"Travesty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... accept the inevitable things life cruelly brings to men, without futile struggling, without contemptible pretence. Quite calmly, quite serenely, he had accepted the snows of middle age. He had not secretly groaned or cursed, railed against destiny, striven to defy it by travesty, as do many men. He had thought himself to be "above" all that—until lately. But now, as he thought of the fire, he was conscious of an immense sadness that had in it something of passion, or a regret that was, for a moment, desperate, bitter, that seared, that tortured, ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... altogether expired. The art involved in its presentment is less studied, or its 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, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... satire upon human justice that his name should have been kept green in Scotland by the rough jests of an imaginary Geordie Buchanan, commonly supposed to have been the King's fool, as extraordinary a travesty as it is possible to conceive. It is almost as strange a twist of all the facts and meaning of life that the only money of which he could be supposed to be possessed at his death should have been one hundred pounds (Scots, no doubt), ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... others had been merely childish playthings. She was strangling love, and that is a desperate deed, and the strangler suffers more than love. Maria, with the memory of that marriage which was, indeed, no marriage, but the absurd travesty of one, upon her, was in almost a suicidal frame of mind. She knew perfectly well that if it had not been for that marriage secret which she held always in mind, that George Ramsey would continue to call, that they would become engaged, that her life might be like other women's. And now he ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... a jackass-fool," Miss Stapylton said, crisply, "and a fortune-hunter, and a sot, and a travesty, and a whole heap of other things I haven't, as yet had time to look up in the dictionary. And I think—I think you call yourself an English gentleman? Well, all I have to say is God pity England if her gentlemen are of your stamp! There isn't a costermonger in all Whitechapel ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... to conceive. Would to God I had never tried to find out! But no man standing where Roberts does to-day among the leaders of a great party can fall into such a pit of shame without weakening the faith of the young and making a travesty ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... he said briefly, as he turned into a travesty of a front yard and halted beside a small cabin, built of logs and containing not more than ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... King of the Belgians protested that to interpret the intentions of the French Government in this manner was to travesty them, and to allow oneself to be misled as to the feelings of the French nation by the manifestations of a few hotheads, or of ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... ways of presenting the narrative, and Henry chose the second. He made it a travesty: and all the time that he was talking, Anna continued to gaze at him in that same curious, thoughtful fashion, as if she were noting, for the first time, a subtle variation ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... 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 ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... 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
... living man would be by night—the king 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 flames having cracked the bottles, might gain fresh fuel. ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... room told him that his brothers were awake and watching him, though the monk still snored on in his stertorous fashion. One after the other the pair stole from their beds and looked for a moment at this skilful travesty of nature's handiwork, and both nodded in token of ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... cheek and brow, as he held his glass. After many failures, I had just triumphantly succeeded when he caught sight of my reflection in a mirror, and seeing the halfpenny in my eye, my chin in air, and my face puckered up with what must have been a comical travesty of his own appearance, he concluded that I was mimicking him, and defying his authority, and coming quickly up to me he gave me a ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... think that it is a sufficient vindication of gloom and sadness to say that things are going badly with them in the outer world, and who act as if they supposed that no joy can be too exuberant and no elation too lofty if, on the other hand, things are going rightly. It is a miserable travesty of the Christian faith to suppose that its prime purpose is anything else than to put into our hands the power of ruling ourselves because we let ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... food, of waning hope—had come over Desiree. She listened heedlessly to the sounds in the streets through which the dead were passing to the Oliva Gate, while the living danced by in their hideous travesty of rejoicing. ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... with her, and a man stooped over Dylks and voided a mouthful of tobacco juice in his face; another lashed him on the head with a switch of leatherwood: all in a squalid travesty of the supreme tragedy of the race. As if a consciousness of the semblance touched the gospel-read actors in the drama, they shrank in turn from what they had done, and lost ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... "that the wives of the American farmers fill our insane asylums. See what a life they lead, most of them; no music, no books. Seventeen hours a day in a couple of small rooms—dens. Now there's Sim Burns! what a travesty of a home! Yet there are a dozen just as bad in sight. He works like a fiend,—so does his wife,—and what is their reward? Simply a hole to hibernate in and to sleep and eat in in summer. A dreary present and a well-nigh hopeless future. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... in mythological fable, Trove has scarcely ever reduced demi-god or hero to more fantastic plight than was this travesty of the great Henry. After dinner Madame de Traigny led her fair guest about the castle to show her the various points of view. At one window she paused, saying that it commanded ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 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; truth in spirit, not truth to ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... could have given no more conclusive proof of his courage and his earnestness of purpose than in selecting as the motif of this book that outrage upon justice, that travesty on morality; the condemnation of woman for a crime that is readily ignored or as readily forgiven in man. It is really such an outworn theme that the very mention of it is greeted with smiles or supercilious ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... to angelic eyes, So, through the scenes of life below, In life's ironical disguise, A travesty of man, ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you are afraid of tragedy, you ought never to have joined me in starting upon such a story. Even what has never happened must be made to seem actual to be successful. The art of fiction is to imitate truth with absolute fidelity, not to travesty it. In such circumstances the man's love would ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... soldiers, who were mostly Sikhs and hill men of good physique; but their ludicrous style of marching, the strange outlandish uniform of the men, and the shrill discord of their bands, created great amusement among the assembled Europeans, who had never seen such a travesty on soldiers before. They encamped on our right flank; but were not employed on active service till the day of assault, ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... kind of romance, we know what Mr. Howells thinks of it; and have read "Rebecca and Rowena," Thackeray's travesty of "Ivanhoe." Thackeray took no print from the romantic generation; he passed it over, and went back to Addison, Fielding, Goldsmith, Swift. His masters were the English humourists of the eighteenth century. He planned a literary history of that century, a design which was carried out ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... "What a travesty my efforts at pride are with you!" she cried. "I begin by trying to preserve some proper dignity, and end by confessing abject poverty. I yet have the ten you paid me the other day, but twenty-four dollars are not much to set up housekeeping on, ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... deposition of the king, had resolutely held himself aloof from the proceedings 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, just above the heads of the judges, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... children at this age, as if to challenge the other sex to a definite attitude immediately. A quivering freshness—the "bloom" of the poets—gave a soft shimmer to her skin of which the powder of later years is such a palpably poor travesty; her limbs were nicely rounded and not too fragile; her teeth, like Cleopatra's, were perfect, and although she was a trifle smaller than her sister, she was broad across the shoulders, ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... grand speech to the jury that would make 'em all blubber and acquit Pete without leaving the box, on the grounds of emotional or erratic insanity—or whatever it is that murderers get let off on when their folks are well fixed. He sputters quite a lot about this monstrous travesty on justice before they can drill the real facts into his head; and even then he keeps coming back ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... of the age, maintain that God himself was man's first teacher, or that he created Adam a full-grown man, with all his faculties developed, complete, and in full activity. Hence, too, the heathen mythologies, which always contain some elements of truth, however they may distort, mutilate, or travesty them, make the gods the first teachers of the human race, and ascribe to their instruction even the most simple and ordinary arts of every-day life. The gods teach men to plough, to plant, to reap, to work in iron, to erect a shelter from the storm, and ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... and he could tell what all were about to do. Oh, the secrets that were revealed, while the motives for acts were now laid bare that till then he had misunderstood! He had often heard the old saying, that if every person in a ball-room could read the thoughts of the rest, the ball would seem a travesty on enjoyment, rather than real pleasure, and now he perceived its force. He also noticed that many were better than he had supposed, and were trying, in a blundering but persevering way, to obey their consciences. He saw some unselfish thoughts and ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... he had first seen her, and they had a private box, and Uncle 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 Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... never sued him, but simply publicly seized some of his goods, sold them by auction, deducted our claim from the proceeds, and handed over to him the balance." There is something almost humorous in this travesty of an amende honorable ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... he went on, giving a kind of humorous travesty of a lecture on physics, which, Alec could not help perceiving, glanced every now and then at his mental condition, especially when it came to treat of the mechanical powers. It was evident that the strange being had some perception of the real condition of Alec's feelings. After walking a ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... later the yellow, fear-distorted face of Mark Fenwick peeped out into the corridor. He came shambling along on tottering limbs, and his coarse mouth twitched horribly. It seemed to Vera as if she were looking at a mere travesty of the man who so short a time ago had been so ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... and an affront to the whole profession of innkeeping. Whereupon, in the days that followed, looking back at our fine mood of expectancy as we entered that hostelry, and its pitiable collapse when the miserable travesty of victuals was laid before us, we fell to thinking about some of the inns we had known of old time where we had feasted not without ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... a propos of the prevailing epidemic, writes,—"Sir, there must have been an epidemic of influenza at Cambridge about thirty-three years ago, as in a travesty of Faust, produced at the A. D. C. about that time, occurs a parody of the song 'Di Frienza' from La Traviata, commencing 'Influenza is about, So I'll stay no longer out.' History repeats itself ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... literally, but upon the principle of adapting it to a modern and English treatment of its topics. Caesar, upon this system, becomes George the Second—a very strange sort of Caesar; and Pope is supposed to have been laughing at him, which may be the color that Pope gave to the travesty amongst his private circle; otherwise there is nothing in the expressions to sustain such a construction. Rome, with a little more propriety, masquerades as England, and France as Greece, or, more strictly, as Athens. Now, by such a transformation, already from the ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... stress of passion. "A while ago you called me a brave man and a good scout; and, because I'm both, your people have set a price on me. Five hundred dollars—alive or dead!" He laughed; a hoarse, harsh travesty of mirth, and added, with a lip that curled in withering contempt: "Alive or dead! A gentleman and a scout!—for just half the price of one good, sound nigger! By Heaven, it makes ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... 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 ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... to arrangement of business on reassembling; Truculent TIM, coming to the front at least urgent opportunity, demanded that Irish business should not be taken as first Order. OLD MORALITY promptly gave desired pledge. Then MARJORIBANKS, who, to travesty TREVELYAN's famous saying, Though a Whip, is a Scottish gentleman, broke the long pause of eloquent silence cultivated in the Lobby; protested against Scotch Members being placed in inconvenient position, by being obliged to put in appearance on first day after holidays. Welsh Members echoed plaint ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Dec. 20, 1890 • Various
... heard perfectly in the next box: for he was at once indignantly bidden to be silent. He withdrew to the back of the box to swear his fill. He could not recover his temper. If he had been just he would have given homage to the elegance of the travesty and the tour de force of nature and art, which made it possible for a woman of sixty to appear in a youth's costume and even to seem beautiful in it—at least to kindly eyes. But he hated all tours de force, everything which violates and falsifies Nature, He ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... life a travesty of the life of Christ, according to the Gospel of the Infancy.] Very different morally from that of Rama is the character of Krishna. While Rama is but a partial manifestation of divinity Krishna is a full manifestation; yet what a manifestation! ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... mirth. Why? Because these pages no longer contain an acute transcript of life as only a sensitive feminine mind would have the cunning to observe it, and of a form of human life in itself highly feminine in its character, but they now present a singularly insular travesty of man, an unconscious caricature of man as he could only appear to a feminine mind bound by the romantic limitations of sex, a mind, that is, devoid of masculine understanding, unable to recognise by virtue of affiliation of instinct ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... Mexican general, and wearing his forelock of hair in a way that appeared to imitate a like peculiarity in the King, there was an outcry among the audience; and Louis-Philippe's son, who was present, was informed by complaisant courtiers that the travesty was intended as an insult to his father. The next day, Harel was advertized that the authorities forbade any other presentation of the piece; and, on the 16th, the Press, following the Government's lead, were practically unanimous in anathematizing the unhappy dramatist, the Debats ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... time, and exhaust the activity of our youth in the learning of 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 ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... barrack-room smartness of address: indeed, you could have seen our army nowhere more discreditably represented than in this Castle of Edinburgh. And I used to see myself in fancy, and blush. It seemed that my more elegant carriage would but point the insult of the travesty. And I remembered the days when I wore the coarse but honourable coat of a soldier; and remembered further back how many of the noble, the fair, and the gracious had taken a delight to tend my childhood.... But I must not recall these tender and sorrowful ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... architecture. In the graphic arts it takes the form better known as "caricature" (q.v.). Its particular sphere is, however, in literature, and especially in drama. The Batrachomachia, or Battle of the Frogs and Mice, is the earliest example in classical literature, being a travesty of the Homeric epic. There are many true burlesque parts in the comedies of Aristophanes, e.g. the appearance of Socrates in the Clouds. The Italian word first appears in the Opere Burlesche of Francesco Berni (1497-1535). ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... 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 ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... be mistaken that here a voice was singing as if out of the black water-deeps, so clear and hollow were the notes. I burst through the knotted stalks of the ivy, and stooping like some poor travesty of Narcissus, with shaded face pierced down deep—deep into eyes not my own, but violet and unendurable and strange—eyes of the living water-sprite drawing my wits from me, stilling my heart, till I was very near plunging into that crystal ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... each saddle, and on it was seated wife, daughter, or perhaps a young child—I should like to have seen the church-going dames perched up proudly in all their Sunday finery, masked in black velvet, a sober Puritan travesty of a gay carnival fashion. Riding-habits were hardly known until a century ago, and even after their introduction were never worn a-pillion-riding, so the Puritan women rode in their best attire. Sometimes, in unusually muddy or dusty weather, a ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... barbarians. Their manners and customs, while lively and unconventional, are most charming. Their dress is graceful and practical, not grotesque; their soft speech is pleasing to the ear. Their flag is the original flag of the Republic of Texas; it is definitely not a barbaric travesty of our own emblem. And the underlying premises of their political system should, as far as possible, be incorporated into the organization of the Solar League. Here politics is an exciting and exacting game, in which only the true representative ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... 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 affinities. She endangered her neighbours because there was no guarantee ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... of Cal Maggard he had fled from Virginia, where, with the juries packed against him, justice would have been a travesty. In self-defense his sister had killed her husband, and he ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... drawn 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 ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 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 work for the world. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... in the years to come, when the impartial student has familiarised himself with the most adverse criticisms, he will see in this literature much of the hand of enmity, cowardice, and delusion and, as conviction forces itself upon him, there evolve therefrom the revelation of a senseless travesty of justice. ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... broke the deadlock by going directly to Roosevelt and persuading him to accept the Berlin zoning agreement, which Mr. Krock calls a "war-breeding monstrosity," and a "witless travesty on statecraft ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... look at you. If so, you do it cleverly. Your face is honest. Yet I hear it was for me alone this travesty was enacted." ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... my hair dressed, ornamented with quantities of little curls, diamonds, and jewelled pins, she had the impertinence to appear at Court wearing a huge wig, a grotesque travesty of my coiffure. I was told of it. I entered the King's apartment without deigning to salute Madame, or even ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... of poetry, the fable and the parody, which, though differing widely from each other, have both their source in the turn for the delineation of the ludicrous, and both stand in close historical relation to the iambic. The fable in Greece originated in an intentional travesty of human affairs. It is probable that the taste for fables of beasts and numerous similar inventions found its way from the East, since this sort of symbolical narrative is more in accordance with the Oriental than ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... return to America have called to my attention the fact that, in spite of all that has been written about Russia, the common incidents of everyday life are not known, or are known so imperfectly that any statement of them is a travesty. I may cite, as an example, a book published within the past two years, and much praised in America by the indiscriminating as a truthful picture of life. The whole story hung upon the great musical talent of the youthful hero. The hero skated to church through ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... 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 ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 impressive moment a scream. [1] And ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... 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 ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... 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
... this, Ryder's attitude towards Marcia in the presence of her guests had been merely a piquant travesty of that of an adorer. He had offered her gallant homage with a humorous reservation. Perhaps he had reckoned on a keener sense of humour than the guests were possessed of. At any rate, they preferred to put a rather serious construction ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... 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 kitchen ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... repeated. "When the name was a travesty, an ignominy, a reproach! When Barbarians thronged the Forum, and the representative of Galilee fishermen claimed power in the Capitol? Yes; I descend, they say, from the Commneni; but I am far prouder that, on the other hand, I come from pure Athenians. I belong to two buried worlds. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... a travesty on running, to be sure, but it was the best he could do. He staggered and stumbled; he lurched rapidly ahead for a little space and then moved with halting steps. His limbs grew weak, his breath came in gasps, and the pain in his side was ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... to believe that love can do EVERYTHING—it is the SUPERSTITION peculiar to her. Alas, he who knows the heart finds out how poor, helpless, pretentious, and blundering even the best and deepest love is—he finds that it rather DESTROYS than saves!—It is possible that under the holy fable and travesty of the life of Jesus there is hidden one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of KNOWLEDGE ABOUT LOVE: the martyrdom of the most innocent and most craving heart, that never had enough of any human love, that DEMANDED love, that demanded inexorably and frantically to be loved ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... himself, and secondly on his residence. These names were obtained from the intensity of their respective characters, in favor of the beverage named. L'eau de mort was the place termed by the voyagers, in a sort of pleasant travesty on the eau de vie of their distant, but still well-remembered manufactures on the banks of the Garonne. Ben Boden, however, paid but little attention to the drawling remarks of Gershom Waring. This was not the first ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... Altrurian proceeded, "to have any one believe that I have not been giving you a bona fide account of conditions in my country before the Evolution, when we first took the name of Altruria in our great, peaceful campaign against the Accumulation. As for offering you any allegory or travesty of your own conditions, I will simply say that I do not know them well enough to do so intelligently. But, whatever they are, God forbid that the likeness which you seem to recognize should ever go so far as the desperate state of things which we finally reached. I will not trouble ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... government and law, it is the antithesis of Mr. Carpenter's proposal that they should disappear, because they are the travesty of inward government and order. On the contrary, I hope that external government, animated by the general will of a social democratic commonwealth and vested in representatives sensitively accountable to an alert and intelligent public opinion, will appear to my listeners not ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... heart-rending grief. Their lamentations would succeed in attracting a crowd of sympathizing mourners who would join the family, and by indulging in yells, groans, and screeches, convert the whole scene into the most hideous travesty, which did violence to all those feelings of awe and solemnity, that are experienced by viewing the last sad ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... pleasing picture which imagination would fail to evolve from the burlesque ugliness of the slovenly deshabille wherewith the Dutch colonist disguises every claim to beauty or grace. On alluding to the shock experienced by this grotesque travesty of native garb, a Dutch officer asserts that there are in reality but few Dutch ladies in Java of pure racial stock, for one unhappy result of remoteness from European influence is shown by the gradual merging of ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... governors-general and the governors—the power of issuing special enactments and thereby setting aside the normal laws as well as of placing under arrest and deporting to Siberia, without the due process of law, all citizens suspected of "political unsafety." This travesty of a habeas corpus Act, insuring the inviolability of police and gendarmerie, and practically involving the suspension of the current legislation in a large part of the monarchy, has ever since been annually renewed by special imperial enactments, and ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... doctor ought to be here by this time. It was sooner than they had expected. Even the nurse had not come. Tillie was alone, out in the harness-room. He looked through the crowded rooms, at the overflowing porch with its travesty of pleasure, and he hated the whole thing with ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... were stern-faced and intense. They had made laws of their own, they had established a code. The violation of either was not to be countenanced. It was of no consequence to them that Judge Malone's methods were without precedent, that they were not even a travesty in the ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... the closet for dresses, cloaks, and artificial flowers; Brigitte as usual, was patient and cheerful. We both arranged a sort of travesty; she wanted to dress my hair herself; we painted and powdered ourselves freely; all that we lacked was found in an old chest that belonged, I believe, to the aunt. In an hour we could not recognize each other. The evening passed in singing, in a thousand follies; toward one in ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... perceived Paul's sorrow rooted in the same colossal egotism that would have sacrificed the mother on the altars of its vast conceit. He knew that Paul was grieving for himself, for lost sensations of pride, love and pleasure that he could never experience again. When the ludicrous travesty had partly spent itself, he stemmed the tide ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... of the earth, or collecting the glittering dust by sifting and washing; and then we hear of vast torrents of the precious metal finding their way into Europe, threatening to swamp us all with absolute wealth, and confound and travesty the whole monetary transactions of the world. What we don't see, is the gold itself. We should like, if it were only out of curiosity, to feel a handful of it in our pocket: but we grope in vain. A sovereign costs twenty shillings, as before; and twenty shillings are ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... sounds rendered trebly thrilling by the feeble and tremulous utterance produced by his debility. The melody, which no weakness could destroy, gradually wrought its sweet influence on the senses of those who heard it. It even prevailed over the miserable travesty of the song of David which the singer had selected from a volume of similar effusions, and caused the sense to be forgotten in the insinuating harmony of the sounds. Alice unconsciously dried her tears, and bent her melting eyes on the pallid features of Gamut, with an ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... copy, distantly and humbly indeed, the fashion of her clothes, to learn the trick of her voice, of her slow, soft gait, of her little, surprised laugh. But I soon give it up. If I tried till my death-day, I should never arrive at any thing but a miserable travesty. Before—ere Roger's return—I used complacently to treasure up any little civil speeches, any small compliments that people paid me, thinking, "If such and such a one think me pleasing, why may not Roger?" But now I have given ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... 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 ...
— Mother America • Sam McClatchie
... schoolmen or their equivalent are useless in Social discussion. Social phenomena do not lend themselves to the rigorous formulas of mathematics and logic, for the human intellect is unable to discern and grasp all the factors of these problems. My travesty of Plato was intended to illustrate the difficulty of close reasoning ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... Prince Nagaya's 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 later, the lady Asuka ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... hearts are torn, other families are dispersed, other nameless crimes are accomplished coolly, simply, legally: it is the necessary revenue of the one, it is the indispensable supply of the others. Must not the South live, and how dares any one travesty a fact so simple? by what right was penned that eloquent calumny called "Uncle ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... an 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 ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Pahi Minstrels emerged from a little boarded room in one corner, and took up their positions on the platform at the end of the hall. Then, for two mortal hours, there was a dismal and lugubrious travesty of the performances of that world-famous troupe which never performs out ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... Molon,[1] who taught at Rhodes. The former raised the charge that the Jews alone of all peoples refused to have any communication with other nations, but regarded them as their enemies. Molon, besides a general travesty of their early history, wrote a special diatribe against them—the first document of the kind which history records—accusing them of atheism and misanthropy, cowardice and stupidity. These remained the stock charges for centuries, and they ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... princess,—a consumptive school-mistress,—a young woman dying of the perfidy of her lover,—a mysterious widow; and I daily expect to hear that a caterpillar which figured as hero in one of my tales was an allegory of myself, and that a cat mentioned in "The New Tobias" is a travesty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... be read without danger of serious misunderstanding. The two well-known passages which follow, however, are cases where either a simple statement may become a ridiculous travesty or a serious arraignment may ...
— Punctuation - A Primer of Information about the Marks of Punctuation and - their Use Both Grammatically and Typographically • Frederick W. Hamilton
... was a child I was so bored with 'Telemachus' that, in order to endure it, I turned it into travesty." ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and dabbed at her nose with a ridiculous travesty of a handkerchief. "Be so kind," she said in a tearful voice, though her eyes were quite dry and, if one looked closely, ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... extreme views, calm, polished, and judicial in his demeanour. But whatever his opinions on the questions of the day he was too discreet a politician and too honest a judge ever to have descended to such a travesty of justice as had been shown by his predecessor in the case of Gourlay. His influence, however was never in the direction of liberal measures. He opposed responsible government and the union of the two provinces, both when proposed ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... the laws which confine the ebb and flow of civilization; unconsciously fulfilling the will of God, who has suffered evil and good to abide in nature, and reserved the secret of their continual strife to Himself. A frantic travesty of debate ensued, a Walpurgis-revel of intellects. Between the dreary jests of these children of the Revolution over the inauguration of a newspaper, and the talk of the joyous gossips at Gargantua's birth, stretched the gulf that divides the nineteenth century from the sixteenth. ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... Boon himself, in 1784, but in reality by John Filson, the first Kentucky historian,—a man who did history good service, albeit a true sample of the small hedge-school pedant. The old pioneer's own language would have been far better than that which Filson used; for the latter's composition is a travesty of Johnsonese in its most aggravated form. For Filson see Durrett's admirable "Life" ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... boy, and such was her one comfort. Her mirror showed an epicene denizen of romance,—Rosalind or Bellario, a frail and lovely travesty of boyhood; but it is likely that the girl's heart showed stark terror. Here was imminent no jaunt into Arden, but into the gross jaws of even bodily destruction. Here was probable dishonor, a guaranteeable death. She could fence well ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... Radbourn, pitilessly, "that the wives of the American farmers fill our insane asylums. See what a life they lead, most of them; no music, no books. Seventeen hours a day in a couple of small rooms—dens. Now there is Sim Burns! What a travesty of a home! Yet there are a dozen just as bad in sight. He works like a fiend—so does his wife—and what is their reward? Simply a hole to hibernate in and to sleep and eat in in summer. A dreary present and a ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... on a 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 ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... know what you require at my hands," returned he, passionately. "You do not know how an ill-timed pause or a slighted rest would mar the fair face of my godlike music, and travesty its beauty." ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... then, will make use of plain English, "naked wordes in English"; he will employ the national language, the king's English—"the king that is lord of this langage."[549] And he will use it, as in truth he did, to express exactly his thoughts and not to embellish them; he hates travesty, he worships truth; he wants words and things to be in the closest ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... for an impression which I carried about with me almost constantly for a period of two years and which culminated finally in a visit to Tolstoy—that the Settlement, or Hull-House at least, was a mere pretense and travesty of the simple impulse "to live with the poor," so long as the residents did not share the common lot of hard ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... now beginning to see the real author of the "Maximes," when, at the age of forty, he begins to peep forth from the travesty of his aristocratic violence and idleness. Whether the transformation would have been gradual instead of sudden is what can never be decided, but we date it from July 2, 1652, when he was dangerously wounded in a riot in the Faubourg St. Antoine, at the ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... 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 ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... nothing, but put down a piece of money; and the man behind the counter said nothing, but took the money and filled the bottles, which were hidden under the tattered shawl again, and the speechless phantoms glided out, guarding that little travesty of modesty even in that ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... 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, it is impossible ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... the 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 danger with the Trade, in quarto, by Roger Cook, Esq. Erasmus ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... passions; the multiplication of androgyne lodges for this purpose; the dual nature of the Divine Principle; and the cultus of Lucifer as the good God. The most curious feature of the performance is that here again it is from end to end a travesty of Eliphas Levi, slice after slice from his chief writings, combined with interlineal additions, which give them a sense diametrically opposed to that of the great magus. Now, it is impossible that two persons, working independently for the production ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... 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 veneration for the great ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... no aimless travesty of the average Wall Street man, but a faithful etching of him, apart from those more sorry lineaments which might be disclosed in a portrait painted, as it were, with the oil of his own slippery speculations. If he resents ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... British select their island home; destiny and history were again the determining factors. But it would be a travesty of the truth to assert that Germany has not envied her that position, together with the advantages arising from it. Yet in the same degree as the inhabitants of these islands have used the "talents" entrusted to them through their favourable position, Germany's jealousy seems to have become more ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith |
