"Burlesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which during the struggle with Spain led to a series of conspiracies or revolts against the government, known as the Wars of the Fronde (1648-1652). "Notwithstanding its peculiar character of levity and burlesque, the Fronde must be regarded as a memorable struggle of the aristocracy, supported by the judicial and municipal bodies, to control the despotism of the crown.... It failed;... nor was any farther effort made to resuscitate the dormant liberties of the nation until the dawning of the ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... of the dancers enveloped them in shortening circles, two young and attractive maenads broke from the throng and literally entwined themselves with the troopers. Military dignity, assaulted in burlesque, tried to keep its post. But the bold nymphs were clinging, not to be "shaken"; as the mad whirl of the dancers touched the centre, the troopers and their female captors were borne away in the ricocheting, plunging motions, disappearing thenceforward from our story. Little Henriette dived to ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... comic burlesque upon Forrest, and were very sorry to learn that the carriages were waiting to ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... mendicants, lying everywhere in wait for charity, murmured a modulated appeal; if you heard shouts or yells afar off they died upon your ear in a strain of melody at the moment when they were lifted highest. I am aware of seeming to burlesque the operatic fact which every one must have noticed in Naples; and I will not say that the neglected or affronted babe, or the trodden dog, is as tuneful as the midnight cat there, but only that they approach it in the prevailing ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... VICARS. This Vicars was a man of as great interest and authority in the late Reformation as Pryn or Withers, and as able a poet. He translated Virgil's AEneids into as horrible Travesty, in earnest, as the French Scaroon did in burlesque, and was only outdone in his way by the ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... fanciful sketch; Mr. Maurice Hewlett, with a light poem; Mr. Hugh Walpole, with a cathedral town comedy; "Saki," with a caustic satire on the discursive drama; Mr. Stephen Leacock, the Canadian humorist, with a burlesque novel; Mr. Lucas himself, and Mr. Ernest Bramah, the author of The Wallet of Kai Lung, with one of his gravely comic Chinese tales. Mr. Lucas, furthermore, has had placed at his disposal some new and extremely interesting letters ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... received the refuse of the various meals. The bird, furious with pain, was burying its beak into the leg of the soldier, while he, with the butt end of his musket aloft, and the bayonet depressed, offered the most burlesque representation of St. George preparing to give his ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... voice and induced in me a pleasing melancholy. Thus was I engaged when young Rupert Hentzau, who feared neither man nor devil, and rode through the demesne—where every tree might hide a marksman, for all he knew—as though it had been the park at Strelsau, cantered up to where I lay, bowing with burlesque deference, and craving private speech with me in order to deliver a message from the Duke of Strelsau. I made all withdraw, and then he ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... man of humor, and the burlesque has a place in his philosophical writings; but in the words which I have just read to you he seems to have intended seriously to expound the system which replaces God by an idea. Try now to form a definite conception of this universe ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... water, the oysters that are served on his dining cars do not seem to be suffering from car-sickness. And you can get a beefsteak measuring eighteen inches from tip to tip. There are spring chickens with the most magnificent bust development I ever saw outside of a burlesque show; and the eggs taste as though they might have originated with a hen instead of a cold-storage vault. If there was only a cabaret show going up and down the middle of the car during meals, even the New York passengers would be satisfied with ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... not noticing the bulk of mediaeval Latin literature. Excepted divisions. Comic Latin literature. Examples of its verbal influence. The value of burlesque. Hymns. The Dies Irae. The rhythm of Bernard. Literary perfection of the Hymns. Scholastic Philosophy. Its influence on phrase and method. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... might make a success," he said, "of an entertainment like one I attended up in the mountains last summer. It was called a 'County Fair,' and was a sort of burlesque on the county fairs or state fairs that used to be held annually, and are still, I believe, in some sections of ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... truck system, in full operation. Men live there, year in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in supplies. The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper they will fall in debt - a burlesque injustice in a new country, where labour should be precious, and one of those typical instances which explains the prevailing discontent and the ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hairdresser's window, if his countenance possessed the thought which is communicated to those waxen caricatures of the human face divine. He is a militia-officer, and the most amusing person in the House. Can anything be more exquisitely absurd than the burlesque grandeur of his air, as he strides up to the lobby, his eyes rolling like those of a Turk's head in a cheap Dutch clock? He never appears without that bundle of dirty papers which he carries under his left arm, and which are generally supposed to be the miscellaneous estimates for 1804, or some ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... his character, unless his faint approval signifies his liking for such songs. Nor does it seem on the surface to connect him with Troy, as do the other two songs of Demodocus. (3) It gives an unworthy view of the Gods, degrading them far below Homer's general level, reducing them to ordinary burlesque figures which violate all decency, not to speak of morality. (4) Philologists have picked out certain words and expressions peculiar to this passage, which, not being employed by Homer elsewhere, tend ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... Still more closely do some birds resemble mammals in the habit of secreting a sort of milk for the sustenance of their nestlings. Most people think the phrase "pigeon's milk" is much like the phrase "the horse-marines," a burlesque name for an absurd and impossible monstrosity. But it is nothing of the sort: it answers to a real fact in the economy of certain doves, which eat grain or seeds, grind and digest it in their own gizzards into a fine soft pulp ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... reputation. He has written for one particular actor to support his play—Lewis—more worthy to be thus considered than almost any other performer: but here his very skill gives the alarm—for Lewis possesses such unaffected spirit on the stage, a kind of vivid fire, which tempers burlesque with nature, or nature with burlesque, so happily, that it cannot be hoped any other man will easily support those characters written purposely ...
— The Dramatist; or Stop Him Who Can! - A Comedy, in Five Acts • Frederick Reynolds
... has done more than any other man to rescue the American stage from the insignificance with which it was threatened. It speaks volumes for him as an actor and a manager, that when New York seemed wholly given up to ballet, burlesque, and opera bouffe, he was able to make the almost forgotten masterpieces of Shakespeare the most popular and most profitable dramatic ventures of ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... best kind. Will [Greek: ph]. point out in any existing poem of such profession and character, a single heroic line, consisting of ten words, all which ten words shall be "low" in the sense of "vulgar"? Can even the Muses of burlesque and slang furnish such ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... ill timed, no matter, provided they brought guffaws. It is probable, therefore, that in many other cases, where the tone and "stage business" are not as obvious, where an actor's high seriousness might elicit catcalls, and burlesque certainly would elicit chuckles, Plautus wished his players ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... explain is the laughter excited by scenes or narrations which we call ludicrous, funny, grotesque, comic; and still more so the derisive and contemptuous laugh. Caricature or burlesque of well known men is a favourite method of producing laughter among savages as well as civilised peoples. Why do we laugh when a man on the stage searches everywhere for his hat, which is all the time on his head? Why do we laugh when a pompous gentleman slips on a piece of orange-peel and falls ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... those of Shakespeare's queen Margaret; but they lose their effect by being thrown into the form of monologue and ascribed to a departed spirit, whose agonies of grief and rage in reciting his own death have something in them bordering on the burlesque. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... necessary to quote more examples. They are not unknown to the historian, but because they are in rhyme they have been hastily assumed to be spurious or even burlesque.[142] But the evidence of a rhyming formula is the opposite to this. It is evidence of their genuineness, and if some of the words appear to be nonsensical it is due to the fact that the sense of the old formula has been misunderstood, and has then ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... rejection or release, relieved his feelings in a letter about Miss Owens to one of the somewhat older married ladies who were kind to him, the wife of one of his colleagues. She ought to have burnt his letter, but she preserved it to kindle mild gossip after his death. It is a burlesque account of his whole adventure, describing, with touches of very bad taste, his disillusionment with the now maturer charms of Miss Owens when her sister brought her back to New Salem, and making comedy of his own honest bewilderment ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... aspiration, so ill-educated a love of refinement; so unarmed a credulity, noblest of weaknesses, betrayed for the laughter of a chambermaid. By an actual Bottom the weaver our pity might be reached for the sake of his single self-reliance, his fancy and resource condemned to burlesque and ignominy by the niggard doom of circumstance. But is not life one thing and is not art another? Is it not the privilege of literature to treat things singly, without the after-thoughts of life, without the troublous completeness of the many- sided world? Is not Shakespeare, for this reason, ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... The story of Kathleen as they had written it was discussed pro and con.; the usual protests were launched at Carter for having in his chapter lowered the theme to the level of burlesque; praise was accorded to the Goblin for the dexterity with which he had rescued the plot. Blair's chapter had been full of American slang which had to be explained to the others. "Joe," the Rhodes Scholar hero, had shown a vein of fine gold under Blair's hands: he bade fair ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... hotel was scarcely the correct place in which to receive this august young man. There he stood, with his head half-way through the bureau window, negligently leaning against the woodwork, just as though he were a stockbroker or the manager of a New York burlesque company. ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... a burlesque outcry and a good-humored protest from the gentlemen around her against this manifestly leading question. "It's no fair! Ye'll not answer her—for the dignity of our sex." Yet in the midst of it, it suddenly ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... afternoon I should have been slowly coming down the Housatonic Valley, with my dear little wife beside me. Instead, the unfamiliar train, and the fat man at my side reading a campaign newspaper, and shaking his huge sides over some broad burlesque. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... an article in the Nuevo Mundo, in which I considered Vazquez Mella and his refutation of the Kantian philosophy, dwelling especially upon his seventeenth mathematical proof of the existence of God. The thing was a burlesque, but a conservative paper took issue with me, called me an atheist, a plagiarist, a drunkard and an ass. As for being an atheist, I did not take that as an insult, but ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... industry, neatness, legibility, with notes, arms, etc. I know no such repositories. You will receive with your manuscript Mr. Kerrick's and Mr. Gough's letters. The former is very kind. The inauguration of the Antiquated Society is burlesque and so is the dearth of materials for another volume; can they ever want such rubbish as ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... as patronised by the nobility (either sex) when travelling"; another of "Mrs. Rodd's anatomical ladies' stays (which ensure the wearer a figure of astonishing symmetry";) and another of a "Brilliant burlesque ballad, 'Get along, Rosey,' sung with the most positive triumph ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... sullen and indifferent manner. They took off their aprons, went to the hydrant and washed their hands, then put on their coats and went home in silence and shamefacedness, amid the angry remonstrances of the master-builder. A little farther on Farnham saw what seemed like a burlesque of the last performance. Several men were at work in a hole in the street; the tops of their heads were just visible above the surface. A half-grown, ruffianly boy, with a boot-black's box slung over his shoulder, came up and shouted, "You —— —— rats, come out of ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... two," replied Phil, as readily as though the dialogue had been rehearsed; "and I hated them." Then, drawing her hand from her muff, she flung it out in a burlesque of the amateur recitationist:— ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... of the converted fisherman, a few young people belonging to the better families in the locality gathered together to witness what they imagined would be mere burlesque. There was only standing room behind the kitchen bed for them, and there was anything but an air of sanctity amongst that portion of his congregation. Jimmy's pulpit style was peculiar. He was flashing ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... scribbling when not at the wheel," said Bixby, "but the best thing he ever did was the burlesque of old Isaiah Sellers. He didn't write it for print, but only for his own amusement and to show to a few of the boys. Bart Bowen, who was with him on the "Edward J. Gay" at the time, got hold of it, and gave it to one ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... from its green thickets; not one of the hideous objects which the architects of our district churches perpetrate, to puzzle the passer-by as to the purpose of its being,—whether a brewer's chimney, or a shot-tower,—a perch for city pigeons, or a standing burlesque on the builders of the nineteenth age of the fine arts in England. This steeple is an old grey turret, ivy-mantled, modest, and with that look of venerable age which instinctively makes us feel, that it has witnessed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... which it abounds. As the original had been inscribed by Pope to Lord Bolingbroke, so was the parody by Wilkes to Lord Sandwich; thus it began, "Awake my Sandwich!" instead of "Awake my St. John!" Thus also, in ridicule of Warburton's well-known commentary, some burlesque notes were appended in the name of the Right ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... these "fine and subtle disguisings, masks, and mummeries," too often degenerated into abuse, as indeed was to be expected, when such pastimes had for their object to turn all lawful authority into ridicule, and more particularly to burlesque the services of the Church. On such occasions, "the rude vulgar occupied the Churches, profaned the holy places by a mock imitation of the sacred rites, and sung indecent parodies of the hymns of the Church;" and the lively ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... between "the Blue Knight" (Mr. Lechmere Whitmore), and "the Yellow Knight" (Mr. Baylis), each mounted upon hobby-horses, was most fiercely executed. Nor was the Giant Cormoran (fourteen feet in height), nor the Queen of Beauty, nor the Dragon Queen wanted to complete the chivalry of this burlesque upon the ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... was a literary game popular in the 17th and 18th centuries—the rhymed words at the end of a line being given for others to fill up. Thus Horace Walpole being given, "brook, why, crook, I," returned the burlesque verse— "I sits with my toes in a Brook, And if any one axes me Why? I gies 'em a rap with my Crook, 'Tis ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... restricted his wife from visiting where she would meet the odd medley in the suburbs of Paris. Retired opera-singers, Bohemians who have made a fortune by chance, superseded politicians, officials who have perfected libeling into an art, and reformed female celebrities of the dancing-gardens and burlesque theatres. But, as society is constituted, it would have earned him the reputation of a tyrant if he had refused her receiving and returning the visits of the venerable Marchioness de Latour-Lagneau, to whom the Bishop always accorded ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... equally of Walt Whitman and Artemas Ward. Yet it is not burlesque. It appears to have been written in good faith, and for this reason the incongruity of such a grandiloquent rhapsody on such a prosaic subject is all the more noticeable. As an example of "fine writing" it ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... are the toils of this hunter, that on the very next night after that, I was again entrapped, where no vestige of a spring could have been apprehended by the timidest. It was a burlesque that I saw performed; an uncompromising burlesque, where everybody concerned, but especially the ladies, carried on at a very considerable rate indeed. Most prominent and active among the corps of performers was what I took to be (and she really ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... appeared in his utmost magnificence. His grade was never lower than that of colonel, and it not unfrequently extended to, or even beyond, the rank of brigadier-general. It was worth "a sabbath-day's journey" on foot, to witness one of these parades; for I believe that all the annals of the burlesque do not furnish a more amusing caricature of the "pomp and circumstance" of war. Compared to one of those militia regiments, Falstaff's famous corps, whose appearance was so unmilitary as to prevent even that liberal-minded gentleman from ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... imitation of grand opera," he said; and then he launched into the drollest burlesque of a fashionable tenor and a prima-donna, as clever as could be. He was evidently a born mime as well as a musician, and presently delighted us with some farmyard imitations, and one particularly quaint impersonation, "an old lady singing ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... periwinkle from its shell, once more to play his abased and bashful role of free entertainer to guffawing mixed audiences. For all others in the great city there were havens and homes. But for a poor, lorn, unguided vagrant, enmeshed in the burlesque garnitures of a three-year-old male child, what haven was there? By night the part had been hard enough—as the unresponsive heavens above might have testified. By the stark unmerciful sunlight; by the rude, revealing glow of the impending ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... fun is palpable here. But something unexpected happened: what was begun as burlesque, almost horse-play, began to pass from the key of shallow, lively satire, broadening and deepening into a finer tone of truth. In a few chapters, by the time the writer had got such an inimitable personage as Parson Adams before the reader, it was seen that ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... on bed, crosses down stage to lower left side of bed, sits facing LAURA.] But I do care. I know how you feel with an old cat for a landlady and living up here on a side street with a lot of cheap burlesque people. Why, the room's cold [LAURA rises, crosses to window.], and there's no hot water, and you're beginning to look shabby. You haven't got a job—chances are you won't have one. What does [Indicating picture on bed with thumb.] this fellow out there do for you? Send ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... them analyzed the nature of his infectious gayety, nor thought of the pathos that lay so close to it, in the fact of his recent slavery, and the distinction of being one of Wade Hampton's niggers, and the melancholy mirth of this light-hearted race's burlesque ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to such straits for amusement, that one Wednesday afternoon, finding himself with nothing else to do, he was working at a burlesque and remarkably scurrilous article on 'The Staff, by one who has suffered', which he was going to insert in The Glow Worm, an unofficial periodical which he had started for the amusement of the School and his own and his contributors' profit. He was ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... scarcely sufficed for those principal wants. Some years before, the Parisians had been very much displeased at the establishment of import dues on all alimentary substances. The writers of that epoch preserved the burlesque Alexandrine, which was placarded all over the town, on the ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... parody, not only of the general spirit, but of the numerous passages of the Iliad itself; and even, if no such intention to parody were discernible in it, the objection would still remain, that to suppose a work of mere burlesque to be the primary effort of poetry in a simple age, seems to reverse that order in the development of national taste, which the history of every other people in Europe, and of many in Asia, has almost ascertained to be a law of the human mind; it is in a state of ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... very singular English burlesque of the unprofitable sermons of the preaching friars in the Middle Ages, which is worthy of Rabelais himself, and of which this ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... the rehearsal of another great poet. But a work of art is valuable, and pleasurable in proportion to its rarity; one beautiful book of verses is better than twenty books of beautiful verses. This is an absolute and incontestable truth; a child can burlesque this truth—one verse is better than the whole poem, a word is better than the line, a letter is better than the word, but the truth is not thereby affected. Hugo never had the good fortune to write a bad book, nor even a single bad line, so not having ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... ever before read such a mixture of the bombastic and the burlesque? We are called upon to cry over every joke, and, for the life of us, we cannot hold our sides when the catastrophes occur. It is a salad in which the pungency of the vinegar has been wholly subdued by the oil, and the fatness of ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... boy had not already been bereft of his senses by the melodrama preceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty, her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart, but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate who fought a losing fight with broadswords, two up and two down—click-click, ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... mean to give offence," said the Idiot. "I've read so much of yours that was purely humorous that I believe I'd laugh at a dirge if you should write one; but I really thought your lines in the Observer were a burlesque. You had the same thought that ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... following Thursday to defend themselves. Before that day came, we had the report on the eight thousand seamen, when Pitt and his associates made speeches of lamentation on their disagreement with Pelham, whom they flattered inordinately. This ended in a burlesque quarrel between Pitt and Hampden,(218) a buffoon who hates the cousinhood, and thinks his name should entitle him to Pitt's office. We had a very long day on Crowle's defence, who had called the power of the House brutum fulmen: he was very submissive, and was dismissed with a reprimand on his ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... his "Jennie"; that was always her name on such occasions. "It isn't about Oolong?" she asked, in burlesque anxiety. ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... all controversy, is that Rabelais owed much to one of his contemporaries, an Italian, to the Histoire Macaronique of Merlin Coccaie. Its author, Theophilus Folengo, who was also a monk, was born in 1491, and died only a short time before Rabelais, in 1544. But his burlesque poem was published in 1517. It was in Latin verse, written in an elaborately fabricated style. It is not dog Latin, but Latin ingeniously italianized, or rather Italian, even Mantuan, latinized. The contrast between the modern form of the word and ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the crowded house. The ruffling of the face of the sea before a storm. The Sisters Sigsbee, Coon Delineators and Unrivalled Burlesque Artists, have finished their dance, smiled, blown kisses, skipped off, skipped on again, smiled, blown more kisses, and disappeared. A long chord from the orchestra. A chord that is almost a wail. A wail of regret ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... woman's coquettish humor; he knew still less of that mimic stage from which her present voice, gesture, and expression were borrowed; he had no knowledge of the burlesque emotions which that voice, gesture, and expression were supposed to portray, and finally and fatally he was unable to detect the feminine hysteric jar and discord that underlay it all. He thought it was strong, ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Kiobenhavn, 1834. It is a mixture of tragedy and farce: the former occasionally good, the latter poor buffoonery. In the notes, readings of the old MS. are referred to with apparent seriousness; but Gammel Gumba's Saga is quoted in a manner that seems burlesque. I cannot find the word "Kyhlam" in any dictionary. Can any of your readers tell me whether it signifies a real country, or is a mere fiction? The work does not read like a translation; and, if one, the number of modern allusions show that it is not, as it professes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... the President of the United States. There is no ascending or descending scale of importance. Any of the topics can raise a laugh. If one examines a collection of American parodies, one will find that the happy national talent for fun-making finds full scope in the parody and burlesque of the dearest national sentiments. But no one minds; everybody believes that the sentiments endure while the jokes will pass. The jokes, intended as they are for an immense audience, necessarily lack subtlety. They tend to partake of the methods of pictorial caricature. Indeed, ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... exchanged shots twice with his adversary, and put a ball into his body which he carried all his life. By this time, too, the precocious and ungovernable boy had become, as he flattered himself, a complete atheist. One of his favorite amusements at Princeton was to burlesque the precise and perhaps ungraceful Presbyterians of the place. The library of his Virginian home, it appears, was furnished with a great supply of what the French mildly call the literature of incredulity,—Helvetius, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... was surprised that Blent did not on the instant punish the blasphemy by a revengeful earthquake or an overwhelming flood. Cecily caught her by the arm, a burlesque apprehension screwing her face up ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... his habits of drinking were excited by the stimulants of society.[G] Little, I believe, is known of his life, even to the actors and playwrights, with whom he chiefly associated, from the time when his burlesque of "Hamlet Travestie" (printed in 1810) commenced his career of celebrity, if not of fame, to his death, (in the year 1862, I believe,) being then probably ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... Short bathing skirts left him cold, but the unexpected, the casual, the vagaries of fashion and the wind, were unfailingly potential. Humiliating, he thought, a curiosity that should be left with the fresh experience of youth; but it wasn't—comic opera with its choruses and the burlesque stage were principally the extravagances of ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... it as follows: "Flashy people may burlesque these things, but when hundreds of the most sober people in a country, where they have as much mother-wit certainly as the rest of mankind, know them to be true, nothing but the absurd and froward spirit of Sadduceeism can question them. I have not yet mentioned so much as one thing, ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... rider—the old critter and the young creature—was ridiculously striking: the former appearing a burlesque on the most beautiful of quadrupeds, while the latter was the very impersonation of the loveliest of ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... Pulcinella. This character, peculiar to the local stage (who is supposed to have originated in Acerra, as Arlequino did in Bergamo), supported by his inseparable companion Pancrazio, poked fun to his heart's content, and in the raciest of burlesque, at all the latest Neapolitan occurrences and fashions, in a piece ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... the thing most difficult to be done. But Bonaparte undertook the task; and, as if by the aid of a magic rod, the ancient order of things was restored in the twinkling of an eye. The distinctions of rank—orders—titles, the noblesse—decorations—all the baubles of vanity—in short, all the burlesque tattooing which the vulgar regard as an indispensable attribute of royalty, reappeared in an instant. The question no longer regarded the form of government, but the individual who should be placed at its head. By restoring the ancient ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... man at his side felt as if he were witnessing a burlesque of himself as he listened to the pitiless and lurid description of torment which Elder Wheat poured forth,—the same figures and threats he had used a hundred times. He stirred uneasily in his seat, while the audience paid so little attention that the perspiring ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... a burlesque Ode on St. Cecilia's day, adapted to the ancient British musick, viz. the salt-box, the Jew's-harp, the marrow-bones and cleaver, the humstrum or hurdy-gurdy, &c. Johnson praised its humour, and seemed much diverted with it. He repeated the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... she soon won her way to the brilliant and fashionable society of the crippled wit, buffoon, and poet, who was coarse, profane, ungodly, and physically an unsightly wreck. In this society, which the burlesque poet amused by his inexhaustible wit and fancy, and his frank, Gallic gayety, she showed an infinite amount of tact and soon made his salon the most prominent social centre of Paris. There, Scarron, never tolerated a stupid person, no matter of ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... will be commenced a new burlesque serial, "The Mystery of Mister E. Drood," written expressly for this paper by the celebrated ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... Graces, what relentless fate has conducted thee to the shambles? Butterfly of the summer, why should a nation rise to break thee upon the wheel? A sense of the mockery of such an execution, of the horrible burlesque that would sacrifice to the necessities of a mighty people so slight an offering, made itself felt among the crowd. There was a low murmur of shame and indignation. The dangerous sympathy of the mob was perceived by the officer in attendance. ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... so much choked by his tears on his pronouncing these words, that Fleur-de-Marie, very much affected, turned quickly toward him: he had turned away his head. An incident, half burlesque, diverted the attention of La Goualeuse, and prevented her from remarking more closely the emotion of her father: the worthy squire, who still remained behind the curtain, and, apparently was very attentively looking into the ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... form of the building or the shape of the wall on which he had to place his frescoes. Painting on the ceiling was no easy task, and Michelangelo, in a humorous sonnet addressed to Giovanni da Pistoya, gives a burlesque portrait of himself while he was painting ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... 1714 the delightful poem appeared in its present form with the machinery of sylphs and gnomes adopted from the mysteries of the Rosicrucians. Pope styles it an heroi-comical poem, and judged in the light of a burlesque it is conceived and executed with an art that is beyond praise. Lord Petre, a Roman Catholic peer, had cut off a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor's hair, much to the indignation of her family and possibly of the young lady also. Pope wrote the ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... which had been filled with priests and laymen arrested on charges of complicity with the enemies of liberty, were entered by ruffians acting under influence of Marat and the commune's "committee of surveillance," and, after "a burlesque trial" before an armed jury, were murdered. In Versailles, Lyons, Orleans, and other towns, there were like massacres. The victims of these massacres ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... pronoun thou, or their improper nominative thee, ordinarily inflect with st or est the preterits or the auxiliaries of the accompanying verbs, as is done in the solemn style. Indeed, to use the solemn style familiarly, would be, to turn it into burlesque; as when Peter Pindar "telleth what he troweth." [213] And let those who think with Murray, that our present version of the Scriptures is the best standard of English grammar,[214] remember that in it they have no warrant for substituting s or es for ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... in it. The wit is often entirely superficial—a mere tricky playing with light resemblances and wordy jingles. I do not feel as though it were the humour in it; for Byron is not really a humorist at all. I think it is something deeper than the mere juxtaposition of burlesque-show jests with Sunday-evening sentimentality. I think it is the downright lashing out, left and right, up and down, of a powerful reckless spirit able "to lash out" for the mere pleasure of doing so. I think it is the pleasure we get from the spectacle of mere splendid energy and devil-may-care ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... arms in our hands against the authority of the true and proper chief of the island. It is impossible to describe the absurd language used, and the ceremonies gone through. It would have been a complete burlesque had not the matter been somewhat too serious. As it was, when one of the counsellors kicked another for interrupting him, and the judge threw a calabash at their heads to call them to order, I could not help bursting into a fit of laughter, which was soon quelled when one of my guards ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... Hades to pass before Rhadamanthus, Minos, or Aacus, three upright judges, to be dealt with, according to their merits, with impartial accuracy. The distribution of poetic justice in Hades at last became, in many authors, so melodramatic as to furnish a fair subject for burlesque. Some ludicrous examples of this may be seen in Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead. A fine instance of it is also furnished in the Emperor Julian's Symposium. The gods prepare for the Roman emperors a banquet, in the air, below the moon. The good emperors are admitted to the table with honors; ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... could see that it would be at the moment Mr. Bernard Shaw so forgot himself as to be interested in something he had not himself written. The Press was charmed with the play and went so far as to say, with a gross burlesque of Chesterton, that it was 'real phantasy and had soul.' Chesterton by his one produced play had earned the right to call himself a dramatic author, who could make the public shiver and think at the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... comic ballets. I leave you to imagine whether these now wonderful, now charming improvisations quickened the brains and made supple the legs of our performers. He led them as he pleased and made them pass, according to his fancy, from the droll to the severe, from the burlesque to the solemn, from the graceful to the passionate. We improvised costumes in order to play successively several roles. As soon as the artist saw them appear, he adapted his theme and his accent in a marvellous manner to their respective characters. This went on for three ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... handle of the dining-room door, and realises that his scent is not so good as he had thought it. He bids his hostess and the COMTESSE good-bye in a burlesque whisper and tiptoes off to safer places. JOHN having gone out with him, MAGGIE can no longer avoid the COMTESSE's reproachful eye. That much injured lady advances upon her with ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... and speak of the cubic contents of anything? The inference is easy: reduce all objects to forms which can be bounded by planes and defined by straight lines and angles; make their cubic contents measurable to the eye; transform drawing into a burlesque of solid geometry; and you have, at once, attained to the highest art. The Futurist, on the other hand, maintains that we know nothing but that things are in flux. Form, solidity, weight are illusions. Nothing exists but motion. Everything is changing every moment, and if anything were ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... see the varying expressions of his face as he passes from grave to gay, from lively to severe. Now he is tender, now indignant; now rattling along in good-natured raillery without broadening into burlesque; now becoming serious and pensively philosophic without a suggestion of mawkish morality. For Burns, when he is himself, is always an artist; says his say, and lets the moral take care of itself; and in his epistles he lets himself go in a very revelry of artistic abandon. He does not think ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... "The Acharnians" and Socrates in "The Clouds," to mention no other examples; and in English drama this kind of thing is alluded to again and again. What Jonson really did, was to raise the dramatic lampoon to an art, and make out of a casual burlesque and bit of mimicry a dramatic satire of literary pretensions and permanency. With the arrogant attitude mentioned above and his uncommon eloquence in scorn, vituperation, and invective, it is no wonder that Jonson soon involved himself in literary and even personal quarrels with his fellow-authors. ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... contrast, no impulse given to the mind. It is all on a level and of a piece. In fact, there is so little connection between the subject-matter of Mr. Crabbe's lines and the ornament of rhyme which is tacked to them, that many of his verses read like serious burlesque, and the parodies which have been made upon them are hardly ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... perambulate the streets. They are enveloped in cloaks of coarse grey woollen cloth, their head-gear consists of an old vicuna hat, with a horse's tail dangling behind. Their features are disguised by ludicrous masks with long beards; and, bestriding long sticks or poles, they move about accompanied by burlesque music. Every remarkable incident that has occurred in the families of the town during the course of the year, is made the subject of a song in the Quichua language; and these songs are sung in the streets by the Corcobados. Matrimonial quarrels ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... spectacular course; Ione Burke, Polly Marshall, and Mrs. Vining were in the cast; tableau succeeded tableau; "I wish I were in Dixie," was sung, and the popular burlesque ended in the celebrated scene, "The Birth of the Butterfly in the Bower of Ferns," with the entire company kissing their finger-tips to a vociferous and ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... scene that the author seems to have reserved for putting forth his strongest powers of burlesque and broad humour. Isabella and Castaldo are together; the latter feels a little afraid to murder Martinuzzi, but is impelled to the deed by a thousand imaginary torches, which he fears will hurry his "moth-like ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... gallantry, it was hoped I would do my utmost to maintain it; after which I was dismissed. I soon found that my exploit had placed me upon quite a different footing in the ship from that which I had occupied before. The men treated me with real respect, instead of the good-humoured burlesque thereof which they had accorded me hitherto; and my fellow-mids at once received me into the berth upon a footing of perfect equality with themselves, each one striving to do me some little kindness or show me some little attention, ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... afforded of bright, amusing dialogue, pleasing lyrical interludes, and charming displays of brilliant stage effects and pretty dresses. Unlike other plays of the same Author, there is here apparently no serious political MOTIF underlying the surface burlesque and buffoonery. ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... had made the Republican party, by 1897, the party of organized business. For twelve years the alliance had grown steadily closer. Marcus A. Hanna was its spokesman. The burlesque of his sincere and kindly face, drawn by a caricaturist, Davenport, for Eastern papers, created for the popular eye the type of commercialized magnate, but it did him great injustice. Self-respecting and direct, he believed it to be the first function of government to protect property, and that ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... man. There was no one to touch her in boys' parts in burlesque. A dashed fine woman she is—though I say it, dashed fine!" He seemed to reflect a moment. "She's a spiritualist. I wish she wasn't. Spiritualism gets on her nerves. I've no use for it myself, but it's her life. It gives her fancies. She got some sort of a silly notion—don't ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... mixed up his statement with a blunder which it is not easy to account for. He points out how the poets began to introduce rhyme into alliterative verse, until at length rhyme came to predominate over alliteration, and "thus was this kind of metre at length swallowed up and lost in the common burlesque Alexandrine or anapaestic verse, as "A cobbler there was, and he lived in a stall.'' Percy made a serious mistake when he gave the name of Alexandrine to anapaestic verse; but he is quite right in his general statement that alliterative verse became lost in a measure ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... has not survived. Beaurain and his brother Nicholas, a doctor of the Sorbonne, assisted him in this perpetration, and Claude made the pen-and-ink sketches with which it was illustrated. In the few years that had elapsed since the writing of this burlesque Perrault had acquired more sense and taste, and his new poems—in particular the "Portrait d'Iris" and the "Dialogue entre l'Amour et l'Amitie"—were found charming by his contemporaries. They were issued anonymously, and Quinault, himself a ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... skip airily behind the footlights of the Wellington, or any other important theater in England. So far as she was concerned, the musical comedy candle that succeeded to the sacred lamp of West End burlesque was snuffed out. ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... coming back to this Irrational Knot as a stranger after 25 years, I am proud to find that its morality is not readymade. The drunken prima donna of a bygone type of musical burlesque is not depicted as an immoral person, but as a person with a morality of her own, no worse in its way than the morality of her highly respectable wine merchant in its way. The sociology of the successful inventor is his own sociology ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... such endeavor and the bathos of the failure. Wieland includes in the letter some "specimen passages from a novel in the style of Tristram Shandy," which he asserts were sent him by the author. The quotations are almost flat burlesque in their impossible idiocy, and one can easily appreciate Wieland's despairing cry ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... inspectors, who surmised that we were not trying to smuggle a great value into the country, and with their apologetic regrets for bothering us to open so many trunks. They implied that it was all a piece of burlesque, which we were bound mutually to carry out for the gratification of a Government which enjoyed that kind of thing. They indulged this whim so far as to lift out the trays, to let the Government see that there was nothing dutiable underneath, where they touched or lifted the contents with ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Aristophanes' latest works. This description coincides with the idea of parody, which we placed foremost in our account of the Old Comedy. Platonius adduces also another instance in the Ulysses of Cratinus, a burlesque of the Odyssey. But, in order of time, no play of Cratinus could belong to the Middle Comedy; for his death is mentioned by Aristophanes in his Peace. And as to the drama of Eupolis, in which ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... excursions, parties of pleasure, and the contingencies that occurred in them, we decked out poetically; and thus, by the description of an event, a new event always arose. But as such social jests commonly degenerate into personal ridicule, and my friend Horn, with his burlesque representations, did not always keep within proper bounds, many a misunderstanding arose, which, however, could soon ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... remained of her visit passed pleasantly enough. Hetty contrived to turn her lessons into a sort of burlesque, and to impose a good deal on Miss Davis, who was not a humorous, but indeed a most matter-of-fact person. Every day Phyllis grew more and more disgusted with their visitor, who interrupted the even course of their studies and "made fools," as she considered, of Miss Davis and Nell. She thought ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... that represented One Month's Board down where Jim lived. They fell into a Horseless Hansom and went to see the Hity-Tity Variety and Burlesque Aggregation in a new Piece entitled "Hooray! Hooray!" Jim sat in a Box for the First Time, and wanted to throw Money on the Stage. The Head Usher had to come around once in a while to ask him not to let his Feet hang over, and to remember that the Company could ...
— More Fables • George Ade
... spoiled rather than overworn, was still of a quality inconsistent with her evident habits, and the lace-edged petticoat that peeped beneath it was draggled with mud and unaccustomed usage. Her glossy black hair, which had been tossed into curls in some foreign fashion, was now wind-blown into a burlesque of it. This incongruity was still further accented by the appearance of the room she had entered. It was coldly and severely furnished, making the chill of the yet damp white plaster unpleasantly obvious. A black harmonium organ stood in one corner, ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... followed by other light comedies. His pieces include numerous burlesques and pantomimes, the libretti of Savonarola (Hamburg, 1884) and of The Canterbury Pilgrims (Drury Lane, 1884) for the music of Dr (afterwards Sir) C. V. Stanford. The Happy Land (Court Theatre, 1873), a political burlesque of W. S. Gilbert's Wicked World, was written in collaboration with F. L. Tomline. For the last ten years of his life he was on the regular staff of Punch. His health was seriously affected in 1889 by the death of his only son, and he died on the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... show how really hard it is to foist a moral or a truth upon an unsuspecting public through a burlesque without entirely and absurdly missing one's mark, I will here set down two experiences of my own in this thing. In the fall of 1862, in Nevada and California, the people got to running wild about extraordinary petrifactions and other natural marvels. One could scarcely pick ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Institution. Some who send in these resolutions privately, are, no doubt, secret friends, needing a little more courage to face the pro-slavery feeling and sentiment which are all about them. Some one who read these resolutions suggested the idea of their being a burlesque. I repudiated the idea at once. They will commend themselves to you, dear Aunty, I am sure, as honest ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... the bar, but left law for literature, and contributed to the journals; has taken interest in and written on the industrial arts, social science, folk-lore, the gypsies, &c.; his works are numerous, and of a humorous or burlesque character, and include "The Poetry and Mystery of Dreams," "The Legends of Birds," "Hans Breitmann's Ballads," &c.; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 20 plays that we possess (the entire Varronian list, except the Vidularia, which was lost in the Middle Ages) all have the same general character, with the single exception of the Amphitruo. This is more of a burlesque than a comedy, and is full of humour. It is founded on the well- worn fable of Jupiter and Alcmena, and has been imitated by Moliere and Dryden. Its source is uncertain; but it is probably from Archippus, a writer of the old comedy (415 B.C.). Its form suggests ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... talked about, for the puff and humbug attracted people. The Montefiores, like fashionable knicknacks, succeeded that whimsical jade, Rose Peche, who had gone off the preceding autumn, between the third and fourth acts of the burlesque, Ousca Iscar, in order to make a study of love in company of a young fellow of seventeen, who had just entered the university. The novelty and difficulty of their performance, revived and agitated the curiosity of the public, for there seemed to be an implied threat ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... was flung open, and Mr Smithson arrived with a small army of men, who dumped paint-pots on the boards, threw hammers down, and rushed across the stage with flats and fly-cloths. Yet, in spite of all these accidents introducing the spirit of burlesque, the play survived. Sir Henry would tolerate interruptions up to a point, but, when a charwoman in the auditorium started brushing or turned on a sudden light, he would turn and ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... Morgan (then only Sydney Owenson) and "Rosa Matilda" even more roughly and asks (as has been asked about a hundred years later and was asked about a hundred years before), "Is it not amazing that the [two] most licentious writers of romance are women?" And it starts with a burlesque account of a certain Margaret Marsham who exclaims, "What then? to add to my earthly miseries am I to be called Peggy? My name is Margaritta!" "I am sure that if I am called Peggy again I shall go into a fit." But this promise of something to complete ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... fifteen inches in height; the novelty of which caused them to succeed for a few years. One of the earliest productions of this kind, which distinguished him as a painter, is supposed to have been a representation of Wanstead Assembly; the figures in it were drawn from the life, and without burlesque. The faces were said to bear great likenesses to the persons so drawn, and to be rather better coloured than some of his more finished performances. Grace, however, was no attribute of his pencil; and he was more disposed to aggravate, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... somebody, Lady Alicia?" he asked, negligently; and his easy burlesque of her name was like the familiarity of the rest of him. He was one of those full-bodied, grossly handsome men who are powerful and active, but never submit themselves to the rigour of becoming athletes, though they shoot and fish from expensive camps. Gloss is the most ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... go in. This vault of heaven with its spotless blue, this wide land that laughs in festive summer, these winds that lift my hair and come heavy with odors,—these do not fit with me, I burlesque the fair face of creation. O invisible airs, that softly sport round the castle-towers, why do you not woo my soul forth and bear it and lose it in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... exhibition of the white devil, which had the appearance of a human figure in white wax, looking miserably thin, and as if starved with cold, taking snuff, rubbing its hands, treacling the ground as if tender-footed, and evidently meant to burlesque and ridicule a white man, while his sable majesty frequently appealed to Clapperton, whether it was not well performed. After this, the king's women sang in chorus, and were accompanied ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... he took a newspaper from his pocket, folded it into a small square, laid it on the wet beaten grass, and sat thereon, arching his knees till only the soles of his boots touched the ground. To Alec's eye his long, thin figure looked so odd, bent into this repeated angle, that he almost suspected burlesque, but none was intended. The youth clasped his hands round his knees, the better to keep himself upright, and seated thus a few yards from the body, he shared the watch for some time as mute as was all else in that ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... popular song is quoted by Grose in his Olio, where it is made the subject of a burlesque commentary, the covert political allusions having evidently escaped the penetration of the antiquary. The reader familiar with the annals of the Commonwealth and the Restoration, will readily detect the leading points of the allegory. The ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... burlesque that night, as you may know when I tell you that Governor Brigdar's forces played us such a trick they were under shelter of the ship ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... restraint in consequence of his marriage. He is adored by a certain class of burlesque actresses. He flatters them by adoring himself. He owns a small house in Belgravia, but he frequently lives elsewhere. No pigeon-shooting matches, and few poker parties, amongst a certain set, are complete without him. Having ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... we had an Ode in Horace sung, instead of David's Psalms; whence you may find that we don't think a Poet worth Christian Burial; the Pomp of the Ceremony was a kind of Rhapsody, and fitter, I think, for Hudibras than him; because the Cavalcade was mostly Burlesque; but he was an extraordinary Man, and bury'd after an extraordinary Fashion; for I believe there was never such another Burial seen; the Oration indeed was great and ingenious, worthy the Subject, and like the Author [Dr. Garth], whose Prescriptions can restore ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... apologues he showed Bunyan's influence. But Franklin was essentially a journalist. In his swift, terse style, he is most like Defoe, who was the first great English journalist and master of the newspaper narrative. The style of both writers is marked by homely, vigorous expression, satire, burlesque, repartee. Here the comparison must end. Defoe and his contemporaries were authors. Their vocation was writing and their success rests on the imaginative or creative power they displayed. To authorship Franklin laid no claim. He wrote ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... stage. His most successful comedies kept their place in the acting repertory for a long time. He was an excellent actor, especially in the role of the fashionable coxcomb. Horace Walpole said that as Bayes in The Rehearsal he made the part what it was intended to be, the burlesque of a great poet, whereas David Garrick degraded ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... I bought five pairs of white silk stockings, men's and women's gloves, two fine castor hats, two burlesque men's masks, and three graceful-looking female masks. I also bought two pretty china plates, and I carried them all to Zenobia's in ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... down, unconscious of the future, with the book between them; and applied themselves to the study of the law of marriage, with a grave resolution to understand it, which, in two such students, was nothing less than a burlesque in itself! ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... sonnet of this period is intended to be half burlesque, and, therefore, is composed a coda, as the Italians describe the lengthened form of the conclusion. It was written while Michael Angelo was painting the roof of the Sistine, and was sent to his friend Giovanni da ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... shocking burlesque upon legislative proceedings, we must not forget that there is something very real to this uncouth and untutored multitude. It is not all sham, nor all burlesque. They have a genuine interest and a genuine earnestness in the business of the assembly which we are bound to recognize and ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... long as it is ignorant, a source of profit to designing speculators. Nonsense is put into the mouths of men who mean no evil, but who sincerely desire their own improvement. Truth is murdered, and her dress is worn by knaves who burlesque sympathy with working-men for selfish purposes. The poor man's sincere advocate, at last, can not speak truth without incurring the suspicion of some treasonable purpose against honesty or common sense. The very language necessary ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... the Duke is equally merciless in the description of George II.'s funeral in the Abbey, in which the "burlesque Duke" is introduced as comic ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... season, the demirep of many, the antiquary, and the dilettanti,—painters, sculptors, engravers, all brought news to the 'Strawberry Gazette;' and incense, sometimes wrung from aching hearts, to the fastidious wit who professed to be a judge of all material and immaterial things—from a burlesque to an Essay on history or Philosophy—from the construction of Mrs. Chenevix's last new toy to the mechanism of a clock made in the sixteenth century, was ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... equally wild and abominable, luckily counteract themselves;—they present such a Fee-fa-fum for grown up people, such a burlesque upon tragic horrors, that a sense of the ludicrous irresistibly predominates over the terrific; and, to avoid disgust, our feelings gladly take refuge in contemptuous laughter. Pathos like this may ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... from his English reputation: and, secondly, understand that Boileau had at no time any such authority in England as to make anybody's reputation; he had first of all to make his own. A sure proof of this is, that Boileau's name was first published to London, by Prior's burlesque of what the Frenchman had called an ode. This gasconading ode celebrated the passage of the Rhine in 1672, and the capture of that famous fortress called Skink ('le fameux fort de'), by Louis XIV., known ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... one girl's head, and on another's locks was arranged a gorgeous fillet of pale-blue ribbon of the style advertised at the time in every shop-window in New York as the "Du Barry." The scene was a sorry burlesque on the boudoir and the ball-room, a grim travesty on the sordid realities of ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... merry with the Ideal theory, if its consequences were burlesque; as if it affected the stability of nature. It surely does not. God never jests with us, and will not compromise the end of nature, by permitting any inconsequence in its procession. Any distrust of the permanence of laws, would paralyze the faculties of man. Their permanence is sacredly ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... during the long winter nights. With Bjoernson it was in the blood. It was his soul's accent, the dialect of his thought, the cadence of his emotion. And so, also, is the touching minor undertone in the poem, the tragic strain in the half burlesque, which is again so deeply Norwegian. Who that has ever been present at a Norse peasant wedding has failed to be struck with the strangely melancholy strain in the merriest dances? And in Landstad's ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... which, as this poem was intended for perusal only, the author, one would have thought, might have easily avoided. This arises from the stage directions, which supply the place of the terrific and beautiful descriptions of Milton. What idea, except burlesque, can we form of the expulsion of the fallen angels from heaven, literally represented by their tumbling down upon the stage? or what feelings of terror can be excited by the idea of an opera hell, composed of pasteboard and flaming ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... arrested next month; but the court did not sit until July of the next year, and their decision is not known. Col. Butler died Sept. 7, 1805. Out of the arrest and persecution of this sturdy veteran, Washington Irving (Knickerbocker) has worked up a fine piece of burlesque, in which Gen. Wilkinson's character is inimitably delineated in that of the vain ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... mantel-shelf of a gay young bachelor, for the boudoir of a pretty woman. You couldn't make a prettier present to a person with whom you wished to exchange a harmless joke. It is not classic art, signore, of course; but, between ourselves, isn't classic art sometimes rather a bore? Caricature, burlesque, la charge, as the French say, has hitherto been confined to paper, to the pen and pencil. Now, it has been my inspiration to introduce it into statuary. For this purpose I have invented a peculiar plastic compound which you will permit me not to divulge. That's my secret, signore! ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... them up, and she gave them forth in the same way as the first, with close, rude, audacious mimicry. There was a moment for Sherringham when it might have been feared their hostess would see in the performance a designed burlesque of her manner, her airs and graces, her celebrated simpers and grimaces, so extravagant did it all cause these refinements to appear. When it was over the old woman said, "Should you like now to hear how you do?" and, without waiting for an answer, phrased and trilled the last of ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... and various words: in those of the agriculturist of the Seine-et-Marne, whom I could name, and who for perhaps the first time in his life takes an interest in the sunset; in those of the young middle-class Parisian who had seemed incapable of speech save in terms of unbelief and burlesque; in those of the artist who utters his emotion in poetry and lifts it up to the heights of stoical philosophy. Through all unlikenesses, in the hearts of all—peasant, citizen, soldier, German schoolmaster—one ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... for ennobling Monsieur Jourdain is performed in dance and music, and comprises the Fourth Interlude.) [The ceremony is a burlesque full of comic gibberish in pseudo-Turkish and nonsensical French, in which Monsieur Jourdain is made to appear ludicrous and during which he is outfitted with an extravagant ...
— The Middle Class Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere
... incident are attractively arranged, the expression of life for the most part second-hand and artificial. There are traces of Dickens' burlesque without his sympathy, and the high colouring of Lytton with less than Lytton's wit. Disraeli's satire, too, is echoed in the political scenes. The young Australian squatter, whose experiences in England were to have formed the main purpose of ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... What a silly you were not to come! How's your headache?... I do wish your father would have those stairs altered. It's like the ascent of Mount Parnassus." Buckstone was presenting a burlesque of that name just then, and her ladyship may have had it running in ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... prescribed attendance upon the church and prayer-meetings. I saw him in the exercise of his functions, armed with a bamboo-cane, driving his herd to the spiritual pasture. He seemed himself to be conscious of the burlesque attaching to his office,—at least he behaved very absurdly in it, and many a stroke fell rather in jest than in earnest. The drollery of the driver did not, however, enliven the dejected countenances ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... was a will at the lawyer's office and were invited to be present at the reading of it. I can remember it, as if it were yesterday. It was an imposing scene, dramatic, burlesque and surprising, occasioned by the posthumous revolt of that dead woman, by the cry for liberty, by the demands of that martyred one who had been crushed by our oppression during her lifetime and who, from her closed tomb, uttered a despairing ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant |
