"Travesty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... amply pays its way, in showing how much of mirth may be caused by feebleness in a great attempt at a small matter. Besides, in him the mother element of the whole piece runs out into broad humour and travesty; his reasons for breaking with his master the Jew being, as it were, a variation in drollery upon the fundamental air of the play. Thus he exhibits under a comic form the general aspect of surrounding humanity; while at the same time his ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... corner houses with light on three sides; while ordinary mortals lived in tunnels more or less magnificent where electric light had often to do duty for the sun. Ben declared that his income only admitted light fore and aft, but that with skillful decoration they could at least travesty the sunshine, and so they tried to reproduce its effects by wall hangings of faint yellow and pale green, by chintz-covered bedrooms that seemed to blossom with roses, and living rooms sweet with fresh flowers. There was no solemn mahogany—no light-absorbing color on door or window; all was delicately ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... ought to do, nor what they would do, nor, it might be said, such is the insanity of the atmosphere, not even what they intend to do. The conduct of Rochester is so primevally and superhumanly caddish that Bret Harte in his admirable travesty scarcely exaggerated it. 'Then, resuming his usual manner, he threw his boots at my head and withdrew,' does perhaps reach to something resembling caricature. The scene in which Rochester dresses up as an old gipsy has something ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... girl whom he had loved long ago and who had died. Since her death he had put aside love as a passion. Now and then—not often—a sort of travesty of love had come to him, the spectre of the real. It is difficult for a young, strong man in the pride of his life never to have any dealing either with love or with its spectre. But Isaacson was right. Nigel's life had been much purer than are most men's lives. Often he had ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... feeble and tremulous utterance produced by his debility. The melody, which no weakness could destroy, gradually wrought its sweet influence on the senses of those who heard it. It even prevailed over the miserable travesty of the song of David which the singer had selected from a volume of similar effusions, and caused the sense to be forgotten in the insinuating harmony of the sounds. Alice unconsciously dried her tears, and bent her melting eyes on the pallid ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... produce, in ten minutes, what it would require a laborious volume to shadow forth by comparisons and roundabout approaches. If verbal logic were sufficient, life would be as plain sailing as a piece of Euclid. But, as a matter of fact, we make a travesty of the simplest process of thought when we put it into words; for the words are all coloured and forsworn, apply inaccurately, and bring with them, from former uses, ideas of praise and blame that have nothing to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... barbarians. Their manners and customs, while lively and unconventional, are most charming. Their dress is graceful and practical, not grotesque; their soft speech is pleasing to the ear. Their flag is the original flag of the Republic of Texas; it is definitely not a barbaric travesty of our own emblem. And the underlying premises of their political system should, as far as possible, be incorporated into the organization of the Solar League. Here politics is an exciting and exacting game, in which only the true representative of ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... from this bill because, if the facts before me, derived from the army records and the statements of the claimant are true, the allowance of this claim would, in my opinion, be a travesty upon our whole scheme of pensions and an insult to every decent ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... expired. The art involved in its presentment is less studied, or its professors are less capable than was once the case. And perhaps burlesque has exposed too glaringly its ridiculous or seamy side. It was not one of those things that could long endure the assaults of travesty. The spell was potent enough in its way, but it dissolved when once interruptive laughter became generally audible. A creature of theatrical tradition, curiously sophisticated and enveloped in absurdities, its long survival is perhaps more surprising than the fact of its decease. Some attempt ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... inefficacy of the dull, half-informed body. Though her footing was uneven, and her gestures often ludicrously helpless, still the spectacle was not merely amusing; and though subtle inspirations of movement miscarried in tottering travesty, you could still see that they had been inspirations; you could still see that she had set her heart on realising something just and beautiful, and that, by the discipline of these abortive efforts, she was making for herself in the future a quick, supple, and obedient body. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... its splendid occupants? The horrible laughter, stamped for ever "by order of the king" upon the face of this strange spokesman of democracy, adds yet another feature of justice to the scene; in all time, travesty has been the argument of oppression; and, in all time, the oppressed might have made this answer: "If I am vile, is it not your system that has made me so?" This ghastly laughter gives occasion, moreover, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Wherever there was a vacant theatre—were it in Cheltenham, Birmingham, or any other town—he would engage it for his productions. One night he would play his favourite part, Romeo, with reverence and ability. The next, he would repeat his first travesty in all its hideous harlequinade. Indeed, there can be little doubt that Mr. Coates, with his vile performances, must be held responsible for the decline of dramatic art in England and the invasion of the ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... the date of the travesty known to us, and most popular amongst our mediaeval ancestors, it might be shown that some rude notion of Homer's fable and personages ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... close familiarity, by obstinate and patient interrogation, he divined Correggio's secret, and was able at last to see clearly through the mist of cobweb and mildew and altar smoke, and through the still more cruel travesty of so-called restoration. What he discovered, he faithfully committed first to paper in water colours, and then to copperplate with the burin, so that we enjoy the privilege of seeing Correggio's masterpieces ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... us in a change of role," she cried. "I should play the poorest travesty of Mentor to your Telemachus. Oh! ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... poor travesty upon life that we should have seen behind the footlights for a glimpse into one of ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... which He that was greater than Solomon typically denounced in foretelling the overthrow of that gorgeous pile. The Bible, as to its important verities and solemn doctrine, is transparent to the imagination and affections, and does not require the mediation of dumb show or scenic travesty. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... egotism, that sad travesty of personal interest, appears under a form quite as formidable when the general interest takes the form of communism. The cooeperation of personal interest and of the general interest is always necessary, both for individual profit ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... no aimless travesty of the average Wall Street man, but a faithful etching of him, apart from those more sorry lineaments which might be disclosed in a portrait painted, as it were, with the oil of his own slippery speculations. If he resents the honest drawing of his well-known features, why, so much the better. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... that exclude every doctrine of purgation after death? They condemned Transubstantiation—did they condemn the Real Presence? They condemned a great popular system—did they condemn that of which it was a corruption and travesty? These questions could not be foreclosed, unless on the assumption that there was no doctrine on such points which could be called Catholic except the Roman. The inquiry was not new; and divines so stoutly anti-Roman ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... sex, I lack the imagination to conceive. Would to God I had never tried to find out! But no man standing where Roberts does to-day among the leaders of a great party can fall into such a pit of shame without weakening the faith of the young and making a travesty of virtue ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... not effectively checked. He was accordingly tried before the Assembly on a frivolous charge of having, in a private conversation held at the house of a Mr. Glennan, in York, spoken disrespectfully of some of the members. The proceedings were the veriest travesty of the forms of justice. The accused was found guilty, and committed to the common jail of the Home District, there to remain during the sitting of Parliament.[53] This indignity he was compelled to suffer, being confined for many weeks in a small close cell, which he ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Nagaya's charge that he had compassed the death of the infant prince by charms and incantations. Two of the Fujiwara nobles were appointed to investigate the accusation, and they condemned the prince to die by his own hand. He committed suicide, and his wife and children died with him. The travesty of justice was carefully acted throughout. A proclamation was issued promising capital punishment to any one, of whatever rank or position, who compassed the death or injury of another by spells or incantations, and, six months later, the lady ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... That Senator Morgan's bill to deprive the women of Utah of the right of suffrage because of the social institutions and religious faith originated and maintained by the men of the territory, is a travesty on common justice. While the wife has not absolute possession of even one husband, and the husband has many wives, surely the men and not the women, if either, should be ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... the door to—to this hideous travesty of a room opening. Her eyes darted around the shrunken metal-walled shell, even the ceiling curved overhead, and she saw two grotesque daubs taped to the walls that parodied the paintings of her dead ...
— Moment of Truth • Basil Eugene Wells
... suggested that the substitution of such play for school for all children up to the age of ten would insure better minds and sounder physiques at fifteen. It is generally admitted that the child who enters school at eight rather than at six will be the gainer at twelve. What a travesty upon education to insist upon schooling for children because they are apt to be run over on the street, or to be neglected at home, to shoot craps, or belong to a gang ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... or despair bring his youthful characters to picture their lot with the deprivations, the ills or forebodings of age. But in no such passages is language used which is at all equivalent to that here quoted. Nowhere does he present such a travesty as to allow Juliet to describe herself in good straight terms that would befit her grandmother; and there is nothing that the much-lamenting Hamlet says which would lead an actor to play the part with ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... my body about, and strolled up and down the room with a supposed travesty of Mrs. ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... illumination on the many complexities she had come up against in his character. The two women who should mean most in a man's life had both failed him. He bore on his body a scar which surely he must never see reflected in the mirror without recalling the travesty of motherhood that was all he had ever known. And scored into his soul, hidden beneath a bitter reticence and unforgiving cynicism, lay the still deeper scar of that hurt which the woman who was to have been his ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... as long as he lived. He had been, I imagine, an itinerant doctor, for there was no town in England, or country in Europe, of which he could not give a very particular account. He had some letters, and was ingenious, but much of an unbeliever, and wickedly undertook, some years after, to travesty the Bible in doggerel verse, as Cotton had done Virgil. By this means he set many of the facts in a very ridiculous light, and might have hurt weak minds if his work had been ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... he said to himself, "that the fine woman I married—for she was a fine woman, a deuced fine woman!—should have died to present the world with such a travesty! It's like nothing human! It's an affront to the family! Ah! the strain will show! They say your sins will find you out! It was a sin to marry the woman! Damned fool I was! But she bewitched me! I was bewitched!—Curse the little monster! I ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... of this hot August day, one of the last of glorious Fructidor, had begun to wane, and the shades of evening to slowly creep into the long, bare room where this travesty of justice ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Philosophy of the Fine Arts," and aims at carrying a love of the beautiful into all the relations of life. The fantastical developments which accompanied the movement brought its devotees into much ridicule about ten years ago, and the pages of Punch of that time will be found to happily travesty its more amusing and extravagant aspects. The great success of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, "Patience," produced in 1881, was also to some extent due to the humorous allusions to the extravagances of the ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... infinitely young could have held firm in face of such dejection, only eyes as alert and wakeful as those of this wayfaring boy could possibly have looked undaunted at the shabby streets with their flaunting travesty of joy exhibited in the dripping awnings of the deserted cafes, that offered Biere, Billard, and yet again Biere to ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... tell us?) than by such phrases could the Prophet have described an inward and purely spiritual process? To say as Duhm does that the phrases only mean that common men would learn the Law of God "by heart" (auswendig), is, whoever their author may have been, to travesty his meaning. Finally, all the phrasing of the New Covenant is in harmony with the rest of the Prophet's teaching. He had spoken of God's will to give His people a new heart to know Him;(818) he had taught religion as the individual's direct knowledge of God;(819) ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... fine detail which cannot be distinguished across the room cause visual cramp; and the rearing horse which keeps one longing for the rockers cannot be called reposeful. Any picture in which one seeks in vain the rest and peace and quietude and inspiration which the home harmony demands, is but a travesty of art—domestically speaking. There is probably nothing more rest-giving than the marine view, and next come the pretty pastoral and cool woodland scenes, while madonnas and other pictures of religious significance ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... stored in the warehouse of a certain safety-deposit company, in the winter of 1892. The event which had then vacated the chair is still so near as to be full of a pathos tenderly personal to all readers of that magazine, and may not be lightly mentioned in any travesty of the facts by one who was thought of for the empty place. He, before putting on the mask and mimic editorial robes—for it was never the real editor who sat in the Easy Chair, except for that brief hour when he took it to pay his deep-thought ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... foreigner, though it was heard perfectly in the next box: for he was at once indignantly bidden to be silent. He withdrew to the back of the box to swear his fill. He could not recover his temper. If he had been just he would have given homage to the elegance of the travesty and the tour de force of nature and art, which made it possible for a woman of sixty to appear in a youth's costume and even to seem beautiful in it—at least to kindly eyes. But he hated all tours de force, everything which violates and falsifies Nature, He liked a woman to be ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... that the hump atop each rounded body was a travesty of a head, hairless, and without a neck. Their features were particularly hideous, and I shall pass over a description ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... infer that Shakespeare found little to sympathize with in this somewhat extravagant outline of a happy nation, but he goes out of his way to travesty it. In "The Tempest" he makes Gonzalo, the noblest character in the play, hold the following language to the inevitable king (Shakespeare can not imagine even a ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... an extraordinary sight. The shaven-headed, clay-faced pirate looming so high and so huge in the doorway that he filled it altogether, his clothes torn, filthy and stained from the battle and from careless weeks at sea. His companion was a travesty of his onetime elegance, dirty lace ruffles spotted by forgotten meals, his velvet coat marked by chairbacks and soiled from months of constant wear, his hair unwashed and sleazily caught back, no longer curled with a fine exactitude. Both men had ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... ethical, were the only permanent testament that her father had given to the world; and dealing, as in the main they did, with ultimate problems, their keynote an illumined democracy that saw in most of the results as yet achieved by his country a base travesty of the doctrine, the largeness of their grasp was perhaps a trifle loose. Imogen did not see it. Her appreciation was more of aims than of achievements; but she felt that her father's writings were the body, only, ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... fortifications anywhere. How could people live in such a careless, unnatural fashion? He blushed with shame as he thought to himself that a foreigner might apparently journey through the country from one end to the other without knowing that there was such a thing as a soldier in the land. What a travesty this was on civilization! How baseless the proud boasts of national greatness when only an insignificant and almost invisible few paid any attention to the claims of military glory! The outlook was indeed dismal, but Sam was no pessimist. Obstacles were in his dictionary "things to be removed." ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... the springs of Georg and Kasimir, at which stand two charming maidens ready to fill your glasses. No conventional and hideous hat or bonnet disfigures the neat outline of their heads. No travesty of Berlin or Paris fashion burlesques their sturdy figures. Theirs the traditional costume of the Thuringian female peasant—a dark skirt, and white, short-sleeved chemisette, a blue apron and the daintiest of white silk kerchiefs, fringed sparsely and brocaded abundantly with red roses. Albeit ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... she had not had strength to paint her lips and cheeks again, and the old woman's efforts had ended pitifully. She had grown very small in the last few hours, and with her thin, daubed face and blood-stained lips, she looked like a sorrowful travesty of the little circus clown who had ridden the fat pony and shouted "Oh la—la!" and ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... may be truly Arabian, his figure, as I have remarked, is a travesty on that of the typical Arabian—the Arab of the boundless and comfortless desert. I have tried to picture him as a lean and haughty mameluke in loose, white robes, mounted on a dust-distributing camel, and, lance in hand, peering ferociously across ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... son of a Virginian Loyalist, and a Tory of extreme views, calm, polished, and judicial in his demeanour. But whatever his opinions on the questions of the day he was too discreet a politician and too honest a judge ever to have descended to such a travesty of justice as had been shown by his predecessor in the case of Gourlay. His influence, however was never in the direction of liberal measures. He opposed responsible government and the union of the two provinces, both when proposed ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... an eye to the bizarre, to whom Dennis had presented some of his characteristic enterprises, had put the young Irishman in the way of securing a biography of the Hebrew premier, whom he provided with such an absurd travesty of likeness, and the "ole clo' merchant" was so impressed by the resolution and dexterity of the celebrated statesman, that he became, from that moment, the prey of a consuming ambition whose ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... Markheim. "Who can do so? My life is but a travesty and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them. You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and muffled in a cloak. If they had their own control—if you could see their faces, ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... for in all cases a reverse is possible, is the appropriate business of burlesque and travesty, a predominant taste for which has been always deemed a mark of a low and degraded mind. When I was at Rome, among many other visits to the tomb of Julius II. I went thither once with a Prussian ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a zoological garden which, although inferior to ours, is far better than that at Amsterdam, while it converts The Hague's Zoo into a travesty. Last spring the lions were in splendid condition. They are well housed, but fewer distractions are provided for them than in Regent's Park. I found myself fascinated by the herons, who were continually soaring out over the neighbouring houses and returning like ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... great invalid chair. There, propped up in cushions, lay a fat travesty of the old Saradokis. This was a Sara whose tawny hair was turning gray with suffering; whose mouth, once so full and boyish, was now heavy and sinister, whose buoyancy had changed to the bitter irritability of ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... in the Rue de la Paroisse that we noticed an uninviting compound labelled "Pudding Anglais, 2 fr. 1/2 kilo." A little thought led us to recognise in this amalgamation a travesty of our old friend plum-pudding; but so revolting was its dark, bilious-looking exterior that we felt its claim to be accounted a compatriot almost insulting. And it was with secret gratification that towards the close of January we saw the same ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... through all the various shades of copper and olive to that repulsive white where the dark blood seems to flow just beneath the skin, and bedecked in all the violence of blues and greens, reds and yellows, some in country costume, their heads covered with kerchiefs, others in a travesty on the prevailing fashion, stood in their shops or behind the long double row of temporary stalls, vociferating at the passers by as they called attention to fowl, meats, hot soup, fruit, vegetables, wild birds, fish, cigars, sugar cakes, castor oil, cloth, ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... to arrangement of business on reassembling; Truculent TIM, coming to the front at least urgent opportunity, demanded that Irish business should not be taken as first Order. OLD MORALITY promptly gave desired pledge. Then MARJORIBANKS, who, to travesty TREVELYAN's famous saying, Though a Whip, is a Scottish gentleman, broke the long pause of eloquent silence cultivated in the Lobby; protested against Scotch Members being placed in inconvenient position, by being obliged to put ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Dec. 20, 1890 • Various
... problem of the flesh" by indiscriminate satisfaction of the passions; the multiplication of androgyne lodges for this purpose; the dual nature of the Divine Principle; and the cultus of Lucifer as the good God. The most curious feature of the performance is that here again it is from end to end a travesty of Eliphas Levi, slice after slice from his chief writings, combined with interlineal additions, which give them a sense diametrically opposed to that of the great magus. Now, it is impossible that two persons, working independently for ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... continuing: "Yes, the Law is here. Or what is more to the point, a representative of the Law is here. 'I am the Law,'" he quoted, ironically. "But my hands are tied; this court is a mere travesty upon justice. The government at Washington has seen fit to send me here—alone. I can't go out and get evidence; I couldn't secure a conviction if I did. The people here who are not Dunlavey's friends were afraid of him. I can't get a jury. Dunlavey elects the sheriff—controls the election ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... productive farming and grazing lands. In that event Graustark will be no larger than one of the good-sized farms in your western country. There will be nothing left for Her Royal Highness to rule save a tract so small that the word principality will be a travesty and a jest. This city and twenty-five miles to the south, a strip about one hundred fifty miles long. Think of it! Twenty-five by one hundred fifty miles, and yet called a principality! Once the proudest and most prosperous state in the ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... wish you to comprehend fully my actions, and the motives that inspire them. If they are in any way unsatisfactory to your mind, you may feel at perfect liberty to withhold your services. I am now, and always have been, opposed to duelling; I believe it wrong in principle, and a travesty upon justice; but it is a custom of the South, a requirement among officers of our army, and after what has just occurred between Major Brennan and myself I cannot honorably refuse any longer to go out. Major Brennan has deliberately placed me in a position where I cannot avoid meeting him ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... variations that we faintly recognise the broad simple theme of Italy's struggle for deliverance. The Patriot and Instans Tyrannus both have a kind of nexus with the place and time; but the one is a caustic satire on popular fickleness and the other a sardonically humorous travesty of persecution. Italy is mentioned in neither. Both are far removed from the vivid and sympathetic reflection of the national struggle which thrills us in The Italian in England and the third scene of Pippa Passes. This "tyrant" has nothing to do with the Austrian ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... transpositions or parodies of Christian hymns, and one in particular was his favorite. Apparently he had made it very popular with the natives of the band, for it vied with the "Himene Tatou Arearea" in repetition. It was a crude travesty of a hymn much sung in religious camp-meetings and revivals, of which the proper chorus as often heard by me in Harry Monroe's mission in the Chicago ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... likes our frauds and wars. They are but so many yokes to the neck. Our painful labours are unnecessary and fruitless. A higher law than that of our will regulates events. If we look wider, things are all alike: laws and creeds and modes of living are a travesty of truth. Only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience we become strong. Our real action is in our silent moments. Why should we be awed by the name of Action? 'Tis a trick of ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... use his own spectacular language, as well as to extort money from the pockets of the attendants. He left the town $5,000 richer than when he entered and also carried with him, as advertising material, a long list of so-called converts. A travesty on the sacred work of the church! But such methods are to-day the exception and not the rule, and the exceptions merely ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... or in prose, with glib assurance, as the production of some well-known writer. The chances are ten to one that the conversation is mainly manufactured in the brain of the narrator, and that the quotation is either not written by the author to whom it is attributed, or else is a travesty of his real language. It is Lord Byron who tells of that numerous class of sciolists whom one ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... Fourth of July procession, which in the old days had seemed so funny, so exciting to me. I laughed no more. It filled me with bitterness to think that such a makeshift spectacle could amuse anyone. "How dull and eventless life must be to enable such a pitiful travesty to attract and hold the attention of girls like Ella and Flora," I thought as I saw them standing with their little sister to ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... producing what the French term "une gamme de couleur," most pleasing to the eye, and with never a false note in it. Beside these comely, amply breasted bronze statues, the British West Indian negress, with her absurd travesty of European fashions, and her grotesque hats, cuts, I am bound to say, ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... Radbourn, pitilessly, "that the wives of the American farmers fill our insane asylums. See what a life they lead, most of them; no music, no books. Seventeen hours a day in a couple of small rooms—dens. Now there's Sim Burns! what a travesty of a home! Yet there are a dozen just as bad in sight. He works like a fiend,—so does his wife,—and what is their reward? Simply a hole to hibernate in and to sleep and eat in in summer. A dreary present and a well-nigh hopeless future. No, they have a future, if they knew ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... of the North are not mirrored with any exactitude in the Elder Edda. Indeed only a travesty of the faith of our ancestors has been preserved in Norse literature. The early poet loved allegory, and his imagination rioted among the conceptions of his fertile muse. "His eye was fixed on the mountains till the snowy peaks assumed human features and the ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... their travesty of merriment. They voiced the gossip of a vanished society; the politics, fashions, and scandals of old Florence. One heard the names of noble families long since extinct, accounts of historic escapades related as if they had happened ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... dragging them along with a scratching noise upon the floor. Liddy, elevating her feelings to the occasion from a sense of grandeur, floated off behind Bathsheba with a milder dignity not entirely free from travesty, and the door ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... glance yet lives for us in the searchlight of Fanny Burney's adoring scrutiny. Afar, the sons pursued their wild careers. The Prince of Wales, the mirror of fashion, diced and drank, coquetted with politics and kingship, and—a very travesty of chivalry—betrayed his friend, broke the heart of the woman who loved him, deserted the woman who had wedded him, and tortured with petty jealousy the sensitive soul of the child who might rule ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... whole discourse. And he must do it now with the urgency of one who has in view a real peril of apostasy. His readers are hard pressed, by persuasions and by terrors, to turn back from Christ to the Judaistic travesty of the message of the Law. He must tell them not only of the splendour of Messiah's work but of the absolute finality of it for man's salvation. To forsake it is to "forsake their own mercy," ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... And he continued to travesty the truth, and I was impotent—the truth, that profound thing whose voice was in my ears, whose shadow was in my eyes, and whose taste was in ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... Fitz Victor. The name of the supposititious nephew reminds us of "Original Poems" by Victor and Cazire, and raises the question whether the poems in that lost volume may not have partly furnished forth this Oxford travesty. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... impossible to enumerate the various items, and it would not be meet that the attempt should be made here. It will be enough to say that among the many interesting numbers was the first portion of an unpublished travesty on "Othello," written in 1833, before the first published "Boz" sketch, and a hitherto unknown (to experts) page of "Pickwick," this one fragment being valued, says the catalogue, at L150 sterling. First editions, portraits, oil paintings, miniatures, and what not, and autographs were ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... How had he contrived to be blind to it so long? He had not reached the age of twenty-one without entertaining vague theories concerning love, and having definitely decided that it had nothing to do with the travesty of its name which had confronted him on his wanderings. Neither taste nor training, nor the absorbing passion for his work had left him time or wish to explore this field which roused only an impatient contempt when thrust on his notice. Of Love itself, as before stated, he held vague ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... responsible for an impression which I carried about with me almost constantly for a period of two years and which culminated finally in a visit to Tolstoy—that the Settlement, or Hull-House at least, was a mere pretense and travesty of the simple impulse "to live with the poor," so long as the residents did not share the common lot of hard labor and ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... not weep; laughing because their souls were dead; laughing in their conscious travesty of the tragedy of pleasure—they tripped and lounged and sauntered along. And the lamps shone round them, and above them ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... impression of having followed cleanliness of thought and person all his life. I began to have a sneaking admiration for the man. I beheld in its openness that which I had often seen pierce through Paragot's travesty of mountebankery or rags, but which singularly enough seemed hidden beneath his conventional garb—the inborn and incommunicable quality of the high-bred gentleman. I set to dreaming of it and scheming out a portrait ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... a curious travesty of his elder brother. He was shorter, but he wore enormously high boot-heels, which brought him to a fair stature. In figure he had none of that grace which marked the king, nor had he the elegant hand and foot which had been the delight of sculptors. He was fat, waddled ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... be becoming were I to travesty a sermon, or even repeat the language of it in the pages of a novel. In endeavouring to depict the characters of the persons of whom I write, I am to a certain extent forced to speak of sacred things. I trust, however, that I shall not be thought to scoff ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... taken off by caricaturists; and the solemn air of this form of verse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle. A constant invitation to parody was offered by the 'Divine Comedy,' and Lorenzo il Magnifico wrote the most admirable travesty in the style of the 'Inferno' (Simposio or I Beoni). Luigi Pulci obviously imitates the Improvisatori in his 'Morgante,' and both his poetry and Boiardo's are in part, at least, a half-conscious parody of the chivalrous poetry of the Middle ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... (q.v.). Its particular sphere is, however, in literature, and especially in drama. The Batrachomachia, or Battle of the Frogs and Mice, is the earliest example in classical literature, being a travesty of the Homeric epic. There are many true burlesque parts in the comedies of Aristophanes, e.g. the appearance of Socrates in the Clouds. The Italian word first appears in the Opere Burlesche of Francesco Berni (1497-1535). In France during part of the reign of Louis XIV., the burlesque ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... angelic eyes, So, through the scenes of life below, In life's ironical disguise, A travesty of man, ye go: ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sand lay the chalk-white skeleton of a man, the grinning mouth and sightless eyes staring up at me in a hideous travesty of mirth; and all around between the outstretched bones lay diamonds, diamonds innumerable: big, bright, sparkling beauties by the handful, wealth incredible to be had for the picking up, with no guardian other than these bare bones of a ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... his life, and carried down his labours to the very verge of the grave. It is a curious satire upon human justice that his name should have been kept green in Scotland by the rough jests of an imaginary Geordie Buchanan, commonly supposed to have been the King's fool, as extraordinary a travesty as it is possible to conceive. It is almost as strange a twist of all the facts and meaning of life that the only money of which he could be supposed to be possessed at his death should have been one hundred pounds (Scots, no doubt), arrears of the pension ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... reader, not knowing that it is the key of the whole thing and the only important paragraph in the article, tranquilly turns up his nose at it and leaves it unread. One can deliver a satire with telling force through the insidious medium of a travesty, if he is careful not to overwhelm the satire with the extraneous interest of the travesty, and so bury it from the reader's sight and leave him a joked and defrauded victim, when the honest intent was to add to either his knowledge ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... describes the new dissipation, which carried Carl away from his old riots; the new magnet that dragged from him all the money he could earn, and more than he could borrow. It was a wild and reckless crew and addicted to such entertainments as the travesty on Marc Antony, with music by Carl, who played Cleopatra, while Gretchen ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... proceedings which, beginning on Saturday the 20th of January 1649, terminated so dismally on Tuesday the 30th. The strange part played by Lady Fairfax on the first day of the so-called trial (though it was no greater a travesty of justice than many a real trial both before and after) is one of the best-known stories in English history. There are several versions of it. Having provided herself with a seat in a small gallery in Westminster ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... he could tell what all were about to do. Oh, the secrets that were revealed, while the motives for acts were now laid bare that till then he had misunderstood! He had often heard the old saying, that if every person in a ball-room could read the thoughts of the rest, the ball would seem a travesty on enjoyment, rather than real pleasure, and now he perceived its force. He also noticed that many were better than he had supposed, and were trying, in a blundering but persevering way, to obey their consciences. He saw some unselfish thoughts and acts. Many things ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... and more fully worked out. In spite of incongruous masque or rather pantomime scenes the pervading atmosphere is sustained. One would say that Purcell got his inspiration by reading of Prospero's magic island, and never thought of Shadwell's stupid and boorish travesty. ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... alludes to his friendship with a much younger and gayer man than himself, Charles Cotton (born 1630), the friend of Colonel Richard Lovelace, and of Sir John Suckling: the translator of Scarron's travesty of Virgil, and of Montaigne's Essays. Cotton was a roisterer, a man at one time deep in debt, but he was a Royalist, a scholar, and an angler. The friendship between him and Walton is creditable to the freshness of the old man and to ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... pitilessly, "that the wives of the American farmers fill our insane asylums. See what a life they lead, most of them; no music, no books. Seventeen hours a day in a couple of small rooms—dens. Now there is Sim Burns! What a travesty of a home! Yet there are a dozen just as bad in sight. He works like a fiend—so does his wife—and what is their reward? Simply a hole to hibernate in and to sleep and eat in in summer. A dreary present and a well-nigh hopeless future. No, they have a ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... initiation was supposed to enter upon a new and higher life. It is possible that the veiling and disguising with clay originally signified a death to the old life, such as is the ruling idea in many initiations of a primitive type. (Cf. Aristophanes, travesty of an initiation-ceremony in ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... fear from one who is no true Muslim, from one who makes a mock and travesty of the True Faith ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... of such a travesty of the sacred office as these passages describe must have been deplorable; and without doubt it was one of the principal causes of the overthrow of the Jewish State. Jeremiah says expressly, that from the prophets profaneness had gone out over the whole ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... And he wondered if Natalie felt at all as he did, the vast room and the two men serving, with Graham no one knew where, and that travesty of Christmas joy between them. His mind wandered ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... surrounded the giving or the taking of a name, it hardly seems appropriate that Indian names should be assumed even for a short period without some regard being shown to the customs and thought of the people from whom the names are borrowed. While there should be no travesty of rites such as those that have been here described, rites that have been held sacred upon this continent for untold generations, still it would not be unseemly to hold to the spirit of those rites when we borrow these names during the camp days in which we seek to live close to ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... in the fourth act, dressed as a Mexican general, and wearing his forelock of hair in a way that appeared to imitate a like peculiarity in the King, there was an outcry among the audience; and Louis-Philippe's son, who was present, was informed by complaisant courtiers that the travesty was intended as an insult to his father. The next day, Harel was advertized that the authorities forbade any other presentation of the piece; and, on the 16th, the Press, following the Government's lead, were practically unanimous in anathematizing the unhappy dramatist, the Debats ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... most ingenious pen has been all too seldom employed on children's books. Indeed, one that comes first to memory, the "New Sandford and Merton" (1872), is hardly entitled to be classed among them, but the travesty of the somewhat pedantic narrative, interspersed with fairly amusing anecdotes, that Thomas Day published in 1783, is superb. No matter how familiar it may be, it is simply impossible to avoid laughing anew at the smug little Harry, the sanctimonious tutor, or the naughty ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... no travesty. It is a hasty, but I believe a pretty exact application of Jefferies' method. And I ask how it would look in a book. If the critics really enjoy, as they profess to, all this trivial country lore, why on earth don't they come ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in it," she heard him say, and she was in her room once more, holding to the bed-rail, standing near this haggard travesty of ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... obviously insufficient as any quaint old chronicle tracing the genealogies of English kings through the chiefs of Troy to the children of Noah. There is no difference, except that the tale of the Dark Ages can never be proved, while the travesty of the Darwinian theory can sometimes be disproved. But I should diminish my meaning if I suggested it as a mere score in the Victorian game of Scripture versus Science. Some much larger mystery veils the origins of man than most partisans ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... all that, to feel the degradation of her nature, to lie, sick with exhaustion, on the broken slats of her bed under a ravelled-out travesty of a quilt, and get up morning after morning in an iron winter dark—to experience that in your spirit and put it into durable metal, hard stone—is to hold beauty in ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the hymnals with its tune. Is it because profane people or thoughtless youth made a travesty ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... such a phase to-day. And most of the aggressions and annexations of the modern period have arisen out of the inconveniences and reasonable fears caused by such an inept phase. I am a persistent advocate for the restoration of Poland, but at the same time it is very plain to me that it is a mere travesty of the facts to say that Poland, was a white lamb of a country torn to pieces by three wicked neighbours, Poland in the eighteenth century was a dangerous political muddle, uncertain of her monarchy, her policy, her affinities. She endangered her neighbours because ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... who had received, through a long line of apostolical succession, some mystic power for administering rites and conferring absolution, together with those who came beneath the touch of their priestly hands. That theory has notoriously broken down. But the truth of which it is a grotesque travesty is presented in our Lord's conception of the vine, deeply planted in the dark grave of Joseph's garden, which had reached down its branches through the ages, and in which every believing soul has a part. Touch Christ, become one with Him in living union, abide in Him, and you are ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... the velvet was off the doctor's voice now. He rose with a certain travesty of dignity. "But I may say that I desire—that I will tolerate—no interference. My daughter's future ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... of the Belgians protested that to interpret the intentions of the French Government in this manner was to travesty them, and to allow oneself to be misled as to the feelings of the French nation by the manifestations of a few hotheads, ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... supplies in the manner they judge best." Chatham, in short, applied precisely the same argument to Ireland as, in his memorable speeches of the next year (1774), he applied to America, and in both cases he was right. The only mistake he made was in his estimate of that travesty of a representative assembly, the Irish House of Commons, which, at the secret instigation of the Viceroy, though without actual coercion, eventually threw out a tax so distasteful to its English patrons. But the argument for financial independence remained ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... really all that M. Flourens can make of Natural Selection. We have given the original, in fear lest a translation should be regarded as a travesty; but with the original before the reader, we may try to analyse the passage. "For an organized being, Nature is only organization, neither ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... which, though differing widely from each other, have both their source in the turn for the delineation of the ludicrous, and both stand in close historical relation to the iambic. The fable in Greece originated in an intentional travesty of human affairs. It is probable that the taste for fables of beasts and numerous similar inventions found its way from the East, since this sort of symbolical narrative is more in accordance with the Oriental than with the Greek ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... cabal insists that the treaty be Americanized. Suppose that Italy asked that it be Italianized— France that it be Frenchized—Britain that it be Britainized, and so on down the line. The whole thing would result in a perfect travesty. ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... volition, actuated by some dreadful, unclean force. Breed knew it for some sort of poisoning, and his muscles bunched for flight. Shady barked angrily as if to drive the thing away. Then Breed saw a hairless travesty of a coyote move out of a draw and halt directly in the path of the mad coyote. Cripp stood there grinning till he felt the other's teeth score his unprotected hide; then he whirled and snapped back at him. The mad coyote kept straight on and Cripp followed at his own queer shambling ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... nature? not studied with the microscope, but seen largely, in plain daylight, with the natural eye? What novel has more good sense, and gaiety, and wit, and unflagging, admirable literary skill? Good souls, I suppose, must sometimes read it in the blackguard travesty of a translation. But there is no style so untranslatable; light as a whipped trifle, strong as silk; wordy like a village tale; pat like a general's despatch; with every fault, yet never tedious; with no merit, yet inimitably right. And, once more, to make ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that with Ale or viler Liquors, Didst inspire WITHERS, PRYN, and VICARS. This Vicars was a man of as great interest and authority in the late Reformation as Pryn or Withers, and as able a poet. He translated Virgil's AEneids into as horrible Travesty, in earnest, as the French Scaroon did in burlesque, and was only outdone in his way by the politic author ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... she used her power, and it was alleged that she was overmuch in the company of divers magicians and astrologers who had been brought from Italy, and that the black art alone was responsible for her success. These accusations finally aroused such public hostility that, after a trial which was a travesty upon justice, Eleanora was soon condemned to death, on the charge of having unduly influenced the queen by means of magic philters. Eleanora went to her death bravely, saying with dignity to her accusers: "The philter ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... rebours. How many times have we read that the art of singing is in its decadence, that soon there would not be one artist left fitted to deliver vocal music in public. The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe wrote something of the sort in 1825 for he found the great Catalani but a sorry travesty of his early favourites, Pacchierotti and Banti. I protest against this misconception. Any one who asserts that there are laws which govern singing, physical, scientific laws, must pay court to other ears than mine. I have heard this same man for twenty years shouting ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... French ladies but a bad opinion of our morals. How could they comprehend that the taste was, like themselves, imported, and that its indulgence here did not characterize us? It was only in appearance that, while we did not enjoy the wit we delighted in the coarseness. And how coarse this travesty of the old fable mainly is! That priest Calchas, with his unspeakable snicker his avarice, his infidelity, his hypocrisy, is alone infamy enough to provoke the destruction of a city. Then that scene interrupted by Menelaus! It is indisputably witty, and since all those people are so purely creatures ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... of fatiguing drollery the history of the relations between Great Britain and the United States previous to the war of 1812, and reflecting the popular feeling with regard to some of the English tourists who overran us after the conclusion of peace. In this ponderous travesty John Bull of Bullock is England, and Brother Jonathan the United States; Napoleon figures as Beau Napperty, Louis XVI. as Louis Baboon, and France as Frogmore. It could not have been a hard thing to write in its day, and we suppose that it must once have amused people, though it is not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... closet for dresses, cloaks, and artificial flowers; Brigitte as usual, was patient and cheerful. We both arranged a sort of travesty; she wanted to dress my hair herself; we painted and powdered ourselves freely; all that we lacked was found in an old chest that belonged, I believe, to the aunt. In an hour we could not recognize each other. The evening passed in singing, in a thousand ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... mythological fable, Trove has scarcely ever reduced demi-god or hero to more fantastic plight than was this travesty of the great Henry. After dinner Madame de Traigny led her fair guest about the castle to show her the various points of view. At one window she paused, saying that it commanded ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to the bateau did Carrigan dare to glance back over his shoulder at the man who was paddling, to see what effect the fistic travesty had left on him. He was a big-mouthed, clear-eyed, powerfully-muscled fellow, and he was grinning from ear ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... place," he said briefly, as he turned into a travesty of a front yard and halted beside a small cabin, built of logs and containing not more ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... ask, in our own allegory-loving literature or in any other, merit the same commendation? For the rest, Pope's own immortal "Dunciad," though doubtless more immediately suggested by a personal satire of Dryden's, is in one sense a kind of travesty of the "House of ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... incidents and persons of domestic life; out of the stuff of which they made their emperors, their heroes, and their princesses, they cut out a pompous country justice, a hectoring tailor, or an impudent mantua-maker; but it was not merely this travesty of great personages, nor the lofty effusions of one in a lowly station, which terminated the object of parody. It was designed for a higher object, that of more obviously exposing the original for any absurdity in its scenes, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... above which the Virgin floated with the infant Jesus in her arms. One wondered whether she was really holding him out to bless; her attitude might equally have been that of one who was flinging him down into the shambles, disgusted with this travesty on religion. ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... responded to the influence in the air and come. In the foreground, where a solitary Indian stood motionless, waiting, there was being repeated the same puerile pantomime and horse-play of a former occasion. At intervals, from the rear, sounded the war whoop travesty. It was all the same as that afternoon eighteen days before, when the girl had left, similar even to the cloud of black smoke in the distance lifting lazily into the sky; only now the trail, instead of growing ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... sacred opera, as Rubinstein entitles it, was written in 1870, the text, which is somewhat of a travesty on sacred history, by Julius Rodenberg. An English critic very pertinently says: "One item alone in all the multitude of details crowded by Herr Rodenberg into his canvas has any foundation in fact. He adopts the theory that there really was a tower of ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... always stand in history to Ireland's credit and as an instance of her intimate familiarity with American affairs, one hundred years prior to that Revolution which emancipated the people of this land from the same tyranny under which she herself has groaned. And yet, what a cruel travesty on history it reads like now, when we scan the official records of the New England colonies and find that the Irish were often called "convicts", and it was thought that measures should be taken to prevent their landing on the soil where they ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... external government and law, it is the antithesis of Mr. Carpenter's proposal that they should disappear, because they are the travesty of inward government and order. On the contrary, I hope that external government, animated by the general will of a social democratic commonwealth and vested in representatives sensitively accountable to an alert and intelligent public opinion, will appear to my listeners not as a travesty, ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... of all nations on equal terms. We had assumed the position of guarantor of the canal, including, of course, the building of the canal, and of its peaceful use by all the world. The enterprise was recognized everywhere as responding to an international need. It was a mere travesty on justice to treat the government in possession of the Isthmus as having the right—which Secretary Cass forty-five years before had so emphatically repudiated—to close the gates of intercourse on one of the great highways of the world. When we submitted to Colombia the Hay-Herran ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... to the terrible travesty of justice which was going on. Magistrates were seen to have overlooked the most flagrant instances of falsehood and contradiction on the part of both accusers and accused, using the baseless hypothesis ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... close to me I obtained an excellent view of him, and though I was later to become better acquainted with his kind, I may say that that single cursory examination of this awful travesty on Nature would have proved quite sufficient to my desires had I been a free agent. The fastest flier of the Heliumetic Navy could not quickly enough have carried me far from this ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Why? Because these pages no longer contain an acute transcript of life as only a sensitive feminine mind would have the cunning to observe it, and of a form of human life in itself highly feminine in its character, but they now present a singularly insular travesty of man, an unconscious caricature of man as he could only appear to a feminine mind bound by the romantic limitations of sex, a mind, that is, devoid of masculine understanding, unable to recognise by virtue of affiliation of instinct that which is fine in the male character and that which ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... afraid of tragedy, you ought never to have joined me in starting upon such a story. Even what has never happened must be made to seem actual to be successful. The art of fiction is to imitate truth with absolute fidelity, not to travesty it. In such circumstances the man's love would be ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... years ago, Japan adopted the outward forms of Western civilisation, her action was regarded by many as a stage trick—a sort of travesty employed for a temporary purpose. But what do they think now, when they see cabinets and chambers of commerce compelled to reckon with the British of the North Pacific? The awakening of Japan's huge neighbour promises to yield results equally startling and ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... vindication of gloom and sadness to say that things are going badly with them in the outer world, and who act as if they supposed that no joy can be too exuberant and no elation too lofty if, on the other hand, things are going rightly. It is a miserable travesty of the Christian faith to suppose that its prime purpose is anything else than to put into our hands the power of ruling ourselves because we ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... ultimately came into his own over his own bridge of kisses, built under a heavy barrage of needless misunderstandings. But Joey's pipsqueak shirker fiance, Hilary, was altogether too foolish a travesty of a man ever to have gained her hand or, having gained it, to have held it against any real male in or out of khaki. The fact is that "BERTHA RUCK" can achieve something better than these meandering methods and this spinelessness of characterisation; and it is distinctly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 8, 1917 • Various |
