"Clown" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... clown, in monstrous garb With crooked arrows starred, Silently we went round and round The slippery asphalte yard; Silently we went round and round, And no man ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... Favourite'—with a ring and a rush, a spirit and swiftness of colour, not approached by the best verse of Egerton Warburton or Whyte-Melville. Especially vivid and terse is the description of the latter part of the race, where the favourite (The Clown) overtakes Iseult, the mare leading in ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... His usual walk is by pauses, as if (from the same vacuity of thought which made Dryden's clown whistle) he was telling his steps: and first paid his clumsy respects to my mother; then to my sister; next to me, as if I was already his wife, and therefore to be last in his notice; and sitting down by me, told us in general what weather it was. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... pre-eminence;—you who prate of God and know nothing whatsoever about Him! The horse, dog, cat,—even the wild animals, whose vices, perchance, pale beside your own, may go to Heaven before you. The Supreme Architect is neither a Nero, nor a Stuart, nor a clown. He will recompense all who deserve recompense, be they great or ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... and speaking violently.] I warrant you will, you clown. But let me advise you to look better afore you leap next time, or very likely 'tis in sommat worse than a ditchful of nettles ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin
... offensive to his taste as it had been unconvincing to his intelligence. The man was a mountebank, nothing more, Stephen had decided, and his strange power was simply the reaction of mob hysteria to the stage tricks of the political clown. ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... hills on the 21st, we soon reached a little colony of detached hills of queer shapes, one, as Breaden said, looking "like a clown's cap." From the top of the highest, which I named Mount Ernest, after my brother-in-law, a dismal scene stretched before us, nothing but the interminable sand-ridges, the horizon as level as that of the ocean. What heartbreaking country, monotonous, lifeless, without interest, without ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... and "The Coward"; of the soldiers, in "The Cadets," "The Interrogation," "The Night Watch," "Delirium"; of the actors, in "How I Was an Actor" and "In Retirement." We have circus life in "'Allez!'" "In The Circus," "Lolly," "The Clown"—the last a one-act playlet; factory life, in "Moloch"; provincial life, in "Small Fry"; bohemian life, in "Captain Ribnicov" and "The River of Life"—which no one but Kuprin could have written. There are animal stories and flower stories; ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... my man, I'll pay you, but I want you to understand you can't call me a clown," said ...
— The Rover Boys on the Farm - or Last Days at Putnam Hall • Arthur M. Winfield (AKA Edward Stratemeyer)
... the palace as if he were flying, and going up the stairs he found the King, who was still paying compliments to the country clown. When the man saw the dog with the letter in his mouth, he ordered it to be taken from him; but the dog would not give it to any one, and bounding up to Menechella he placed it in her hand. Then Menechella ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... if you please, Mr. Adam Hartley. I was not born a clown like some folks, and should care little, if I saw it fit, to talk to the best of them at the ordinary, and make myself ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... with a wooden dagger, a habit which took a great hold on the popular imagination, as numerous references in later literature testify. Transformed by time, the Vice appears in the Elizabethan drama, and thereafter, as the clown. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... will leave unshaken My hold, though I may seem to sway or lurch. A bird who knows his book Can afford to cock a snook At a chatterer who intrigueth against his chief. 'We Three'? You quote the Clown; And you play him! Yes, I own Pretty Poll may be pulled down, But I do not think 'twill be by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 28, 1893 • Various
... incline your head gracefully, and don't act as if it were glued immovably onto your shoulders." Sahwah dutifully grinned from ear to ear, and Gladys shook her head again. "No, not like that, it makes you look like a clown. Just smile slightly and naturally; act as if you were enjoying yourself." Thus the lesson proceeded. Gladys had undertaken the task of teaching Sahwah fancy dancing, and drilled her every morning in the shack. Sahwah was eager to learn and practised the steps until her feet ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... years had passed, Jasmin, being a spirited fellow, was allowed to accompany his father at night in the concerts of rough music. He placed a long paper cap on his head, like a French clown, and with a horn in his hand he made as much noise, and played as many antics, as any fool in the crowd. Though the tailor could not read, he usually composed the verses for the Charivari; and the doggerel of the father, mysteriously ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... my friends I often used to give an account of my observations, until at last I discovered that wherever I went, and under whatever circumstances (except, of course, at the funeral of a member of the family), I was expected to be amusing! I found myself in the same relation to society that the clown bears to the circus-master who has engaged him—he must either be funny or leave ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... related that once, when a clerk was singing the 'Allelulia' in the emperor's presence, Charles turned to one of the bishops, saying, 'My clerk is singing very well,' whereat the rude bishop replied, 'Any clown in our countryside drones as well as that to his oxen at their ploughing'?[6] It is certain too that Bodo agreed with the names which the great Charles gave to the months of the year in his own ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... under the glazed aperture which is in front of the piece there is placed a small terra-cotta car drawn by a child and loaded with a head, or ear, of maize, a goose, and a clown; he explains that the maize means 1000, the car 400, the clown 90, and the goose "per il suo verso"—whatever this may mean—4, which numbers taken together make the number of infants that were killed. He adds that there is another like hieroglyphic, which, ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... dominated the whole mental horizon of the schoolmen. Alfred of Beverley tells us that Geoffrey of Monmouth's book "was so universally talked of that to confess ignorance of its stories was the mark of a clown."[1] So great was the influence of Piers Plowman, that from it were taken watchwords at the great rising of the peasants.[2] The power of such works could not be wholly hemmed in by the barrier of manuscript: like a spring torrent it would burst forth and ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... not recognise any one as she looked round upon Turks, clowns, Indians, the tinselled, sequined, beaded, ragged flutter of the room, then from the coloured and composite clothing of a footballer, clown or jockey grinned the round face and owlish eyes of little Duval, who flew to her at once to whisper compliments and stumble on the swelling fortress of her white skirt. She realised dimly from him that her dress was as beautiful as she had hoped it might be, but what was the use ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... impossibilities; then in three hours he runs through the world, marries, makes children men, men to conquer kingdoms, murder monsters, and bringeth gods from Heaven, and fetcheth devils from Hell. And, that which is worst, many times, to make mirth, they make a clown companion with a king; in their grave counsels they allow the advice of Fools; yea, they use one order of speech for all persons,—a gross indecorum."—In 1581, Stephen Gosson published a tract in which he says: "Sometimes you shall see nothing but the adventures of ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... and fine only as it is wrought finely. Educate a boy to tumbled hair and grimy hands, and he will go tumbled and grimy to his grave. Put a hundred boys together where they will have the appurtenances of a clown, and I do not believe there will be ten out of the hundred who will not become precisely to that degree clownish. I am not battling for the luxuries of life, but I am for its decencies. I would not turn boys into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... 'Returne,' Burbage and Kemp, the noted morrice dancer and clown of Shakespeare's company, are introduced. 'Few of the University men pen plays well,' says Kemp; 'they smack too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why here's our fellow Shakespeare' (fellow ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... from that which she has attempted." This is the usual way of reviewers. Tales that fascinated Scott, Fox, and Sheridan, "which possess charms for the learned and unlearned, the grave and gay, the gentleman and clown," do not deserve to be dismissed with a sneer by people who have never read them. Following Horace Walpole in some degree, Mrs. Radcliffe paved the way for Scott, Byron, Maturin, Lewis, and Charlotte Bronte, just as Miss Burney filled the gap between Smollett and Miss Austen. Mrs. ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... named Calico, because he is marked so queerly. His hair grows in such funny little streaks and stripes and patches that he looks as if he had been painted that way on purpose. He was a clown pony in a circus one time, and is supposed to know a lot of tricks. Joyce wanted him because he is so gentle, and she had never ridden any before. She didn't mind his ridiculous looks. So Lad fell to my share,—a pretty ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... in the world, as in the school, I'd say, how fate may change and shift; The prize be sometimes with the fool, The race not always to the swift. The strong may yield, the good may fall, The great man be a vulgar clown, The knave be lifted over all, The ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Would you believe it? I've actually deserted my dressing-table, and the perfume I used lies all forsaken and forlorn. Fresh water, plenty of fresh water ... that's what I like. I'm a long way from the Leonora who had to paint herself every night like a clown before she could appear before an audience. Take a good look at me! Well ... what do you think? You might mistake me for one of your vassals almost, eh? I'll bet that if I had gone out this morning to join your demonstration at the station you wouldn't ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... it shall make no cloud and no bitterness betwixt us twain. He is a fine lad and a noble one, and he deserves more at Dame Fortune's hands than such a clown as I. Shall I grudge him his luck if he gets her? never a whit! There may not be more than one Cherry in the world, but there are plenty of good wives and honest maidens who will brighten a man's ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... in figure—a caricature of a man, His Grace of Richmond was the last degenerate scion of the Stuarts of Richmond-d'Aubigny, a man of depraved tastes and besotted brain, the butt and the clown of Charles's Court. That this middle-aged buffoon should aspire to the hand of the loveliest and most elusive woman in England was only less amazing than that she should smile on his suit. The Court was struck with consternation—and convulsed with laughter. Nothing so utterly astonishing and so ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... A Clown, who had lost his Mare, To his Neighbour, a Wit, did repair, And begg'd him with him to go To the famous Doctor Foreknow, A Conjurer powerful and strong, Who would tell who had done the Wrong. So when to the Door they came, The Wit, he besh ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... I was a reveryin'—right there, when we wuz a floatin' clown the still waters, their voices riz up in one of their inspired songs. They sung about their "Hard Trials," and how the "Sweet Chariot swung low," and how they ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... regarded it, and Donato seeing this, entreated him by the friendship existing between them, to say what he thought of it. Whereupon Filippo, who was exceedingly frank, replied that Donatello appeared to him to have placed a clown on the cross, and not a figure resembling that of Jesus Christ, whose person was delicately beautiful, and in all parts the most perfect form of man that had ever been born. Donato hearing himself censured where he had expected praise, and more hurt than ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... herbs following—Wormwood, Sage, Broom-flowers, Clown's-All-heal, Chickweed, Cumphry, Birch, Groundsell, Agremony, Southernwood, Ribwort, Mary Gould leaves, Bramble, Rosemary, Rue, Eldertops, Camomile, Aly Campaigne-root, half a handful of Red Earthworms, two ounces of Cummins-seeds, Deasy-roots, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... common to our sex in the general tender-heartedness of pretty women. But I confess I was alarmed. Yet, with a feeble smile, I tried to introduce the subject with classical ease and lightness. I even said, "If Shakspeare's Athenian clown, Mrs. Brown, believed that a lion among ladies was a dreadful thing, what must"—But here I broke down; for Mrs. Brown, with the awful intuition of her sex, I saw at once was more occupied with my manner than my speech. So I tried a business brusquerie, and, placing the ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... honour to be Neptune's child, A grace to be so near with Jove allied. But yet, sweet nymph, with this be not beguiled; Where nature's graces are by looks decried, So foul, so rough, so ugly as a clown, And worse than this, a monster with one eye! Foul is not graced, though it wear a crown, But fair is beauty, none can ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... credit, pawned his rent, Is therefore fit to have a Government; Who in the secret, deals in stocks secure, And cheats the unknowing widow and the poor; Who makes a trust or charity a job, And gets an Act of Parliament to rob; Why turnpikes rise, and now no cit nor clown Can gratis see the country, or the town; Shortly no lad shall chuck, or lady vole, But some excising courtier will have toll. He tells what strumpet places sells for life, What 'squire his lands, what citizen his wife: And ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... called the kernel of his personality. An artist is in this sense insincere whenever, for example, he inserts anything in his work which exists solely for the sake of convention—some of Shakespeare's clown scenes were often put in solely because an Elizabethan audience demanded them, and they were to that extent a truckling to convention, an insincerity. They do not express the real Shakespeare. Any artist not capable of entirely direct ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... am only a clown giant in a circus, but I ran away to-day so I could see the flowers in the woods. I was tired of being in the circus so much and ...
— Bully and Bawly No-Tail • Howard R. Garis
... in a mountain town. The mountaineers swarmed from far and near, and lined the streets on every hand with open mouth and bated breath, as the grand procession, with band, and clown, and camels, and elephants, and lions, and tigers, and spotted horses, paraded in brilliant array. The excitement was boundless when the crowd rushed into the tent, and they left behind them a surging mass of humanity, unprovided with tickets, and destitute of the silver half of ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... muster'd, escaped from the plains, Of sight-loving lasses and holiday swains: Bob Bantam push'd forward and strutted before; Will Woodpecker modestly tapp'd at the door; Poor Robin, the rustic, a countrified clown, As he blush'd, look'd too simple by half for the town, There were scores in brown mantles, black, yellow, or green, From the villages round, and among them were seen, Luke Linnet, Sam Swallow, Mat Martin, and then, Bill Bullfinch, Tom Titmouse, ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... people; half of his blood was from another source. Besides, how could the boy be expected to feel as he did? Would he even understand if his father should explain it to him? . . . It was useless to expect anything from this lady-killing, dancing clown, from this fellow of senseless bravado, who was constantly exposing his life in duels in order to satisfy ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... you know. I came back—in tights, playing a big trombone, prancing round and making an awful noise. Lady Webling gave a little scream; nobody heard her because I made a loud blat on the trombone in the ear of the black-face clown, and he gave a shriek and ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... life. There were horses to ride also, and a beautiful "plage" to bathe upon. It was always sunny and warm, and I invariably look back on that winter as spent in paradise. I was permitted to go over with a young friend to the Carnival at Nice, where, disguised as a clown, and then as a priest, with the abandon of boys, we enjoyed every moment of the time—the world was so big and wonderful. The French that I had very quickly learned, as we always spoke it at our villa, stood me on this occasion in good stead. But better still, I happened, when climbing into ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... Internationalists Kramarov, long, stoop-shouldered and near-sighted-destined to achieve some notoriety as the Clown of the Opposition. Only a Government composed of all the Socialist parties, he said, could possess the authority to take such important action. If a Socialist coalition were formed, his faction would support the entire programme; if not, only part of it. As for the ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... partly because women, being more solitary, brood more unceasingly over cherished ideas, whether good or evil; partly also, for the same reason that makes a wicked gentleman, who has lost caste and character, more irreclaimable than a wicked clown, low-born and lowbred, namely, that in proportion to the loss of shame is the gain in recklessness: but principally, perhaps, because in extreme wickedness there is necessarily a distortion of the reasoning faculty; and man, accustomed ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... has not felt at the Play, the strong allegorical power in the coming of the first actress before the house? The hero may pose, the clown dance, the villain plot, the warrior, the king, the merchant, the page, fuddle the attention for the nonce: it is a dreary business; it is like parsing poetry; it is a grammatical duty; the Play could not, it seems, go on without these superfluities. ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... and presented it to Madame de Turgis. Without thanking him, the lady turned towards Mergy with a look of crushing contempt; and, observing Captain George at his side, 'Captain,' said she, very loud, 'where does that great clown spring from? He must be some Huguenot, judging from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... the prisoner; "let me but speak one word with you in private, and rescue me from the gripe of this iron fisted and leaden pated clown, and I will show thee that no harm was designed to thee or thine, and, moreover, tell thee ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... Russia, with whom I desire to live in friendly relations, has sent to me a clown. I can not consequently allow any of my people to accompany him back to Russia, lest they should find him offensive. Respected as I am from the east to the west, I blush in being exposed to such an affront. ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... can not blame Shakespeare for making use of cutthroats and villains in developing his plots, but we might have been spared the jokes which the jailors of Posthumus perpetrate when they come to lead him to the scaffold, and the ludicrous English of the clown who supplies Cleopatra with an asp. The apothecary who is in such wretched plight that he sells poison to Romeo in spite of a Draconian law, gives us another unflattering picture of a tradesman; and when Falstaff declares, "I would I were a weaver; ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... diamond in some instances wants the graver;—but it is the diamond. Nature seems now and then to have taken a princess's child and dropped it in some odd corner of the kingdom, while she has left the clown in the palace." ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... streets silent as the grave—not a person, not a lamp, not so much as a barking dog, as queer and as creepy as some made-up thing in a theatre. Once we stumbled past a naked and dismembered trunk set up beside a doorway—a physician's manikin that chance or some sinister clown had left there. Once—and one of the strangest sounds I ever heard—behind the closed up-stair shutters of an apothecary's shop, whose powders and poisons were strewn over the sidewalk, a piano haltingly played with ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... the giant, partly in profile against the sky, with his back bent and his hands upon his knees, watching me with an occasional approving nod of his big head. He looked so funny standing there on his little seven-by-nine world, like a clown on a performing ball, that, despite my terrible situation, I shook my sides with laughter. There was no echo in the ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... lay fighting his last battle, and I followed his corpse to the grave; and I know that the worm is busy about those leonine features, and the rain trickles through with a scent of faded flowers. Yes, it is true; he is dead. Dead like the king and dead like the clown; yet living truly beyond the dust of death in the lives of others, an inextinguishable light, a vivifying fire, a passionate ...
— Reminiscences of Charles Bradlaugh • George W. Foote
... were gone, a life of atrocious misery commenced for him. A dependent on a sister of his, everybody in the farmhouse treated him as a beggar who is eating the bread of others. At every meal the very food he swallowed was made a subject of reproach against him; he was called a drone, a clown; and although his brother-in-law had taken possession of his portion of the inheritance, the soup was given to him grudgingly—just enough to ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... but I cannot but esteem that of some Parents equal to it; I mean such as sacrifice the greatest Endowments and Qualifications to base Bargains. A Parent who forces a Child of a liberal and ingenious Spirit into the Arms of a Clown or a Blockhead, obliges her to a Crime too odious for a Name. It is in a Degree the unnatural Conjunction of rational and brutal Beings. Yet what is there so common, as the bestowing an accomplished Woman with such a ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... finds passage to the vital part Fear nought so much as Fear itself If thou wouldst fix remembrance—thwack! Nought credit but what outward orbs reveal The overwise themselves hoodwink The king without his crown hath a forehead like the clown Vanity maketh the strongest most weak Where fools are the fathers of every miracle Who in a labyrinth ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... A clown was blowing a trumpet. The barrel-organ accompanying the carrousel sent through the air its shrill jerky notes. The lottery-wheel made a whirring sound like that of cloth tearing, and every moment the crack of the rifle could be heard. And the slow-moving throng passed on quietly ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... said in pleasant, cheery tones, and smiling sweetly as she spoke; then, bending clown, she gave the little girl ...
— Elsie's Kith and Kin • Martha Finley
... way of compensation for this ruthless turning down Of the chief Elizabethan by a neo-Georgian clown, 'Tis averred that STOLL (Sir OSWALD), in a life of storm and stress, Finds distraction from his labours in the works of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... terrible; he would not allow himself to think of it. He turned away, went back up the chamber, and crossed over again to the air-way. Moving back a little to search for foot-prints, he came to an old door-way and sat clown by it to rest—yes, and to weep. He could no longer think of the torture the child must have endured in his wanderings through the old mine and keep the tears from his eyes. He almost hoped that death had long ago come to ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... dancing with the girls and forgetting that he was an old fellow, and now his family rather surprised him; he seemed to think it a joke that all these children should belong to him. As the younger ones slipped up to him in his retreat, he kept taking things out of his pockets; penny dolls, a wooden clown, a balloon pig that was inflated by a whistle. He beckoned to the little boy they called Jan, whispered to him, and presented him with a paper snake, gently, so as not to startle him. Looking over the boy's head he said to me, 'This one is bashful. ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... the stupid delight of a religious sightseer; his vanity is satisfied, he will next draw a rosary from his pocket and get it blessed by Christ Himself; he will recount it all to his friends at home. Another is dull and gaping, a clown who has walked barefoot from Valencia to Rome, and got imbecile by the way; yet another, prim and dapper; the rest indifferent looking restlessly about them, at each other, at their feet and hands, perhaps exchanging mute remarks about the length of time they are kept waiting; ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... English-reading world—judges on the bench and bishops in their studies, cobblers in their stalls and grooms in the stables—were all laughing over Pickwick, should have sued the Eatanswill Gazette for calling him a clown. Thackeray pronounces Cooper's Long Tom Coffin one of the prizemen of fiction. That is a final judgment by the chief-justice. But who knows what was the verdict in Cooper's lawsuits to vindicate himself, and who cares? When Cooper died there was a great commemorative ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... capitally danced by Miss NITA COLE as Nance, with Mr. DENNY as The McCrankie, may be considered as the real hit of the evening, having in itself about as much to do with whatever there is of the plot as would have the entrance of Mr. JOEY GRIMALDI, in full Clown's costume, with "Here we are again!" Of the music, as there was very little to catch and take away, one had to leave it. Of course this seriously comic or comically serious Opera is drawing—["Music," observes Mr. WAGG, parenthetically, "cannot be drawing"]—and will continue to do so for ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... in the Hospital, one of them being Jefke, the orderly in Ward I, who at times could be tender as a woman, at others a veritable clown keeping the men in fits of laughter, then as suddenly lapsing into a profound melancholy and reading a horrible little greasy prayer book assuring us most solemnly that his one idea in life was to enter the Church. Though he stole jam right and left his heart was in the right place, ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... than before. Oh again bade him chop wood, but again he went to sleep. Then Oh again tied him to the wood and burnt him and scattered the ashes to the four winds and sprinkled the remnant of the coal with living water, and instead of the loutish clown there stood there such a handsome and stalwart Cossack[3] that the like of him can neither be imagined nor described but only told ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous
... big feature of her parties at present; and society is rather inclined to make a pet of her, too—patronizing high art, don't you know. It's wonderful what you can do in that way. If a duke wants a clown to make fellows laugh after a Derby dinner, he gets him to his house and makes him dance; and if the papers find it out, it is only raising the moral status of the pantomine. Of course it is different with Mrs. Ross's friend: ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... of the 16th century and during the 17th, repeatedly visited the continent, bringing with them the repertory of the Elizabethan theatre. From those actors Ayrer learned how to enliven his dramas with sensational incidents and spectacular effects, and from them he borrowed the character of the clown. His plays, however, are in spite of his foreign models, hardly more dramatic, in the true sense of the word, than those of Hans Sachs, and they are inferior to the latter in poetic qualities. The plots of two of his comedies, Von der schoenen Phoenicia and Von der schoenen Sidea, were evidently ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... silver and pink and gold habits, and by knights in armor, all of whom carried umbrellas also. Pages walked beside the horses, waving banners and shields with "Visit Currie's World-Renowned Circus" painted on them. A droll little clown, mounted on an enormous bay horse, made fun of the pages, imitated their gestures, and rapped them on the back with his riding-stick in a droll way. A long line of blue and red wagons closed ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... eyes of the whole nation. Of the rescuing party only three were citizens of Lawrence. Sam Wood was in his element. He was a man overflowing with patriotism, yet succeeded in doing more harm to his friends than to his enemies. He possessed unmistakable talent; he was a clown and a born actor, and as a public speaker was sure to bring down the house; he was a pronounced free State man; yet in this act he made himself the marplot ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... tease her about her coquetry,—for he confounded that odious defect with the natural desire to please; he was always mistaken in matters of feeling, taste, and the higher ethics. So, whenever this man of the middle-ages appeared on the scene, Laurence immediately made him, unknown to himself, the clown of the play; she amused her cousins by arguing with Robert, and leading him, step by step, into some bog of ignorance and stupidity. She excelled in such clever mischief, which, to be really successful, must leave the victim content with ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... "adaptation." Adapt yourself to the demands of the reigning social powers, act the obedient servant before them, and if you produce something be sure that it does not run against the grain of your "superiors," or say adieu to success, reputation and recompense. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, prejudices which they hold as righteousness and falsehoods which they hold as truths. Paint the whole, crown it with regard for good manners, for society does not like to hear the truth about itself. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... in these brilliant waves, and our admiration increased as we watched the marine monsters disporting themselves like salamanders. I saw there in the midst of this fire that burns not the swift and elegant porpoise (the indefatigable clown of the ocean), and some swordfish ten feet long, those prophetic heralds of the hurricane whose formidable sword would now and then strike the glass of the saloon. Then appeared the smaller fish, ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... 'Clown! loafer! puff-ball! Leave my house instantly, and never enter it again until you have apologized to Mrs. Crawford and her grandson for the insult offered them by your vile accusations. If it were not for ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... patriots playing the clown, there was magistrates playing the fool; There wos jugginses teaching the trombone to kids at a bloomin' Board School. "This is Free Hedgercation in Shindy," sez I. "They're as mad as March hares, All these Limboites, dear Miss DIANNER. We ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... [Is a holiday clown, and differs only in the stuff of his clothes, not the stuff of himself,][35] for he bare the king's sword before he had arms to wield it; yet being once laid o'er the shoulder with a knighthood, he finds the herald his friend. ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... at present. Files of patients kept streaming into the already crowded room, and one gentleman, reversing the order assigned to him by nature, walked gravely in on the palms of his hands, with his legs elevated in air. He had been a clown at a theatre, and still retained some of the proclivities of the boards. A wizen-faced man, who seemed to have no name beyond the conventional one of "Billy," strutted in with huge paper collars, like ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... and white wine until they were very merry. Two rang bells, two played castanets, and two sang. One carried a tray behind his back laden with good things, so that all could help themselves; some smoked water-pipes; another acted like a clown; others played various tunes ...
— The Cat and the Mouse - A Book of Persian Fairy Tales • Hartwell James
... companion seemed not only seriously excusable, but even comically excusable. Who were all these pompous preposterous people with their footmen and their foot-scrapers, their chimney-pots and their chimney-pot hats, that they should prevent a poor clown from getting sausages if he wanted them? One would suppose that property was a serious thing. I had reached, as it were, a higher level of that mountainous and vapourous visions, the heaven of a ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... of jurists, psychologists, and physicians, all, therefore, men trained in careful observation. Somewhere in the same street there was that evening a public festivity of the carnival. Suddenly, in the midst of the scholarly meeting, the doors open, a clown in highly colored costume rushes in in mad excitement, and a negro with a revolver in hand follows him. In the middle of the hall first the one, then the other, shouts wild phrases; then the one falls to the ground, the other jumps on him; ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... fought hard and yet in vain) the most ludicrous images were mixed with the most awful personations; and whatever the subject might be, however sublime, however pathetic, yet the Vice and the Devil, who are the genuine antecessors of Harlequin and the Clown, were necessary component parts. I have myself a piece of this kind, which I transcribed a few years ago at Helmstadt, in Germany, on the education of Eve's children, in which after the fall and repentance of Adam, the offended Maker, as in proof of his reconciliation, condescends ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... meat and bread, but with the Negro it was a scathing indictment of a Christian earthly master who muzzled those who produced the food. "He Paid Me Seven" is a mock at the white man for failing to practice his own religion but the clown mask is there to be held up for safety to any who may see the ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... phenomenon of laughter and explained it away as "the result of an expectation which of a sudden ends in nothing." Some modern cynic has compiled a list of the situations on the stage which are always "humorous." One of them, I recall, is the situation in which the clown-acrobat, having made mighty preparations for jumping over a pile of chairs, suddenly changes his mind and walks off without attempting it. The laughter that invariably greets this "funny" maneuver would seem to have philosophical sanction. Bergson, ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... what shall I fancie, Amidst these gloomy dayes? Shall I goe court brown Nancy? In a countrey town They'l call me clown, If I sing them my outlandish playes. Let me inform their nodle with my heroick spirit, My language and worth besides transcend unto merit; They'l not believe one word, what mortal flesh can bear it? Alas! poor ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... wrote, "no room for mirth;" Much less for sigh and frown. "A vale of tears" may be this earth— 'Tis so to every clown. The desert blossoms as the rose, And joy flows everywhere; The star of hope in brightness glows, No room for ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... the world by travel, but more of human nature by remaining at home.... A youth just landed at the Brille resembles a clown at a puppet-show; carries his amazement from one miracle to another; from this cabinet of curiosities to that collection of pictures; but wondering is not the way to grow wise.... The greatest advantages which result to youth from travel are an easy address, the shaking off national ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... rake the sea-beds, Raked up all the water-flowers, Bits of broken reeds and rushes, Deep-sea shells and colored pebbles, Did not find his harp of fish-bone, Lost forever to Wainola! Thereupon the ancient minstrel Left the waters, homeward hastened, Cap pulled clown upon his forehead, Sang this song with sorrow laden: "Nevermore shall I awaken With my harp-strings, joy and gladness! Nevermore will Wainamoinen Charm the people of the Northland With the harp of his creation! Nevermore my songs will echo O'er the hills of Kalevala!" ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... the courtyard. There it was that I saw him for the first time, surrounded by a great wilderness of books, and attired in an unpretentious indoor costume, the most striking feature of which was a tall, pointed felt cap, such as I had seen worn by the clown who belonged to the troupe of rope-dancers at Eisleben. A great love of independence had driven him to this strange retreat. He had been originally destined for the Church, but he soon gave that up, in ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Blondel had grown from a minstrel-boy To a very romantic troubadour Whose soul was music, whose song was joy, Whose only motto was Vive l'amour! In lady's bower, in lordly hall, From the king himself to the poorest clown, A joyous welcome he had from all, And Care in his presence forgot to frown. Sadly romantic, fantastic and vain, His heart for his head still made amends; For he never sang a malicious strain. And never was known to fail his friends. Who ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... right; most natural mistake in the world. I've got a clown costume and I'm going down there myself after a while. Silly idea for a man of my age." He turned to Butterfield. "Better change your mind ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... his own temperament he seemed able to generate a kind of atmosphere and texture in his daily life which was rich and warm, splendid really in thought (the true reality) if not in fact, and most grateful to all. Yet also, as I have said, always he wished to seem the clown, the scapegrace, the wanton and the loon even, mouthing idle impossibilities at times and declaring his profoundest faith ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... all right, only he was so busy calling a few choice names after him that he placed the snake back in the cage instead of throwing it in, and the rattler struck him before he could draw his hand out. He had a clown make-up on, so I couldn't tell whether he was pale or not when he came to me a few minutes later and held out his hand, but there was a queer expression on his face and I knew that my ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... before him—young, emotional, without a doubt intellectual. But for his awful clothes he was well enough to look upon, he had no affectations, his instincts were apparently correct. His manners were hoydenish, but there was nothing of the clown about him. She asked him a direct question ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... made of red berries. Mrs. Budge, forgetting, when Robin held a sprig of mistletoe over her head and daringly kissed her wrinkled cheek, that "things was going to sixes and sevens," laughed until her sides ached at Harkness in his silly clown's cap. Robin and Beryl, with much solemnity, exchanged purchases each had secretly made at the village store and Robin could not resist adding: "Dare you to send it to ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... attainment; that it forms the rugged basis of our own tongue; and, above all, that we hear it loudly echoed in the dialect of our own vulgar. Indeed, the manners as well as language of a Lancashire clown often suggest the idea of a Saxon peasant; and prove, with respect to remote tracts like these, little affected by foreign admixtures, how strong is the power of traduction, how faithfully character and propensities may be transmitted ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... dress of a mediaeval crowd was captured the colours of the rainbow. With an odd result. Men laughed at the devil in the freedom of their souls. They tweaked his tail on carven misericords, and in the mystery play he was invariably cast for the clown. ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... class distinctions from our shoulders shall be hurled, An' the influence of woman revolutionize the world; There'll be higher education for the toilin' starvin' clown, An' the rich an' educated shall be educated down; An' we all will meet amidships on this stout old earthly craft, An' there won't be any friction 'twixt the classes fore-'n'-aft. We'll be brothers, fore-'n'-aft! Yes, an' sisters, fore-'n'-aft! ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... to be caught by the facile fallacy that the rapid changes in religious thought betoken the early abrogation of all creeds. Lessing, the philosophers of the French revolution, James Mill, Schopenhauer and others fell into this error. They were not wiser than the clown of Horace, who seated himself by the rushing stream, thinking it must soon ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... see this greeting, this common phrase, this bit of old ware, this antique, come upon a dramatic scene and pulverise it. Nothing remained but a ridiculous dust. Coke, glowering, with his lips still trembling from heroic speech, was an angry clown, a pantaloon in rage. Nothing was to be done to keep him from looking like an ass. He, strode toward the door mumbling ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... the individual, in the second he gives us a picture of life. The Oxford undergraduates, then, are to be congratulated on the selection of the play, and the result fully justified their choice. Mr. Bourchier as Festa the clown was easy, graceful and joyous, as fanciful as his dress and as funny as his bauble. The beautiful songs which Shakespeare has assigned to this character were rendered by him as charmingly as they were dramatically. To act singing ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... of one's eyes. Teddy sat spellbound for a while, but found time at last to draw a long breath. "Cousin Derry, that is the funniest clown—" ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... except him, there was no other member of the family old enough to govern except Tiberius Claudius Nero, the brother of Germanicus and the only surviving son of Drusus and Antonia. He was generally considered a fool, was the laughing-stock of freedmen and women, and such a gawk and clown that it had been impossible to put him into the magistracy. Indeed, he was not even a senator ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... your pardon again and again, and I really mean no offence: clown as I am, I hope I know better than to say anything to hurt my own guest ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope |
