"Clown" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... then in three hours he runs through the world, marries, makes children men, men to conquer kingdoms, murder monsters, and bringeth gods from Heaven, and fetcheth devils from Hell. And, that which is worst, many times, to make mirth, they make a clown companion with a king; in their grave counsels they allow the advice of Fools; yea, they use one order of speech for all persons,—a gross indecorum."—In 1581, Stephen Gosson published a tract in which he says: "Sometimes you shall see nothing but the adventures of an amorous ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... to Kramer?" he asked. And the German told him a strange story. Kramer was a queer mountebank sort of a chap who before conscription claimed him had been clown in a circus, and his antics and gymnastic feats had made him very popular with his fellow-troopers. He had been a good soldier too; and when he had become separated from his fellow-trooper in a sandstorm a day ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... that has no taste for Dress. The Dress of a man speaks out his soul. In other words, a man is known by his Dress; not by its richness, not by its conformity to fashion, but by its neatness, appropriateness, harmony, and the way he carries it. A clown will carry a king's dress clownishly; and a true king will carry a clown's dress kingishly. It is not the Dress that makes the man, but the ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... authors and actors are ashamed of being funny?—Why, there are obvious reasons, and deep philosophical ones. The clown knows very well that the women are not in love with him, but with Hamlet, the fellow in the black cloak and plumed hat. Passion never laughs. The wit knows that his place is at the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... coming from so white a priestess, and in words that lent so musical and sweet a sanction, removed the last mote of conjecture from the air. Mrs. Wright, as usual, was the first to take action. Every set of women, probably, has its recognized clown, she who is just too cute and killing. And those who do not like her say she is tiresome and "silly." Mrs. Wright, in keeping with the character, went through the gate with ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a London street. Upon anyone who feels this nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the abiding spirit of pantomime. Of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said (with no darker meaning) that he realizes one of our visions. And it may be noted here that this internal quality in pantomime is perfectly symbolized and preserved by that ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... slowly swung open. Gerty saw beautiful ladies, all bright and glittering with spangles, and handsome horses in gorgeous trappings, and great strong men in tights, all the wonders and sights of the circus, and the funny jokes and antics of the clown and pantaloon. And Gerty had never known anything half so fine; and there was riding and jumping and tumbling, and all manner of fun, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... 'No, you purblind clown,' said Major de Blacquaire, rising, and fitting his crutches to his armpits. 'I am not. You have about as much notion of what a man is bound to do under these conditions as an ox would have. Please do as I have asked you, and leave me, and send ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... easy work, buy the necessary accessories for her. Let be what may! And let us do everything in order to educate her mind a little; and that her heart and soul are beautiful, of that I am sure. I've no grounds for the faith, but I am sure, I almost know. Nijeradze! Don't clown!" he cried abruptly, growing pale, "I've restrained myself several times already at your fool pranks. I have until now held you as a man of conscience and feeling. One more inappropriate witticism, and I'll change my opinion of you; and know, that ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... to be a clown, Playing tricks around the town, Turning somersaults and springs, As if they were easy things, Laughing morning, noon and night, Being such ...
— Songs for Parents • John Farrar
... find lava blocks and ashes, and instead of the clash of elemental forces, we see a dark mass, that glows dully. We can hardly believe that here is the origin of the explosions that shake the island, and are inclined to consider the demon of the volcano rather as a mischievous clown than a ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... will know all, if I to her arrive. This only would I have thee clearly note: That so my conscience have no plea against me; Do fortune as she list, I stand prepar'd. Not new or strange such earnest to mine ear. Speed fortune then her wheel, as likes her best, The clown his mattock; all things have ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... floated in these brilliant waves, and our admiration increased as we watched the marine monsters disporting themselves like salamanders. I saw there in the midst of this fire that burns not the swift and elegant porpoise (the indefatigable clown of the ocean), and some swordfish ten feet long, those prophetic heralds of the hurricane whose formidable sword would now and then strike the glass of the saloon. Then appeared the smaller fish, the balista, the leaping mackerel, ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... electric battery which I frequently took into the steerage to astonish the natives. When I first put a silver piece in a basin of water and told them the man taking it out could keep it, what a rush there was! There was one would-be clever clown who was perfectly willing to test the power of the battery, but was so clever he never would take hold of both handles at once. He dodged around for two or three days greatly pleased with his sharpness, but ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... a relief to the eye, as was the vivid face of Shorty, who came out of the forecastle with a leap and a gurgle of laughter. But there was something wrong with him, too. He was a dwarf, and, as I was to come to know, his high spirits and low mentality united to make him a clown. ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... rabbit out of one of the girl's handkerchiefs, and was springing it from his hand against the wall. He seemed to have a fair appreciation of the character of his associates for the evening; and though himself perfectly competent to behave well in the best society, chose to act the clown in this. ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... carelessly or dishonestly employed. And when a man has had any actual experience of this, and at all perceived how far this mischief reaches, he is sometimes almost tempted to say with Shakespeare, 'Out, idle words, servants to shallow fools'; to adopt the saying of his clown, 'Words are grown so false I am loathe to prove reason with them.' He cannot, however, forego their employment; not to say that he will presently perceive that this falseness of theirs whereof he accuses them, this cheating power, is not of their proper use, but only of their abuse; he will see that, ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... Caswall, M.A., who had an interview with the prophet at Nauvoo, in 1842, thus describes him: "He is a coarse, plebeian, sensual person in aspect, and his countenance exhibits a curious mixture of the knave and the clown. His hands are large and fat, and on one of his fingers he wears a massive gold ring, upon which I saw an inscription. His eyes appear deficient in that open and straightforward expression which often ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... as in the school, I'd say, how fate may change and shift; The prize be sometimes with the fool, The race not always to the swift. The strong may yield, the good may fall, The great man be a vulgar clown, The knave be lifted over all, The kind ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... founder of the system of phrenology. Born in Baden, 1758; died in Paris, 1825] was illustrated. I saw a troop passing the Place du Carrousel, composed of clowns, harlequins, fishwives, etc., all rubbing their skulls, and making expressive grimaces; while a clown bore several skulls of different sizes, painted red, blue, or green, with these inscriptions: Skull of a robber, skull of an assassin, skull of a bankrupt, etc.; and a masked figure, representing Doctor Gall, was seated on an ass, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... them With deaf'ning clamours in the slipp'ry shrouds, That with the hurly Death itself awakes: Can'st thou, O partial Sleep! give thy repose To the wet seaboy in an hour so rude, And in the calmest and the stillest night, With all appliances and means to boot, Deny it to a King? Then, happy lowly clown! Uneasy lies the ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... his nameless opponent in the Divorce quarrel he deals—this time in English—no less contemptuously: "I mean not to dispute philosophy with this pork, who never read any." The creature is a conspicuous gull, an odious fool, a dolt, an idiot, a groom, a rank pettifogger, a presumptuous losel, a clown, a vice, a huckster-at-law, whose "jabberment is the flashiest and the fustiest that ever corrupted in such an unswilled hogshead." "What should a man say more to a snout in this pickle? What language can be low and degenerate enough?" In ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... in the field, yon red-cloaked clown, On thee, from the hill top looking down; And the heifer that lows on the upland farm, Far heard, lows not thine ear to charm; The sexton, tolling the bell at noon, Dreams not that great Napoleon Stops his horse ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... field met with a clownish fellow, to whom he spake in this manner. "Friend," quoth he, "what is a clock?" "A thing," answered the clown, "that shows the time of the day." "Why then," said Robin Good-fellow, "be thou a clock, and tell me what time of the day it is." "I owe thee not so much service," answered he again, "but because thou shalt think thyself beholden ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... creeping onwards; while amazed the foe, Beheld, and thought some subterranean gust Had burst the caverns of the earth and forced The nodding pile aloft, and wondered sore Their walls should stand unshaken. From its height Hissed clown the weapons; but the Grecian bolts With greater force were on the Romans hurled; Nor by the arm unaided, for the lance Urged by the catapult resistless rushed Through arms and shield and flesh, and left a death Behind, nor stayed its course: and massive stones Cast by the beams of mighty ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... whose appetite has ne'er Known than the thistle any sweeter fare Thinks all the world eats thistles. Thus the clown, The wit and Mentor of the country town, Grins through the collar of a horse and thinks Others for pleasure do as he for drinks, Though secretly, because unwilling still In public to attest their lack of skill. Each dunce whose ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... and Bell did the same. Johnson prepared his gun in case fire-arms should be necessary. The noise grew louder and louder; the ice kept cracking beneath the repeated blows. At last only a thin crust separated the adversaries; suddenly this crust tore asunder like paper through which a clown leaps, and an enormous black body appeared in the gloom of the room. Altamont raised his hand ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... however, than the stranger. Still his head and heart, alike, were full, and he talked more freely than was altogether consistent with his Yankee character. He told of Ralph's predicament, and the clown sympathized; he narrated the quest which had brought him forth, and of his heretofore unrewarded labors; concluded with naming the ensuing Monday as the day of the youth's trial, when, if nothing in the meantime could be discovered of the true criminal—for the pedler ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... it come so far," answered the Prior; "but here is the clown's sunken cross, and the night is so dark that we can hardly see which of the roads we are to follow. He bid us turn, I think ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... clumsy clown!" roared one. Between them they seized the Young Doctor, who was a small man, and deposited him on the deck. "Couldn't you see I was asleep, Pills?" demanded the other hotly. "You've woken Peter, too. He's had—how many is it, Peter?—eight morning watches running. I've brooded over him like a ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... survived only in the performances of circuses and menageries. Between acts the extravaganzaist in cork and wool would appear, and to the song of "Coal-Black Rose," or "Jim along Joe," or "Sittin' on a Rail," command, with the clown and monkey, full share of admiration in the arena. At first he performed solus, and to the accompaniment of the "show" band; but the school was progressive; couples presently appeared, and, dispensing with the aid of foreign instruments, delivered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... Horse for ditto (if possible). 1 Goat to do Alpine feats of daring. 1 Donkey to play see-saw. 2 White pigs—one to be Learned, and the other to play with the clown. Turkeys, as many as possible, because they can make a noise that The dogs, for any odd parts. 1 Large black pig—to be the Elephant in the procession. Calves (several) to be camels, and to ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... his neighbor's damaged eyes, Or sowed the trodden ground beneath With smashed incisors, like the teeth, The dragon's tusks of ancient ken From which sprung hosts of armed men. Such pastime was a frequent thing, The entertainment of the ring, Without equestrian or clown Was often seen in Cork's own town, And best, for impecunious boys Who boasted few of modern joys, Who daily went to see the play Had no admission fee to pay. But gone is Corkstown, vanished too The whitewashed shanty from our view, Where once the minstrel's youthful eyes Beheld strange ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... around, He hitch'd his sleek old horses; And in his rattling wagon took His dimpl'd household forces— The boys to wonder at the Clown, And think his fate Life's ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... considerate enough, God knows, of those dirty brats and ignorant louts—coddling that girl, Rebecca, who is a good-hearted creature enough, but not fit for respectable people to touch their hands to; and associating with such conceited boors as that George Olver, and that grinning clown, Harvey, and that poor fool, Lovell Barlow, and that what-d'ye-call him—that fiddling young devil with the ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... story with a very florid imitation of a very pallid ghost, or hear him sing an old-time stage song, such as he used to enjoy in his youth at a cheap London theatre, to see him imitate a lion in a menagerie-cage, or the clown in a pantomime when he flops and folds himself up like a jack-knife, or to join with him in some mirthful game of his own composing, was to become acquainted with one of the most delightful and ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... unable to distinguish those nice shades of manner which as effectually separate the gentleman from the clown with us as do these broader lines which mark these two classes among all other nations. They think that it is the grand characteristic of Columbia's children to be prejudiced, opinionated, selfish, avaricious, and unjust. It is vain to ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... ordain'd by fate, Neal Gahagan, Hibernian clown, With hatchet blunter than thy pate, To hack my ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... the clown, there was magistrates playing the fool; There wos jugginses teaching the trombone to kids at a bloomin' Board School. "This is Free Hedgercation in Shindy," sez I. "They're as mad as March hares, All these Limboites, dear Miss DIANNER. We ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... generate a kind of atmosphere and texture in his daily life which was rich and warm, splendid really in thought (the true reality) if not in fact, and most grateful to all. Yet also, as I have said, always he wished to seem the clown, the scapegrace, the wanton and the loon even, mouthing idle impossibilities at times and declaring his profoundest faith in ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... as our parish schoolmaster, a most worthy King Log, whom Ben dumbfounds twenty times a day. He is a great ornament of the cricket-ground, has a real genius for the game, and displays it after a very original manner, under the disguise of awkwardness—as the clown shows off his agility in a pantomime. Nothing comes amiss to him. By the bye, he would have been the very lad for us in our present dilemma; not a horse in England could master Ben Kirby. But we are too far from ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... "Doan't thou marry for money, but go where money is." An admirable piece of advice. Well, Maud made a mistake, let us say. Dolomore is a clown, and now she knows it. Why, if she had waited, she might have married one of the leading men of the day. She is fit to be a duchess, as far as appearance goes; but I was never snobbish. I care very little about titles; what I look ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... when perhaps it is her duty but to use that inward eye for her own delinquencies. He, then, who designs to benefit his kind by strains of high instruction, will turn from the deathbed of the famous Wit, whose brilliant fancy hath waxed dim as that of the clown—whose malignant heart is quaking beneath the Power it had so long derided, with terrors over which his hated Christian triumphs—and whose intellect, once so perspicacious that it could see but too well the motes that are in the sun, the specks and stains that are ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... multitude muster'd, escaped from the plains, Of sight-loving lasses and holiday swains: Bob Bantam push'd forward and strutted before; Will Woodpecker modestly tapp'd at the door; Poor Robin, the rustic, a countrified clown, As he blush'd, look'd too simple by half for the town, There were scores in brown mantles, black, yellow, or green, From the villages round, and among them were seen, Luke Linnet, Sam Swallow, Mat ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... Lord Byron for an insinuation in 'English Bards.' Grey, Charles (afterwards Earl Grey), his oratory See also Grey de Ruthven, Lord, Newstead Abbey let to him Grillparzer, his tragedy of Sappho Character of his writings Grimaldi, Joseph, Covent Garden clown Grimm, Baron His 'Correspondence' as valuable as Muratori or Tiraboschi Grindenwald, the 'Grongar Hill,' Dyer's Guerrino, a picture of his at Milan Guiccioli, Count ——, Countess, her first introduction to Lord Byron attacked with fever sincerity of Lord Byron's attachment ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... like Geoffrey, with all the world to lose, grows love-sick for a pretty face; it is a very pretty face by the way. I do believe that if I were out of the way he would marry her. But I am in the way, and mean to stay there. Well, it is time to dress for dinner. I only hope that old clown of a clergyman won't do something ridiculous. I shall have ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... is a burning reality. He can hear the shrieks and groans. He is of that order of mind that rejoices in these things. If he could only convince others, he would be a great revivalist. He cannot terrify, he astonishes. He is the clown of the horrible—one of Jehovah's jesters. I am not responsible for the revival failure in Brooklyn. I wish I were. I would have the happiness of knowing that I had been instrumental in preserving the sanity of ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... minds is his making a clown of himself in her front yard! It made her think he didn't care much about her. She's probably mistaken, but that's what she thinks, and it's too late for her to think anything else now, because she's going to be married ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... trousers far above his knees for tights, and galloped his father's fat delivery horse up and down the alley, riding sideways, standing, and backwards, with much vainglory. To simulate the motley of the tight-rope-walking clown, Jimmy Sears wore the calico lining of his clothes outside, when he was in the royal castle beyond his mother's ken. Mealy donned carpet slippers in Pennington's barn, and wore long pink-and-white striped stockings of a suspiciously feminine appearance, fastened to his abbreviated shirt ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... of the weak and coward with the strong," he cried, "when there's any pleasant charge, you send the other servants, but when it's a question of seeing any one home in the dark, then you ask me, you disorderly clown! a nice way you act the steward, indeed! Do you forget that if Mr. Chiao Ta chose to raise one leg, it would be a good deal higher than your head! Remember please, that twenty years ago, Mr. Chiao Ta wouldn't even so much as look at any one, no matter ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... vanished behind the screen when their dance was finished. Thus one pair would follow another till the play was over. Besides the actors who played the serious and solemn part of the dead, there was usually a clown who skipped about and cut capers, tumbling down and getting up again, to make the spectators laugh and so to relieve the strain on their emotions, which were deeply stirred by this dance of death. The beat of the drums proclaimed that the sacred drama was at an end. ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... been engaged for Clown, and set down to sing "hot codlins;" were Palmerston "secured" for Pierrot, or Lord Monteagle for Jim Crow, who would have wondered? But to saddle "The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... the midst of the gay promenade, to transact some business in peanut candy. The interest of the public in that operation was inconceivable. If he had been Mr. Vanderbilt buying out Mr. Astor—if he had been a lunatic astray from the asylum, or a clown escaped from the circus—he could hardly have excited more attention. The passengers stared in amazement. Some young gentlemen, escorting certain young ladies from school, cracked excellent jokes upon the honest buyer of peanut candy; and ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... under-man. Languidly, critically, as he would have observed at the "zoo" an animal with whose habits he was unacquainted, he had watched this rather curious under-man in his foolish, or worse than foolish, endeavor to find amusement or oblivion. He had often been interested, as by a clown at a circus; but more frequently the sight had merely inspired disgust, and he had returned to his own diversions, his own efforts to secure the same end, with an all but unconscious thankfulness that he was not such as that other. To-night, for the first time, and with a wonder ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... large picture, and Jimmy stared at it with a great deal of interest. The picture represented a lion and a clown, and the clown's head was inside the lion's mouth; whilst a little way off a very small clown, of about ...
— The Little Clown • Thomas Cobb
... circus," he admitted with grim appreciation. "A circus in which no one knew whether he was to be a ringmaster or a clown. There were the financial tight-rope walkers, and the social lion-tamers, and snake-charmers, and the political acrobats whose falls were unsoftened by any kind of network. There were heat and dust and discomfort, and weary, wretched animals looking out of cages ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... he, "do it: be not too wise; Seeing that ye are wedded to a man, Not all mismated with a yawning clown, But one with arms to guard his head and yours, With eyes to find you out however far, And ears to hear you even ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... short time he and his brother had fastened the barrel staves to their shoes, winding and tying the cords and ropes, and even some old straps around and around. Their feet looked very queer—almost like those of some clown in the circus. But Laddie and Russ did not mind that. They wanted to walk ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Grandpa Ford's • Laura Lee Hope
... religious because there is communication with spirits. In the Californian tribes and others they become occasions of merrymaking; a peculiar feature of these gatherings among the Maidu and other tribes is the presence of a clown who mimics the acts and words of the dancers and performs knavish tricks; the origin of this feature of the dances is not clear. In all such ceremonies the tendency to regulate the details of religious ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... don' believe it, Miss, but I went an' took the clown's hoss at Schumann's circus aroun' the ring three times. Them's the kind o' things I does. An' is ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... woman's face among them, Many a face that was bad, And some that were very vacant, And some that were very sad. And behind a canvas curtain, In a corner of the place, The clown with chalk and vermilion Was ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... were five grotesquely clipped French poodles. Michael could not see them, save when he was being taken out or brought back, but he could smell them and hear them, and, in his loneliness, he even started a feud of snarling bickeringness with Pedro, the biggest of them who acted as clown in their turn. They were aristocrats among performing animals, and Michael's feud with Pedro was not so much real as play-acted. Had he and Pedro been brought together they would have made friends in no time. But through the slow ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... defect with the natural desire to please; he was always mistaken in matters of feeling, taste, and the higher ethics. So, whenever this man of the middle-ages appeared on the scene, Laurence immediately made him, unknown to himself, the clown of the play; she amused her cousins by arguing with Robert, and leading him, step by step, into some bog of ignorance and stupidity. She excelled in such clever mischief, which, to be really successful, must leave the victim content with himself. ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... A tragic actor, Caesar in a clown; He's a brass farthing stamped with a crown; A bladder blown with other breaths puffed full; Not a Perillus, but ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... appearances to inability—for all the rest of Maelzel's automata are evidence of his full ability to copy the motions and peculiarities of life with the most wonderful exactitude. The rope-dancers, for example, are inimitable. When the clown laughs, his lips, his eyes, his eye-brows, and eyelids—indeed, all the features of his countenance—are imbued with their appropriate expressions. In both him and his companion, every gesture is so entirely ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... I was a clown in a circus!" she exclaimed. "Laughing when, as you say yourself, the man that she—the cat—wrote that fiendish letter to is ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... reference was to a very popular song of the period called 'The Bull in the China Shop,' words by C. Dibdin, Junior, and music by W. Reeve. Produced about 1808, it was popularized by the celebrated clown Grimaldi. ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... exactly whither his ultimate ambitions tended. He had no vague boyish design to serve a 'prenticeship as stake driver or roustabout in the hope some day of graduating into a rider or a tumbler, a ringmaster or a clown. He joined out in order that among these congenial influences he might the quicker ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... I went to tea in Lord Hopetoun's boat and their sailors gave a grand fantasia excessively like a Christmas pantomime. One danced like a woman, and there was a regular pantaloon only 'more so,' and a sort of clown in sheepskin and a pink mask who was duly tumbled about, and who distributed claques freely with a huge wooden spoon. It was very good fun indeed, though it was quite as well that the ladies did not understand the dialogue, or that part of the dance ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... veritable and inimitable clown, and his name has figured in French literature both as a proper and a common noun almost from the day that he and his partner, Mondor, set up their booth on the Pont Neuf. They began their sale of ointments and liniments in Paris about the year 1618, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... red face and a bald pate whose curly fringe of grizzled, reddish hair made him look like a clown in a pantomime, motioned them with a surly thumb toward the back of the house, where clattering preparations for supper were audible and odoriferous. The old fellow sat in a splint-bottomed chair of extra size and with arms. This he had kicked back against the wall of the house, ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... deserted street; they beheld a being more agile than a clown climb over the omnibus, and Gavroche bounded into the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... of many taxpayers, is getting the value of what they are called on to pay for. But with the mass of the onlookers, the pouring of the hot pitch into the gravelled interstices is watched with a satisfaction ever new, like that bestowed in the pantomime upon the application by the clown of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... at the spring near by," said Percival the Pure. "He hurried to fill his bucket, and some rude clown muddied the water as the child reached down; but he spoke no angry words, and waited patiently till the water was clear again. I should like to find his home and see ...
— Mother Stories • Maud Lindsay
... the country stopped at a town near by; and John, together with a number of his associates, attended some of the exhibitions. John's interest was at once captivated, and he felt that it would be great to join the company and to act the part of the clown; and he soon began to plan to secretly join them the following season. His visions of great wealth enlarged day by day, and in fancy he pictured a future ...
— How John Became a Man • Isabel C. Byrum
... would be ended! But it is not enough, apparently, that you come here with munitions and food, that you insult us at sea, that you lie about us and slander us and send your shells and cartridges to England to slay our people! No! Also you must come to insult us in your clown's uniform and with your pistol—" The man began to choke with fury, unable to continue, ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... word, consistent with that central thing which I have called the kernel of his personality. An artist is in this sense insincere whenever, for example, he inserts anything in his work which exists solely for the sake of convention—some of Shakespeare's clown scenes were often put in solely because an Elizabethan audience demanded them, and they were to that extent a truckling to convention, an insincerity. They do not express the real Shakespeare. Any artist not capable of entirely direct and spontaneous expression (and probably no great ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... asked me if I were sure I was not hurt. And by that time the archers were coming in, when all was over; and Long Robin must needs snatch up a joint stool and have a stroke at the Moor's head. I trow the Prince was wrath with the cowardly clown for striking a dead man. He said I ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Folly and Wisdom side by side, just as we find them in Calderon's and Shakespeare's dramas, Lucretia presented the costly robe which she wore when she offered up her prayer, to one of her court fools, and the clown ran merrily through the streets of Rome, bawling out, "Long live the illustrious Duchess of Ferrara! Long live Pope Alexander!" With noisy demonstrations the Borgias and their retainers celebrated ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... be highly annoying when one has, after infinite labour, succeeded in converting a clown, to see him come to chapel with a red-hot poker and his pockets full of stolen sausages; but even that shock is nothing to ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... his faith in the child who had seen the image of Pegasus in the water, and in the maiden who had heard him neigh so melodiously, rather than in the middle-aged clown who believed only in cart horses, or in the old man who had forgotten the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... that we are presented with the triumphs of civilisation. How immeasurable is the distance between the voice of the clown, who never thought of the power that dwells in this faculty, who delivers himself in a rude, discordant and unmodulated accent, and is accustomed to confer with his fellow at the distance of two fields, and the man who understands his instrument as Handel understood the organ, and who, whether he ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... one will not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity for instruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trained intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer and a soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of race and pedigree in a race horse and a bird dog how dare you deny ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... a wooden ass, in which the speaker was concealed. The ass and the devil were favorite characters. The former sometimes appeared in monkish garb and brayed responses to the intonations of the priests, while the latter, arrayed in fantastic costumes, seems to have been the prototype of clown in the pantomime. As late as 1783 the buffoonery of this kind of exhibition continued. An English traveller, describing a mystery called the "Creation" which he saw at Bamberg ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... us to remain with her over Christmas. I longed to see the pantomime, having heard much from my cousins and from Leo of its delights—and of the harlequin, columbine, and clown. But my father wanted to be at home again, and he took me and Rubens and Nurse Bundle with him ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... of these ruffians, or wandering comedians that were hated, or scorned, pitied, embraced, conventionalized. There's not a notion in this book that has a more frightful, or ridiculous, mien than had the notion of human footprints in rocks, when that now respectabilized ruffian, or clown, was first heard from. It seems bewildering to one whose interests are not scientific that such rows should be raised over such trifles: but the feeling of a systematist toward such an intruder is just about what anyone's would be if a tramp ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... saw that Cathy had been carrying a lipstick of shiny gold-colored metal. "Don't tell me you've taken to using lipstick! You trying to look like a clown?" ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... says Steele. "Actually, that country clown is trying on, right here in New York, the same primitive methods that real estate boomers use in the soggy South and the woolly West. Would you believe ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... falter? To the rescue, at the need, The clown was ploughing Persia, clearing Greek earth of weed, As he routed through the Sakian ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... as a silver dollar. In the book we can smell the sawdust, hear the flapping of the big white canvas and the roaring of the lions, and listen to the merry "hoop la!" of the clown. ...
— From Farm to Fortune - or Nat Nason's Strange Experience • Horatio Alger Jr.
... That was during camp, and Hans Dunnerwust tented with him then. I cultivated the thick-headed Dutchman, and succeeded in getting into his good graces. So I often visited Hans in the tent when Merriwell and Mulloy, that Irish clown, who thinks Merriwell the finest fellow in the world, were away. I kept my eyes open, and one day I spotted a letter to Merriwell. I swiped it instanter, and it helped me out, for it was from ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... declamation won't do for a country that has had thirty-eight years of compulsory education. If our War Office wishes to rouse patriotic feeling, it should cease to contrast "the dull labour of the fields" with "the soft calm of Malta": the veriest clown would not be caught by such chaff. It would be more to the point to send gratuitous copies of The Barrack Room Ballads ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... turgid and unnatural. Nature is never more truly herself than in her grandest form. The Apollo of Belvedere (if the universal robber has yet left him at Belvedere) is as much in nature as any figure from the pencil of Rembrandt, or any clown in the rustic revels of Teniers. Indeed, it is when a great nation is in great difficulties that minds must exalt themselves to the occasion, or all is lost. Strong passion, under the direction of a feeble reason, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... the pale moonlight, Are played by me, the merry little Sprite, Who wing thro' air from the camp to the court, From king to clown, and of all make sport; Singing, I am the Sprite Of the merry midnight, Who laugh at weak mortals ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Clown Toby and the big "boss canvas-man" Jim had always taken turns amusing and guarding little Polly, while her mother rode in the ring. So Toby now carried the babe to another side of the lot, and Jim bore the lifeless body of the mother to the distant ticket-wagon, now ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo
... gentlest means in the world, Reuben had the option given him of being flogged, or of laying out on the smoke-sail yard, just to begin with, and to get into the way of it. It was a laughable thing to see this huge clown hanging with us boys on the thin yard, and hugging it as closely as if he loved it. He had a perfect horror of getting to the end of it. At a distance, when our smoke-sail yard was manned; we looked like a parcel of larks spitted, with one great goose ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... deluded. Why, even the old Catholic cathedrals with their holy-water stoups, their occasional altars of stone, still remaining, their Lady chapels, and their niches for the images of the saints, as ill befit the present occupiers, and their modern English services, as a Court dress befits a clown. ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... instance, a country that St. Paul never seemed to have visited, which, to say the least, was strange. Whereupon a long talk began about Paul and Jesus, Mr. Walter Poole maintaining that Paul's teaching was identical with that of Jesus, and that Peter was a clown despised by Paul ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... catching trout by tickling them with the hands under rocks or banks. Shakspeare makes the clown in "Measure for Measure" say that ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the head menial of the castle, "the royal shoemaker, villain, is no clumsy clown from these parts; but he and his wares come from abroad, from Paris. He is, moreover, with the king at present, receiving his reward for the beautiful new pair of shoes in softly-tanned leather, which arrived last night at dusk. He is an elegant gentleman, this Parisian, and knows fine manners ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... at the dispatcher. "Very funny, clown. I'll recommend you for trooper status one ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... chandelier, the crimson draperies and great curtain with its equestrienne on a curvetting steed. The orchestra, with a blare of trombones, announced the raising of the curtain and appearance of Mr. John Mays, the celebrated clown. He was followed by Chinese sports, the Vision of Cupid and Zephyr, and the songs, the programme stated, of Lowrie and Williams. These gentlemen, in superb yellow satin, emphasized ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... at once, and champagne flowed in streams. At a garden table under an orange tree one could see a powerfully limbed peasant, his hawthorn stick between his knees, devouring a plateful of caviare, while his neighbor, a circus clown, was ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... incense Juno and Minerva, who, ever since the golden apple was bestowed upon Venus, are sworn foes of Paris and Troy. In disguise, therefore, Minerva urges Ulysses, wiliest of the Greeks, to silence the clown Thersites, and admonish his companions that if they return home empty-handed they will be disgraced. Only too pleased, Ulysses reminds his countrymen how, just before they left home, a serpent crawled ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... or coyish bashfulness. She is young, it is true, but full-blown and bloated, very big about, and excessively dirty and nasty. The favourite of the Mudeer is besides almost as black as a Negress, with a pock-marked face. After dodging about with the Negro clown some ten minutes, her eye catches the shape of a huge ill-looking Turkish fellow, walking heavily into our apartment, or hall of audience, and the Moorish damsel immediately retires to her ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... the Devil about the stage with a wooden dagger, a habit which took a great hold on the popular imagination, as numerous references in later literature testify. Transformed by time, the Vice appears in the Elizabethan drama, and thereafter, as the clown. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... stalked in. His usual walk is by pauses, as if (from the same vacuity of thought which made Dryden's clown whistle) he was telling his steps: and first paid his clumsy respects to my mother; then to my sister; next to me, as if I was already his wife, and therefore to be last in his notice; and sitting down by me, told us in general what weather it was. Very cold he made it; but I was warm ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... words of the rubric. A little carven image of an acolyte—a weird boy who seemed to move by springs, whose hair had all the semblance of painted wood, and whose complexion was white and red like a clown's—did not make matters more intelligible by ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... additional references to Khamoor, and several of them are amusing. Says Mrs. Burton in one of them, [255] "Khamoor was charming at the theatre. I cried at something touching, and she, not knowing why, flung herself upon my neck and howled. She nearly died with joy on seeing the clown, and said, 'Oh, isn't this delightful. What a lovely life!' She was awfully shocked at the women dancing with 'naked legs,' and at all the rustic swains and girls embracing ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... to give, retired with his posse to debate; whilst we derided the wild manners of these "bush-folk," who feared to shake hands with us. After an hour or so the council returned, clapped palms, sat clown, grumbled at the gift and gave formal leave to see the Yellala—how the word now jarred in my ears after its abominable repetition! Had these men been told a month before that a white would have paid for permission to visit what they considered ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... house of worship, where in order due and fit, As by public vote directed, classed and ranked the people sit. Mistress first and good wife after, clerkly squire before the clown, From the brave coat lace-embroidered to the gray coat ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... has not felt at the Play, the strong allegorical power in the coming of the first actress before the house? The hero may pose, the clown dance, the villain plot, the warrior, the king, the merchant, the page, fuddle the attention for the nonce: it is a dreary business; it is like parsing poetry; it is a grammatical duty; the Play could not, it seems, go on without these superfluities. We listen, weary, regret, find fault, ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... of mode, and which I cannot but look upon as very extraordinary. It was certainly one of the first distinctions of a well-bred man, to express every thing that had the most remote appearance of being obscene, in modest terms and distant phrases; whilst the clown, who had no such delicacy of conception and expression, clothed his ideas in those plain homely terms that are the most obvious and natural. This kind of good-manners was perhaps carried to an excess, so as to make conversation too stiff, ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... manners, winsome face, And forehead fit to wear a crown, How brilliant might have been her place, Had she not mated with a clown,— ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... your rhinoceriouses," answered Ben, who couldn't help imitating his old friend the clown when he ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... that? 'Tis a stately thing That confesseth itself but the ape of a King; A tragical Caesar acted by a clown, Or a brass farthing stamped with a kind of crown; A bauble that shines, a loud cry without wool; Not Perillus nor Phalaris, but the bull; The echo of Monarchy till it come; The butt-end of a barrel in the shape of a drum; A counterfeit piece that woodenly shows; ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... shoes, you may run engines, you may carry coals; you may blow the huntsman's horn, hurl the base-ball, follow the plough, smite the anvil; your face may be brown, your veins knotted, your hands grimed; and yet you may be a hero. And, on the other hand, you may write verses and be a clown. It is not necessary to feed on ambrosia in order to become divine; nor shall one be accursed, though he drink of the ninefold Styx. The Israelites ate angels' food in the wilderness, and remained stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears. The white water-lily ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... monotony. On the contrary, character and individuality ran riot, appearing in such strange and attractive shapes as to puzzle and bewilder even those who were familiar with the queer manifestations. Every settlement had its peculiarities, and every neighborhood boasted of its humorist,—its clown, whose pranks and jests were limited by no license. Out of this has grown a literature which, in some of its characteristics, is not matched elsewhere on the globe; but that which has been preserved by printing is not comparable, either in volume or merit, ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... had been: But this one night it weighed him down. "What work for an immortal soul, To feed and clothe some lazy clown! Is there no action worth my mood, No deed of daring, high and pure, That shall, when I am dead, endure, A ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... thy rod, from Power's majestic brow Drops the gay plume; he pines a lowly clown; And on the cold earth stretch'd, the son of Woe Quaffs Pleasure's draught, and wears a ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... any one particular thing; also might be seen one Claude Hastings, a chap who was a regular monkey in his way, and who always kept the crowd laughing by his antics, such as might be expected of a prize clown at the big Barnum ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... for want of something to do. When he walks, he drags his feet along as if they were too heavy to lift up. His clothes are always dirty, for he will not brush them; his eyes are dull and heavy; he looks like a clown and speaks like a blockhead. Idle Richard is a burthen to himself, ...
— The Bad Family and Other Stories • Mrs. Fenwick |
