the Press, but no Acceptance follows after; And if, as formerly, I try Satiric themes my gibe'll Be certain to be hampered by The common ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... panels there was a dainty bit of white note-paper, with these satiric words written across its surface in a ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... for a——!'" "GRUMPER'S speech is strong; Flanders and screeds of old satiric song Blend in his vigorous diction. Around, in lounging groups or knots apart, Are lesser lights of thought, small stars of art, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... one; Pushkin (considered only as a poet) must be allowed to have attained very high eminence in various walks of his sublime art; his works are very numerous, and as diverse in their form as in their spirit; he is sometimes a romantic, sometimes a legendary, sometimes an epic, sometimes a satiric, and sometimes a dramatic poet;—in most, if not in all, of these various lines he has attained the highest eminence as yet recognised by his countrymen; and, consequently, whatever impression may ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... knight, and cotempory the author of Hudibras. In a tract entitled Religio Vindicata a Calumniis Atheismi, he thus alludes to the spiritual Quixotism which induced Butler to "crack the satiric thong:" ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 55, November 16, 1850 • Various
... jury—may embellish his oration with a wide circuit of historical, or of antiquarian, nay, even speculative discussion. Every Latin scholar will remember the leisurely and most facetious, the good-natured and respectful, yet keenly satiric, picture which the great Roman barrister draws of the Stoic philosophy, by way of rowing old Cato, who professed that philosophy with too little indulgence for venial human errors. The judices—that is, in effect, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... snowy whiteness of her coat, and were in turn set off by it. She had a refined, coquettish, mincing walk, which alone was enough to bespeak the agreeable sense she had of her own charms. Perhaps a satiric observer of manners might have thought her more like a lady's-maid than a lady. A suggestion of pertness in her beady eyes, and a certain superciliousness of bearing were mingled with a coquetry not displeasing to one who ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... dwelling on the praises of poverty, and that even in his own age it attracted unfavourable notice, as we may see from the epithet Proedives, "the over-wealthy," which is applied to him alike by a satiric poet and by a grave historian. Seneca was perfectly well aware that this objection could be urged against him, and it must be admitted that the grounds on which he defends himself in his treatise On a Happy Life are not ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... was an Alsatian humorist of satiric bent, great learning, and little originality. His prose—especially in Gargantua, his most important work, which is an amplified and Germanized version of the first book of Rabelais—is hard to read ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... course, in the sense of Burton, or of Shakespeare. Yet all the time I read masses of Pope. The occasion for my satire was one which must be described as inevitable in the case of one eager to try his hand at imitations of Pope. By this I mean that the satiric outburst was not provoked by any sort of anger. I merely found in some of the circumstances of the life around me good copy. One of the things I liked particularly in Pope was the Epistle describing the Duke of Chandos's ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... and Milton both had their schools, most of our seventeenth-century poetry fell into an almost complete oblivion. Dryden's satiric, and Milton's epic strains engrossed attention, and shaped the verses of an age. But the seventeenth century was extraordinarily wealthy in poetic kinds quite distinct from these: in metaphysic, and mysticism, in devotional ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... Isis, the queen of heaven, was the deity to whom they bowed with the most tender devotion, and to swear by Isis was their favourite oath; and hence the leek, in their own language named Isi, was no doubt the vegetable called a god by the satiric Juvenal. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... in the streets, we could hear the cries, "free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men!" Douglas looked annoyed, ironic lights passed across his face. He said in a satiric way: "Just listen to that." These cries could not be met by direct denial, by an epigrammatic retort. One could not so aptly say "slave banks, slave tariffs, slave labor conditions." These required arguments to expound. If labor conditions presaged slavery for white men were they freed by negro ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... and disfavour with which the Church regarded the profession of jonglerie. It is, indeed, from the fabliaux themselves that we learn much of what we know about the jongleurs; and one of not the least amusing[134] deals with the half-clumsy, half-satiric boasts of two members of the order, who misquote the titles of their repertoire, make by accident or intention ironic comments on its contents, and in short do not magnify their office in a very ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... in fact, a very strong satiric and ironic touch in the author of Marianne, and I do not think that I was too rash when some years ago I ventured to speak of him as "playing Fielding to his own Richardson" in ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... an innovator. Don't you see that he's brought satire into sculpture? The future of plastic art, of music, painting, and even architecture, has set in satiric. It was bound to. People are tired—the bottom's tumbled out ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... a man of middle age; In aspect manly, grave, and sage, As on king's errand come; But in the glances of his eye, A penetrating, keen, and sly Expression found its home; The flash of that satiric rage, Which, bursting on the early stage, Branded the vices of the age, And broke the keys of Rome. On milk-white palfrey forth he paced; His cap of maintenance was graced With the proud heron-plume. From ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... and only incidentally in the public interest. The welfare of the party was closely bound up with the profit of special interests, such as public service corporations and insurance companies. The prevalent condition of affairs was shrewdly summed up in a satiric paraphrase of Lincoln's conception of the American ideal: "Government of the people, by the bosses, for the special interests." The interests naturally repaid this zealous care for their well-being by contributions to the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... was clearing my throat to begin he exclaimed, with a jerk of the elbow and a benevolently satiric smile: ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... vigorous composition, terse sentiment, and glowing invective. It gathers around Pulteney as a ring of fire round the scorpion, and leaves him writhing and shrivelled. Out of Dryden and Pope, it is perhaps the best satiric piece ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... phrases of sarcasm and bitterness. Be fair and courteous in every way. Never indulge in such belittling expressions as "No one understands what he is trying to prove. He reels off a string of figures which mean nothing." Never indulge in cheap wit or attempts at satiric humor. ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... he would have sustained the high reputation which he acquired by the drama. Very rarely have dramatic writers, even of the first rank, exhibited powers of equal rate, when out of the precincts of their own art; while, on the other hand, poets of a more general range, whether epic, lyric, or satiric, have as rarely succeeded on the stage. There is, indeed, hardly one of our celebrated dramatic authors (and the remark might be extended to other countries) who has left works worthy of his reputation in any other line; and Mr. Sheridan, perhaps, might only have been saved from adding to ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... literary qualities that make Defoe's novels great, if little read, classics, how delightful are the little satiric touches that add grave weight to the story. Consider the following: "My good gipsy mother, for some of her worthy actions, no doubt, happened in process of time to be hanged, and as this fell out something too soon for ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... rest, Should dare attack these gnatlings in their nest, At once they rise with impotence of rage, Whet their small stings, and buzz about the stage: 'Tis breach of privilege! Shall any dare To arm satiric truth against a player? Prescriptive rights we plead, time out of mind; Actors, unlash'd themselves, may lash mankind. 500 What! shall Opinion then, of nature free, And liberal as the vagrant air, agree To rust in chains like these, imposed ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... lovable, of a temperamental phase of American character in the course of the national development. But 'The Gilded Age' has long since disappeared from that small but tremendously significant group of works which are tentatively destined to rank as classics. Much as I enjoy the satiric comedy of 'A Yankee in King Arthur's Court', I have always felt that it set before Europe an American type which is neither elevating nor inspiring—nor national. It tends to the gratification of England and Europe, even in the face of its democratic demolition ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... kinds of white, He proffers his defence, in tones subdued Near to mock-mildness now, so mournful seems The obtuser sense truth fails to satisfy; Now, moved, from pathos at the wrong endured, To passion.... Also his tongue at times is hard to curb; Incisive, nigh satiric bites the phrase. ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... period of its career Punch set itself a very high artistic standard. The paper intended to avail itself of the services of whatever artistic genius it could attach to itself by attractive emoluments. It then pieced out its satiric business among its distinguished staff, above everything else artists, perhaps not one of them animated with that fervour of attack which is the genius of foreign caricature. These men, by their several temperaments, founded the characteristics and traditions of Punch. ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... wife. No one ever thought of taking a liberty with him (except once a tipsy gentleman from York, and I am bound to own that my papa never forgave him): he set the humblest people at once on their ease with him, and brought down the most arrogant by a grave satiric way, which made persons exceedingly afraid of him. His courtesy was not put on like a Sunday suit, and laid by when the company went away; it was always the same; as he was always dressed the same, whether ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... language, for Dryden has written nothing of the kind. His other work which discovers invention, fine designing, and admirable execution, is his Dunciad; which, tho' built on Dryden's Mac Flecknoe, is yet so much superior, that in satiric writing, the Palm must justly be yielded to him. In Mr. Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, there are indeed the most poignant strokes of satire, and characters drawn with the most masterly touches; but this poem ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... speeches of the clown in Twelfth Night are particularly worthy of study for the satiric adroitness with which they expose the quibbling futility of syllogistic logic. Cf. Act I., Scene v., ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... straight at the speaker of these impetuous words. He smiled. It was a kindly, albeit a satiric smile. He was getting quite fond of Mrs. Guthrie! And though his duties often brought him in contact with strange and unusual little groups of people, this was the first time he had ever had to bring into his official work a bride on her wedding ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... later, and with a further promise, in the antipathy shown for the routine of schools, and especially of the University of Cambridge,—a suffocating atmosphere for genius, equally uncongenial to Milton, Dryden, Gray, and Locke, who all, like Lord Byron, and more bitterly than he, exercised their satiric vein on it. As for the slight attraction he sometimes showed for the world in his youth—in his seventeenth year—and which the excellent Mr. Beecher reproached him with, his feelings are too well defined by the noble boy himself for us to dare to substitute ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... three poets, who represent the three vices of Dutch literature—of losing themselves in the clouds, of creeping on the ground, of entangling themselves in the meshes of mysticism—are grouped a number of epic, comic, satiric, and lyric poets, most of whom flourished in the seventeenth and a few in the eighteenth century. Many of them are renowned in Holland, but none possesses sufficient originality to attract the attention of the ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... bulwarks of poetry, assailed by the phalanx of rhetoricians and grammarians who declared Rabelais barbarous and Montaigne obscure. It was this same cynic, Mathurin Regnier, who, adding fresh knots to the satiric whip of Horace, exclaimed, in indignation at the manners of his day, "Honor is an old saint past ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... humorous, forcible, and effective than the Biglow Papers, and nothing in Swift more original. It is said that it is ludicrous to compare the mild humor of Rip Van Winkle with the "robustious fun of Swift". But this is a curious "derangement of epitaphs". Swift has wit, and satiric power, and burning invective, and ribaldry, and caustic, scornful humor; but fun, in any just sense, he has not. He is too fierce to be funny. The tender and imaginative play of Rip Van Winkle are wholly beyond the ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... motto the Si non caste tamen caute of the Counter-Reformation.[28] Aretino, with his usual blackguardly pointedness of expression, has given a hint of what the new regime implied in the following satiric lines:— ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... himself to ferret out the secret, and forgot all his sorrows for the time, as soon as he found a human being to whom he might do good. But Raphael was inexplicably wayward and unlike himself. All his smooth and shallow persiflage, even his shrewd satiric humour, had vanished. He seemed parched by some inward fever; restless, moody, abrupt, even peevish; and Synesius's curiosity rose with his disappointment, as Raphael went on obstinately declining to consult the very physician ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... of wielding the satiric lash, and that spirit leads to exaggeration. Bacon was not the meanest of mankind, Pope himself did things that Bacon would never have stooped to. Nor was Bacon the wisest and brightest of mankind. A wiser and brighter spirit was contemporary with him in the person of "a poor ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... equal excellence; and these are emphatically humorists of a pure American type. If humour of a finer point be demanded it seems to me that there are few, if any, living English writers who can rival the delicate satiric powers of a Henry James or the subtle suggestiveness of Mr. W.D. Howells' farces, for an analogy to which we have to look to the best French work of the kind. But this takes us beyond the scope of this chapter, which deals merely with the humour ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the tea-table at Old Place, the Naylors' handsome house on the outskirts of Sprotsfield and on the far side of the heath from Inkston. She was enjoying herself, although she was, as usual, a trifle distrustful of the quality of Mr. Naylor's smile; it smacked of the satiric. "He looks at you as if you were a specimen," she had once been heard to complain; and, when she said "specimen," it was obviously beetles that she had ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... was, in its fashion, performed thirty years ago by Main-Travelled Roads. Each book challenges the myth of the rural beauties and the rural virtues; but whereas Sinclair Lewis, in an intellectual and satiric age, charges that the villagers are dull, Mr. Garland, in a moral and pathetic age, charged that the farmers were oppressed. His men wrestle fearfully with sod and mud and drought and blizzard, goaded by mortgages which may at almost any moment snatch ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... sight. The richness of his satiric perception was too great to permit of speech. He could only gloat and ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... apoplexy.' His autobiography, MEMOIRES ECRIT PAR LUI MEME (in twelve volumes), has been described as 'unmatched as a self-revelation of scoundrelism.' It has also been suggested, with I think far less colour of probability, that the original of Barry was the diplomatist and satiric poet Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, whom Dr Johnson described as 'our lively and elegant though too licentious lyrick bard.' The third original, and one who, there cannot be the slightest doubt, contributed features ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... inserted in the first constitution of Pennsylvania, and for which he had such a fondness as to insert it in his will. I call it weak, for so it must have been, or hypocritical; unless he meant by one satiric touch to ridicule his own republic, or throw it into ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... as she faced them, that light, fixed smile she had seen so often on others' lips, the smile of pride trying desperately to hide its wounds from the penetrating glances of the curious. Satiric, cynical, or sympathetic, that light smile defied them all, but beneath its guard she felt she was slowly bleeding to death of ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... those days longer than they are at present, small was the amount of time really abstracted from that which he had disposable for general purposes; amongst which purposes ranked foremost his literary pursuits. And, however much he transcended the prevailing conception of his order, as sketched by satiric and often ignorant novelists, he might be regarded, in all that concerned the liberalization of his views, as pretty fairly representing that order. Thus, through every real experience, the crazy notion of a rural aristocracy flowing apart from the urban aristocracy, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... A SATIRIC poet underwent a severe drubbing, and was observed to walk ever afterwards with a stick. "Mr. P. reminds me," says a wag, "of some of the saints, who are always painted with ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... that I had already perused Sterne, much of Swift, and far more comic and satiric literature than is known to boys, and, what is far more remarkable, had thoroughly taken it all into my cor cordium by ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... plays I know not. But in this I have ever feared to do ill, and indeed will not be persuaded to that undertaking.' So says Betterton. RUFUS is not so good; I am not pleased with RUFUS; plainly a RIFACCIMENTO of some inferior work; but there are some damned fine lines. As for the purely satiric ill-minded ABELARD AND HELOISE, another TROILUS, QUOI! it is not pleasant, truly, but what strength, what verve, what knowledge of life, and the Canon! What a finished, humorous, rich picture is the Canon! Ah, there was nobody ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with ponderous and awful blunders like this that the satiric power of the writer finds its favorite field ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... it after all. You never know with these corporations." A remark extremely undeserved, for George considered that the modesty and simplicity of his own demeanour under the stress of an inordinate triumph were rather notable. Still, he had his dignity to maintain against the satiric, and his position was such that he could ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... be found so near the surface," said Rufus with a satiric glance at the cover of Elizabeth's book, — "it would be folly ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... him a keyboard made up of a series of I's. The lyric and satiric writers play in the purely human octave; the critic plays in the bookman's octave; the historian in the octave of the investigator. When an author writes of himself, perforce he plays upon his own "I," which is not exactly ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... recall, and the indignities which he received at the hands of the emperor, tells in itself a tale of outraged feeling that needs no comment. It has been truly said that ridicule is more bitterly resented and more rarely forgiven than injury. The indulgence of a satiric humor, in some words spoken in jest by Suwarrow, is said to have piqued Paul so much that he took a cruel revenge. The rage of the emperor for the introduction of German fashions was so great, that he determined to have the German uniform adopted in ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... these satiric and facetious remarks, his half-brother paced up and down the glass parlour, scowling over the panes into the bank where the busy young clerks sate before their ledgers. At last he gave an "Ah!" as of satisfaction. Indeed, he had seen Sir Barnes ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... he had made all {127} his other agents, a pawn in the game where he alone was player. In his correspondence he stands out as an old-fashioned, worldly, cultured, and unbusiness-like diplomatist, worthy perhaps of a satiric but kindly portraiture by Thackeray—a genuine citizen of Vanity Fair. Apart from his correspondence, his friendships, and his American achievements, he might have passed through life, deserving nothing more than some few references in ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... merely decorative effect. We seem to perceive that the poet had a truth or fact—philosophical, agricultural, social—distinctly before him, and then, as we say, clothed it in metrical and coloured language. Most argumentative, didactic, or satiric poems are partly of this kind; and in imaginative poems anything which is really a mere 'conceit' is mere decoration. We often deceive ourselves in this matter, for what we call decoration has often a new and genuinely poetic content of its own; but wherever there is mere decoration, ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... persuaded to that undertaking." So says Betterton. Rufus is not so good; I am not pleased with Rufus; plainly a rifaccimento of some inferior work; but there are some damned fine lines. As for the purely satiric ill-minded Abelard and Heloise, another Troilus, quoi! it is not pleasant, truly, but what strength, what verve, what knowledge of life, and the Canon! What a finished, humorous, rich picture is the Canon! Ah, there was nobody like Shakespeare. But what I like ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... self-contempt, without any curative self-reproach, dull the intelligence, and degrade the conscience, into sullen incredulity of all sunshine outside the dunghill, or breeze beyond the wafting of its impurity; and at last a philosophy develops itself, partly satiric, partly consolatory, concerned only with the regenerative vigour of manure, and the necessary obscurities of fimetic Providence; showing how everybody's fault is somebody else's, how infection has no law, digestion no will, and profitable ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Dupleisis. "My family were treated shabbily; 'the muse is a maiden of good memory,' but a cocote; my satiric efforts were rewarded by a ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... marble, executed by the most famous sculptors, and on the middle spaces were hung works by the painters of Sicyon and tapestry woven with stories of the adventures of the gods. Above these, again, ran a frieze of gold and silver shields, while in the higher niches were placed comic, tragic, and satiric sculptured groups 'dressed in real clothes,' says the historian, much admiring this realism. It is impossible to number the tripods, and flagons, and couches of gold, resting on golden figures of sphinxes, the salvers, the bowls, the jewelled ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... by this time have waxed furious. Our negroes of the Antilles, after a dreadful day of heat and hard work, would go and dance away some four leagues off. So it was with the serf too. But with his dances there must have mingled a merriment born of revenge, satiric farces, burlesques and caricatures of the baron and the priest: a whole literature of the night indeed, that knew not one word of the literature of the day, that knew little ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... learn more. It also happened that, at this time, a gentleman with whom I had been long acquainted, and of whose talents I held a high opinion, was elected to the head-mastership of that school, which held its chief endowments from Gifford, the satiric poet, and Dr. Ireland, the late Dean of Westminster. I remember how I returned in gloomy spirits after leaving him there. As I had four other children, it may be said that I showed undue partiality for this one, but my conscience clears me from the charge. I deeply felt ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... toughness of Sir Pertinax consistently to the end, Macklin remained true to the tradition of critical, satiric comedy that he had been bred in but that by this time had almost disappeared. Protesting against the refusal of a license for his play, in 1779, Macklin composed a defense of satiric comedy. He insists upon the reformatory function of ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... Magazine, Jan. 1786. BOSWELL. There we learn that he was in his time a grammar-school usher, actor, poet, the puffing partner in a quack medicine, and tutor to a youthful Earl. He was suspected of levying blackmail by threats of satiric publications, and he suffered from a disease which rendered him an object almost offensive to sight. He was born in 1738 or 1739, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... joyous indifference. With their lances poised high in the right hand they were together running swiftly up the long alley again to the starting-point, Otasite commenting on the evident lack of intention in Wyejah's lucky cast with a loud, jocosely satiric cry, "Hala! Hala!" (signifying, "You are ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... letter that was the post had brought him—what a letter, and what a woman! He sighed, thinking with a rueful though satiric spirit of all those protestations of hers in the summer, as to independence, a maiden life, and the rest. And now she confessed that, from the beginning, it had been Faversham. Why? What had she seen in him? The young man's vanity no less than his love ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... conventional; the fifth is almost, but not quite, English; the third, seventh, and ninth are avowedly classical in theme; while the eighth is a more delicate and subtle fairy poem than the Nymphidia. The fourth and tenth Nymphals are also touched with the sadder, almost satiric vein; the former inveighing against the English imitation of foreigners and love of extravagance in dress; while the tenth complains of the improvident and wasteful felling of trees in the English forests. This last Nymphal, though designedly ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... of graffiti, however, vary from the very earnest expression of affection to the nonexcrementally satiric. One of the more unusual is a poem in praise of a faithful ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... was, on the part of Doctor S., that the second book in the Latin language which I was summoned to study should have been Phaedrus—a writer ambitious of investing the simplicity, or rather homeliness, of Aesop with aulic graces and satiric brilliancy. But so it was; and Phaedrus naturally towered into enthusiasm when he had occasion to mention that the most intellectual of all races amongst men, viz., the Athenians, had raised a mighty statue to one who belonged to the same class in a social ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... unwonted tone for Kavanagh to employ. Clare's father, till now, had not included Harlan in his feud with the grandfather. He had always treated him with a brusqueness that had a sort of good-humor beneath it. His discourse with the young man had been curt and satiric and infrequent, and consisted usually in mock messages of defiance which he asked to have delivered by word of mouth to the grandfather. But his tone now was crisp and it had a ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day |
