"Comic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wreathed smiles," As some tame landscape desolately bare Is charmed by sunshine into seeming fair; So, gentle friends, if you your smiles bestow, That which is tame in us will not seem so. Our play is a charade. We split the word, Each syllable an act, the whole a third; My first we show you by a comic play, Old, but not less the welcome, I dare say. My second will be brought upon the stage From lisping childhood down to palsied age. Last, but not least, our country's joy and pride, A British Jury will my whole decide; But what's the word you'll ask me, what's the word? ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... years we find Shelley in Florence, in 1819, and it was here that his son was born, receiving the names Percy Florence. Here he wrote, as I have said, his "Ode to the West Wind" and that grimly comic ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... the Huckleberry Finn book illustrated after his own ideas. He looked through the various comic papers to see if he could find the work of some new man that appealed to his fancy. In the pages of Life he discovered some comic pictures illustrating the possibility of applying electrical burners to messenger ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... then by acting plays; notably, that famous one which Rabelais wrote for them in 1531: "The moral comedy of the man who had a dumb wife;" which "joyous patelinage" remains unto this day in the shape of a well-known comic song. That comedy young Rondelet must have seen acted. The son of a druggist, spicer, and grocer—the three trades were then combined—in Montpellier, and born in 1507, he had been destined for the cloister, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... their part; we can't understand a word they say, but their humorous faces and comic gestures are irresistibly funny. Suddenly Golden-Jacket puts down her cigar, springs to her feet, and gets across the shaking boards with marvellous serpentine movements in a skirt tighter even than a modern one, literally a tube wound around her legs. Then, waving her ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... amusing; but the same gentleman on his head is worth an orchestra-chair. When a man wears his trousers where other men wear their coats, people are bound to turn around. It is not a new trick. Mystes, the Argive comic poet, and the White Queen, taught this author the value of substituting 'is' for 'is not,' until, from standing so long inverted, he himself forgets what he means, and at this point the eminent brothers Rogers take up the ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... the existence of a sort of comic spirit in these works which relieves the tragedy of the situations. In spite of their dark pessimism, the actors in these little dramas have an appearance of gaiety which deceives. It is by this popular ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... addicted to private theatricals. This reproduction of a forgotten play, with its characters attired in the costume of the period in which the play was placed, had had great success, a success due largely to the excellence of the costumes. In the comic parts the dressing had been purposely exaggerated, but Madame de Nailles, who played the part of a great coquette, would not have been dressed in character had she not tried to make ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... at from two to five dollars an evening. He grew in popularity until he was in demand at five hundred dollars a lecture, and no one before or since more successfully used all the arts of the platform, from the comic that drew the very rabble of the streets, to flights of eloquence that captured college culture. It has been well said: "While Gough was a great preacher of righteousness, he was a whole theatre in dramatic delivery." Lecturers, like preachers, are fishers ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... manifestations have appeared of recent years in various quarters of the world, each of which is treated by the press in a more or less comic vein, with a conviction apparently that the use of the word "spook" discredits the incident and brings discussion to an end. It is remarkable that each is treated as an entirely isolated phenomenon, and thus the ordinary reader gets no idea of the strength ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dangerous experiment, as you may be personal without intending it. An English lady of rank, speaking of an evening party, says: "At an evening party, given expressly in honor of a distinguished lady of color, we heard a thoughtless amateur dash into the broadly comic, but terribly inappropriate' nigger' song of' 'Sally, Come Up.' Before he had got through the first verse, he had perceived his mistake, and was so overwhelmed with shame that he could scarcely preserve sufficient presence of mind to carry ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... that little of him which seemed to square with their shallow mechanical taste. The old fairy superstition, the old legends and ballads, the old chronicles of feudal war and chivalry, the earlier moralities and mysteries, and tragi-comic attempts—these were the roots of his poetic tree—they must be the roots of any literary education which can teach us to appreciate him. These fed Shakespeare's youth; why should they not feed our children's? Why indeed? That inborn delight ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... have been asked out to tea at rare intervals, and the mothers have apologised for the ordinary conversation, and laboriously switched it on to books. I didn't want to talk books. I wanted to discuss hats and dresses, and fashionable intelligence, and sing comic songs, and play puss-in-the-corner, and be generally giddy and riotous; but my presence cast a wet blanket over the whole party, and we discussed Science and Art. Now I'm old and resigned, but it's hard on the new hands. I think it was rather brutal of your mother to let you come to London ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... scarcely sound. The least movement increased her torments; but what troubled her even more than the pain, was that, when the latter began to subside, one of her cheeks commenced to swell. She was anxious to look her very best before her lover: her lopsided face gave her a serio-comic expression. The swelling had diminished a little before she set out on the bleak December afternoon to meet her lover. Before she went, she looked long and anxiously in the glass. Apart from the disfigurement caused by the swelling, ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... spectator a tacit consent that no truth is to be expected in the piece. In a farce we exempt the poet from all faithfulness in his pictures; he has a kind of privilege to tell us untruths. Here, in fact, all the comic consists exactly in its contrast with the truth, and so ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... positions, the low comedian of a country-theatre,—that he had come timidly to London and accepted at a low salary the post of buffoon at a half-theatre half-saloon in the City Road, called indifferently the "Grecian" and the "Eagle," where he had danced and tumbled, and sung comic songs, and delivered the dismal waggeries set down for him, without any marked success, and almost without notice. He was a quiet, unassuming little man, this Robson, seemingly without vanity and without ambition. He had a wife and family to maintain, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... shoulders resting on the top bar of it, and which he sometimes accompanied with the peculiar jerk of his right arm habitual to him in preaching. A snell remark of his brother William suggesting some new and comic association with a philosophic term dropped in the course of the discussion, would bring him back with a roar of laughter to the actual world and to more sublunary themes. When the young men rose to leave he always ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... solo dances, upon which we shall not touch further, the Morris is performed by six men; the records show that women have occasionally, but rarely, figured as performers. A musician is of course indispensable; also, as it seems, a fool, to supply comic relief and give the dancers breathing-time. The fool often goes by the name of "Squire," sometimes of "Rodney." These are practically invariable; but beyond and beside these, other characters have accompanied the dancers. The ...
— The Morris Book • Cecil J. Sharp
... were a stalwart gang.... Their talk was as muscular as their arms. When these laughed, as only men fresh and hearty and in the open air can laugh, the world became mainly grotesque: it seemed at once a comic thing to live,—a subject for chuckling, that we were bipeds, with noses,—a thing to roar at, that we had all met there from the wide world, to hobnob by a frolicsome fire with tin pots of coffee, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... sensible fellow," said Barnstable, with an air half comic, half serious. "But we must be moving; the sun is just touching those clouds to seaward, and God keep us from riding out this night at anchor in ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the romantic movement occurs the name of Jens Baggesen (q.v.; 1764-1826), a man of great genius, whose work was entirely independent of the influences around him. Jens Baggesen is the greatest comic poet that Denmark has produced; and as a satirist and witty lyrist he has no rival among the Danes. In his hands the difficulties of the language disappear; he performs with the utmost ease extraordinary tours de force of style. His astonishing talents were wasted on trifling themes and in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... moved away from her, and began telling an irresistibly comic story about a call he had made on a poor woman that afternoon (he could not for the life of him help seeing the ludicrous side of every thing), and from one subject they passed to another, and when Soeur Angelique summoned them to tea, she found her reverend brother standing in the middle of the ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... The second volume suffers the fate of all sequels in endeavouring to revive after a lapse of years the pranks and passions of the poet Tricotrin. The first five stories in the volume, while they do not attain the excellence of "The Tragedy of a Comic Song," are worthy stories in the same kind. The other seven stories are frankly mawkish in content, although redeemed by ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... turning to Captain Wharton, and contemplating his figure for a moment until the anxiety of his countenance gave place to a lurking smile. He approached the youth with an air of comic gravity, and with a low bow, continued, "I am sorry for the severe cold you ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... laughter from men, women, and children; in which even the animals seemed to join—more especially the maherry, who stood with its uncouth head craned over its dismounted rider, and looking uncontrollably comic! ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... true, you fraud?" she said, with comic indignation. "You deny that since we met up at the Hermitage you have been taking all your walks in this neighborhood? Dios mio! What a monster of falsehood have we here? ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a comic poet, and a minute observer of manners and circumstances, that Chaucer excels. In serious and moral poetry he is frequently languid and diffuse, but he springs like Antaeus from the earth when his subject changes to coarse ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... consequence, if they unhappily choose or are compelled to take part in politics, are exposed to those strange paroxysms of giddiness, of which the history of Napoleon's marshals supplies so many tragi-comic examples. He may probably have held himself entitled to rank alongside of Caesar as the second chief of the democracy; and the rejection of this claim of his may have sent him over to the camp of his opponents. His case rendered for the first time apparent the whole ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... standing off to survey his prisoner. "I believe you're harmless enough to have the use of your legs and mouth." With a comic bow the little doctor added, "M'sieur, I'm going to ask you to drive us back to Fort Smith, and if you so much as look the wrong way out of your eyes I'll blow off your head. You and your friend are to answer for the killing of Pierre Thoreau and for the attempted murder ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... it went on to tell us about things he had seen, not dull pictures and beastly old buildings, but amusing incidents of comic nature. The Italians must be extreme Jugginses for the kind of things he described to be of such everyday occurring. Indeed, Oswald could hardly believe about the soda-water label that the Italian translated for the English traveller so that it ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... number, But they all were plunged in slumber, The prince's ear delighting By uniting In a snore. The prince remarked: "This must be Philadelphia, Pennsylvania!" (And so was born the jest that's still The comic journal's mania!) ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... that night, a new comic singer of great promise having been announced, and oh! it was sad to see the youths of both sexes, little more than big boys and girls, who went there to smoke, and drink, and enjoy ribald songs and ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... first time it dawned upon me that I had a liking for the strange, simple-hearted Chinaman, who had always shown himself to be frank, honest, and brave in our service. He had been comic and peculiar, but always devoted to me as a faithful servant; and now, just too as I was joining in the mirth against him, instead of being indignant on behalf of one who had been insulted by the men's horseplay, he was as it were ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... thread-bare coat and pigtail; his stooping gait, not the decrepitude of age, but as though it sprang from the abasement of his fortune; his endurance of injury to a certain point, when patience suddenly forsook him, and his, to us, irresistibly comic rage and exasperation! What would that generous seaman Pipes have thought a defenceless Frenchman fit for, but as the object of spirited and well-conducted pranks? Nothing cruel or revengeful, but only to show our own superior ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various
... spring time, and after harvest, it was the custom of these musicians to make a progress through a particular district of the country. The music and the tale repaid their lodging, and they were usually gratified with a donation of seed corn[63]. This order of minstrels is alluded to in the comic song of Maggy Lauder, who thus addresses ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... Good Heavens! would he stay four weeks at Ludwigsburg? She smiled; even in her despair there was something humorous in her being which no sadness could dull, and she found her own dismay at the honoured guest's possible procrastination a trifle comic. ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... had assumed the habitual look of servitude—he was no longer a partner, but a mere retainer, with a half-comic resignation in ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... young man from Sandhurst started to shout a comic song, Owen shut the door hastily and wished the boy ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... equal to the fine and excellent Uncle Braesig, who, in the opinion of competent critics, is the most successful humorous figure in all German literature. Braesig is certainly a masterpiece of psychology; as remote from any mere comic effect, despite his idiosyncrasies, as from maudlin sentimentality; an impersonation of sturdy manhood and a victor in life's battles, no less than his creator, who, although he had lost seven of the most precious years of his life in unjust imprisonment and even had been ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... actually see at present stage-scenery painted like sentimental mood-pictures, trees in the foreground, for example, on whose deformed greenish-brown foliage an elegiac late-autumnal tinge rests? And these are shoved into position regularly each evening for every dialogue scene, and every light comic situation—a satire on the inner eye of our time. In a German metropolis of art one can even see sign-boards of sausage manufacturers on which sausages, hams, salted spare-ribs and swards are appetizingly ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... nibble at experience, old Time's fruit, hateful to the palate of youth! for which season only hath it any nourishment! Experience! You know Coleridge's capital simile?—Mournful you call it? Well! all wisdom is mournful. 'Tis therefore, coz, that the wise do love the Comic Muse. Their own high food would kill them. You shall find great poets, rare philosophers, night after night on the broad grin before a row of yellow lights and mouthing masks. Why? Because all's dark at home. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... end of rope, left over from a knot, and with this he proceeded to lead the enraged German to the automobile. It looked for all the world as if he were leading a dog, and for a moment Dick doubled up in helpless laughter. The whole episode had its comic side, ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... to prevent her, she burst out with the first verse of a stupid comic song. Spared by his deafness from this infliction of vulgarity, our host filled a tumbler from the water in the claret jug, and ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... at the service of all conspiracies. Mormoro, a printer, intoxicated with philosophy. Dubuisson, an obscure writer, whom the hisses of the theatre had forced to take refuge in intrigue. Fabre d'Eglantine, a comic poet, ambitious of another field for his powers. Chabot, a capuchin monk, embittered by the cloister, and eager to avenge himself on the superstition which had imprisoned him. Lareynie, a soldier-priest. Gonchon, Duquesnois, friends of Robespierre. Carra, a Girondist journalist. An Italian, named ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... of Peter, where his inner self was crouching, it was as if a sudden douche of ice-cold water were let down on him. "Marry!" Who had said anything about marrying? Peter's reaction fitted the stock-phrase of the comic papers: ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... Little Mr. Perker came out wonderfully, told various comic stories, and sang a serious song which was almost as funny as the anecdotes. Arabella was very charming, Mr. Wardle very jovial, Mr. Pickwick very harmonious, Mr. Ben Allen very uproarious, the lovers very silent, Mr. Winkle very talkative, and ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... rather hurriedly in my working clothes, went inside, and spread myself dramatically on the old cane lounge and covered my face with my oldest hat, to show that it was comic and I took it that way. But my landlady was so full of sympathy, condolence, and self-reproach (because she failed to draw my attention to the gurgling) that she let the coffee and ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... demand. Take the Education Act. It was devised and carried simply for the reason indicated by Egremont's friend Dalmaine; a more intelligent type of workmen is demanded that our manufacturers may keep pace with those of other countries. Well, there is a demand for comic illustrations of the Bible, and the demand is met; the paper exists because it pays. An organ of culture for the people who enjoy burlesquing the Bible couldn't possibly be ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... statements of one or two men as to their tribal God idea has added to the gayety of nations. But when any view is laughed at, it is doomed. From the very moment that the doctrine of election, that made God love a few aristocrats and pass the non-elect by, became a matter of joke in the comic papers, that theory was dead. Not otherwise is it with this idea of a tribal God. When Barry Paine ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... to earn, and when he was fourteen he was apprenticed to his uncle that he might learn to become a sculptor. Before long, while polishing a marble tablet he pressed on it too heavily and broke it. His uncle thrashed him. Lucian's spirit rebelled, and he went home giving the comic reason that his uncle beat him because jealous of the extraordinary power he showed ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... existence—D'Artagnan, we repeat, had absolutely nothing whatever to do, amidst these brilliant butterflies of fashion. After following the king during two whole days at Fontainebleau, and critically observing the various pastoral fancies and heroi-comic transformations of his sovereign, the musketeer felt that he needed something more than this to satisfy the cravings of his nature. At every moment assailed by people asking him, "How do you think this costume suits me, Monsieur d'Artagnan?" he would reply to them in quiet, ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Office; but had been told quite cavalierly that they had no need of him. As he persisted, he had been asked—in the hope that it might get rid of him—to go over to the United States in company with a writer of comic stories, a retired actor and a music-hall singer, and lecture on the causes of the War in the hope of bringing America in. This he had declined to do, and being rich and happening to know personally General Armstrong (Honoria's husband) he had been allowed to accompany him to the ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... had never been a patient man, and the feelings which that wild girl had awakened in his heart were all too earnest for such trifling. He rose to leave her. Then she gave him a side glance, half comic, half repentant. ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... no condition to see the comic side of the affair. Nor was Miss Vantweekle. She was on my wife's bed ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... in the character and costume of a peasant girl. Her genius excites much admiration, and, intoxicated with this new pleasure, she repeats the entertainment, and alike excels in all characters, whether comic or tragic. The number of spectators is gradually increased. Louis is not exactly pleased to see his queen transformed into an actress, even in the presence only of the most intimate friends of the court. Half jocosely, half seriously, ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... the more plausible, from the fact that there was a pronounced ironic and comic vein in Chopin's character. The accounts of his melancholy, in fact, like those of his ill-health, have been too much exaggerated. He was often in a cheerful mood. Sometimes he would amuse himself for a whole evening ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... foreigners the show is at first shocking and then tedious; to the good people of Madrid it is a sermon, full of absolute truth and vivid reality. The class of persons who attend these spectacles is very different from that which you find at the Royal Theatre or the Comic Opera. They are sober, serious bourgeois, who mind their shops and go to mass regularly, and who come to the theatre only in Lent, when the gay world stays away. They would not dream of such an indiscretion as reading ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... clergyman; many of them who had not read a passage of Scripture for years, having shaken the dust off their Bibles, turned to the verses to which he referred, and when in the taverns, so intoxicated as to be scarcely able to stand, they, with maudlin utterances, and serio-comic grimaces, would unctiously quote these hackneyed texts in the pauses which intervened ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... however, passed off without any inconvenience to us, as in those first days of the war the regulations of international law were still to some extent respected. We had already made all preparations to throw the Treasury notes overboard, in case we were searched. As a curiosity I mention a comic interlude that occurred after we had left Dover Harbor. A friendly German-American from a Western State, who did not know who I was, but had recognized me as a German, accosted me with the remark: "Take care that you don't expose ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... when he heard them. Many persons, not being able to take into the mind and analyze a character like Courtlandt's, sought the line of least resistance for their understanding, and built some precious exploits which included dusky island-princesses, diaphanous dancers, and comic-opera stars. ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... got a kind o' trouble in her breest, doctor: wull ye tak' a look at it?" We walked into the consulting-room, all four, Rab grim and comic, willing to be happy and confidential if cause could be shown, willing also to be the reverse on the same terms. Ailie sat down, undid her open gown and her lawn handkerchief round her neck, and, without a word, showed me her right breast. I looked at and examined it carefully,—she ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.
... mended." Later in 1701 she brought out at Drury Lane her only comedy, Love at a Loss, dedicated in most enthusiastic terms to Lady Piers, to whom "I owe the greatest Blessing of my Fate," the privilege of a share in her friendship. Love at a Loss was made up of the comic scenes introduced into an old tragedy which the author had failed to get acted. This is not a fortunate method of construction, and the town showed no favour to Love at a Loss. The first and only ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... wealthy of the original thirteen, which, as colonies, separated from Great Britain after the War of Independence. In the days of his childhood, before the Civil War actually broke out, his surroundings were those of the cabin standing amid the squalor of slavery. All the sad, as well as the comic, phases of life on the Southern plantations, as they then existed, are vividly remembered by Booker Washington. Of course, to the slaves themselves very much depended on the disposition of their owners, or on the character of the overseers which those planters ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... saying that Bacon had invited his corps to an entertainment at Greenwich. When Bungay engaged your celebrated friend Mr. Wagg to edit the 'Londoner,' Bacon straightway rushed off and secured Mr. Grindle to give his name to the 'Westminster Magazine.' When Bacon brought out his comic Irish novel of 'Barney Brallaghan,' off went Bungay to Dublin, and produced his rollicking Hibernian story of 'Looney MacTwolter.' When Doctor Hicks brought out his 'Wanderings in Mesopotamia' under Bacon's auspices, Bungay produced Professor ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... up into the whimsically comic face of Charlie Murray, famous in film farces—with funny features and gruff ways, but a heart as soft as a mother's. With no idea to whom he was speaking, John ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... the following ultimate resource. Two large-boned horses, usually taken from the plough, were harnessed on as leaders. By main force they hauled our wicked wheelers into the right direction, and forced them, by pure physical superiority, into working. We furnished a joyous and comic spectacle to every town and village through which we passed. The whole community, men and children, came out to assist at our departure; and all alike were diverted, but not the less irritated, by the demoniac obstinacy ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... comical little work, by merely running over a few of the head and tail pieces of the several pages. We think with Mr. Hood, that "In the Christmas Holidays, or rather, Holly Days, according to one of the emblems of the season, we naturally look for mirth. Christmas is strictly a Comic Annual, and its specific gaiety is even implied in the specific gravity of its oxen." So much for the design, which is far more congenial to our feelings than the thousand and one sonnets, pointless epigrams, laments, and monodies, which are usually showered ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... child, the old General, with comic twitchings of his eyebrows and nostrils, felt a strong desire ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... very clothes, she was there. Robust and pleasant, with a practical eye on her promising future, she had arrived, the fulfilment of despair. Dr Drummond looked at her with acquiescence, half-cowed, half-comic, wondering at his own folly in dreaming of anything else. Miss Cameron brought the situation, as it were, with her; it had to be faced, and Dr Drummond faced it like a philosopher. She was the material necessity, the fact in the case, the substantiation of her own legend; and Dr Drummond ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... noxious vegetation, and swarming with deer and tigers"—do, what does any one suppose, perform what forlorn part in the economy of the world? Why, they "supply the cultivated districts with abundance of salt." It is as comic as— ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... piquet round the stove, and that row of doors on which I had read "Public Health," "Burials," "Deaths," "Expropriations," etc. I should have been aggrieved at this dealer in iron bedsteads touching on my cherished dreams if the comic side of the situation had not absorbed my whole attention, and if a mad wish to laugh outright had not ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... fragmentary drearinesses that people endure because they are fashionable; tours de force on the piano, and fragments from operas, which have no meaning without the setting, with weary pauses of waiting between; there is the comic basso who is so amusing and on such familiar terms with the audience, and always sings the Barber; the attitudinizing tenor, with his languishing "Oh, Summer Night;" the soprano with her "Batti Batti," who warbles and trills and runs ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the habit of excepting, it sounds as though they were hiccoughing. "Overruled"; "I except"; "Allowed"; "I except"; "Denied"; "I except"; "Granted"; "I except." It becomes a custom as constant as the refrain in a comic opera. ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... idea was that all the communities should be knit together very loosely for specific purposes, such as the war against the Germans, of which he was still heartily in favor. Later dispatches, if true, would indicate that the real instigator of this comic-opera scene was a woman, possibly in the pay of the German Government, since she was the companion of Robert Grimm, a Swiss Socialist, later expelled from Russia by the Socialists themselves on account of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... reader, we can more easily excuse, than that want of taste which often prevails in his productions, and which gives way only by intervals to the irradiations of genius. A great and fertile genius he certainly possessed, and one enriched equally with a tragic and comic vein; but he ought to be cited as a proof, how dangerous it is to rely on these advantages alone for attaining an excellence in the finer arts.[*] And there may even remain a suspicion, that we overrate, if possible, the greatness of his genius; in the same manner as bodies often appear ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... I had expected), and cast secret looks of almost comic appeal at their brother, but he pretended not to see them, being disposed for some reason to grant my request. Taking advantage of the momentary hesitation that ensued, I made them all three my most conciliatory bow, and said as I retreated ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... Christopher Benson and the school which has acquired celebrity by holding the mirror up to its own nature. The wonder was that Mr. Benson did not, following his precedent, write to the papers to say that Mr. Whitten was no gentleman. In the days before the Academy blended the characteristics of a comic paper with those of a journal of dogmatic theology, before it took to disowning its own reviewers, Mr. Whitten was the solid foundation of that paper's staff. He furnished the substance, which was embroidered by the dark grace of the personality of Mr. Lewis Hind, whose new volume of divagations ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... Ghent to Aix" better than anything of his own, except, perhaps, "The Northern Farmer." He used to preserve the monotonous rhythm of the galloping horses in Browning's poem, and made the words come out sharply like hoofs upon a road. It was a little comic until one got used to it, but that fault lay in the ear of the hearer. It was the right way and the fine way to read this particular poem, and I have never ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in the one object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic to those who do not share the philosopher's perception of identity. To him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws. Though he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... to this serio-comic strife of the sparrow and the moth, is he pigeon hawk's pursuit of the sparrow or the goldfinch. It is a race of surprising speed and agility. It is a test of wing and wind. Every muscle is taxed, and every ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... know not whence, upon her lips, invented by I know not what confused and mysterious travail of soul. She said: "That woman is a demoniac." This phrase, culled by that austere and sentimental creature, seemed to me irresistibly comic. I myself, never called her now anything else, but "the demoniac," exercising a singular pleasure in pronouncing aloud ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... they looked at one another in comic dismay; but would certainly have gone to No. 5, and taken a look at the modern Sairy, if the woman hadn't called out as ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... the wheezes they essayed And where the smiles they made to flow? Where's Caron's seltzer siphon laid, A squirt from which laid Herbert low? Where's Charlie Case's comic woe And Georgie Cohan's nasal drawl? The afterpiece? The olio? Into the night go one ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... Hermann took his friend to the theatre, where a comic piece was being performed. In his young days Warren had been very partial to plays of that kind, and his joyous peals of laughter on such occasions still rang in the ears of his friend. But the attempt was a complete failure. Warren ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... Comic and tragic were so jumbled up in this startling series of adventures, that Jack scarce knew whether ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... the people to come to the window; and their delight and rapture in seeing their monarch at table, with the evident hungry feeling it occasioned, made a contrast of admiration and deprivation, truly comic. They crowded, however, so excessively, that this can be permitted them no more. They broke down all the paling, and much of the hedges, and some of the windows, and all by eagerness and multitude, for they were perfectly civil and well-behaved. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... begun dancing their national fandango, and the extraordinary lightness which had become the physical property of every object in the new planet made the dancers bound to a height of thirty feet or more into the air, considerably above the tops of the trees. What followed was irresistibly comic. Four sturdy majos had dragged along with them an old man incapable of resistance, and compelled him, nolens volens, to join in the dance; and as they all kept appearing and disappearing above the bank of foliage, their ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... infliction of summary punishment on impure, mischievous, or offensive pieces. They had the power to punish with whipping, and were authorised to bestow great rewards for merit. Thus, Sophocles was awarded a dignified and lucrative government for one of his pieces, and an unfortunate comic poet of the name of Evangelus was publicly whipped. This circulated a spirit of correctness, and a chaste and delicate taste through the people, as was evidenced in the case already mentioned, of one of the tragedies of Euripides, which was instantly censured for the introduction ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... will be as good a pattern for orders as I can think on. A little thin flowery border, round, neat, not gaudy, and the Drury Lane Apollo, with the harp at the top. Or shall I have no Apollo,—simply nothing? Or perhaps the Comic Muse? ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... silent for a moment and then he continued: "If you will stay for the last act you will find in your room a little supper, a bottle of wine, and a box of cigars, which you may consume while you are waiting." In sooth when Campanari entered his dressing room after the first act of Wagner's comic opera he found that his director had kept his word.... The baritone ate the supper, drank the wine, put the cigars in his ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... the performance always draws screams of laughter from the spectators. The whole ends with a vivid but very comic representation of the avid consumption of the honey ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... wholly of this world: the beautifully cut mouth had a proud and somewhat sarcastic expression, while an air of free-and-easy superiority sat not ungracefully in every turn and movement of his fine form. He was listening with a good-humoured, negligent air, half comic, half contemptuous, to Haley, who was very volubly expatiating on the quality of the article for which ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... that the same anecdote which formed the Induction to the original "Taming of a Shrew", and which, from a comic point of view, Shakespeare so wonderfully developed in his own comedy, Calderon invested with such solemn and sublime dignity in "La Vida es Sueno". He found it, as Senor Hartzenbusch points out in the edition of 1872 already quoted, ...
— The Wonder-Working Magician • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... all you are to see of the tragedy they and their house might be remaining at Ecloo in leisure and perfect hospitality and peace. Only, as they see us pouring in over their threshold a hovering twinkle in their kind eyes shows that they are not blind to the comic aspect of retreats. ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... softly, shaking a slender white finger very close to Rand's nose, "have you forgot it is the gala night of our good host, the Papa Francais? That you don't care for trouble to-night? Mama mia! You are a comic—no?" ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... murderers for nephews. When a mere child this HENRY WILKINS was compelled to go to the Sunday-school. He carried no Sunday-school book. The teacher told him to go home and bring one. He went and returned with a comic song- ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 2 • Charles Farrar Browne
... his father a rich, strong, musical, and sympathetic voice, which made him a pleasant speaker and afterward a successful public reader. He very naturally excelled in conversation at table and in getting up little comic almanacs, satirizing the boys, but always in good-humor, never descending to anything bitter or vulgar. Indeed, in all his fun, he showed ever a certain purity and nobility ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... account that he treated me with systematic unfairness and set himself the unnecessary task of making me ridiculous in the eyes of the other boys. One night I was wandering in the playground and heard him playing the violin in his study. My taste in music was barbarian; I liked comic songs, which I used to sing to myself in a lugubrious voice, and in London the plaintive clamour of the street-organs had helped to make my sorrows rhythmical. But now, perhaps for the first time, I became aware of the illimitable melancholy that lies at the heart of all great music. It seemed ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... married a man beneath her in station. To punish her in Webster's extravagant fashion every other character, with the whole story of the play, has to be dehumanised. To me—as I penetrate the Fourth Act—the whole business becomes ludicrous: not sanely comic, or even quite sanely absurd: but bizarre, and ridiculously bizarre at that. It has no "idea" at all, no relation to the Universal in the shape of any moral order, "law," fate, doom, destiny. It is just a box of tricks, of raw heads and bloody bones, left with the lid open. That ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Dancing to the 14th Century. Dancing in Churches and Religious Dancing. The Gleemen's Dance. Military Dances. The Hornpipe. Tumbling and Jest Dances. Illustrations of Gleemen's Dance, Hornpipe, Sword Dances, Tumbling and Various Comic Dances. ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... sobs. There was the fall of a foot on the stairs which she heard long before it reached him, and, in a moment, she was in her chair. He looked at her, and there was no trace of a tear. "It's Houghton," she said, putting her finger up to her mouth with almost a comic gesture. There was a smile in her eyes, and a little mockery of fear in the trembling of her hand and the motion of her lips. To him it seemed to be tragic enough. He had to assume to this gentleman whom he had been injuring a cordial friendly manner,—and thus to lie to him. He had to make pretences, ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... was opened to him, not by the old man with whom he had exchanged amenities on the previous night, but by a short, thick fellow, who looked exactly like a picture of a loafer from the pages of a comic journal. He eyed Fenn with what might have been meant for an inquiring look. To Fenn ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... Wayne, with incredible violence. "Crucifixion is comic. It is exquisitely diverting. It was an absurd and obscene kind of impaling reserved for people who were made to be laughed at—for slaves and provincials, for dentists and small tradesmen, as ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the only Scot who has lost his kilt in the war. One of the Royal Engineers gives a comic picture of a Highlander who appears to have lost nearly every article of clothing he left home in. When last seen by this letter writer he was resplendent in a Guardsman's tunic, the red breeches of a Frenchman, a pair of Belgian infantry boots, and his own Glengarry! "And when ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... charming gift of singing little French and English ditties, comic or touching, with his delightful fresh young pipe, and accompanying himself quite nicely on either piano or guitar without really knowing a note of music. Then he could draw caricatures that we boys thought inimitable, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... cruelly avenged." The old and the new generation of Frenchmen clamour that as much as may be of the stigma that rests upon them shall be removed, threatening reprisals if it be not quickly done. The British Government diplomatically, and with almost comic celerity, gravely drop "the General Bonaparte" and style their dead captive ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... heat, I guess. Some say he's cold as ice. His ice is the kind that freezes to what he likes. Mort's a gentleman if we have one in Fraser County. If you think you're chasin' one of these blue jeans politicians you read about in comic papers you're hitting the wrong trail, son. Mort can eat with a fork without appearin' self-conscious. Good Lord, boy, if you can say these other fellows in Indiana politics have brains, you got to say that Mort Bassett has intellect. Which is different, ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... the Pratts!" Hester said to herself, watching the grotesque gambols and nudgings of the dwindling humorists. "It must be very fatiguing to be so comic." ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... of himself were not so profoundly sad, when we think of the high place he occupies and the great man he succeeded in it, nothing could well be so comic as some of the incidents of Mr. Johnson's tour. No satirist could have conceived anything so bewitchingly absurd as the cheers which greeted the name of Simeon at the dinner in New York, whether we suppose the audience to have thought him ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... a Pulcinella," the Moon told me. "The public applaud vociferously directly they see him. Every one of his movements is comic, and is sure to throw the house into convulsions of laughter; and yet there is no art in it all—it is complete nature. When he was yet a little boy, playing about with other boys, he was already Punch. ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... when we bore down on them. As we neared they began to paddle frantically, as though fearful we should be snatched away from them at the last moment. The crew were mostly Arabs and Lascars, and the first mate, a typical comic magazine Irishman, delivered himself of the following: "Sure, toward the last some o' thim haythen gits down on their knees and starts calling on Allah: but I sez, sez I, 'Git up afore I swat ye wid the ax handle, ye benighted haythen; sure if this boat gits saved 't will be the Holy Virgin does ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... this period the Doctor and his two men appeared on the brow of the hill, looking down in a most complacent manner upon the serio-comic scene that the little basin wherein we were encamped presented. For, indeed, despite the serious aspect of it, there was much that was comical blended with it—in a naked young man who—perfectly drunk, barely able to stand on his feet—was beating the ground with his only loin-cloth, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Teufelsdrockh and the rather odd name of Sartor Resartus—the Tailor Patched—which the present Editor has affixed to his pretended commentary, seems to look the same way. But though there is a good deal of remark throughout the work in a half-serious, half-comic style upon dress, it seems to be in reality a treatise upon the great science of Things in General, which Teufelsdrockh, is supposed to have professed at the university of Nobody-knows-where. Now, without intending to adopt a too rigid standard of morals, we own that we doubt a little the propriety ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... of married life. Many other poets have indeed complained of their married lives, and Chaucer (if the view to be advanced below be correct) as emphatically as any. But though such occasional exclamations of impatience or regret—more especially when in a comic vein—may receive pardon, or even provoke amusement, yet a serious and sustained poetic version of Sterne's "sum multum fatigatus de uxore mea" would be unbearable in any writer of self-respect, and wholly ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... gondolas passing at the time, there was one at some distance, in which sat two gentlemen, who had the appearance of being English; and, observing them to look our way, Lord Byron putting his arms a-kimbo, said with a sort of comic swagger, "Ah! if you, John Bulls, knew who the two fellows are, now standing up here, I think you would stare!"—I risk mentioning these things, though aware how they may be turned against myself, for the sake of the otherwise indescribable traits of manner and character ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... a good deal of pleasure in poking fun at woman's use of dress and ornaments as bait for entrapping lovers, and many a squib expressing this theory appeared in the newspapers. These cynical notes no more represented the general opinion of the people than do similar satires in the comic sheets of to-day; but they are interesting at least, as showing a long prevailing weakness among men. The following sarcastic advertisement, for instance, was written by ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... table was general and very interesting. Mr. Airy says, 'The best of a good dinner is the amount of talk.' He talked of the great 'Leviathan' which he and Struve had just visited, then anecdotes were told by others, then they went on to comic poetry. Mr. Airy repeated 'The Lost Heir,' by Hood. General Sabine told droll anecdotes, and the point was often lost upon me, because of the local allusions. One of his anecdotes was this: 'Archbishop ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... learned to arrange flowers, our meanest labourer to offer his salutation to the rocks and waters. In our common parlance we speak of the man "with no tea" in him, when he is insusceptible to the serio-comic interests of the personal drama. Again we stigmatise the untamed aesthete who, regardless of the mundane tragedy, runs riot in the springtide of emancipated emotions, as one "with too ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... first bullock-cart was driven by Hans, who sat upon the top of a heap of baggage, his head covered with a very old and battered Panama hat, through several broad holes in which his red hair bristled out in a most comic fashion, and over his blue flannel shirt a large red beard flowed almost to his waist. Terence was walking by the side of the second cart in corduroy breeches and gaiters and blue coat, with a high ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... Stratford. I could never pick up any certain Intelligence, when He relinquish'd the Stage. I know, it has been mistakenly thought by some, that Spenser's Thalia, in his Tears of his Muses, where she laments the Loss of her Willy in the Comic Scene, has been apply'd to our Author's quitting the Stage. But Spenser himself, 'tis well known, quitted the Stage of Life in the Year 1598; and, five Years after this, we find Shakespeare's Name among the Actors in Ben Jonson's Sejanus, which first made its ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... be unfair to leave the subject without a passing reference to its effect on the imagination. We are all familiar with comic paper mosquito stories, and some of them are very good. But until actual experience takes you by the hand and leads you into the realm of pure fancy, you will never know of what improvisation the ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... longer than she anticipated, for she found that "El Diablo Cojuelo" had left his stronghold. Failing to make herself understood, Dolores fetched an old man who looked like a comic opera pirate and who could speak a ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... Sir Arthur Currie, who in 1914 locked his real estate desk in Victoria, B.C., and in 1919 came back to Canada admittedly one of the ablest commanders in a war which made the exploits of Wellington seem like comic ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... not here omit to relate something which may serve to give a notion of the size of this great work, and is at the same time highly comic. It must first be mentioned that I had forbidden all the men who lived at my cost to bring light women into my house or anywhere within the castle precincts. Upon this point of discipline I was extremely strict. Now may lad Ascanio loved a very ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... and song and dance! Our purpose is an essay in romance: An old-world story where such old-world facts As hate and love and death, through four swift acts— Not without gleams and glances, hints and cues, From the dear bright eyes of the Comic Muse!— So shine and sound that, as we fondly deem, They may persuade you to accept our dream: Our own invention, mainly—though we take, Somewhat for art but most for interest's sake One for our hero who goes wandering still In the long shadow of PARNASSUS ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... living by comic sketches, and all but lost it again by tragic poems. So he was just the man to be chosen king of the fairies, for in ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... and kissed him. "Do it again," said he, "and let us see who will tire first." He kept her on his knee some time while he and she drank tea. He was now like a buck indeed. All the company were much entertained to find him so easy and pleasant. To me it was highly comic to see the grave philosopher—the Rambler—toying with a Highland beauty! But what could he do? He must have been surly, and weak too, had he not behaved as he did. He would have been laughed at, and not more respected, ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... of modern everyday existence in China which may fairly be quoted to show that Chinese civilisation is not, after all, that comic condition of topsy-turvey-dom which the term usually seems ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... feet—you'd make an adorable Alice in Wonderland, with ankle- strap slippers, and a comb, and a dear little pinny over a blue frock! And your friend can be the Mad Hatter. Look well, wouldn't she, with a hat on one side? There are only the girls to see you, and the more comic you can make yourself the better they'll be pleased. You are about to be introduced to a new side of Newnham life, and will see how mad the students can be when they let themselves go. You'll laugh yourself ill before the evening's ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... nonsense!" said Rosa, deliberately tearing the bold "geant" to pieces down to the bare stem, "unless he meant to be comic, and intimate that the gazer was so rash as to come too near the bush, and ran a ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... pointed out, "that every comic opera had one act on a tropical island. Then some fellow discovered Holland, and now all comic operas run to blonde girls in patched breeches and wooden shoes, and the back drops are 'Rotterdam, Amsterdam, any damn place at all.' But this town combines both the ancient and modern ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... school his teasing comrades gave him many comic names, And he became the victim of all sorts of naughty games; Nor did the master like him, for he felt that such a face, Mid a row of ruddy youngsters, was extremely ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... the stern realities of war, Lincoln was keenly appreciative of anything that disclosed the comic or grotesque side of men or happenings,—largely, doubtless, for the relief afforded him. At the beginning of Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania, in June, 1863, when the Union forces under Colonel Milroy were driven out of Harper's Ferry by the Confederates, great consternation and alarm ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... him from me that his father is a wretch. Is there a wife? I think someone said there was—well, she probably doesn't know all I know." The old woman pulled down her mouth in comic disapproval. ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... "regretted that Shakspere did not know or rarely observed the Aristotelian laws of the three unities," but was good enough to express his surprise at the powerful effect of his plays. "He is many times flat, insipid, his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling, ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... of the poet, where the king of the pygmies is measured by the same standard. We have all read in Milton of the spear that was like "the mast of some tall admiral", but these images are surely likely to come to the comic poet originally. The subject is before him. He is turning it in a thousand ways. He is full of it. The figure suggests itself naturally to him, and comes out of his subject, as in that wonderful passage, when Gulliver's box having been dropped ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... manage it somehow! Surely one lame old woman, and a torpid machine for knitting and writing notes like Miss Smeardon, can't want to be out of doors all day. Hang that boy, though! He'll come anywhere." Here he stopped and sat down suddenly at the dressing-table, covering his face with his hands in comic despair. "Mrs. Loring can't like it! She must be doing it on purpose, avoiding being alone with me because she sees I admire her," he sighed. "After all why should I ever suppose that I interest her as much ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... farce is a relief from these profane absurdities. "An uncommonly droll piece with an original comic idea in it has been in course of representation here. It is called Les Cheveux de ma Femme. A man who is dotingly fond of his wife, and who wishes to know whether she loved anybody else before they were married, cuts off a lock of her hair by stealth, and takes it to a great mesmeriser, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... didactic, and slowly Isidore Diamantstein came to forsake the paths of evil and to spend long afternoons in the serene and admiring companionship of Morris Mogilewsky, Patrick Brennan and Nathan Spiderwitz. But when, early in December, he found a stranded comic valentine and presented it, blushingly, to Eva Gonorowsky, Miss Bailey found that ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... sustained, his sense of humour is highly capricious. It is impossible for even his most intimate friends to guess beforehand what will amuse him and what will not; and he has a most disconcerting habit of taking a comic story in grim earnest, and arguing some farcical fantasy as if it was a serious proposition of law or logic. Nothing funnier can be imagined than the discomfiture of a story-teller who has fondly thought to tickle the great man's fancy by an anecdote which depends for its point ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... vagabond of a plumber doing a fine part on his head, as is his way nowadays. But the thing is so good that it is perhaps ungracious to remind him he could make it better. Mr. SIDNEY PAXTON'S triumph with Poulder was his admirable restraint—rarest of accomplishments among comic stage butlers. The effect of everything was heightened by this excellent economy. It was a lesson in artistic reticence. An even more notable feat in the same kind was The Press of Mr. LAWRENCE HANRAY. Obviously he could have collected a good deal more of the laughter of the house if he had ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... say in my own defense except at the other man's expense—which would have been in questionable taste and would have been deemed the resort of a weakling. So I kept my counsel and brooded. The ignorance of the guards made the tragedy comic. It was very humiliating. I gritted my teeth and swore that I at any rate should go again in spite of their incredulous jeers. But it was all terribly discouraging and made ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... suggest that psychological analysis with an example so absurd provokes the sense of the comic, but it is not quite that. It is not Heinesque irony, the concealment of an insult, nor Wilde's paradox, the burlesque of a truth. It is merely comic: a humorous facility in the use of words, though not barren as such things are apt to be, but quite common and human. The philosophical ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... amusing instance of that fact, and of the way in which things used to be done in Tuscany. Most of the Italian provinces—or larger cities, rather—have been from time immemorial personated in the popular fancy by certain comic types, supposed to represent with more or less accuracy the special characteristics of each district. Venice, as all the world knows, has, and still more had, her "Pantaloon," Naples her "Pulcinello," etc. The specialties of the Florentine character ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... and in it they shut up the remains the combustion had spared. The manikin was then clothed with the royal vestments—we know that those clothes are not worth much—and they did not forget to ornament it with Cousin Benedict's famous spectacles. There was something terribly comic in ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... Navy Department plotted to advertise the navy and encourage recruiting. In moving pictures, in the form of a story, with love interest, villain, comic relief, and thrills, it would show the life of American bluejackets afloat and ashore, at home and abroad. They would be seen at Yokohama playing baseball with Tokio University; in the courtyard of the Vatican ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... of the comic papers displayed one selfsame and highly complacent person, first as "Our Grocer," then as "Our Mayor," then as "The Gentleman who elects our Mayor," "The Gentleman who disposes of our Public Trusts," "The Gentleman who benefits by our Public ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... I see it quite often, The pictures are simply inane; The verses and jokes—they would soften An average Vassar girl's brain. Of course they are killingly comic; I laugh, but I feel like a loon!" And thus, with a fierceness atomic, She censures the ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... of these notes to retail the accounts of others. I must therefore refer the reader, for whatever concerns the history of the satiric, as I have hitherto done of the tragic and comic drama, to the numerous dissertators on the ancient stage; and, above all, so the case before us, to the learned Casaubon; from whom all that hath been said to any purpose, by modern writers, hath been taken. Only it will be proper to observe one ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... Oscar Wilde won the gold medal for Greek. The subject of the year was "The Fragments of the Greek Comic Poets, as edited by Meineke." In this year, too, he won a classical scholarship—a demyship of the annual value of L95, which was tenable for five years, which enabled him to go to Oxford without throwing an undue strain on his ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... bodies at every conceivable angle, and they appeared as if suddenly transformed into monstrous porcupines or hedgehogs. There was something almost ludicrous in this, but the magnitude and aspect of the animals were too terrible, and our danger was too imminent, to permit anything like comic ideas to enter our brains. I observed, too, that the natives were perfectly wild with excitement. Their black faces worked convulsively, and their white eyes and teeth glittered as they leaped and darted about in a state of almost perfect nudity, ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... the dark beauty, fixing her large eyes, from which not light, but, as it were, a rich shadow fell softly on her companion. It was the first time she had made any such confession. Rachel returned her look as frankly, with an amused smile, and then said, with a comic ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... lane and by-path of circumstance that leads nowhere and matters not the least in their story. Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Shakespeare, and many other writers have seized upon such characters and made use of them for their comic effect. James, in illustrating this mental type, has quoted the following from Miss ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... suffocated in her fat, broke through the crowd and hurried to the wagon, crying aloud. Being heavy and unable to climb into it, she seized her son's feet, with sobbing words of love, with such sharp broken cries and such a terribly comic expression of grief, that all the bystanders shuddered ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... were intended for comic, Dr Johnson has said, "they are such as that age did not probably commend, and as the present would not endure." Dryden has remarked, with self-complacency, the art with which they are made to depend upon the serious business. This has not, however, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... bear's work is, of course, evident to the most unpracticed eye; and in no way can one get a better idea of the brute's power than by watching it busily working for its breakfast, shattering big logs and upsetting boulders by sheer strength. There is always a touch of the comic, as well as a touch of the strong and terrible, in a bear's look and actions. It will tug and pull, now with one paw, now with two, now on all fours, now on its hind legs, in the effort to turn over a large ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt |
