"Burlesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... among these beautiful hills that Bayard Taylor lived and wrote his "Hannah Thurston," a most contemptible burlesque of his own neighbors and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of justice usually cured them. The indifferent, business-like manner in which the oaths are put, the sing-song tone of voice, the rapid utterance of the words, give to this solemn act an appearance of excellent burlesque, which ultimately renders the whole proceedings remarkable for the absence of truth and reality; but, at the same time, gives them unquestionable merit as a dramatic representation, abounding with fiction, well related and ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... in "The Clouds," to mention no other examples; and in English drama this kind of thing is alluded to again and again. What Jonson really did, was to raise the dramatic lampoon to an art, and make out of a casual burlesque and bit of mimicry a dramatic satire of literary pretensions and permanency. With the arrogant attitude mentioned above and his uncommon eloquence in scorn, vituperation, and invective, it is no wonder that ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... followed by other light comedies. His pieces include numerous burlesques and pantomimes, the libretti of Savonarola (Hamburg, 1884) and of The Canterbury Pilgrims (Drury Lane, 1884) for the music of Dr (afterwards Sir) C. V. Stanford. The Happy Land (Court Theatre, 1873), a political burlesque of W. S. Gilbert's Wicked World, was written in collaboration with F. L. Tomline. For the last ten years of his life he was on the regular staff of Punch. His health was seriously affected in 1889 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... burlesque by upsetting the chair. The Captain and Patch-Eye, chuckling at their jest, sit to a game of cards. The Duke returns to the chest. Once in a while he lays down the ship and seems to be thinking. The broken crystal of the fortune-teller ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... Then I make a separate group of those who expect to sing, or to do any sort of a musical specialty, or any kind of a "stunt" that might be included in the show. I have had the greatest variety of specialties in a show. I have had them do magic, burlesque magic, play ukuleles, and all sorts of stunts which I have placed effectively in a show. We had a man in the Princeton show who did a little trick with a cigarette that was a scream. I saw him standing around, and I ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... or the quinquennial assessment exactly as if Gilbert and Sullivan had never been born. It appeared that Milly had a future, that she was the best Patience yet seen in the district amateur or professional, that any burlesque manager would jump at her, that in five years, if she liked, she might be getting a hundred a week, and that Dolly Chose, the idol of the Tivoli and the Pavilion, had not half her style. It also appeared that Milly had no brains of ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... courtesy nor of France; it belonged to an age far behind the eleventh century, or even the tenth, or indeed any century within the range of French history; and it was as little fitted for Christian's way of treatment as for any avowed burlesque. The original Tristan—critics say—was not French, and neither Tristan nor Isolde had ever a drop of French blood in their veins. In their form as Christian received it, they were Celts or Scots; they came from Brittany, Wales, Ireland, the ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... the Chevalier; "however, I may acquaint you with my first exploits without offending my modesty; besides, my squire's style borders too much upon the burlesque ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... which have no other origin than the prayer of the Hebrews in the third act, with its superb change of key.'" Thus by a stroke of genius, a scene which first impressed the audience as a piece of theatrical burlesque, was raised to sublimity by the solemn ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... The former, that of earnest and submissive contemplation, declares itself in prayers, hymns, and "the dim religious light" of cathedrals. The second mood, that of playful and erratic fancy, is conspicuous in the buffoonery of Miracle Plays, in Marchen, these burlesque popular tales about our Lord and the Apostles, and in the hideous and grotesque sculptures on sacred edifices. The two moods are present, and in conflict, through the whole religious history of the human race. They stand as near each other, and ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... anathematizing the lights, lungs, liver, and all odd joints, without excepting even the great toe of his victim.—To proceed in our review; the dying expostulations of poor Beatrice, are beautiful and affecting, though occasionally tinged with the Cockney style of burlesque; for instance, Bernado asks, when they tear him from ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... a prolonged and elaborate and audacious burlesque of the early annals of New Amsterdam. The undaunted Goth of the legend who plucked the Roman senator by the beard was not a more ruthless iconoclast than this son of New Amsterdam, who drew its grave ancestors from venerable obscurity by flooding them with the cheerful light ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... about, for the puff and humbug attracted people. The Montefiores, like fashionable knicknacks, succeeded that whimsical jade, Rose Peche, who had gone off the preceding autumn, between the third and fourth acts of the burlesque, Ousca Iscar, in order to make a study of love in company of a young fellow of seventeen, who had just entered the university. The novelty and difficulty of their performance, revived and agitated the curiosity of the public, for there ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... ceremony the reader may imagine who has already gathered some idea of the reckless irreverence of Roaring Camp. The master of ceremonies was one "Boston," a noted wag, and the occasion seemed to promise the greatest facetiousness. This ingenious satirist had spent two days in preparing a burlesque of the Church service, with pointed local allusions. The choir was properly trained, and Sandy Tipton was to stand godfather. But after the procession had marched to the grove with music and banners, and the child had been deposited before a mock altar, Stumpy stepped before the ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... knowledge was exceedingly crude; and the facts in nature had become so strangely distorted, through centuries of ignorance and superstition, that the solemnly pronounced verities of the time were but a burlesque upon the truth. Belief in the existence of the antipodes was considered by ecclesiastical authority as a sure proof of heresy, the philosopher's stone had been found, astrology was an infallible science, and the air was filled ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... not absolutely new or original; but, again, what matters this to anyone, so long as the new shape given to the old material is genuinely amusing? So "farcical" goes with "original." But now, as to its being a "Romance?" Would not the term "burlesque" be a better term than "Farcical Romance?" The characters of the three adventurous lovers are not less burlesque than were those of the three Knights in ALBERT SMITH'S romantic Extravaganza, The Alhambra, played then by ALFRED WIGAN, and Mr. and Mrs. KEELEY. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... attributed this advice to jealousy. In 1714 the delightful poem appeared in its present form with the machinery of sylphs and gnomes adopted from the mysteries of the Rosicrucians. Pope styles it an heroi-comical poem, and judged in the light of a burlesque it is conceived and executed with an art that is beyond praise. Lord Petre, a Roman Catholic peer, had cut off a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor's hair, much to the indignation of her family and possibly of the young lady also. Pope wrote the poem to remove ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... Barbee together dragged Royce away, letting Blenham lie there. Both men were naked to their waists, their shirts and undershirts in rags and strips hanging grotesquely about their hips; Royce looked like some hideously painted burlesque of a ballet-dancer in a comic skirt. Only there was nothing of burlesque or ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... I. Fellow Travellers with a Bird, II. Children in Midwinter That Pretty Person Out of Town Expression Under the Early Stars The Man with Two Heads Children in Burlesque Authorship Letters The Fields The Barren Shore The Boy Illness The Young Children Fair and Brown ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... already been bereft of his senses by the melodrama preceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty, her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart, but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate who fought a losing fight with broadswords, two up and two down—click-click, ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... trampling of the horses and the measured tread of the marching multitude rose the voices of the priests chanting the requiem, while the military bands struck in with the solemn roll of the muffled drums. On reaching the principal square the procession halted, a burlesque funeral oration was pronounced over the defunct Pau Pi, and the lights were extinguished. Immediately the devil and his angels darted from the crowd, seized the body and fled away with it, hotly pursued by the whole multitude, yelling, screaming, and cheering. Naturally the fiends were overtaken ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... but as we believe without sufficient proof, that the wit combats of the lords and ladies, {146} and the artificial speech of the sonneteering courtiers, were also introduced for burlesque. These elements appear, however, in other plays than this, with no intention of burlesque; and it seems probable that Shakespeare greatly enjoyed this display of his power as a master in the prevailing fashion of courtly repartee. ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... the intervals of business I had written a good deal, but my works had been almost exclusively for the stage, and for those theatres that devoted themselves to extravaganza and burlesque. I had written many pieces of this description, full of puns and comic songs, and they had had a fair success, but my best piece had been a treatment of English history during the Reformation period, in the course of which I had introduced Cranmer, Sir Thomas More, Henry the Eighth, Catherine ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... the act of composition has been called the keenest of intellectual pleasures; and this was the poet's almost sole reward in Canada a generation ago, when nothing seemed to catch the popular ear but burlesque, or trivial verse. In strange contrast this with a remoter age! In old Upper Canada, in its primitive days, there was no lack of educated men and women, of cultivated pioneers who appreciated art and good literature in all its forms. Even the average immigrant brought his favourite books ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... af det Kyhlamske vech C. Bredahl: Kiobenhavn, 1834. It is a mixture of tragedy and farce: the former occasionally good, the latter poor buffoonery. In the notes, readings of the old MS. are referred to with apparent seriousness; but Gammel Gumba's Saga is quoted in a manner that seems burlesque. I cannot find the word "Kyhlam" in any dictionary. Can any of your readers tell me whether it signifies a real country, or is a mere fiction? The work does not read like a translation; and, if one, the number of modern allusions show that it is not, as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... resolutions privately, are, no doubt, secret friends, needing a little more courage to face the pro-slavery feeling and sentiment which are all about them. Some one who read these resolutions suggested the idea of their being a burlesque. I repudiated the idea at once. They will commend themselves to you, dear Aunty, I am sure, ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... place in the spirit land, are most grotesque and silly and would be taken as a burlesque upon Spiritualism, were they not put forth in all gravity by the friends and advocates of that so-called new revelation. Thus Judge Edmunds, giving an account of what he had seen in the spirit world, mentions ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... to a "Nina padrona mia dilettissima," shows that the memory of Gori and the friendship of Gori's friends were not the only things which attracted him ever and anon from Florence to Siena. A collection of wretched bouts-rimes and burlesque doggrel, written at Florence in a house which Mme. d'Albany could not enter, and in the company of women whom Mme. d'Albany could not receive, and among which is a sonnet in which Alfieri explains his condescension in joining ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... "If he were here, I would make him a prince." To Goethe he now said that in art, as in politics, there should be rule and ordered beauty; apropos of the drama imitated from Shakspere, which mingles tragedy and comedy, the terrible with the burlesque, he expressed surprise that a great mind like Goethe's did not like clean-cut models—"N'aime pas les genres tranches." These two judgments, taken together, give a valuable picture of ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... The Californian's Tale A Helpless Situation A Telephonic Conversation Edward Mills and George Benton: A Tale The Five Boons of Life The First Writing-machines Italian without a Master Italian with Grammar A Burlesque Biography How to Tell a Story General Washington's Negro Body-servant Wit Inspirations of the "Two-year-olds" An Entertaining Article A Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Amended Obituaries A Monument to Adam A Humane Word from Satan Introduction to "The ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... matter which will be new to great numbers of our readers. One of the best evidences of the naturalness and ease of our author's writings, is to be found in the ready appreciation of them by all classes of readers. Whether the vein be a serious one, or the theme turn upon the humorous or the burlesque, it is not too much, we think, to say that the writer takes always with him the heart or the fancy of the reader. Without however pausing to characterize productions which bid fair to become very ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... poem was first published in 1656. Chapelain is unconsciously burlesque; he is a Scarron without knowing it. It is none the less interesting to learn from him that he merely treated his subject as an occasion for glorifying the Bastard of Orleans. He expressly says in his preface: "I did not so much regard her (the Maid) as the ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... oysters that are served on his dining cars do not seem to be suffering from car-sickness. And you can get a beefsteak measuring eighteen inches from tip to tip. There are spring chickens with the most magnificent bust development I ever saw outside of a burlesque show; and the eggs taste as though they might have originated with a hen instead of a cold-storage vault. If there was only a cabaret show going up and down the middle of the car during meals, even the New York passengers would be satisfied with the service, ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... Smithson arrived with a small army of men, who dumped paint-pots on the boards, threw hammers down, and rushed across the stage with flats and fly-cloths. Yet, in spite of all these accidents introducing the spirit of burlesque, the play survived. Sir Henry would tolerate interruptions up to a point, but, when a charwoman in the auditorium started brushing or turned on a sudden light, he would turn and roar ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... Paris on the inaugural day of the Constitution for the present year. The foreign ministers were ordered to attend at this investiture of the Directory;—for so they call the managers of their burlesque government. The diplomacy, who were a sort of strangers, were quite awe-struck with the "pride, pomp, and circumstance" of this majestic senate; whilst the sans-culotte gallery instantly recognized their old insurrectionary ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 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
... history, architecture, and, in fact, all arts and sciences which depend more on genius than on experience. It was no lightening of the judgment when he added that the moderns surpass the ancients in doggerel, humour burlesque, and all the trivial arts of ridicule, the arts of the "unlucky little wits." So degraded had wit become! In the Adventurer, nos. 127 and 133, Joseph Warton showed himself to be essentially in agreement with Addison's verdict, differing only in thinking ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... good farcical standard. The good PINERO has nodded over this. The Cabinet Minister is an excellent title thrown away. The Cabinet Minister himself, Mr. ARTHUR CECIL, in his official costume, playing the flute, is as burlesque as the General in full uniform, in Mr. GILBERT'S "Wedding March," sitting with his feet in hot-water. The married boy and girl, with their doll baby and irritatingly unreal quarrels, reminded me of the boy-and-girl lovers in Brantingham Hall. The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, May 3, 1890. • Various
... improper nominative thee, ordinarily inflect with st or est the preterits or the auxiliaries of the accompanying verbs, as is done in the solemn style. Indeed, to use the solemn style familiarly, would be, to turn it into burlesque; as when Peter Pindar "telleth what he troweth." [213] And let those who think with Murray, that our present version of the Scriptures is the best standard of English grammar,[214] remember that in it they have no warrant for substituting s or es for the old termination eth, any more ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... these terrible fatigues, dancers often run serious personal risks. So, at least, says the author of the "Petits Mysteres" who, as a journalist and frequenter of the coulisses, is excellent authority. He cannot resist a joke, but it is easy to sift the facts from their admixture of burlesque exaggerations. "By dint of incurring simulated dangers, the dancer accustoms herself to real peril, as a soldier in war time becomes habituated to murder and pillage. She suspends herself from wires, sits ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... a quality inconsistent with her evident habits, and the lace-edged petticoat that peeped beneath it was draggled with mud and unaccustomed usage. Her glossy black hair, which had been tossed into curls in some foreign fashion, was now wind-blown into a burlesque of it. This incongruity was still further accented by the appearance of the room she had entered. It was coldly and severely furnished, making the chill of the yet damp white plaster unpleasantly obvious. A black harmonium ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... former self—were laughing in satire. There was a devilish, mischievous joy in battling to outwit Bouchard more than in her deceit of Westerling. Satire, yes—needle-pointed, acid-tipped! Melodrama done in burlesque, too. In the name of the noble art of war, a bit of fooling about ghosts in a tunnel might influence the fate of armies that were the last word in modern equipment. And men played at killing with a grand front of martial dignity, when such a little thing could ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... to portray the motley characters which move before the observer in a large city; but he has not enough of the vision and the faculty divine, to make them more than melancholy ghosts of what they profess to be. The attempts at humor are inexpressibly dismal; the burlesque overpowers the most determined reader, by its leaden dulness. The style is ingeniously tasteless and feeble. He who has read it through can do or dare any thing. Mr. MATHEWS suffers from several erroneous opinions. He seems to think that literary elegance consists ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... the Tales—of the Council of Nice, in the fourth century, Mr. Smith indulges his usual felicitous vein of humour, in a burlesque which he puts into the mouth of a slave of the Bishop of Ethiopia,—"a little, corpulent, bald-headed, merry-eyed man of fifty, whose name was Mark; whose duty it was to take charge of the oil, trim the lamps, and perform other menial offices in the church of Alexandria." The profane wight deserved, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various
... noble family of the Snobs, and in every way did honour to her progenitors. As the reader is aware, there is what is known as a "cultivated voice," the result of education—it is absolutely without affectation: there is also the voice which, in imitation of the well-trained one, is little more than a burlesque, and is affected in the highest degree: this was the only fault in ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... of Natural Society," with intent to produce a burlesque, he missed his aim, and came very near convincing himself of the truth of his proposition. And in fact, the book was hailed by the rationalists as a vindication ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... adaptation of attire. Very estimable, and, we trust, very religious young women sometimes enter the house of God in a costume which makes their utterance of the words of the litany and the acts of prostrate devotion in the service seem almost burlesque. When a brisk little creature comes into a pew with hair frizzed till it stands on end in a most startling manner, rattling strings of beads and bits of tinsel, mounting over all some pert little hat with a red ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... the crowded house. The ruffling of the face of the sea before a storm. The Sisters Sigsbee, Coon Delineators and Unrivalled Burlesque Artists, have finished their dance, smiled, blown kisses, skipped off, skipped on again, smiled, blown more kisses, and disappeared. A long chord from the orchestra. A chord that is almost a wail. ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... come, and forth he would be drawn like a shy, unwilling periwinkle from its shell, once more to play his abased and bashful role of free entertainer to guffawing mixed audiences. For all others in the great city there were havens and homes. But for a poor, lorn, unguided vagrant, enmeshed in the burlesque garnitures of a three-year-old male child, what haven was there? By night the part had been hard enough—as the unresponsive heavens above might have testified. By the stark unmerciful sunlight; by ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... gestures. His race has a very keen sense of humor. They see a thousand funny things about them, and laugh inwardly; but they never see anything amusing in themselves. The individual man conceives himself a dignified figure in a world of burlesque. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... barbarously murdered in the tragedy. This was, indeed, novelty to me. It was a peep into another planet. I gazed and listened with intense curiosity and enjoyment. They had a thousand odd stories and jokes about the events of the day, and burlesque descriptions and mimickings of the spectators who had been admiring them. Their conversation was full of allusions to their adventures at different places, where they had exhibited; the characters they had met with in ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... surely should never be applied in a serious composition, but where some reference may be made to a higher being, or where some duty is exacted, or implied. A man may keep his friendship sacred, because promises of friendship are very awful ties; but, methinks, he cannot, but in a burlesque sense, be said to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Honey in a tone of burlesque warning. "There must be five mirrors. He knows nothing of women who thinks that one mirror may be divided among five girls. I hope Lulu ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal—a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... far and wide over the globe. The young sculptor sat at the same board as Marsilio Ficino, interpreter of Plato; Pico della Mirandola, the phoenix of Oriental erudition; Angelo Poliziano, the unrivalled humanist and melodious Italian poet; Luigi Pulci, the humorous inventor of burlesque romance—with artists, scholars, students innumerable, all in their own departments capable of satisfying a youth's curiosity, by explaining to him the particular virtues of books discussed, or of antique works of art inspected. During those halcyon years, before the invasion of Charles VIII., ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... appropriate their portraits; venerable bachelors, who have striven to earn some little local notoriety by the diligent use of an odd phrase, a quaint garment, or an eccentric fling in the peripatetic, dread a satirist's powers of retributive burlesque; table orators suddenly grow dumb, for they suspect such a caitiff intends cold-blooded plagiarisms from their eloquence; the twinkling stars of humble village spheres shun him for an ominous comet, whose very trail robs them of light, or as paling ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... been filled with priests and laymen arrested on charges of complicity with the enemies of liberty, were entered by ruffians acting under influence of Marat and the commune's "committee of surveillance," and, after "a burlesque trial" before an armed jury, were murdered. In Versailles, Lyons, Orleans, and other towns, there were like massacres. The victims of these massacres ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of Altisidora. (This immediately follows the article on Periodical Criticism, and is a burlesque sketch on the same subject. It serves to introduce the following imitations, respectively, of Crabbe, Moore, and ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... other diversion. The cast and language of the poems appear, however, to belong to a later date; and the quaint stanza, afterwards employed in a modified form with such effect by Fergusson and Burns, is that used by Alexander Scot in The Justing at the Drum, and in other burlesque pieces of the early or middle period of the ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... to obtain some information as to the observance of the nuptial tie amongst slaves, I touched upon that subject, when he told me the ceremony was mostly a burlesque, and that unions were in general but temporary, although he had known some very devoted couples. But he proceeded to state that there was much room for reform in this respect. "I will relate to you an instance," said he, "of the manner in which this, as we white people consider it, solemn ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... at me fixedly for some seconds. And then a very odd thing occurred. Suddenly she squinted—squinted horribly; not with the familiar convergent squint which burlesque artists imitate, but with external or divergent squint of extreme near sight or unequal vision. The effect was quite startling. One moment both her eyes were looking straight into mine; the next, one of them rolled round until it looked out of the uttermost ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... support his play—Lewis—more worthy to be thus considered than almost any other performer: but here his very skill gives the alarm—for Lewis possesses such unaffected spirit on the stage, a kind of vivid fire, which tempers burlesque with nature, or nature with burlesque, so happily, that it cannot be hoped any other man will easily support those characters written purposely ...
— The Dramatist; or Stop Him Who Can! - A Comedy, in Five Acts • Frederick Reynolds
... from every class of society. Eichenstine Bros. sent fifty dollars, and six ragged newsboys came to present thirty cents. A lavender note, with huge monogram and written in white ink, stated that some of the girls of the "Gay Burlesque Troupe" sent a few dimes to the "kid's" mother. The few dimes amounted to fifteen dollars. Mrs. Van Larkin's coachman had to wait with her note while Lucy answered the questions of a lame old negro who had ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... raise the siege of Orleans, and actually succeeded in so doing. Schiller has a tragedy on the subject, Casimir Delavigne an elegy on her, Southey an epic poem on her life and death, and Voltaire a burlesque. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... of the book. How a man of Mr. Warricombe's intelligence could take grave interest in an arid exegesis of the first chapter of Genesis, Godwin strove in vain to comprehend. Often enough the debates were perilously suggestive of burlesque, and, when alone, he relieved himself of the laughter he had scarce restrained. For instance, there was that terrible thohu wabohu of the second verse, a phrase preserved from the original, and ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... recover'd, and had heard of the Menaces of Caesar, but he called his Council, who (not to disgrace them, or burlesque the Government there) consisted of such notorious Villains as Newgate never transported; and, possibly, originally were such who understood neither the Laws of God or Man, and had no sort of Principles to make them worthy the Name of Men; but at the very Council-Table ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... of the house at the end of the second act of La Zolfara. And Pietro was not really touched, he had acted in many unwritten dramas, understood in a moment, played up with the correct stage exit and we all laughed at the impromptu burlesque—or modificazione, as one ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... Raffaelle, Parmegiano, Poussin, are all indebted to the cartoon of Pisa. The lecture concludes with some just remarks upon the "Transfiguration," and a censure upon the coldness of Richardson, and the burlesque of the French critic Falconet, who could not discover the point of contact which united the two parts of this celebrated picture. "Raphael's design was to represent Jesus as the Son of God, and, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... inability to penetrate to its true profundities. They will probably say that his theory can tolerate no partial statement, and that the attempts of the uninitiated can compass nothing but caricature and burlesque. We cordially give them the advantage of this supposed stricture, and as cordially refer all earnest inquirers to this first instalment of the heroic work. We say heroic, and would abate the adjective of no jot of meaning. It requires the stuff of which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... and a fitting burlesque to tragic scenes, or, rather, to the thing called "glorious war," old Joe Brown, then Governor of Georgia, sent in his militia. It was the richest picture of an army I ever saw. It beat Forepaugh's double-ringed circus. ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... the contagion of Roman society. It was fashionable for men like Bembo and La Casa to form connections with women of the demi-monde and to recognize their children, whose legitimation they frequently procured. The Capitoli of the burlesque poets show that this laxity of conduct was pardonable, when compared with other laughingly avowed and all but universal indulgences. Once more, compare Guidiccioni's letter to M. Giamb. Bernardi Opp. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... it a club of the lowest species. Here, in advance, we contemplate the ways of the future revolutionary inquisition. They welcome burlesque denunciations; enter into petty police investigations; weigh the tittle-tattle of porters and the gossip of servant-girls; devote an all-night session to the secrets of a drunkard.[2218] They enter on their official report and without ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... with the joking tone of the inspectors, who surmised that we were not trying to smuggle a great value into the country, and with their apologetic regrets for bothering us to open so many trunks. They implied that it was all a piece of burlesque, which we were bound mutually to carry out for the gratification of a Government which enjoyed that kind of thing. They indulged this whim so far as to lift out the trays, to let the Government see that there was nothing dutiable ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... was occupied with the performance of the curious burlesque which James had invented. The day after George Brooke was beheaded, the King drew up a warrant to the Sheriff of Hampshire for stay of all the other executions. With this document in his bosom, he signed death-warrants ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... called "teaching the young idea how to shoot," since the corps only bore l'arme blanche; but it was highly creditable to the waggery of the citizens of Taunton, and the most efficient burlesque upon the volunteer system I had yet seen, although I have encountered many more elaborately ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... great professor Burman hath styled Tom Thumb "Heroum omnium tragicorum facile principem:" nay, though it hath, among other languages, been translated into Dutch, and celebrated with great applause at Amsterdam (where burlesque never came) by the title of Mynheer Vander Thumb, the burgomasters receiving it with that reverent and silent attention which becometh an audience at a deep tragedy. Notwithstanding all this, there have not been wanting some who have represented these scenes in a ludicrous light; and Mr D—— ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... di Cristofano, known as Buffalmacco, a Florentine painter, the same that was pupil of Andrea Tafi, and celebrated as a burlesque character by Messer Giovanni Boccaccio in his Decameron was as we know bosom friend of Bruno and Calendrino, also painters and of an even more witty and merry humour than himself, and as may be seen in his works scattered throughout Tuscany, ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... corner sat Amos Entwistle, the butt of not a little mirth from a half-dozen sceptics who had gathered round him. They addressed him as 'Owd Brimstone,' and made a burlesque of his Calvinistic faith, one going so far as to call him 'a glory bird,' while another declared he was 'booked for heaven fust-class ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... had found his audience and his actors. The Prince of Wales's Theatre was directed by a burlesque actress, and devoted to light comedy and extravaganza: after that it gave up burlesque, merely heightening the effect of the comedy and prolonging the programme by a quiet farce. The company was small and strong, the theatre was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... fanciful to-day, my pet," he said at last. "You've been tiring yourself too much. You must rest. You'd better not go to the Brilliant Theatre to-night—it's only a burlesque, and is sure to be vulgar and noisy. We'll stop at home and spend a quiet evening ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... of the poor, Olive saw the frightful profanities of that cant knowledge which young or ignorant minds acquire, and by which the greatest mysteries of Christianity are lowered to a burlesque. Then she inclined to think that Harold Gwynne was right, and that in this temporary prohibition he acted as became a wise father and "a discreet and learned minister of God's Word." As such she ever considered him; though she sometimes thought ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... one of the hardest problems of a woman's life is to realise just when she must acknowlege that her youthful prime is past. Some women never seem able to solve it. They either hang on to the burlesque semblance of twenty-five, or else go all to pieces, and take unto themselves "views" as violent as they are sour. When they cannot command the uncritical admiration of the gaping crowd, they descend from their ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... issues had made the Republican party, by 1897, the party of organized business. For twelve years the alliance had grown steadily closer. Marcus A. Hanna was its spokesman. The burlesque of his sincere and kindly face, drawn by a caricaturist, Davenport, for Eastern papers, created for the popular eye the type of commercialized magnate, but it did him great injustice. Self-respecting and direct, he believed it to be the first function of government to protect property, and ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... seen done at a military post. After making a few scratches on the paper, he handed it to one of his red companions, and, with a smile on his rough countenance, addressed to him some directions in reference to the document. Although the Mexicans were much amused at these burlesque actions of the Indians, yet they did not dare to show their mirth until the latter had departed and left them ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... the Third". I have mentioned the circumstances under which they were written in the notes; and need only add that they are conceived in a very different spirit from Shelley's usual compositions. They are specimens of the burlesque and fanciful; but, although they adopt a familiar style and homely imagery, there shine through the radiance of the poet's imagination the earnest views and opinions of the politician and ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... "Nosey the Dwarf"; "The Young Englishman"; "The Prophecy of the Silver Florin"; "The Cold Heart," etc. What prospects for winter evenings are here! And while we can assure the adult reader that the promise which these titles give of burlesque or humorous description, and bold, romantic narrative, shall be more than kept, it may be well also to say, for the comfort of those whom we hope to see buy the book for their children's sake, that the stories in it are entirely free from certain objections which may ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... lips and knit his brows with a burlesque, melodramatic air, and strode up and down, with his forefinger to ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... of unknown origin, probably coined in burlesque imitation of scholastic Latin, as "hocus-pocus" or "panjandrum"), originally a term meaning whim, fancy or ridiculous idea; later applied to a pun or play upon words, and thus, in its usual sense, to a particular form ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... escapade is perhaps to be connected what seems to have been one of Fielding's earliest literary efforts. This is a modernisation in burlesque octosyllabic verse of part of Juvenal's sixth satire. In the "Preface" to the later published Miscellanies, it is said to have been "originally sketched out before he was Twenty," and to have constituted "all the Revenge taken by an injured Lover." But ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... Job. Arnold must have read Franklin's piece hastily, since he has mistaken a bit of ironic trifling for a serious attempt to rewrite the Scriptures. The Proposed New Version of the Bible is merely a bit of amusing burlesque in which six verses of the Book of Job are rewritten in the style of modern politics. According to Mr. William Temple Franklin the Bagatelles, of which the Proposed New Version is a part, were "chiefly written by Dr. Franklin for the amusement of ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... her innocent ignorance especially, is not very readily intelligible, not quite persuasive, and there is almost a touch of the burlesque in her unexpected appearance as a monk. To weave that old and famous story of love into the terribly complex political intrigue was a task almost too great. The character of Eleanor is perhaps more successfully ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... even hours. While a few gained a competence, many gained only a bare subsistence; thousands lost their health, and not a few their lives. It was a strange play that men enacted there, embracing all the confusion, glitter, rapid change of scene, burlesque, and comedy of a pantomime, with many a dash of darkest tragedy intermingled. Tents were pitched in all directions, houses were hastily run up, restaurants of all kinds were opened, boats were turned keel up and converted into ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... 'Rehearsal' was a witty burlesque upon the heroic dramas of Davenant, Dryden, and others, written by George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, the Zimri of Dryden's 'Absalom and Achitophel,' 'that life of pleasure and that soul of whim,' who, after running through a fortune ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... then, in a sort of burlesque "fashionable" lounge suit and wore a straw hat set rakishly backward on his well-oiled dark hair. He carried gloves and a malacca cane, and his gait was one of assured superiority. He was a stoutly-built, muscular young fellow and might ordinarily have been ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... 9s., the upper boxes, 8s., the pit, 6s., and the gallery, 2s.; and the proceeds realised no less a sum than 610 pounds! The performances were the "Poor Gentleman," "A Concert," by musical amateurs, and the burlesque of "Bombastes Furioso." The characters were personated for the most part in each of the pieces by amateurs, amongst whom were several of the leading gentlemen of the town, who spared no pains, study, nor cost ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... Biographies, nay Vaudevilles, Dramas and Melodramas, in all Provinces of France, there will, through these coming months, be the due immeasurable crop; thick as the leaves of Spring. Nor, that a tincture of burlesque might be in it, is Gobel's Episcopal Mandement wanting; goose Gobel, who has just been made Constitutional Bishop of Paris. A Mandement wherein ca ira alternates very strangely with Nomine Domini, and you are, with a grave countenance, invited to 'rejoice at possessing in ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... them; and although the rest were no longer regarded as sacred, the feeling of obligation remained attached to them for centuries. They were secularized, and ultimately degraded for the most part into burlesque. Such as were connected with municipal life, or, as we shall see in a future chapter, with family life, retained a measure of solemnity long after it had passed away from rites which had been abandoned to an unorganized ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... cube; do we not measure by it and speak of the cubic contents of anything? The inference is easy: reduce all objects to forms which can be bounded by planes and defined by straight lines and angles; make their cubic contents measurable to the eye; transform drawing into a burlesque of solid geometry; and you have, at once, attained to the highest art. The Futurist, on the other hand, maintains that we know nothing but that things are in flux. Form, solidity, weight are illusions. Nothing exists but motion. Everything is changing every moment, ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... in a simple prayer, in an artless letter[4120]. None of the gifts which serve to arrest and fix the attention are wanting in this style, neither grandeur of imagination nor profound sentiment, vivid characterization, delicate gradations, vigorous precision, a sportive grace, unlooked-for burlesque, nor variety of representation. But, amidst so many ingenious tricks, apologues, tales, portraits and dialogues, in earnest as well as when masquerading, his deportment throughout is irreproachable and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... its stead. As usual, no expense had been spared in the mounting, and Adrien's money had been poured out like water on extraordinary costumes, gorgeous, highly-coloured scenery, and a hundred embellishments for this new piece of elaborate and senseless burlesque, Prince Bon-Bon. But with all its deficiencies as regarded culture, the piece ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... most obvious proofs that we can select for proving the existence of a state of unbelief(302) are, the ridicule of religion expressed in the burlesque poetry of the time, and the antichristian sympathies of ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... and daily received the refuse of the various meals. The bird, furious with pain, was burying its beak into the leg of the soldier, while he, with the butt end of his musket aloft, and the bayonet depressed, offered the most burlesque representation of St. George preparing to give his mortal thrust ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... has my pupil of his own abilities, that he has for some time professed himself a wit, and tortures his imagination on all occasions for burlesque and jocularity. How he supports a character which, perhaps, no man ever assumed without repentance, may be easily conjectured. Wit, you know, is the unexpected copulation of ideas, the discovery of some occult relation between images in appearance remote from ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... acquaintance with the little Tessa. He came upon her in the thronged streets during carnival time, and seeing her, a timorous, tearful little contadin, terrified by the burlesque threats of a boisterous conjurer, took her under ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... an article in the Nuevo Mundo, in which I considered Vazquez Mella and his refutation of the Kantian philosophy, dwelling especially upon his seventeenth mathematical proof of the existence of God. The thing was a burlesque, but a conservative paper took issue with me, called me an atheist, a plagiarist, a drunkard and an ass. As for being an atheist, I did not take that as an insult, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... abode of drunkenness and grossness; they defaced the sacred trees and the grey walls with inscriptions which the indignation of a purer age has caused to be removed; they carried on nightly revels which no historian could describe, and in their wicked buffoonery mocked the Creator with burlesque religious rites. Such an unholy place would be pulled down by the mob nowadays, and the gang of debauchees would figure in the police-court; but in those "good old times" the Prime Minister and the Secretary to the Admiralty were merry members of a crew that disgraced humanity. ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... a literary game popular in the 17th and 18th centuries—the rhymed words at the end of a line being given for others to fill up. Thus Horace Walpole being given, "brook, why, crook, I," returned the burlesque verse— "I sits with my toes in a Brook, And if any one axes me Why? I gies 'em a rap with my Crook, 'Tis constancy makes ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... he got, and mimicked the dances of the boy and girl in burlesque fashion, and inasmuch as the spectators had been pleased to think the natural beauty of the boy enhanced by every gesture of his body in the dance, so the jester must give a counter-representation, (44) in which each twist and movement of his ...
— The Symposium • Xenophon
... best kind. Will [Greek: ph]. point out in any existing poem of such profession and character, a single heroic line, consisting of ten words, all which ten words shall be "low" in the sense of "vulgar"? Can even the Muses of burlesque and slang furnish such ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... the personage who had just addressed him with much curiosity. He was dressed in the height or rather the burlesque of fashion, wore an eyeglass, and an enormous locket on his chain. The face which surmounted all this grandeur was almost that of a monkey, and Toto Chupin had not exaggerated its ugliness when he likened ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... club to go to at that time, so he went and read the papers, and drank coffee at a cigar divan until it was late enough to dine, and after dinner tried to drown his care by going to see one of those anomalous productions—a 'three-act burlesque'—at a neighbouring theatre, which he sat through with a growing gloom, in spite of the pretty faces and graceful dances which have now, with some rare exceptions, made plot and humour so unnecessary. Each leading member of the clever company danced his or her ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... applying them to another sense they are made a relation of a wedding-night, and the act of consummation fulsomely described in the very words of the most modest amongst all poets. Of the same manner are our songs which are turned into burlesque, and the serious words of the author perverted into a ridiculous meaning. Thus in Timon's "silli" the words are generally those of Homer and the tragic poets, but he applies them satirically to some customs and kinds of philosophy which he arraigns. But the Romans not using any ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... little relation to life as the philosophy that is enunciated in a monkey-house. Opera-bouffe performed upon Helvellyn would be a sorry spectacle; what was all this bedizened rout of people playing before the footlights of cities, but a vain burlesque at which Nature laughed? And as my sense of the importance of this kind of spectacle gradually sank, my appreciation of the serious drama conducted by Nature, upon a stage as old as time, whose footlights are the changeless planets, gradually rose. I had become the neighbour ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... institution it was so trite that once we made of it a fraternity play. I faintly remember a pledge to secrecy—sworn by the moon and the seven wandering stars—but nevertheless I shall divulge the plot. It was a burlesque tragedy in rhyme. Some eighteen years ago, it seems, Brabantio, the noble Venetian Senator, kept this same dog-wagon—he and his beautiful daughter Desdemona. Here came Othello, Iago and Cassio of the famous ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... burlesque narrative of how this gentleman had almost been married two days before. There was not a word about the marriage, however, but the story was adorned with generals, colonels and kammer-junkers, while Zverkov almost took the ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... consequently, of inferior manners, whereas the grave romance sets the highest before us: lastly, in its sentiments and diction; by preserving the ludicrous instead of the sublime. In the diction, I think, burlesque itself may be sometimes admitted; of which many instances will occur in this work, as in the description of the battles, and some other places, not necessary to be pointed out to the classical reader, for whose entertainment those parodies or burlesque ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... now became acquainted with all the audacious and burlesque inventions, all the serio-comic combinations of that mendicancy of great cities, organized like a department of state, innumerable as an army, which subscribes to the newspapers and knows its Bottin ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... according to his own fashion, creates her according to his own image. Pious souls clothe her with an invincible charm and the divine gift of charity; simple souls make her simple too; men gross and violent figure her a giantess, burlesque and terrible. Shall we ever discern the true features of her countenance? Behold her, from the first and perhaps for ever enclosed in a flowering thicket ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... bordering on farce—are classed as "dramatic" subjects, and this, apparently, because they are strongly dramatic in certain scenes. Thus, again, genuine farce (as distinguished from "slap-stick" comedy), social comedy, burlesque and extravaganza are all classed under the head of "comedy," just as comedy-drama, tragedy, melodrama, and historical plays are classed as "dramatic." These two broad classifications will be used ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... puerile street fights with slings, of the printers' devils and schoolboys of Paris. The incidents of the war read like scenes in a comic opera. A hundred thousand armed citizens were besieged by eight thousand soldiers. The evolution of a burlesque form of cavalry, called the corps of the Portes Cocheres, formed by a conscription of one horseman for every house with a carriage gate, became the derision of the royal army. They issued forth, beplumed and beribboned, ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... overcoming the difficulties of interpreting aright my clumsy, circumlocutory phrases in attempting to describe shawls, gowns, and bonnets; and taught me the exact millinery language which I ought to have made use of with an arch expression of triumph and a burlesque earnestness of manner, that always enchanted me. At that time, every word she uttered, no matter how frivolous, was the sweetest of all music to my ears. It was only by the stern test of after-events that I learnt to analyse her conversation. Sometimes, when I was away ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... its subjects are sublime, its writer's genius should be so too; otherwise it becomes the meanest thing in writing, viz. an involuntary burlesque. ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... over, for ever render impossible the rehearsal of another great poet. But a work of art is valuable, and pleasurable in proportion to its rarity; one beautiful book of verses is better than twenty books of beautiful verses. This is an absolute and incontestable truth; a child can burlesque this truth—one verse is better than the whole poem, a word is better than the line, a letter is better than the word, but the truth is not thereby affected. Hugo never had the good fortune to write a bad book, nor even ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore |
