"Ribald" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the souls of these river people who sang ribald songs, danced to lively music, and lived clear of all laws except the one they called "The Law," a deadly, large-calibre revolver or ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... Anti-Slavery Standard, representing the American Anti-Slavery Society, denies that the society asks for the enfranchisement of colored men, and the Liberator apologizes for excluding the colored men of Louisiana from the ballot-box, they injure us more vitally than all the ribald jests of the whole pro-slavery press." Finally the convention insisted that any such things as the right to own real estate, to testify in courts of law, and to sue and be sued, were mere privileges ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... "with kindly solicitude, help her on with her clothes." We can even pause to admire the experienced skill with which they put each garment in its proper place—and deftly button it. That she should have the ribald slang of the free-and-easy neighborhood at her tongue's end and be destitute of delicacy as a young cow might be expected; but we are hardly prepared to see one grown up among such surroundings so unutterably ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... knew. This old soldier had come in from the Long Trail to bear again the flag of his country. If his clothes were old and ill-fitting, at least they were his best, and the largeness of the empty sleeve belittled the too-largeness of the other. In all this ribald, laughing, irreverent, commonplace, semi-vicious crowd he was the one note of sincerity. To him this was a real occasion, and the exalted reverence in his eye for the task he was so simply performing was Smith's real triumph—if he could have known it. We understood now, ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... when its inhabitants, instead of crowding reverently to the kirk, swooped profanely down in their scores and tens of scores on our God-fearing town, intent on making a day of it. Then did the weavers rise as one man, and go forth to show the ribald crew the errors of their way. All denominations were represented, but Auld Lichts led. An Auld Licht would have taken no man's blood without the conviction that he would be the better morally for the bleeding; and if Tammas Lunan's case gave an impetus to the blows, it can only ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... Mrs. Blanderocks. "But it shows us that we must be careful. Mrs. Grant, you have had experience in such matters, suppose you retire and draw up a set of resolutions that will not expose us to the ribald and unseemly comments of ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... robe never reach paradise per saltum, but 'by slow degrees;' and an irreverent ballad supports the vulgar belief that the only attorney to be found on the celestial rolls gained admittance to the blissful abode more by artifice than desert. The ribald broadside ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... cruelty; nothing so certain as that to humanity it is a wrong; to say that such and such an one was sent by the All Wise, and must therefore be not merely permitted, but elaborately coaxed and forced, to live, is to utter a blasphemy against Man at which even the ribald tongue of a priest might falter; and as a matter of fact, society, in just contempt for this species of argument, never hesitates to hang, for its own imagined good, its heaven-sent catholics, protestants, sheep, sheep-stealers, etc. ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... trust I do not seem even in the shadowiest way to comment unfavourably. I merely look on at the rapidities of change with unalloyed interest. As the Head of the House of Coombe I am not sure WHAT I am an Example of—or to. Which is why I at times regard myself in that capacity with a slightly ribald lightness." ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Two ribald listeners, who had evidently been in some choir, paced arm in arm, singing the responses to the Litany in melodramatic fashion, except when their voices were choked with loud laughter at ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... with a ribald debate between two hirelings, who, at last, compete with each other in a match of pastoral song. No other idyl of Theocritus is so frankly true to the rough side of rustic manners. The ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... toward one o'clock, Bill Day and his party felt their spirits revive a little. The calculation had failed in one part, and it might in all. Bill resumed his burlesque exhortations to the rough-looking "brethren" about him. He tried to lead them in singing some ribald parody of Adventist hymns, but his terror and theirs was too genuine, and their voices died down into husky whispers, and they were more alarmed than ever at discovering the extent of their own demoralization. The bottle, one of those small-necked, big-bodied quart-bottles ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... upon to read chapters in the Bible for the edification of the worthy Ocracoke pilots, who probably had not heard a chapter of Scripture recited for years. The prophecy had taken a deep hold on the minds of some; and ribald jests and disgusting oaths were seldom heard in the neighborhood ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... be swords—swords!... And his steel Should rip death from my breast. But would he ever know the feel Of Spring again, of its ribald reel, As once ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... the song had been without words the result would have been the same, almost, for it was the voice which reached through liquor befuddled brains to find and stir remote and hidden recesses in natures long since hardened to sentiment. Rough speeches, ribald words and oaths died on the lips of those who crowded the doorway of saloons, and they stood spell-bound by the song which was sung as they felt dimly the angels must sing up there in that shadowy land back of the stars in which ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... vagrant people, from whom she had often received food and comfort; and her worst danger, as he learned with shame, had come from the girovaghi or wandering monks, who are the scourge and dishonour of Christendom; carrying their ribald idleness from one monastery to another, and leaving on their way a trail of thieving, revelry and worse. Once or twice the Wild Woman had nearly fallen into their hands; but had been saved by her own ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... For, when the fair entreats her lover foul, * Sighs rend his bosom and bespeak his soul By charms of thee and whitest cheek I swear thee, * Pity a heart for love lost all control Bend to him, be his stay 'gainst stress of love, * Nor aught accept what saith the ribald fool.'" ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... "Stop your ribald talk," said Alan in a stern voice. "It would be better if instead of making jokes you gave thanks to Providence for bringing both of us alive and well out of very dreadful dangers. Now I am going to dress for dinner," and with an anxious glance seaward into the gathering ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... to sleep in splendid isolation under the verandah of an empty house, but awoke among some Munsters, who greeted dawn with ribald songs. Harnessed up after breakfast, and marched off through the town, past the head-quarters, where Roberts reviewed us and the 38th. He was standing with a large Staff at the foot of the steps. The ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... in the ear of Ernest. Meantime joke followed jest, among Polydore and the rest of the gay youths, in riotous and ribald succession, which, however characteristic of the rude speakers, may as well be omitted here. Their effect was to shake in some degree the fortitude of the Saxon maiden, who had some difficulty in mustering courage to address them. "As you ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... hour of the night. Many, just out of banquet-hall, theatre, and circus, thronged the main thoroughfares of the capital. Cries of venders, ribald songs, shouts of revelry, the hurrying of many feet roused the good people who, wearied by other nights of dissipation, now sought repose. They turned, uneasily, reflecting that to-morrow they would have ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... he extorts blackmail from monarchs, makes princes tremble, and receives smooth answers to his insults from Buonarroti. These three men, Machiavelli, Cellini, and Aretino, each in his own line, and with the proper differences that pertain to philosophic genius, artistic skill, and ribald ruffianism, sufficiently indicate the dissolution of the social bond in Italy. They mark their age as the age of adventurers, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... authorship—there is a singular echo in it from the opening of Jonson's "Poetaster," the furious dramatic satire which blasted for upward of two centuries the fame or the credit of the poet to whose hand this masque has been hitherto assigned. In it, after a full allowance of rough and ribald jocosity, the presence of a poet becomes manifest with the entrance of an allegoric figure whose declamatory ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... diamond, tomboy, hoyden, cub, unlicked cub^; clown &c (commonalty) 876; Goth, Vandal, Boeotian; snob, cad, gent; parvenu &c 876; frump, dowdy; slattern &c 653. V. be vulgar &c adj.; misbehave; talk shop, smell of the shop. Adj. in bad taste vulgar, unrefined. coarse, indecorous, ribald, gross; unseemly, unbeseeming^, unpresentable^; contra bonos mores [Lat.]; ungraceful &c (ugly) 846. dowdy; slovenly &c (dirty) 653; ungenteel, shabby genteel; low, common, hoi polloi [Gr.], &c (plebeian) 876; uncourtly^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... camps, cooking, and building sheds for themselves or barracks for the German army. We saw a procession of about two thousand who came in from a near-by forest carrying tremendous bundles of faggots for firewood. As they marched they were singing, with a good deal of spontaneous gusto, a ribald French song. We considered their condition a ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... Quarryman had not been a week in Washington before he was heartily home-sick for Indiana. No maid-of-all-work in a cheap boarding-house was ever more harassed. Everyone conspired against him. His enemies gave him no peace. All Washington was laughing at his blunders, and ribald sheets, published on a Sunday, took delight in printing the new Chief Magistrate's sayings and doings, chronicled with outrageous humour, and placed by malicious hands where the President could not but see them. He was sensitive to ridicule, and it mortified ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... consoling. The fact is, the poets are the only people who score by the present arrangement; which it is therefore their interest to maintain. While we are doing all the work, these incorrigible skulkers lounge about and make ribald remarks; they write Greek tragedies on Fate, on the sublimity of Suffering, on the Petty Span, and so on; and act in a generally offensive way. And we are even weak enough to buy their books; offer them drinks, peerages, and ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... have to do it as breadwinners, Mr. Morelock, and the most ribald one of them wouldn't laugh at you. I wouldn't be afraid to promise that you could fill St. John's, forbidding as its atmosphere is to the average working-man, the very next Sunday after ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... and their effigies would now bedeck a British chamber of horrors. Nor would death itself have shielded their reputations from hatchments of dishonour. For the greatest of Englishmen reviled even the sacred name of Joan of Arc, the stainless Maid of France, to belittle a fallen foe and spice a ribald stage-play. ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... —from ribald lips and throats turned brazen with laughter, from singers who toss their hats aloft and roll in their seats; the chorus swells to the accompaniment of a ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... especially those in the apsis and in one of the side chapels, which are in a beautiful spirit of art, and form the widest possible contrast to the eighteenth-century high altar, with its insane and ribald angels flying off at the sides, and poising themselves in the rope-dancing attitudes favored by statues of heavenly persons in the decline of the Renaissance. The choir is peculiarly built, in the form of a half-circle, with seats rising one above ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... mild and peaceful." Selden is again referred to and complimented: "one of your own now sitting in Parliament, the chief of learned men reputed in this land." Acquaintance, on the other hand, is implied or avowed, on Milton's part, with some of the most notoriously ribald writers that the world had produced: with Petronius Arbiter, and him of Arozzo "dreaded and yet dear to the Italian Courtiers," and an Englishman whom he will not name, "for posterity's sake," but "whom Harry the Eighth named in ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... and foul words, as is customary in a camp. Verily I saw well that this was not the army of men clean confessed and of holy life who had followed the Maid from Blois to Orleans. In place of priests, here were harlots, and, for hymns, ribald songs, for men had flocked in from every quarter; soldiers of the robber companies, Bretons, Germans, Italians, Spaniards, all talking in their own speech, rude, foul, and disorderly. So we took our way, as best we knight, through the press, hearing oaths enough ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... which contrasted with the whiteness of her powdered countenance. She leaped from joy to dejection without transition. She could not smile. Her face was as soon darkened by stupidity as it was illuminated by a ribald merriment, insulting ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... present rulers of France. Could any statesman not gifted with second sight have spoken otherwise? At that time the Reign of Terror was approaching its climax. The Goddess of Reason had lately been enthroned in Notre Dame amidst ribald songs and dances. The schism between Robespierre and the atheistical party was beginning to appear; and few persons believed that France would long bend the knee before the lords of the guillotine, whose resources were largely derived from the plunder ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... wise and ripened scholar who wastes his effort," was the dry comment. "Most of the lads of the town are coarse louts who pattern after their ribald elders, Jack. They will lead ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... jay, whatever he is after, Makes the woods ring with ribald laughter; "Hee, hee, ha, ha," he says, and then "Ha, ha, hee, hee, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... was explained a minute later when, in accordance with her mistress's order, the visitor was shown into the drawing-room, for his presence was of an elegance so extraordinary as to attract attention anywhere—and mirth as well from ribald observers. ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... very hard, and rebuked the ribald mirth of Mr. Tubbs. He had to shed tears over a devastating poem called "The Drunkard's Home," before she would forgive him. Cookie made his peace by engaging to vote the prohibition ticket at the next election. My own excuses for the unfortunate ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... setting the whole company laughing, would stop their jokes with a maxima debetur pueris reverentia, and once offered to lug out against another trooper called Hulking Tom, who wanted to ask Harry Esmond a ribald question. ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not to be outdone, is exceedingly lenient with female cases, as he is pleased to style them. Though her virtue is as chaste as the falling snow, Maria is compelled to suffer, for nearly an hour, the jeers and ribald insinuations of a coarse crowd, while the fact of her being in the guard-house is winged over the city by exultant scandal-mongers. Nevertheless, she remains calm and resolute. She sees the last struggle of an eventful life before her, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... marauders, humbly imploring for the blood and offal of their own cattle which had been slaughtered for the soldiers' food! Such is the avowal which historical justice demands. But let me turn from further details of these painful and irritating scenes, or of the ribald frolics and revelry with which they were intermingled—races of naked women on horseback for the amusement of the ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... All the old religious and hospitable uses of the abbey are foregone. The reverend stillness of the cloisters, scarce broken by the quiet tread of the monks, is now disturbed by armed heel and clank of sword; while in its saintly courts are heard the ribald song, the profane jest, and the angry brawl. Of the brethren, only those tenanting the cemetery are left. All else are gone, driven forth, as vagabonds, with stripes and curses, to seek refuge where ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Dio!" said a man of huge stature, pressing onward, like some bulky ship, casting the noisy waves right and left from its prow, "this is hot work; but for what, in the holy Mother's name, do ye crowd so? See you not, Sir Ribald, that my right arm is disabled, swathed, and bandaged, so that I cannot help myself better than a baby? And yet you push against me as if I ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... tears from her wild and terror-stricken eyes, and not stopping even for her hat, in her fear that she might be too late, left the house and made her way through the throng before the Fennell house. At sight of her pallid cheeks and set lips, the ribald jeer died on the lips even of the drunken, and the people made way for her in silence. It was not that they had ever liked her, or now sympathized with her. She had always held herself too daintily aloof from speech or ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... impression on the girl. Jenkins soon became the friend, the confidant, a vigilant and gentle guardian. Sometimes in the studio, when some one—the father himself most frequently—made a too equivocal remark or a ribald jest, the Irishman would frown and make a little noise with his lips, or else would divert Felicia's attention. He often took her to pass the day with Madame Jenkins, exerting himself to prevent her from becoming once more the ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the somewhat ribald mirth which has clung for centuries about Saint Peter as gatekeeper of Heaven. We can trace this mirth back to the rude jests of the earliest miracle plays. We see these jests repeated over and over again in the folklore of Latin and Germanic nations. And if we open a comic ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... A mocking, ribald cheer arose from the men around me. The platform was ascending. Why the long delay? A premonition of disaster chilled me. I ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... bowl sat a company of roisterers, all flushed with wine and the attendant false happiness. Long clay pipes clouded the candle-light; there was the jingle of gold and the purr of shuffling cards; and here and there were some given to the voicing of ribald songs. To Victor this was no uncommon scene; and it was not long before he had thrown himself with gay ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... the poor fellows were enough, one would think, to create sympathy in the coldest bosom. But they had no effect upon Gaskell, excepting to excite derision; and when he spoke to his sick or dying shipmates with a ribald jest on his lips, and a scornful grin on his features, I longed to fell him to the deck. I rebuked him for his want of feeling, and suggested that, proud as he was of his strength and immunity from sickness, he might, notwithstanding, become ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... Duke, "pay him gold pieces five," "How—pay a rogue?" the Knight did fierce retort. "A ribald's rant—give good, gold pieces for't? A plague! A pest! The knave should surely die—" But here he met Duke Joc'lyn's fierce blue eye, And silent fell and in his poke did dive, And slowly counted thence ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... dim with tobacco smoke, noisy with ribald jests and laughter. Here and there the waitresses, girls coquettishly dressed, tripped with bottles and syphons, foaming bocks, and glasses of brandy or liqueurs. The customers of the brasserie were a mixed lot of women and men, the latter ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... believe her dead—that this sweet clay, That even from her picture breathes perfume, Was carried on a fiery wind away, Or foully locked in the worm-whispering tomb; This casket rifled, ribald fingers thrust 'Mid all her dainty ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... their own personal affairs. They behaved splendidly and with great physical effort resisted the need to drink. Officers were grateful to one or two men in their platoons who proved a moral support to their comrades by keeping a cheerful countenance, interposing a ribald remark when things looked black, and explaining to their weakest pals the rigours of the necessity in a rougher but more intelligible manner than their leaders could have done. Such men are invaluable and are always to be ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... edges browned by age—a reprint of a letter largely circulated at the time, addressed by Dickens to The Times, dated "Devonshire Terrace, 13th Novr., 1849," in which he describes, in graphic and powerful language, the ribald and disgusting scenes which he witnessed at Horsemonger Lane Gaol on the occasion of the execution of the Mannings. The letter is too long to quote in its entirety, but the following extract will suffice:—"I have seen habitually some of the worst sources ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... nay, encouraged and lauded by the very men who endeavor to hamper our great landscape painters with rules derived from consecrated blunders. The very critic who has just passed one of the noblest works of Turner—that is to say, a masterpiece of art, to which Time can show no parallel—with a ribald jest, will yet stand gaping in admiration before the next piece of dramatic glitter and grimace, suggested by the society, and adorned with the appurtenances of the greenroom, which he finds hung low upon the wall as a brilliant example of the ideal of English art. It is natural enough ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... now was flushed and moist; every forehead streaming with perspiration. Escanes, goblet in hand, was singing a ribald song, the chorus of which was taken up by the group of young men nearest to him. The older ones were making insane bets and driving preposterous bargains over ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... thoroughfares a ranging nighthawk cab. As a last resort he could take the Subway or the L north. This contingency, though, Mr. Leary considered with feelings akin to actual repugnance. He dreaded the prospect of ribald and derisive comments from chance fellow travellers upon a public transportation line. For you should know that though Mr. Leary's outer garbing was in the main conventional there were strikingly incongruous features ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... peevish mood. Whence came this ill temper? He could not have told himself. Was it because the sky was gray? or was the buckle of his old belt of Montlhery badly fastened, so that it confined his provostal portliness too closely? had he beheld ribald fellows, marching in bands of four, beneath his window, and setting him at defiance, in doublets but no shirts, hats without crowns, with wallet and bottle at their side? Was it a vague presentiment of the three hundred and seventy livres, sixteen ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... I hate ribaldry and ribald talkers. Especially ribald talkers! The third point: I love justice, truth and honesty." I went on almost mechanically, for I was beginning to shiver with horror myself and had no idea how I came to be talking like this. "I love thought, Monsieur Zverkov; I ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... Micawber, much affected, 'you will forgive, and our old and tried friend Copperfield will, I am sure, forgive, the momentary laceration of a wounded spirit, made sensitive by a recent collision with the Minion of Power—in other words, with a ribald Turncock attached to the water-works—and will ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... that the busy day, Wak'd by the lark, hath rous'd the ribald crows, And dreaming night will hide our joys no longer, I would not ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... Dance Hall, fortified for another possible encounter with the inquiring and obviously sympathetic Montague girl. He entered and saw that she was not on the set. The bar-room dance-hall was for the moment deserted of its ribald crew while an honest inhabitant of the open spaces on a balcony was holding a large revolver to the shrinking back of one of the New York men who had lately arrived by the stage. He forced this man, who was plainly not ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... Mayor, "d' ye think I brook Being worse treated than a Cook? Insulted by a lazy ribald With idle pipe and vesture piebald? You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst, Blow your pipe there till ...
— The Pied Piper of Hamelin • Robert Browning
... night, on the windlass, he sat and sang; and from the ribald jests so common to sailors, the men slid into silence at every verse. Hushed, and more hushed they grew, till at last Harry sat among them like Orpheus among the charmed leopards and tigers. Harmless now the fangs with which they were ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... glanced round. Her first impulse was to speak; her second to remain silent. For the Arkansan was not looking at her. His mocking ribald gaze was upon ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... yeares: but happy the father that begot thee, and thrise happy the Nurse that soffred such a toward yonker as thy selfe: I know thy vertues as well as thy selfe, thou hast a superficiall twang of a little something: an Italian ribald can not vomit out the infections of the world, but thou my pretty Iuuinall, an English Dorrell-lorrell, must lick it vp for restoratiue, & putrifie thy gentle brother ouer against thee, with the vilde impostumes of thy lewd corruptions: God blesse good ...
— The Art of Iugling or Legerdemaine • Samuel Rid
... openly, in the sight of all men: then, I will believe that its influence is lessening, and men are returning to their manly senses. But while that Press has its evil eye in every house, and its black hand in every appointment in the state, from a president to a postman; while, with ribald slander for its only stock in trade, it is the standard literature of an enormous class, who must find their reading in a newspaper, or they will not read at all; so long must its odium be upon the country's head, ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... understood his meaning, or she may not, as she rocked herself to and fro in the roadway. The ribald songs of these patriots, these apostles of freedom, had not died as they marched and danced out of Tremont when there was a smell of burning in the air, and first smoke, then flame burst from the tavern, quickly reducing it to a heap of ashes. It was a strange grave for the charred remains ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... to crush the harmless fancies and the love of innocent delights and gaieties, which are a part of human nature: as much a part of it as any other love or hope that is our common portion: let them, for me, stand openly revealed among the ribald and licentious; the very idiots know that THEY are not on the Immortal road, and will despise them, ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... turned victory into defeat. We were beaten. I shall never forget that election night. I walked home through the Bowery in the midnight hour, and saw it gorging itself, like a starved wolf, upon the promise of the morrow. Drunken men and women sat in every doorway, howling ribald songs and curses. Hard faces I had not seen for years showed themselves about the dives. The mob made merry after its fashion. The old days were coming back. Reform was dead, and decency ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... they belong to the class Cephalopoda, family Dibranchiata, consisting of themselves together with cuttlefish and argonauts. The naturalists of antiquity made a special study of them, and these animals furnished many ribald figures of speech for soapbox orators in the Greek marketplace, as well as excellent dishes for the tables of rich citizens, if we're to believe Athenaeus, a ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... who was facing the door, stopped in the midst of a ribald song to cry: "God be praised! ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... her skirts and fled, whirling up the veranda steps and into the house like a small cyclone, never pausing until a locked door lay between her and a ribald, ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... teachers, musicians, all drift at times down the river; and one is often startled at finding in the apparently rough crew men who seem worthy of a better fate. To these the river experiences are generally new, and the ribald jokes and low river slang, with the ever-accompanying cheap corn-whiskey and the nightly riots over cutthroat euchre, must be at first a revelation. Hundreds of these low fellows will swear to you that the world ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... back the mob had not been gratified with a spectacle of this nature. In the ribald language of the day, the "holy guillotine had grown thirsty from long drought;" and they read the announcement with greedy eyes, commenting as they went upon those whose names were familiar to them. There were many of noble birth among the proscribed, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... profundity of thought was deemed possible unless allied with those pagan ideas which Saint Augustine had exploded and Pascal had ridiculed. Even while living among these people, Rousseau had all the while a kind of sentimental religiosity which revolted at their ribald scoffing, although ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... entrusted to him to review? Does he break his word to his publisher? Does he write begging letters? Does he get clothes or lodgings without paying for them? Again, whilst a wanderer, does he insult helpless women on the road with loose proposals or ribald discourse? Does he take what is not his own from the hedges? Does he play on the fiddle, or make faces in public-houses, in order to obtain pence or beer? or does he call for liquor, swallow it, and then say to a widowed landlady, "Mistress, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... happens when he sits on the Magisterial Bench and dispenses justice. It is as JEMMY, J.P., he rises to the fullest height of his judicial manner. Still, pretty well just now. A little embarrassed at the outset by consciousness that his postal address at Leeds is "Swillington House." Afraid some ribald person will remember this, and vulgarly connect it with the discussion. Delightful to observe the way in which he reproved GEORGE CAMPBELL for language unbecoming the precincts of the Court. CAMPBELL had lightly spoken about "Members requiring a pick-me-up." "Persons ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 18, 1891 • Various
... carried links on foggy nights. By the clear force of genius he had made his way up from that;—from throwing cart-wheels for the amusement of the queues waiting at the pit entrances of theaters, from the ribald knock-about of East End halls, from the hilarity of Drury Lane pantomimes. Professionally his success was a solid indubitable thing. If he weren't actually preeminent in his special field, at least there was no one who was ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... sheriff stood again to set his censorious eye upon someone responsible, the last ripple was on the farther rows. Nobody can catch a laugh in a crowd; it is as evasive as a pickpocket. Nobody can turn with watchful eye upon it and tell in what face the ribald gleam first breaks. It is as impossible as the identification of the first stalk shaken when a breeze assails a ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... and thoughtful men looked far beyond this question of what shall we eat and what shall we drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed? Intemperate habits were growing fast on the people. Coarse profanity and ribald speech were becoming so common as to be the rule and not the exception. Fathers and mothers began to tremble when they thought what their boys were coming to; and this turned their thoughts to the question of schools and churches. Then ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... after leaving the court house, he was kept busy nodding to friends—many of whom had become such during the later days of the drought. Merchants grinned at him from their doorways; Dunlavey's friends sneered as he passed or sent ribald jokes after him. ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Whilst we were there, my friend of yesterday came towards the spot; but when he saw our large, and, I fear me, rather unimpressed party, he turned upwards, and disappeared. After inscribing our names in a book—into which also appropriate poetry, as well as ribald nonsense finds its way—we drank to Napoleon's immortal memory in his own favourite spring, and mounting our steeds spurred towards ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... the good old grandfather used to hesitate. There were some prints among them very odd indeed; some that girls could not understand; some that boys, indeed, had best not see. We swiftly turn over those prohibited pages. How many of them there were in the wild, coarse, reckless, ribald, generous book of ...
— John Leech's Pictures of Life and Character • William Makepeace Thackeray
... than pet sheep grown ribald and reckless were to confront Marcus and Faustina. They had both been betrothed to others, years before, and this they now resented. They talked of this much, and then suddenly ceased to talk of it, and each ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... contusion of shoulder-blade or funny-bone; he finally became aware that two men were following him through the lots, and that with a closeness of attention indicating more than common interest. To the perception of his keenly sensitive Southern nature they at once became ribald Yankee vandals, hoping for unseemly amusement from the detection of some awkwardness in the Indian-club-play of a defeated but not conquered Southern Gentleman; and, in the haughty sectional pride of his contemptuous soul, he indignantly ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... certainly—more meritorious countrymen. I do not indeed go so far as to say that this woman is in collusion with those ferocious ruffians who have made these sacred precincts of justice ring with their ribald and threatening scoff's. But the persistence of these riotous interruptions, and the ease with which their perpetrators have evaded arrest, have produced a strange impression in my mind. (Very impressively.) ...
— The Tables Turned - or, Nupkins Awakened. A Socialist Interlude • William Morris
... righteous, judging from the revelations made by his unconscious lips; since more than once Robert authoritatively silenced him, when my gentler bushings were of no avail, and blasphemous wanderings or ribald camp-songs made my cheeks burn and Robert's face assume an aspect of disgust. The captain was a gentleman in the world's eye, but the contraband was the gentleman in mine;—I was a fanatic, and that accounts for such depravity of taste, I ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... put in under his breath, "the best thing to do with them is to chop 'em up." He was swinging them back and forth under his arm. My wife took them firmly from him. "He shall have his pictures, and not from your ribald hands." ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... attempt to catch Jack Nugent's eye, resigned himself to his fate, and with his fair burden on his arm walked with painful slowness towards Equator Lodge. A ribald voice from the other side of the road, addressing his companion as "Mother Kybird," told her not to hug the man, and a small boy whom they met loudly asseverated his firm intention of going straight off ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... thrown upon the citizens of Plymouth. An enormous debt had been created in equipping it, and the soldiers' allowances were hopelessly inadequate to provide them with a proper supply of food or clothes. 'A more ragged, ribald, and rebellious herde never gathered on the eve of an important expedition. Mutiny was common in the town, and the ringleaders were tried at Drum-head, and shot in the nearest open space.... Incensed at the disregard of their appeals, the publicans ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... a friend; but the negligence, the coldness of Trevor, the overpowering mastery of my own passions, drove me one day past the line, and I wrote that which I dared not utter. It never entered into my mind for an instant to insult such a woman with the commonplace sophistry of a ribald. No! I loved her with all my spirit's strength. I would have sacrificed all my views in life, my ambition, my family, my fortune, my country, to have gained her; and I told her this in terms of respectful adoration. ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... placed me servant to a lord, For she had borne me to a ribald knave, Destroyer of himself and ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... aloud: "He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he be the King of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him. He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him: for he said, I am the Son of God."[1313] Though uttered in ribald mockery, the declaration of the rulers in Israel stands as an attestation that Christ had saved others, and as an intended ironical but a literally true proclamation that He was the King of Israel. The ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... an eye. But the prisoner did not move or raise a hand in protest, even when he was bared to his under-clothing in front of fraeulein, who signalled her appreciation of the sight by wildly clapping her hands, laughing merrily, and giving expression to ribald jokes. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... said, that you're going to be a trouble to us. You're too big, too big and too heavy by far to be smuggled through the country as a woman, and, 'pon my word, in whatever disguise you are hid—if one can hide such a monster—there's always the danger of your giving us away by ribald laughter." ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... Don Rodrigue, with a band of ribald followers, succeeds in carrying her off with all the other nuns. They are all driven by the King's soldiers into the cemetery of the Aliscamps. Nerto wanders away during the battle and is lost among the tombs. At dawn the next day she strays far out to a forest, where she finds a hermit. The ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... heed of her letter, she finally mounted the walls of the town, and in a loud voice warned the English to depart before overtaken with the shame and disaster in store for them. To this the English responded with insults and ribald words, and told her to "Go home and keep her cows." Joan wept at their insults to her modesty, and would have at once opened an attack, had she not been dissuaded by her generals, who begged her to await the arrival ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... how deeply it distressed him as he walked along, larding the earth as he passed, to hear bystanders making ribald comments about the inadvisability of trying to move bank vaults through the streets in the daytime. And now that, after fifteen years of fatness, I am getting thin again—glory be!—wherein, I ask, is the impropriety ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... affording me a brief respite, had enabled me to collect my thoughts, and, disregarding the ribald interruptions, which at first were frequent, I began as follows: 'I am no Rabelais, sire,' I said, 'but droll things happen to the most unlikely. Once upon a time it was the fortune of a certain swain, whom I will call Dromio, to arrive in a town not a hundred miles from Blois, having in his company ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... with its hundred-foot oval windows all aglow with light. Music floated out—a distant blare of sounds, and the ribald laughter of giant voices. I had seen no women among these giants of the island. But now a huge face was at one of the ovals. A dissolute, painted woman of Earth, staring out at Polter as he passed. It was like the enormous ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... begun to march, closely followed by the trumpeters. Behind them a bevy of Columbines in many-coloured tarlatan skirts and hair flying wildly in the breeze, giggling, pushing, exchanging ribald jokes with the men behind, and getting kissed or slapped for ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Cleek, and leant far out into the darkness as though sucking in the air when the sash was raised and the thing which had been only a dim babel of wordless sounds a moment before became now the riotous laughter and the ribald comments of men upon the verses of a comic song which one of ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... fiercely, flinging out an arm to drag forward her son. "Is he to waste his youth here in softness and idleness? But yesternight that ribald mocked him with his lack of scars. Shall he take scars in the orchard of the Kasbah here? Is he to be content with those that come from the scratch of a bramble, or is he to learn to be a fighter and leader of the Children of the Faith that himself ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... A ribald cuckoo clamoured, And out of the copse the stroke Of the iron axe that hammered The iron heart of ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... youths, Romeo reeled off more ribald remarks, things that created a sudden chill among the passengers on the Fall of Rome. Mrs. Tinneray, looked upon as a leader, called up a shocked face and walked away; Mrs. Mealer after a faint "Excuse me," also abandoned the parrot-cage; and Mrs. Bean, a small stout woman with a brown ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... his pipe in peace; the substantial solace of his domestic cares, after her daily toils were done, sat soberly at the door, with her arms crossed over her apron of snowy white without being insulted by ribald street walkers or vagabond boys—those unlucky urchins who do so infest our streets, displaying under the roses of youth the thorns and briars of iniquity. Then it was that the lover with ten breeches, and the damsel with petticoats of half a score, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... their ribald comments and curtly ordered them to make a new and exhaustive search of the unused portions of the basement—those dark earth banks, with their overhead networks of water and drain pipes, heavily insulated cables of electric wires, cobwebby rafters and rough ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... needed rest at night By ribald youth is troubled; No more your windows, fastened tight, ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... horse, on January 30. With him went Caterina Sforza-Riario, and of course there were not wanting those who alleged that, during the few days at Cesena he had carried his conquest of her further than the matter of her territories(1)—a rumour whose parent was, no doubt, the ribald jest made in Milan by Trivulzio when he heard ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... years' service among the lepers Father Damien died of the disease, leaving behind him a name for pure self-sacrifice that has not been surpassed since the beginning of the Christian era. He had lived to see the leper colony grow from a ribald, obscene settlement to an orderly hospital where as much as was possible was done for the sufferers that were compelled to remain there. And he had the satisfaction of knowing that others would carry on efficiently the work that ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... shameless comedy. If religion was honoured in the age of faith, the bourgeois spirit found matter of mirth in the adventures of dissolute priests and self-indulgent monks. Not a few of the fabliaux are cynically gross—ribald but not voluptuous. To literary distinction they made small pretence. It sufficed if the tale ran easily in the current speech, thrown into rhyming octosyllables; but brevity, frankness, natural movement are no slight or common merits in mediaeval poetry, and something of the social life of the time ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... short rotund body writhing not unlike an Oriental dancer's, the Widow Weatherwax had assumed the centre of the ring. The sanctified were without sense of humor, but the unregenerate onlookers were not proof against the comic aspects of emotional religion, and from the dark outskirts rang a ribald laugh. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... kerchiefs, and short clumsily-plaited petticoats, gave them a grotesque, antiquated air, altogether irreconcilable to an Englishman's taste. They were, however, wonderfully clean, and civil and honourable in their traffic, compared with the filthy, ribald, over-reaching hucksters who infest our markets; and it was gratifying to hear that the Jersey people encouraged their visits, and treated ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... be answered by his dying word of reproach! The horsemen of the army followed, and then the legions, every spear wreathed, every head crowned with bay, so that an evergreen grove might have seemed marching through the Roman streets, but for the war songs, and the wild jests, and ribald ballads that custom allowed the soldiers to shout out, often in pretended mockery of their own victorious general, ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the cabmen and watermen at the cabstand knew him and passed their comments upon him: the policemen gazed after him and warned the boys off him, with looks of scorn and pity; what did the scorn and pity of men, the jokes of ribald children, matter to the General? He reeled along the street with glazed eyes, having just sense enough to know whither he was bound, and to pursue his accustomed beat homewards. He went to bed not ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... no scandalous liver, but he would fain stifle all the voices that call for better things. Ay, you look back at yon ballad-monger! Great folk despise the like of him, never guessing at the power there may be in such ribald stuff; while they would fain silence that which might turn men from their evil ways while yet ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... this time Jerry-Jo took to wearing his Sunday suit on week days, thus proclaiming his aspirations and awaking the ribald jests of his ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... A ribald and prolonged laugh greeted this brief announcement, and some twenty pairs of gentlemanly shoulders were shrugged in ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... little in the character of the people around to induce me to enter much into society. The higher class of the Andalusians are probably upon the whole the most vain and foolish of human beings, with a taste for nothing but sensual amusements, foppery in dress, and ribald discourse. Their insolence is only equalled by their meanness, and their prodigality by their avarice. The lower classes are a shade or two better than their superiors in station: little, it is true, can be said for the tone of their morality; they are overreaching, quarrelsome, and revengeful, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... to his feet, forgot his wrath on the instant, and began to sing drunkenly the words of a ribald air. I took him by both shoulders and pushed him back ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of a prisoner, was the signal for a great yell of ferocious delight on the part of the outlaws, immediately followed by a brisk fusillade of scurrilous, ribald jests concerning the sport that they would have with me upon their return to their mountain stronghold; and so bloodcurdling were the suggestions thrown out by some of those fiends that I confess a qualm of fear surged over me for a second or two; for I saw at once that, unlike ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... various times, Posing as Europe's self-appointed saviour, Afforded copy for our ribald rhymes ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... which he had sworn to enforce, prohibited the sale of intoxicating liquors; prohibited gambling and games of chance; interdicted the operation of immoral resorts—put a lock and key in his hand, in short, that would shut up the ribald pleasures of Ascalon like a tomb. As for the ordinances of the city, which he also had obligated himself to apply, Morgan had not found time to work down to them. There appeared to be authority in the thick volume Judge Thayer had lent him to last Ascalon a long ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... good-nature make one of the most elementary compounds, and may easily be misused (as in Rainouart) where the author has few scruples and no dramatic consistency. Galopin is a more singular humorist, a ribald and a prodigal, yet of gentle birth, and capable of good service when he can be ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker |
