"Bagpipe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nimbly on the kettle-drum, that he has reduced that noisy instrument to an object of sight; for, if you don't see the tricks with his hands, it is no better than ordinary: another plays on a violin and trumpet together: another mimics a bagpipe with a German flute, and makes it full as disagreeable. There is an admired dulcimer, a favourite salt-box, and a really curious jew's-harp. Two or three men intend to persuade you that they play on a broomstick, which ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... right, and Finsbury Fields, with its gardens, dog-houses, and windmills, on the left. At the end of Bishopgate-Street-Without a considerable crowd was collected round a party of comely young milkmaids, who were executing a lively and characteristic dance to the accompaniment of a bagpipe and fiddle. Instead of carrying pails as was their wont, these milkmaids, who were all very neatly attired, bore on their heads a pile of silver plate, borrowed for the occasion, arranged like a pyramid, ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... sides, in order to avoid the expense of a regular wedding. The principal amusement on Sundays and holidays is the choro ([Greek: choros]), which is danced on the village green to the strains of the gaida or bagpipe, and the gusla, a rudimentary fiddle. The Bulgarians are religious in a simple way, but not fanatical, and the influence of the priesthood is limited. Many ancient superstitions linger among the peasantry, such as the belief in the vampire and the evil ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Injun know I was on to him would be a sign of bad luck. I wiggled around kind of careless to see if there was any more of him. There was. Nine more. Here was Saunders Colorado and Colin Hiccup Grunt, fortified by—say six, drops of Scotch whiskey, a Scotch sword and a Scotch bagpipe, up against ten Tontos armed with rifles. I would have traded my life interest in this world for an imitation dead yaller dog. "Oh, they won't do a thing to us, thing to us, thing to us!" sings I to myself, hoppin' ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... soon as he appeared to their view They vanished all away out of his sight And clean were gone, which way he never knew, All save the shepherd, who, for fell despite Of that displeasure, broke his bagpipe quite." ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... In modern Scotland the bagpipe has altogether taken the place of the harp. A writer of the sixteenth century says: "They (the Highlanders) take great delight to deck their harps with silver and precious stones; the poor ones that cannot ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... stomach, a curved sack something like a bagpipe or a badly made boot, with a tiny canal at the toe connecting it with the small intestine. There ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... the creek on a warm afternoon in June we realize how true are these lines of Lowell. The frog chorus is dying down, though now and then we catch sight of a big fellow blowing out his big balloon throat and filling the air with a hoarse bass, while another across the creek has a bagpipe apparently as big but pitched in a higher key. Two months ago one could not get near enough to see this queer inflation, but now the frogs do not seem so shy. Garter snakes wiggle through the grass down the bank of the creek and the crickets are just beginning to chirp the love ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... in a quiet, mysterious manner, and the three dogs looked at him uneasily, Sneeshing uttering a low growl, as if he had unpleasant memories of bagpipe melodies and stones thrown at him because he had been unable to bear the music, ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... garments, forming, upon the whole, a splendid and imposing scene. As the procession moved slowly along, the band in the Chief's boat struck up a lively, martial sort of air, on instruments similar to those we had heard last night; the tone of which is not unlike the drawling sound of the bagpipe, the bass or drone being produced by a long horn, and the squeaking sounds by four trumpets, two of which have stops in the middle, by which the ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... flourished their defiances, with the beating of innumerable drums and metal instruments, and then yielded for a while to the soft harmonious breathings of their long flutes, with which a pleasing instrument, like a bagpipe without the drone, was happily blended. At least a hundred large umbrellas or canopies, which could shelter thirty persons, were sprung up and down by the bearers with brilliant effect, being made of scarlet, yellow, and the most showy cloths and silks, and crowned on the top with crescents, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... and dexterity, united in two bodies, and exhibited a sort of mock encounter, in which the charge, the rally, the flight, the pursuit, and all the current of a heady fight, were exhibited to the sound of the great war bagpipe. ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... sad reveries I was roused by the hoarse notes of the bagpipe. That well-known sound brought every Scotchman upon deck, and set every limb in motion on the decks of the other vessels. Determined not to be outdone, our fiddlers took up the strain, and a lively contest ensued between the rival musicians, ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... be the knight's ale, and the foresters' venison, and there will be Kit Scrapesqueak with his fiddle, and little Tom Whistlerap with his fife and tabor, and Sam Trumtwang with his harp, and Peter Muggledrone with his bagpipe, and how I shall dance with Will Whitethorn!" added the girl, clapping her hands as she spoke, and bounding from the ground with the pleasure of ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... lawless times, while by a strange contumacy in latter times, a representative of that ancient family pertinaciously continued to proclaim its infamy and downfall by the adherence to the wild strain of bagpipe music (their family pibroch called Cillechriost), at once indicative of its shame and submission. Kenneth's character and policies were of a higher order, and in the result he was everywhere the gainer by them." He was supported by Murdoch Mackenzie, II. of Redcastle; and by his own brothers ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... instrumental music but by percussion, of which the greatest boast was made of the psaltery,—a small triangular harp, or lyre, with wire strings, and struck with an iron needle or stick. Their sackbut was something like a bagpipe; the timbrel was a tambourine; and the dulcimer, a horizontal harp with wire strings, and struck with a stick ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... their glancing arms, were seen pacing on their watch; some of the guard were asleep on wooden benches, and on the platform amongst the branches, where a little baboon-looking old man, in the dress of a drummer, had perched himself, and sat playing a Biscayan air on a sort of bagpipe; others were gathered round the fire cooking their food, or cleaning ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 472 - Vol. XVII. No. 472., Saturday, January 22, 1831 • Various
... to a partiality for the bagpipe on the ground that your true Briton "loves a grumbling noise," and he favours organs and the popular oratorios. But his "top talent is a bill ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... habit suggest certain agreeable passions. For the same combination of notes and tones do not excite devotion, love, or poetic melancholy in a native of Indostan and of Europe. And "the Highlander has the same warlike ideas annexed to the sound of a bagpipe (an instrument which an Englishman derides), as the Englishman has to that of a trumpet or fife," (Dr. Brown's Union of Poetry and Music, p. 58.) So "the music of the Turks is very different from the Italian, and the people of Fez and Morocco have again a different ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... carried to the gallows, Jack played a fine tune of his own composing on the bagpipe, which retains the name of Macpherson's tune to this day.—History of ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... take down the timbrel and the harp, And delight in the sound of the bagpipe; They while away their days in bliss, And in a twinkling go down ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... desertions caused by this air became so frequent that the government prohibited it. The reader will remember the comic effect produced upon the French troops in the Crimea by the Highlanders marching to battle to the sound of the bagpipe, whose harsh, piercing notes inspired these brave mountaineers with valor, by recalling to them their country and its heroic legends. Napoleon III. finds himself compelled to allow the Arab troops incorporated into his army their barbarous tam-tam music, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... act is a cry, not of wrath, as Kant said, nor a shout of joy, as Schwartz thought, but a snuffling, and then a long, thin, tearless a-a, with the timbre of a Scotch bagpipe, purely automatic, but of discomfort. With this monotonous and dismal cry, with its red, shriveled, parboiled skin (for the child commonly loses weight the first few days), squinting, cross-eyed, pot-bellied, and bow-legged, it is not strange that, if the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... standing where two streets met, and singing without looking at each other. In the narrow ancient streets the notes sounded quite in character with the surroundings and with the quaint dresses of the singers. Modrich says that they use the svirala, a kind of bagpipe with two canes, one with four and the other with three holes, and suggests that the long-drawn terminating notes of the songs are in imitation of its sound; but we neither saw nor heard this instrument, ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... who, with the aid of ropes, are pulling the boat, those two-legged horses, groan from exertion. The bagpipe player is making his gayest music, but in vain—he cannot allure the young people to dance; there is no place for dancing, the large deck of the boat is covered with human beings. Old men, and even women, are obliged ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... were not for Pony we should press on to the settlement, but we must give Pony a respite. Pony is an enthusiastic little fellow, but his lungs are too much for him, they have blown him out like a bagpipe. A mile farther and then eleven miles back to Deer's Castle, is a great undertaking for so small an animal. In the meanwhile, we will ourselves rest and take some "home-brewed" with the landlord, who is harbor-master, inn-keeper, store-keeper, fisherman, shipper, skipper, mayor, and ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... a charade is to try and puzzle your audience as much as you can. You must choose a word of two or more syllables, such as "Bagpipe." First you must act the word "Bag," and be sure that the word is mentioned, though you must be careful to bring it in in such a way that the audience shall not guess it is the word ...
— My Book of Indoor Games • Clarence Squareman
... or two there was no sound but the wind, which had found a loose chimney cowl on the roof and screwed out of it an odd sound like the drone of a bagpipe. Dickson, unable to remain any longer in one place, moved into the centre of the hall, believing that Leon had gone to the smoking-room. It was a dangerous thing to do, for suddenly a match was lit a yard from ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... my sheepe I sort them in my Pens, and sorted soe I keepe: Those that are bigst of Boane, I still reserue for breed, My Cullings I put off, or for the Chapman feed. 210 When the Euening doth approach I to my Bagpipe take, And to my Grazing flocks such Musick then I make, That they forbeare to feed; then me a King you see, I playing goe before, my Subiects followe me, My Bell-weather most braue, before the rest doth stalke, The Father ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... middle ages the name chorus was given to a primitive bagpipe without a drone. The instrument is best known by the Latin description contained in the apocryphal letter of St Jerome, ad Dardanum: "Chorus quoque simplex, pellis cum duabus cicutis aereis, et per primam inspiratur per secundam ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... agitation of three days' endurance. She was roused from her stupor at length by female voices, which cried the coronach, or lament for the dead, with clapping of hands and loud exclamations; while the melancholy note of a lament, appropriate to the clan Cameron, played on the bagpipe, was heard ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... of the national virtues, chief among which reigned hospitality. As Moggy turned the corner, and got out of the cold wind under its friendly shelter, she heard a stentorian voice, accompanied by the mellifluous drone of a bagpipe, concluding in a highly decorative style the last ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... night, he is not precisely as cool and collected as he was at one in the day. Another one calls a man so when he lies on the floor and holds himself on by the carpet. So,—as to soundness, some persons can not see that a horse is unsound, unless he works his flanks like the drone of a bagpipe, or blows and roars like a blacksmith's bellows; while some are so fastidious as to consider a horse as next to valueless because he may have a corn that he never feels, or a thrush for which he is not, nor likely to ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... tame, they be a beastly sort, In sweate and labour hauing most chiefe comfort, On the holy day assoone as morne is past, When all men resteth while all the day doth last, They drinke, they banket, they reuell and they iest They leape, they daunce, despising ease and rest. If they once heare a bagpipe or a drone, Anone to the elme or oke they be gone. There vse they to daunce, to gambolde and to rage Such is the custome and vse of the village. When the ground resteth from rake, plough and wheles, Then moste they it trouble ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... home, saw a light streaming through the gothic window of Alloway kirk, and on riding near, beheld a batch of the district witches dancing merrily round their master, the devil, who kept them "louping and flinging" to the sound of a bagpipe. He knew several of the old crones, and smiled at their gambols, for they were dancing in their smocks: but one of them, and she happened to be young and rosy, had on a smock shorter than those of her companions by two spans at least, which so moved the farmer that he exclaimed, "Weel luppan, Maggie ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... maintaining a monotonous droning noise, as if they were performing, out of time and tune, on a ruder sort of bagpipe. ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... this song, methinks, it was as if nightingale, owl, and echo had combined in song, and if ever I had been able to hear the morning star, or to try to imitate the melody on my bagpipe, I should have slipt away out of the hut to join in the melody, so beautiful it seemed; but I ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... pease-bannock—the true hogmanay cake, to which he was entitled, by "the auld use and wont" of Scotland; and far better breathe the smoke of the "smeikin horn" on foot, and with the means of self-defence at command, than lie choked in bed, and "deaved" by the stock and horn, the squalling bagpipe, and the eternal— ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... chorus, by a recitative extolling the wealth of the vintage. This chorus ("Joyful the Liquor flows") is in two parts,—first a hymn in praise of wine, sung by the tippling revellers, and second, a dance tempo, full of life and beauty, with imitations of the bagpipe and rustic fiddles, the melody being a favorite Austrian dance-air. With this rollicking combination, for the two movements are ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... all of golden hue, rivalling the sun itself, and covered with garlands of jessamine, roses and woodbine. They were led up by a venerable old man and an ancient matron, to whom the occasion had given more agility than might have been expected from their years. A Zamora bagpipe regulated their motions, which being no less sprightly and graceful than their looks were modest and maidenly, more lovely dancers were ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... gong with a melodious sound; a clarionet played by an old and accomplished musician, rivalling in its strains that beautiful instrument the bagpipe; a man bearing a wooden painted slab on a pole, on this was an inscription; a banner looking like a composition of rags; a white flaglet; fifteen matchlockmen; fifteen bowmen; the Dompa of Roongdong; five horses ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... object, reduced to nothing, was the body of Satellite, flattened like a bagpipe without wind, and ever ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... welcome guests, particularly in the Highlands of Scotland; and so late as the latter end of the sixteenth century, as appears by the above quotations, the harp was in common use among the natives of the Western Isles. How it happened that the noisy and inharmonious bagpipe banished the soft and expressive harp, we cannot say; but certain it is, that the bagpipe is now the only instrument that obtains universally in the Highland districts' (Campbell's Journey through North Britain. London, 1808, ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Plagiary: Nor is it less unbecoming the Dignity and Fidelity of your Undertaking, to supply the Want of Application and Diligence, by filling up your lifeless Pages with Musical Punctations, as vile and unrelishing as ever echo'd from your own natural Bagpipe. Therefore, that you may the better be enabled these Indecencies equally to avoid, I send you the following Collectanea Nasutula: If you honour them, I shall honour your next Performance; if not, Non cuicunque datum est ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... word for decay. - There will come an immediate decree In thy mind for the opposite party's decease, If he bends not an instant knee. Expunge it: extinguishing counts poor gain. And accept a mild word of police:- Be mannerly, measured; refrain From the puffings of him of the bagpipe cheeks. Our political, even as the merchant main, A temperate gale requires For the ship that haven seeks; Neither God of the winds ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith |
