"Drollery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sympathy with which we are expected to regard them. Nevertheless, the essence of what we call humour is that amusing weaknesses should be combined with an amicable humanity. Whether it be in the way of ingenuity, or oddity, or drollery, the humorous person must have an absurd side, or be placed in an absurd situation. Yet this comic aspect, at which we ought to wince, seems to endear the character all the more. This is a parallel case to that of tragedy, where ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... along in a strange way, and all eyes naturally fell upon her little feet, which were sailing about in the Dominie's slippers! Amid the general laughter, she walked up to the diffident youth, who could scarcely believe his eyes, and said with an air of irresistible drollery, by which she tried to cover her confusion: 'Here is your Christmas present, sir; do you hold to your promise of accepting it?' Of course, the lady having broken the ice, the Dominie could do no less than speak out, and, all being willing, the two ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... nor, at times, eat with him. On one occasion, his profanity was so shocking, that he ran some risk of being thrown overboard. He was a witty, comical fellow, and they would listen and laugh at his drollery; but they finally stopped his mouth from uttering things, for which he would be severely punished in England and in America; and skinned, or fried, or ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... boys, but serious bullying was uncommon, and not unfrequently a hideous retribution befell a bully through some "big fellow" resolving to wreak on him what he inflicted on others. We can recall one very bright, brilliant youth, now high in the Indian civil service, whose drollery when bullying was irresistible, even to those who knew their turn might come next. "Come here, F——," we remember his saying to a fat youth of reputed uncleanness: then dropping his voice to a tone of subdued horror and solemnity, "I was shocked to hear you use a bad word ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... world, serves but to admit additional vexations. Every few moments the steps of the passengers are heard to pause, and some well-known face appears in the free sunshine behind the iron bars, brimful of mirth and drollery, the owner whereof stands on tiptoe to tickle poor Dr. Bullivant with a stinging sarcasm. Then laugh the little boys around the prison door, and the wag goes chuckling away. The apothecary would fain ...
— Dr. Bullivant - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... politician, these intervals of relaxation occurred so rarely, that they might strengthen his influence with the vulgar, and could never expose him to contempt." It has been observed, that Philips partiality for drinking and dancing, his drollery, and a dash of scurrility in his character, endeared him especially to the Thessalians. See Jacobs' note on this passage.] he is pushed aside and accounted as nobody. The rest about him are brigands and parasites, and men of that character, ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... functions, armed with a bamboo-cane, driving his herd to the spiritual pasture. He seemed himself to be conscious of the burlesque attaching to his office,—at least he behaved very absurdly in it, and many a stroke fell rather in jest than in earnest. The drollery of the driver did not, however, enliven the dejected ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... drollery. Now I will believe That there are unicorns; that in Arabia There is one tree, the phoenix' throne; one phoenix ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... some doubts if any one of his lectures, except the Mormon one, was ever fairly written out. "The Babes in the Wood," as a lecture, was a pure and unmitigated "sell." It was merely joke after joke, and drollery succeeding to drollery, without any connecting thread whatever. It was an exhibition of fireworks, owing half its brilliancy and more than half its effect to the skill of the man who grouped the fireworks together and let them off. In the hands of any other pyrotechnist ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... is the onely drinking: and for thy walles a pretty slight Drollery, or the Storie of the Prodigall, or the Germane hunting in Waterworke, is worth a thousand of these Bed-hangings, and these Flybitten Tapistries. Let it be tenne pound (if thou canst.) Come, if it were not for thy humors, there is not a better Wench in England. Go, wash thy face, and draw ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... of the characters, a circumstance which an imaginative boy of ten, named John Milton, was not to forget. "Pan's Anniversary," late in the reign of James, proclaimed that Jonson had not yet forgotten how to write exquisite lyrics, and "The Gipsies Metamorphosed" displayed the old drollery and broad humorous stroke still unimpaired and unmatchable. These, too, and the earlier years of Charles were the days of the Apollo Room of the Devil Tavern where Jonson presided, the absolute monarch of English literary Bohemia. We hear of a room blazoned about ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... his powers of drollery to enliven the miscellaneous meal, and Flora soon retired to rest, fully determined to bear the crosses of life with more fortitude ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... mirth and the finest sense, between the puffs of her cigarette, of the drollery of things, appeared to find their conversation highly delightful. "Yes, it isn't ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... Cowper says that Puss showed his gratitude by licking his hand for a long time, a ceremony he never went through with but once in his life, before or afterward. Bess, who died young, was the funny one. He had a great fund of humor and drollery. Tiney, though very entertaining in his way, seems to have been rather a grave and surly fellow. When he died—and he lived to a good old age, some nine years, I think—Cowper buried him with honor, and wrote an epitaph ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... argument was that usual one, quae separantur distinguuntur et haec, etc.; the Lad answered by a distinction, quae separantur per se verum: per accidens, falsum; and so they went on. The lad chanced to transmit a proposition one tyme: the fellow in a drollery replied, si tu transmittas ego—revocabo. Thus have we dwelt enough on Orleans, its hy tyme for us to ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... society possessed that serenity of mood which distinguishes those whom no ennui annoys, because they expect no interest. He was generally gay, his caustic spirit caught the ridiculous rapidly and far below the surface at which it usually strikes the eye. He displayed a rich vein of drollery in pantomime. He often amused himself by reproducing the musical formulas and peculiar tricks of certain virtuosi, in the most burlesque and comic improvisations, in imitating their gestures, their movements, ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... prologue and epilogue occur in the "Covent-Garden Drollery" a publication which contains original copies of several of Dryden's fugitive pieces. They appear to have been spoken upon occasion of the male characters in "The Maiden Queen" being represented by female performers. From our author's ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... when Alice said those last cold words, "Pray do not ask me," she released the grasp, and left the letter where it was. "I suppose he won't bite me, at any rate," she said, and she assumed that look of childish drollery which she would sometimes put on, almost with a grimace, but still with so much prettiness that no one who saw her ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... "hoops," "shuttle-cocks," and "battle-doors," than to be seated among a lot of little ragged, half-starved Gipsy children, who have never known what soap, water, and comb are. It is more in harmony with our sensibilities to sit and listen to the drollery, wit, sarcasm, and fun of Punch than to the horrible tales of blood, revenge, immorality, and murder that some of the adult Gipsies delight in setting forth. It is more in accordance with our feelings to ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... levelled his drollery against Simpson, which so roused the malevolent disposition of the groom, that he had from that hour viewed Lary in the light of a bitter enemy, and vowed, the first opportunity that offered, to repay with interest the ...
— The Little Quaker - or, the Triumph of Virtue. A Tale for the Instruction of Youth • Susan Moodie
... me in the strangest quiet way imaginable. 'You insulted Lady Featherstone at Ohlau, Mr. Wogan,' said he, 'one evening when she hid behind your curtain. It was a very delicate piece of drollery, no doubt. But I shall be glad to show you another, view of it.' It is strange how that had rankled in his thoughts. I liked him for it,—upon my soul, I did,—though it was the only thing I liked ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... the Kronstadt people on that day is not yet complete. His legs were encased in Hessian boots; his shooting-jacket was somewhat the worse for wear; and his hat, which had been eminently respectable at first starting, had acquired a sort of brigandish air; and to add to the drollery of his general appearance, the excellent little Servian horse he rode was not high enough for a ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... did a General and his Chief-of-Staff, in a more unseemly state of cachinnation, ride along a picket-line. At every new phase of the subject it presented new features of the ludicrous; and though the reply at this late date may have lost much of the drollery which then it wore, it is a serio-comic document of as much vital importance in the moral history of our late contest as any that can be found in the archives under the care of Gen. E. D. Townsend. It was received late Sunday evening, and was answered very ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... indeed, not inhuman; but he venerated nothing. Neither in the masterpieces of art nor in the purest examples of virtue, neither in the Great First Cause nor in the awful enigma of the grave, could he see anything but subjects for drollery. The more solemn and august the theme, the more monkey-like was his grimacing and chattering. The mirth of Swift is the mirth of Mephistopheles; the mirth of Voltaire is the mirth of Puck. If, as Soame Jenyns oddly imagined, a portion of the happiness of Seraphim and just ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... slatternliness, suffering, shiftlessness, dirt and raggedness, were inducements to one of her charitable temperament to visit its inhabitants, having their relief and improvement in view; while her appreciation of the warm-heartedness and drollery of the Irish character afforded her genuine pleasure. Proximity to English life had not refined these Irish; their houses were just as filthy, their windows as patched and obscured with rags, their children just as neglected, and their pigs equally familiar with those children as ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... sharp tone, gave a long whispered whistle, and pretended to hide under the table. He had a certain gift of drollery which made it difficult not to laugh even at his most foolish antics, and Marian was giving way in spite of herself when she found Douglas bending over her and saying, in ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... stage carpenter and property-man, and is married to another lady of the company. One of the under-carpenters is stepson of the chief comic who was formerly a fruit seller and is a little fellow of inexhaustible drollery with a flavour of Dan Leno ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... of the American backwoodsmen, Oncle Jazon, despite years of practice among them, gave to it a creole lisp and some turns of pronunciation not to be indicated by any form of spelling. It added to his talk a peculiar soft drollery. When he spoke French it was mostly that of the COUREURS DE BOIS, a PATOIS which still lingers in ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... specimens of old Scottish humour have come down to us in ballad form, some of them made more familiar to our ears in modernised versions or paraphrases in which, along with the roughnesses, much of the force and quaint drollery of the originals has been smoothed away. Of such is The Wyf of Auchtermuchty, a Fife ballad, full of local colour and character, the production of 'Sir John Moffat,' a sixteenth century priest, who loved a merry jest, and of ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... to an expression of arch and coquettish benignity, I gave my lady a pat on the one cheek, and a kiss on the other, and without saying one syllable (Furies! I could not), left her astonished at my drollery, as I pirouetted out of the room ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... powdered hair, his raised and clasped hands,—rushing out of the lockup-house scene in all the fervid extasy of a father rejoicing at the escape of his son from destruction. In Crack, Dozey, Nipperkin, and other drunken characters, his drollery was irresistible. His intoxication displayed as much discrimination as his pathetic performances. Who can forget his stare in being detected in his fuddling as Dozey, and his plea for drinking to "wa-ash down your honour's health:" or his anti-polarity as Nipperkin, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... might do with a sister or cousin, whom one would only kiss and embrace fervently after a long absence. This seemed to be Mr Phillips' case, coming up occasionally from the provinces. Fitton then finished this drollery by charging me with not having done justice to Hutton, who he said ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... Conquer." The manager was not without great difficulty induced to bring this piece out. The sentimental comedy still reigned; and Goldsmith's comedies were not sentimental. The "Goodnatured Man" had been too funny to succeed; yet the mirth of the "Goodnatured Man" was sober when compared with the rich drollery of "She Stoops to Conquer," which is, in truth, an incomparable farce in five acts. On this occasion, however, genius triumphed. Pit, boxes, and galleries, were in a constant roar of laughter. If any bigoted ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... back from her face with a plain black ribbon. Her face was singularly intelligent, her voice clear and quick, her eyes often much too mournful for the eyes of a child, but sometimes flashing with fun, as, for instance, when Mark engaged her in some piece of drollery. Then the old spirit that she used to display when she performed her little mimicries for Mrs. Rushton's amusement would spring up in her again, and she would take great delight in seeing Mark roll about with laughing, ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... comes to us on reading Aldous Huxley's brilliant and hugely entertaining book of poems called "Leda." There is no more brilliant young poet writing to-day; his title poem is nothing less than extraordinary in pagan and pictorial beauty, but as a whole the cynical and scoffish tone of carnal drollery which gives the book its appeal to the humorously inclined makes a very dubious sandal for a poet planning a long-distance run. Please note that we are not taking sides in any argument: we ourself admire Mr. Huxley's ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... amandi, and The remedy of love Englished. As also The loves of Hero and leander, amock poem: together with choice poems, and rare pieces of drollery. London, printed in ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... at five hundred miles distance better than fanaticism under his nose," became the recipient of one of the most amusing and yet most virulent attacks which even that controversial age produced. "The whole pamphlet," Mr. Collins truly says, "is inimitable. Its irony, its humour, its drollery, are delicious." ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... disappeared, another drollery was exhibited, called the "Fool and his Five Sons," the names of the hopeful offspring of the sapient sire being Pickle Herring, Blue Hose, Pepper Hose, Ginger Hose, and Jack Allspice. The humour of this piece, though not particularly refined, seemed to ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was fond of anecdote and humour. In his youth he was keen on the turf and in field sports; he subsequently found his chief entertainment in literary avocations. As a poet, he had been better known if his efforts had been of a less fragmentary character. The general tendency of his Muse was drollery, but some of his ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... about publishing the whole of the matter abroad. He soon succeeded in inducing a number of young men and maidens to favour the joke, and to lend themselves to it. He explained the insane folly of this worthy pair with such irresistible drollery that everyone was eager to be ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... from under the bushy black eyebrows like a grizzly's from a cave. He was not a thing of beauty, but, at the back of his unflinching gaze, humor in some spritely and satanic shape was always disporting itself, and there was, as Lincoln Lang described it, "a certain built-in look of drollery in his face," which ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... cooked with any fine, savory herbs, such as Drollery, which is always in season, or Pleasant Reminiscence, which no one need be without, as it keeps for years, sealed ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... the discussion we ventured to ask His Highness for his autograph. The Prince, who has perhaps a more exquisite sense of humour than any other sovereign of Europe, declared with a laugh that he had no pen. Still roaring over this inimitable drollery, we begged the Prince to honour us ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... loop round the peg, and every time the gust struck the sail he was lifted from his seat by the crowding of the oar and the haul of the rope. His muscles swelled tense and rigid—the sweat poured from his face; but he laughed when Lincoln, with reckless drollery, began to shout a few ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... curious story of converting our emblem of death into a parti-coloured fool; and such satirical allusions to the folly of those who persisted in their notion of the skeleton were not unusual with the artists of those times; we find the figure of a fool sitting with some drollery between the legs of one of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... familiar epistles, either remonstrating with or speaking of the "Gineral," or, as the Major latterly styled the President, "the Govermint;" no less admirable for the political acumen they display than for a caustic drollery, which is enforced with shrewd Yankee humour, and in the singular phraseology current amongst 'Uncle Sam's' kindred. These letters have been collected, and are published both in America and in England; and although neither the purity of the politics or the dialect of the honest Major can be ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... into verse, for it revealed a capacity which otherwise we could hardly have guessed him to possess. The vigor and rapidity of the action, the vivid sketching of the background, the pregnant characterization, the drollery of the humor give this piece a high place among stories in verse, and lead us to conjecture that, had he followed this vein instead of devoting his later years to the service of Johnson and Thomson, he might have won a place beside the author of the Canterbury Tales. ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... of wit and drollery then animating the Irish capital has perhaps never had a parallel in any society. The House and the bar were both overflowing with it. When the dull, matter-of-fact Lord Redesdale first came over to take the position of lord chancellor, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... at that paper at your full leisure and convenience—all in good time, for you're not curious to read it, and why should you be?—what do you find it to be but a will, you see. That's the drollery of it," said Mr. Bucket with the same lively air of recalling a joke for the enjoyment of Mr. Smallweed, who still had the same crest-fallen appearance of not enjoying it at all; "what do you find it ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... were all frequently taken to the new Zoological Garden, where we were especially delighted with the drollery of the monkeys. Even then I felt a certain pity for the deer and does in confinement, and for the wild beasts in their cages, and this so grew upon me that many a visit to a zoological garden has been spoiled by it. Once in Keilhau I caught a fawn in the wood ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... country party," said the King. "I am much minded to secure the lad for an elfin page," he added aside to Killigrew. "There's a fund of excellent humour and drollery in those queer eyes of his! So, Sir Hobgoblin, if you are proof against cold steel, I know not what is to be done with you. Get you back, and devise some other mode of finding your way ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... brother of the nature of her quarrel with Mrs. Houghton, only that, even to a brother, she would not have mentioned her husband's folly. When he spoke of her crying, or laughing, or sneezing, she liked the little attempt at drollery. She liked to know that he had found her charming. Where is the woman who does not wish to charm, and is not proud to think that she has succeeded with those whom she most likes? She could not rebuke him. She could not even ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... the lower classes of subjects, we think justice is hardly done to Jan Steen, of whom, considering him even as a colourist, more should have been said, than that he "is distinguished by the drollery of his subjects, and by the most true and ingeniously simple expression of the feelings of common life." All this might be said of many others; the characteristic of Jan Steen is still wanting. So we think ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... naturally, sire. I was out driving in a plain cabriolet, when I remarked the boy, who was singing, and otherwise exercising his animal spirits by hopping, dancing, and running along the road by the side of the vehicle. I was much diverted by his drollery, and finally invited him to take a drive with me. He jumped in—without awaiting a second invitation, stared wonderfully at me with his great brown eyes, and in high satisfaction kicked his feet against the dash-board, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... that carries him quarter way 'round the track 'fore he c'n pull up." They all laughed except Miss Verjoos, whose gravity was unbroken, save that behind the dusky windows of her eyes, as she looked at John, there was for an instant a gleam of mischievous drollery. ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... that a good many members of the Bradshaw family possess a keen and rather sinister sense of the humorous, inherited doubtless from their great ancestor, the dry wag who wrote that monument of quiet drollery, Bradshaw's Railway Guide. So with the hero ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... contrast between that and the flashy passages with which it is interlarded. From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step. You laugh and are surprised that any one should turn round and travestie himself: the drollery is in the utter discontinuity of ideas and feelings. He makes virtue serve as a foil to vice; dandyism is (for want of any other) a variety of genius. A classical intoxication is followed by the splashing of soda-water, by frothy effusions of ordinary bile. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... settled Anglo-Saxon citizen, he cannot fail to appear at times to the latter as a near relation to Mephistopheles. But his "mockery" is as accidental and naif as that of Jewish Young Germany is keen and deliberate; and the former differs from the latter as the drollery of Abraham a Santa Clara differs from the ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... in with 'Little Prudy.' Compared with her, all other book-children are cold creations of literature; she alone is the real thing. All the quaintness of children, its originality, its tenderness and its teasing, its infinite uncommon drollery, the serious earnestness of its fun, the fun of its seriousness, the naturalness of its plays, and the delicious oddity of its progress, all these united for dear Little Prudy to embody ...
— Prudy Keeping House • Sophie May
... the author was present, they could not have more civilly accepted the toast; it was a bold kind of drollery in Mr. Burney, for I was fain to drink my own health in a bumper, which he filled for ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... disregarded the slight pique that was apparent in the soldier's manner; but, after following the train of her own thoughts in silent enjoyment for a moment longer, she seemed to yield to their drollery, and laughed until her dark eyes flashed with merriment. Cecilia did not assume the severe gravity with which she sometimes endeavored to repress, what she thought, the unseasonable mirth of her cousin; and the wondering Griffith fancied, ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... wedding gift to me—and for the table, a delicate rosewood stand, which was a work table of my sister Lucy's—whom you never knew, and who died long and long ago. However, I was amply repaid by Boosey's drollery afterward. He is a very witty young man, and when he got up from the floor, saturated with punch (his clothes I mean), he looked down at ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... House" do we find his humor so gently turned, so deftly put, and so ripe for the purpose of literary expression. It lies deep here, and those who desire to enjoy it as it should be enjoyed must place their ears close to the heart of human nature. The wit and the rollicking drollery that were but the surface indications of Mr. Field's genius have here given place to the ripe humor that lies as close to tears as to laughter—the humor that is a part and a large part of almost every piece of English literature that has outlived ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... a man of great drollery, and it would almost make you laugh to look at him. I never saw but one other man whose quiet, droll look excited in me the disposition to laugh, and that ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... on hand who had been let into Gilbert's scheme. The fireworks were equally successful whether they blazed splendidly or fizzled ingloriously. It was enough for the boys that Troy Gilbert was doing the act; they whooped at every figure, and whooped again at Troy's unaccustomed drollery. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... exceedingly humorous, and had a great delight in humour. Cheerfulness was habitual with her, she was very ready at a sally or a reply, and in her laugh (as I remember well) there was an unusual vivacity, enjoyment, and sense of drollery. She was perfectly unconstrained and unaffected: as modestly silent about her productions, as she was generous with their pecuniary results. She was a friend who inspired the strongest attachments; she was a finely sympathetic woman, with a great accordant heart and a sterling noble nature. ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... vexed, though her husband could not help smiling at the arch drollery of the girl's tone and manner, "do not thou learn light mockery of all ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on which his sister rested with so much complacency. It was a part of his quiet interior store of amusement to look at these bits of Byzantine embroidery round the room, which affected him always with a subtle sense of drollery. ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... at times, John had always an indefinable drollery about him that made him agreeable company to his friends, at least; and such an admiring friend he had constantly at hand in the person of Bert Haines. Both were Bohemians in natural tendency, and, though John was far in Bert's advance in point of age, he found the young man "just the kind of a ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... torn with perplexity. "I'll go, of course," he said as if in a dream. "Of course I'll go at once, but—why—if Miss Flora already—?" Then suddenly he recovered himself in the way Anna knew so well. "Miss Anna"—he gestured with his cap, his eyes kindling with a strange mixture of worship and drollery though his brow grew darker—"I'm ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... convinced the world will get tired (at least I hope so) of this eternal guffaw about all things. After all, life has something serious in it. It cannot be all a comic history of humanity. Some men would, I believe, write a Comic Sermon on the Mount. Think of a Comic History of England, the drollery of Alfred, the fun of Sir Thomas More, the farce of his daughter begging the dead head and clasping it in her coffin on her bosom. Surely the world will be sick of this blasphemy." John Sterling, in a like ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... "marchen" to Maria Saksis, a very intelligent Penobscot woman, a widow of a former governor, whom I met at North Conway, in the White Mountains, N. H. In her dialect Glooskap is invariably called Glus-gah-be. She told it with that admirable dry drollery, characteristic of a good story-teller in a race where there are no bad ones. The exquisite humor and humanity of this little legend, placed as a pendant to the stupendous successes of the giant hero, are such as to entitle its Indian author to rank as a genius. I have frequently asserted that ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... performed by the young persons of her circle—often, when the case lent itself, by the wonderful small offspring of humbler friends, children of the Venetian lower class, whose aptitude, teachability, drollery, were her constant delight. It was certainly true that an impression of Venice as humanly sweet might easily found itself on the frankness and quickness and amiability of these little people. They were at least so much to the good; for the philosophy of their patroness was as Venetian as everything ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... related of the peculiar wit, sarcasm, and drollery of this remarkable man. One more must suffice. When Newton County was first organized, it was made the duty of Dooly to hold the first court. There then lived and kept the only tavern in the new town of Covington, a man of huge proportions, named Ned Williams, usually ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... from the mountain," as the phrase, often heard in Sulaco, went, could also be seen in the drawing-room of the Casa Gould. He sat with modest assurance at some distance from the tea-table. With his knees close together, and a kindly twinkle of drollery in his deep-set eyes, he would throw his small and ironic pleasantries into the current of conversation. There was in that man a sort of sane, humorous shrewdness, and a vein of genuine humanity so often found in simple old soldiers of proved courage who have seen ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... antagonist with too much presumption; upon which he called to him in a loud tone, 'What is it you are contending for, if you be contending?' And afterwards imagining that the gentleman retorted upon him with a kind of smart drollery, he said, 'Mr. ——, it does not become you to talk so to me. Besides, ridicule is not your talent; you have there neither intuition nor sagacity.' The gentleman protested that he had intended no improper freedom, but had the greatest respect for Dr. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... famous for his drollery was entering the office doors at half-past ten in the morning, or exactly sixty minutes past the appointed time. By an unfortunate chance his principal met him, as, alas! he had too often done, at the same tardy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... a certain apish drollery and humour which exhibited itself in the lad, and a liking for some of the old man's pursuits, the first of the twins was the grandfather's favourite and companion, and would laugh and talk out all his infantine heart to ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Knox has a vein of drollery in him; which I like much, in combination with his other qualities. He has a true eye for the ridiculous. His History, with its rough earnestness, is curiously enlivened with this. When the two Prelates, entering ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... hand of time which turns the kaleidoscope of human affairs appeared to move slowly for a few weeks, as far as the characters of my story are concerned. The two little bakers worked together daily, one abounding in mirth and drollery, and the other cheered, or rather beguiled from melancholy in spite of herself. Business grew apace, not only because two girls who evoked general sympathy were the principals of the firm, but also for the reason that they put something of their ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... friendly; we can imagine that they were attracted by the handsome eyes and quaint garb of the young Friend, and by his quick wit and homely turns of speech, all the more amusing for a rustic flavor. They tried to tease him a little, but they must have quickly found their match in drollery, while the lad was already a citizen of the commonwealth of books. No doubt the stimulus of such a social occasion brought him, as well as the strangers, into new acquaintance with his growing gifts. But presently one of the ladies, evidently the favorite ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... logic, in all manner of brilliant utterance and tongue-fence, I have hardly known his fellow. So ready lay his store of knowledge round him, so perfect was his ready utterance of the same,—in coruscating wit, in jocund drollery, in compact articulated clearness or high poignant emphasis, as the case required,—he was a match for any man in argument before a crowd of men. One of the most supple-wristed, dexterous, graceful and successful fencers in that kind. ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... the sport, and laughing at the drollery of it, all at once I heard a stamping on the other side of the wagon, and, stepping quickly around the horses' heads, I saw the old doe, and a buck and doe ...
— The Nursery, No. 106, October, 1875. Vol. XVIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... friendliness and his quaint humor won him soon a sure, if quiet, social position. He was frequently invited to Mr. Webster's Saturday breakfasts, where his stories were highly relished for their originality and drollery. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... Farmer, the head of Emanuel College, Cambridge, Prebendary of Canterbury, and afterwards of St. Paul's, or Westminster, used to frequent a club in London, to which I belonged. He was at first reserved and silent: but his forte was humour and drollery. At Cambridge he neglected forms and ceremonies in his college too much: and was in all his glory when in dishabille in his study, with his cat by his side, and his Shakspeare tracts about him. He found no literature at Canterbury, and was disgusted with his brother members of the cathedral: quaint ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... vanished and she was full of animated talk. Her conversation abounded in bright, pointed sayings, in fine little touches of humor, in amusing anecdotes and incidents of her own experience, which she related with astonishing ease and fluency, sometimes also in downright girlish fun and drollery; and all was rendered doubly attractive by her low, sweet woman's voice and her merry, fitful laugh. Yet these things were but the sparkle of a very deep and serious nature. Even then her religious character was to me wonderful. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... state of life to which it HAS pleased Heaven to call one,—the horror at her tricycle, the impossibility of improvement, the predilection for farmyard odours, the adherence to tumbledown dwellings, the contempt of drinking fountains,—all had their meed of exaggeration not without drollery. ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... looking at this queer turnout, the little reddish man climbed down from in front and stood watching me. His face was a comic mixture of pleasant drollery and a sort of weather-beaten cynicism. He had a neat little russet beard and a shabby Norfolk jacket. His ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... account of a certain apish drollery and humor which exhibited itself in the lad, and a liking for some of the old man's pursuits, the first of the twins was the grandfather's favorite and companion, and would laugh and talk out all his infantine ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... a note, and Anna responded. Playing with one hand he turned on his stool to glance at her. Instinctively she had fallen into the posture of the poster, her hands behind her, her head bent slightly forward, her chin uplifted, her eyes bright with the drollery of the song. Mr. Earles closed the piano ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the beautiful Greek spirit is sobered down in him almost to sadness. Yet the fact that Stobae'us found him a fruitful source of sententious quotations, and that alphabetical anthologies were made of his proverbial sayings, ought not to obscure his fame for drollery and humor. If old men appreciated his genial or pungent worldly wisdom, boys and girls read him, we are ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... which, as it is the dress of poetry, doth, like the dress of men, establish characters (the one of the whole poem, and the other of the whole man), in vulgar opinion, beyond any of their greater excellences: but surely, a certain drollery in stile, where characters and sentiments are perfectly natural, no more constitutes the burlesque, than an empty pomp and dignity of words, where everything else is mean and low, can entitle any performance to the appellation ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... at the charming child, to whom Lord Petherton was talking with evident kindness and gaiety—a conjunction that evidently excited Mitchy's interest. "May WE then know her?" he asked with an effect of drollery. "May I—if ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... rough power and drollery of Plautus; his whole attraction lies in the subtlety of his amorous intrigues. Steele, speaking of one of the plays, "The Self-Tormentor," observes, "It is from the beginning to the end a perfect ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... from the author's having sometimes admitted it in his diction only; which as it is the dress of poetry, doth like the dress of men establish characters, (the one of the whole poem, and the other of the whole man), in vulgar opinion, beyond any of their greater excellences: but surely, a certain drollery in style, where characters and sentiments are perfectly natural, no more constitutes the burlesque, than an empty pomp and dignity of words, where everything else is mean and low, can entitle any performance to the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... creature, and her intonation reminded me of the caressing way the Swedes articulate English. I heard him read the Russian newspapers to her with evident emotion, but the only word I could make out was Kouropatkin. The herring-agents at the hotel table were full of drollery. One of them, hailing from Wick, addressed a neighbour abruptly to this effect: "I am a rather expensive man to sit beside, and to one like you especially so, for you seem to be a water-drinker. When ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... at Paris, a little fellow, who was the darling of all the wags of his acquaintance. Nature seemed, in the formation of this little man, to have amused herself, by giving loose to half a hundred of her most comical caprices. He had some wit and drollery of his own, which sometimes rendered his sallies very amusing; but, where his friends laughed with him once, they laughed at him a thousand times, for he had a fund of absurdity in himself that was more pleasant ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... money, and on the making-up, no little time and eye-sight, would lie for months in a yellow neglected heap; and at such times, it was said, Miss Galindo was more amusing than usual, more full of dry drollery and humour; just as at the times when an order came in to X. (the initial she had chosen) for a stock of well-paying things, she sat and stormed at her servant as she stitched away. She herself explained her ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... swift-budding reason, that foretold Virtues the future years would yet unfold. Thy words, thy archness, every turn and bow— How sick at heart without them am I now! Nay, little comfort, never more shall I Behold thee and thy darling drollery. What may I do but only follow on Along the path where earlier thou hast gone. And at its end do thou, with all thy charms, Cast round thy father's neck ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... O'Leary was simple. In his countenance there was a mixture of goodness, solemnity, and drollery, which fixed every eye that beheld it. No one was more generally loved or revered; no one less assuming or more pleasing in his manner. Seeing his external simplicity, persons with whom he was arguing were sometimes tempted to treat him cavalierly; but then the solemnity ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... belongings of a person whose high spirit appeared to have no taint either of fastness, as they said in England, or of subversive opinion, and whose mouth had charming lines, should not be a little more distinguished. There was an effect of drollery in her behaviour to these subjects of her zeal, whom she seemed to regard as a care, but not as an interest; it was as if they had been entrusted to her honour and she had engaged to convey them ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... almost seem as if there were a certain drollery of art which leads men who think they are doing one thing to do another and very different one. Thus, men have set up in their painted church-windows the symbolisms of virtues and graces, and the images of saints, and even of Divinity itself. Yet now, what ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... wonderful woman,' said Mrs. Edmonstone, in her quiet way; and Guy with an expression between drollery and simplicity, said, 'Then there aren't ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... optics, with an expression of mingled drollery, apprehension, and confidence in his master's ability to lead the battle. It is wonderful how much expression can be condensed into ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... personage, with a physiognomy in which good nature and malice, folly and shrewdness, were so oddly blended, that it was difficult to say which predominated. His look was cunning and sarcastic, but it was tempered by great drollery and oddity of manner, and he laughed so heartily at his own jests and jibes, that it was scarcely possible to help joining him. His attire consisted of a long loose gown of spotted crimson silk, with the royal cipher woven in front in gold; hose of blue cloth, ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth |
