"Burlesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... family. Ye have them yourself. Ye must always remember ye got them from your great-grandmother Jeanie Napier, who was so much admired by Sir Walter Scott at her first ball. And talking of dancing ...." and she had lifted up her skirts and set her feet waggishly twinkling in a burlesque dance, which she followed up with a travesty of an opera, a form of art she had met with in her youth and about which, since she was the kind of woman who could have written songs and ballads if she had lived in ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... the first stanza very good solemn poetry, as also the three first lines of the second. Its last line is an excellent burlesque surprise on gloomy sentimental enquirers. And, perhaps, the advice is as good as can be given to a low-spirited dissatisfied being:—'Don't trouble your head with sickly thinking: take a ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the mass of Greek literature affords a very imperfect view. In Homer indeed this is not the case; but in the Athenian period the dramatists and historians give little information, if we accept the highly idealised burlesque of the Aristophanic Comedy. Of the New Comedy too little is preserved to be of much use, and even in it the whole atmosphere was very conventional. The Greek novel did not come into existence till too late; and, when it came, ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... is a word used in the theatrical business to distinguish the full-evening drama, its actors, producers, and its mechanical stage from those of burlesque and vaudeville. Originally coined as a word of reproach against vaudeville, it has lost its sting and is used by vaudevillians as well as legitimate actors ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... his liking for such songs. Nor does it seem on the surface to connect him with Troy, as do the other two songs of Demodocus. (3) It gives an unworthy view of the Gods, degrading them far below Homer's general level, reducing them to ordinary burlesque figures which violate all decency, not to speak of morality. (4) Philologists have picked out certain words and expressions peculiar to this passage, which, not being employed by Homer elsewhere, tend to indicate ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... of 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, ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... third century before Christ, in celebration of the procession of the sacred basket of Demeter, not [125] at the Attic, but at the Alexandrian Eleusinia. He developes, in something of the prosaic spirit of a medieval writer of "mysteries," one of the burlesque incidents of the story, the insatiable hunger which seized on Erysichthon because he cut down a grove sacred to the goddess. Yet he finds his opportunities for skilful touches of poetry;—"As the four white horses draw her sacred basket," he says, "so will the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... thickets; not one of the hideous objects which the architects of our district churches perpetrate, to puzzle the passer-by as to the purpose of its being,—whether a brewer's chimney, or a shot-tower,—a perch for city pigeons, or a standing burlesque on the builders of the nineteenth age of the fine arts in England. This steeple is an old grey turret, ivy-mantled, modest, and with that look of venerable age which instinctively makes us feel, that it has witnessed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... the men are slow to take them. There is a man towards the end of the evening who wins one unmistakably with an inimitable burlesque of "Alice, where art thou?" The pianist fails to keep in touch with the astonishing vagaries of this performance, and the singer, unabashed, finishes without accompaniment. The audience yells with delight, and continues to yell till the singer comes ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... 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 it must have been largely revised ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... the wars created great discontent, which during the struggle with Spain led to a series of conspiracies or revolts against the government, known as the Wars of the Fronde (1648-1652). "Notwithstanding its peculiar character of levity and burlesque, the Fronde must be regarded as a memorable struggle of the aristocracy, supported by the judicial and municipal bodies, to control the despotism of the crown.... It failed;... nor was any farther effort made to resuscitate the dormant liberties ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... in wait for charity, murmured a modulated appeal; if you heard shouts or yells afar off they died upon your ear in a strain of melody at the moment when they were lifted highest. I am aware of seeming to burlesque the operatic fact which every one must have noticed in Naples; and I will not say that the neglected or affronted babe, or the trodden dog, is as tuneful as the midnight cat there, but only that they approach it in the prevailing tendency of all the local discords to soften and lose themselves ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... is not easy to account for. He points out how the poets began to introduce rhyme into alliterative verse, until at length rhyme came to predominate over alliteration, and "thus was this kind of metre at length swallowed up and lost in the common burlesque Alexandrine or anapaestic verse, as "A cobbler there was, and he lived in a stall.'' Percy made a serious mistake when he gave the name of Alexandrine to anapaestic verse; but he is quite right in his ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 each ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... July, 1597, Pembroke's Men at the Swan acted Nashe's satirical play, The Isle of Dogs, containing, it seems, a burlesque on certain persons high in authority. As a result the Privy Council on July 28 ordered all acting in and about London to cease until November 1, and all public playhouses to be ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... a success—I could see that it would be at the moment Mr. Bernard Shaw so forgot himself as to be interested in something he had not himself written. The Press was charmed with the play and went so far as to say, with a gross burlesque of Chesterton, that it was 'real phantasy and had soul.' Chesterton by his one produced play had earned the right to call himself a dramatic author, who could make the public shiver and think at the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... like all his colleagues, given, as it is said, to frequent excesses of drunkenness, and whom the National Assembly raised again imprudently to a throne which was not made for him,—if we show him hereafter some pity, it shall not be the result of the burlesque ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... the men and women merely players. He had been a player himself, but only on the stage: Jaques had been a player where he ought to have been a true man. The whole of his account of human life is contradicted and exposed at once by the entrance, the very moment when he has finished his wicked burlesque, of Orlando, the young master, carrying Adam, the old servant, upon his back. The song that immediately follows, sings true: "Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly." But between the all of Jaques and the most of the song, there is just the difference ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... gore'?[262] If 'to bathe in reeking wounds,' and 'spongy officers,' and even 'alarum'd by his sentinel the wolf, Whose howl's his watch,' and other such phrases in Macbeth, had occurred in the speech of Aeneas, we should certainly have been told that they were meant for burlesque. I open Troilus and Cressida (because, like the speech of Aeneas, it has to do with the story of Troy), and I read, in a perfectly serious context ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... was in the shape of ballads. The ballad vied with the sermon in doing what the modern newspaper does, in satisfying the public craving for information, amusement, or guidance. It related the last great novelty, the last great battle or crime, a storm or monstrous birth. It told some pathetic or burlesque story, or it moralized on the humours or follies of classes and professions, of young and old, of men and of women. It sang the lover's hopes or sorrows, or the adventures of some hero of history or romance. It might be a fable, a satire, a libel, a squib, a sacred song or paraphrase, a homily. ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... she caught her partner making a [v]burlesque face of suffering over her shoulder, and, turning her head quickly, saw for whose benefit he had constructed it. Eugene Bantry, flying expertly by with Mamie, was bestowing upon Mr. Flitcroft a commiserative wink. The next instant ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... superb with grace, warm harmony, and May ecstasies; "Confluentia," whose threads of liquidity are eruditely, yet romantically, intertangled to represent the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle; and "The Headless Horseman," a masterpiece of burlesque weirdness, representing the wild pursuit of Ichabod Crane and the final hurling of the awful head,—a pumpkin, some say. It is relieved by Ichabod's tender reminiscences of Katrina Van Tassel at the spinning-wheel, and is dedicated to Joseffy, the pianist, who lives ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... surely a vague way of translating. It is also, in the present acceptation of the word, improper. Formerly the term wise men denoted philosophers, or men of science and erudition: it is hardly ever used so now, unless in burlesque. Some say Magi; but Magians is better, as having more the form of an English word." CAMPBELL'S Translation of the Four ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... Canadien exile—le Canadien errant, comme dit la chanson populaire—qui croit toujours entendre resonner a son oreille le vague tintement des cloches de son village; que le recit soit plaisant ou pathetique, jamais la note ne sonne faux, jamais la bizarrerie ne degenere en puerilite burlesque. ...
— The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems • William Henry Drummond
... which arose from the form of the building or the shape of the wall on which he had to place his frescoes. Painting on the ceiling was no easy task, and Michelangelo, in a humorous sonnet addressed to Giovanni da Pistoya, gives a burlesque portrait of himself while he was painting the ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... indeed, of others in California—that nobody, not even the ingenious theorists themselves, believed their story, and that no one took the slightest pains to verify or disprove it. Happily, Uncle Billy never knew it, and moved all unconsciously in this atmosphere of burlesque suspicion. And then a singular change took place in the attitude of the camp towards him and the disrupted partnership. Hitherto, for no reason whatever, all had agreed to put the blame upon Billy—possibly because he was present to receive it. As days passed ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... the immersed Frenchman one end of a barge-pole, and he was drawn to the side, apparently quite sobered. The Slasher stood guffawing on the bridge, a little crowd of loafers roared with laughter, and the fat victim of the incident seemed as much amused by it as anybody. He struck a burlesque fighting attitude on the tow-path, and then went ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... this rollicking collection of 'Nonsense Novels,' in tabloid form, he not only confirms the excellent impression of his earlier work, but establishes his reputation as a master of the art of literary burlesque. The whole collection is a sheer delight, and places its author in the front rank ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... knows the value of his writings and his time too well to whittle at verses in the Messenger office, and leave his chips on the floor; and that he is too observant of the laws of fair wit to make a falsification and call it a burlesque. The Sorrows of Werther is not so popular as when known here chiefly by a wretched version of a wretched French version, and many who read these stanzas will be satisfied that the {378} last conveys, at worst, a distorted notion of the end of Goethe's story. To prevent this misapprehension, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... face of the girl. She looked at the young man with fine disdain, as a great lady might reprove with a glance the man who snapped a camera at her. "Yes?" she asked. "Well, what are you going to do about it—arrest me?" Mocking him, in a burlesque of melodrama, she held out her arms. "Don't put the ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... all on a level and of a piece. In fact, there is so little connection between the subject-matter of Mr. Crabbe's lines and the ornament of rhyme which is tacked to them, that many of his verses read like serious burlesque, and the parodies which have been made upon them are hardly so ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... to undermine the reputation of our leading statesmen. On the contrary, nothing popularises like genial ridicule; and of this Aristophanes was well aware. But the same characteristics of the god which suggested the friendly burlesque of the comedian were also those which provoked the indignation and the disgust of more serious minds. The poet Pindar, for example, after referring to the story of a battle, in which it was said gods had fought against gods, breaks out into protest against ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... the royal person, suffered a serious blow when a London alderman entered the circle clothed in a suit of the same tartan. The portly figure and civic dignity of Sir William Curtis gave to the costume too much the appearance of a burlesque to pass unnoticed either by the Sovereign or his loyal admirers, and it was some time before they recovered their gravity. On the 24th, the magistrates of "the gude town" entertained the King with a ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... veriest embryonic reader of Horace, if he will but remember that, while some of these transcriptions are indeed very faithful reproductions or adaptations of the original, others again are to be accepted as the very riot of burlesque verse-making. ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... 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 his tone is perfect. If; as an author, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of admission. Mr. Sambourne is excellent, too, at adaptations of popular pictures,—witness the more than happy parodies of Herrman's "A Bout d'Arguments," and "Une Bonne Histoire." His book-illustrations have been comparatively few, those to Burnand's laughable burlesque of "Sandford and Merton" being among the best. Rumour asserts that he is at present engaged upon Kingsley's "Water Babies," a subject which might almost be supposed to have been created for his pencil. There are indications, it may be ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... and perhaps most beautiful of all, because most rare, sparrows, not clothed, like ours, in sombre gray, but rejoicing in vestments of green and gold. But brilliancy of plumage is the solitary charm of these feathered beauties, for their voices are harsh and their song a very burlesque on ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... But after dose theaters open, I stays me on the chob till twelve, or later somedimes. There is one—two—three what you call burlesque places, right by me; and no sooner do they close up, than right away those actor peoples come to buy. I do a goot ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... vengeance.' Under our modern development of the social sentiment we can hardly imagine a really high-minded youth setting out in such a Quixotic and fanatical enterprise. This feature of Schiller's plot, which has for us something of the burlesque about it, has been taken more than any other to prove his inexperience of life. But the fact is that the thing was after all not so unthinkable. Outlawry on a large scale was by no means unknown, and the romance of outlawry was familiar ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... appearance of a figure in a hairdresser's window, if his countenance possessed the thought which is communicated to those waxen caricatures of the human face divine. He is a militia-officer, and the most amusing person in the House. Can anything be more exquisitely absurd than the burlesque grandeur of his air, as he strides up to the lobby, his eyes rolling like those of a Turk's head in a cheap Dutch clock? He never appears without that bundle of dirty papers which he carries under his ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... and she gave them forth in the same way as the first, with close, rude, audacious mimicry. There was a moment for Sherringham when it might have been feared their hostess would see in the performance a designed burlesque of her manner, her airs and graces, her celebrated simpers and grimaces, so extravagant did it all cause these refinements to appear. When it was over the old woman said, "Should you like now to hear how you do?" and, without waiting for an answer, phrased and trilled the ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... them analyzed the nature of his infectious gayety, nor thought of the pathos that lay so close to it, in the fact of his recent slavery, and the distinction of being one of Wade Hampton's niggers, and the melancholy mirth of this light-hearted race's burlesque of itself. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... inspector?'" In writing of his old associates satirically, he was not indulging in any rage of anger, but he would hardly have felt the impulse to give his pen such liberty unless grievances had still rankled in his memory. The scene he sets forth is one of burlesque, done like fiction. "On ascending the steps you would discern," he says, "a row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... Lady is the latest resultant of the two forces of ennui and dissipation acting on a Society that is willing to spend money and desires to kill time. She has played many parts, some (of infinitesimal proportions), on the burlesque stage, others in the semi-private life of her own residence in the South-west district of London. Her versatility has gained for her many admirers and a precarious income, but so long as she possesses the former she scorns to live upon the latter. Being ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... is only there From a love of the picturesque— You hint, maybe, that it takes no share In the plot of this weird burlesque; But cliffs that tremble at every touch, And that flap in the dreadful draught, Have something better to do—ah, much! Than ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... same time there were signs everywhere that the forces of reaction were gaining confidence.(See App. I, Sect. 5) At the Troitsky Farce theatre in Petrograd, for example, a burlesque called Sins of the Tsar was interrupted by a group of Monarchists, who threatened to lynch the actors for "insulting the Emperor." Certain newspapers began to sigh for a "Russian Napoleon." It was the usual thing among bourgeois intelligentzia to refer to the Soviets of ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... which, in all probability, he must himself so soon descend; think how unpleasant a situation! He bore it all with a firm and unaffected countenance. This grave scene was fully contrasted by the burlesque Duke {82} of Newcastle. He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung himself back in a stall, the archbishop hovering over him with a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the better ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... 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 it professes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... woman's coquettish humor; he knew still less of that mimic stage from which her present voice, gesture, and expression were borrowed; he had no knowledge of the burlesque emotions which that voice, gesture, and expression were supposed to portray, and finally and fatally he was unable to detect the feminine hysteric jar and discord that underlay it all. He thought it was strong, characteristic, and real, and ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... impossible to mistake it. They all look alike—it's a type which even the comic opera has been unable to burlesque. You probably noticed him—all moustache, imperial, ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... answers for the weather remaining fine, under penalty of his head, for the slightest contrary wind might capsize the ship and drown the Doge, with all the most serene noblemen, the ambassadors, and the Pope's nuncio, who is the sponsor of that burlesque wedding which the Venetians respect even to superstition. To crown the misfortune of such an accident it would make the whole of Europe laugh, and people would not fail to say that the Doge of Venice had gone at last to consummate ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... be after thinking of money, or taxes, or any thing else when yer honor is near? Will yer enter me tent and partake of me hospitalities?" demanded Pat, with a serious face, and a show of politeness that was refreshing, knowing as I did that it was intended as burlesque. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... he is a lunatic, prince?" whispered Evgenie Pavlovitch in his ear. "Someone told me just now that he is a bit touched on the subject of lawyers, that he has a mania for making speeches and intends to pass the examinations. I am expecting a splendid burlesque now." ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... these landholders you may find our old friend, the truck system, in full operation. Men live there, year in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in supplies. The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper they will fall in debt - a burlesque injustice in a new country, where labour should be precious, and one of those typical instances which explains the prevailing discontent and the ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he himself would have said, he was diablement epris with Lucy. This was regarded as one of the best of Zavier's jokes. He himself laughed at it, and his extravagant compliments and gallantries were well within the pale of the burlesque. Lucy laughed at them, too. The only one that took the matter seriously was Bella. She was ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... you must have, Susanna, to pick wrong out of that! All about love and lovers! So are books and songs and plays at the theatre. I suppose you didn't understand that it was intended as a burlesque on fortune-telling?" ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... writer of Athenian Sport, or Two Thousand Paradoxes, merely argued to amuse and divert the Age, by a Member of the Athenian Society, London, 1707?[1] It would almost appear to have been a burlesque upon the Athenian Oracle. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... nightly. After Field had added colored inks to his stock in trade, these fits of coughing were succeeded by a handkerchief act, in which the dying Camille appeared to spit blood in carmine splotches. No burlesque that I have seen of a play frequently burlesqued ever approached the side-splitting absurdity of these rehearsals for the benefit of the heroine of "Modjesky ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... were crowded with a mass of cheap pleasure seekers; the burlesque theatres and motion picture places were besieged with throngs; from the open fronts of auction houses the strident voices of the auctioneers rose in feeling appeals that every one grasp the opportunities offered. "Store show" keepers stood upon ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... of Baucis and Philemon has been imitated by Swift, in a burlesque style, the actors in the change being two wandering saints, and the house being changed into a church, of which Philemon is made the parson. The following ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... embedded in matter, were also plunged in the grossest superstitions? Materialism in morals always ends by producing a low credulity. Here Augustin triumphs. He sends marching under our eyes, in a burlesque array, the innumerable army of gods whom the Romans believed in. There are so many that he compares them to swarms of gnats. Although he explains that he is not able to mention them all, he amuses himself by stupefying us with the ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... back at his "Jennie"; that was always her name on such occasions. "It isn't about Oolong?" she asked, in burlesque anxiety. ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... with cheers, and after he had gone through the mockery of clearing his throat, and pitching his voice after the usual manner of your would-be fine singers, he gave out, to the tune of a well-known rollicking Irish lilt, the following burlesque version of ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... had 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 numbered about ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... would care about machinery and the rules of Bossu, or read without utter weariness the mechanical imitations of Homer and Virgil which were occasionally attempted by the Blackmores and other less ponderous versifiers. The shadow grows dim with the substance. The burlesque loses its point when we care nothing for the original; and, so far, Pope's bit of filigree-work, as Hazlitt calls it, has become tarnished. The very mention of beaux and belles suggests the kind of feeling with which we disinter fragments of old-world ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... shall adopt you. Only don't be cross, little goosey. Let us go into the garden." Young Musgrave made such a burlesque of his remorse that Bessie, wounded but skin-deep, was fain to laugh too and be friends again. And thereupon they went forth together into ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... about this, and as Elder Stenhouse read it to me "my feelings may be better imagined than described," to use language I think I have heard before. I pleaded, however, that it was a purely burlesque sketch, and that this strong paragraph should not be interpreted literally at all. The Elder didn't seem to see it in that light, ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... abnormal shapes as she struggled to cry out. "Hamoud!" she screamed at last, raising her arms as high as she could, and trying to tear her gaze away from that spectacle. The Arab's pose, as he bent over his enemy, was a frightful burlesque of solicitude. How many times had she not seen him bending thus over David, maybe to smooth his pillow? And now, against the colonnade of gloomy trees, there was something sacrificial in that tableau—the blue robe, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... his own vile desires, overruled the slight opposition of his superior; and, once entered on the affair, the latter found himself highly amused in carrying it out. The burlesque proclamations, the exaggerated stories of Indians, the terror of the citizens, their encomiums on his own energetic and valorous conduct—all these were a pleasant relief to the ennui of a barrack life and, during the several days' ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... John's preparation consisted in a complete rehearsal of the 'Drama didacticum', which Christ and the Apostles were to exhibit to a full audience!—Nay, prithee, good Barrister! do not be too rash in charging the Methodists with a monstrous burlesque of ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to have seen in Paris a man in a sort of chaise, grinding an organ, drawn by two ponies, and followed by a boy—begging from house to house. From the faded livery worn by the boy, we set the whole down as a burlesque. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... other artists, such as Ostade, Mieris, and Dou. But, even taking into consideration its satirical character, one must say that Steen has often exceeded his purpose if he really had a purpose. The fury with which he pursued the burlesque often got the better of his feeling for reality; his figures, instead of being merely ridiculous, became monstrous and hardly human, often resembling beasts rather than men, and he has exaggerated these figures until sometimes he awakens, ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... again, an individual, suspended by his arms from a cross-bar, had his feet held up and his legs stretched apart by another, while a third pounded vigorously with closed fists upon his seat of honour. Now and then a prolonged yell, accompanied with all sorts of burlesque variations, issued from the throats of the assembly. The object of this was at first not clear to me, but I afterwards discovered that the full use of the lungs was considered by Ling a very important part of the exercises. Altogether, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... Simoun, nor Ben-Zayb, nor Padre Irene, nor Padre Camorra knew it, so they begged for the story, some in jest and others from genuine curiosity. The priest, adopting the tone of burlesque with which some had made their request, began like an old tutor relating a ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... during the absence of the owner and editor, Orion Clemens. Wrote local items for the Hannibal Journal. Burlesque of a rival editor in the Hannibal Journal. Wrote two sketches for The Sat. Eve. Post (Philadelphia). To ...
— Widger's Quotations from Albert Bigelow Paine on Mark Twain • David Widger
... coach endeavoured to have waited on my Lord Sandwich, but meeting him in Chancery Lane going towards the City I stopped and so fairly walked home again, calling at St. Paul's Churchyarde, and there looked upon a pretty burlesque poem, called "Scarronides, or Virgile Travesty;" extraordinary good. At home to the office till dinner, and after dinner my wife cut my hair short, which is growne pretty long again, and then to the office, and there till 9 at night doing business. ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... presents artistically a bit of real life; the primary object of which is to amuse, though it may also depict a character, plead a cause, or point a moral; this amusement is neither of that aesthetic order which we derive from poetry, nor of that cheap sort which we gain from a broad burlesque: it is the simple yet intellectual pleasure derived from listening to ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... a gesture, without a stir—the horrible squeaky burlesque of professional jealousy—this man of a sinister alliterative nickname, this executioner of revolutionary verdicts, the terrifying N.N. exasperated like a fashionable tenor by the attention attracted ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... me; but I 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 ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... talent at burlesque; his genius slides so naturally into it, that he hath burlesqued Homer without ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... serious downright matter of fact, and the gravest part of a tragedy which is not intended for burlesque. I tell it you for the honour of Ireland. The writer hopes it will be represented:—but what is Hope? nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of Truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of. I am not sure that ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... one strange, but quite essential, character in us: ever since the Conquest, if not earlier:—a delight in the forms of burlesque which are connected in some degree with the foulness of evil. I think the most perfect type of a true English mind in its best possible temper, is that of Chaucer; and you will find that, while it is for the most part full of thoughts of beauty, ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... natural turn for comic burlesque, which comes out so plainly in his drawings, had become ingrained and inveterate by early practice, and certainly his immoderate delight in setting snobs and flunkeys on a pillory became a flaw in the perfection of his higher composition. It might ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... details of the First Act are a little too leisurely, so that I appreciated the impatience of my little neighbour for the arrival of Peter Pan, whose acquaintance she had still to make. Also from the presence of children in my party I became conscious how much of the humour of the play—its burlesque, for example, of the stage villain—is only seizable by children who have grown up. BARRIE wrote it, of course, to please the eternal child in himself, but forgot now and then what ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... narrate how in the infancy of the settlement the whisky shop was more frequented than the preaching meeting, whenever that was held, and how, on one occasion, a party of scoffing unbelievers bore in mock triumph an effigy of the Saviour through the streets. A regular meeting of infidels was held, and burlesque celebrations of the Lord's Supper performed. Still later, when the business of slaughtering hogs became an important branch of industry, it was carried on regularly, on Sundays as well as on week-days, and as this was a leading feature in the year's doings the religious observance ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... the middle of what looks like the chorus of a burlesque show, only the men is wearin' tights instead of the women. I picked him out right away because he was the first guy I had seen in the place in citizen's clothes, outside of the guys with the kodaks. He ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... suggests itself whether discipline be not the final cause of the universe, and whether Nature outwardly exists. The frivolous make themselves merry with the ideal theory as if its consequences were burlesque, as if it affected the stability of Nature. It surely does not. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... though amusingly told, is neither original in idea nor quite fair in execution. Throughout I found indeed that Mr. LYONS'S natural good-humour and sympathy were severely tried when they came in contact with squires and the ruling classes; and that now and then he was unable to resist the temptation to burlesque. But for one thing at least he deserves unstinted praise; I know of no other writer who can transfer, as he can, the genuine flavour of dialect into print. Try reading some of the Moby Lane dialogue aloud and you ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... a celebrity. Strangers even went to him, and gravely asked to be permitted to shake hands with him as such. He was pointed out to newcomers, and observed on all hands with a serious respect that had all the comedy of piquant burlesque. ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... dubitarim:" and the 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 ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... him a minor episode in his life, Payne's enemies were aware of the fact that he was a playwright and have written their knowledge into the record of his treasonable activities. For example, the author of a burlesque life of Payne, which contains, so far as I know, the only connected account of his activities, makes this useful remark: "Then [after his return from Ireland in 1672] he composes a Tragedy of a certain Emperour of ...
— The Fatal Jealousie (1673) • Henry Nevil Payne
... thought either that Marbodius, or even Virgil, could have known the Etruscan tombs of Chiusi and Corneto, where, in fact, there are horrible and burlesque devils closely resembling those of Orcagna. Nevertheless, the authenticity of the "Descent of Marbodius into Hell" is indisputable. M. du Clos des Lunes has firmly established it. To doubt it would be to doubt ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... Sutton in Surrey, underwent the same sentence, as author of a pamphlet called "A Letter to the Author of the Memorial of the Church of England." Edward Ward was fined and set in the pillory, for having written a burlesque poem on the times, under the title of "Hudibras Redivivus;" and the same punishment was inflicted upon William Pittes, author of a performance, intituled "The Case of the Church ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... romances, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho, and she wrote Northanger Abbey as a burlesque of that type. In this story the heroine, Catherine Moreland, who has been fed on such literature, is invited to visit Northanger Abbey in Gloucestershire, where with an imagination "resolved on alarm," she is prepared to be agitated ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... mind that no Portsmouth Poll would ever wait for me. Did you ever hear anything so ridiculously absurd—such a bit of maudlin nonsense. I laughed at myself afterwards. It gave me a good, idea, though. I'll compose a burlesque, and the ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... in Watson's Collection of Scottish Poems, Edin. 1711; and also noticed in the Edinburgh Topographical and Antiquarian Magazine, 1848, last page. I am anxious to ascertain if the emblem writer, and the burlesque poet, be one and the same person. The dates, I confess, are somewhat against this conclusion; but there may have been a previous edition of the Emblematical Representation (1779). The University Clark is supposed to have been an Aberdeenshire ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... the face-plate. He clicked his heels and bowed stiffly from the waist, in a fine burlesque of an ancient courtier. He stalked past Hoskins and punched the button ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... faithfully copied from one worn by a gentleman of colour who serves the Turkish coffee at the Wistaria Restaurant. It may be said that there was no special reason why an ordinary business man should possess a bodyguard at all, and less reason why he should affect one who had the appearance of a burlesque Othello, but Mr. Augustus Tibbetts, though a business man, was ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... Rosamund, 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 drawn in the Prologue than in the scene where she offers the ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... could perform all the parts in a comedy himself, and with the help of Fred Loring, or some other, would improvise a burlesque on almost any well-known play. It was after one of these performances that Whittier (who sat in his quiet corner enjoying it as much as an honest Quaker dared to) said to Mrs. Thaxter, "Celia, thou knowest I have never been to the theatre, but I think ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... had not escaped, but of which he saw the inanity, the petty jealousies of authors which had also come within his personal experience. A mock tragedy on the subject of Esther, which forms part of the burlesque, is a malicious parody of the French models which he had begun by imitating, but which were now the sport of the youths who led ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... however, going on in front of a neighbour's door, as a nuptial serenade on the occasion of some unsuitable marriage; when the clamour of horns and kettles, marrow-bones and cleavers, saluted the mother's ears, accompanied by thirty burlesque verses, the composition of the father of the child who ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... twenty times 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 a single bad line, so not having time ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Tuck here is a kind of good old-fashioned burlesque Friar, more like that one some years ago at the Gaiety, in Little Robin Hood than the Friar in Ivanhoe. But I should say that this Friar would be uncommonly thankful to have got anything like the song that Sir ARTHUR has given his Friar over the way, or something even as good as Mr. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... song-writer, was believed to be an illegitimate s. of George Savile, Marquis of Halifax. He wrote innumerable burlesques, farces, songs, etc., often with his own music, including Chrononhotonthologos (1734), a burlesque on the mouthing plays of the day, and The Dragon of Wantley (1744?). His poem, Namby Pamby, in ridicule of Ambrose Phillips (q.v.), added a word to the language, and his Sally in our Alley is one of our best-known ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... importance. Any of the topics can raise a laugh. If one examines a collection of American parodies, one will find that the happy national talent for fun-making finds full scope in the parody and burlesque of the dearest national sentiments. But no one minds; everybody believes that the sentiments endure while the jokes will pass. The jokes, intended as they are for an immense audience, necessarily lack subtlety. ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry |
