"Travesty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had once told me what to do on such occasions. It was either to throw the patient upon his back and move his arms up and down in a travesty of rowing or to slap him violently on the back. Seeing that the stranger was several times larger than myself I chose with diffidence the latter course. Rising to my feet I turned him round and thumped his back vigorously. He received the treatment with amiable ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... dreams that she is jealous of her husband, she will find many shocking incidents to vex and make her happiness a travesty. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... Powers as a man whose lust of conquest was a terrible menace to all constituted authority. The oligarchies thought themselves bound to combine against him in order to reseat the Bourbons on the throne of France and restore law and order to that distracted country. What a travesty ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... was greater than Solomon typically denounced in foretelling the overthrow of that gorgeous pile. The Bible, as to its important verities and solemn doctrine, is transparent to the imagination and affections, and does not require the mediation of dumb show or scenic travesty. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Virginian Loyalist, and a Tory of 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 unsuccessfully ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... closet for dresses, cloaks, and artificial flowers; Brigitte, as usual, was patient and cheerful. We both arranged a sort of travesty; she wished to dress my hair herself; we painted and powdered ourselves freely; all that we lacked was found in an old chest that had 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 ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... translation of the poems of a newly discovered Oriental Greek poetess; Bilitis (more usually Beltis) is the Syrian name for Aphrodite. Les Chansons de Bilitis are not without charm, but have been severely dealt with by Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Sappho und Simonides, 1913, p. 63 et seq.) as "a travesty of Hellenism," betraying inadequate knowledge ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Emperors?" she 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, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... safely off for Fremont we started to produce a column that would be a travesty on his favorite expressions at the expense of his titled friends. We opined and violated all the confidences of which we were possessed in regard to Colonel Phocion Howard, of the Batavia frog-farm, Major Moses P. Handy, the flaming sword of ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... are not uncommon today and are of two different kinds. First, there is the burlesque that is travesty, which takes a well-known and often serious subject and hits off its famous features in ways that are uproariously funny. "When Caesar Sees Her," took the famous meeting between Cleopatra and Marc Antony and made even the most ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... window together, amused at the figure Mungo presented as with an odd travesty of the soldier's strategy, and all unseen as he fancied, he chased a fowl round the narrow confines of the ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... this travesty of battle maintained. Then the Indian fire slackened, and finally ceased altogether. Believing the affair to be merely a temporary outbreak of a few hot-headed savages, that must quickly blow over, Gladwyn took advantage of this lull in the storm to send out ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... earnest in their distractions," observed Deppingham, with a glance at his wife's eager face. "This could be nothing more than a travesty, ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... five-franc piece. It was the first coin he found in his pocket, and the sight of it caused a frown. Confound those Montmartre playwrights! Why was their stupid travesty constantly recurring to his mind? He frowned again, this time at Auguste Comte's smugness, and looked at his watch. Twenty-five minutes to seven! It was too late now to do other than write—if he succeeded. If not—ah, well! "Some of them are slain in the ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... called us at this, and we all trooped into the house again. The little girl had crowed and clapped her hands during our struggle, all unconscious of the dreadful event of which it was a juvenile travesty. We two boys admired her as she was borne in on the negro's ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... in his literature, he must express himself and his own views and preferences; for to do anything else is to do a far more perilous thing than to risk being immoral: it is to be sure of being untrue. To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty a sentiment; that will not be helpful. To conceal a sentiment, if you are sure you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth. There is probably no point of view possible to a sane man but contains some truth and, in the true connection, might be profitable to the race. I am not afraid of ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a full beard, roughly trimmed into the travesty of a Vandyke, was dealing. He tossed out the cards, carefully inclining their faces downward, and returned the remainder of the pack softly ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... "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 ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... Register. One of these was a grim story of village crime called The Poacher, and written in avowed imitation of Crabbe. Scott was earnest in assuring Lockhart that he had written in no spirit of travesty, but only to test whether he would be likely to succeed in narrative verse of the same pattern. He had adopted Crabbe's metre, and as far as he could compass it, his spirit also. The result is noteworthy, and shows once again how a really original imagination ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... Camberton just before the final smash and the exile. In the hall of the college there hung a portrait of his great grandfather in his black preacher's robes; of this, Roper Ellwell, second, was a weak travesty. The thin features had been blurred in the process of transmitting; an inclination to flabby stoutness of person made the young man portly, where the old minister had been nervously fragile. But ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... 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. ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... he 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 with ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... region, firstly on Gershom 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 time he had ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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 ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... 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 kitchen ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... had dumbly responded to the influence in the air and come. In the foreground, where a solitary Indian stood motionless, waiting, there was being repeated the same puerile pantomime and horse-play of a former occasion. At intervals, from the rear, sounded the war whoop travesty. It was all the same as that afternoon eighteen days before, when the girl had left, similar even to the cloud of black smoke in the distance lifting lazily into the sky; only now the trail, instead of growing thinner and lighter, became ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... followed the armies as a spy. The latter had been arrested because his little girl had picked up a bit of telephone wire broken by shrapnel. One morning toward 6 o'clock the Bavarian officers went through a travesty of justice, reading documents drawn up in German, collecting the votes of eight or nine young Lieutenants to whom voting papers had been given. The two men were condemned unanimously and warned that they ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... inimitable comic actor, Poitier, in a farce called "Les Danaides" that was making a furor—a burlesque upon a magnificent mythological ballet, produced with extraordinary splendor of decoration, at the Academie Royale de Musique, and of which this travesty drew all Paris in crowds; and certainly any thing more ludicrous than Poitier, as the wicked old King Danaus, with his fifty daughters, it is ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... march of Jews. The fishmongers, who, from their proximity to the Ghetto, were aware of its customs, enriched the Carnival with divers other parodies; now it was a travesty of a rabbi's funeral, now a long cavalcade of Jews galloping upon asses, preceded by a mock rabbi on horseback, with his head to the steed's tail, which he grasped with one hand, while with the other ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... alludes to his friendship with a much younger and gayer man than himself, Charles Cotton (born 1630), the friend of Colonel Richard Lovelace, and of Sir John Suckling: the translator of Scarron's travesty of Virgil, and of Montaigne's Essays. Cotton was a roisterer, a man at one time deep in debt, but he was a Royalist, a scholar, and an angler. The friendship between him and Walton is creditable to the freshness of the old man and to the kindness of the younger, who, to be sure, laughed ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... manifest consciousness of the ludicrous that these industrials now do their little drama of the war-dance and the oration and the council-smoke. That drama has degenerated into a very feeble farce now, and the actors in it would be quite outdone in their travesty by any average corps of "supes" at one of our theatres. By-and-by all this will have died out, and the "Indian side" of the stream at Lorette will be assimilated in all its features to the other. The moccason is already typifying the decadence of aboriginal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... the same kind were taken off by caricaturists; and the solemn air of this form of verse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle. A constant invitation to parody was offered by the 'Divine Comedy,' and Lorenzo il Magnifico wrote the most admirable travesty in the style of the 'Inferno' (Simposio or I Beoni). Luigi Pulci obviously imitates the Improvisatori in his 'Morgante,' and both his poetry and Boiardo's are in part, at least, a half-conscious parody of the chivalrous poetry of the Middle Ages. Such a caricature was deliberately ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... found it hard, too, to get her out of his eyes, even now—she had impressed herself so shockingly upon him. The picture of her floated in front of him, above the shimmering pavement, as if he still confronted her in all her unloveliness, the smooth, white face like a travesty on youth, the swift, darting eyes, the hard, straight lines of the lean figure, the cold deliberation of ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... example, when I was riding from Bloemfontein to Kimberley I and my companion descried a farmhouse two miles in front of us near Koodoesrand Drift; when we had come within about a mile of it a little travesty of a Union Jack was run up on a stick, and when we rode up to the door a farmer came out, smiling, rubbing his hands, sniggering—in a word, truckling. His talk was like the political swagger of the ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... 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, ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... itself in these re-entering curves. It has not even ventured to throw itself boldly outward, as do other thoughts, but projects half-heartedly from the astral body, which must be supposed to be on the left of the picture. A sad travesty of the divine quality love; yet even this is a stage in evolution, and distinctly an improvement upon earlier stages, ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... of such a travesty of the sacred office as these passages describe must have been deplorable; and without doubt it was one of the principal causes of the overthrow of the Jewish State. Jeremiah says expressly, that from the prophets profaneness had gone out over ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... a factor in the class exercise. The humdrum traditional teacher asks the question; and when the pupil drones forth the answer, "Columbus discovered America in 1492," she dismisses the whole matter with the phonographic response, "Very good." What a farce! What a travesty upon the work of the teacher! Instead of being very good, it is bad, yea, inexpressibly bad. The artist teacher does it far better. By the magic of her touch she causes the imagination of her pupils to be fired and their interest to thrill with the mighty significance of the ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... and papers entrusted to his charge. In very stormy weather the mail guard would prop up the lid of his imperial and get inside for shelter. On one occasion when the mail arrived at Liverpool the guard was found imprisoned in his letter-box. The lid had fallen and fastened in the male travesty of "Ginevra." Fortunately for him it was a burlesque and not a tragedy. Bags thrown to the guards at wayside stations not unfrequently got under the wheels of the train and the contents were cut to pieces. On one occasion, on the Grand Junction, an ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... spectacular travesty came back to me with a rush, as I sat there in the presence of the only man who had ever been known to get the better of Jasper Titus in a trade. I remembered with some vividness my scornful attitude toward the newspapers of the metropolis, all of which fairly sloshed over ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... no town in England, or country in Europe, of which he could not give a very particular account. He had some letters, and was ingenious, but much of an unbeliever, and wickedly undertook, some years after, to travesty the Bible in doggerel verse, as Cotton had done Virgil. By this means he set many of the facts in a very ridiculous light, and might have hurt weak minds if his work had been published; but ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... 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 Christ ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... magicians and astrologers who had been brought from Italy, and that the black art alone was responsible for her success. These accusations finally aroused such public hostility that, after a trial which was a travesty upon justice, Eleanora was soon condemned to death, on the charge of having unduly influenced the queen by means of magic philters. Eleanora went to her death bravely, saying with dignity to her accusers: ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... Henriette and Maurice directly from their arrest to their trial, and they gazed upon a sight for Gods and men—a travesty on the sacred name of justice. Such scenes would seem unbelievable to us but for the recent events of the Russian Revolution, which prove that in our age also a proletarian dictatorship can ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... English. Some of these songs were transpositions or parodies of Christian hymns, and one in particular was his favorite. Apparently he had made it very popular with the natives of the band, for it vied with the "Himene Tatou Arearea" in repetition. It was a crude travesty of a hymn much sung in religious camp-meetings and revivals, of which the proper chorus as often heard by me in Harry Monroe's mission in ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... of rebel paraphernalia. Their only intent was against the treasonable liquor traffic. Had there been no liquor dispensing there had been no smashing. This the liquorized courts would not admit for a moment. Every ruling was a burlesque on civil law, a travesty on justice and a contemptible farce. The whole proceedings from beginning to end were a ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... 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, ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... insufficient 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 ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... satisfaction of the 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 of bogus documents, should ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... 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
... 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
... Markheim. "Who can do so? My life is but a travesty and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them. You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and muffled in a cloak. If they had their ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... 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 ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... presented to posterity in. The artists fancy that the court dress of posterity is that of Van Dyck's time, or Caesar's. I have seen the model of a statue of Sir Robert Peel,—a statesman whose merit consisted in yielding gracefully to the present,—in which the sculptor had done his best to travesty the real man into a make-believe Roman. At the period when England produced its greatest poets, we find exactly the reverse of this, and we are thankful that the man who made the monument of Lord Bacon had genius to copy every button of his dress, everything down to the rosettes on his shoes, and ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... god."8 Mure says that the doctrine of apotheosis belonged to the Graco Pelasgic race through all their history.9 Seneca severely satirizes the ceremony, and the popular belief which upheld it, in an elaborate lampoon called Apocolocyntosis, or the reception of Claudius among the pumpkins. The broad travesty of ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... 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 ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the will of the baggage herself!" declared Monsieur Brisson with bitterness. "Hardly had she put on her travesty of a mourning than she began her oglings ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... is a comedy, but if it has no story or cannot be told humorously, then no amount of bolstering will ever make it into a comedy. You may add a lot of knockabout and perhaps get an acceptable farce, or you can write in sensation and get travesty, but you cannot by these means change the unfit into comedy, and the broad use of 'comedy' to apply to anything intended to be diverting is a misuse of an ancient and honorable word.... To my way of thinking comedy is first of all ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... the Royal Chapel, to be conducted by Dr. Barlow, Bishop of Rochester. They had been brought to London to be schooled into conformity; and as part of the process, the English bishops had been commanded to prepare a series of sermons for their benefit. These were such a travesty on the texts of Scripture they were supposed to expound, that if they had been addressed to the ministers' own congregations in Scotland, the humblest of their hearers would have resented them. Whatever these bishops could ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... the new dissipation, which carried Carl away from his old riots; the new magnet that dragged from him all the money he could earn, and more than he could borrow. It was a wild and reckless crew and addicted to such entertainments as the travesty on Marc Antony, with music by Carl, who played ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of Tibet are a travesty of the Mahayana which on Indian soil adhered to the sound doctrine that saints are known by their achievements as men and cannot be selected among infant prodigies.[14] It was the general though not universal opinion that one who had entered on the career of a Bodhisattva could not fall so low ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... with a caution—forsooth!—your fellow —magistrate. I've consulted my solicitor as to whether an action will lie for false imprisonment. I'm informed that it won't. I take this opportunity of saying that justice in this town is a travesty. I have no wish to be associated further with you or your fellows; but you are vastly mistaken if you imagine that I shall resign my position on the Bench or the Town Council.—Yours, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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 ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of French and English in Hamilton. Hardly any Frenchman could have borne to put even a fictitious eidolon of himself in such a contemptible light; very few Englishmen, though they might easily have done this, would have done it so neatly, and with so quaint a travesty of romantic situation. But the main story, as admitted above, is assommant, though, just before the breach, a substitution of three agreeable damsels for the nymph herself promises ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... oddly enough, an almost total lack of resentment amongst the victims consigned here by an infamous travesty of justice. Madame Akimova, for instance, a plain but homely-looking person, seemed devoted to the care of her miserable little household to the exclusion of all mundane matters. I sometimes wondered, as I sat in her hut, and watched the pale, patient little woman clad in rusty black ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... "this little travesty reminds me of a quaint story. It was in 1746, when I was completing my noviciate under the care of the Pere Magitot, a man well on in years, of deep learning and austere morals. At that period, you perhaps remember, ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... The composer has sought to catch them, has touched them with his refining art and has spoiled them. The playwright has striven to transfer from the field to the stage a cotton-picking scene and has made a travesty of it. To transfer the passions of man and to music-riddle them is an art with stiff-jointed rules, but the charm of a cotton-picking scene is an essence, and is breathed but cannot be caught. Here seems to lie a sentiment that no other ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... hanged for infanticide, and it is a mere travesty of justice to pass on her the death sentence, well knowing that it ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... details of the decoration were deplorable, and the Husainabad was just a piece of showy, meretricious tinsel. The gathering dusk and the golden expanse of the Indian sunset sky had by some subtle wizardry thrown a veil of glamour over this poor travesty of the marvels of Delhi and Agra. So a long-cherished ideal was hopelessly shattered, which ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... often this "moral" is tagged on at the bottom, and the reader, not knowing that it is the key of the whole thing and the only important paragraph in the article, tranquilly turns up his nose at it and leaves it unread. One can deliver a satire with telling force through the insidious medium of a travesty, if he is careful not to overwhelm the satire with the extraneous interest of the travesty, and so bury it from the reader's sight and leave him a joked and defrauded victim, when the honest intent was to add to either his knowledge or his wisdom. I have had a deal of experience ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... He had but disdainful and kingly silence. Thoroughly piqued, Herod turned from insulting questions to acts of malignant derision. He and his men-at-arms made sport of the suffering Christ, "set him at nought and mocked him"; then in travesty they "arrayed him in a gorgeous robe and sent him again to Pilate."[1289] Herod had found nothing in ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... different 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
... 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; ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... our sex, I lack the imagination 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 of virtue ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... Ambroise Thomas's Hamlet, had been succeeded in the rle by Lassalle, whose fine art in newer works had met with full recognition from press and public. To Lassalle's great surprise, his Hamlet, a remarkably fine performance within the limit set by the pitiable operatic travesty of Shakespeare's play, was received coldly, and there was wide comment on the circumstance that he had ignored traditions of performance, especially in the scene between the Prince and his mother. In considerable distress he went to Faure, who ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... until the gondola of Giambattista or of Jacopo should close the colloquy; an older peasant, tranquilly kneeling to the Madonna of the traghetto, amid the clatter, while steaming greasy odors from her housewifely basket of Venetian dainties mount slowly, like some travesty of incense, and cloud the humble shrine. Two or three comers swell the group from the recesses of the dark little shop behind, for no other reason than that life is pleasant where so much is going on; and some maiden, into ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... wit is thus enriched by his complacency in dealing it out. His part indeed amply pays its way, in showing how much of mirth may be caused by feebleness in a great attempt at a small matter. Besides, in him the mother element of the whole piece runs out into broad humour and travesty; his reasons for breaking with his master the Jew being, as it were, a variation in drollery upon the fundamental air of the play. Thus he exhibits under a comic form the general aspect of surrounding humanity; while at the same time his character is an integral part ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... white sand lay the chalk-white skeleton of a man, the grinning mouth and sightless eyes staring up at me in a hideous travesty of mirth; and all around between the outstretched bones lay diamonds, diamonds innumerable: big, bright, sparkling beauties by the handful, wealth incredible to be had for the picking up, with no guardian other than these bare bones ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... 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 expression ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... Fine Arts," and aims at carrying a love of the beautiful into all the relations of life. The fantastical developments which accompanied the movement brought its devotees into much ridicule about ten years ago, and the pages of Punch of that time will be found to happily travesty its more amusing and extravagant aspects. The great success of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, "Patience," produced in 1881, was also to some extent due to the humorous allusions to the extravagances of the "Aesthetetes." In support of what may be ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... applauded loudly when the 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 ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... and loose with the rites of the Church. Indulgences for a hundred years were readily granted for a consideration. The manufacture of relics became an organized branch of industry; and festivals of fools and festivals of asses were invented by the jovial priests themselves in travesty of sacred mysteries, as a welcome relaxation from the monotony of prescribed ecclesiastical ceremony. Pilgrimages increased in number and frequency; new saints were created by the dozen; and the disbelief of the clergy in the doctrines they professed was manifest even to the ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... 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 labor ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... an eye to the bizarre, to whom Dennis had presented some of his characteristic enterprises, had put the young Irishman in the way of securing a biography of the Hebrew premier, whom he provided with such an absurd travesty of likeness, and the "ole clo' merchant" was so impressed by the resolution and dexterity of the celebrated statesman, that he became, from that moment, the prey of a consuming ambition whose direction he ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... this hot August day, one of the last of glorious Fructidor, had begun to wane, and the shades of evening to slowly creep into the long, bare room where this travesty of justice was ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... would do, nor, it might be said, such is the insanity of the atmosphere, not even what they intend to do. The conduct of Rochester is so primevally and superhumanly caddish that Bret Harte in his admirable travesty scarcely exaggerated it. 'Then, resuming his usual manner, he threw his boots at my head and withdrew,' does perhaps reach to something resembling caricature. The scene in which Rochester dresses up as an old gipsy has something in it which is really not to be found in any ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... generally. He was appalled to find out what a tremendous hold the whisky men had on the business and politics of the place. It was a revelation to him of their power. The whole thing seemed to him like a travesty of free government, and a terrible commentary on the boasted ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... I neither know nor care," Said Baba; "but pray do as I desire: I have no more time nor many words to spare." "At least," said Juan, "sure I may inquire The cause of this odd travesty?"—"Forbear," Said Baba, "to be curious; 't will transpire, No doubt, in proper place, and time, and season: I have no authority ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... What must be, must be. If 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 be changed ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... man, who was intended by the people who voted for him to have no other connection with reconstruction than what a casting vote in the Senate might possibly give him, has taken the whole vast subject into his exclusive control. Was there ever acted on the stage of history such a travesty of constitutional government? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... 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
... own characters, they scorn the human and travesty the divine; they gather a company of guileless youths, and feed them with solemn chatter upon Virtue and quibbling verbal puzzles; in their pupils' presence they are all for fortitude and temperance, and have no words bad enough for wealth ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... love; the 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, ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... back some of our fine old horror of pinchbeck, and once more insist on truth as the foundation of our national life. Education and refinement will be of no avail if they do not land us here; and the progress of the arts and society must not be brought to mean chiefly the travesty of civilized ladies into the semblance of savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances. Women are always rushing about the world eager after everything but their home business. Here is something for them to do—the regeneration of society by means of their own energies; ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... with the microscope, but seen largely, in plain daylight, with the natural eye? What novel has more good sense, and gaiety, and wit, and unflagging, admirable literary skill? Good souls, I suppose, must sometimes read it in the blackguard travesty of a translation. But there is no style so untranslatable; light as a whipped trifle, strong as silk; wordy like a village tale; pat like a general's despatch; with every fault, yet never tedious; with no merit, yet inimitably right. And, once more, to make an end ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the most recent additions to the Entente Alliance proves that the art of war as practised by Germany is such a horrible travesty that even ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 18, 1917 • Various
... bundle of ideas—some of them very illiterate, some very delicate hair-splitting, some curious even to comicality,—gathered out of the writings of a certain number of men, who assuredly were not inspired, since they often travesty Scripture, and at times diametrically contradict it. Having lived in the darkest times of the Church, they were extremely ignorant and superstitious, even the best of them being enslaved by fancies as untrue in ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... with blazing eyes and with hands that shook in the 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 ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... called his young men to take care of our canoe and to bring wood for a fire that he might feast us. The wife of this chief was one of the finest looking Indian women I have ever met,—tall, straight, lithe and dignified. But, crawling about on the floor on all fours, was the most piteous travesty of the human form I have ever seen. It was an idiot boy, sixteen years of age. He had neither the comeliness of a beast nor the intellect of a man. His name was Hootz-too (Bear Heart), and indeed all his motions were those of a bear rather than of ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... make himself understood, would perhaps involve further risk of infection. While he was considering, the door slowly opened, and the leather-skinned crone appeared. Her eyes were swollen. In her hand she carried a travesty of a wreath, done in whitish metal, which she had interwoven with her own black mantilla, the best substitute for crape at hand. This she undertook to hang on the door. As Carroll crossed to address her, a powerful, sullen- faced man, with a scarred forehead and the insignia of some official ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... him, and so sensitive, despite the apparent indifference to the opinion of the world, of which he spoke so often, and with such unguarded emphasis. Sometimes she tried to think that he was masquerading, and that a travesty of evil really concealed sound principles, possibly even evangelical tendencies, or a bias towards religious mania. But she was quickly undeceived. Lord Reggie was really as black as he painted himself, or Society told many lies concerning him. Of ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... applied precisely the same argument to Ireland as, in his memorable speeches of the next year (1774), he applied to America, and in both cases he was right. The only mistake he made was in his estimate of that travesty of a representative assembly, the Irish House of Commons, which, at the secret instigation of the Viceroy, though without actual coercion, eventually threw out a tax so distasteful to its English ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... 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
... plan at least offered a fair ground for discussion, but the Commission's Report is a travesty of his scheme. It intensifies every native difficulty and goes much further than the wild demands of the "Free" State extremists. Thus even if it be thrown out, as it deserves to be, future exploiters will always cite it as an excuse for measures subversive of native well-being. In fact, that ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... though it was 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 liked a woman to be a woman, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... 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 on all ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... In the summer-time we sometimes saw her with her servants wandering aimlessly about the court. She had the appearance of a gentle, quiet, kindly person who was always afraid of intruding and had no place or part in anything. And now she is the Empress Dowager! It seems a travesty on the English language to call this kindly, gentle soul by the same title that we have been accustomed to use in speaking of the woman who has just ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... not question the sincerity of Mr. Bryan's attachment to the cause of arbitration; but it is strange that he does not see what a disservice he does to arbitration by accepting and preaching a travesty of it. When there is litigation between individuals over an alleged wrong, the first condition is that the wrong shall stop for the interim—a result effected through an interim injunction between nations. There is no judge ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... are the springs of Georg and Kasimir, at which stand two charming maidens ready to fill your glasses. No conventional and hideous hat or bonnet disfigures the neat outline of their heads. No travesty of Berlin or Paris fashion burlesques their sturdy figures. Theirs the traditional costume of the Thuringian female peasant—a dark skirt, and white, short-sleeved chemisette, a blue apron and the daintiest of white silk kerchiefs, fringed sparsely and brocaded abundantly with red roses. Albeit ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... redoubled their travesty of merriment. They voiced the gossip of a vanished society; the politics, fashions, and scandals of old Florence. One heard the names of noble families long since extinct, accounts of historic escapades related as if they had ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... unnatural fashion? He blushed with shame as he thought to himself that a foreigner might apparently journey through the country from one end to the other without knowing that there was such a thing as a soldier in the land. What a travesty this was on civilization! How baseless the proud boasts of national greatness when only an insignificant and almost invisible few paid any attention to the claims of military glory! The outlook was indeed dismal, but Sam was no pessimist. Obstacles were in his dictionary "things ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... to travesty the truth, and I was impotent—the truth, that profound thing whose voice was in my ears, whose shadow was in my eyes, and whose taste was in ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... his boots. He gave one the impression of having followed cleanliness of thought and person all his life. I began to have a sneaking admiration for the man. I beheld in its openness that which I had often seen pierce through Paragot's travesty of mountebankery or rags, but which singularly enough seemed hidden beneath his conventional garb—the inborn and incommunicable quality of the high-bred gentleman. I set to dreaming of it and scheming out a portrait in which that essential quality could be expressed; ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... au fait with the 'Tempest' and felt no indignation or jealousy at the travesty, it was charming; and though the audience at the rehearsal numbered few of these, the refined sweetness and power of the performers made it delightful and memorable. Every one was in raptures with the fairies, who had been beautifully drilled, and above all with their graceful little ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that, to feel the degradation of her nature, to lie, sick with exhaustion, on the broken slats of her bed under a ravelled-out travesty of a quilt, and get up morning after morning in an iron winter dark—to experience that in your spirit and put it into durable metal, hard stone—is to hold ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the bishop had to listen to Veni Creator Spiritus, in its English form, and it seemed to him the worst of all possible hymns. Its defects became monstrously exaggerated to his hypersensitive mind. It impressed him in its Englished travesty as a grotesque, as a veritable Charlie Chaplin among hymns, and in truth it does stick out most awkward feet, it misses its accusatives, it catches absurdly upon points of abstruse doctrine. The great Angel stood motionless and ironical ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... It was 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 ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... sense of humor almost as much as the verses themselves. It is true that while differing utterly in his tone of mind, and his attitude toward the mediaeval stories, from that of the mediaeval artists and sculptors,—whose gargoyles and other grotesques were carved without a thought of travesty on anything religious,—he is at one with them in combining extreme irreverence of form with a total lack of irreverence of spirit toward the real spiritual mysteries of religion. He burlesques saints and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... something sinister in every move, as if his body was driven on without conscious volition, actuated by some dreadful, unclean force. Breed knew it for some sort of poisoning, and his muscles bunched for flight. Shady barked angrily as if to drive the thing away. Then Breed saw a hairless travesty of a coyote move out of a draw and halt directly in the path of the mad coyote. Cripp stood there grinning till he felt the other's teeth score his unprotected hide; then he whirled and snapped back at him. The mad coyote kept straight on and Cripp followed at his own ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... Having by a travesty of truth created a false theological bogey, bearing little resemblance either to Catholic or to Anglican teaching, Lord Dawson proceeds to demolish his own creation by a somewhat boisterous eulogy of sex-love. Now sex-love is an instinct ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... sorts 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 with the Greek character. Aesop (fl. 572 B.C.) was very far from being ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... imagined that his honour's flashing eyes, convulsive mouth and distorted face were the outward signs of a jocose frame of mind, for there was always a sort of travesty of humour in Mr. John's features whenever he was angry. So, to his own confusion, it occurred to him to make a joke for the first ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... have studied Prussian conditions to very little purpose when he makes so ludicrous a comparison. To call such a quiet, silent country gentleman, such a law-abiding Parliamentarian as Sir Edward Grey, to call even him a typical Prussian Junker is a travesty of the facts. A more striking contrast to the complete Junker of Pomerania than the "Complete Angler" of the Foreign Office could not well be imagined. The glorified Prussian Junker is Bismarck. The typical Junker is Prince Bluecher. A perfect modern type is that ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... went on 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'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 ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... whom he had loved long ago and who had died. Since her death he had put aside love as a passion. Now and then—not often—a sort of travesty of love had come to him, the spectre of the real. It is difficult for a young, strong man in the pride of his life never to have any dealing either with love or with its spectre. But Isaacson was right. Nigel's life had been much purer than are most men's lives. Often ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... half is not told") sounds to the unobservant like a harsh exaggeration, an imaginative travesty of the principles of labor organizations. It is not a travesty; it has no element of exaggeration. Not in the last twenty-five years has a great strike or lockout occurred in this country without supplying facts, notorious and undisputed, upon which some of these confessions of ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... Vargas and Louis del Rio. The two royalist nobles, Noircarmes and Barlaymont, and five Netherland jurists also had seats; but, as only the Spaniards voted, the others before long ceased to attend the meetings. The proceedings indeed were, from the legal point of view, a mere travesty of justice. A whole army of commissioners was let loose upon the land, and informers were encouraged and rewarded. Multitudes of accused were hauled before the tribunal and were condemned by batches almost without the form of a trial. For long hours day by day Vargas and del Rio revelled ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... place," 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 ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... them. He said that I wrote many things which I did not believe, and then stood aside, and was amused in a humorous mood to see that other people believed them. It would be absurd to be, or even to feel, indignant at such a travesty of my purpose as this, and indeed I think that one is never very indignant at misrepresentation unless one's mind accuses itself of its being true ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 themselves ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... 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 acts. Many ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... pretense, an hypocrisy. I would be 'your wife,' you say. I would give you all my love, all my life. You, in return, would give me—your left hand. And you know well that, in a country which tolerates such a one-sided travesty of marriage, the laws would hold you free to marry another woman—a Royal woman, whom you could make an Empress—as free as if I had ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... necessary preliminaries to the investigation, and in the case of others there are very important links missing (e.g., for the well-known Greek palmettas). In proportion as the representation of the plant was a secondary object, the travesty has been more and more complete. As in the case of language, where the root is hardly recognizable in the later word, so in decorative art the original form is indistinguishable in the ornament. The migration of races and the early commercial intercourse between distant lands have done ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... by editorials, many of them couched in language even stronger and more suited to fan the public rage. The recent trial was called an outrageous travesty on justice; attention was directed to the damnable vagaries of recent juries which had been impaneled to try red-handed ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... the figure of Karl to that of his brother, one is struck at once with the artificiality of the portrait. We seem to have before us in Franz Moor the result of a deliberate effort to conceive the vilest possible travesty of human nature. Nothing here that was copied from nature, nothing that Schiller found in his own heart. It is all a brain-spun creation, born of his dramatic reading and of his studies in medicine and philosophy. In the first place we can observe ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the 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 ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... sprung up, a street people. They pass their lives at work and in the streets. They have dens and lairs into which to crawl for sleeping purposes, and that is all. One cannot travesty the word by calling such dens and lairs "homes." The traditional silent and reserved Englishman has passed away. The pavement folk are noisy, voluble, high- strung, excitable—when they are yet young. As they grow older they become steeped and stupefied in beer. When they have nothing else ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... 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. To Sapt it seemed now as if they ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... 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
... the way, in my impatience forgetful of his great paunch and little legs, so that he was sorely tried to keep pace with me. Yet who would not have been in haste, urged by such a spur as had I? Here, then, was the end of my shameful travesty. To-morrow a soldier's harness should replace the motley of a jester; the name by which I should be known again to men would be that of Lazzaro Biancomonte, and no longer Boccadoro—the Fool of ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... in ignorance of the real conditions. Look at the farm labourer's wife and her home-life. She is often the most miserable, worn-out creature, who tries in vain to keep the children and herself properly fed and clothed. Her life is a long travesty of the laws ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... fire—did that exclude every doctrine of purgation after death? They condemned Transubstantiation—did they condemn the Real Presence? They condemned a great popular system—did they condemn that of which it was a corruption and travesty? These questions could not be foreclosed, unless on the assumption that there was no doctrine on such points which could be called Catholic except the Roman. The inquiry was not new; and divines so stoutly anti-Roman as Dr. ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... son to his room. He is master of the house and yet he has never been possessor. Almost ten years ago it was being finished and furnished for the splendid woman in the opposite room, and by a strange travesty of fate he has brought her here to-day. But he has no time for retrospection. He hardly hears what his mother is saying as he stands his little girl on a chair by the window ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... its ornaments cheapened, its laces poorer. By the time it reaches Grand Street the $400 gown in brocaded velvet from the best looms in Europe has become a cotton velvet from Lawrence or Fall River, decorated with mercerized lace and glass ornaments from Rhode Island! A travesty—and yet a recognizable travesty. The East Side hovers over it as Fifth Avenue has done over the original. The very shop window, where it is displayed, is dressed and painted and lighted in imitation of the uptown shop. The same process goes on inland. This same gown will travel ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... the same thing. I never gave the matter any thought until the Werner episode. Then I began to examine this thing called patriotism and I found that it was the very wellspring of a man's usefulness as a citizen. Without it family pride is a travesty. Without it, the impulse to build up sane and humane and lasting governments is lacking. Without it, a man may be ever so learned, ever so rich, yet he lacks any real place in community life. Patriotism is to a man's community life what religion ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... which had evidently at some remote period, been sculptured out of a solid block of black marble seemingly springing vertically out of the ground. There was nothing artistic in the conception or execution of the image, which was a mere travesty of the human figure, every member being absurdly out of proportion, while the only features upon the modelling of which any pains had been taken were those of the face, the expression of which hideously suggested the extremes of mingled cunning ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... Christianity was a disfigurement of truth. He knew that the theological claptrap which the Church, with such oracular assurance, such indubitable certainty and gross assumption of superhuman knowledge, handed out to a suffering world, was a travesty of the divinely simple teachings of Jesus, and that it had estranged mankind from their only visible source of salvation, the Bible. He saw more clearly than ever before that in the actual achievements of popular theology there had been ridiculously little that a seriously-minded man could accept ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all" (Eccles. viii. 14; ix. 11). It is this element of chance that threatens to make a mockery of effort, and sometimes seems to make life but a travesty. The terrible feature of Tennyson's description of Arthur's last, dim battle in the west is not the "crash of battle-axe on shattered helm," ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler |
