"Travesty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... professors are less capable than was once the case. And perhaps burlesque has exposed too glaringly its ridiculous or seamy side. It was not one of those things that could long endure the assaults of travesty. The spell was potent enough in its way, but it dissolved when once interruptive laughter became generally audible. A creature of theatrical tradition, curiously sophisticated and enveloped in absurdities, its long survival is perhaps more surprising than the fact ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... and surveyed the two heaps with tired eyes, a curious, almost scornful smile on her lips. "There!" she said with a sigh. "The black pile is mine, the gay pile is yours," she went on, turning toward the sleeping girl. "What a travesty!" ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... lover, The Bridge Builder, who was a confoundedly long time over his work, by the way, but ultimately came into his own over his own bridge of kisses, built under a heavy barrage of needless misunderstandings. But Joey's pipsqueak shirker fiance, Hilary, was altogether too foolish a travesty of a man ever to have gained her hand or, having gained it, to have held it against any real male in or out of khaki. The fact is that "BERTHA RUCK" can achieve something better than these meandering methods and this spinelessness of characterisation; and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 8, 1917 • Various
... out. In spite of incongruous masque or rather pantomime scenes the pervading atmosphere is sustained. One would say that Purcell got his inspiration by reading of Prospero's magic island, and never thought of Shadwell's stupid and boorish travesty. ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... in answer to a question, may be the foulest calumny. A fact may be an exception; but the feeling is the law, and it is that which you must neither garble nor belie. The whole tenor of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate statement; the beginning and the end define and travesty the intermediate conversation. You never speak to God; you address a fellow-man, full of his own tempers; and to tell truth, rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, but to convey a true impression; ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... it needs constant emphasis or it is forgotten under the propaganda. Besides, I don't believe in mating people like cattle or slaves. That's why this whole thing is a travesty of love and marriage. I hate being used to give it a semblance of scientific authenticity. I'm going to declare the top four contestants equal. They are, as far as I am concerned, genetically speaking. The audience will decide the winner. ...
— Mother America • Sam McClatchie
... well at Newport, exchanging with him occasional visits, though he was much my senior in years. His name was Fauvel, which the midshipmen, or other, had promptly Anglicized into Four Bells—a nautical hour-stroke. I suppose this propensity to travesty foreign or difficult names is not merely maritime; but naturally enough my reading has brought me more in contact with it in connection with naval matters. Thus the Ville de Milan, captured into the British service, became to their seamen the "Wheel ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... symbols in clustered rubies, clad in the barbaric splendour of an Eastern queen; presently she would be wearing the black hood, pointed above the brow, and the dusky velvet robe of a Royal widow, like the portraits to be seen guarded as holy relics in a chamber of the Louvre; last travesty of all (and it was in this guise he found her most adorable), as a modern horsewoman, clothed from neck to heel in a close-fitting habit, a man's hat set rakishly on her dainty head. He would fain spend his life in these romantic dreams, and devoured Racine, the Greek tragedians, Corneille, ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... bogus heraldry of Haeckel is as obviously insufficient as any quaint old chronicle tracing the genealogies of English kings through the chiefs of Troy to the children of Noah. There is no difference, except that the tale of the Dark Ages can never be proved, while the travesty of the Darwinian theory can sometimes be disproved. But I should diminish my meaning if I suggested it as a mere score in the Victorian game of Scripture versus Science. Some much larger mystery veils the origins of man than most partisans ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... purpose when he makes so ludicrous a comparison. To call such a quiet, silent country gentleman, such a law-abiding Parliamentarian as Sir Edward Grey, to call even him a typical Prussian Junker is a travesty of the facts. A more striking contrast to the complete Junker of Pomerania than the "Complete Angler" of the Foreign Office could not well be imagined. The glorified Prussian Junker is Bismarck. The typical ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... Chatham, in short, applied precisely the same argument to Ireland as, in his memorable speeches of the next year (1774), he applied to America, and in both cases he was right. The only mistake he made was in his estimate of that travesty of a representative assembly, the Irish House of Commons, which, at the secret instigation of the Viceroy, though without actual coercion, eventually threw out a tax so distasteful to its English patrons. But the argument for financial independence remained unassailable, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... love or grief, or who are telling each other the news, or secrets, stop to set their words to music, and roar and howl in each other's ears, the world will be mad, and the opera natural," he said. "I will not lend my countenance before them to such a villainous travesty." ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... rarely hanged for infanticide, and it is a mere travesty of justice to pass on her the death sentence, well knowing that ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... solemnly puerile fashion did they work out a travesty on one of the most august utterances ever penned. A young man who was present remarked: "Tour grievances must be grievous indeed when you are obliged to go to books in order to find them out." He might have added, "And they must be false indeed when you have to found most of your ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... charge that he had compassed the death of the infant prince by charms and incantations. Two of the Fujiwara nobles were appointed to investigate the accusation, and they condemned the prince to die by his own hand. He committed suicide, and his wife and children died with him. The travesty of justice was carefully acted throughout. A proclamation was issued promising capital punishment to any one, of whatever rank or position, who compassed the death or injury of another by spells or incantations, and, six months ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of the University, in which the doctrine of evolution was "enunciated as a matter of course—disputed by no reasonable man,"—although accompanied by a description of the working of natural selection and variation which appeared to the man of science a mere travesty ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... come up against in his character. The two women who should mean most in a man's life had both failed him. He bore on his body a scar which surely he must never see reflected in the mirror without recalling the travesty of motherhood that was all he had ever known. And scored into his soul, hidden beneath a bitter reticence and unforgiving cynicism, lay the still deeper scar of that hurt which the woman who was to have been ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... lace cap trimmed with blue ribbons, but she had not had strength to paint her lips and cheeks again, and the old woman's efforts had ended pitifully. She had grown very small in the last few hours, and with her thin, daubed face and blood-stained lips, she looked like a sorrowful travesty of the little circus clown who had ridden the fat pony and shouted "Oh la—la!" and blown ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... of this hot August day, one of the last of glorious Fructidor, had begun to wane, and the shades of evening to slowly creep into the long, bare room where this travesty of justice ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Erewhonians had caught many of these, sometimes corrupting them so that they were hardly recognizable. Things that he remembered having said were continually meeting him during the few days of his second visit, and it shocked him deeply to meet some gross travesty of his own words, or of words more sacred than his own, and yet to be unable to correct it. "I wonder," he said to me, "that no one has ever hit on this as a punishment for the ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... Fragments of Margaret Nicholson", edited by John Fitz Victor. The name of the supposititious nephew reminds us of "Original Poems" by Victor and Cazire, and raises the question whether the poems in that lost volume may not have partly furnished forth this Oxford travesty. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... Stepan Borovitch of my good friend Dr. Duchat. If that excellent man had not long since died he should have shared in my triumph. I took Stepan to my home and plied the saw and the knife. could operate on that poor, worthless, useless, hopeless travesty of humanity as fearlessly and as recklessly as upon a dog bought or caught for vivisection. That was a little more than twenty years ago. To-day Stepan Borovitch wields more power than any other man on the face of the earth. In ten years he will be the autocrat of Europe, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... advertisement—of Victor Hugo's Les Chatiments. It is as sinister, as malign as a Rops. The big book, title displayed, crushes to earth a vulture which is a travesty of the Napoleonic beak. Daumier was a power in Paris. Albert Wolff, the critic of Figaro, tells how he earned five francs each time he provided a text for a caricature by Daumier, and Philipon, who founded several journals, actually ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... styles and degrees of horsemanship among his lumbering followers, and the business-like replacing of the quarry in his vehicle, to be hauled away for another day's sport, served as the most complete travesty imaginable of the chase. It has the compensation of placing a number of worthy men in the saddle at least once in the year and compelling them to do some rough riding. The English have always made it their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... Desperate Inoperative Benevolent Voluntary Offend Enumerate Dilapidate Request Exquisite Exonerate Approximate Insinuate Resurgence Insurrection Rapture Exasperate Complacent Dimension Commensurate Preclude Cloister Turnpike Travesty Atone Incarnate Charnal Etiquette Rejuvenate Eradicate Quiet Requiem Acquiesce Ambidextrous Inoculate Divulge Proper Appropriate Omnivorous Voracious Devour Escritoire Mordant Remorse Miser Hilarious Exhilarate ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... close to me I obtained an excellent view of him, and though I was later to become better acquainted with his kind, I may say that that single cursory examination of this awful travesty on Nature would have proved quite sufficient to my desires had I been a free agent. The fastest flier of the Heliumetic Navy could not quickly enough have carried me far from this ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Solomon took the chair, while old Mr. Shelford, Trixie, and young Langton were all in the choir, which was more like an orchestra. It was not particularly connected or reverent, but she had not been included in the general travesty—his sleeping brain had respected her image even in its waywardness, and presented it as vivid and charming as in life, so that the dream with all its absurdity seemed to have brought her nearer to him, and he could not resist the fancy that ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... Henry Fielding was like going into the fresh air from a close room heated by stoves. Richardson, it has been affirmed, knew man, but Fielding knew men. The latter's first novel, Joseph Andrews, 1742, was begun as a travesty of Pamela. The hero, a brother of Pamela, was a young footman in the employ of Lady Booby, from whom his virtue suffered a like assault to that made upon Pamela's by her master. This reversal of the natural situation was in itself full ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... modern period have arisen out of the inconveniences and reasonable fears caused by such an inept phase. I am a persistent advocate for the restoration of Poland, but at the same time it is very plain to me that it is a mere travesty of the facts to say that Poland, was a white lamb of a country torn to pieces by three wicked neighbours, Poland in the eighteenth century was a dangerous political muddle, uncertain of her monarchy, her policy, her ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... sinners "hit the sawdust trail," to use his own spectacular language, as well as to extort money from the pockets of the attendants. He left the town $5,000 richer than when he entered and also carried with him, as advertising material, a long list of so-called converts. A travesty on the sacred work of the church! But such methods are to-day the exception and not the rule, and the exceptions merely prove ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... instantly flashed his lantern on me, or the draggled, drunken old woman that was my travesty. 'Now then, mum,' he ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... which the mission of Christ teaches us about the love of God is that it is a love which takes note of and overcomes man's sin. I have said, as plainly as I can, that I reject the travesty of Christianity which implies that it was Christ's mission which originated God's love to men. But a love that does not in the slightest degree care whether its object is good or bad—what sort of a love do you call that? What do you name it when a father shows it to his children? ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... them out when I begin to feel the beast in them, and presently they wander there. They all dread this house and me. There is a kind of travesty of humanity over there. Montgomery knows about it, for he interferes in their affairs. He has trained one or two of them to our service. He's ashamed of it, but I believe he half likes some of those beasts. It's his business, not mine. They only sicken me with a sense of failure. ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... at this period of his celebrity, the inimitable comic actor, Poitier, in a farce called "Les Danaides" that was making a furor—a burlesque upon a magnificent mythological ballet, produced with extraordinary splendor of decoration, at the Academie Royale de Musique, and of which this travesty drew all Paris in crowds; and certainly any thing more ludicrous than Poitier, as the wicked old King Danaus, with his fifty daughters, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... second address the bishop had to listen to Veni Creator Spiritus, in its English form, and it seemed to him the worst of all possible hymns. Its defects became monstrously exaggerated to his hypersensitive mind. It impressed him in its Englished travesty as a grotesque, as a veritable Charlie Chaplin among hymns, and in truth it does stick out most awkward feet, it misses its accusatives, it catches absurdly upon points of abstruse doctrine. The great Angel stood motionless and ironical at the bishop's elbow while it was being ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... good looks, sees a beautiful young creature with Junoesque air parading before her in bold color-combinations and doubtful harmonies, and she imagines she can venture the same thing with like effect. But alas! what a travesty ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... transpositions or parodies of Christian hymns, and one in particular was his favorite. Apparently he had made it very popular with the natives of the band, for it vied with the "Himene Tatou Arearea" in repetition. It was a crude travesty of a hymn much sung in religious camp-meetings and revivals, of which the proper chorus as often heard by me in Harry Monroe's mission in the Chicago ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Dedication of the third edition of Reliquiae Wottonianae, Walton alludes to his friendship with a much younger and gayer man than himself, Charles Cotton (born 1630), the friend of Colonel Richard Lovelace, and of Sir John Suckling: the translator of Scarron's travesty of Virgil, and of Montaigne's Essays. Cotton was a roisterer, a man at one time deep in debt, but he was a Royalist, a scholar, and an angler. The friendship between him and Walton is creditable to the freshness of the old man and to the kindness of the younger, who, to ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... ingenious pen has been all too seldom employed on children's books. Indeed, one that comes first to memory, the "New Sandford and Merton" (1872), is hardly entitled to be classed among them, but the travesty of the somewhat pedantic narrative, interspersed with fairly amusing anecdotes, that Thomas Day published in 1783, is superb. No matter how familiar it may be, it is simply impossible to avoid laughing anew at the smug little Harry, ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... Lassalle, whose fine art in newer works had met with full recognition from press and public. To Lassalle's great surprise, his Hamlet, a remarkably fine performance within the limit set by the pitiable operatic travesty of Shakespeare's play, was received coldly, and there was wide comment on the circumstance that he had ignored traditions of performance, especially in the scene between the Prince and his mother. In considerable distress he went to Faure, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... that Shakespeare found little to sympathize with in this somewhat extravagant outline of a happy nation, but he goes out of his way to travesty it. In "The Tempest" he makes Gonzalo, the noblest character in the play, hold the following language to the inevitable king (Shakespeare can not imagine even a desert island ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... a travesty of the sacred office as these passages describe must have been deplorable; and without doubt it was one of the principal causes of the overthrow of the Jewish State. Jeremiah says expressly, that from the prophets profaneness had gone out over the whole ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... rein and sat on his horse in the road. He was trying to picture Hannah standing in the door waiting for him, to hear her calling him from work; but always Phebe intervened with her travesty of Hannah's ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... curves. It has not even ventured to throw itself boldly outward, as do other thoughts, but projects half-heartedly from the astral body, which must be supposed to be on the left of the picture. A sad travesty of the divine quality love; yet even this is a stage in evolution, and distinctly an improvement upon earlier stages, ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... from the figure of Karl to that of his brother, one is struck at once with the artificiality of the portrait. We seem to have before us in Franz Moor the result of a deliberate effort to conceive the vilest possible travesty of human nature. Nothing here that was copied from nature, nothing that Schiller found in his own heart. It is all a brain-spun creation, born of his dramatic reading and of his studies in medicine and ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... that sad travesty of personal interest, appears under a form quite as formidable when the general interest takes the form of communism. The cooeperation of personal interest and of the general interest is always necessary, both for individual profit and social advantage. There is as much ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... them without delay to Alexandrovsk. There they were put into prison for a month, until it pleased the Governor to take notice of them. Then followed the mere mockery of a trial, during which the prisoners were not permitted to utter a word in self-defence, and as a fitting end to this travesty of justice, the ten unfortunates were launched upon their weary foot-journey to the frozen North, destined to live and die beyond the reach, ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... succession, some mystic power for administering rites and conferring absolution, together with those who came beneath the touch of their priestly hands. That theory has notoriously broken down. But the truth of which it is a grotesque travesty is presented in our Lord's conception of the vine, deeply planted in the dark grave of Joseph's garden, which had reached down its branches through the ages, and in which every believing soul has a part. Touch ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... earnest in their distractions," observed Deppingham, with a glance at his wife's eager face. "This could be nothing more than a travesty, a jest." ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... Horace Williams said, if a dead horse could be made to go this one would have brought Murchison romping in. And Lorne had taken heed to the counsel of his party leaders. At joint meetings, which offered the enemy his best opportunity for travesty and derision, he had left it in the background of debate, devoting himself to arguments of more immediate utility. In the literature of the campaign it glowed with prospective benefit, but vaguely, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... at last, that not because the Queen had ordered him to procure Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye's enlargement had he submitted to assume a filthy travesty, to set his neck in jeopardy, to play the lackey and the spy. It was because something in Valerie's eyes, something in her pure, lily face had moved him to it; and simultaneously had come the thought of the relation ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... in the guest-room, the huntsman in the sort of cupboard where the honest fellow had been wont to lie. They dug up the buried dog, Sapt chuckling convulsively, James grave as the mute whose grim doings he seemed to travesty: they carried the shot-pierced, earth-grimed thing in, and laid it in the king's room. Then they made their piles of wood, pouring the store of oil over them, and setting bottles of spirit near, that the ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... queens, and hoping to put himself in their way as the court advanced along the river-bank on its return to Blois. He disguised himself as a pauper, at the risk of being taken for a spy, and by means of this travesty, he mingled with the crowd of beggars which lined the roadway. After the departure of the Prince de Conde, and the execution of the leaders, the duke and cardinal thought they had sufficiently silenced ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... to the terrible travesty of justice which was going on. Magistrates were seen to have overlooked the most flagrant instances of falsehood and contradiction on the part of both accusers and accused, using the baseless hypothesis that the devil had warped ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... ever fear from one who is no true Muslim, from one who makes a mock and travesty of the True Faith ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... Either, that is, he remains grave when others laugh, or he laughs, as Horace says, "with alien jaws," by constraint rather than because he cannot help it. He has a confused idea that it is expected of him. Such laughter is apparently the outcome of an uneasy sense of duty, a dismal travesty ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... her sitting with the letter in her lap, as if she had not moved from her posture while she had been away exchanging her Ptolemaic travesty for the ease of a long silken morning gown of Nile green. She came back buttoning it at her throat, when she gave a start of high tragic satisfaction at something stonily rigid in Cornelia's attitude, but she kept ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... travesty came back to me with a rush, as I sat there in the presence of the only man who had ever been known to get the better of Jasper Titus in a trade. I remembered with some vividness my scornful attitude toward the newspapers of the metropolis, ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... refined characters on the stage? Yes; but let them be taken by men and women of taste and refinement and let us have done with this masquerading in false raiment, ancient and modern, which makes nearly every stage a travesty of nature and the whole theatre a painful pretension. We do not expect the modern theatre to be a place of instruction (that business is now turned over to the telegraphic operator, who is making a new language), but it may give amusement ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and English in Hamilton. Hardly any Frenchman could have borne to put even a fictitious eidolon of himself in such a contemptible light; very few Englishmen, though they might easily have done this, would have done it so neatly, and with so quaint a travesty of romantic situation. But the main story, as admitted above, is assommant, though, just before the breach, a substitution of three agreeable damsels for the nymph herself ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... their own characters, they scorn the human and travesty the divine; they gather a company of guileless youths, and feed them with solemn chatter upon Virtue and quibbling verbal puzzles; in their pupils' presence they are all for fortitude and temperance, and have no words bad enough for wealth and ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... allows his spirits to run away with his judgment, although in such instances the manner is so obviously exaggerated as to suggest deliberate mimicry. His account of the tawdry sentimentality of Moore's poetry sounds like pure travesty: ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Bodhisattvas of Tibet are a travesty of the Mahayana which on Indian soil adhered to the sound doctrine that saints are known by their achievements as men and cannot be selected among infant prodigies.[14] It was the general though not universal opinion that one who had entered on the career of a Bodhisattva could not ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... somebody had once told me what to do on such occasions. It was either to throw the patient upon his back and move his arms up and down in a travesty of rowing or to slap him violently on the back. Seeing that the stranger was several times larger than myself I chose with diffidence the latter course. Rising to my feet I turned him round and thumped his back vigorously. He ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life's struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character. ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... part of him, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, for she eats what comes from his table and, being fed of one flesh, are they not brother and sister to one another in virtue of community of nutriment which is but a thinly veiled travesty of descent? When she eats peas with her knife, he does so too; there is not a bit of bread and butter she puts into her mouth, nor a lump of sugar she drops into her tea, but he knoweth it altogether, though he knows nothing ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... to the bateau did Carrigan dare to glance back over his shoulder at the man who was paddling, to see what effect the fistic travesty had left on him. He was a big-mouthed, clear-eyed, powerfully-muscled fellow, and he was grinning ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... cry that nearly escaped her, her heart almost bursting. The picture Miss Craven's words called up was an ideal of happiness that might have been. The suffering that reality promised seemed more than she could contemplate. What happiness could come from such a travesty? The strange yearnings she had experienced seemed suddenly crystallised into form, and the knowledge was a greater pain than she had known. What she would have gone down to the gates of death to give him he did not require—the unutterable joy that Miss Craven suggested would never be hers. She searched ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... she would willingly and cheerfully allow herself to be tricked out in colored kerchiefs, ribands, and flowers, and on her part could contrive the most fantastic costumes for them. So soon as she saw Hermas with the helmet on, the fancy seized her to carry through the travesty he had begun. She eagerly and in perfect innocence pulled the coat of armor straight, helped him to buckle the breastplate and to fasten on the sword, and as she performed the task, at which Hermas proved himself unskilful enough, her gay and pleasant laugh ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... could have held firm in face of such dejection, only eyes as alert and wakeful as those of this wayfaring boy could possibly have looked undaunted at the shabby streets with their flaunting travesty of joy exhibited in the dripping awnings of the deserted cafes, that offered Biere, Billard, and yet again Biere ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... frauds and wars. They are but so many yokes to the neck. Our painful labours are unnecessary and fruitless. A higher law than that of our will regulates events. If we look wider, things are all alike: laws and creeds and modes of living are a travesty of truth. Only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience we become strong. Our real action is in our silent moments. Why should we be awed by the name of Action? 'Tis a trick of ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... fortifications anywhere. How could people live in such a careless, unnatural fashion? He blushed with shame as he thought to himself that a foreigner might apparently journey through the country from one end to the other without knowing that there was such a thing as a soldier in the land. What a travesty this was on civilization! How baseless the proud boasts of national greatness when only an insignificant and almost invisible few paid any attention to the claims of military glory! The outlook was indeed dismal, ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... travesty of royalty that a criminal dying there, with a crowd of his 'subjects' gloating on his agonies and shooting arrowy words of scorn at him, should be a King. But His cross is His throne. It is so because His death is His great ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... are not uncommon today and are of two different kinds. First, there is the burlesque that is travesty, which takes a well-known and often serious subject and hits off its famous features in ways that are uproariously funny. "When Caesar Sees Her," took the famous meeting between Cleopatra and Marc Antony and made even the most ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... and factories thinned out and the open spaces increased as he approached the country. At last the city was behind him, and he was walking down a leafy lane beside the railroad track. He did not walk like a man. He did not look like a man. He was a travesty of the human. It was a twisted and stunted and nameless piece of life that shambled like a sickly ape, arms loose-hanging, stoop-shouldered, ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... the instructor, himself gliding with a dab of fat in exaggerated ribbons, there wasn't a sound. To Lee it had the appearance of the negation of pleasure; it was, in its way, as bad as the determined dancing of adults; it had the look of a travesty of that. Helena conducted a restive partner, trying vainly to create the impression that he was leading, wherever she considered it advantageous for him to go. The thick flood of her gold hair shimmered about her uncompromising shoulders, her embroidered skirt ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... streets in the City Plan. The flippant carelessness with which this apparent union has been effected only serves to emphasise the actual separation. In almost every case these ill-advised couplings are productive of anomalous disorder, which in the case of the numbered streets they openly travesty the requirements of communal propriety and of common-sense: as may be inferred from the fact that within this disjointed region Fourth Street crosses Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth streets very nearly at right angles—to the permanent bewilderment of nations ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" was unlike the style of his "Life of Schiller." It was vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to travesty and ridicule. But the laugh could not be very loud or very long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson tells us, to sell five hundred copies. It was a good deal ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 'Stunning Farce,' 'Roars of Laughter,' 'Good Old English Fun and Frolic,' placarded in vermilion letters on the gate. He went into the pit, and saw the lovely Mrs. Leary, as usual, in a man's attire; and that eminent buffo actor, Tom Horseman, dressed as a woman. Horseman's travesty seemed to him a horrid and hideous degradation; Mrs. Leary's glances and ankles had not the least effect. He laughed again, and bitterly, to himself, as he thought of the effect which she had produced upon him, on the first night of ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... march of Jews. The fishmongers, who, from their proximity to the Ghetto, were aware of its customs, enriched the Carnival with divers other parodies; now it was a travesty of a rabbi's funeral, now a long cavalcade of Jews galloping upon asses, preceded by a mock rabbi on horseback, with his head to the steed's tail, which he grasped with one hand, while with the other he offered an imitation Scroll ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... that it is made in ignorance of the real conditions. Look at the farm labourer's wife and her home-life. She is often the most miserable, worn-out creature, who tries in vain to keep the children and herself properly fed and clothed. Her life is a long travesty ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... the Belgians protested that it was a travesty of the intentions of the French Government to interpret them in that sense, and to let oneself be misled as to the sentiments of the French nation by the ebullitions of a few irresponsible spirits or the intrigues of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... Latin and Greek, is to very little purpose indeed. Translation! what a strange word! To me I confess it appears the most unaccountable invention, that ever entered into the mind of man. To distil the glowing conceptions, and to travesty the beautiful language of the ancients, through the medium of a language estranged to all its peculiarities and all its elegancies. The best thoughts and expressions of an author, those that distinguish one writer from another, are precisely those that are least capable of being translated. ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... Life of the Duke Espernon, the great Favourite of France. . . . Scarronides or Virgil Travesty . . by Charles Cotton, Esq. Elvira, a Comedy, or The worst not alwaies true, by the Earl of Bristol. Mr. Simpson's Division Viol, in folio, price 8s. A Treatise wherein is demonstrated, that the Church and State of England are in equal ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... platform receiving the respect of attention, marching with her fellows under common conventions, common orders. Here, alone, slipping in and out among the crowd, she looked abandoned, the sight of her in her bare white feet and the travesty of her dress was a wound. Her humility screamed its violation, its debasement of her race; she woke the impulse to screen her and hurry her away as if she were a woman walking in her sleep. She had on her arm a sheaf of the War Cry. This was another indignity; she offered them right ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... love-lorn wailings of Petrarch's sonnets and others of the same kind were taken off by caricaturists; and the solemn air of this form of verse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle. A constant invitation to parody was offered by the 'Divine Comedy,' and Lorenzo il Magnifico wrote the most admirable travesty in the style of the 'Inferno' (Simposio or I Beoni). Luigi Pulci obviously imitates the Improvisatori in his 'Morgante,' and both his poetry and Boiardo's are in part, at least, a half-conscious parody of the chivalrous poetry of the Middle Ages. Such a caricature was ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... which, beginning on Saturday the 20th of January 1649, terminated so dismally on Tuesday the 30th. The strange part played by Lady Fairfax on the first day of the so-called trial (though it was no greater a travesty of justice than many a real trial both before and after) is one of the best-known stories in English history. There are several versions of it. Having provided herself with a seat in a small gallery in Westminster Hall, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... fourteen towns, all of our mines and our most productive farming and grazing lands. In that event Graustark will be no larger than one of the good-sized farms in your western country. There will be nothing left for Her Royal Highness to rule save a tract so small that the word principality will be a travesty and a jest. This city and twenty-five miles to the south, a strip about one hundred fifty miles long. Think of it! Twenty-five by one hundred fifty miles, and yet called a principality! Once the proudest and most prosperous state in the east, ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... of Greuze, as of Hogarth, that the moral scenes which he represents appear to have been posed for and acted by excellent actors rather than copied directly from nature. This is the truth, but seen, however, through an interpretation and under a travesty of rusticity. All is reasoned out, full of purpose, and leading to an end. There is in every stroke what the litterateurs call ideas when they talk about painting. Thus Diderot has celebrated Greuze in the most lyric strain. Greuze, however, is not a mediocre artist: he invented ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... every doctrine of purgation after death? They condemned Transubstantiation—did they condemn the Real Presence? They condemned a great popular system—did they condemn that of which it was a corruption and travesty? These questions could not be foreclosed, unless on the assumption that there was no doctrine on such points which could be called Catholic except the Roman. The inquiry was not new; and divines so stoutly anti-Roman as Dr. Hook and ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... speaking of "the mystery of so-called white things," as being "ever an after-thought—the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselves but half-real, half-material—the white queen, the white witch, the white mass, which, as the black mass is a travesty of the true mass turned to evil by horrible old witches, is celebrated by young candidates for the priesthood with an unconsecrated host, by way of rehearsal." So, white-nights, I suppose, after something like the same analogy, should be [14] nights not of quite blank forgetfulness, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... travesty the truth, and I was impotent—the truth, that profound thing whose voice was in my ears, whose shadow was in my eyes, and whose ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... heart to jest about the subject, and his attempt to back up his companion's drunken playacting was a sad travesty. He did not know much about Indians anyhow, and he was sick through and through with apprehension. Would they finish by scalping their hosts, as Dud had suggested early in ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... felt both extremes of fortune to the full. During the travesty of justice at his trial the attorney-general, having no sound argument, covered him with slanderous abuse. These are three of the false accusations on which he was condemned to death: 'Viperous traitor,' 'damnable atheist,' and 'spider of hell.' ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... Cyprus, the main interest of which upon the stage is derived from its cynical contrast between the innocence of the beautiful nymph of stone whom Pygmalion's love endows with life, and the conventional prudishness of society. Obviously the purpose of such a travesty may be fulfilled without any call upon the deeper emotions—upon the stress of passion, which springs from that 'knowledge of good and evil' transmitted by Eve to all her daughters. It is sufficient that the living ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... exercise and bad air. To breathe dust and bombazine, to feed the mind on cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a case and drink a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings for the hour when a man may slip out of his travesty and devote himself to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and to do this day by day and year after year, may seem so small a thing to the inexperienced! But those who have made the experiment are of a different way of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pronounce an opinion upon them. He said that I wrote many things which I did not believe, and then stood aside, and was amused in a humorous mood to see that other people believed them. It would be absurd to be, or even to feel, indignant at such a travesty of my purpose as this, and indeed I think that one is never very indignant at misrepresentation unless one's mind accuses itself of its being true ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... from the hymnals with its tune. Is it because profane people or thoughtless youth made a travesty ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... go unpunished by the law. No one could tell the hour of his fate. The people lived from day to day and left their homes not knowing whether they should return to them or whether they should be dragged from the streets and thrown into the dungeons of that travesty of courts, the Revolutionary Committee, more terrible and more bloody than those of the Mediaeval Inquisition. We who were strangers in this distraught land were not saved from its persecutions and I ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... would follow the poor worn body to its grave rather with thanksgiving than with grief. And realizing so well that this was his inevitable feeling, even as in a smaller degree it had become her own, Dinah agreed without demur to his wish to spare her all the jarring details, the travesty of mourning, that could not fail to strike a false chord ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... chain of pieties to the past, conjure up a glowing vision of the social organism, and celebrate the wisdom of our ancestors and the infallibility of the race. There was, indeed, a real opposition of temperament here; but Burke had no monopoly of the historical vision. It is a travesty to suggest that the revolutionary school despised history. Paine, indeed, was a self-taught man, who knew nothing of history and cared less. But Godwin wrote history with success and even penned a remarkable essay (On Sepulchres) in which he anticipated the Comtist ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... zoological garden which, although inferior to ours, is far better than that at Amsterdam, while it converts The Hague's Zoo into a travesty. Last spring the lions were in splendid condition. They are well housed, but fewer distractions are provided for them than in Regent's Park. I found myself fascinated by the herons, who were continually soaring out over the neighbouring houses and returning like darkening clouds. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... I could not have known my departed relation did not prevent two of my cousins, elderly maiden ladies who had had that privilege, from writing to me in great indignation at my having ventured to travesty my old aunt. They had found me out (I am always being found out), and the vials of their wrath were poured out ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... as he recognised occasionally the grotesque travesty of a familiar face. Presently his eyes were arrested by a drawing which was new to him, a face of striking ugliness, offering advantages to the caricaturist of which, doubtless, he had not omitted to avail himself. It imposed itself on ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... emphatically and categorically denounce as lies many statements made in the German official reports on the fighting in the Verdun theatre. Although, they say, the Germans usually travesty the truth, they have not before issued such ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... also, in most cases, in ridicule of their wives. His accounts of Hazlitt, Campbell, and Coleridge have just enough truth to give edge to libels, in some cases perhaps whetted by the consciousness of their being addressed to a sympathetic listener: but it is his frequent travesty of well-wishers and creditors for kindness that has left the deepest stain on his memory. Settled with his pupil Charles in Kew Green lodgings he writes: "The Bullers are essentially a cold race of people. They live in the midst of fashion and external show. They love no living creature." ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... teacher asks the question; and when the pupil drones forth the answer, "Columbus discovered America in 1492," she dismisses the whole matter with the phonographic response, "Very good." What a farce! What a travesty upon the work of the teacher! Instead of being very good, it is bad, yea, inexpressibly bad. The artist teacher does it far better. By the magic of her touch she causes the imagination of her pupils to be fired and their interest to thrill ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... which the various members of the little circle were famous and which were always performed for Mrs. Gray's pleasure. "Oakdale's Great Mystery," of which Hippy calmly admitted the authorship, proved to be a ridiculous travesty on a melodrama which the boys had seen the previous winter. Hippy as the much-vaunted Mystery, with a handkerchief mask, a sweeping red portiere cloak, and an ultra-mysterious shuffle was received with shrieks of laughter by the audience. The dramatic manner in which, after a series of ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... as I walked along the Strand, but I did not put up my umbrella. The truth is I couldn't put up my umbrella. The frame would not work for one thing, and if it had worked, I would not have put the thing up, for I would no more be seen under such a travesty of an umbrella than Falstaff would be seen marching through Coventry with his regiment of ragamuffins. The fact is, the umbrella is not my umbrella at all. It is the umbrella of some person who I hope will ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... not weep; laughing because their souls were dead; laughing in their conscious travesty of the tragedy of pleasure—they tripped and lounged and sauntered along. And the lamps shone round them, and above them was ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... three-fourths of the illiteracy of the whole nation exists; where the darkness is increasing more rapidly than it is being lighted up; where much which passes for religion even among those who preach it, is a travesty upon Christianity, openly divorced from relationship with truth, purity, ...
— American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 11. November 1888 • Various
... and trade would have suffered little inconvenience from the depredations of the gangs; but there was in the system a flaw that generally reduced the aid lent to ships to something little better than a mere travesty of assistance. That flaw lay in the fact that Admiralty never gave as good as it took. Clearly, it could not. True, it supplied substitutes to go in "pressed men's rooms," but to call them "men in ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson |
